Kalinda (Caribbean Stick Fighting)
Caribbean stick fighting of African origin, at home in Trinidad. Drumming and a lead singer, the chantwell, accompany it; calypso grew from its chants.
Quick Facts
Character & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Kalinda (Caribbean Stick Fighting)
Kalinda, also written calinda or kalenda, is Caribbean stick fighting that is at the same time music and dance. It has no founder and no year of origin, because it is a custom rather than a school. What is documented is that it appeared in the Caribbean in the 1720s and that its roots run to the Kingdom of Kongo; enslaved Africans brought it to the islands. It reached Trinidad after 1783, when the Cédula de Población brought French planters to the island together with the people they held in slavery. From there it spread further and appears under various names in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Barbados and Puerto Rico. A bout has three inseparable parts. The stick is called the bois, the arena the gayelle, and a lead singer, the chantwell, leads the call and response known as lavways, with which the crowd urges the fighters on. Drumming with its own ceremonial songs belongs to it as well. Kalinda is therefore not a fight with music in the background — the music sets its rhythm and its limits. After the abolition of slavery in 1833 kalinda soaked into the Trinidad Carnival and its chants became the basis of calypso. The colonial administration banned it repeatedly; the tension culminated in the canboulay period between 1858 and 1884, when clashes between processions and the police grew into riots. It survived the bans. Today the fighting part is staged within Carnival as an annual competition with settled rules.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.