Ethnic and Racial Studies

ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20

A polyethnic London carnival as a contested

cultural performance

Abner Cohen

To cite this article: Abner Cohen (1982) A polyethnic London carnival as a contested cultural
performance , Ethnic and Racial Studies, 5:1, 23-41, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1982.9993358

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A polyethnic London carnival as a contested
cultural performance*

Abner Cohen
School of Oriental and African Studies University of London

Introduction

Marx's famous statement that 'the ideas of the ruling classes are in every epoch
the ruling ideas'1 was elaborately defined and developed by Gramsci in his
concept of 'hegemony',2 by Althusser in his discussion of 'the ideological
state apparatus'3 and by members of the Frankfurt School in their analyses
of the impact of the mass media on modern society.4 The theme was carried
to its logical end by some anthropologists who credited the ruling classes with
the creation, not only of religion, but also of the multiplicity of such groupings
as tribes, lineages and ethnic groups: anthropologists who studied these were
labelled as 'ideologists' who, wittingly or unwittingly, reified such groupings
and presented them as given 'in the nature of things', thereby in effect legiti-
mizing the established order. The central argument throughout is that the
masses are made, through various techniques of instruction, persuasion and
mystification, to accept, and even willingly to support, the ruling dominant
culture and thereby indirectly to maintain the very politico-economic system
that dominates and exploits them.
During the last few years, this monolithic view has been increasingly ques-
tioned and duly modified by some students of Marxism, who have begun to
analyse the nature of'sub-cultures', which are developed by different sections
of the subordinate classes in response and resistance to the dominant culture.
This is a running theme in Resistance through Rituals,s written by members
of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham. The editors and some of the contributors to this work complain
that the orthodox Marxian view 'treats the working class as the passive reci-
pients of their culture and fails to trace the active process by which a culture
is created from material experiences'.6 In contrast, they regard the subordi-
nate subcultures as active responses by various oppressed groups to the
hegemony of the dominant culture. This position is more explicitly discussed
by Miliband in his book Marxism and Politics,1 in which he states that
account should be taken 'of the many-sided and permanent challenge which
is directed at the ideological predominance of the "ruling class", and the fact

Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 5 Number 1 January 1982

© R.K.P. 1982 0141-9870/82/0501-0023 $1.50/1
24 Abner Cohen
that this challenge, notwithstanding all difficulties and disadvantages, produces
a steady erosion of that predominance. . . . The discussion of hegemony and
class consciousness more than ever requires the inclusion of the concept of a
battle being fought on many different fronts.... The ideological terrain is by
no means wholly occupied by "the ideas of the ruling class": it is highly
contested territory.'
Social anthropologists started their work from the other end, by implicitly
or explicitly attributing exclusiveness and even independence to the small-
scale cultural groups which they studied, and it was only after the indepen-
dence of Third World countries that they began to take account of the fact
that these culture groups were incorporated within larger nation-states whose
dominant national ideologies impinged on them. In other words, particular
cultures were considered in relation to national cultures. The analysis of the
political nature of ethnicity, which began to gather momentum in the 1960s,
has been one of the first evident outcomes of this orientation. The very
definition of ethnicity in this view entailed interaction, often conflict, by
culture groups within the universe of the nation-state.8 The process of this
interaction was analysed in terms of politico-cultural dynamics, as interest
groups manipulate different types of symbolic formations to articulate a
number of basic organizational functions to co-ordinate their activities in the
struggle for power.
There is thus at present some convergence of different orientations in
treating the cultures of particular groupings as, in the words of Miliband,
contested territory. However, the nature of the contest, and the identities of
the cultures involved, needs a great deal of empirical inquiry and cannot be
assumed a priori.
In what follows an attempt is made to examine such a contest on a micro-
sociological level by discussing the formative years of a carnival movement in
London. I am referring to the Notting Hill carnival, which has been staged
annually for the last fifteen years. Between 1966 and 1970 it was local, small
in scale and polyethnic under essentially white leadership. From 1971 onwards
it became national, attended sometimes by as many as a quarter of a million
people, almost exclusively West Indian in leadership, in artistic conventions
and in attendance. In an article entitled 'Drama and politics in the develop-
ment of a London carnival', published in Man,9 I dealt principally with the
1971—80 period. In the present article I deal with the earlier period, on the
basis of data from hundreds of documents of different sorts as well as from
interviews with people who took part in the festivity during those years.
Carnivals generally are a fertile field for exploring this issue, as their sym-
bolic forms have the potentiality for political articulation, serving in some
situations as 'rituals of rebellion',10 whose function is cathartic and is ulti-
mately a mechanism helping in the maintenance of the established order; and
in other situations as expressions of resistance, protest and violence. Carnival
is almost always poised between the two tendencies, invariably tense; at best
it is like a grand 'joking relationship' arising, as Radcliffe-Brown11 showed, in
relationships that are characterized by both conflict and alliance at one and
 A London carnival as a contested cultural performance 25
the same time. Carnivals are symbolic events that are always contested by dif-
ferent interests and forces. In the conclusion of the article I discuss the political
potentialities of carnivals generally for articulating both dominant and opposed
ideologies simultaneously.

