Deep Roots: BVI Emancipation Festival’s 70th!
By Claudia Colli
It’s the BVI Emancipation Festival’s 70th anniversary, a milestone for this weeks-long holiday that celebrates the end of slavery with parades, pageants and music. Events which start on July 17th and go through August 10th is a non-stop party chockablock full of activities and happenings. But it also has a deep cultural meaning that digs deep into the islands’ cultural roots.
How It All Began
Virgin Islands culture is a pastiche of African, West Indian and British influences. It has developed since slave times with an oral tradition of folk stories and history passed down from parent to child. The VI’s biggest cultural celebration is its Emancipation Festival.
Festival’s roots began with the Emancipation Proclamation, which according to tradition, was read out on the first Monday of August 1834 at Road Town’s Sunday Morning Well. The Proclamation was the culmination of a growing abolitionist movement which first ended the international slave trade in 1807. But it wasn’t until 1834 that slavery was abolished in Britain and all its colonies in its entirety.
In the Virgin Islands, the Proclamation was read out at the Sunday Morning Well in Road Town, and was followed by an island-wide celebration the likes of which the islands had never seen. There were church picnics, horseraces and watersports. Children unfurled maypoles and adults danced in the streets.
For decades this tradition was carried on annually in early August, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that it became the festival-like event that we know today. The year that Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne in 1952 was marked here in the Virgin Islands by a carnival parade. Floats, beauty queens, dancers and colorfully costumed troupes joyfully wended their way down Main Street in Road Town.
So popular was the event that the next year it was decided to incorporate a parade into the August festivities. Eventually Festival was declared a three-day public holiday beginning on the first Monday in August. Monday would be parade day, the next day would be set aside for horseracing and watersports, and on Wednesday, East End and Long Look would stage their own parade and activities.
The event continued to grow and a Festival Village comprised of a collection of colorful food and drinks booths each year was constructed in the midst of Road Town. The Village soon became an entertainment center for the festivities, featuring popular local and regional reggae, calypso and soca bands nightly.
Festival Today
Today, Festival is organized by the Tourist Board and dozens of community organizations and individuals. Activities start in mid-July with fundraising events, pageants, a kiddie fiesta and a torch light procession. Festival’s roots as an emancipation celebration have also been newly emphasized, with one of the highlights a re-enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation at the Sunday Morning Well, now a popular community gathering spot. Dressed in traditional African garb, members of churches and prominent community representatives give speeches, recite prayers of thanksgiving, and of course, read out the famous Emancipation Proclamation.
More recently, Tortola’s quiet north shore village of Carrot Bay jumped on the Festival bandwagon, tagging on its own fiesta at the end of the week. The focus of the event is on the islands’ old-time traditions and games. There are fishing and tug of war contests, donkey races and other competitions for old and young.
Cultural roots aside, Festival in the BVI is one tremendous party – a two week-long celebration of life and a year of hard work. People dance in the street, dress in their brightest clothes, drink rum and maubi and play music amplified to the hilt.
At J’ouvert, also called the Rise and Shine Tramp, the street dancing begins before dawn and carries on through the early morning. One of the high spots of Festival is the Grand Parade, held on August Monday. Dozens of costumed troupes, many representing community organizations, massive trucks carrying a battalion of musicians and amplification equipment, colorful Mocko Jumbies dancing a top towering stilts; beauty queens, princes and princesses, all dance and gyrate their way down Road Town’s waterfront road.
Fun to participate in and fun to watch, Festival is as much a national state of mind as an event.
For music and other 2024 BVI Festival information go to:
https://www.facebook.com/VirginIslandsFestival/?locale=en_GB
and https://www.bvitourism.com
Enjoy old time fun at the Carrot Bay Fiesta, including a video of the donkey race at:
For more about the BVI’s history and culture click on:
