africa in the caribbean

Dennis R. Hidalgo—Facts on File

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Africa and the Caribbean: Overview

The Caribbean, that region that encircles the Sea, shores and the islands also called Antilles, is

known for its thriving and diverse African Diaspora. It rivals in size and intensity with that of Brazil.

In fact, the Caribbean has the most concentrated cluster of Afro-descendents of any place in the

world with the exception of Africa. Strong elements of African culture are ubiquitous in every

Caribbean country, and some, like Haiti, have made it a cause for ethnic and national pride. The

extraordinary yet agonizing transfer of Africa, its people and culture, and its deliberate reproduction

in the Caribbean has been in the making for about five centuries.

Prior to the European conquest, the Caribbean region was densely populated with millions of

indigenous people of various cultural groups like the Ciboney, Tainos, and Caribs. The unexpected

arrival of explorers from the other side of the Atlantic in 1492 led to a rather appalling clash.

Historical documents captured scenes of the natives’ nearly total extermination both at the hands of

European colonists and by epidemics they inadvertently brought. Humanitarians like BARTOLOMÉ

DE LAS CASAS, wrote hyperbolically about the lethal side of the Caribbean encounter with Europe.

Today we have learned that a few fortunate Indians fled to the mountains and survive beyond

European control, intermingling with escaped Blacks and other colonial defectors.

The rapid decline of indigenous Caribbean people coincided with the first importation of enslaved

Africans. This Atlantic slave trade brought about 11 million Africans to the Americas and over 40

percent of them came to the Caribbean, drastically altering the region's population and cultures.

Though the trade’s impact over the entire Americas was gradual, measured in centuries, it took just

decades for slave traders to replace the Caribbean indigenous population with Africans and their

descendants. Since the 1550s Afro-Caribbeans have been the dominant ethnic group in the region.

The early years of Sugar and African slavery

Around the 1440s, prior to any Spanish claim over the Americas, Portuguese explorers began

kidnapping Africans and selling them in Europe to help fund their explorations along the African

coast. Mostly abandoning crude kidnappings, the Portuguese soon developed a sophisticated

transaction system with strategic posts [Feitorias] on the African coast. Some African leaders

resisted, but others, seeking business opportunities similar to familiar forms of slavery, helped create

profitable networks to supply captives to the foreign trading posts. By the 1500s, about when

Hispaniola, the current island occupied today by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, fell to Spanish

control, the Portuguese had entrenched their enslaving business in key positions across the West

African coast.

In 1444, the chronicler Gomes Eannes de Zurara recorded the first Portuguese sale of enslaved

Africans in southern Portugal. By 1500, enslaved Blacks were about 10 percent of the Lisbon

population, Portugal's capital. Though not as big as in Portugal, Madrid and other Iberian cities had a

noticeable Black population as well. As the Iberians expanded, they brought some of their enslaved

Africans to the newly conquered Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa. Here, in the Madeira and

Canary Islands, they worked on sugar plantations, early versions of the kind of estates that would

dominate the Caribbean.

Those who bought African workers exploited their talents in many ways, but sugar production came

to define modern slavery. Asian traders had brought sugarcane from India to the Mediterranean, and

by the 1200s plantations on islands like Sicily, Crete and Cyprus, in southern Spain and northern

Africa were producing sugar for a new European market. When Iberians discovered fertile tropical

ground on the Atlantic Islands of the Madeiras, Cape Verde, the Canaries and São Tomé, these

locations became new hubs for sugar production. Processing sugar, with its dreadful tending of


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boilers and mills [ingenio], did not attract free laborers. So, those financing the occupation of these

islands used enslaved North Africans, Guanches [native Canarians], and other war prisoners, as

sugarcane workers. As the callous toil took its toll on the laborers, the colonizers found it more

convenient to replace them with West Africans. By 1480s, African Blacks had become the common

enslaved worker on the Atlantic Islands.

The Spanish invaded the Caribbean on the heels of the conquest of the Atlantic islands. Columbus

and others were well acquainted with the sugar plantations of Madeira and Canary Islands. It is not

surprising, then, that enslaved Africans would become chief workers in the Caribbean estates.

