Masks, music and tossed trinkets have been moving through New Orleans for weeks, building a carnival crescendo to Mardi Gras on Feb 20 in a city still recovering from a devastating flood.

Little more than half of the city’s 480,000 residents have returned to the main Orleans parish since the 2005 hurricane, officials estimate. Much of the hard-hit ninth ward has not been rebuilt due to bureaucratic snafu and doubt over its security from future flooding.

But the number is still larger than the one-third who had returned by Mardi Gras last year. And it includes newcomers such as actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who recently bought a $3.5 million home in the jazz-saturated French Quarter for their family of five.

In another symbol of rebirth, the notoriously bad New Orleans football team, the Saints, made it to Super Bowl semi-finals last month in a season hailed as their best ever. Fans say the 2006 rushed restoration of the Super Dome, symbol of Washington’s inability in August 2005 to rescue tens of thousands of New Orleans residents, propelled the team with psychic energy into the playoffs.

All of this bodes well for good tourist crowds at the colourful celebrations culminating with the most famous Rex and Zulu parades on Shrove Tuesday, says Lea Sinclair, director of communications for the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation.

Last year, many critics charged the celebration insulted the memory of more than 1,300 people who died when Hurricane Katrina ploughed across New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. Mardi Gras 2006 was muted, with only 500,000 revellers.

This year, the city is anticipating 600,000 to 800,000 tourists by the time Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday as it is known in English, arrives, she said - nearer to the one million tourists who showed up in past decades.

Carnival started in the ‘Big Easy’ on Jan 6, the 12th night after Christmas that traditionally marks the beginning of European pre-Lenten partying. Dozens of krewes, civic spirited parade organizations with mythological names like Druid, Sparta and Pegasus, have been gliding floats and dancers through the streets, tossing candy and symbolic trinkets to the crowds.

Each krewe has its separate king and even queen, but all are subservient to Rex, King of Carnival, usually a civic leader who arrives on Mardi Gras Tuesday in a boat on the Mississippi River.

Rex goes back to Mardi Gras’ origins in 1872, when the Rex krewe adopted the official Mardi Gras flag of green for faith, gold for power and purple for justice.

Decades of racial segregation gave rise to a black krewe, Zulu, founded in 1916 by the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. The club’s first king allegedly poked fun at the white-dominated celebrations by wearing a can as a crown and carrying a banana stalk as his sceptre, historian Arthur Hardy wrote.

The late jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong was the most famous Zulu king in 1949.

Symbolic of racial integration and growing African American influence in the city, Zulu is the only other krewe that performs on the finale of Mardi Gras. Through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, activists protested the Zulu krewe for its caricature of racial stereotypes - for wearing grass skirts and throwing coconuts from the float.

The coconut - the Zulu ‘trinket’ - has provoked injury suits from onlookers hit by the flying orbs. But the Louisiana legislature, in keeping with the fun-loving tradition, passed a law in 1988 to exclude the coconut from liability suits.

In 1992, New Orleans city government required the private parade clubs to open to the public, a move that forced racial integration. While some krewes dropped out in protest, ‘Rex opened its membership to Blacks,’ Hardy wrote.