THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE

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THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall

A speech delivered at Holetown Library to celebrate the 22nd Holetown Festival on Friday 19th February 1999. This article is 12 pages long.

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Welcome to Barbados - 21 miles long and a smile wide. Alfred has stolen one hundredth of my thunder by stating that Barbados has a unique history in the Caribbean in that the history of the Caribbean people is usually that there were Amerindian people (and we call them by the old terminology which North Americans now have ceased to use "Amer" meaning American and "Indian", utilising the mistake of Christopher Columbus in seeing these people and calling them "Los Indios", the "dark-skinned people" and thinking that he was in India). So Amerindians inhabited these Caribbean territories, then came the Spaniards and Portuguese and there was a point in contact after which Africans were introduced and that occupied at least 50 years, in some cases 100 years, in some cases more. So the African in the Caribbean has come to this region as the third layer of post-Columbian immigrants, but in the case of Barbados, the African arrived here with the Englishmen and as Alfred said at the beginning, we don't know how it happened (the jury are still out) but the story which historians have accepted is that in 1627 when the "William and John" was traveling to Barbados with a colonising party of 80 Englishmen, they happened upon a Spanish galleon. At that time (according to Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh) there was the concept of "No peace beyond the line", meaning that there was continual warfare between England and Spain and, no matter what the situation was in Europe, whenever Spanish or English fleets met each other on the high seas past an imaginary line crossing the Azores, wherever they met beyond that west and south, there was hostility.

Our story goes that this English vessel under the captaincy of John Powell stopped the Spanish galleon and demanded whatever they had that was "merchantable", to use the term of the day, on board. Of course they took stores, guns, jewellery etc and ten Africans who had been brought by Portuguese to Spanish territories, because Africans were here in the Caribbean from about 1522 as bond servants, as slaves, and the Spaniards were prevented from themselves trading in Africa for human cargo but the Portuguese could, therefore the Portuguese bought Africans to Spanish territories in the Caribbean. The English took ten of them and landed 100 metres from here at Holetown, the Hole. I think that this lady's book (Ann Watson Yates "Bygone Barbados") does indicate where the Hole is and what it looks like. That little inlet is where the Englishmen landed of course it's silted up much more now than it was 372 years ago. That's where the English came ashore in Barbados, which reminds me to congratulate Alfred, Keith Simmons and others for conceptualising the Holetown Festival in 1977 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the landing and now it's 22 years later, the 372nd anniversary.

So the Africans, some ten of them, came to Barbados with the Englishmen in 1627. Thereafter they became enslaved. Immediately they were made into slaves, not by reason of any judge made law, but by the simple situation of having been captured and forced into bond servant work in perpetuity. That was 1627. The society was not intended to be for Africans but it was supposed to be a racially homogeneous one. Therefore one finds that these bond servants coming into Barbados, the drawers of water, cutters of tobacco and cotton, and the planters of the initial crops in and around this area were working-class Englishmen - the "dregs of society" as one contemporary writer claims - and that went on for about ten years until 1637 when there was a problem in England. The main crop coming from these "plantations" as they were called, tobacco, reached glut proportions because Virginia exported a superior quality and quantity of tobacco, and all of England's Caribbean territories also produced and exported tobacco to England. There was not only a glut and a fall in prices, but these fledgling colonies then faced extinction. Then it happened, the event which changed forever not only the history of Barbados but the history of the entire Western hemisphere. I suppose we have forgotten about cane sugar a crop indigenous to New Guinea, which was known in India and in Europe. This extremely expensive delicacy, which apparently had been brought to the Caribbean by Columbus, now became exploited on a major commercial scale in this territory, Barbados. Sugar had been in Polynesia. Today Barbadians of all ethnic groups can be proud of the fact that the 'sugar revolution' as it was called, started here and that from 1637 onwards Barbadians experimented with the growing of a crop here and by 1645 they were exporting that crop to England. The experiment was conducted by a Dutch Jew resident in Brazil, Pieter Brewer who was brought over here to test the soil to see if the sugar cane would grow. These experiments were successful and from 1640 onwards one finds that the sugar cane plant is grown in Barbados on a large scale. Between 1640 and 1690, a period of 50 years Barbados became the single most valuable piece of real estate in the entire Atlantic world, bar none.

