Trinidad and Tobago

• 1. Introduction

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  Trinidad and Tobago is the southernmost archipelagic country in the Caribbean, yet its larger island counts geologically as part of South America. Trinidad rests on that continent's shelf, and in ancient times it was physically joined to the mainland. On the island sits Pitch Lake, the largest naturally occurring deposit of asphalt on Earth. The capital is Port of Spain, while the biggest and most populous municipality is Chaguanas. Cultural invention runs deep here. The steelpan and the limbo were born in Trinidad and Tobago, along with calypso, soca, rapso, chutney music and chutney soca. This documentary asks how a Caribbean country came to depend on oil and gas rather than tourism. It asks how conquest, slavery and indentured labour assembled a population of many origins. And it asks how an island chain passed between European powers ended up a republic of its own.

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• 2. Spain And Its Rivals

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  Historian E. L. Joseph claimed that Trinidad's Indigenous name was Cairi, or Land of the Humming Bird. He traced it to an Arawakan word for hummingbird, ierèttê or yerettê. Other authors push back. Some say cairi does not mean hummingbird and propose tukusi or tucuchi instead. Others hold that kairi, or iere, simply means island.

  The earliest known settlement in the islands is Banwari Trace in southwestern Trinidad, dating to about 5000 BCE. It is the oldest pre-Columbian archaeological site in the Caribbean. The site has yielded the remains of Banwari Man, the oldest human skeleton found in the region. By the time Europeans arrived, Arawakan-speaking peoples such as the Nepoya and Shebaya lived on Trinidad, alongside Cariban-speaking groups like the Yao.

  Christopher Columbus was the first European to see Trinidad, in 1498. He named it La Isla de la Trinidad, the Island of the Trinity, to honour a vow made before he set out on his third voyage. Tobago appeared to him only on the distant horizon. He called it Bellaforma and never landed. Its later name may come from its cigar-like shape, or from the native use of tobacco, which in Spanish appeared as tabaco, tavaco and tobacco. Some Indigenous names for the island, such as Aloubaéra, meaning black conch, and Urupaina, meaning big snail, may share that origin.

  In the 1530s the Spanish soldier Antonio de Sedeño landed on Trinidad's southwest coast with a small army, determined to subdue the Indigenous population. His men fought the native peoples many times and built a fort. Decades of warfare followed until 1592, when the chief Wannawanare, also called Guanaguanare, granted the area around modern Saint Joseph to Domingo de Vera e Ibargüen and withdrew to another part of the island. Antonio de Berrío then founded the settlement of San José de Oruña on that land. Shortly afterward, on the 22nd of March 1595, the English pirate Walter Raleigh arrived, hunting for El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold supposedly located in South America. He attacked San José, captured Berrío and questioned him, and gathered information from him and from the chief Topiawari. Then Raleigh moved on, and Spanish authority returned.

  In 1687 Catalan Capuchin friars were handed responsibility for converting the Indigenous peoples of Trinidad and the Guianas. They founded several missions, richly funded by the state, and received encomienda rights that forced native people to labour for the Spanish. Tension turned to violence in 1699, when Indigenous people of the San Rafael encomienda rebelled. They killed several priests, attacked a church and killed the Spanish governor, José de León y Echales. Among the dead was Juan Mazien de Sotomayor, missionary priest to the Nepuyo villages of Caura, Tacarigua and Arauca. Spanish forces retaliated by slaughtering hundreds of native people in what became known as the Arena massacre. Continued slave-raiding and introduced diseases then did their work, and by the end of the following century the native population was virtually wiped out.

  In 1757 the Spanish moved the capital from San José de Oruña to Puerto de España, now Port of Spain, after several pirate attacks. Even so, Spain never made a concerted effort to settle the island. Trinidad remained mostly forest, home to a few Spaniards with a handful of slaves and a few thousand Indigenous people.

  Tobago, meanwhile, attracted repeated attempts at settlement between the 1620s and the 1640s. The Dutch, English and Couronians all tried with little success. The Couronians came from the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, now part of Latvia. From 1654 the Dutch and Courlanders gained a firmer foothold, and several hundred French settlers later joined them. A plantation economy grew around sugar, indigo and rum, worked by African slaves who soon vastly outnumbered the Europeans. Forts multiplied as France, the Netherlands and Britain contested the island, and piracy made matters worse. Tobago changed hands some 31 times before 1814. Britain held it from 1762 to 1781, France ruled until 1793, and Britain then recaptured it.

  In 1777 the captain general of Venezuela, Luis de Unzaga, allowed free trade in Trinidad, which drew French settlers and improved the economy. Spain still saw the island as underpopulated. On the 4th of November 1783, Roume de St. Laurent, a Frenchman living in Grenada, won a more generous Cédula de Población from King Charles III. An earlier one, granted in 1776, had produced no results. The new decree offered free land and ten years of tax exemption to Roman Catholic foreign settlers willing to swear allegiance to the Spanish king. Each free man, woman and child received 30 fanegas, about 13 hectares. Each slave brought along earned half that. Spain sent a new governor, José María Chacón, to carry out the terms.

  The Cédula came only a few years before the French Revolution, and the upheaval sent French planters toward Trinidad. They arrived with their slaves, along with free coloureds and mulattos, from Martinique, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Guadeloupe and Dominica. They built an economy on sugar and cocoa and founded communities in Blanchisseuse, Champs Fleurs, Paramin, Cascade, Carenage and Laventille. Trinidad's population leapt to over 15,000 by the end of 1789. By 1797 Port of Spain had grown from under 3,000 people to 10,422 in just five years. Its residents included Spaniards, Africans, French republican soldiers, retired pirates and French nobility.

  In 1797 General Sir Ralph Abercromby led a British force against Trinidad. His squadron sailed through the Bocas and anchored off Chaguaramas. Heavily outnumbered, Governor Chacón surrendered without a fight. Trinidad became a British crown colony with a largely French-speaking population and Spanish laws, and the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 formalised the change. The first British governor, Thomas Picton, was recalled after enforcing his authority with torture and arbitrary arrest. Settlers from the United Kingdom and the eastern Caribbean followed, including English, Scots, Irish, German and Italian families. Free Black veterans known as Merikins, who had fought for Britain in the War of 1812, received land in southern Trinidad.

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• 3. Emancipation And Indenture

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  Slavery was abolished in 1833, but former slaves first served an apprenticeship period, which ended with full emancipation on the 1st of August 1838. The numbers set Trinidad apart from its neighbours. At emancipation it held only 17,439 slaves, and 80% of slave owners had enslaved fewer than ten people each. Jamaica, twice Trinidad's size, held roughly 360,000.

  During the apprenticeship, in 1837, a man named Daaga was conscripted into the local regiment. He was a West African slave trader whom Portuguese slavers had captured and the British navy had later rescued. Daaga and a group of his compatriots mutinied at the barracks in St Joseph and set out eastward, hoping to return to their homeland. A militia unit ambushed them just outside the town of Arima. The revolt was crushed at the cost of some 40 dead, and Daaga and two others were later executed at St Joseph.

  In Laventille and Belmont, east of Port of Spain, many freed people settled after emancipation rather than return to plantation work. A severe agricultural labour shortage followed. The British answered with indentureship, contracting Indians, Chinese and Portuguese. East Indians came in the largest numbers, beginning on the 1st of May 1845, when the Muslim-owned ship Fatel Razack delivered 225 of them. Indentureship of Indians lasted until 1917, and more than 147,000 arrived to work the sugarcane plantations.

  Historian Hugh Tinker called indentureship “a new system of slavery”. Yet the system differed from slavery in important ways. Workers were paid, contracts were finite, and the idea of one person owning another had ended with abolition. Employers had no legal right to flog or whip their workers. The main sanction was prosecution in court, followed by fines or, more likely, jail.

  Contracts ran for five years, with a daily wage as low as 25 cents in the early 20th century and a guaranteed return passage to India. Coercion was still used to keep labourers, and from 1854 contracts were extended to ten years after planters complained that they were losing workers too early. Indians also faced laws that segregated them from the rest of the population. They had to carry a pass when leaving the plantations, and freed workers carried “Free Papers” certifying that their indenture was complete.

  Instead of return passage, the British began offering plots of land. By 1902 independent cane farmers, mostly Indian, were producing more than half of Trinidad's sugar cane. About 90% of Indian immigrants chose to make Trinidad their permanent home when their contracts ended. Few settled on Tobago, where descendants of African slaves remained the majority.

  A slump in the middle to late 19th century caused widespread poverty. In 1876 discontent erupted into rioting on the Roxborough plantation, known as the Belmanna Uprising after a policeman who was killed. Britain restored control, but Tobago's Legislative Assembly voted to dissolve itself, and the island became a Crown colony in 1877. With the sugar industry near collapse and the island no longer profitable, Britain attached Tobago to the Trinidad colony in 1889.

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• 4. Strikes And Independence

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  In 1903 a protest against new water rates in Port of Spain turned into rioting. Eighteen people were shot dead, and fire damaged the Red House, the government headquarters. A local elected assembly with limited powers arrived in 1913.

  In November 1919 dockworkers went on strike over poor management, low wages and a high cost of living. Strikebreakers were brought in to keep a minimum of goods moving through the ports. On the 1st of December 1919 the strikers rushed the harbour, chased the strikebreakers away and marched on the government buildings in Port of Spain. Other unions and workers with similar grievances joined, turning the action into a general strike. Violence broke out and was put down only with help from sailors of a British naval ship. The strike brought the first cooperation among the colony's ethnic groups. Historian Brinsley Samaroo read it this way. He said the 1919 strikes “seem to indicate that there was a growing class consciousness after the war and this transcended racial feelings at times.”

  The 1920s brought the collapse of the sugarcane industry and the failure of the cocoa industry. Rural and agricultural workers fell into widespread depression, and a labour movement rose. Conditions worsened in the 1930s with the Great Depression, and labour riots in 1937 caused several deaths. The movement sought to unite urban workers and agricultural labourers. Its key figures included Arthur Cipriani, who led the Trinidad Labour Party. Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler stood with the British Empire Citizens' and Workers' Home Rule Party. Adrian Cola Rienzi led the Trinidad Citizens League, the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union and the All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factory Workers Union.

  Petroleum had been discovered in 1857, but it became economically significant only in the 1930s and afterwards. Sugarcane and cocoa were collapsing, and industrialisation was growing. By the 1950s petroleum was a staple of the export market, and it fed a growing middle class across all sections of the population. The failure of the old crops, the Depression and the rise of oil together transformed the country's social structure.

  During World War II, American military bases at Chaguaramas and Cumuto had a profound effect on society. The Americans improved the infrastructure and gave many locals well-paying jobs. They left in 1961. Universal suffrage arrived in 1945 as Britain began decolonising its empire, and political parties emerged, largely divided along racial lines. Eric Williams formed the People's National Movement in 1956, which drew mostly Afro-Trinidadian and Tobagonian support. Bhadase Sagan Maraj formed the People's Democratic Party in 1953, and it merged into the Democratic Labour Party in 1957. Indo-Trinidadians and Tobagonians mostly backed it.

  Britain's Caribbean colonies formed the West Indies Federation in 1958 as a vehicle for independence. Jamaica withdrew after a membership referendum in 1961, and the Federation dissolved. The government of Trinidad and Tobago then chose to seek independence on its own.

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• 5. Republic And Turmoil

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  On the 31st of August 1962 Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from the United Kingdom. Elizabeth II remained head of state, represented by Governor-General Solomon Hochoy, until the Republican Constitution of 1976. Eric Williams of the People's National Movement served as the first prime minister, without interruption until 1981. Rudranath Capildeo of the Democratic Labour Party was the dominant opposition figure in the early years.

  Hurricane Flora struck Tobago in 1963, killing 30 people and causing enormous destruction. Partly as a result, tourism replaced agriculture as the island's primary source of income in the following decades.

