Neagar Business: A Christmas Folk Performance in Nevis

Neagar Business, folk performances based on local events and gossip, were once an important part of holiday celebrations called Christmas Sports in Nevis as well as in St. Kitts, a neighboring island in the Eastern Caribbean.¹  These performances by troupesof men were accompanied by a string band as they went to the yards of houses around the island. While there are no written data as to just when and how Neagar Business and other Christmas Sports originated, it is likely that they began in the pre-emancipation holiday celebrations common in the Anglophone Caribbean when slaves were given several days off between Christmas and New Year (Abrahams 1967; Olwig 1933).  Williams (1908-10) observed several holiday celebrations during her stay in Nevis in the early 1900s but did not mention Neagar Business.

However, data from Jamaica at the end of the Eighteenth Century noted the “talent of ridicule and derision, which is exercised not only against each other but also, not infrequently, at the expense of their owner or employer” (Edwards 1794:87). Abrahams (1967:474) described the fondness of gossip that continued in the West Indies:

[O]ther people’s doings are a constant topic of conversation. . . .  The smallest bit of overheard conversation or overseen action may be embroidered into a story and transported over a community in minutes. This includes good news and bad, stories of births, deaths, infidelities and flirtations, a big catch of fish and the thieving of a few potatoes.

Gossip and events such as these provided the basis for the Neagar Business skits.

The preparations for Neagar Business began several weeks before Christmas, when groups of five to six men would get together to plan the skits they would perform. The group usually consisted of one man who would always be designated to play the role of a woman and would dress accordingly. Other roles such as husband, policeman, magistrate, and so forth would depend on the event to be dramatized. The costumes and the simple props that might be needed were organized. No face masks were used but faces could be painted. When costume changes were required for different skits during the performances, the players would change behind trees.

In Nevis, the gossip that served as the basis of the Neagar Business might be a man who abused his wife, a woman who beat her servant or paid her poorly, a man who fathered a child out of wedlock, a politician who lost an election, someone who stole something, and so forth Only the behavior of adults, not children, was used for the skits. The names of the people involved in these events were not used. Different names were given to all the people portrayed, but because all the details of the event and the characterizations were so accurate everyone knew just who the actual people were.

It was important to get as many details of the events as possible. Everyone wondered how the performers learned so much. One way the performers got information that served as the basis of the skits was by “overhearing” what was going on inside the wooden houses that were once common on the island. The wooden boards from which the houses were constructed often had spaces between them making it possible for neighbors and passersby to hear what was being said and done inside. The players would also crawl under the houses that were built on blocks so they could hear without being seen. Events that occurred in yards, on roads, and so forth provided additional material for the skits. This material was collected all year as well as during the Christmas season so the skits were often very timely. Using their wits and verbal skills, the players created distinctive Christmas folk performances from the events they observed and “overheard” in daily life.

Preparations for the performances were also a source of entertainment. The following is a description of the rehearsals for the Christmas Sports in the 1930s and 1940s in St. Kitts that both young and old people enjoyed:

On moonlight nights these [people] brought out their big drums and the string bands for the troupes practicing their plays for Christmas. With each band came crowds of fun-seeking villagers . . . to listen, dance or “wok up” behind the music. We young boys and girls were glad when “sports” were practicing; for we got the opportunity to be out late at night, to meet our friends and engage in youthful frolic, and to return home well after 10 o’clock without incurring the wrath of our parents. (Sutton 1996:129)

From this account it can be seen that the fun of Christmas Sports was not limited to the actual performances but began with the rehearsals.

On Christmas Eve, Nevisian Neagar Business groups would begin their performances at sunrise in their villages and continue until sunset. At each yard, the players would be given food and drink before they began the skits and money after they finished. According to one former player, the group might get a collection of as much as $1,000 in local currency for the performances. The length of each skit varied depending on the event that was being dramatized. A four or five piece string band accompanied the performers. Large groups of people of all ages from the village would follow the performers from yard to yard. When asked why the event ended at sundown, one performer said that they were all too drunk to continue any longer. There were other events such as serenades which did occur at night.