You must understand why I say that and how this happened. Sugar 360, 350, 340 years ago was as much in demand as today as (and if you will pardon me if I say so) marijuana and cocaine, except that sugar was legal but the demand for these crops which were exotic, stimulating, sweet to taste etc, was fantastic and the demand was higher than productivity. The entirety of Barbados' original forest was cut down, deforested to establish plantations, large commercial farms cultivating the sugar cane and exporting it to England. Out of that economic activity also came the rum industry and Barbados can also claim to have patented the production and export of rum from 1703. Certainly over a period of 50 years Barbados became extremely valuable because it was the first to produce sugar on a large-scale commercial basis and to export it to Europe. You will remember at that time England, under James 1 and Charles 1 and his successors, had become accustomed to the practice of taking tea, which is now a cultural signature of the English people and it follows therefore that the natural sweetener, sugar, should be available and when it became available the source of that sweetener was doubly valuable. This was Barbados and Barbados had a jump of 20 years on other sugar producers. Barbados started producing sugar and exporting it in 1640 - 1645. Martinique, Guadeloupe and other territories did not begin until after 1660. Persons seeking to discover the present-day prosperity of Barbados need seek no further. This country became the pristine, the quintessential, the archetypical sugar-producing territory and remained so up to just 40 years ago, when we underwent our second major revolution - the"Tourism revolution"

Key to this therefore was the presence of the African. In 1640 the population of Barbados was about 10,000, of which there were no more than 1,000 Africans. As I indicated it, was not expected that the African would become a permanent feature in this society and the initial work force was the young and landless from the English cities who served the bold and the wealthy. And then the brawny African became a feature when sugar became important. The African had been known Europeans from the time of Greeks, from the time of the Romans. The African, after all, was both slave and conqueror. The African was in Germany, the African was in France and more particularly in Spain and Portugal where Moors had conquered and colonised Spain for 900 years. He was therefore eminently qualified, according to the Europeans, for working in the fields and working in the tropical climate of Barbados, hence the large scale hemorrhaging, as people say, of Africa, where its young and able bodied persons as well as its weak, its old, its children were transported across the Caribbean to serve the interest of 'King Sugar'. And that basically is the reason for the large presence of Africans in this society. By 1640, as I said, there were only 1,000 Africans in this society, a society of 10,000. Society increased eightfold and by 1690 Barbados was over-populated. It had 80,000 persons and whereas it had a ratio of 9 to 1 in 1640 in favour of Europeans - Englishmen, Scotsmen, by 1690 that ratio was overturned. Barbados now had 60,000 Africans and 20,000 more or less whites - Euro-Barbadian, British, English-Barbadians (as you know England does not become Britain until 1702 in the time of Queen Anne) and the number of Barbadian Blacks or Africans in Barbados continued to increase as the number of whites in Barbados decreased. By the end of the century there were about 90,000 people in this society and about 75,000 of them were African-Barbadian. My collegues like Karl Watson and Ronnie Hughes have said that these people shed a lot of their African identity over the next two centuries and became "Barbadian", so too the Euro-Barbadians and they coalesced not only in sexual terms to produce what Alfred says he is miscegenated or half-castes. Looking at him you would not know, but that grouping was called "mulattos" and the historians and others wonder what are they - European in features, phenotype hair etc etc but having African genes. They had quaint and queer terminology "mulattos" suggested that they were "little mules" in that they come from a donkey (which is an African) and a horse (which is a European) and that they could not reproduce normally and that they had to return to the matrix, either a full blooded African or a full blooded European to produce. To carry that joke a bit further, where you find a European and a African mating the product was a mulatto; a European and a mulatto mated, the product was an octoroon, one eighth white; if that octoroon mated with a white, the product was a quadroon, a quarter white; if a quadroon and a white mated, the product was a mustee which is, Alfred would be a mustee; and if that mustee and a European mated, the product was a mustifino, or seven eighths white (or as they said seven eighths human) and that process was called "washing the blackamoor white". In Barbados therefore one can move from black to white in about three or four generations. But that is just by the way.

