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Religion and History in Trinidad and Tobago

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Religion and History in Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad is among the most religiously plural societies in the Americas, and the plurality is a direct product of labour policy. The island was Spanish, then settled by French Catholic planters under a Spanish decree, then taken by Britain, so it entered the nineteenth century as a Catholic colony under a Protestant crown. After emancipation the planters recruited indentured labour from British India from 1845, and over the following seventy years well over a hundred thousand people arrived, the majority Hindu and a substantial minority Muslim. Their descendants are roughly as numerous as the Afro Trinidadian population.

The consequence is a public calendar with no single centre. Divali is a national public holiday, marked by lit deyas across whole districts and by nagar kirtan processions. Eid is a public holiday. So is Corpus Christi, and so is 30 March, Spiritual Baptist Liberation Day.

That last one records a prohibition. The Shouters Prohibition Ordinance of 1917 outlawed the worship of the Spiritual Baptists, whose practice combines Protestant hymnody and scripture with bell ringing, candles, mourning rites and possession derived from African tradition. It was repealed in 1951, and the holiday marking the repeal was instituted decades later.

Orisha worship, descended from Yoruba tradition carried by enslaved and later by free African immigrants, has been practised alongside Catholicism for generations, with orisha and saints identified with one another. It received legal recognition of its marriages in 1999, which is the practical measure of a tradition moving from tolerated to acknowledged.

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