African oral tradition,cultural retentions and the transmission of knowledge in the West Indies

Background

Boromé (1970) traced the first appearance of libraries in the West Indies to the ecclesiastics of Spain who followed on the heels of Christopher Columbus’ rediscovery of the islands. His depiction of a library was a collection of books brought by Bishop de las Casas in 1517 during his second sailing to the New World. By the 17th century, the Spaniards had been vanquished, the native Amerindians annihilated, and the British, French and Dutch were jostling for control and power to extract the wealth from the islands. They too brought their libraries; some were private while others were subscription-based, intended for use by other elites, and managed by their own librarians. In those days, sugar was king (Williams, 1969).

As time progressed, these collections were expanded to incorporate library service to the, by then, emancipated Africans, a group that had been forcibly recruited to provide labour in the cane fields. However, these libraries served the interest of an elite minority, telling the story of Europe, while ignoring the ‘lives, struggles, products, institutions of “ordinary folks”‘ of the dispossessed and the enslaved (Higman, 1985 quoted in Alleyne, 1999: 21). This class history viewed the masses as objects and not agents of this shared past. Certainly, there was little in these library collections that served as culturally relevant to this ethnic group or their lost heritage. Unlike their overlords, the Africans’ manner of departure forestalled the ability to pack books or parchment (Niane, 1982). Yet Africa was not a stranger to books. In fact, Singleton (2004) wrote a comprehensive and concise examination on book culture at the intellectual pinnacle of Timbuktu from the 15th to 16th century, when this West African city was a respected centre of learning. The presence of books, bookmaking and libraries highlighted stratifications within the societies; but more importantly, it demonstrated the impact of Islam which was an important conduit of learning for literate Africa as ‘virtually every mosque possessed a library of some size within its confines or nearby’ (Singleton, 2004: 7).

Historically, the western world’s definition of a library has given limited credence to the African’s oral tradition. But the perspective was indicative of a common ‘refusal to see Africans as the creators of original cultures which flowered and survived over the centuries in patterns of their own making’ (M’Bow, 1999: xxiii). It is important then that organisations such as UNESCO embarked on an undertaking, through its history project, to shed some light on Africa’s underserved darkness. Additionally, several cultural projects with national, regional and multinational organisations served to untangle the weave of cultural heritage and traditions as they impact indigenous peoples (Ruggles and Silverman, 2009).

This paper suggests that, in retrospect, given the broadening of the concept of a ‘library’ in the contemporary setting, and given that it is now accepted that the transportation of millions of Africans across the middle-passage was one of the most traumatic experiences in human history, the memories of enslaved Africans brought to the West Indies between the 1650s and the 1850s should be seen as a ‘library in crisis’. This work presents the unorthodox view that African slaves who were transported to the West Indies, despite being shackled, bound and thrust into an alien world, subtly accomplished the installation of a massive store of knowledge and culture within the New World. Embodied within their physical frames, African slaves transported a repository of indigenous knowledge and skills which they transmitted to subsequent generations through oral and epic traditions, many of which are still in practice today. The Africans’ skills and talents were used singularly or merged with the technology of their enslavers to produce new technologies for human advancement. This is a significant accomplishment that should undoubtedly be counted among the contributions to the development of libraries in the West Indies.

To support this proposition, I present three main lines of argument: first, the concept of a library within the context of its representation in the 21st century; second, an overview of the intellectual status of Africans in Africa during the period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and third, the manifestation of Africans’ contributions to the advancement of life in the contemporary British West Indies.

What is a library?

According to Eberhart (2006: 2), a library is:

a collection of resources in a variety of formats that is (1) organized by information professionals or other experts who (2) provide convenient physical, digital, bibliographic, or intellectual access and (3) offer targeted services and programs (4) with the mission of educating, informing, or entertaining a variety of audiences (5) and the goal of stimulating individual learning and advancing society as a whole.

While Logan’s definition admittedly aligns with my argument as it relates to preservation, I want to distinguish the concept with respect to the library, using Eberhart’s somewhat generic definition. African slaves’ indigenous knowledge was further developed in response to the new environment in which they were placed. This expertise was applied to local-level decision making in the West Indies and served to improve and enhance processes in conjunction with the technology of the Europeans and the Amerindians. This knowledge was not only traditional cultures, language or performance which are regarded as cultural heritage and which governments and international government organisations seek to protect. Instead, they were wilful applications of forms or processes for human advancement, the re-engineering of knowledge based on circumstances, available resources and time.

