It is puzzling that the carnival crowds in Notting Hill are always so well behaved, so very friendly, in spite of so many people and so many opportunities for mischief. Looking from my high perch above the intersection of Artesian Road and Chepstow Road, which is on the carnival route, I have never seen even the slightest sign of aggression in spite of the fact that so many people down there are rather drunk rather early in the day. True, police is everywhere, but they main job is to control the flow of the crowd. Carnivals and similar festivals must be old, very old. They must be important to the species. They must be well protected deep in the human brain. In prehistoric times, there were few opportunities for people to meet many others, who would perforce be coming from afar, and who would thus be good potential mates in terms of gene pools. Normal human aggression would need to be suspended for such important occasions.

Addendum (August 30, 2000)

I wrote this piece in the afternoon of the first day of the carnival. Yesterday I heard on the news that a young man was stabbed to death around ten o’clock in the evening on the second day. He died from his wounds sometime yesterday. According to the same report, this was the first death at the carnival since 1997. This evening I heard on the news that another young man died after having been badly beaten on Monday night. Presumably, he died earlier today. In short, my enthusiasm about the behavior of carnival crowds needs to be tempered a bit. The fact still remains that it is amazing that more aggression does not take place among one-million tipsy people crowded together.

I should add here a few words about something I myself saw around midnight on the second day. Chepstow Road was already almost empty, except for an occasional truck bearing huge loudspeakers and trailing a large number of dancing youths. By this time, most of the dancers were black. Most of them were young men, too. One of the last trucks to come through suddenly stopped when a brawl took place by its side. I did not see the beginning of the whole thing, but I saw ten or twenty youths swarm in front of the truck, and then I saw them run away. The music stopped, and the disk-jockey started yelling at them to stop the fight. “This is a peaceful carnival!” the gruff voice with a Caribbean accent kept repeating, suggesting there were carnivals of different kind. “Enough of violence between black people!” the disk-jockey yelled, followed by a tremendous cheer of support from the crowd.

But those young men in front of the bus were magnificent to watch from my safe perch. Lightfooted, hey hopped around in circles, leaping high in the air. After a few leaps, they would run forward, and then hop in circles again. Prodded by the disk-jockey’s admonishments, they were running away, but the two groups of youths, which I could not clearly distinguish from my post, were eyeing each other and making sure no-one from the other party got too close. The spring in their legs, the stoop in their upper bodies, the loose hang of their hands, the nimbleness with which they hopped about, like boxers, were mesmerizing. They looked exactly the same, I am sure, as the warriors on some grassy plain in Africa hundreds or thousands of years ago. They were beautiful even without their war-paint, their clubs and spears, and their lush headgear.

Returning to my hypothesis, the stabbing and the swarming happened at the very end of the Notting Hill Carnival. Even the festivals of old would be most dangerous precisely at the end, I suppose, when the magic of meeting and mating would begin to wear thin. That was the time when the most prudent among the revelers quietly collected their belongings and walked into the surrounding darkness, out of harm’s way.