Heritage · VincyMas History
The Carnival Riots of 1879: When Kingstown Rose for the Right to Masquerade
For several nights in February 1879, the streets of Kingstown did not belong to the colonial government. They belonged to the people. Police were beaten and driven back to their barracks, the Chief of Police was knocked to the ground and nearly killed, the Administrator’s own carriage was stoned by a crowd of hundreds, and placards went up threatening to burn the town. The spark for all of it was something that today sits at the very heart of Vincentian identity: the right to put on a mask and play mas.
A vivid first-hand account of those events has been circulating again, drawn from the Saint Vincent Governors’ Despatches of 1877 to 1879 and brought to public attention through the work of historian Dr. Adrian Fraser. It takes the form of a detailed report written by the Administrator, Edward Laborde, to Lieutenant-Governor Dundas. Read carefully, it is two stories at once: the panic of a colonial official losing control of a town, and, between the lines, the determination of ordinary Black Vincentians to defend a culture the authorities had tried to ban.
The ban that lit the fuse
To understand 1879, you have to go back to 1872. Masquerading, the practice of parading through the streets in costume and mask, was an African-rooted tradition that had taken hold in St Vincent as it had across the region. The colonial authorities distrusted it. In 1872, after what Laborde described as years of disturbances arising from masking, wearing a mask in any street was made punishable as a petty offence. The tradition was, in the language of the day, suppressed.
It did not die. By February 1879, Vincentians were masquerading in the streets again in open defiance of the ban. When the Administrator learned that masqueraders had appeared on the Saturday evening, he ordered the Chief of Police to warn the public that masking was against the law and to take the names of anyone who defied it. A group of maskers came to him directly to ask permission to carry on. He refused. That refusal set the stage for a confrontation.
How it unfolded, February 1879
Masquerading is prohibited in St Vincent. Wearing a mask in the street becomes a punishable offence.
Maskers reappear in Kingstown. The Administrator refuses permission and warns of arrests. Police detain and identify masqueraders.
A dense mob gathers, beats the police with sticks, stones and bottles, and drives them back to barracks. The Chief of Police is struck down and nearly killed before friendly hands pull him to safety.
The Council swears in 121 special constables, issues a proclamation, and requests the warship HMS Blanche. The Administrator’s carriage is attacked by a crowd of 300 to 400.
Quiet returns. Suspected leaders sail away on crowded boats. Only a handful are ever convicted.
The town takes over
The clashes built over several days. Police arrested masqueraders, took their names and released them, and proceedings began in the Police Court. Then, on the Tuesday evening, it boiled over. A dense mob gathered and attacked the constables patrolling the town with sticks and stones. The Chief of Police led out his whole available force with batons to rescue his men, only to be overwhelmed. Stones and broken bottles rained in from every side. When the crowd recognised him, Laborde recorded, a cry went up: “there is the Chief! Kill him, kill him.” He was struck down and knocked to the ground several times before sympathetic hands dragged him into a gateway and he escaped through the back of the house.
By the administrator’s own account, the mob then held the streets for hours, pelting anyone they took for a special constable, until the town fell quiet around eleven. The authorities scrambled. The Executive Council swore in one hundred and twenty one special constables, issued a proclamation reminding the public that masking was unlawful, and sent an urgent cipher telegram begging for the warship HMS Blanche to steam down from Barbados, hoping its mere presence in the bay would cow the crowd. Placards had appeared around town threatening officials and the burning of the town, one of them likening the moment to the confederation riots that had shaken Barbados only three years earlier. Even the Administrator was not safe: warned not to travel in his easily recognised carriage, he was attacked anyway by a crowd of three to four hundred that pelted it with stones.
What the Administrator recorded as lawless disorder, history remembers as a people refusing to let their culture be banned.
Reading against the colonial grain
Laborde’s report is invaluable, but it is written entirely from the colonial chair, and its language tells you exactly where its author stood. He calls the masqueraders “the lower orders,” blames the whole affair on “a few idle and disorderly persons,” and describes the wider population as “excitable” people whose passions were roused by trivial causes. To him, a ban on an African cultural tradition was simply the law, and its defenders were a rabble.
Vincentian history reads it very differently. What Laborde saw as disorder, later scholars, Dr. Fraser among them, understand as one of the earliest acts of organised cultural resistance in the country’s history: ordinary Black Vincentians standing up against a colonial state that had tried to legislate their heritage out of existence. The details in Laborde’s own account support that reading. The community shielded the rioters rather than informing on them. Of the masqueraders identified, only a few were ever convicted, and the Administrator admitted with frustration that not one of those involved in the serious Tuesday-night uprising was ever identified. The leaders, he believed, had simply boarded boats and sailed away, protected by a town that did not consider them criminals at all.
First in the region
There is a point of Vincentian pride buried in this story that is often overlooked. The 1879 Kingstown disturbances were the first Carnival riots in the region. Trinidad’s far more famous Canboulay riots did not come until 1881 and 1884. St Vincent was first, and word of it travelled: even the Barbados press of the day reported on the riotous scenes in Kingstown caused by masquerading parties the police could not check. When Vincentians defied the mask ban, they were part of a Caribbean-wide refusal by newly freed people to surrender their culture, and on the calendar of that resistance, St Vincent led.
From the mask ban to VincyMas
The tradition those masqueraders fought for did not disappear. It endured, evolved and eventually became the national celebration Vincentians now proudly call the hottest Carnival in the Caribbean. Every band that crosses the stage at VincyMas, every masker in the road, is the descendant of the people who refused the ban in 1879. And the impulse behind that night, ordinary Vincentians insisting on their dignity and their rights against a power that dismissed them, did not stop with Carnival. It runs like a thread through the country’s history, from 1879 to the 1935 riots that Dr. Fraser has chronicled, and on toward adult suffrage and self-government.
So the next time the drums start and the road fills with mas, it is worth remembering that the freedom to do it was not simply given. It was defended, on the streets of Kingstown, by people the colonial record dismissed as the lower orders, but whom we can now recognise for what they were: the guardians of a culture that has outlived the empire that tried to ban it.
Source: Saint Vincent Governors’ Despatches, 1877 to 1879 (Dispatch No. 27, February 15, 1879), Administrator Edward Laborde to Lieutenant-Governor Dundas. Historical context via Dr. Adrian Fraser.
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