In 1503, theologians and others concerned with the moral implications of slavery lost an important

battle. Financiers, who had invested in the exploration of the Indies, and others who argued that

rebellion excused enslavement, convinced Isabella of Castile to permit selling Caribs. The Tainos,

whom the Admiral had initially labeled meek and inclined toward Christianity, were also forced into

hard labor. For, although the claim over the Americas was to evangelize the natives, the European

colonists typically sought to enrich themselves by forcing others to work. Attempting to balance the

need for revenue and piety, the Crown in 1503 hurriedly allowed a seemingly safe tribute system

called the Encomienda. In 1512, it also issued the Law of Burgos to regulate colonists’ behavior

with Indians. The Crown intended to shepherd Indians into Christianity while also making them

work. But disease and overwork gradually eliminated the native labor force and with them went the

colonists’ dreams for profit.

Without much fanfare, enslaved Blacks, the descendants of Africans who had been born in slavery

among Christians, began appearing in Spain’s new American colonies. Some merchants gained

individual permission from the Crown to send enslaved Blacks to the Indies. Juan de Córdoba may

have been the first one. In 1502 he sent an enslaved Black as his business agent to Hispaniola, the

most important Caribbean colony of the 16th Century. That same year Nicolas de Ovando, the

island’s new governor, arrived with various enslaved Blacks to do hard labor. Unhappy in this

dehumanizing condition, Ovando’s enslaved workers escaped from bondage and joined with

rebellious Indians. Yet Spaniards continued sending enslaved Blacks. For example, Alonzo de

Hojeda brought five enslaved Moors to the Caribbean. And Ponce de León carried some enslaved

Blacks with him to occupy Puerto Rico in 1508.

Diego Columbus, Columbus’ son and the new Hispaniola governor, convinced the Crown to allow

the open importation of enslaved Africans. He complained that the Indians could not break the rocks

that contained the island’s gold. In 1510 King Ferdinand of Aragon, now without the calming

influence of Queen Isabella, officially proclaimed open the African slave trade to the Indies. In fact,

his first set of instructions bid the transportation to Hispaniola of 250 enslaved persons ―as soon as

possible.‖ Though the document does not identify the workers’ origins, there is little doubt that

Ferdinand intended them to be nothing but Africans. At the moment that Ferdinand’s orders crossed

the Atlantic, the Caribbean virtually moved closer to Africa. Ships loaded with enslaved Africans

began arriving in Hispaniola to replace the dwindling Indian population in the mines.

By 1520 this mineral wealth had reached its peak. Following Hernán Cortes’ conquest of Mexico in

1521, White colonists began leaving the Antilles in throngs. About the same time, the Crown

decided to promote the sugar industry on the Caribbean islands instead of focusing on mining. The

intention was to keep colonists profiting and the colonies viable. As a direct result of the Crown’s

incentives, the Hispaniola’s first sugar mill began operating in 1520, staffed by a few remaining

Indians and several newly arrived Africans.

In 1527, Hispaniola sugar estates had grown to 25, all of them now mostly worked by enslaved

Africans. The increasing number of sugar plantations [from 1 in 1520 to 25 in 1527] required a


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similar intensification of slave imports. Two decades after the inauguration of the first Caribbean

sugar plantation, Hispaniola’s sugar planters owned an unprecedented surplus of enslaved Africans.

They exported enslaved Africans to the surrounding islands and to other colonies in the Caribbean

basin— anyplace where colonial construction was taking place, and sugar plantations were also

sprouting.

The Africans’ surge overwhelmed the colonists. By the 1540s, Hispaniola’s enslaved population

grew to about 12,000, compared to 1,000 free residents. The Italian traveler Girolamo Benzoni

reported in 1542 that there was more than 7,000 maroons [runaways] living outside of slavery. Half

a century after Columbus’s landing, Blacks, both enslaved and in rebellion, far outnumbered

Hispanic colonists. Despite government’s successes, like those of Governor Alonso de Cerrato in

1545, the maroons continued menacing Santo Domingo even after the 1560s, when it had lost its

original colonial value.

