Caroni Plain

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The Caroni Plain is a large landscape in the north of the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean island state of Trinidad and Tobago .

geography

Historic counties in Trinidad with Caroni County in the midwest

The Caroni Plain is bounded in the north and south by two low mountain ranges , the Northern Range in the north and the Central Range in the south. In a west-east direction, the area of ​​the Gulf of Paria runs in the west to the east. An eastern end is not defined. In the north and south, the boundaries of the Caroni Plain roughly coincide with those of the historic Caroni County , which existed from 1849 to 1991 and whose eastern border ran roughly along an imaginary vertical axis through the center of Trinidad. It is possible to end the Caroni Plain at this former border, but not in writing. There is no administrative definition of the boundaries of the greater landscape.

The entire Caroni Plain is a lowland and as such the largest in Trinidad. The core area is for the most part very fertile, since watercourses coming from the low mountain ranges drain there, and for a long time it was primarily used for agriculture. On the west coast lies the Caroni Swamp, a wetland protected by the Ramsar Convention . Significant rivers that drain the plain are the Caroni River and the Oropuche River .

The greater landscape extends over parts of the regions of San Juan-Laventille , Tunapuna-Piarco and Couva-Tabaquite-Talparo and includes the cities of Port of Spain and Chaguanas that are not assigned to any regions . The populous East-West Corridor along the southern foothills of the Northern Range, in which over a third of the Trinidadian people live, runs largely within the Caroni Plain and at the same time defines its northern border.

history

During the British colonial period, the Caroni Plain was called "Grand Savannah". Traditionally, sugar cane was grown in it; the plant was introduced in 1785 by the plantation owner St. Hilaire Begorrat on Trinidad, and sugar was the island's most important export good from the beginning of the 19th century to around 1890 and again from 1920 to 1935. After the end of slavery in 1840, Indian contract workers hired for five years poured onto the island from 1845 and quickly made up the majority of the population in the "sugar cane belt" that made up the Caroni Plain. Their settlements were called "Coolie Villages", "Coolie Villages", whereby "Coolie" was a nickname with negative connotations for people of Asian origin. The original plan of the Trinidadian government was for the contract workers to move back to their homeland after the end of their contract period, but the vast majority remained, and their descendants now make up over 40% of the Trinidadian population.

Until 1880 the southern part of the Caroni Plain was only connected to the capital Port of Spain by a steamboat line via San Fernando . In that year the line of the Trinidad Railway Company was extended to Couva , in 1882 to San Fernando. With the collapse of Caroni (1975) , the industrial cultivation of sugar cane in the Caroni Plain ended in 2003. Since then, large parts of the previously agriculturally used areas have been fallow. Large-scale use as grazing land for livestock is occasionally discussed.

Culture

In the rural area of ​​the Caroni Plain, traditions of the East and North Indian homeland of the ancestors of today's residents are maintained. The Lucian writer Derek Walcott set a monument in his 1992 speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature : He described a visit to Felicity, a rural suburb of Chaguanas , where the residents performed the Ramlila as part of a festival lasting several days . The sociologist Cameron McCarthy explained that the people of Indian descent of the Caroni Plain countered their marginalization within Trinidadian society by preserving their traditions and thereby added a nuance to the folk culture of the entire Caribbean.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Jan Knippers Black et al.: Area Handbook for Trinidad and Tobago . The American University, Washington 1976, p. 9 .
  2. ↑ Ramsar.org: Caroni Swamp. Retrieved August 26, 2018 .
  3. ^ Caribbean History Archives: The History of Sugar Cane and Rum Part Three. Retrieved August 20, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Michael Anthony: Historical Dictionary of Trinidad and Tobago . Scarecrow Press, London 1997, ISBN 0-8108-3173-2 , pp. 553 .
  5. ↑ James Ferguson: The Jumbie Bird: From East to West Indian . In: Caribbean Beat . No. 44, July 2000.
  6. ↑ Angelo Bissessarsingh: The Red Bridge of Plaisance Park . In: Trinidad Guardian . May 5, 2013, p. A27.
  7. ↑ PTSC.co.tt: About Us ( Memento from April 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Steve Alvarez: Innovative ways to earn foreign exchange . In: Trinidad Newsday . October 12, 2017.
  9. ↑ nobelprize.org: Derek Walcott: Nobel Lecture. Retrieved August 20, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Cameron McCarthy: The Triumph of Multiplicity and the Carnival of Difference: Curriculum Dilemmas in the Age of Postcolonialism and Globalization . In: William F. Pinar (Ed.): International Handbook of Curriculum Research . Lawfrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah 2003, ISBN 0-8058-4535-6 , pp. 79 .