I read a history exhibit at the Museum of the African Diaspora that showed how Calypso had been used by slaves to circumvent heavy censorship. Despite efforts by American and British authorities to restrict speech, encrypted messages were found in the open within popular songs. Artists and musicians managed to spread news and opinions about current affairs and even international events. See if you can decipher this one from 1935 by a calypsonian called Atilla:

I’m offering a warning to men to take care
Of Modern women beware
Of Modern women beware
Even the flappers we cannot trust
For they’re taking our jobs from us
And if you men don’t assert control
Women will rule the world.

Now different are the ladies of the long ago
To the modern women we know
If you’ve observed you have bound to see
The sex has changed entirely.
Long ago their one ambition in life
Was to be a mother and wife
But now they mean to (?) the males
Smoking cigarettes and drinking cocktails.

Long ago the girls used to be school teachers
Then they became stenographers.
We next hear of them as lecturers
Authors and engineers
There is no limit to their ambition
They’ve gone in for aviation
And if you men don’t assert control
Women will rule the world.

They say anything that man can do
They also can achieve too
And they’ve openly boasted to do their part
In literature and art
We will next hear of them as candidates
For the President of the United States
So I’m warning you men to assert control
Or women will rule the world.

If women ever get the ascendancy
They will show us no sympathy
They will make us strange things, goodness knows
Scrub floors, even wash clothes
If these tyrants speak as our masters
We’ll have to push perambulator,
And in the night as they go to roam
We’ll have to mind the baby at home.