The Crown did not have the same expectation for Puerto Rico and Cuba as for Hispaniola, but the

overall pattern of European colonization on these islands was similar nonetheless. After eliminating

or pushing the Indians into hiding or assimilation, colonists replaced their labor with that of Africans,

and increasingly came to depend on agriculture instead of mining. The pattern was that the closer

the colony was to its imperial economy, the more intense slavery and the slave trade were.

A refocusing of imperial attention away from the Antilles to the then more profitable Aztec and Inca

regions coincided with the attempts of European rivals to gain a foothold in the Americas. The

French, Dutch and the English coveted Spain’s colonial wealth, and repeatedly attempted to seize it.

For that purpose, they commissioned privateers and encourage pirates to plunder Spanish

possessions.

The end of the 1500s and beginning of the 1600s were a period of high piracy in the Caribbean in

which the Spanish relied even more on enslaved Blacks to protect and build its empire. They worked

constructing forts, mining copper, cutting timber, building ships or growing food for the Spanish

military. Of the 20,000 individuals who lived in Cuba in 1610, for example, about half were

enslaved Blacks. They provided a vital portion of the skilled labor in the royal arsenals and

shipyards. In the 17th Century, despite its waning power in Europe and the loss of American

territory to its rivals, Spain was still able to defend its major sea lanes and Caribbean ports. This was

in part possible because of the crown’s dependence on enslaved Blacks and the intensification of the

slave trade in the region.

The Slave Trade

Africa became Portugal’s exclusive concern with the Treaty of Tordesillas [1494]. Portuguese

merchants were therefore the lawful providers of African captives to Spanish colonists in the

Caribbean. At first, they received individual asientos, the Spanish royal license to sell slaves in its

colonies. But such a profitable market would not go unchallenged for long. In 1562 the English

John Hawkins assembled a group of financiers to invest in the slave trade. He set sail for the African

coast where he hijacked a Portuguese enslaving ship near modern Sierra Leone. Hawkins took the

enslaved Africans and sold 301 of them to Spanish colonists in the Caribbean. The trip yielded

extraordinary profits, generating also an unprecedented English interest in the slave trade. French

and Dutch ships were also challenging Spanish supremacy in the Caribbean and the Portuguese

control of the Atlantic Slave Trade. From the Iberian perspective, they were all pirates. Thus, in

1595 the Spanish Crown tried to regularize the trade by officially giving the Portuguese a monopoly

over the asiento.


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From the 1620s to the 1650s, European rivals elbowed in their own colonial settlements in the

Caribbean. While Spanish Caribbean sugar production had gradually declined after the 1550s, these

new competing colonies turned also to the Atlantic slave trade for coerced laborers. The importation

of enslaved Africans intensified after 1660, when sugar estates began to outpace tobacco farms in St

Kitts, Barbados, Antigua, Martinique and Guadeloupe. From the mid-1660s, the number of enslaved

Africans transported across the Atlantic more than doubled. In 1634, after noticing Spanish lack of

steady settlement, the Dutch West India Company occupied the islands of Aruba, Bonaire and

Curaçao. In 1662, after capturing Elmina and other Portuguese factories off the coast of Africa,

Curaçao became the center of the Dutch slave trade in the Caribbean. But control over the exploits

of the slave trade would change hands again. In 1713, after the War of the Spanish Succession, the

British gained the Spanish asiento and elevated the trade’s profits to record heights. The French,

who were in an intense imperial competition against the British from the 1680s to 1815, also

competed in the slave trade. In fact, European imperial competition over colonial profits largely

shaped the early African Diaspora in the Caribbean.

Sugar became a mass market commodity in Europe; a near-necessity for the middle class’ diet and

eventually for all people. Concomitantly, Caribbean sugar colonies became the most valuable

overseas possessions of France and Great Britain. These empires believed that to increase sugar

production they had to increase the enslaved working population in the colonies.

A powerful example of this was Saint-Domingue, which grew from an abandoned part of Spanish

Hispaniola in the early 1600s to become France's most valuable colony and the most valuable

European colony in the world by the 1780s. Saint-Domingue produced more sugar than all the

British Caribbean colonies combined, and it was also a leading producer of coffee. Indigo and cotton

were also important products. The colony’s extraordinary production level was directly related to its

enormous population of enslaved Blacks.