Revival of an English Fayre

The Notting Hill carnival was started by Rhaunee Laslett, a local community
leader and a former social worker. She said that the idea had come to her
when in May 196612 she had a vision that she ought to gather the culturally
heterogeneous groups in Notting Hill in a joyful series of cultural events and
performances and in street processions. During the following four months she
devoted all her time and energy to mobilizing the local population for the
event. Her conviction of the importance of the event was so strong that she
said it would be the most important achievement of her life.13
In March 1966, only a few weeks before the carnival vision, she had helped
to organize a neighbourhood community centre called the London Free
School and was elected as its president and secretary. The aims of the school
were 'to promote co-operation and understanding between people of various
races and creeds through education and through working together'.14
In a series of statements to newspapers correspondents,15 as well as in a
magazine of the London Free School called The Grove, Laslett outlined
three major goals for the carnival:
(1) To familiarize the various culture groups with each other's customs.
(2) To bring some colour, warmth and happiness to a grim and
depressed neighbourhood.
(3) To correct the image of the Notting Hill area, which had been
unjustly castigated by the national media as a den of prostitution,
drug addiction, crime and political extremism.
Laslett was essentially a reformer, not a revolutionary. She believed that
the best thing for the immigrant population, whether black or white, was to
integrate within British society and culture. The general cultural form that
the carnival was to take was essentially English, i.e. in terms of the symbols of
the dominant culture and ideology. There was no suggestion that it would
imitate a West Indian or any other foreign form of carnival. It was, she said, a
revival of the Notting Hill Annual Fayre that had been traditionally held in
the area until it was stopped at the turn of the present century. Carnivalists
would be dressed in the costumes of the earlier period, the old musical hall
would be revived; there would be mock boxing, the appearance of Good
Queen Bess, dart competitions in the local pubs and so on. Some bands would
masquerade as characters from Dickens's novels; others would reconstruct in
a succession of costumes and floats the history of Kensington. A whole week
of nightly events was planned, and eventually performed, including poetry
reading, drama, film, folk singing and dancing.16
Relentlessly, Laslett and the members of the London Free School mobilized
26 Abner Cohen
the support and active participation of a large number of people and local
institutions. They booked halls, engaged drama groups, singers, dancers and
poets. They elicited help from the churches in the area, and obtained a licence
from the police. They also collected money from jumble sales and contribu-
tions from local traders, particularly the antique dealers of Portobello Road.
The Borough Council of Chelsea and Kensington gave the enterprise their
blessing and promised a grant of £100, as well as the use of council trucks to
carry the bands in the street procession. The Mayor gave his patronage
and planned to dignify the carnival by his personal attendance at its opening
and at some of its functions.17
The Council approval and enthusiasm was due to a variety of considera-
tions. It was and has always been Conservative-dominated, substantially repre-
senting the wealthy ratepayers of Kensington, businesses and expensive
residential properties. The 1958 race riots in Notting Hill, together with the
growing notoriety of the area as a den of prostitution, gambling, drug traf-
ficking, overcrowding, house racketeering, and the activities of a number of
neo-Nazi groups — all these had affected the value of the palatial houses and
blocks of flats in the adjacent streets. An improvement in the image of the
neighbourhood was thus beneficial and could only be a positive contribution.
The development of racial harmony would be a step in that direction. The
race riots a few years earlier and the incitements of Mosley's followers had
shocked the British public generally and threatened security in the area. The
black population were working productively in the local hospitals, railway
stations, industrial yards and businesses. There was no unemployment
problem. Indeed, this was the period of what the economists of the day called
'overemployment'. The Council had done a great deal to identify the causes
of racial tension and to eradicate them. An interracial committee, on which
leaders of both white and black communities sat, was formed for the purpose.
A full-time West Indian social worker was appointed and entrusted with the
task of investigating points of tension in the field, hi a series of reports, she
was emphatic that the only cause of tension was misunderstanding and
ignorance of one another's culture and lifestyle, and she therefore suggested
what she called 'interracial education'.18 The Council duly encouraged the ini-
tiation and organization of some interracial leisure and cultural activities. At
one time or another, a mixed Christmas party was given in the Town Hall, a
goodwill week was organized, a mixed cricket match held, exhibitions and
essay competitions arranged.
It is thus understandable that the Council should be enthusiastic about the
impending carnival, particularly since it was to revive an old local English
tradition as a framework for the event.
As the weeks of preparation went by, excitement about the event built up,
with the promise of a cheerful, colourful public festival. However, only a
short time before carnival week, there was a bombshell — the Mayor cancelled
his sponsorship and withdrew the promised grant. He announced this in a
letter addressed to Mrs Laslett, stating in vague terms that his action was
prompted by 'certain information' he had received. He refused to divulge the
 A London carnival as a contested cultural performance 27
nature of that information to the London Free School or to journalists.19
Laslett was bitter and furious, and in a lengthy article published in The
Grove she spelled out what she thought the reason was. She wrote that the
Mayor had reversed his position because he had been told that the Free School
was a subversive organization associated with Communists, Fascists, Black
Muslims and Provos. She went on: 'The membership of the London Free
School is very varied and free and possibly embraces 250 members and we do
not keep dossiers or reports on the political or religious affiliations of our
members.' She complained in passing that the Council had apparently
instructed local schools not to allow their children to participate in the
carnival.20
The Grove also published a letter sent to the Mayor by the Carnival
Committee in which they stated that 'In view of the fact that a fairly large
number of people of the community — singers, dancers, drama groups, com-
mercial firms, churches and other voluntary bodies - still wish to participate
we are continuing to plan the Carnival under the auspices of the Free
School.'21
The carnival was duly held and was described by the Kensington News
and the Kensington Post as a great success.22 In a leading article after the
event, the Kensington Post23 ridiculed the Mayor and Council for with-
drawing their patronage. The paper went on: 'For our part, all we saw was an
innocent, unselfconscious mingling of white and black . . . all intent on en-
joying themselves and in so doing bringing a welcome splash of colour and
gaiety to their drab surrounding.'