For the purposes of this paper, Eberhart’s definition of a library is conceptualised within the contemporary notion of a library as a storehouse of knowledge in diverse formats. This expanded treatment of a library aligns with the suggestion that African slaves’ indigenous knowledge, coupled with techniques learned from the Amerindians and Europeans enabled the development of skills and knowledge as if gleaned from any traditional library.

The people who came: Their origins and skills

Tales of enslaved Africans who came to the West Indies often depict a conquered race with a myriad of perceived cultural characteristics: ‘docile and agreeable…proud, brave and rebellious…timorous and despondent…lazy’ (Dunn and Nash, 2012: 236). For some, there is the belief that the lives of these displaced groups began when they crossed the ocean during the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Crawfurd, 1866). However, this sea passage spelled the continuation of a journey disrupted but not broken as it relates to the traditions and history of their recent past. Brathwaite (1974: 73) noted that ‘African culture not only crossed the Atlantic, it crossed, survived, and creatively adapted itself to its new environment’. Despite being situated in colonies of exploitation, enslaved Africans still thrived. Oliver and Atmore (1989: 88) connected the trans-Atlantic trade to the West Indies during the 1630s with the development of plantation agriculture, a purpose for which they were thought to be eminently suited. Ironically, Malowist (1999: 7) noted pre the trans-Atlantic passage, slaves exported to Portugal and Spanish countries served as ‘domestic servants and artisans’, and were not credited with the important foundational role in European agriculture. Therefore, the emphasis placed on the African’s physicality and his/her ability to withstand tropical diseases and arduous labour seemed mischievous propaganda and only served to contribute to the racial stereotyping that Africa had little or no culture (M’bow, 1999).

West Africans recruited for the sugar plantations in the New World were captured from different points at different periods of Africa’s development. Areas identified as popular points of transhipment during the trans-Atlantic slave trade were the ‘Slave Coast’ (Benin and Nigeria), ‘West-Central Africa’ (Zaire, Congo and Angola), and the ‘Gold Coast’ (Ghana) (Nunn, 2008). Nunn (2008) as did Barry (1999) earlier, noted that prior to the slave trades, ¹ complex state systems were in the process of evolving. He provided evidence of research that attributed the disassembling of rule and order in West-Central Africa to the impact of the Portuguese trade in African slaves in the 16th century (Nunn, 2008: 144). Similar patterns of instability were documented in East Africa (see Isaacman, 1989; Mbajedwe, 2000) with the disintegration of the Shambaa kingdom, the Gweno kingdom, and the Pare states in the Pangani valley in the 19th century (see Kimambo, 1989; Mbajedwe, 2000). People were being enslaved and kidnapped daily, ‘even nobles, even members of the king’s own family’ (Vansina, 1966: 52). Slavery in those times was not uncommon among Africans. In fact, it was a practice common among other great civilizations; the trans-Atlantic slave trade, however, represented human trafficking on an unprecedented scale (Eltis et al., 1999).

Human beings were not the only commodity up for trade, however, as authors recount trade in goods from the African interior of items such as Senegambian mats, textiles and salt (Curtin et al., 1978). At the Bight of Benin, excavations revealed archaeological evidence of artistry such as Nok figurines. Curtin et al. (1978) wrote about reflections of cultural diffusion among the trade routes, and evidence of advanced metallurgy. In the Dahomey Gap (Accra) Curtin et al. (1978) also mentioned political structures, again, an indication of some form of systematic organisation as they documented the role of the Oba or ruler who, although the supreme official, was not free to act singularly but instead, had his rulings strictly circumscribed by a set of councils consisting of lineages and professional groups (p. 241). This is not an uncommon form of governance in some West Indian (Caribbean) states. Links were highlighted in political rule – personal ties to kinship; ties to fellow members of a professional or occupational group (Masonic lodges) and then finally, loyalty and obedience to the Oba.

Curtin et al. (1978) wrote of the Sanga from the Congo, acknowledging their works in metal, iron and copper which were thought to be astonishing; where they had established communities of caste and guild societies. They highlighted potters, who were also skilled at making vessels. Special artisans were identified, showing evidence that a surplus in food production made specialisation possible. Barry (1999: 266) referenced men skilled in boat building and women who ‘devoted themselves to farming, fishing and house-building’. Similarly, Diagne (1999) referenced the erection of houses, palaces and mosques on the East African coasts, along with the bodies of ‘mason, cabinet-makers and decorators’ (p. 30) who developed into fraternities and castes. Leatherwork artisans flourished most in Nigeria (Diagne, 1999).