Our focus after this long introduction is what the Africans bought to Barbados. It has long been thought that the African brought to Barbados in those formative years of the sugar revolution nothing more than brawn and a pint-sized brain. Victorian ideology argued that there was the Darwinian process of evolution from beasts coming up from the swamp lands and evolving into Australopithecus, Java man etc etc and becoming Homo Sapiens and at some point there was a "missing link" between man and the monkeys, chimps etc and that was the African. That dominated a lot of scientific and pseudo-scientific arguments over the past 100 or more years and there is substantial refutation of that, suffice to say that it has been argued that the Africans are no less human than other people. So at the time the African came to Barbados and other places, the propaganda was that he had nothing but brawn and a pint-sized brain; that his society had contributed nothing to the noble heritage of mankind. This was part of the reasons used by Christians and others for enslaving him, because he was, after all, not a human being, he was a sub-human. Remember that Adolf Hitler utilised the same argument with respect to the Jews, that they were sub-human and had been a parasitic drain on society and they should be eliminated. All Europe from Portugal to Russia became involved in the slave trade, enslaved Africans and brought them to this region. They subscribed to the notion, at least officially, that Africans were sub-human, but as we see sexually Europeans did not subscribe to that belief. The African was not supposed to come from a society that had reading, writing or had contributed anything of major scientific note, and although Egypt is extremely firmly situated in Africa, it was argued by scientists (and is even argued today) that Egyptian civilisation is not African, it could not be. Africans could not produce the pyramids, those great temples at Karnak, papyrus writing etc. It was established that the typical African was in the Bantu-speaking people, of West Africa with woolly hair like mine, jutting jaws, thick lipped, and that they had not either the brains, intellectual tools or else to create a major civilisation.

This morning I won't bore you with any refutation of that argument; suffice to say that a new generation of Egyptologists has engaged in substantial refutation of that notion. Let us look at the Bantu-speaking West African and what he brought to Barbados. He brought with him first of all a material culture. The Africans brought with them the ability to work in wood, stone, clay. They had established in areas like Mali and Ghana and so on, a cross continent trade with North Africa in salt, with East Africa in slaves, also in gold and ivory. There were parts of West Africa with workers in iron, that became the "Birmingham" of West Africa and of course they utilised reeds, plants etc and the hides of animals to make baskets, utensils for homes, for carrying, embroidery for their horses, which they domesticated, by the way. All of these art forms and artistic practices were brought by blacks to this Island. Women from Africa, these women came to Barbados in large numbers and were equally engaged in work on the plantation. Women brought with them almost all of the arts which they have today. Basketry was their main preserve and this was not their only preserve; they worked in calabash carving, embroidery, pottery, weaving, bead work, wall-painting, leather work and of course you know they did body decoration. Women's work and men's work occupied different spheres - men were engaged in hunting and cultivating the soil etc, women pursued the manual arts which I just described. Were they able to pursue these material and practical arts in Barbados? The answer is "yes". Because Africans, in coming here along with the Europeans, had to establish a fledgling society. The initial buildings in Barbados were made of wattle and daub, therefore the African with his circular hut house technology was superbly equipped to help the Englishmen in establishing not only the simple grounding but also the initial sugar plantation great houses. Most of the plantation Great Houses were one storey edifices and they were not only built by the Africans in terms of labour, but they were designed by Africans as architects. Although we find that the first set of outstanding Great houses like 'Drax' Hall in St. George and 'Nicholas Abbey' six miles north and east of here, are of Jacobean architecture and a style which comes directly out of England, throughout the Caribbean and in some areas in Barbados (though these plantation great houses are no longer existing) one found single storey great houses and there is evidence of these looking like or coming from African-style houses. So the African did contribute to the material culture of Barbados. He brought a skill, a talent with an experience in masonry, carpentry. You think of Africans as Stone Age people, but at the time when the Europeans went to Africa to capture or buy them and bring them here as slaves, they had iron work, they had nails, there were carpenters, builders, designers. One must remember that out of the West African empires one had large cities, Timbuktu, Jenne etc which had three and four-storey buildings and Africans therefore had that kind of experience. Some of it was not utilised in Barbados because, after all, their purpose here was to hew wood or draw water, cut canes and load them and send sugar on to Britain but at least their material culture remained and they were given the opportunity to try again.