Byron Spenser, a prominent Nevisian, described how his family prepared for the arrival of the performers. His father would stack small piles of coins on a desk to be given to the players. The amount given would be determined by how good the performances were. Spenser vividly recalled when a very brief Neagar Business which enraged his mother was played in the yard of his house many years earlier. It concerned a servant named Ernestine (Tine) that the family employed. The players performed several skits and were about to leave when one player began to recite:

Isn’t it a wonder . . .

(Chorus) Uh, Uh

that Mrs. Byron took a shoe heel

(Chorus) Oh, Oh

and knocked Tine sunder?

The string band then began to play. According to Byron, his mother had not mistreated the servant. His mother was furious, but she had to take the skit in stride since Neagar Business permitted making fun of others. Byron did not say how much the players were given on this occasion. It is interesting to note that this brief skit was in rhyme; Neagar Business skits did not have to be in rhyme.

Abrahams (1964:475) noted that the skits were sometimes first performed in “the yard of the people being portrayed in hopes of getting a pay-off to end the performance of the piece,” but this was not reported by any of the Nevisian informants.

There are similarities in the Christmas Sports in Nevis and St. Kitts. At times the players from one island would go to the other to perform. Arthur Anselyn, who often played Neagar Business, recalled a group that he went with to St. Kitts not to perform Neagar Business but rather another Christmas Sport, Tarzan and the Apes. The proximity of the two islands and their political union made interaction frequent not just at holiday times. However, there are differences in Kittitian and Nevisian performances. In St. Kitts it was possible to repeat popular Neagar Business plays each year although this did not seem to be common in Nevis. One of the skits repeated in St. Kitts was about a man who became ill by eating a barracuda. A fisherman had caught a barracuda, but fearing that it was poisonous, left it on the beach. The village glutton saw the fish and took it home to cook and eat not sharing it with anyone. After eating the fish, the glutton was abruptly awakened in the dead of the night by his erupting bowels. He looked for his enamel chamber pot—or poe in local parlance—whose better days had long gone; the handle was broken, there were a few rusted holes, and it was covered with a myriad of spalls. The poison of the fish soon had him vomiting in the poe. His ordeal reached its height when, to the delight of the crowd, he could not switch the poe fast enough to accommodate the simultaneous occurrence of his vomit and bowel movement (Mills, et al. 1984:10).

Religious leaders and church ceremonies could also be satirized in Neagar Business. Another skit described by Mills et al. (10-11) concerned a preacher who was known for the fervor of his sermons and his condemnation of adultery. The Neagar Business players portrayed him “whispering amourously to the sisters [in his congregation] as he kneeled to pray with them.” The wife of a bar-shop owner, a member of his congregation, was often visited by the preacher and the visits were not just religious. A woman who lived next door told the husband what was happening. The husband then surprised his wife and the preacher. The husband chased “the howling preacher into the street with his bull bud.”

A popular skit performed in St. Kitts by a group from a northern village was a mock wedding. The bride was a man dressed as a woman who rode with her groom in a buggy (a child’s pram). The church ceremonies that were satirized “would make even the Archbishop of Canterbury force a chuckle” (Mills et al. 26).

The Neagar Business performances produced great humor for the performers and the villagers who were part of the audience, if not for the people being portrayed. However, they could not object to the performance. Sutton said that in St. Kitts the Neagar Business performers “went about mimicking well-known characters in the district. They humorously re-enacted outstanding events and gossips involving villagers, thus providing lots of fun and laughter” (135).

Neagar Business was a popular part of Christmas in times when Nevisians and Kittitians had to provide their own entertainment. People still laugh when they recount some of the skits that were performed. The fun that was provided for the spectators and performers was certainly one of the main purposes of Neagar Business.

