GOOGLE has done well. She has shown the world that the pan was born and bred in Trinidad and Tobago. This may stop the attempts of many fraudsters to claim paternity of the only musical instrument created in the 20th century. We should be proud.
We have done a poor job of protecting a priceless heritage. Instead of using our cultural diversity to promote this national treasure, we allowed cultural isolation to treat it like a foster child.
I was shocked a decade ago, when I was in South Africa, when a group of young children in a classroom in Soweto told me that this musical instrument originated in Jamaica. They even asked where in Jamaica Trinidad and Tobago is. Some said the pan started in the US. No one said he was from Trinidad and Tobago.
A Canadian businessman living in South Africa was teaching a group of children how to play pans. Michael Rea had taken about 100 children between the ages of five and 12 from the streets of Soweto, providing them with education and music facilities in a group called the Soweto Marimba Youth League (SMYLe).
They were playing marimba and timpani. He had brought to Soweto some old tenor pans donated by a nightclub in Canada. The pans had not been tuned for years. But the children played them as if they were young.
In 2013, the Exodus Steel Orchestra, through its manager Ainsley Mohammed and the late Wendy Wilshire, toured South Africa and Zimbabwe. They were sympathetic to SMYLE’s plight and agreed to donate the Exodus pans to them. Exodus agreed, but demanded that they be reimbursed for the cost of shipping the instruments to SA. It reached $132,000. The High Commission placed the matter in the hands of the then Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Trinidad.
Both then foreign minister Winston Dookeran and tourism minister Gerald Hadeed supported the project. When I left Pretoria in 2015, the instruments were stored safely in the basement of the high commissioner’s residence. Seven years later, this case is still unresolved.
Wilshire and her SA counterpart, Nozipho Ndiweni, had been working with the high commission to correct the paternity misinformation. We were invited by Education Africa coordinator Joan Lithgow to a joint sponsorship of the International Marimba and Steelpan Schools Festival. This festival attracted school steel orchestras from all over South Africa and abroad. It was a weekend party. At the 2014 festival, renowned pan soloist Andy Narell was one of the judges. The High Commissioner had presented a challenge trophy and REA 3,000 to the school that won the pan competition.
The pan was also featured in Wilshire’s Dare2Discover Caribbean Mas Feeva in the SA municipality of Bela Bela. The municipality had put the carnival on its calendar of events.
I should have been surprised that South African children were being taught to play the pan, even though they did not know where the pan instrument originated. But I wasn’t. You see, after establishing diplomatic relations with the Republic of South Africa in 1994, our high commission in Lawley Street, Pretoria, did not have a name plate on the wall or a national flag on a flagpole to identify our country until 2011 Apart from a few colorful carnival photos taped to the wall of the cramped reception room, there was nothing to introduce T&T to the people of South Africa.
Why? I asked the Head of the Chancellery. She told me that zoning regulations prevented any display that would identify the building’s commercial use. I later learned that there was no such ban. In 2011, for the first time, a national flag and nameplate was flown at the four diplomatic properties belonging to the Government of Trinidad and Tobago in Pretoria. And a tenor pan, sitar, harmonium and tabla are on display in the lobby.
