Columbus out, steel drums in: Trinidad plans new coat of arms

Delete the three-masted ships. Bring on the steel drums. That is the proposal of Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Dr Keith Rowley, who has called for the national coat of arms to be redesigned, removing a prominent reference to the country’s colonial past, and replacing it with something more melodic.
But the announcement, the latest in a wave of worldwide calls to eradicate symbols of colonialism, has led to heated discussions in the Caribbean state about both its history and identity.
The controversy centres on three 15th-century ships that appear on the escutcheon, or shield, at the centre of Trinidad’s coat of arms. These portray the vessels that Christopher Columbus used in his first 1492-93 voyage to the Americas: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.
“You see those three Columbus boats in the emblem,” Rowley told a group of red-shirted supporters from his centre-left political party, the People’s National Movement, on August 18. “They will go.” Many in the crowd rose to their feet and applauded the unexpected announcement.
His plan is to unveil a new design by September 24, the country’s Republic Day. But phasing out the existing symbol, which was designed by local artists in 1962 to mark the country’s independence from the United Kingdom, could realistically take years. The present version is everywhere: on every banknote, every passport, every naval vessel and every official government document.
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Complicating matters, Rowley’s plan to replace Columbus’s ships with an image of a steel drum, also known as a steel pan, has provoked a whole new controversy, with the prime minister even accused of stoking racial tension in a country whose population is about 35 per cent Afro-Trinidadian and 35 per cent Indo-Trinidadian.
The problem is that, like Rowley, musicians in the nation’s steel drum orchestras have traditionally been predominantly from Afro-Trinidadian, rather than Indo-Trinidadian, communities.
Changing the emblem, especially without careful consideration of what might replace it, risks igniting “ethnic rivalries, societal strife, and hate … in a primarily peaceful multicultural society like ours, which can then devolve into violence and destroy our societal peace”, said Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the opposition’s leader, who is of Indian descent.
“Sanitising history, truth and free speech in the modern era of wokeness, virtue signalling and cancel culture will only promote ignorance and foster the repetition of evil acts in the future,” she added.
Rowley has said such arguments are “wicked”. His government points to the fact that last month it was agreed, in parliament, that the steel drum was officially the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago.
Some have proposed a compromise, perhaps by including an image of the tassa, another drum commonly used on the islands, which is made from a clay shell tightly covered in a goat, sheep or deer skin, and is popular in Indo-Trinidadian communities. The Tassa Association of Trinidad and Tobago has been pushing the idea, arguing that unlike the steel drums, which are made from imported oil barrels and whose mass popularity dates back only to the 1940s, the tassa is homemade and has a far longer history.
“It is clear the steel drum is a foreign metal instrument and the tassa is a 100 per cent local instrument,” the association said in a statement. But its suggestion was quickly quashed by the government. “There is one musical instrument that was invented and developed in Trinidad and Tobago. That musical instrument is the steel pan,” said the culture minister, Randall Mitchell.
The dispute has been filling local newspaper editorials for much of last week. “Generations of schoolchildren in this country have been fed a whitewashed, sanitised narrative about Italian explorer Christopher Columbus ‘discovering’ our islands,” opined the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian. It pointed out that the ships Columbus used on his third voyage — when he reached the islands in 1498 — were not those depicted on the coat of arms anyway. Historical figures “that brought tyranny, exploitation and oppression”, should not be honoured, concluded the paper.
An additional problem is that ridding the emblem of all its colonial references would in practice involve deleting more than the images of the three ships. The existing design features a golden helmet, representing Queen Elizabeth II. Another of its images, a palm tree with a large coconut was one of the symbols of Trinidad when it was under British colonial rule.
Then there is the issue that even the name Trinidad, or La Isla de la Trinidad (the Island of the Trinity), was chosen by Columbus himself, replacing an Arawak name for the larger of the nation’s islands. The capital, Port of Spain, originally Puerto España, was named by its Spanish founders in the 1560s.
Dr Rowley has dismissed such concerns as quibbles, and described as “unpatriotic” those who object to his plan. “Those three misleading ships, those three icons of colonialism, or barbarism, or rape and repression … will be replaced by our newly born national instrument,” he said. The steel drum is the true “legacy” of the nation, and one of which it should be proud, he insisted.