  On the 1st of May 1968 the country joined the Caribbean Free Trade Association, known as CARIFTA. It kept an economic link among the former British West Indies after the Federation failed. On the 1st of August 1973 Trinidad and Tobago became a founding member of its successor, the Caribbean Community, known as CARICOM. In 1967 it had become the first Commonwealth country to join the Organization of American States. In 1995 it hosted the inaugural meeting of the Association of Caribbean States and became the seat of that 35-member grouping.

  The 1960s brought a Black Power movement, inspired in part by the civil rights movement in the United States. Protests and strikes became common, and in April 1970 police shot dead a protester named Basil Davis. Fearing a breakdown of law and order, Prime Minister Williams declared a state of emergency and had many Black Power leaders arrested. Army officers sympathetic to the movement, notably Raffique Shah and Rex Lassalle, tried to mutiny, but the Coast Guard quashed it. Williams and his party kept power largely because the opposition was divided.

  A more radical opposition then emerged in the National Union of Freedom Fighters, known as NUFF. Its members were frustrated by slow change and inspired by guerrilla warfare tactics. They attacked banks, police stations and other infrastructure, hoping to ignite a revolution against Williams' government. Police and security forces pressed them hard, many members died, and the insurgency was suppressed by 1974.

  Between 1972 and 1983 the country profited from rising oil prices and vast new oil deposits found in its territorial waters. The boom substantially raised living standards. In 1976 the country became a republic within the Commonwealth, though the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council remained its final appellate court. A largely ceremonial president replaced the governor-general, and Ellis Clarke was the first to hold the office. Tobago won limited self-rule with the creation of the Tobago House of Assembly in 1980.

  Williams died in 1981, and George Chambers led the country until 1986. By then a fall in oil prices had caused a recession, with rising inflation and unemployment. The main opposition parties united as the National Alliance for Reconstruction and won the 1986 general election, making A. N. R. Robinson prime minister. Robinson could not hold the coalition together. His reforms, including an International Monetary Fund structural adjustment program and a currency devaluation, led to social unrest.

  In 1990, 114 members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, led by Yasin Abu Bakr, formerly known as Lennox Phillip, stormed the Red House, the seat of Parliament. They also seized Trinidad and Tobago Television, then the country's only television station. They held Robinson and the government hostage for six days before surrendering. The coup leaders had been promised amnesty, but they were arrested on surrender and ultimately released after protracted legal wrangling.

  Patrick Manning's party returned to power after the 1991 election. Hoping to capitalise on a better economy, Manning called an early election in 1995, which produced a hung parliament. Two NAR representatives backed the opposition United National Congress, which had split from the NAR in 1989. Basdeo Panday then became the country's first Indo-Trinidadian prime minister. After years of inconclusive results, Manning returned in 2001 and held office until 2010. A second oil boom began in 2003.

  In 2010 the newly formed People's Partnership coalition defeated Manning, and Kamla Persad-Bissessar became the first female prime minister. A spike in killings led to a state of emergency from the 21st of August 2011 to the 5th of December 2011, with curfews in so-called hotspots. Keith Rowley's party defeated the coalition in 2015 and won again in August 2020. His second term saw a state of emergency begin on the 15th of May 2021 to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. From the 4th to the 11th of August 2023, the country hosted the seventh Commonwealth Youth Games, delayed from 2021 by the pandemic. It was the first time a Caribbean country had hosted them. A second state of emergency took effect on the 30th of December 2024, aimed at people posing a threat to public safety through crime and illegal firearms. Stuart Young succeeded Rowley in March 2025, but in April 2025 the United National Congress won the election, and Kamla Persad-Bissessar became prime minister once more.

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• 6. Terrain And Wildlife

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  Trinidad lies just 6 nautical miles off the coast of Venezuela, across the Columbus Channel. Together the two main islands cover 5128 square kilometres, and a strait of 20 nautical miles separates them. Trinidad accounts for 4768 square kilometres, or 93.0% of the total, with an average length of 80 kilometres and an average width of 59. Tobago covers about 300 square kilometres, 5.8% of the country, and is 41 kilometres long and 12 wide at its widest. Smaller islands include Chacachacare, Monos, Huevos, Gaspar Grande, also called Gasparee, Little Tobago and Saint Giles Island.