In some regards, Islam was a religion of contradiction in Africa. On the one hand it supported wars and counter-wars, following which conquered factions were converted to Islam. At the same time, the rise of Islam saw the establishment of schools, the teaching of the Quran through recitation or memorisation but also in writing, as it brought literacy to Africa. The history of the Niger was reported as written by Abd-al-Rahmanal-Sa’di (1596–1655) and Mahmoud Kati (1468–1570), both famous Islamic historians (Belcher, 1999). It is important to note that Islam was a religion of a minority caste of merchants and couriers in the royal courts, which transitioned to become a popular resistance movement against the arbitrary power of the ruling aristocracies. When European presence in Senegambia began to negatively affect the trans-Saharan trade through the redirection of slaves and cereal to the trans-Atlantic efforts, it sparked this holy war led by the marabout Nasir Al Din (Boubacar, 2002). Barry (1999: 275) noted: ‘With the connivance of indigenous Muslims and popular support, the marabout movement swept away one after the other of the ruling aristocracies in Futa Toro, Waalo, Kayor and Jolof without any great resistance’. Barry also claimed that the practice of domestic slavery doubtless lay behind the cultural revolution at Futa Jaloon where the marabout and political class, freed from agricultural work, came to devote themselves to teaching. He wrote: ‘According to the account of Winterbottom, who visited Tibo in 1794, the new regimes set up many Qur’anic schools throughout the country’ (Barry, 1999: 299). The revolution resulted in plentiful and rich literature in Fulfulde and deeper Islamisation of the masses. During the second half of the 18th century, civil war during the Torodo regime saw Futanke sold to trans-Atlantic slavers, which constituted a breach of a covenant that Muslims were not to be sold to slavers. In a nutshell, the extracts demonstrate that writing was not a skill offered only to African elites. Because of greed, agreements were broken and slaves with writing capabilities were transported to the West Indies.

Although this may be a debatable claim, there was, however, one indisputable commonality among all Africans. Their oral cultures were amazingly rich. Niadie (1982), for example, referred to Africans learning ‘to recite the Koran’ (p. 106), a factor Illife (2009) observed as he noted the ‘veneration of the book’ which emphasised the difference between Islam and indigenous religions. In fact, he went further to expound on the richness of African oratory, debate, poetry and conversation ‘when unconfined by written texts’ (p. 94) and the amazement by traders of the Africans’ power of recall (p. 98). Alternatively, the transmission of messages through ‘drum calls or clusters of natural objects’ (p. 95) are lasting symbols or representations of African heritage that have survived the transatlantic passages, and which have only now been documented in texts and audio despite the absence of vehicles of books or writing in the past to ensure their survival (Illife, 2009). While it could be said that few West Africans were literate, a parallel claim could not be ascribed to their orality (Illife, 2009) or their resourcefulness in the epic traditions (Belcher, 1999). This element speaks to the importance of orality as a vehicle for the transmission of heritage and the embodiment of the individual as a vehicle to house this orality. The African griot has been promoted in recent African historiography as a conveyer of African history and tradition although Belcher (1999) disputed their value and authenticity as historians. While he acknowledged their multilateral role as diplomats and intermediaries in negotiations, he cautioned that not all served such laudable positions as some were also scamps and miscreants (p. 8). Still, they emerged as important transmitters of African culture and tradition.

Despite the sometimes negative depiction of African slaves, Africa at the time of the slave trade was a civilized continent with a system of theology, education, social, cultural and political organisation. Although the oral culture was pervasive among its people, a system of education, to include writing, was also established. Africans who possessed writing skills were also shipped to the West Indies.