Moving swiftly on - the area of soil cultivation and crop production. This was a main contribution of Africans to Barbados for 300 years. Africans cut the canes, not only cut the canes, but they cleared the land; they built these roads and built those marvels of masonry, the Dutch windmills. It was they who lugged all of the heavy machinery, the iron rollers and the other machinery for the boiling house, the curing house, and who manned the plantations to produce the sugar crop. Africans truly 'ran' the plantations because the persons who came to Barbados from England, from Scotland, from Ireland, as supervisors and managers and owners of plantations, did not have that experience in tropical crop production. They therefore depended, as time went on, on Africans as under-managers, not even as under managers, as drivers, supervisors, in the field, as captains of the mills, as persons in the boiling houses. Some persons would come from England at aged 20/21 to manage a plantation of 3/400 acres and that plantation when they came here was a growing concern, prospering and when they left or died it was still that way. Clearly there was some other agency, some other dimension other than their innate skill or genius and that was the African presence here. When we look therefore at the African contribution to Barbados it seems trite, it seems self-evident, but here you see the presence of the African in the sugar industry. In the 19th century, about 100 years ago, an African Barbadian (and there is a debate over whether you call them Africans or Barbadians or African Barbadians, and you will be surprised to know that persons darker than myself resent being called Africans but that's another story). One dark-skinned Barbadian, Iraneus Harper, a hundred years ago, was responsible for discovering that sugar cane could be reproduced from seedlings and that led to some intensive investigation and research by John Redman Bovell. Consequently, Barbados became one of the two places in the world (the other being Java) which developed sugar breeding and stations producing different crop varieties suited to particular soils and resistant to diseases and also to rats, mongooses, etc. So African work in agriculture was important.

In the arts (that is arts and crafts) here is another major area of African expression and African productivity and contribution. Perhaps the main area visibly that we can identify in arts and crafts is pottery, earthenware. Some 12 miles East of here is the Chalky Mount Pottery village and that is evidence of an expansive and extensive tradition of the ceramic art exclusively African. There is no evidence that the Europeans taught the Africans who were slaves ceramic art, the art of earthenware production. That pottery utilising no kiln, just a wood fire and using the iron pots for 'open-hearth' technique and technology, that practice of utilizing a primitive wheel or no wheel at all, has produced urns and the peculiar jars, which Alfred should have here such as the 'monkey', which kept water cool. They produced urns for keeping meat not only cool but well preserved (well-salted) for long periods. Every possible utensil that you can think of, plates, pots, cups, bowls, vessels for washing etc. were produced by African potters here and that tradition of producing for the household, for the market is also well shown in Ann Watson Yates' book. Here is evidence of the pottery and of a marketeer, a woman, and this is the Wharf in Barbados about 100 years ago and that lady is having a pottery sale not only to Barbadians but to inter-island vessels and visitors. Men and women were the potters, but this lady is marketing. The story of the African here in Barbados is one of men and women working together. When I talked about the African bringing brawn, it was not only male brawn but female brawn as well because in cane fields able bodied men and women worked together and there was activity as you can see there, in that wall painting; men and women using hoe cultivation, weeding fields and that has been a feature of our agriculture for over 300 years - women alongside men. So in pottery, in basketry, in needle craft, in weaving etc, the African brought those skills and those practices and products to Barbados. There was not so much painting until the 20th century, although we find petroglyphs which could be Amerindian or could be early African in some caves but we do not find wall daubs. In fact the tradition of painting in Barbados has only taken off in the last 15 or so years, prior to that it was an exercise of Europeans and North Americans and really could not be considered a major form in this island, but practices such as weaving cloth, peculiarly African practices, these were brought to Barbados. We tend to think, and the literature tends to suggest, that Africans wore cast-off European finery, in the case of the mulattos and the lighter ones, and that the darker skins wore next to nothing, a loin cloth etc. But Africans in Barbados continued the West African practice of weaving their own cloth on primitive racks and making cloth and one has to say it died out because in this century one does not find much evidence of it, but it was here and it did exist during the slave period. So the materials arts were well represented and were continued. As I said pottery is the longest-standing in Barbados and the most evident of a strong and almost exclusive African tradition. Turning to other areas, when we talk about pottery we must talk about culinary arts and practices. Barbadian culinary tradition is African. Those of you who come here to find Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips or the roast beef tradition of England, will not find that. You will find that there is a tea-drinking tradition, but not just the English tea, which came from India, but the black Barbadians knew and called all brewed beverages "tea", therefore there is a tradition of "bush teas", the bush being the vegetation, the flowering and non flowering vegetation around the areas which had either medicinal qualities or nutritious qualities; and this they knew from Africa, therefore the beverage tradition of Barbados is essentially African. The patented teas were brought from England for the plantation management personnel, but the average black Barbadian drank bush teas, and Alfred is a great singer and he will probably sing for you the song about the 49 different bushes, flowering and non flowering plants from which black Barbadians made brewed beverages, not only for nutritive purposes but for medicinal purposes as well, both during the slave period and afterwards.

