Calypso In The Service of African Liberation: Kelvin (‘Mighty Duke’) Pope’s Contribution– Winthrop R. Holder

Reading Time 8 mins

May 25, 2021

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Indeed, Kevin Pope was a boss lyricist who, by the sheer power of crisp and deft word choice and masterly rhyme scheme, brought his audiences into his scenes and compositions as participants… He didn’t sing to an audience but with them. The bard served as a vehicle that gave Voice to those on the margins. By recording the lives of ordinary folks in song, he not only validated them but may well have re-fashioned and extended lives—social realism at its best!

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“Mussolini, you too brass face and bold/ Ah mean to claim our land filled with gold…. We are going to fight until we get you in the grave.” “Advantage Mussolini,” – Roaring Lion, (1936)

The calypso, which Kelvin Pope (Mighty Duke, 1932-2009) characterized as “an editorial in song of the life we undergo,” has displayed a deep commitment to Africa and its Liberation. Indeed, there’s no better representation of this devotion in calypso to Africa than  Roaring Lion’s decisive repudiation of Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia and embrace of Haile Selassie, as reflected in the epigraph. Twenty years later, in “Birth of Ghana,” Lord Kitchener welcomed Ghana’s independence by hailing Dr. Kwame Nkrumah as one who “endeavored continually/To bring us freedom and liberty.” Such reclamation of and identification with our African past underscores calypso’s imprint.

In the late 1950s, Duke entered the University of Calypso, discovering and distilling a unique, uplifting message. The fight for freedom, justice, and equity informed his work from the beginning. Chanting down Babylon, Pope offered “Afro-Chant” (1974) and the classic “Black is Beautiful” in 1969, followed by the defiant “Uhuru” (1977) and “How Many More Must Die?” 1986. All songs encapsulate the spirit of the times by championing the cause of African Liberation.

In advancing a liberatory vision, Kelvin Pope also penned the haunting “Man Child of a Slave” (1980) while asserting in “Freedom in Africa” (1980), “dialogue is over…it is war” as the only means necessary to regain self-hood and topple the oppressors. Not surprisingly, then, he was a relentless critic of the vile apartheid system from early.

If, as The Mighty Duke suggested, “calypso is more than a work of art,” then he proved to be more than an artist and calypsonian on his lifelong calypso pilgrimage. While contesting the stranglehold of the European centers of learning on African/Caribbean society, he functioned as both a grassroots philosopher and archaeologist of memory, displaying ‘poetic wisdom.’ By challenging the euro-centric basis/base of colonial and neocolonial society, Duke’s poetry in songs created a pathway toward our self-knowledge and self-fashioning as actors in charge of our futures. In this sense, he championed African Liberation Day’s ideals and Pan-Africanism, even without having voiced those terms in his lyrics. There was no need; his work teems with calls for African dignity, resistance to unfreedom, and genuine emancipation.

Duke was a grassroots intellectual whose intelligence and knowledge sprung from keen observation and critical engagement with his environment. Liming in and beyond the kaiso tent was Duke’s necessary laboratory and classroom as he imbibed not only the poetry of everyday life but also the native wit and intelligence of the kaiso titans with whose works he grounded. For Duke, then, kaiso warriors such as Roaring Lion, Kitchener, Spoiler, and Growling Tiger, among others, blazed a trail that served as the guiding spirit that fashioned kaiso sensibilities.

Duke’s interventions into the calypso discourse were in the tradition of the African griots, encapsulating the memory of man while serving both as a clearinghouse and storehouse of our indigenous knowledge—as distilled beyond the ivory showers of the more formalized centers of miseducation. Indeed, underscoring the solid progressive currents in his work, he affirmed, in a 2007 TriniSoca.com interview, “I grew up in that era of resistance,” while recalling the Tubal Uriah Butler-led workers’ uprising in Trinidad and Tobago of the 1930s, which set the stage for the independence struggle.

Kevin Pope was one of that rare breed of calypsonians who excelled in all spheres of the calypso, having an uncanny ear for zeroing in on the street vendor’s patter while capturing, recasting, and retelling the drama and nuances of the best lime or spontaneous social gathering. Indeed, one can hear many of his witty songs as if listening in on a great lime or viewing theatre in the barrack yard. Duke employed a minimalist approach that facilitated his storytelling to allow his varied audiences to experience his craft much more vividly than if the drama of his songs were re-represented on screen by the best filmmaker. This slant was most evident in ‘Social Bacchanal.’ ‘One Foot Visina’ and ‘Freaking Streaking,’ where laughter cut both ways, as therapy and as a prompt for self and societal reflection.

Indeed, Kevin Pope was a boss lyricist who brought his audiences into his scenes and compositions as participants and co-creators by the sheer power of crisp and deft word choice and masterly rhyme scheme. He didn’t sing to an audience but with them. The bard served as a vehicle that gave Voice to those on the margins. By recording the lives of ordinary folks in song, he not only validated them but may well have re-fashioned and extended lives—social realism at its best!