Struggle for urban space

The withdrawal of the Council's support from the carnival might have been
due initially to the discovery that one or two political activists were in some
way involved. But the real issue was something more fundamental. The ming-
ling of whites and blacks in the event was not so innocent after all, and the
London Free School did not confine itself to 'interracial education'. For even
during the period of preparing for the carnival the school members were in
effect mobilizing the local working-class population, both black and white,
for a vigorous, sustained and relentless campaign against the local landlords
and the Council for 'urban space', against the worst housing situation the
country had ever seen. Neither the carnivalists nor the Council and the land-
lords consciously linked the two issues, and carnival, like all other symbolic
forms, had many different significata, but its major impact during the 1966—
70 period was to develop and enhance a united stand of the local population
to wage a struggle for housing. The same people who came together to plan,
prepare and stage carnival, joined forces on the housing front. Carnival and the
housing issue became invisibly intertwined. The Council and the landlords in
their turn fought sporadically against carnival, as much as against the militants
on the housing front.
The struggle for housing space is perhaps the most crucial political issue in
28 Abner Cohen
the cities all over the world. It is directly related to the struggle for employ-
ment, and for a large proportion of the urban population the acquisition of
housing space is the major form of family saving. The difficulties in getting a
foothold in the city are particularly formidable for newcomers and more
particularly so for foreign newcomers of a different colour.
When the West Indian immigration to Britain started in the 1950s there
was already a shortage of housing in London and the competition for it had
been intense. There was at the time open discrimination against letting accom-
modation to black immigrants.24 Advertisements for lettings in local papers as
well as doors openly bore the sign 'No Coloured'. And because they had only
recently arrived and were not yet in secure and steady employment, and were
also lacking in capital, it was difficult for them to obtain mortgages from
building societies for the purpose of buying accommodation. The result of
those conditions was that the mass of black immigrants was forced to seek
rented, often furnished accommodation at inflated prices. The 1957 Rent Act
removed restrictions on landlords, and rents were duly raised. This led to the
formation of housing development companies, which bought old houses and
converted them to flats for letting.25
Those conditions were most dramatically present in the North Kensington
area, where many of the first wave of West Indian immigrants found employ-
ment in railway stations and hospitals, in business, and in catering concerns
like restaurants and cafes. Between forty and seventy housing companies
developed in the area to cater specifically for West Indian house seekers,26 ex-
ploiting racial discrimination and charging exorbitant rents. That led to over-
crowding as, to save money, many black immigrants shared the same house or
even the same room, in high density, with a great deal of pressure on sanitary
faculties and local public services. The West Indians generally love loud pop
music and are used to staying up until the early hours of the morning. This
has sometimes caused a great deal of tension with their neighbours; in fact
it was at the same time used by unscrupulous landlords to force old white
tenants to move away. Thus a housing company would buy a large building to
convert to small flats, and in order to drive away the existing white tenants
would let rooms to large black families whom they encouraged to stage noisy
parties. The housing situation in the area thus became a nightmarish jungle,
with housing companies sometimes employing thugs to collect rent and to
unlawfully evict 'undesirable' tenants. In many cases landlords did not even
reveal their identity to tenants and relied on third parties to represent their
interests.27
By 1966, about 68 per cent of the West Indians in Kensington and Chelsea
lived in rented accommodation.28 Among other disadvantages, this meant
that they were not eligible for rehousing in Council accommodation. This
became a particularly acute problem after 1965, when work began on building
the Westway, a massive flyover linking Baker Street with the A40, which cut
right through the Notting Hill area and led to the demolition of vast housing
concentrations and the rehousing of their occupants.
Thus the housing nightmare affected blacks badly; but it also affected
 A London carnival as a contested cultural performance 29
whites. There had been a core of permanent English working-class settlers in
the district, as well as significant concentrations of Polish and Irish im-
migrants.29 There were thus calls for joint action by all residents, black and
white, to organize their campaign against both the housing companies and the
local authorities, not only over accommodation, but also over public services
and amenities.30
Scores of joint white—black formal associations were formed during those
years, under essentially white leadership, but they had narrow aims and
served limited interests of small groups, and quickly disintegrated.31 The
basic weakness in the more serious of those associations was black—white
tendencies to separateness, exclusiveness, estrangement and mutual suspicions
and prejudices. This meant lack of proper communication within the organiza-
tions, lack of unity and hence lack of the ability to co-ordinate the activities of
members in the struggle to achieve their aims. Many leaders thought at the
time that the problem could be solved by public interracial education and it
was ostensibly for this purpose that the London Free School was formed.
Thus Mrs Laslett wrote: 'The aims of the London Free School are purely to
promote co-operation and understanding between people of various races and
creeds through education and through working together.'

A politico-cultural movement
It is in this light that the significance of the carnival which the School
promoted should be assessed. Most of the forms of music, drama, poetry,
dancing and masquerading employed in the carnival at that period were
cultural forms shared between West Indians and Britons and were therefore
effective means of creating communion in primary relationships among them.
Jazz sessions frequently attracted mixed audiences. It should also be remem-
bered that the West Indians had regarded themselves as British even before
their immigration to the 'Mother Country'. They spoke English as their first
language and were Christians. What proved to be particularly efficacious in
bringing about communion across the colour lines was the interaction and co-
operation during the months of preparation for the carnival.
Simultaneously, the members of the School were working together on
more down-to-earth material issues. The first enterprise they undertook was
to conduct a detailed household survey in the area to discover who lived
where, who were the landlords, what tenancy agreements had been con-
tracted, what was the amount paid, what were the conditions of the accom-
modation, and so on. The political significance of that survey was immense,
for, until then, landlords, and sometimes the Council, were confronted by
individual tenants or by a handful of these and the encounter was thus
between unequal parties and the tenants were easily outmanoeuvred. The
survey revealed an overall picture and by doing so collectivized the issue and
raised it into a higher political public plane. This infused the consciousness of
common corporate interests, and more people eventually joined the struggle.
These activities continued during the following years. For a variety of
30 Abner Cohen
reasons, and probably in an attempt to clarify its nature and precise aims, the
collectivity changed its. name in 1967 from the London Free School to the
Notting Hill Neighbourhood Service, with Mrs Laslett, again, in a leading
position. The Kensington News32 described it as 'an organisation run on
entirely selfless and voluntary lines by dedicated men and women who have
turned a part-time aid programme into a full time social mission. . . . It is
performing an enormous amount of difficult and extensive social work.'
The Neighbourhood Service continued its activities — both cultural, in the
form of months of preparations for the carnival week, and political, in the
form of co-ordinating and intensifying the struggle on the housing front.
The 1967 carnival was described in a leading article in the Kensington
News33 as a 'successful failure'— the failure being a deficit of £155 in the
budget, the success being the variety of cultural activities and the numbers of
crowds who took part,including about 2,000 'hippies'. The article stated that:
'The Notting Hill festival lost money but enriched the community. It brought
a lot of gaiety to Notting Hill, the street carnival and the international song
and dance festival being particularly successful. At these events the various
national groups got together and mingled freely and happily. It was a far cry
from the sullen atmosphere sometimes associated with the area.... It showed
just what a voluntary organisation can achieve but at the same time showed
up the Council's own failings.'
On the housing front the struggle went on at the same time. An article
published in June 1967 in the national Sunday paper the Observer3* stated:
'A former social worker, Mrs Rhaunee Laslett, runs the Voluntary Neighbour-
hood Service Unit from her home. She has passed on hundreds of tenants'
complaints to an advisory panel of lawyers, fought cases before the rent
tribunal and the rent officer and has taken proposals for new action on
housing and Rent Act reforms to ministerial level.'
In 1968, the festival was called by the Neighbourhood Service 'Carnival of
the Poor', because the stores and shop owners in North and South Kensington
would not give financial support, as they had done in the past years, and there
was also the deficit from the previous year. To offset the financial difficulty,
donations were given by the poor inhabitants, and a collection from onlookers
along the route in the street procession was calculated to raise about £100.
This latter assumption was dashed by the torrential rain, described in the
papers as a 'tropical downpour', on that day, and only £14 was collected. But
the local papers were unanimous in expressing admiration for the tenacity of
the organizers and the participants in mounting the series of cultural and
artistic activities in the face of such adversity. The papers published numerous
pictures to show how the carnivalists ignored the elements in their gaiety and
dance. One West Indian carnivalist, pointing to the rain, told a correspondent
with great excitement: 'Man, this is like home.'3S
In 1969, the carnival proved to be 'the biggest and best', in the words of a
local paper,36 even though the thousands of 'hippies' who had participated in
the event in previous years were distracted this time by a pop festival held on
the Isle of Wight. Said the Kensington News:37 'The thousands of inhabitants
 A London carnival as a contested cultural performance 31
forgot their housing problems for five hours and danced and sang on a merry
jaunt in the streets. . . . The procession certainly united people no matter
what their race, colour or religion.'
The symbolic structure of the carnival can be summed up as polyethnic
diversity within the framework of an overall unity representing British
dominant culture. Thus the first few carnivals contained appearances and per-
formances by an Afro-Cuban Band, the London Irish Girl Pipers, a three-man
West Indian band led by Russ Henderson, the Asian Music Circle, the Gordan
Bulgarians, a Cypriot-Turkish band, a band of the British Czechoslovak
Friendship League, New Orleans Marching Band, the Concord Multi-racial
Group, and the Trinidad Folk Singers. In 1967 the Carnival Queen was a
Norwegian girl masquerading as Marie Antoinette, with men and women from
the American Air Force Base in High Wycombe dressed as noblemen and
ladies.38 (This was the period of 'Swinging London' and the area was also in-
habited by artists, writers, hippies, university students and US draft dodgers,
mostly of the New Left persuasion.)
But all these bands appeared within an unmistakably British — if not
English — cultural framework. The first street procession of the carnival in
1966 was led by an English homosexual masquerading as Queen Victoria.
The reports about the carnival which appeared in the local newspapers during
those years list numerous British artists and bands. There were masquerading
themes from The Lord of the Rings, from Dickens's novels, and from the
ordinary social life of Victorian London. Even the small West Indian steel
band at the time repeatedly played the tune 'The Saints Go Marching In'.
Thus a report of the carnival in the Kensington Post euphorically referred to
'the revival of this Ancient Event'.39
Although the underlying political issue of the carnival remained generally
latent and quite unintended by the crowds and the actors, the housing
problem occasionally surfaced as a motif of song, drama and masquerade. Thus
in 1967 there was a performance entitled 'England This England', described
by the Kensington News40 as 'a musical parody of the housing problem'. A
year later there was a similar performance titled 'Eviction Blues', dramatizing
the continual unlawful eviction of tenants in the area. In the programme
distributed by the Carnival Committee in 1967, Laslett spelled out the
political significance of the event:41 'The people of North Kensington, regard-
less of race, colour and creed, have a common problem: bad housing condi-
tions, extortionate rents and overcrowding. Therefore, in this misery, people
become one.'

