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chapter eight Yoruba in the British Caribbean: A Comparative Perspective on Trinidad and the Bahamas Rosalyn Howard Yoruba culture was transplanted to the Caribbean region with its African adherents during the holocaust of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The region absorbed over 50 percent of the ten to twenty million Africans who involuntarily left the continent and survived the middle passage.1 Members of the Yoruba state in Africa were not early subjects of the trade, owing largely to their welldeveloped sociopolitical structure. To some extent they—along with the Dahomey , Ashante, Fulani, Kom, Mandingo, and Hausa—dominated neighboring peoples in a multitude of ways: politically, economically, militarily, and culturally. Circumstances radically changed, however, when, between 1700 and 1867, “west-central Africa and the coastal areas of the Bight of Benin (extending roughly from eastern Ghana to western Nigeria) and the Bight of Biafra (extending roughly from central Nigeria to western Cameroon) accounted for over 75% of the total number of Africans shipped across the Atlantic.”2 The Slave Coast, as the region became known, was partially centered on the area now known as Benin, home of the Yoruba, the Ibo, and other lesser-known groups.3 Africans replaced indigenous laborers in the Americas whose populations had been decimated by various measures, including overwork, exposure to epidemic and epizootic diseases, and, at worst, subjected to genocide.4 They represented the abundant source of captive labor that could satisfy what the Europeans required for their colonization of the New World.5 Accurate assessments of the number of Yoruba peoples who were landed in Trinidad and the Bahamas, both former British colonies, are difficult to ascertain because of sparse records. Confirmation of their presence, however, is 157 Falola_Childs,Yoruba Diaspo 2/2/05 1:34 PM Page 157 demonstrated by the remnants of Yoruba culture that persist, transformed by time, repression, and contact with other cultures. Both Trinidad and the Bahamas represent comparatively anomalous examples of the institution of slavery in most British colonies of the Caribbean. Trinidad was not involved in plantation-style sugar production until the late eighteenth century, when the British gained control of the colony from Spain. Upon arrival in Trinidad, just one decade before ending their involvement in the slave trade in 1807, the British encountered a culturally and linguistically diverse society, one that included a larger percentage of free persons of color than other British colonies did; a significant number of the French Creole plantocracy who had migrated there, attempting to thwart their enslaved Africans’ rebellious ideas that were engendered by the principles of the French Revolution of liberty, equality, and fraternity; and Hispanophones from Venezuela who had worked in the cacao industry. In subsequent years Trinidad’s population became even more ethnically diverse with the importation of thousands of indentured East Indian laborers.6 The British gained nominal control of the Bahamas in 1670, when Woodes Rogers, assigned as governor, ousted the pirates who had long favored this strategically located territory. It was, however, a marginal colony, which, analogous to Trinidad, had a large population of free persons of color and an enslaved population that operated with a large measure of autonomy. Additionally the Bahamas never had a sustained, large-scale plantation economy. For a brief period British Loyalists, refugees from North and Central America, reestablished their cotton plantations. But these did not prosper very long for ecological and economic reasons that are detailed later in this chapter. Although these similarities exist, there are significant differences that caused the manifestation of Yoruba culture and religion to diverge in these two former British colonies. The “retention” of Yoruba culture ultimately leads to the controversial discourse on cultural survivals in the African diaspora. The African Diaspora The slave trade engendered the displacement of heterogeneous populations of Africans who demonstrated a wide spectrum of cultural and linguistic variation . The traditional cultures of these Africans were destined to become further diversified by exposure to European and indigenous peoples in the New World, creating a “diasporic ethnogenesis” of African-descended peoples with new identities and cultural practices.7 The extent to which elements of these African traditional cultures survived in the diaspora has long been a question of debate and analysis for historians, anthropologists, and other social scientists.8 Many scholars believe that the integral nature of traditional African cultures in daily life led to the maintenance of “Africanisms” in language, religion, family structure, and institutions.9 rosalyn howard 158 Falola_Childs,Yoruba Diaspo 2/2...

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