I Don’t Want to Hear Afrobeats at Caribbean Carnival

This isn’t about hating Afrobeats.

And it isn’t about gatekeeping Blackness.

I’m not trying to add to any diaspora war.

It’s about specificity.

I am Nigerian, Barbudan, and Dominican. 

I love Afrobeats. 

I love Amapiano. 

I love the joy, innovation, and global reach of contemporary African music. 

I listen to it often. 

I dance to it freely.

I just don’t want to hear it at Caribbean Carnival.

Caribbean Carnival is not a general celebration of “Black vibes.” It is a historically specific, culturally rooted event with origins in enslavement, emancipation, resistance, and survival. It is a space where Caribbean people asserted humanity through sound, movement, costume, and ritual — often in direct opposition to colonial control.

The Origins of Caribbean Carnival In England (specifically Notting Hill)

Caribbean Carnival in the UK did not start as a street party.

It began as a political and cultural response to racism, violence, and exclusion.

After World War II, Britain invited people from the Caribbean to help rebuild the country.

Many settled in areas like Notting Hill.

Racial tension exploded in 1958 during the Notting Hill race riots, where white mobs attacked Caribbean residents, their homes, and businesses.

In response, Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian journalist, communist, and Black feminist, organised something radical.

In 1959 following the murder of Kelso Cochrane, she launched the Caribbean Carnival in London indoors, at St Pancras Town Hall.

It had calypso music, steel pan players and storytellers. 

It was an act of resistance through the celebration of Caribbean joy in the face of immense violence.

To remind people that Caribbean culture was not shameful, temporary, or marginal — it belonged. 

This was not entertainment for the mainstream.

It was community healing after racial violence.

From halls to the streets

In the mid-1960s, community organisers like Rhaune Laslett helped move Carnival outdoors, combining:

• Caribbean Carnival traditions

• local community festivals

• street processions

By 1966, Carnival took to the streets of Notting Hill.

Streets that we once walked in fear, we walked those streets and cheered.

Music, sound systems, and movement became acts of defiance.

Caribbean Carnival music wasn’t just background noise.

Sound systems themselves were political — loud, mobile, and impossible to ignore.

Caribbean Carnival said 

We are here. We are alive. We are not assimilating quietly.

The music matters because the history matters.

Soca,

Calypso,

Lovers rock,

Reggae,

Dancehall didn’t just emerge for fun.

They were shaped by displacement, by rebellion, by grief, and by joy carved out of brutality. Carnival sound systems weren’t just entertainment — they were expressions of freedom.

I feel like many people no longer know the meaning of Carnival.

I’ve spoken to Caribbean youth and African youth alike.

Who see Carnival only as “bussing a wine,” “a motive”, some describe as full of hedonism without understanding the people who were lost so that Carnival could exist at all.

In London specifically, Notting Hill Carnival exists because of resistance — because of figures like Claudia Jones, because of racial violence, because Caribbean people carved out space to gather, to mourn, to celebrate, and to survive. Carnival was never just a party.

So when Afrobeats or Amapiano gets dropped into that space, something feels blurred.

Caribbean history starts to disappear, flattened into vibes, catching a wine, a motive. The depth of Caribbean music gets reduced, and entire genres stop being heard.

I don’t hear enough soca.

I don’t hear enough lovers rock, some people don't even know this genre.

I don’t hear enough dancehall or bashment.

I want people to understand why Carnival started.

I want people to understand what Carnival is.

I don’t want to have to pay to enter a park to celebrate my people’s freedom.

How strange is that?

Maybe some of my anger lives there — in watching Caribbean Carnival become something else.

Becoming commercialised, sanitised.

In hearing Afrobeats and Amapiano instead of calypso, instead of soca, instead of dancehall.

Feeling like I’m being erased in the very space meant to hold my history.

Not because African music doesn’t belong.

But because everything doesn’t need to belong in one place.

There is a quiet violence in homogenising Black cultures — in treating them as interchangeable, as if one rhythm can stand in for many histories.

“Black is Black” sounds inclusive, but it often erases the particularities that make our cultures rich.

Why must everything collapse onto one platform to be considered celebratory?

It’s about respecting lineage.

I don’t want Afrobeats removed from the world — I want it honoured properly. I don’t want Caribbean music diluted — I want it centred where it belongs. I want us to stop flattening differences in the name of togetherness.

Togetherness doesn’t require sameness.

Sometimes loving a culture means saying: this space is not for everything.

Sometimes care looks like boundaries.

I don’t want to hear Afrobeats at Caribbean Carnival specifically, not because it isn’t beautiful, but because this space was built to hold Caribbean history.

Leicester Caribbean Carnival 2017 - That year, troops were required to dance to soca, calypso, or dancehall for the procession. I understand why now