Ethnic polarization
As the 1960s drew to an end, the polyethnic character of carnival increasingly
gave way to a polarized structure consisting of West Indian cultural formations
as opposed to the British dominant culture. When the carnival started in 1966
there was only one West Indian band in the procession. It was a three-man band
led by Russ Henderson. Henderson had come to Britain in 1951. He was, and
32 Abner Cohen
still is, primarily a professional piano player, performing regularly throughout
these years every Sunday night in a pub in Earls Court.42 The pub used to be
frequented by West Indian students and artists. Two of the latter were steel
band players. When Laslett organized the first carnival she looked for a West
Indian band and she therefore turned to Russ Henderson, who lived at the
time in Notting Hill. Henderson soon mobilized the two pan players and him-
self as a steel band. They marched in the procession that year with the pans
hanging on strings round their necks. They were also accompanied by a
simple masquerading section enacting the traditional theme of 'Fancy Sailors'.
Henderson said43 that on carnival day they simply went out of his house and
started playing until they reached the assembly point. Their music, the tunes
they played, were mixed, British and West Indian. They were from the start
very popular with the carnivalists, and reporters described their rhythms as
being particularly infectious.
In the spring of 1967 Laslett helped organize a new steel band in the so-
called Adventure Playground under the leadership of a free-lance musician,
Selwyn Baptiste,44 who was to play a leading role in the carnival movement
during the 1970s. Baptiste and his young players started from scratch, making
their own pans by hammering them out of oil drums contributed by a bene-
factor. After weeks of strenuous work and training they appeared in carnival
that summer and attracted a large crowd, particularly West Indians. One
correspondent gave a glowing account of a continuous performance by the
band that lasted for five hours without rest.4s
In the following few years West Indian expression and participation
became increasingly substantial, while those of the other ethnic groups
became smaller and eventually withered away. There were a number of
factors that led to this transformation in the symbolic structure and in the
following of carnival. To begin with, as the construction of the Westway
continued during this period, more and more of the white, principally British
population, were rehoused away from the area. The West Indians, on the
other hand, being predominantly tenants in rented accommodation, were not
eligible for rehousing in Council flats and had therefore to stay in the area.
Those of them who had in the meantime settled in secure employment
managed to buy some of the privately owned houses.
A second factor was the familiarity of the West Indians with the carnival
conception, its techniques, themes and conventions. Most of those living in
the Notting Hill area had come from Trinidad, where carnival had been a
national tradition for about a century and a half.46 During those decades the
Trinidadians had evolved artistic conventions in three major fields: rhythm
for the road, masquerading themes and techniques, arid calipso lyrics of
social comment and criticism. The carnival in Notting Hill thus encouraged
many West Indians to re-create in London some of the Trinidad forms.
Eventually a number of these West Indians became full-time choreographers,
musicians, masque-makers and organizers.
Thirdly and most crucially, already by the end of the 1960s the economic
boom of earlier years in Britain was coming to an end and unemployment
 A London carnival as a contested cultural performance 33
began to assume higher proportions, hitting the black population particularly
hard. Tension began to develop between whites and blacks over diminishing
places of employment. Discrimination against the West Indians began to in-
tensify among the working-class white population in the area and this was
exacerbated by the tightening of immigration laws.
These conditions led to a rapidly intensifying political consciousness
among the West Indians. Those were the years that witnessed the rise of the
Black Power movement in the United States. Even as early as 1966, Black
Power leaders from the United States, including the champion boxer
Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, had visited the Notting Hill area and met
some of the local West Indian political activists. In 1968, a Black Power
meeting was held in Kensington Town Hall to consider contesting the Council
election with a candidate of their own. The meeting was poorly attended,
with only a few West Indians present; but it was a beginning that was to
gather momentum in later years.47
As the carnival became bigger and drew larger crowds, it began to anta-
gonize some of the white residents in the neighbourhood, because of the
noise and threat to security; and as the carnival eventually assumed yet larger
proportions, white opposition became more intense and more organized, with
growing sympathy and encouragement from the Council and the police.
A dramatic turning point in the form and politics of the carnival was the
violent confrontation between the police and West Indian demonstrators, in
an episode that came to be known as the 'Mangrove Restaurant case', in
August 1970.48 The incident led to a protracted court case against nine West
Indian leaders, some of whom later became deeply involved in the organiza-
tion and staging of carnival.49 The tension created by the confrontation
frightened Mrs Laslett and led her to cancel the carnival which was to take
place a few weeks later. But the carnival movement had acquired a momentum
of its own; other local leaders took over and staged the carnival on time,
though on a diminished scale. Subsequently the carnival became national in
scale and almost exclusively West Indian.50
I am following in these statements developments in later years in order to
highlight the nature of the change in the structure of carnival towards the end
of the 1960s. Mrs Laslett felt and witnessed the ensuing change as early as
1968, when she told reporters: 'We owe it to the West Indian population in
the area to stage the carnival'; and later some of the papers occasionally
referred to the carnival as a West Indian festival. The description of the event
as a local traditional 'Fayre' was eventually dropped.
Later, in the 1970s, all the symbolism of carnival became predominantly
West Indian, not only in the techniques and conventions it employed, but
also in the dramatic masquerading themes adopted by its leading bands.
Among the themes staged in the street processions were 'Prisoners on Remand'
portraying the fate of West Indian youth ending up in prison, 'Marcus Garvey
and Rastafarianism', 'Wings of Freedom', 'Zapata', 'Forces of Victory',
'Youth War' depicting the freedom fighters in South Africa and Rhodesia.
These themes are in sharp contrast with the major masquerading themes in
34 Abner Cohen
Trinidad during the same period, where literally thousands of carnivalists
would take part in staging a gigantic artistically sophisticated masque on the
theme of 'Paradise Lost', which was given the prize for Best Band of the Year
in 1977.S1 Thus West Indian Londoners adopted the Trinidad artistic conven-
tions but used them to dramatize different messages that are relevant to their
situation in Britain. In Trinidad carnival has served since independence as a
national festival whose function, both latent and manifest, is to symbolize the
unity of the ethnically heterogeneous population, under essentially middle-
class leadership and ideologies. In London towards the end of the 1960s and
certainly in the 1970s, on the other hand, it served as a medium for expres-
sing and organizing protest, resistance and counteraction, first on the part of
a working-class section, consisting of both white and black groups, later on
the part of West Indians only.