In terms of food, as I said, our tradition is African, even Joan cooks cou-cou (spelt "coo-coo" or "cou-cou"). This is known as "fou-fou" in Africa and it is our couscous and it is a solid porridge, in fact it was called "lob lolly" in the beginning by Englishmen who ate it. It is made of cornmeal, the guinea corn which we call Indian corn or maize and it was stirred to a consistency like that of hard porridge and it was the first fast food in Barbados because it could be whipped up in about 20 minutes and produced or served on banana leaves. Corn is in itself a protein element, the meat protein would be crab or fish brought in from Canada and from North America, or around Barbados a lot of fish abounded. There is the flying fish which is native to Tobago but around here we call ourselves "the land of flying fish". The strange thing is that the poor whites, whose story must be told next time, those persons who got lost in the in the struggle to build plantations, they had a long standing relationship with blacks in bondage and their culinary and other practices complemented each other. The poor whites fished, Africans farmed; the poor whites therefore traded fish for farines, for protein and for vegetables etc. We learn that black Barbadians were not allowed, by reason of being slaves, to go on the sea because perhaps some sailed away to St. Vincent and to freedom; that they depended on poor whites for their fish and we also learn that like the blacks in the United States and Canada, they utilised the cast-off elements in a slain animal - the head, the entrails, the hooves. They made food from the head and they made soup, ground the bones and made soup. The obeah men, the faith healers, ground the heads of animals to a fine powder and utilised it in their magical religious formulae, but fish head, cow head or sheep head etc. made a delicious soup. The entrails, the large intestines, the colon was stretched and ground potato, corn etc was put in it. It was cleaned and it became, not your Dutch sausage, but the equivalent of the Dutch and German sausage, called the 'black pudding' which is still a delicacy in Barbados, and tomorrow, Saturday, is the day when our African culinary heritage reasserts itself through the black pudding tradition. Saturday is the day because Saturday is the day of freedom from the hustle and bustle of the week in terms of culinary practices. During the week you have to more or less depend on the fast food, the rice from Italy, from the United States, whatever meat you could put together in a hurry. Two reasons, Saturday was the last day of work and a day of relaxed working; it was also the climax of the exercise of cleaning and preparing the entrails, because remember that the solid waste went through that and you had to clean it totally so that no gastro-enteritis occurred as a result of using it. So that exercise of cleaning and preparing the large intestine for a food took three to four days, utilising salt and lime and cleaning it and letting it soak and become pickled in that lime and totally cleaned and sterilised, so that took a few days. So by Saturday it was ready. I know that my sister is making more money out of selling black pudding than I am making as a lecturer, I have two degrees etc etc and she doesn't and she makes more money out of that. It is an African tradition which continues and is increasing in popularity.

The African traditions are replicated in Europe and they were transferred to America; America is after all a transfer civilization. I think it might be a fruitless exercise trying to establish the original provenance, whether it came from Africa or Europe. It could be a simultaneous development. What we do know is that in Barbados it was African-Barbadians who used head and belly of the slain animals otherwise they would have been thrown away by the Europeans who used the prime cuts. The culture of poverty meant that the slaves were materially poor, they depended on their masters and they also had to eke out a living by utilising the bushes for brewed beverages and by utilising head and belly and the entrails and the hooves of the animals which were slain. Wherever you have had a slave tradition or a slave population in the Americas where the necessity of having meat protein has driven them to killing rodents, lizards, iguana etc which the European literally did not use, and utilising European cattle, African sheep, goats, any and every animal and even chickens, the steppers, the feet of the chicken have been utilised by Africans as a source of meat; every part of the chicken including the head.

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Everybody here in Barbados eats the same thing no matter where they come from; they eat the same type of food. Like most cultural entities it rises up through the layers of society and becomes not just the mark of poverty but sometimes a delicacy. There is an argument for talking about cross-cultural or inter-culturalisation between the African and the Euro-Barbadian, and this is most strong in food. Many black women nursed white children whose mothers had died in the tropical heat or who were found to produce inadequate milk and African culture came into the plantations, into the white lives through the pantry, through the kitchen where the cooks etc were African, and through the nursery where all of the nannies were black. This supports our argument that the food culture of Barbadians during slavery and after had a homogeneity about it. Delicacies such as wine, caviar, European produced delicacies were the preserve of the white elite, but a creolised, an African food culture was the preserve of the black, the poor whites and the Mulattoes.