African contribution in the West Indies

Much of the contemporary publications by researchers such as Warner Lewis, Carney and Rosomoff, Schiebinger, and others have provided new insights, by, in some cases, simply reframing the question on slave contributions. Dunn and Nash (2012) distinguished between slaves shipped to the West Indies and those shipped to the Americas. They explained that the latter were ‘thrown into close association with white people and their European ways’ (p. 250) and so did not preserve as much of their native culture as those slaves who were shipped to the islands. It did not mean that Afro-Caribbean societies escaped the ‘indelible impressions of European imperialism and colonialism’ (Crahan and Knight, 1979: 16), which was endorsed by an educational system that taught an ahistorical and inferior past. Fortunately, West Indian slaves’ African retention was captured in works such as ‘Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link,’ an edited text by Crahan and Knight who produced an amalgam of linguistic, familial and other cultural aspects of retentions. In a similar themed work, Warner-Lewis (2003) used mainly qualitative methods to confirm the occupation of the peoples of central West Africa as agriculturalists, hunters and fishermen with specialists who were smiths and long-distance traders (2003: 88). Correspondingly, in an historical study of women in Jamaica during 1655–1844, Mair (2006) identified a wide range of skills on an estate owned by William Beckford. Enslaved African males had occupations as ‘sawyers, carpenters, stone masons and boilers, as well as a blacksmith, a farrier and a cooper’ (p. 203) while women ‘with skills’ consisted of seamstresses, doctresses, field nurses and midwives. While she could find no accounts for specific training periods, she did note the occurrence of apprenticeships as in the case of Dido who was learning to be a washerwoman, Essey who was learning to be a seamstress and Sophia who was ‘with the midwife’ (Mair, 2006: 205). Historical records were available of the noise slaves would make with trumpets and hollow-log drums, and the music they made with calabash gourds equipped with twine or horsehair strings (Dunn and Nash, 2012). They further cited accounts by Hans Sloane, Douglas Taylor and Richard Ligon ² of ‘elaborate and mournful funeral rites’ (p. 250), and frequent instances of vigorous resistance by field slaves and organised bands of runaways in the various islands – the Maroons in Jamaica and Garifunas (formerly Black Caribs) in St Vincent and the Grenadines (Dunn and Nash, 2012). These accounts excoriate anti-African claims that slaves had ‘no philosophy, no military organization, no social life, no family structure, no arts, no sense of personal or civic responsibility’ (Brathwaite, 1974: 74). It also debunks the inference that Africans had nothing of worth to contribute to their new land; that their captors were the ones responsible for the making of the West Indies.

An important area of African retention was subsistence farming. While some farming tools and methods were clearly provided by the Europeans, the ‘short-handled hoe’, for example, was credited to the Africans (Berleant-Schiller and Pulsipher 1986: 20). Berleant-Schiller and Pulsipher (1986) also posited that the Antillean variation of gardening evolved as an outcome of ‘a syncretic adaptation worked out by African slaves who incorporated African and European elements into aboriginal systems that already existed in the islands’ (p. 20). Their test islands, the British colony of Montserrat and Barbuda, showed evidence of a cultivation system that antedated emancipation, supporting in part the argument of the contribution of the early arrivals to current day systems.

Slaves not only contributed to agricultural techniques but also introduced provisions, to include cereal, vegetables and rootstocks. Earlier, I mentioned the cereal trade was redirected to trading posts to feed captives and also to stock ships on the long sea journey (Boubacar, 2002), spurring the marabo-led incursions. Foods brought from Africa included items such as yams, rice, okra, plantains, lima and kidney beans (Holloway, 2006), and livestock. On arrival in the West Indies, surplus stocks were fed to the enslaved who managed to plant the tubers and grains in the small grounds allotted to them for food cultivation. During the journey, seeds may have been embedded in animal furs, soils or hair (Schiebinger, 2017), thus introducing new plant species to the islands. Slaves also supplemented their diet with familiar looking green leafy herbs and vegetables found growing on the islands. Unintentionally, fortune smiled on these plantation owners and freewill settlers who, unable to cultivate their own temperate grains of oat and barley in the tropical soils, were forced to rely on the ingenuity of African slaves and the produce from their provision grounds. African Hill rice, credited to the Merikins, West Africans slaves who came to the island from Georgia, south America some 200 years ago, was recently found to be growing in Moruga, Trinidad. Planting of hill rice versus regular swamp rice avoided malaria traps as it could be grown in garden patches and so sustained generation of slaves who were taken from that rice growing region of West Africa (Severson, 2018). The significance of the find adds to another bit of the puzzle about the African experience in the New World. Such inputs by African slaves thus ‘revolutionized’ the food systems in the West Indies (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009). Slaves not only introduced indigenous plant life to West Indian soil but also developed creative culinary fares. ‘Memory dishes’ based on African culinary traditions (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009) such as foo foo (pound yam), peanut porridge and rice dishes merged with ‘survival dishes’ such as pig foot souse, ³ black pudding, ⁴ ackee ⁵ and saltfish, and cassava products such as farine and bammy.