Structural contradictions

This dynamic nature of the celebration is not peculiar to the Notting Hill
carnival. Generally speaking, every major carnival is precariously poised
between the affirmation and validation of the established order and its
rejection. It is, in the words of Miliband,S2 a contested event. This is borne
out by the histories of carnivals in Europe, the West Indies and South
America.S3 It is a fact which is hidden by the formal definition of carnival
and by popular ideas about it.
As an ideal type, carnival is a season of festive popular events that are
characterized by revelry, playfulness and overindulgence in eating, drinking
and sex, culminating in one or two days of massive street processions by
masqued individuals and groups, playing or dancing ecstatically to the
accompaniment of loud and cheerful music. More specifically, the term refers
to the long-standing tradition of pre-Lent festivities in many Roman Catholic
countries.54 People are attracted to it because it occasions release from the
constraints of the social order, generates relationships of amity even among
strangers and allows usually forbidden excesses. Through interaction in
primary relationships and change of role in masquerading, individuals re-
create their self-identity and thus enable themselves to resume their
demanding social roles in ordinary daily life. Thus carnival connotes sensuous-
ness, freedom, frivolity, expressivity, merrymaking and the development of
the amity of what Turner calls 'communitas', as contrasted with 'structure'.
But this is only a formal 'blueprint' picture of carnival. In concrete
historical reality it is always amuch more complex phenomenon, characterized
by contradictions between the serious and the frivolous, the expressive and
the instrumental, the controlled and the uncontrolled, themes of consensus
and of conflict. Although it is essentially a cultural, artistic spectacle, it is
always political, intimately and dynamically related to the political order and
to the struggle for power within it. This is not to negate the validity of the
traditional meaning of carnival; on the contrary, carnival generates such a
powerful experience for people that it is always and everywhere seized upon
 A London carnival as a contested cultural performance 35
and manipulated by political interests. Its significance changes with such
variables as the proportion of the people who take part in it in relation to
the total population, their class and ethnic, religious, age and sex composition.
The form may remain the same, but the event may change hands by being
dominated by one class, or ethnic group, or another, and its political functions
change accordingly. This dynamic nature of the event highlights the heuristic
significance of its study for the analysis of politico-cultural dialectics.
Carnival's potentialities for political action are immense and are always
exploited by power interests. In the first place, as many writers have pointed
out,55 carnival can be an integrative institution, helping to bring together in
amity people from different classes and ethnic and religious groupings. This
has tended to be the case in Trinidad since independence, as the middle classes
joined the poorer sections, and East Indians joined Africans in the festivi-
ties,56 and carnival thus became a symbol as well as an instrument of nation-
hood within a heterogeneous, potentially conflict-ridden population. The
event can at the same time consolidate and help to institutionalize social
hierarchy and, indirectly, the structure of authority within the polity. This
was the case in Trinidad during the earlier part of the nineteenth century
when carnival symbolized and maintained a caste-like hierarchy on the island,
as the white plantocracy staged their own carnival, allowed those of mixed
colour to have their separate celebration and prevented the masses of slaves of
African descent from taking part." In New Orleans in the United States
carnival until today asserts, in its organization, procedure, and dramaturgical
structure, the supremacy of the aristocratic upper class within the city.S8
Similarly, in the Rio carnival in Brazil, the various bands, known as the
Samba Schools, consist of poor working-class members who are artistically
supervised and structured by middle-clas-j professional artists, with members
of the upper classes assuming the roles of judges in the competition between
the bands, thus emphasizing their leadership and supremacy in secular life.59
Some anthropologists have emphasized, moreover, the so-called 'safety
value' function of carnival, arguing that through the symbolic inversion of
roles, as the world is stood upside down, when the ruled are allowed to
masquerade as rulers in a ceremonial rebellion, people's pent-up bitterness
and hostility against their masters are spent, thus in effect strengthening the
political system and restoring social equilibrium.60 Other writers have argued
along the same line to the effect that the function of carnival is to represent
chaos and disorder, thereby dramatizing the importance of the return to
order during the rest of the year.61
Thus, regimes have always seemed to orient carnival towards these integra-
tive, ideologically hegemonous, authority-validating functions. But as history
shows, carnival's potentialities for fostering criticism, protest, resistance,
opposition and violence are equally great; and at the best of times carnival is
uneasily poised between compliance and subversion.62 On the whole, the
central authorities are always anxious to contain and even abolish it. But once
the tradition is established in a society, it becomes difficult for these authori-
ties to control it. It is only the most totalitarian regimes that would stop it
36 Abner Cohen
altogether, as was the case in Spain under Franco, following the civil war.
Carnival's possibilities for serving as an instrument for political opposition
are many. In the first place, the event is attended by masses of people who
substantially outnumber stewards and police and even in the most relaxed
times are difficult to control. In the history of nearly all carnivals there were
periods when the revelling masses got out of hand and rioting broke out.
People in groups become ecstatic, particularly when drinking alcohol or taking
drugs, and when they happen to harbour, grievances against the established
order they can be easily swayed to violence.
One conducive factor in this respect is personal anonymity, achieved first
and foremost by the individual fading within the crowd. But anonymity can
also be publicly secured through masquerading. This is why in many cases the
authorities prohibit the wearing of face masks. The British did that in Trinidad
during the nineteenth century.63 In other cases masking the face has been
allowed on condition that the masker should register with the police, who
would give him a serial number on his costume so that if he committed an
offence he would be identified by that number.64 In the Notting Hill carnival
during the 1970s it was alleged that black pickpockets and trouble-makers
operated during carnival, using skin colour as a disguise. On ordinary days
throughout the year a black face can be easily spotted in a predominantly
white population. Indeed, this 'cognition' by colour alone has often led the
police to arrest the wrong people and in a number of cases the policemen who
made the arrest failed to recognize and identify the accused whom they
brought to court." In carnival this tendency is used against the police, who
would fail to recognize different facial features in a predominantly black
crowd. In a number of cases the police even alleged in court that when they
arrested the accused, the latter threatened them, saying, 'Wait for carnival
day!' 66
The rioters in carnival have used as weapons some of the very implements
traditionally used in play in the procession. In Trinidad after the emancipa-
tion of the slaves, torches were used on the eve of carnival day in celebrating
'Canbulay', the freedom procession.67 On occasions when rioting broke out
the torches were used to set buildings and police stations on fire. Eventually,
the bearing of torches was strictly prohibited by law. Again, one of the
popular games in the Trinidad carnival was stick-fighting, and in a number of
carnivals the sticks were used in assaults on the police and carrying them in
carnival was duly banned. In the Notting Hill carnival in 1976, the tens of
thousands of beer bottles from which the revellers drank in the procession,
were used in sustained attacks on the police, of whom over 300 were injured;
in recent years only canned beer has been sold in the area during carnival.
Another feature of carnival that has served opposition are the contents of
popular songs and the dramatic themes used by bands. In relaxed times, both
conventions are used in humorous parodies of the centres of power; but
humour can be easily swayed to satire, sarcasm, open criticism and incitement.
Bezucha thus surveys a series of masques in France that used memiodramatic
techniques in a silent agitation against the establishment of the day.68 In the
 A London carnival as a contested cultural performance 37
Notting Hill carnival reggae lyrics and calypso songs are often used to express
bitter criticism and discontent against the police and public racism.

