After carnival in Trinidad, the Calypso King competition result goes before the courts

I arrived here in Trinidad just before the annual carnival. Thousands were converging on the island from the major cities of the world. In Port of Spain, the capital, I saw familiar faces from Brixton and Notting Hill.

But violence is never far below the surface here. Trinidad and Tobago itself has been physically and culturally ravaged by an imperially organised industrialisation.The urban youths kill each other at the rate of one a day. On the morning I arrived, there was a big row about how the police had violently abused a group of schoolchildren, who returned the abuse with equal intensity. A reporter had her garments ripped off when she tried to photograph this brutality. There is nothing meek and mild about the young people here, particularly the females. They were in the majority among those arrested, and they survived the battle charges without any weeping or wailing.

No doubt I shall get into great trouble for revealing any of this in the international press. A few weeks before my arrival, a journalist wrote in the Los Angeles Times about how Indian businessmen are the main targets in an epidemic of kidnapping in Trinidad, making the country second in the world for this particular crime. Cabinet ministers huffed, puffed and complained to the US State Department, as though it had the power to control journalists. I got the same kind of treatment in 1988 when I made a film for Channel 4 about the extent of social unrest in Trinidad and predicted (rightly, as it turned out) that it would lead to an upheaval.

I am afraid that Trinidadians have no sense of proportion. One is always told that the carnival here is the largest in the world, and never mind Brazil, which celebrates carnival at the same time. In the week leading up to it, everybody is thrown into a frenzy over competitions for Calypso King, King and Queen of the Bands, and so on. These competitions are taken so seriously that every year the results are taken to the courts for judicial review. The saying that the judge's decision is final is foreign language in these parts.

Still, the country enjoys riches in abundance, with oil and natural gas as the main sources. The problem is that, as the money cascades in and out of pockets, every social problem is amplified. Mark my words, there will be another social explosion here.

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