Just in 1789 ninety nine slave ships arrived in Saint Domingue unloading more than 27,000 men,

women and children. The colonial censuses for that year say that 455,000 enslaved people lived in

the colony, together with 31,000 Whites and 28,000 free people of color.

The business of buying, transporting and selling Africans into Caribbean slavery had reached new

heights of efficiency in the centuries since the Portuguese first brought captives to Hispaniola. The

Dutch, French and especially the British governments had subsidized the African trade, making it

illegal for their colonists to buy from foreign ships and using their royal navies to defend their slave

trading depots along the African coast.

Though European governments had initially restricted who could trade within their own countries, by

the 1730s most of them had opened the African slave trade to all national merchants in selected

ports. This was now a system capable of supplying the nearly insatiable labor demands of the

Caribbean estates. Changes in ship design and more precise navigation drastically reduced the time

it took to carry captives across the Atlantic thereby increasing the number of enslaved people

reaching the Americas. These changes cut the transatlantic mortality rates from about 20 percent in

the sixteenth century to less than one-half this level in the late eighteenth century.

By the eighteenth century the triangular route that European slave ships took was becoming

somewhat standardized [American ships followed a less triangular course]. Most vessels departed

from European ports loaded with manufactured goods specifically chosen for the African market,

including cloth, iron tools, tobacco, rum and cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean. They traded these

with African merchants in exchange for enslaved people and provisions. These ships then crossed

the Atlantic, following the trade winds to the easterly Caribbean islands or to a continental Caribbean


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port like Cartagena in modern day Colombia. There they sold or traded their enslaved people for

products, sugar, coffee, cacao and cotton. Colonial merchants, however, would have to fill several

shiploads with these commodities to pay for the costly African captives.

If he had concluded successful trades and navigated uneventful ocean crossings, a ship captain might

bring back to Europe a sum many times greater than the initial investment. However many things

could go wrong with this complicated series of voyages, including rebellions, bad market conditions,

illness, storms and hostile ships. Debates over the trade’s profits have yielded diametrically opposed

numbers. Roger Anstey has proposed a 10 percent annual profit, while Joseph Inikori’s more recent

studies have suggested an average of 27 percent. The business’s risky nature seems to point to high,

but volatile returns.

Slave traders bound for the Caribbean took about 80 percent of their captives from a vast coastline

that stretched for 3,500 miles [5,600 km] along the West and Central African coast. In modern

terms, this began with the nation of Senegal in the north to Angola in the south. It also penetrated

into the African interior, between 500 to 1,000 miles [800 to 1,600 km]. About 20 percent overall

came from the region of Mozambique in southeast Africa.

The list of African ports involved in this commerce changed many times in the long history of the

trade. African coastal rulers and merchants controlled the supply of captives, so events in Africa

were responsible for most changes in the location of the trade. Leaders who became involved in

wars sold their captives to European ships and these profits encouraged Africans to fight each other

and raid unprotected villages deep in the interior.

During the 1400s, the Portuguese took most of their captives from the Senegambia region, the

modern nations of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau. In the 1500s,

when they began shipping enslaved Africans to Spanish Caribbean colonies, the Portuguese slavers

moved south toward the West Central region of Africa, or modern-day Congo and Angola. This

region would eventually supply up to 44 % of the all the enslaved people shipped out of Africa.

After the 1670s, as English slave traders began to outnumber other European merchants, new coastal

areas became major exporters. The English favored the Bight of Benin [western modern-day Nigeria

and southeast Niger] and the so-called Gold Coast [modern Ghana, Burkina Faso, eastern Ivory

Coast, and southern Niger].

After 1807 the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade and the British Navy began to suppress it.

Under pressure, traders shifted their focus mostly to the Bight of Biafra (an area that included

western Cameroon and eastern Nigeria) and Sierra Leone.

