Vulgar Fraction, the mas band designed and led by designer Robert Young of The Cloth, will portray “National Union of Freedom Farmers (NUFF)” for Carnival 2023. The presentation takes its name from the T&T guerrilla group NUFF—National Union of Freedom Fighters, which orchestrated an armed revolutionary campaign during the 1970s until it was violently stamped out by police. The presentation seeks to provoke action against T&T’s apathy and helplessness about the country’s environmental crisis.

The band’s costumes are based on the jumpsuits used by CEPEP workers, with branches taking the place of the workers’ emblematic weed whackers. “Just as working-class people and poor people were the ones who took up arms against the government in 70, working people, people who were raised poor, those are the ones who will respond to the next crisis—the environmental crisis,” said Young.

He drew a direct line between the destruction of the environment and colonialism, one of the reasons the Vulgar Fraction Freedom Farmers will wear jumpsuits in green, black and red, the colours of anti-colonialist Pan-African liberation. The symbolic weed whackers in the hands of the mas players will be wands or weapons of restoration, “made of bush and healing herbs”. Their masks will bear screens imprinted with the faces of slain 17-year-old NUFF member Beverly Jones and Guy Harewood, a member of the leadership. Both were shot and killed by police in 1973.

Police killed 18 NUFF members, who had attacked police stations, banks and other targets during the period 1972-1973. Hunted by the Williams government, NUFF members fled to the bush.

Young said that colonialism promoted “extraction without conscience” and the destruction and exploitation of anything seen as part of the natural world. “Nature” includes women, people of colour, plants, animals and the earth itself—and colonialism and capitalism were therefore given permission to exploit and despoil these elements mercilessly. Whiteness, the defacto racial identity associated with  such exploitation, was equated with progress and civilization, he said. NUFF and the February Revolution of 1970, from which NUFF evolved, represented an “attempt to by black people to say, ‘We want to be seen as and treated as human.’”

Government’s continuous series of unemployment relief programmes such as DEWD, LID, CEPEP and URP are a way to pacify the poor and prevent people from taking up arms and going into the bush as NUFF did, Young said. NUFF “expected society to join them,” he said, but they were instead isolated and killed. Young compared their condition to the situation of today’s environmental activists who are left hanging by an apathetic public that is so overwhelmed at the hugeness of environmental destruction that they do nothing instead of taking action. “We are not even enraged. We bury our grief. It’s too much to think about,” Young said, adding that the panel would include a psychologist who could speak to that grief and apathy.