Caribbean Beat — March/April 2019 (#156)

The president
Growing up in Tobago, Beverly Ramsey Moore was banned from
the panyard mere feet from her family home. It was no place for a
girl, people said. Half a century later, she proved that the panyard —
like the boardroom — is definitely the place for a woman, with her
groundbreaking election as president of Pan Trinbago
lthough it was just five footsteps away from
A
the front door of her childhood family home,
Beverley Ramsey Moore was banned from
entering the Katzenjammers Steel Orchestra
panyard, pioneered by her father and uncles in
Black Rock, Tobago. Half a century ago, a panyard was very
much a man’s world.
Rather, it was in the privacy of his bedroom that Ramsey
Moore’s father Hugh taught his eldest daughter to play Michael
Jackson’s “Ben” on the tenor pan, when she was just fourteen
years old. “In those dark days,” she recalls, “it was taboo.”
Four decades later, in October 2018,
Ramsey Moore was elected president
For years, Beverly
Ramsey Moore had
tapped on the ceiling,
until the glass shattered
with her runaway victory
of Pan Trinbago, the umbrella body for
steelbands in Trinidad and Tobago — the
first women to hold this challenging
office. For years, she had tapped on the
ceiling, until the glass shattered with her
runaway victory against “an army of men
who think it belongs to them,” as the nowfifty-eight-year-old
grandmother puts it.
Once again, she went against her
father’s advice. “Why don’t you leave those people alone?” Hugh
Ramsey asked, knowing the controversy that led to the bankruptcy
and near collapse of Pan Trinbago. “I am a fighter. I want
to help to fix it. Daddy, I am a game changer,” Ramsey Moore
replied, reminding him of her track record.
A relentless dedication to community service had evolved
into a career in politics, as Ramsey Moore served two terms as
representative for Black Rock in the Tobago House of Assembly,
from 1996 to 2000. Then she was called on to help Katzenjammers,
the “family” steelband. The gender taboo was a thing of
the past, but her attempts to reorganise were still a battle.
Ramsey Moore’s narrative about “human capital development”
did not sit well with the few remaining members of the
steelband, but she earned the right to proceed, by one vote.
Over the years, she pulled the Katzenjammers community back
together, until they earned the title of Medium Band Champions
in the National Panorama competition in 2011 and 2012.
By then, Ramsey Moore had moved on from being a band
representative to a role as the only woman on the Pan Trinbago
executive, encouraged by her peers because of her outspokenness
at meetings.
Was there a point of weakness when she thought, this is not a
woman’s business? “Never!” is her emphatic reply. “I see myself
as my family. We are leaders in the Black
Rock community, and I fear no foe,” she
explains. In the Pan Trinbago boardroom
she was confronted with toxic masculinity,
but she stood firm. “I knew they did
not know what they were doing, but I kept
on insisting on a structure, openness, and
good governance.”
Now she finds herself at the helm of
Pan Trinbago and T&T’s entire pan community,
staring into a financial abyss.
In her first ninety days, she came under enormous pressure
from both the T&T government and Pan Trinbago’s member
steelbands. She shrugs.
Navigating the 2019 Carnival season and Panorama competition
is the first order of business. But there is heavy rebuilding
work to be done, in the interest of not only financial survival, but
better governance and accountability. For one thing, Ramsey
Moore has promised to strip apart the constitution under which
she was voted into office and repair the organisation’s weaknesses.
“When communities embrace the steelbands once again,
they won’t have the challenges they now face,” she says, ready
for the uphill climb. A woman’s work is never done.
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