WHAT IT meant to “play mas” was born years ago in the islands across the Caribbean before finding a familiar home on the grey streets of Notting Hill.

The movement of masquerade was already beginning to emerge in parts of the Caribbean when pre-Lenten Mardi Gras masquerade balls were held by French slave owners, but enslaved Africans were still prohibited from taking part. 

Instead, they adopted their own festivities that mimicked the grandeur of these balls and their slave owners in songs and masquerade, while also using elements of their African heritage.

In 1834, the Caribbean was emancipated from slavery and later found  the British Empire in the years to follow, but the dances and songs that mocked their former capturers still stayed with them.

Often adorned in thematic dress and masks, reminiscent of the masquerade balls of the 14th and 15th centuries, free black people took their art of “playing mas” to the streets through vibrant parades across the Caribbean.

However, it was the twin island of Trinidad and Tobago that is most noted as the birthplace of these cultural gatherings and what would become known to many as Carnival.

Amid post-war Britain, as labour shortages ran rife, there was a mass migration of people from the Caribbean throughout the country between 1948 and 1970.

Those that made the long voyage to start a new life on English shores would become known as the Windrush Generation, and what came with it was the slow blossoming of Caribbean communities throughout London’s Notting Hill and corners of Brixton.

As people from the islands made a new home, they were met with vitriol over what it meant to be black in 1950s Britain. The white working-class communities that many Caribbean people settled among pushed back against the influx of black migrants to the “mother country.”

Soon, attacks on black communities ensued, where the messages to “Keep Britain White” and “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” were frequent reminders to many.

As racial tensions spiked, Claudia Jones – a prominent activist that spearheaded the start of the West Indian Gazette newspaper – decided to bring the vibrancy of Carnival from her home island of Trinidad to St Pancras Hall in London.

The year 1959 welcomed the first indoor festival, a place where people of Caribbean descent could celebrate and revel in the culture they brought to Britain.

In the years that followed after Jones’ death in 1964, other members of the community led the way to continue to make a home for black people and took the festivities outdoors, just like on the streets of the Caribbean before seeing it become a parade that would take to the grey streets of London as Carnival.

Amid the sharp echoes of rows of steel pans, there were sounds of calypso folklore and the boom of reggae, which is where Notting Hill Carnival was born.

The 70s saw a new era of people now gathering in the streets and neighbourhoods that Caribbean people first called home.

Rashid Rose, a political commentator on Africa and the Caribbean, celebrates the impact Carnival has made, and how it is now a major cultural event in the UK.

“Carnival became ever expansive, a celebration of blackness, of the Caribbean and the story of our ancestors masked in a bloody past who fought against subjugation.

Its very beginnings and the added presence on British streets was what inspired Val McCalla, a Jamaican-born entrepreneur, to found what droves of black Britain know and remember fondly as The Voice. By its inception in 1982, he witnessed a desperate need for their stories, beginning life on new shores to be heard, that often went untold or skewed through the white narrative.

At the time, the gathering of Carnival was quickly painted as the catalyst for crime and the need for an increased police presence as white communities also began to settle in what were once predominantly black neighbourhoods.

But Carnival has remained forever present as a significant cultural event that has embedded itself not just in black Britain’s calendar, but as part of one of the UK’s most celebrated gatherings across the summer.

It’s been more than 100 years since enslaved Africans danced together and made songs on the plantation fields they were once forced to work upon.

What started as satire and a sense of freedom from the people that profited off their labour and existence, has carried its legacy from then to create something that tells the story of Caribbean people and the diaspora that called Britain home.

Notting Hill Carnival today exists as a fusion of Brazilian samba, too, soca sounds and street vendors.

Still, thousands of people make the journey every summer to embrace the joy of Caribbean culture.

Today, to “play mas” is intertwined with a struggle in times gone by, but it also carries with it the liberation of a people who were determined to paint the streets of Notting Hill.