alsobohbohl[? Fr. Creole Vaval, a masque king of the St Lucia carnival, symbolically thrown into the sea on Ash Wednesday. Orig. 1920s, the term became associated with corrupt ‘speculators’ trading between Martinique and St Lucia and thence to the larger world of fraud. Note Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance p.221: ‘Bobolee was a sort of effigy of Judas, fellars got an old jacket and old pants and stuffed it up with straw to beat on Good Friday, and all the boys with big sticks beating it and running behind it, crying: “Beat! Beat! Beat the bobolee!”’]
(W.I.) fraud and corruption, practised by senior figures in government, business or any position of power; thus make/run a bobol, to organize a fraud; bobol(ize), to steal a company’s or the public’s funds; bobolism, large-scale corruption; bobolist, a fraudster.
D. Walcott ‘The Spoiler’s Return’ Coll. Poems (1986) 434: This ain’t the Dark Ages, is just Trinidad, / is human nature, Spoiler, after all, / it ain’t big genocide, is just bohbohl.
![[WI]](/static/img/flags/wi.png "West Indies")