A Rada Community in Trinidad

Trinidadian Anthropologist Andrew Carr had a deep and abiding love for "Ole Time" Trinidad. In this scholarly study, written in the early 1950s and first published in 1955, he traces the cutlural beliefs, traditions and practices of the Rada, a group of African settlers from Dahomey (now Nigeria), in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the 19th and early 20th century. Carr describes the founding of the Rada Compound in the 1870s and how he experienced it in the 1950s, with the attendant changes in the religious practices and ceremonies, the musical and dance expressions, the sacrifices to the particular pantheon of the inhabitants, their food and their memories. "The existence, up until recently, of the Belmont Rada Community has helped in no small way to mould the personality of that very parituclar part of our capital city," writes Publisher Gérard A. Besson in his Note to the first edition in 1989.