Enslaved African slaves were also instrumental in medical cures. Schiebinger (2017) argued that no ‘pure’ African medical regime was transplanted wholesale to the West Indies (p. 45) mainly because of the wilful, chaotic separation of slaves held in captivity by slavers. Instead she explained, these practices resulted from medical, traditional and cultural traditions. In the absence of medical care, slaves drew upon their knowledge of medicinal plants and herbs, sometimes fusing these with Amerindian techniques thus creating new remedies (Schiebinger, 2017). In his work, Mahomoodally (2013) described ten potent medicinal plants used in Africa, some of which were found in the West Indies. Examples of common flora were the Aloe ferox Mill. (Xanthorrhoeaceae) or bitter aloes (sinkle bible) which was used as a laxative to purify the stomach and as a bitter tonic, alongside its commercial use in beauty products. The leaves of the Momordica charantia Linn. (Cucurbitaceae) – bitter melon (gourd, cerasee, carailli) was brewed as a tonic, and the gourd is prepared as a vegetable. Laboratory experiments continue to explore its use against plasma insulin levels, while it is marketed commercially as an herbal tea. If one follows the naming convention slavers gave to botanical plants transplanted to the West Indies, then the guinea hen weed (petiveria alliacea L.) is another such important transplant. Once used by slaves to control the tick population on animals; and possibly unwanted pregnancies, since ingestion can cause spontaneous abortion (Honeyghan, 2017), the weed is now being explored as a treatment for cancer (Williams et al., 2007) and HIV (Lowe et al., 2014).

Modern medicine’s recognition that African traditional plants might be influential in the treatment of chronic and other health conditions was prompted by living subjects, who were used as guinea pigs (Schiebinger, 2017) or bestowed benefits of knowledge passed down over the years. Mair (2006), for example, mentioned the presence of a ‘Miss Kitty’ who attended Lady Nugent in Jamaica during her first ‘lying in’. In Secret Cures of Slaves Schiebinger (2017) highlighted a case where a slave was called to administer to a sick sibling with bowel complaints, whereupon she ‘administered a cure ‘communicated to her by her mother’ and used in Africa’ (p. 47) after which the sibling made a full recovery. Because this slave was unwilling to reveal the secret of her cure, the physician resorted to trickery, recreating a fake scenario, as he enlisted her help again and secretly observed the herbs she collected. He then applied the plants to other cases ‘with much satisfaction’ (p. 48). It was subsequently revealed the herb, Xanthoxylon was not native to Africa but was apparently either a concoction gleaned from the Amerindians or developed independently by the Africans. These instances showcase practical application of oral traditions as cogent examples of knowledge transmission. African slaves can therefore be identified as ‘heirs to a body of knowledge that included tropical agriculture, animal husbandry, and the skills to recognize wild plants of food and medicinal value’ (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009: 2).

Medical cures for physical ailments were often linked to the supernatural. Obeah emerged in the West Indies as a strong medical tradition whose practice was a form of purification and guard against malevolent spirits. Illness was often linked to some sin or misdeed (Brathwaite, 1971). Although the concept of the supernatural or mystical in the healing process was not unique to African society, as European societies dabbled with their own use of magic and witchcrafts, ‘what whites wrote tended to stress the anti-social or evil dimensions of what they perceived Obeah to be’ (Handler, 2000: 65). Yet in his article on Obeah and slavery in Barbados, Handler (2000: 80) concluded that ‘African cultural influences’ was extremely influential in the development of slave medicine in that island. Handler (2000) cited Bilby (1993) who wrote against the miscasting of Obeah as a negative practice because of poor understanding by white slave masters or European physicians, an understandable assumption given the period. In African and Caribbean folk practice, Brathwaite (1971: 219) explained that the Obeah-man was ‘doctor, philosopher, and priest’ because religion had not been ‘externalized and institutionalized’ as in Europe. Schuler (1979) noted the importance of religious movements in islands like Jamaica. She identified Myalism, which commenced in 18th century Jamaica, as ‘the first documented Jamaican religion cast in the ‘classical’ African mold’ (p. 66); a forerunner for the study of later Jamaican religious movements to include Bedwardism, Revival and Rastafarianism. In an article which examined the continuity and survival of African religious beliefs in Jamaica, Besson and Chevannes (1996: 212) explained that Myalism and Obeah were the results of African slaves’ forging of an indigenous cosmology prior to Christianity. Subsequent Christian incursions led to upheavals that affected the very institution of slavery, while it transformed African cosmologies, conflating with European customs to result in movements such as Jamaica’s Revival cults – Revival Zion (Baptist Christianity) and Pocomania (Myalism). Although these practices have changed because of evolving world views, elements of certain traditions have been maintained, for example ‘set ups’ where community members visit and sit with the household of the deceased (Besson and Chevannes, 1996).