There were other culinary features; first of all our African forbears used the calabash, which is an African tree, as a total utensil, a cup or bowl, substitute plate, a utensil for holding water, all of these kinds of things. They used cassava for making pepper pot, cou-cou; they used the okra, the West African vegetable, they used the banana, which was found in West Africa, not brought here in large quantities, these are also South American plants. In Barbados our wild animal population was never large and it was eliminated early, so rabbits, hares and rodents, the raccoon, the agouti, these were sometimes eaten. All that remained wild were the birds - wild pigeons, wild ducks etc and these were also utilised.

Fish, as I said, all sorts of varieties of fish were used and the main West African food, yam was planted on all Barbadian plantations and utilised by all black Barbadians. In more recent times, the Irish potato, after the 1849 famine when Irish potatoes became plentiful again that became part of the food culture of all Barbadians. In more recent times, the main food of Barbadians has become macaroni pie! So too the Italian pasta has conquered, but the African heritage remained in most beverages, not only the teas. All kinds of quick beverages, lime and water, and sugar and water, lemonade, drink from the grapefruit. The grapefruit is said to have originated in Barbados. We think not. We think that the two varieties of the grapefruit were planted, one in Barbados and one in Jamaica. One Captain Shaddock brought them here and a variety of the grapefruit is called after him - the Shaddock, but suffice, to say African-Barbadians used every bush, every possible source of food. They ate crabs, although crabs were a delicacy for the poor whites; they ate shellfish and they also ate the sea egg, the sea urchin, the prickly sea urchin which is almost totally now cropped out and has disappeared. That was a great delicacy and I don't know if Alfred has seen any in the last ten years. I certainly have not. (Alfred said he had seen them about five years ago, but not since then). Mention was made earlier about culinary practices coming out of the condition of poverty. In the slave period much of food in Barbados came not necessarily from the earth here because much of Barbados' land was devoted to the cultivation of sugar cane. It came from the North Americas, from British North America, which became Canada, and from the United States. In the 1780's when the United States became an independent country, it entered a period of cold war, open war with Britain and cold war with Britain's colonies in the Caribbean, including Barbados and that cut off a source of food. It was then that the breadfruit, which is also a Polynesian product, from Tahiti, Honolulu, that was what Captain Bligh, he of the mutiny fame, brought it to the Caribbean, first to St. Vincent and then to Barbados where it became the slavefood. Prior to that, and also afterwards when relations thawed, the main fish food for the Caribbean black came from Canada. Salted cod which is the product of Newfoundland and New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island etc. Salted cod is the most expensive fish in Barbados today and it is a delicacy. The salted cod withstood long periods of transportation over the seas and was in such plentiful supply and refused by the North American Anglo society that they exported it to the Caribbean where it became identified with slavery and with the slaves and I always tell my Canadian visitors when I lecture that we in Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean have to be thankful to Canada for providing the three F's - farm, forest and fishing products to support Barbadian society because Barbados did not produce its log wood or its hard wood for making buildings, these came from Canada's forests. The fish, as I said, came from Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island etc, and of course the farm products, wheat to make bread, that in particular also came to provide us with bread stuff throughout the slave period. This filtered down to the African Barbadian and he, insofar as he could enjoy the food culture and much of this food culture, the African one exists today. There has been what you could call a culinary syncretism or cross-cultural practices, as I said we now eat the Italian pasta, the Dutch frankfurters, the German hot dogs - so called American, we drink American beer, Heineken from Holland etc, and there is a movement away from the African culinary tradition, that tradition of using the entrails of the animals, although it is increasing among my age group of the 35's and upwards, it is decreasing among the youth. My children for example do not eat the entrails, the black pudding and souse, the pickled ears and head and jaw of the animal. They would not be caught eating pickled chicken steppers and I love them. They have moved into another kind of fast food, away from the fou-fou tradition and into the hot dog and hamburger and ketchup tradition of North America.