For the performers, Neagar Business and other folk performances provided opportunities to demonstrate their verbal skills. Abrahams (1983) described the importance of verbal skills for males in the West Indies saying it is important to be a man-of-words, that is a good talker and a good arguer. It is also important to be a man-of-action, that is a man who has talent for competing with other performers. Neagar Business performances permitted men to show both types of skills.

Mills, et al. (11) also described the skills of these performers noting that although the Neagar Business players were untrained, they nevertheless were “artists with the skill to take ordinary and common events and turn them not only into hilarious episodes but into serious drama.” Performance in Christmas Sports

imbues the players with a sense of personal importance and worth which they are never able to acquire in other ways at any other time of the year or in their entire lives. . . . Lost in a world of destitution and despair all year long, these actors come forth at Christmas to act out the unwritten drama. . . . (15-16)

The Neagar Business players, like the players in other Caribbean holiday celebrations, were working class men. The middle and upper classes could be subjects of their satiric performances, but did not participate in them. For these working class men, Neagar Business and other Christmas Sports “provided psychological release from the lifelong inferiority or sense of irredeemably low status to which the players are subjected” (Mills, et al. 15).  Neagar Business was a way for the working class to caricature the middle class and upper class—opportunities “to laugh at them, to imitate and to mock them and even expose their social and moral depravity and corruption” (Mills, et al. 11).  The skit described above about the preacher provides a good example of this.

For the community these performances also served other functions. For example, one was a warning or threat to stop a particular type of behavior. One person could tell another, “Do that again and we play you for Christmas.” Another purpose was to reinforce or maintain the community norms by giving public attention to those who did unacceptable things and ridiculing these people and their behavior. When asked if the ridicule stopped people from doing unaccepted things, an informant answered, “No,you just learned to be more careful.” Therefore, at least for some Nevisians, Neagar Business did not control behavior—it merely  made people more circumspect.

There are several reasons why Neagar Business is no longer performed. One is that in the 1950s and 1960s many men left Nevis and other small Caribbean islands in search of employment in England, Canada, the United States, other Caribbean islands, and so forth Since Neagar Business, like many other Christmas and Carnival folk performances such as the Carriacou Shakespeare Mas’, Jamaican Jonkonnu, and so forth were only performed by men, migration reduced the number of potential performers.

As noted above, another reason for the death of Christmas Sports is the availability of entertainment provided by television, radio, videos, tape and CD recordings. Now Nevisians no longer have to depend on creating their own entertainment.

An additional reason was given as to why Neagar Business is no longer performed—today it might bring about legal actions. Although the license to ridicule which these performances provided such as the one concerning the beating of the maid, were accepted in the 1950s, they may not be now. Nevisians, like many other people, seem to be litigious. To publicly ridicule a person might be risky behavior today. However, even when ridicule in these skits was acceptable during the Christmas season, some limitations were imposed. In St. Kitts, but not in Nevis, the first performances were always given at the local police station. Originally this was “to impose a form of censorship on anything the players said or did concerning the ruler that could be considered defamatory, obscene, or even seditious” (Mills, et al. 15). However, according to those who remember Neagar Business, this did not mean that the version performed at the police station was the same as the version played around the island.

In an article that appeared in the St. Kitts-Nevis Daily Bulletin in 1952 there is another reason why Neagar Business did not continue. The article noted that Neagar Business was a favorite Christmas Sport with the masses, but then continued:

To the intelligent individual “Neagar Business” is a disgrace. . . . All efforts must be made by leaders of thought to stamp out this form of sport at Christmas-time which serves only to tighten the chain that keeps us bound to ignorance. We are concerned not only with the moral effect it has on adults but the young lives which it will influence. (2)

An article in the same year in another paper, The Union Messenger, stated that steel bands provided “healthy recreation . . . much elevated over the primitive appeal” of Christmas Sports such as Neagar Business (2). It was suggested that in addition to steelbands there should be other celebrations which would “reflect good taste, a high moral tone, and substantial entertainment value”(2).  Races and picnics were suggested. Just what effect these sentiments had cannot be determined. None of people interviewed mentioned any moral outrage.