Conclusion
I have attempted to show in this article the potentialities of carnival for
articulating both hegemonous and opposition political formations. Both
orientations are present in every carnival, thus in effect posing a contradiction
within a unity of form. Like a grand joking relationship, carnival expresses
both alliance and enmity, both consensus and conflict, at one and the same
time. In other words, it is an ambiguous symbolic formation that camouflages
and mystifies a contradiction. In an 'ideal type' carnival, hegemony and oppo-
sition are in a state of balance. To the extent that that balance is seriously
disturbed, the nature of the festival is changed and is transformed into a
different form altogether. If the festival is made to express pure and naked
hegemony, it becomes a massive political rally of the type staged under
totalitarian political systems. On the other hand, if it is made to express pure
opposition, it becomes a political demonstration against the system. In either
extreme case it ceases to be a carnival.
In concrete historical reality the balance between the two tendencies is
always precarious, tilting in the one direction or the other in response to
current political circumstances. The politico-cultural structure of the event is
different every year. This was evident even during the first five years of the
Notting Hill carnival. But even in the 1970s, when carnival became almost
exclusively West Indian, it remained essentially a performance of a joke with
the established order. At times the joke was sour, sarcastic, bitter; but it is
nevertheless there. For despite Black Power rhetoric of withdrawal, exclusive-
ness and the ideology of the return to Africa, the majority of the West Indians
see themselves as an integral part of British society, taking part in its institu-
tions and benefiting from its social services. This love-hate relationship is
nearly always expressed in the symbolic structure of carnival. British kings,
queens, bishops, Robin Hoods, appear alongside African liberation fighters
and Rastafarian heroes in the same procession. At times, the same masque-
rading theme would combine the two motifs within the same theatrical form.
Thus in 1977 — the Jubilee year of the Queen of England — one of the
carnival masquerading bands enacted the theme 'Mansa Musa's Guests in
Regina's Feast', representing a famous West African fourteenth-century king,
appearing with his followers to celebrate the authority of the present Queen.
The structural incongruity is perhaps most dramatic in the role of the
police in carnival. Since 1976, the police have become in effect an integral
part of the carnival structure, particularly as the so-called 'saturation policing'
strategy has been practised. This entails the dispersal of thousands of police-
men among the bands and the attending crowds. Every now and then a
policeman would be induced by revellers to participate in the dancing, and
almost invariably the national papers would publish photographs of policemen
being kissed by women carnivalists, or dancing in a band with their helmets
38 Abner Cohen

playfully worn by the women. Some West Indians have even argued that the
police should appear in a band in the carnival procession, as is the case in
Trinidad. At the same time, the police represent to many black people,
particularly to the youth, evil, oppression and violence. Indeed, one carnivalist
remarked once that masquerading bands do not need to represent the tradi-
tional devil — the police are there!

Notes
* The material on which this article is based was gathered with the help of a research
grant from the SSRC of Great Britain, for which I am grateful. I owe a special debt of
gratitude to the many leaders and artists of the Notting Hill Carnival for giving me so
much of their time in discussion. I would like also to record my thanks to Dr Helen
Hornsey for valuable assistance in gathering some of the records.