African and African-style cultures in the Caribbean

Caribbean planters kept track of what they believed were the African ethnicities of their enslaved

people because they saw certain types suited for specific kinds of work. However, the ethnic labels

they received from traders were often inaccurate. Usually labels merely described the port where

traders have purchased an individual, who might have originally lived hundreds of miles away.

Nevertheless, planters had little interest or respect for the cultures of the people they enslaved. Even

after emancipation, Caribbean elites continued seeing African cultures as liability; they attached

more value to individuals who had better absorbed European cultural values. This was so even in

Haiti, where African-born Blacks had been essential to overthrowing the colonial regime. Haitian

intellectuals in the 1800s, from Pompé-Valentin Vastey to Anténor Firmin, attacked anti-Black

racism, but believed that New World Blacks, not native Africans, would regenerate the African

continent.


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The traditional explanation assumed that since Africa had insignificant cultural development, the

captives would have lost their modest culture in the Middle Passage. This belief supposed that

enslaved Africans were a sort of blank slate and their accomplishments were flawed attempts to

emulate Europe. This thinking would predominate until the 1920s, when cultural movements like

Negritude would embrace African roots of local culture [For example, Fernando Ortiz, Lydia

Cabrera; Aimé Césaire]. Anthropologists Jean Price-Mars with So spoke the uncle [1928] and

Melville Herskovits in the Myth of the Negro Past [1941] persuasively contested these notions. Other scholars continued documenting the survival of African-derived cultural elements in modern

Afro-Caribbean cultures. This period marked a shift away from the inclination to consider enslaved

Africans as passive victims. Black Caribbean cultures were evidence of the many ways enslaved and

free Blacks have shaped their own lives.

Broadly speaking, since the 1930s scholars have described the general impact of African cultures on

the Caribbean in two ways.

The first way, retention, stresses how captives in the Caribbean reconvened in new locations around

ethnic groups from similar African origins. This allowed for the dissemination of African

philosophies and communalisms like Ubuntu. But, perhaps the clearest evidence of cultural

transmission is the role of African ethnicities in rebellions against slavery. [see slavery, resistance

and revolution]

For at least the 1770s, African-born leaders led most of the largest uprising in the Caribbean. In the

1730s, a civil war among the Akan-speaking people, in today’s Ghana, led to the enslavement of

hundred of experienced warriors in the Caribbean. Akan people, whom the English called

Coromantees, have had a hand in the 1701 Christmas uprising in Antigua, the 1675 revolt in

Barbados, and in the 1673 revolt in Jamaica. But the 1730s saw these Africans mount an even

greater challenge to the slave system, with the Saint John slave revolt of 1733 and the Antigua Slave

revolt of 1736. Coromantees were also active in the Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, and in

another 1765 slave plot.

After about 1770, leaders born in the Caribbean became more conspicuous heading many of the

region’s slave rebellions, including the Haitian Revolution [see Toussaint Louverture; Bussa’s

Rebellion]. And yet, one of the key elements in the success of the Haitian Revolution is now thought

to be hundreds of veteran warriors from civil wars in the Kongo region. The military tactics and

royalism of many groups of rebel warriors in the Haitian Revolution appears to be directly linked to

the fighting styles and political ideologies of the Kongo.

Another aspect of slave resistance in the Caribbean directly linked to African ethnicities was the

creation of maroon communities – escaped slaves who found ways to live permanently outside of

bondage, often in villages in remote mountains or deep in the rainforest. Cudjoe, the founder of one

of the most important groups of maroons in Jamaica, was said to have been a Coromantee.

The clearest connection between the Caribbean and specific African cultures is perhaps most

perceptible in Cuban history because the slave trade continued there until 1886. Spanish authorities

had allowed Blacks in the 1500s to organize confraternities and self-help associations along African

cultural practices. Whites supervised these cabildos de nación [guilds], but Blacks elected their own

leaders and organized their own processions, dances and fund raising.

The 1800s sugar boom, which helped produce new waves of captives from Yoruban lands [Nigeria

today], bolstered the Afro-Cuban tradition. Blacks from this region, known as Lucumí to Cuban

slave holders, recreated a secret society known as Abaukuá modeled on the Ékpè Leopard Society


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they had known in their homelands. The Abakuá was highly secretive, and was perhaps involved in

the Aponte Slave rebellion of 1812 and the Escalera conspiracy of 1844. As early as 1836 its

members included island-born Blacks, Africans from the Congo region, and even Whites.