Drawing from the well of our subjugated knowledge and suppressed memories, he refused to believe what society said about Africa and those whom the system consigned to persistent poverty and oppression. Bolstered by his independent research, he challenged authorized history and developed a counter-narrative to contest the dogmas and lies about Africa and Africans at home and abroad. In the interview, he asserts, “My Black consciousness was awakened as a little boy… Once I am doing a serious song… I do a lot of research. I would go to the library and spend weeks looking for information.”

Chipping Away at the Foundation

“[T]he poet appropriates the voice of the people and the full burden of their memory.”  
The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness, Wole Soyinka

“Until liberty, all Blacks possess/ Your Kwame cannot rest… Do you know what Nkrumah said/’We don’t want the crumbs/ We want the whole bread.'” Chalkdust, “Theme For African Liberation Day,” 1976/1977

Indeed, in 1969, a mere five years into his recording career and, as Louis Regis suggests in The Political Calypso: True Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago Duke, being a student of magnetic world events such as the Black Power Movement in the USA and the affirmation of Black pride by Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, in reflecting the New African Spirit, penned the evergreen, “Black Is Beautiful“:

A many, many, many years it took
Now we have found the natural look…
Suddenly out of the blue
This thing has struck like something new.
Everybody young and old/ Going Afro telling the world
Black is beautiful/ Look at the gloss.
Black is beautiful/It’s the texture, of course.
Lift your head like me/ You gotta wear the color with dignity
How it go/, Black is beautiful.
Ah, sing it out loud.
Black is beautiful/ Say I’m Black and proud.
It’s high time that we/ Get rid of this slave mentality…
Proudly I say without pretext/ No more inferiority complex.

The timelessness and prescience of this masterpiece cannot be understated. A colleague reflected on this watershed song today: “I recall growing up literally and figuratively to Duke’s ‘Black is Beautiful,’ etc. That was the first soundtrack of my black consciousness journey.” Indeed, Duke’s sentiment resonates through time and connects with today’s call: Black Lives Matter!

Kelvin Pope’s music traveled to all corners of the world where Africans lived and yearned for social justice, dignity, and, as Fanon implored, “restoration of nationhood to the people.” Duke was part of a cadre of cultural warriors–in reggae, rap, calypso, Afro-Beat, etc.–whose work helped to explode the European/non-Black myths of Africa’s past while upending the badge of servitude.

Ever mindful of the insidious ways of oppressors, he noted, “When they[oppressors] want to destroy a people/ The people’s culture they first destroy,” and this insight allowed him to be eternally vigilant, recognizing the centrality of culture in the affirmation and centering of self.

The effectiveness of Duke’s challenge of European distortions about Africa only fully entered my view in 1988 while trying to engage a group of fourteen and fifteen-year-old Brooklyn students in a social studies classroom. It was students’ continued resistance to and rejection of the drab, sanitized, and disempowering authorized text that led me to share Duke’s seminal “Teach the Children.

 In the song, Duke offered:

Now from the moment I came of age, I clearly remember.
They used to have me marching across a stage, singing Rule Britannia.
But of my ancestry, listen what they taught me
 Tarzan ruled the jungles of Africa.
That’s why I beg you/ Teach the children.
The truth they hide/ So, their forefathers they see with honor, respect, and pride.
Teach them that Africa is where civilization began
Teach them that Africa was the cradle of creation.

But that’s why I beg you/ Teach the children, teach.
The truth they must learn/ How the vulture stole our culture and called it their own…
 Teach them, Poetry, music, and art were Africa’s own from the start.
The year’s calendar was first practiced in Africa.
They never told me once in Africa; we had great empires.
Like those of Axum, Songhai, Mali, Ghana so many others…

After listening to the song and reading the lyrics, all hell broke loose. Instantly warming to Duke’s message and his manner of presentation, one student thundered, “Yes! Teach the Children we’ve been taught lies in the books!” Another student added, “Why can’t we hear more real history in the classroom?” Indeed, the energy generated by the calypso sparked a desire to explore popular culture’s hidden yet vital curriculum. It pushed us to engage sources of knowledge embedded in reggae, rap, calypso, and writers whose works the educated autocrats excluded from the curriculum. Against this drumbeat, I shared excerpts of George James’ influential “Stolen Legacy,” which led the classroom community to make connections between James’ book and ‘Teach the Children’ while critiquing the disempowering classroom text and dismissing it to the dustbin of history.

Duke, no traditional intellectual, reflected on his early education thus: “As a child, I didn’t know much about Africa except… the Tarzan story and that sort of thing… I was taught nothing about Africa except that people were born slaves and they came from Africa.” The imposition and privileging of  European history pushed Duke to challenge the euro-centric distortions and compose “Teach The Children.” By centering the discourse and his lyrics on the hidden truths of Africa, he provided a text for the ages.

Though the Mighty Duke transitioned in 2009, his body of work, like that of the great bards before him in jazz, reggae, calypso, and ‘world music,’ resonates through time. Indeed, his passing casts a new light on the African proverb, ‘ The dead only die when the living forget them. ‘ The Mighty Duke lives through his lyrics as his transformative work continues to guide us on the Freedom March.

*W. R. (troppy) Holder, an emancipated NYC public educator and a founding member of the Caribbean Awareness Committee(NY), is the author of Classroom Calypso: Giving Voice to the Voiceless.