1. Marx and Engels, 1970: 6 4 - 5 .

2. Gramsci, 1971.
3. Althusser, 1971.
4. Horkheimer, 1974; Marcuse, 1964.
5. Hall and Jefferson, 1975.
6. Ibid., 231-2.
7. Miliband, 1977: 53-4.
8. Cohen, 1969; 1974a; 1974b; 1979; 1981a; 1981b.
9. Cohen, 1980.
10. Gluckman, 1954.
11. Radcliffe-Brown, 1952: 90-116.
12. In my 1980 article, the date of the first carnival was given as 1965. I had relied
then on oral history only. I have since consulted written documents, including local news-
papers, on which the present article is based.
13. Kensington News, 8.7.1966.
14. Ibid., 23.9.1966.
15. Ibid.; see also the references in the next note.
16. Kensington News, 3.6.1966; 8.7.1966; 16.9.1966; Kensington Post, 10.6.1966;
16.9.1966.
17. Kensington News, 23.9.1966.
18. Ibid., 13.1.1961; 17.1.1964; 4.8.1977; 22.10.1967.
19. Kensington Post, 5.8.1966; Kensington News, 23.9.1966.
20. Kensington Post, 5.8.1966; Kensington News, 23.9.1966.
21. Kensington News, 23.9.1966.
22. Ibid., 23.9.1966; 30.9.1966, Kensington Post, 23.9.1966. See also West London
Observer, 22.9.1966.
23. Kensington Post, 30.9.1966.
24. Wickenden, 1958: 36-44.
25. See also New Society, 1.8.1963: 15-18; The Times, 2.5.1959; Lee, 1977.
26. Wickenden, 1958: 36.
27. The Times, 2.5.1959.
28. Lee, 1977.
29. The Times, 2.5.1959.
30. New Statesman, 18.6.1960; 5.11.1960.
31. For a discussion of a successful association see New Statesman, 18.6.1960.
32. Kensington News, 8.9.1967.
33. Ibid., 29.9.1967. For more information about the 1967 carnival see also: ibid.,
8.9.1967; 15.9.1967; 22.9.1967; West London Observer, 21.9.1967; Kensington Post,
 A London carnival as a contested cultural performance 39
8.9.1967; 22.9.1967; 29.9.1967. For planning the same carnival see Kensington News,
12.5.1967; 4.8.1967, 11.8.1967.
34. Observer, 25.6.1967.
35. For information on the 1968 carnival see: Kensington News, 2.8.1968; 30.8.1968;
13.9.1968; 27.9.1968; Kensington Post, 16.8.1968; 30.8.1968; 20.9.1968.
36. For the 1969 carnival see: Kensington News, 5.9.1969; Kensington Post,
15.8.1969; 22.8.1969; 5.9.1969.
37. Kensington News, 5.9.1969.
38. Ibid., 15.9.1967.
39. Kensington Post, 23.9.1966.
40. Kensington News, 11.8.67.
41. Ibid., 22.9.1967.
42. Personal interview.
43. Ibid.
44. Kensington Post, 28.7.1967; 13.8.1971. Also personal interviews with both
Mrs Laslett and Mr Baptiste.
45. Kensington Post, 28.7.1967.
46. See Pearse, 1956; Hill, 1972.
47. Kensington Post, 2.2.1968; 9.2.1968; 15.3.1968; 14.8.1970; Kensington News,
2.2.1968; 15.3.1968; 7.6.1968.
48. The Mangrove is a West Indian restaurant in Notting Hill. From the time it was
opened in 1969 until now it has been continually raided by the police in search of drugs.
For some accounts, see MacInnes, 1971; Howe, 1977; Gould, 1979. During almost all
this period, the weekly Time Out published detailed items of news, including a full
coverage of the trial during 1971-2. For direct effect on carnival see the references
cited in the next note.
49. For information on the 1970 carnival and the events affecting it see: Kensington
Post, 28.8.1970; 4.9.1970; Kensington News, 28.8.1970; 4.9.1970; Friends, 2.10.1970.
For some discussion of 'the failure of racial integration', see Kensington Post, 11.9.1970;
18.9.1970; 16.10.1970.
50. For a discussion of the politico-economic and cultural factors involved in this
transformation see Cohen, 1980.
51. Trinidad Carnival, 1978.
52. Miliband, 1977: 53-4.
53. See, for example: Burke, 1978; Hill, 1972; Pearse, 1956; Wood, 1968; Cagnoni,
1975.
54. Look under 'Carnival' in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in the Encyclopaedia
of Religion and Ethics.
55. See, for example, Gluckman, 1954; Burke, 1978.
56. See Hill, 1972; Wood, 1968; Powrie, 1956.
57. Pearse, 1956.
58. Edmonson, 1956.
59. Gardel, 1967.
60. Gluckman, 1954; Burke, 1978; Da Matta, 1977.
61. Da Matta, 1977.
62. Burke, 1978, describes carnival as being on a knife's edge.
63. Pearse, 1956; Hill, 1972; Wood, 1968. Edmonson, 1956: 241, mentions that in
the past, Negroes were not allowed to wear masks in the New Orleans carnival.
64. Gonzalez, 1970: 336.
65. During the Mangrove trial, for instance, a policeman in the witness box failed to
identify an accused woman even when he was asked to pick her out from two women
whom the judge had asked to stand up; see Time Out, 12.11.1970; 17.12.1970. It seems
that, in an effort to avoid such embarrassing incidents in the future, the police pinned the
photograph of the owner of the Mangrove Restaurant inside their local station so that his
features would be familiar to the officers. This was revealed in a trial of the owner, after
40 Abner Cohen
another raid on the premises in 1979. See Kensington News and Post, 21, 28.12.1979.
66. See West London Observer, 6.4.1978, covering a trial of Selwyn Baptiste, director
of the Carnival Development Committee since 1976, who was accused in court of having
told the policeman who had arrested him: 'We will kill all you f— c— at Notting Hill
this year.' The owner of the Mangrove Restaurant was alleged in court to have made a
similar threat in his own trial of 1979; see Kensington News and Post, 21.12.1979.
67. Pearse, 1956.
68. Bezucha, 1975.

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