  In Trinidad's Northern Range stands El Cerro del Aripo, the country's highest peak at 940 metres, followed by El Tucuche at 936. The Central Range and Montserrat Hills rise in the middle of the island, and the Southern Range and Trinity Hills in the south. The east coast is noted for beaches, most famously Manzanilla Beach, and large swamps such as Caroni Swamp and Nariva Swamp cover parts of the island. Tobago has a flat plain in its southwest, while its eastern half climbs to Pigeon Peak at 550 metres. Coral reefs lie off its coast.

  Beneath the Southern Lowlands, Miocene and Pliocene sands, clays and gravels overlie oil and natural gas deposits, especially north of the Los Bajos Fault. The Southern Range is rich in oil sands and mud volcanoes. Port of Spain has recorded a high of 39 degrees Celsius and a low of 12. Because the islands lie farther south than most of the Caribbean, they see fewer hurricanes.

  The islands' biological diversity has more in common with Venezuela than with most other Caribbean islands. Birdwatchers come for 472 recorded bird species, two of them endemic. The list includes the scarlet ibis, the cocrico, the oilbird and 17 species of hummingbird. One of them, the tufted coquette, is the world's third smallest. Mammals number about 100 species, among them the ocelot, the West Indian manatee, the red howler monkey and the collared peccary, known locally as the quenk. There are some 70 species of bat, including the vampire bat.

  Five species of marine turtle nest on the beaches. Larger reptiles include the green anaconda, the boa constrictor and the spectacled caiman. The islands hold at least 47 species of snake, but only four are dangerous and venomous, and those live only on Trinidad. The golden tree frog and the Trinidad poison frog live on the highest peaks of the Northern Range and on Venezuela's nearby Paria Peninsula. Offshore, manta rays, dolphins and whale sharks share the water with sea urchins, lobsters and corals. Pterois, an introduced fish with no natural predators, eats many native species, and efforts are underway to cull it.

  Plant diversity is well documented, with about 3,300 species recorded, 59 of them endemic. Forests still cover about 40% of the country despite significant felling, and about 350 tree species grow there. The manchineel is extremely poisonous, and even touching its sap can cause severe blistering, so the trees are often covered with warning signs. Researchers have recorded 1,647 species of fungi, including lichens, although only about 7% of all fungi worldwide have been discovered. On the 1st of August 1996 the country ratified the 1992 Rio Convention on Biological Diversity. Over-hunting, poaching, habitat loss from quarrying, agriculture, housing and roads, water pollution and invasive species now threaten that inventory.

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• 7. The Oil Economy

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  Oil and gas account for about 40% of GDP and 80% of exports, but only 5% of employment. Trinidad and Tobago is the leading Caribbean producer of both. Investment in liquefied natural gas, petrochemicals and steel has fuelled recent growth, and the country is also a regional financial centre. An expansion of Atlantic LNG created the largest sustained phase of economic growth the country has seen.

  In 2017 the country supplied 13.4 billion cubic metres of liquefied natural gas, with Chile and the United States as its largest markets. Natural gas production that year totalled 18.5 billion cubic metres, down 0.4% from 18.6 billion in 2016. Oil output fell from 7.1 million metric tonnes a year in 2007 to 4.4 million in 2017. The economy has shifted from oil to natural gas. According to an article in the Trinidad Guardian, South Korea imported methanol worth US$286 million in 2022 and US$186 million in 2023.

  A gross national income per capita of US$20,070 in 2014 placed the country among the highest in the Caribbean. In November 2011 the OECD removed it from its list of developing countries. Tourism matters far less here than elsewhere in the region, and most of it happens on Tobago. Visitors are drawn by street food and cultural events, and Aripita Avenue in Port of Spain is one noted place for both.

  Sugar once dominated agriculture, earning the most money and providing the most jobs. Most of it was sold to the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Production ceased around 2010 because of low prices and high costs. Cocoa, the second most valuable crop, covers more land than sugar cane did. Trinidad was once the second-biggest cocoa producer after Ecuador. Then growers in West Africa and South America began selling at lower prices, and Trinidad lost many customers. Agriculture now forms just 0.4% of GDP and employs 3.1% of the workforce.

