The Carnival of Guinea-Bissau

Abstract

Copenhagen and London, the northernmost one I have yet observed being Akureyri, Iceland, on a fjord facing the Arctic Sea. Private carnival festivities take place in homes, schools, and clubs in virtually every Latin city, both in the Old World and in the New, where the Spanish, Portuguese, and French introduced carnival a half-millennium ago, one of the few aspects of colonialism that was welcomed by the aboriginal peoples. The greatest of all contemporary carnivals is in Rio de Janeiro, with Salvador da Bahia, Recife, and virtually every other Brazilian city also mounting impressive week-long festivities. Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Caracas, Panama City, Oruro Bolivia, and even Communist Havana have large carnivals, although the latter has been transferred to July to celebrate the I958 Revolution. Similarly, carnivals in the Caribbean have been changed in date to attract tourists and/or celebrate historic events, but the greatest of them all in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, is still held on the traditional February-March dates, as is the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, other Louisiana Creole towns, and in nearby Mobile, Alabama. Curiously enough, Ash Wednesday is the big day when Martiniquaises bury carnival, and the Haitian Rara carnival breaks all the rules by taking place during Lent. Although equally hit by the onslaught of European colonialism, Asian cultures resisted with their own festival traditions, even in the Christianized Philippines, but a lively carnival did develop and still survives in the ex-Portuguese enclave of Goa on the western coast of India. In Africa, too, strong local traditions minimized the importation of European festival life, but one carnival has been reported, that of GuineaBissau, an ex-Portuguese colony on the curve of the West African coast between Senegal and ex-French Guinea. Living in a small triangular nation of I4,000 square miles of river estuaries, swamps, and savannah, the Bissauan population of less than a million is deeply divided by religious, ethnic, linguistic, and ecological differences. Of the one-third who are