Shelter follows the quest for food and good health. Housing policies for the enslaved varied from the way shelter was constructed and the economies that arose from their presence. Canizzo (1994) noted the paucity of African artefacts of housing and household implements was as a result of the material with which they were constructed and the paltry items owned by them. In their observation of slave housing in Barbados, Handler and Bergman (2009: 8) noted the ‘rectangular, single-storey, wattle-and-daub structure with a packed earth or dirt floor’ and thatched roof were common to what was seen in West Africa and wide-spread throughout the Caribbean. Essential to the argument on African retention was Handler and Bergman’s (2009) citing of Vlach (Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts) who noted that, ‘black builders constantly responded to changes in climate, both natural and social, as well as to changes in technology and design’ (p. 23). The lack of concrete evidence stems from the fact that construction of houses with perishable materials meant they also deteriorated with time. The absence of these elements affected the stories and narratives about their living conditions. For instance, the fact that slave housing was not only about plantation life but also the start of urbanisation in many Caribbean cities.

Until the 17th century in Barbados, slaves were on their own as it related to housing (Handler and Bergman, 2009). Bundled together in Negro Yards, they were the responsibility of the plantations who left them to design, construct, repair and furnish their homes with whatever material was available, although the planters determined the actual locale of the Yards. In Jamaica, Negro Yards near the more commercialised Kingston were organised and fenced in accordance with legislation, so as to control the movements of free, absconding or enslaved Negros (Austin, 1979). Situated as they were at the perimeters of the city, Negro Yards also housed animals, fuel and carriages (Brodber, 1976 cited in Austin, 1979). Their positioning as itinerant, blighted-areas have attributed to socio-political categorization of class within Jamaican society. Conversely, the Barbadian ‘chattel house’ was seen as one of the more positive elements of post-emancipation development (see Henry Fraser et al., A–Z of Barbadian Heritage), not only for its unique designs, which conflated West African with European designs (Potter, 1989) but also because it represented one of the earliest rights to African home ownership and independence. Following the end of the slave trade, plantations would rent pieces of lands to workers for construction of a home with a caveat that it must be moveable, hence their wooden construction without nails to enable easy disassembling. As in Trinidad and also observed in West Africa, chattel houses were raised off the ground to prevent destruction and infestation by ants, vermin and other insects (Potter, 1989).

The African embodiment also affected West Indian literature and performances. In this regard, I note Brathwaite’s disagreement with biased writers of traditional African culture but I also disagree that much of West Indian literature has been watered down through ‘education, communication and sales processing’ (Potter, 1989: 78) by Europeanisation. Cultural traditions continually reinvent themselves, and lack the capacity to commit suicide, as Kambon (1982) so astutely proclaimed. Even unintentionally, creators (writers and performers) showcase the strength of the African retention, through expressions of familiar themes, populated throughout the genre which are inherently ‘African’. In the fast-rising theatre arts, Stanley Niaah (2004) aligned Dancehall’s antecedents to the slave ship’s Limbo and to Jamaica’s Jonkonnu, Dinki Mini, Gerreh, Revival and Brukins Party. Music and dance perpetuated because it also served as a form of exercise onboard ship, with the Limbo specifically arising from the cramped conditions aboard ships (Rice, n.d).

