LONDON – During late August every year in London, over a million people go to the Notting Hill Carnival for a weekend to celebrate Caribbean culture.
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From Haiti to St Kitts, from Barbados to Tobago, all of these countries are represented through food, dance, music and people proudly showing off their flags.
The parade has many beautiful costumes full of vibrant colors and details like feathers and artificial gemstones. There are also food trucks or buses where you can get amazing food for a decent price.
There is usually reggae, Afrobeats, soca blasting all around the streets and people expressing their talents with instruments such as the steelpan and djembe.
Sunday and Saturday are known to be the family days where children can experience the city’s diversity, and Monday is known to be more of an adult event.
But Nottinghill Carnival was not always like this.
According to the carnival website, the festival began in 1959 as a protest. A man named Kelso Cochrane was killed due to a racially motivated attack on May 17th in Notting Hill. Around 1,200 people came to his funeral to protest racial discrimination. The protest grew after people learned that police were protecting the murderer.
Caribbean activist Claudia Jones, a native of Trinidad and a journalist, helped start the first indoor Notting Hill Carnival in 1959, according to her biography published by the Department of History at the University of Bristol.
In the mid-‘60s, activist Rhaune Laslett created small community children’s street fairs for people in the local area as a way to lessen tension and have more connections and interactions with the different nationalities throughout Notting Hill, according to the carnival website.
This also influenced the modern-day Notting Hill Carnival.
This later led to the first festival in Notting Hill in 1966 when Laslett organized an outside festival for children.
The event was seen as a success, the carnival website said, as it eased the racial tension of the 1950s. It also involved the local Caribbean community and included Russell Henderson, a famous steel pan player.
Henderson – invited by Lasset – brought his band to play throughout Portobello Road with a crowds of people dancing and following the band.
This led to the success of the first ever festival and led to many more years of celebration.
After experiencing the Notting Hill Carnival for the first time this year, I would really recommend the family day. People are usually more friendly on those days and it is a great example of how London has become more diverse and celebratory of different cultures.
It all helps to make London the multicultural city it is.
Dezlene Akua Erza-Essien is a Reporter with Youth Journalism International.
