Dear Sir,

It is time to nip in the bud this stupidity of carnival. When Mr. Christie rose, in the House, to announce his idea of a “Junkanoo Festival” he clearly stated that he wanted to develop a vehicle to bring our culture, and, in particular, Junkanoo, to a much wider international audience and to extend Junkanoo throughout the year. I’m not sure if he was the one to introduce the word “carnival” to the proceedings but whoever did, did absolutely no favours to our Bahamaland. Carnival is celebrated further south in the Caribbean and South America and is an amalgam of excesses ending just before Ash Wednesday and the start of the Lenten season.

So now “the powers that be” are forcing an alien culture and southern Caribbean music on us, whether we want it or not. I have no problem with Mr. Christie’s original concept, what I vehemently object to is the crass idea of supplanting our wonderful Junkanoo with this hedonistic carnival!

The nails appear to be being hammered into the Junkanoo coffin. Listening to the news last evening (Saturday) I heard the lady representative from Hennessy calling for soca music to be further played and spread through our society! This reminded me that after last year’s street parade, I was told by one of the members of Colours Junkanoo Group, that Colours was the ONLY Bahamian Junkanoo group that played Junkanoo music ALL the others played soca. Apparently this caused major problems for the attendant media, who also thought, perhaps stupidly, this was supposed to be a Junkanoo Festival and were trying to find the groups playing Junkanoo music and found their choice was wide open with Colours or ….. nothing?! Just to make one further wonder, I understand Colours will not be participating in the 2016 iteration of this rubbish, they have been told NO Bahamian music(???) only soca is acceptable, needless to say Colours have pulled out. I suppose this means that there will be only two groups taking part in the Boxing Day and New Year’s Day parades from now on; Colours and Bahamas Junkanoo Shakers, you remember them, that group in Miami, Florida!

So much, Mr. Christie, for internationalising Junkanoo, looks to me that you have killed it, good move, sir! And there I was thinking you enjoyed Junkanoo, I guess, silly me.

I wish to propose, therefore, if not too late; abandon that hideous word carnival, it has nothing to do with the Bahamas but instead call the celebration a Junkanoo Festival, the word is already used in the overseeing entity anyway, and evidently there is no problem with introducing a second music strain so we internationalise Junkanoo and Rake ‘n’ Scrape. There are serious money saving benefits for this as well, no expensive foreign entertainers to worry about and, I would suggest, we have more than enough quality home-grown music talent to hold parties for a couple weeks at least.

Lastly we would actually get tourists to come and enjoy OUR music, don’t forget USA Today did a survey some 18 months ago that found most Americans would prefer to come to the Bahamas for a Junkanoo extravaganza than go to the Caribbean for some carnival garbage.

Of course there can only be one loser here, if carnival is removed from the Junkanoo Festival it merely goes home to its myriad centres to the south; if Junkanoo is removed it is finished, it dies!

Just hoping we will not have to write “Junkanoo, R.I.P.” any time soon,

H. Armbrister