These and other organizations provided a setting in which Santeria, Palo and other neo-African

religions flourished, and reconstituted them with specific African elements. The orishas, or spiritual

mysteries in Lucumí religion [Santería] had direct connections to the expressions of Olodumare

[divinity] in the Yoruba traditional religious systems. Similarly, the musicians in these organizations

modeled their instruments, especially in percussion, on musical instruments used in Africa. They

eventually entered Cuban popular music. An example of this is the ―conga‖ drum, which became

important in Cuban popular music after the 1940s when Arsenio Rodriguez appropriated it from the

Santiago Carnival into his son band. [see traditional music; Cuban music and dance]

Yet this phenomenon in which Blacks rebuilt specific pieces of African culture in the Caribbean

leaves much of the Afro-Caribbean unexplained. A second approach, which Sidney Mintz, Richard

Price and Andrew Apter advocate, is the process of creolization alongside to syncretism. It stresses

the ways in which Black Caribbeans influenced each other with innovations and adoptions of various

cultural influences to create cultural practices that we today describe as neo-African. It asserts that

culture mixing is universal. This approach would argue that what is considered to be an original

Caribbean or American manner of creating new cultures is actually also very African. It shows how

enslaved Africans deposited in different places learned and invented new ways of speaking,

worshiping, eating, and living just to communicate and live. These include the many religious,

musical or artistic traditions that appear to be African, but which have no clear African antecedents,

since they evolved in the Caribbean differently from anything in Africa.

The Yoruba diasporic communities that have moved between Havana in Cuba and Lagos in Nigeria

have shown examples of this process of creolization. They have created religious and cultural

identities that have fluctuated between Cuban and Nigerian affiliations. They have also developed

cultural markers that are neither exclusively Cuban nor Nigerian. The Antillean Waltz is another

model of this transformation. It began on Curaçao, and then spread to the rest of Netherlands’

Antilles. Like all neo-African cultural expressions, it reflects these islands’ entangled history of

colonization and slavery. It is a mixture of Indian, African and European musical elements forged

during the time before and after emancipation. Historians have found its origins among eighteenth-

century Curaçao Blacks, ―unsalable‖ Africans called manquerons, whom the local elite forced to

play European style of music. Gradually, Black musicians included African aesthetics in the form of

small drums, off-beat phrasing and occasional polymeter, accentuating and embellishing the

European music they were imposed to play. The fluid social context and strategic locations of the

Dutch Caribbean had put these musicians in contact with diverse cultural currents, which also found

their musical expressions in what today we know as the Antillean Waltz. Africa and Resistance Following Emancipation

After slavery, Afro-Caribbean people found that many things remained the same – scorn for African

and neo-African cultures; political powerlessness under European colonial rule; economic subjection

in the colonial system and in a region that was simply producing raw materials for a global economy.

In response to this situation, which reached its pinnacle during the Great Depression Black

intellectuals wrote scientific treatises, works of history, and poetry exalting and affirming the

Caribbean African experience. In this period, which coincided with the shift in scholarly orientation

toward the Black Caribbean, nationalism was a powerful force leading to the recognition of the value

of folk cultures. As intellectuals in the Spanish speaking Caribbean explored their islands’ distinct


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identities, and as British colonies gradually moved towards independence, and French colonies chose

political integration with France, all began to investigate and celebrate their many African cultural

heritages. [see Jean Price-Mars; Jose Marti; Aimé Césaire; CLR James; Eric Williams; Marcus

Garvey; Alejo Carpentier; and Luis Palés Matos] The new recording and broadcasting technologies

of the early twentieth century allowed African-inspired forms of Caribbean music to develop new

forms and reach new audiences in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. [see Cuban music

and dance] On a more local level, forms of Caribbean cultural expression including oral literature

and religion conveyed messages of personal dignity, resistance to oppression and spiritual

transcendence honed over centuries of slavery.