  The Carib Brewery is the largest brewery company in CARICOM, and the country also hosts food production facilities including a Nestle plant. In 2022 the food, beverage and tobacco industry produced almost 8 billion Trinidadian dollars of output. Telecommunications and broadcasting generated an estimated TT$5.63 billion in 2014, or 3.1% of GDP. Mobile voice services earned 39.2% of that revenue and internet services 21.1%. To grow sectors beyond oil and gas, the government formed InvesTT in 2012 as the country's sole investment promotion agency.

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• 8. Languages And Faiths

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  With a population estimated at between 1.4 and 1.5 million by the mid 2020s, Trinidad and Tobago is a country of several large heritages. Indo-Trinidadians and Tobagonians form the largest group at approximately 35.4%, mostly descended from indentured workers. As of the 2011 census, only 2.5% of Tobago's population was of Indian descent. Afro-Trinidadians make up about 34.2% of the country and 85.2% of Tobago. People of mixed heritage account for 23%. Arima is a noted centre of First Peoples' culture, headquarters of the Carib Queen and home to the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community. The Cocoa Panyol community descends from migrant labourers of mixed Spanish, Indigenous and African ancestry. They came from Venezuela between the late 19th and early 20th century to work the cocoa estates.

  English is the official language, but the most commonly spoken tongues are Trinidadian and Tobagonian Creoles. They draw vocabulary and grammar from African, Indian, European and Indigenous sources. Trinidadian Creole French came from Grenada, Martinique and Guadeloupe and served as the island's lingua franca for many decades of the 19th century. It gave the language words such as “bakanal” and “dingolay”, and it appears in Mighty Sparrow's song Gadé Zinah. Today it survives in a few villages such as Paramin and Blanchieusse, and several people are working to revive it.

  Most early Indian indentured immigrants spoke Bhojpuri and Awadhi, which merged into Trinidadian Hindustani. In 1935 Indian movies began showing in Trinidad. Their Standard Hindustani added Hindi and Urdu vocabulary and revitalised the language among Indo-Trinidadians. The colonial government and estate owners held it in contempt, and many Indians came to see it as a broken language that kept them bound to the cane fields. They passed it on as a heritage language and favoured English as a way out. By the mid to late 1960s the common tongue of Indo-Trinidadians had become a Hindinised English. As of 2003 about 15,633 people spoke Trinidadian Hindustani, and as of 2011 about 10,000 spoke Standard Hindi. The language lives on in bhajan, Indian classical music, filmi, pichakaree, chutney, chutney soca and chutney parang. World Hindi Day is marked every year on the 10th of January.

  Tamil is spoken by some older Madrasi Indo-Trinidadians, mostly the few remaining children of indentured labourers from Tamil Nadu, and by recent immigrants from the same state. Most Chinese immigrants of the 19th century came from southern China and spoke Hakka and Yue. Writing in 1906, J. Dyer Ball said that about twenty years earlier Trinidad had 4,000 or 5,000 Chinese, a number that had shrunk to perhaps 2,000 or 3,000. A figure of 2,200 is given for 1900. They once worked the sugar plantations but had become mainly shopkeepers, general merchants, miners and railway builders. On Tobago the Indigenous language was Karina, a Cariban tongue.

  Christianity is the largest religion, followed by around 65.9% of the population as of 2020. Roman Catholics, Pentecostals, Anglicans, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Moravians all have followings. Hinduism, practiced by approximately 22.7%, is most visible in central Trinidad, where groups such as the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha and Arya Samaj are active. Diwali is a national holiday. Islam is practiced by 5.9% of the population, among both Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians. Eid al-Fitr is a national holiday, and Eid al-Adha and Hosay are widely recognised. About 3.6% of people are non-religious or did not state a religion. Rastafari, Spiritual Baptist and Trinidad Orisha faiths sit alongside Baháʼí, Buddhism and Sikhism. The Jewish community is the smallest of all, with about 55 people as of 2007.

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