by TREVOR YEARWOOD

DON'T TURN CARNIVAL into "a bourgeoisie thing", refine it, or put it "in a glass house".

Famous Trinidadian Carnival artiste Peter Minshall made this appeal Monday night.

At the same time, he urged Trinidad and Tobago and other regional countries to "liberate" themselves from "the slavish dependence" on foreign models of culture and development.

"You don't want to make [Carnival] a bourgeoisie thing and put it inside so the upper class could look at it in air-conditioned comfort," said the man who always dresses in black, during a dinner at Hilton Barbados. "You will kill the thing one time."

The dinner was part of the Caribbean International Leadership Summit hosted by the Cave Hill School of Business.

"The last thing the Carnival wants is to be in a glass house," Minshall told the gathering that included former St Lucia Prime Minister Dr Kenny Anthony.

"The Carnival is not a museum piece. And besides that, it does not require to be refined.

"The Carnival is not white sugar or white bread. The Carnival is not white rice and it is only after these long years we know that brown sugar, brown bread and brown rice [are] more healthy anyway."

Minshall urged the Caribbean to make "its own mark" and "stop trying to meet its own impoverished notion of what other people consider to be developed".

Black prince

The theme of the address was Machiavelli's Black Prince, a reference to the controversial 1513 political treatise by Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli.

Minshall underscored the need for both artistes and political leaders to have integrity, which he listed as including honesty, accountability and humility.

"Integrity calls upon us to . . . liberate ourselves from the slavish dependence on models developed by other peoples and have the courage and imagination to develop our own models, for we are special; we are Caribbean," he said.

"We have the heritage of all the world's cultures and yet we are not any of them, but we are our own selves; we are our own unprecedented selves, the tip of the spear that leads into the future."

He added: "Leaders who are alienated from themselves, who have a desperate insecurity and need to try to prove themselves by the standards of others; who crave status without accountability, pomp and circumstance without substance, who ignore the special gifts of their own people do great damage in their ignorant arrogance, their arrogant ignorance."

In the well-received presentation, Minshall talked about the work that has landed him several prizes and some national and international awards.

But he also voiced concern about a number of developments in Trinidad which saw the government clashing with artistes.

These included the building of a controversial "gilded Roman temple with a golden dome" at the official residence of the Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister and "imprisoning" a Port-of-Spain fountain with a nine-foot-tall railing, ostensibly to stop vagrants bathing there.