For people of the British Caribbean, London and New York became important meeting places during

the first half of the 20th century. Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey, for example, mingled with African

nationalists in London in the years before World War I. He found, however, that in 1914 Jamaicans

were unsympathetic to his movement for panAfrican unity. Things changed when he moved to New

York in 1916. Here Garvey mobilized thousands of people with his UNIA organization, and with its

newspaper, The Negro World, which reached circulation in the millions. In 1920, he organized in

Harlem the first of four International Conventions of the Negro Peoples of the World that included

various African leaders. His ideas and influence came to help shape nationalist movements in

Africa. The Black, Green, and Red colors of his movement found their way into the flags of several

African countries, as well as the Black Star of Ghana, so named after Garvey’s Black Star Liner.

London was even more important as a meeting ground for anti-imperialists from Britain’s Caribbean

and African colonies. Garvey came to die here after transplanting his UNIA back to Jamaica.

Trinidad’s Sylvester Williams was a central figure in organizing the first pan-African Congress in

London in 1900. In 1935, a number of West Indian intellectuals in London organized against the

Italian invasion of Ethiopia, including CLR James, Amy Ashwood Garvey and George Padmore.

Padmore, originally from Trinidad, was already active in the Communist Party in the United States

and on the European continent. But in London he grew increasingly active in African nationalist

circles, befriending future African leaders like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. Padmore

helped organize the 5th Pan African Congress in Mancester England in 1945, at the end of World

War II. And he became a central advisor to Nkrumah, playing a major role in the elections that led

to the independence of Ghana from British control in 1957 and organizing the first All African

People's Congress in 1958 in Accra, Ghana's capital.

Since the 1930s, pan-Africanism in the English-speaking Caribbean had a spiritual, as well as

political resonance. Street preachers like Leonard Howell combined Garvey’s pan-African political

rhetoric with charismatic Christianity to produce the idea of Africa as a place of spiritual redemption

for Black Caribbean people. By the 1950s Rastafarianism, which accepted the Ethiopian Emperor

Hailie Selassie as the living god, had emerged in Jamaica as a religious movement that rejected not

only British imperialism but the nascent nationalism of the Jamaican middle and working classes.

Drawing on the Old Testament notion of returning to Zion, the Promised Land, 1960s Rastafarians in

the early 1960s sent groups to live in Ethiopia. But conditions in this part of Africa were as difficult,

if not more so, than in Jamaica. By the 1970s Rastafarianism became an international cultural

phenomenon, associated with leading reggae stars like Bob Marley. The African orientation of this

movement became more spiritual than political, rejecting western materialism rather than advocating

a physical return to Africa.

Since around the same period of the 1930s, intellectuals like Fernando Ortiz had described the many

ways in which African cultures have shaped Caribbean identities. But it was only after the Cuban

Revolution of 1959, when Fidel Castro’s government forged directed ties with various regions of


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Africa. These ties were more than cultural and intellectual. From 1961 to 1989, thousands of Cuban

troops fought in a number of African civil wars and revolutions, most notably in Angola, from 1965

to 1989 [see Cuba's wars in Africa]. Further Reading:

Apter, Andrew Herman. Beyond words: discourse and critical agency in Africa. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2007

Heywood, Linda M., and John K. Thornton. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation

of the Americas, 1585-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Inikori, Joseph E. Africans and the industrial revolution in England: a study in international trade

and economic development. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Klein, Herbert S., and Ben Vinson. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2nd ed.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Manuel, Peter, Kenneth M. Bilby, and Michael D. Largey. Caribbean currents: Caribbean music

from rumba to reggae. Temple University Press, 2006.

Miller, Ivor L. Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba. University Press of

Mississippi, 2009.

Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological

Perspective. Beacon Press, 1992.

Otero, Solimar. Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World. University Rochester Press, 2010

Price, Richard. First-time: the historical vision of an Afro-American people. Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1983.

Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy.

Random House, 1984.

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. 2nd ed.

Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Whitten, Norman Jr. and Arlene Torres. Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean. Indiana

University Press, 1998.

Thomas Foster Earle, K. J. P. Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge University

Press, 2005.

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