Although there are specific reasons for the disappearance of Neagar Business, other Christmas Sports also died as a result of the changing character of folk celebrations in Nevis and St. Kitts. Calypso and steel bands, also part of Caribbean Creole culture, became popular in the late 1950s and were incorporated into island carnival celebrations.

Folk performances in the Anglophone Caribbean such as Neagar Business had their origins in the hybridization of British and West African cultures. Over time they evolved in different ways. In this sense they are like languages in that they are subject to internal and external factors which can cause change and in contact situations may lead to extinction. In Nevis, traditional folk celebrations came into contact with other forms of holiday celebrations. The entertainment provided through media such as radio, television, and so forth reduced or eliminated the need for island entertainment. When this occurred, there were no longer opportunities to learn about Christmas Sports and how to perform them. The large numbers of men who migrated further limited the number of Christmas Sport players. These factors all played a role in the changes in Nevisian folk performances.

Although Nevisians remember Christmas Sports with fondness, there is little likelihood of reviving them. Former players still live on the island and are in frequent contact, but for all the reasons discussed above, there are no plans to revive NeagarBusiness. In discussing the revival of Christmas Sports, Mills et al. found that “it will first and foremost require a fundamental change in mental attitudes towards sports to regard it a genuine form of art that deserves to be preserved. It is an ineradicable link to our past that largely explains the present and must necessarily be our guide to the future” (20) .

One folk performance, an abbreviated version of Giant Despair which is based on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, is part of Culturama held in August. There are attempts to teach school children some of the sports such as Sweet Lemon. During the 2001 Christmas season in the Gingerland area there was a revival of sports such as Johnnie Walker and Cowboys and Indians. However, Neagar Business has not been performed in over twenty years and, despite the popularity it once had, it seems likely to remain just a memory of Christma times past.² 

Joan M. Fayer

Department of English

College of Humanities

University of Puerto Rico—Rio Piedras Campus

 ¹Alternate spellings are Neaga Business and Niega(r) Business. The term continues to be used not just for the satiric skits but also as a term for local gossip.

 ²The fieldwork that serves as the basis of this study was done on visits to the island from 1996 to 2002 funded by grants from Proyecto Atlantea and Fondo Institucional para La Investigacion of the Decanto Estudios Graduados e Investigacion at the University of Puerto Rico. Interviews were conducted with two well known Neagar Business performers—Arthur (Brother) Anselyn and William (Zumbye) Dore as well as many Nevisians such as Byron Spenser, Cardlos Walters, and Emmanuel Jeggers who remembered the event. Earlier versions of this research were presented at the Islands in Between Conference in Carriacou in 1999 and appeared in La Torre, Enero-Marzo 2001.

Works Cited

Abrahams, Roger D. “The Shaping of Folklore Traditions in the British West Indies.” Journal of Inter-American Studies (1967): 456-480.

—.  “Christmas Mummings on Nevis.” North Carolina Folklore Journal (1973): 120-31.

—. Man of Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1983.

Edwards, Bryan. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. Vol. 2. London, 1794.

Fayer, Joan M., and Joan F. McMurray. “Shakespeare in Carriacou.” Caribbean Studies 24 (1994): 242-249.

—. “The Shakespeare Mas’ as “Syncretic Artifact. “ Journal of American Folklore 112 (1999): 58-73.

Gordon, Joyce. Nevis. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica. London: T. Lowndes, 1828.

Mills, Frank L., S.B. Jones-Hendrickson, and Bertram Eugene. Christmas Sports in St. Kitts -Nevis, 1984.

Olwig, Karen. Global Culture, Island Identity. Chur, Switzerland: Haarwood Academic Publishers, 1993.

St. Kitts Daily Bulletin 2 Jan. 1952: 2.

Sutton, James W. A Testimony of Triumph. Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, 1996.

The Union Messenger 27 Dec. 1952: 2

Willams, Antonia. A Tour Through the West Indies. Mona, Jamaica: The U of the West Indies Library, 1908-10.