According to the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission, Dinki Mini originated from the Congolese word ‘ndingi’ and like the Gerreh were performed at ‘Wakes’ (keeping the company of relatives of the deceased). Bruckins was a mixture of African and European influences, with a ‘stately, dipping-gliding…typified by the “thrust and recovery” action of the hip and leg’ (Jamaica Information Service [JIS], 2018: para 1). The Maypole or Long Ribbon Pole formed a part of outdoor social activities of England and Jamaica (JIS, 2018). It involved a team of dancers interweaving different coloured ribbons around a pole from the top creating different patterns. It now forms the national dance of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Dancing in Africa, took place ‘in the centre of a ring of spectator-participants’ (Brathwaite, 1971: 221) with male dancers expressing themselves acrobatically. The drums which were used for entertainment, and in religious and ritualistic performances are inherently identified with slavery. Musical instruments were adaptations of Africa’s versatility in the arts. Murdoch (2009) in reviewing the cultural disruption and transformation that was the slave trade showcased the African influence in musical instruments such as the tambou drums, the abeng (blown cow horn), tcha-tcha (West African shekere) and the lanbi (blown conch shell). Additionally, the calypso, with its roots in satire and parody, arose from dissent by Africans on the plantations (Murdoch, 2009: 69). Crick Crack…monkey break he back…for a piece of pommerac…. The folktales of Africa served not only to ridicule the unaware Massa to his face as identified by Murdoch (2009) but were also reminiscent of the spoken literary forms as proverbs, animal tales (Anansi – the trickster, conman spider), tales of the supernatural and other creation myths (Papa bois, duppies, etc.).

The remnants of African origins cannot be entirely eradicated from the culture of the peoples of the British West Indies or the Caribbean as it is now called. Nettleford (1995) correctly identified the African as having had a living history which pre-dated centuries before Columbus entered the West Indies. It would seem unlikely that slavery, heinous as it was for its maiming of the African continent and displacement of millions to the New World, could so succinctly eradicate the soul of the African people.

Conclusion

V S Naipaul, author of fiction, wrote: ‘Sugar is an ugly crop and it has an ugly history’ (1969: 129). Similarly, Udofia (2013: 12) claimed ‘cane is bitter because it doomed Africans to a life of hard toil, poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, subservience and dependence’. It was the penalty for being black and alive. The discovery of the great economic potential of sugar in the global market saw the consequent importation of Negro slaves to the West Indies which decimated an entire continent and saw the largest historical migration of human trafficking.

Nettleford (1995: 283) claimed there were people who ‘believe that the Caribbean people who happen to be largely of African ancestry have created nothing’. Such a myth continues to be perpetuated because, according to Crahan and Knight (1979: 16), ‘during the long period of the social disintegration, reconstruction, and nation building that took place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the legacies of Africa became distorted, diluted and subordinated’.

Yet Nettleford (1995) went further to argue that while Caribbean peoples cannot claim the construction of monuments in their history, they have created ‘thought systems, ontologies, and cosmologies and from this a Caribbean way of knowing’ (p. 284). This suggestion by Nettleford drives home the point that enslaved Africans should be counted as one of the primary contributors to libraries (broadly defined) in the British West Indies. The examples presented in this paper are perhaps insufficient and simplistic in their representation of the depth of African retention in the Caribbean. More importantly, the idea I attempt to put forward in no way discounts the efforts and achievements of archivists, historians and literary scholars who have worked tirelessly to record the narratives of African slaves. The results of their work can be accessed through social history portals of West Indian, American and European universities and national repositories such as the Jamaica Memory Bank. Preservation of these voices is important if one must interpret Foucault’s philosophy on power over the memory of a people as ‘the key to controlling their dynamism, their experience, and their knowledge of their struggles’ (quoted in Reinhardt, 2008: 8). It is important that the Caribbean has its own slave narratives (The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Olaudah Equiano, etc.), representing its own voices in this important part of its history (Aljoe, 2004).

Some ‘voices’ were collective, however, and manifested in subtler but equally powerful results for their ability to effect change and so affect the course of history. It is also important, in the preservation and development of one’s own cultural values that there is an ability to defy conventional historiography (Nettleford, 1979). Accordingly, I contend that the ‘cerebral repositories’ of African slaves, their libraries, which survived despite the trauma of the Middle Passage followed by 400 years of enslavement, have complemented the more formal approaches to archiving and supported the successful transmission of African knowledge (religion, history, medicine, magic, astrology, pedology, technology, science, etc.) (Niane, 1982: 106). This is especially noteworthy given the fact that slaves were ‘literally less materialistic’ (Canizzo, 1994: 30) than their owners resulting in a paucity of tangible artefacts. The disintegration of tangible evidence makes the argument even more potent as these dispossessed chattels, these living repositories, were able through oral tradition and other means of cultural retention, to facilitate the transmission of indigenous knowledge to current generations. Their legacies have contributed to the sustainable, continued development of West Indians and the West Indies.