Daaga/Donald Stewart

Trinidad Rada is the subject of a Ph.D. thesis nearing completion by Emmanuel Kwaku Senah, a Ghanaían student at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. Kwaku is tracing its roots back to the ‘homeland’ and its transfer to and adjustment in Trinidad. According to Kwaku, several groups of EweFoh entered Trinidad just before and after Emancipation in 1838. They either introduced Rada or strengthened of it in Trinidad. One EweFoh individual was Daaga or Donald Stewart, his British name. He was a soldier in a Black Regiment, the First West Indian Regiment. Daaga led a Mutiny against the British Colonial State on the night of 17 June, 1837 at a station in St. Joseph, the capital of Spanish Trinidad. According to Edward Joseph’s contemporary History of Trinidad (London, 1838), Daaga led his fellow mutineers, drawn apparently from groups other than EweFoh, to the chant of a “a war song”.