Clothing styles. As I said earlier, Afro-Barbadians are least African in terms of their clothing. Much of their clothing by tradition has been cast-off garments or depending on European styles. The African kente cloth tradition died out early and much of the practice of weaving ended with the slave period which ended in Barbados in 1838. After that, social mobility, respectability and evidence that you were a Christian and not a savage were associated with wearing European clothing, the heavier the better, so woollen cloths, tweeds, serges and other heavy European cloth became the wear of the Afro-Barbadian. I went to school in the heart of the Barbadian countryside, the Lodge School, and our wear was the woollen blazer and grey flannel pants which we wore on hot days. Alfred's school, Combermere, had no blazer - it was a working class school. There is a move now that has come out of the Black Consciousness era of the 60's and 70's, a move to resuscitate, not the weaving tradition of Afro-Barbadians, but wearing the Kente cloth and other products of West Africa. The sandals made of leather (that sandal tradition never died out in Barbados) is an African practice which went through a period of slowness for 100 years during which time people in Barbados generally went for European hard shoes. However, with the rise if the Rastafari movement, who are a distinctly and obviously black-oriented and the resuscitation of leather craft, we have found African styles in sandals, in handbags and even in wear coming back into Barbados. So the African tradition is like a phoenix in Barbados, it reasserts itself in various ways and in areas where one would never expect after a time.

Moving on to religion and music, and here is the most controversial area! It is normally and universally (and I say universally) believed in the Caribbean, in Barbados, that the only contribution of the African people to Barbadian heritage was obeah which is our Eastern Caribbean equivalent of what is known as voodoo in Haiti, Santeria in Cuba, and my students 18 and over believe that obeah is devil worship and that it is universally negative in its effects and its culture, manifestations and it is extremely difficult to have many Barbadians submit to rational examination of what obeah is , or even voodoo. We scholars do not use the name "voodoo", we use the African term vodun. Suffice to say that the African who came to the Caribbean was not only a sugar cultivator, yam eating, cou-cou eating person, he had a religious element in his make up as well. He brought with him certain cultural practices, the chief manifestation is ancestor worship - "Obi" and Anglicised to "obeah" is a religion of the priests, where the priest becomes not only the intermediary between the present day and the ancestor, but the priest becomes himself the object of worship, a cult more or less. So the cult of "obi" became the dominant form of African religious worship in the Caribbean, in Barbados during the slave period. The 'obeah man' if we can call him that, was faith-healer, priest, community leader, doctor, counselor; he also gave people love potions. He could use either trickery or magic to make you believe that incantations and poultices work a change in your normal life and destiny and bring back an estranged loved one, defeat a rival etc. One must say that the most pervasive African element of culture in Barbadian culture is that of obeah. It has never died out but there is no one in here, I have never found a Barbadian who knows where an obeah man is, yet it is possible for any Barbadian to find an obeah man when he/she wants one. People go straight from church on Sunday morning, having prayed to the European God for relief from internal / external pain, from the pangs of being in a love triangle to an obeah man. They have that central nervous system, that connection with Africa. They are not satisfied with praying to the European God, they find themselves on Sunday afternoon or Sunday night at the obeah man. Obeah was made illegal during the slave period in the laws of Barbados and the laws of the Caribbean, but from 1627 until the 1820's, 200 years, the African was denied the ceremony and the option of the Christian sacraments, baptism, church, marriage, Christian burial, therefore he was left in a religious no-mans's land. He was prevented from practising his own religion and yet excluded from the white man's religion. Obeah became submerged - it still is. I always tell this story: Our present Attorney General, the Government's major legal officer, when he was a practising barrister about ten years ago, he defended in the court of law a man accused of killing his wife's lover and although the gentleman was found, as the Americans say - with a smoking gun in his hand - that is, in a cane field with a knife which had his fingerprint on it and a man laying dead from knife wounds inflicted by the same knife, the man was not convicted of the capital charge of murder but was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter. How? The defence lawyer offered the argument that the man was being cuckolded or "horned" as we say in Barbados by this lover so he went to an obeah man and the obeah mantold him to bring an item of his wife's underwear, which he did. He boiled it, he did some magical formula with it and gave him to drink, and the accused said "Your honour when I drank that afterwards I did not know where I was and I next found myself in this cane field with this man dead next to me and the knife". He was acquitted of murder and convicted of the lesser charge because he said he was under the influence of obeah. And that is about ten years ago - an unlikely story but nonetheless is the pervasive and strong belief in the submerged and subterranean power of obeah which exists in all Caribbean territories and of course all people have this fear of the supernatural.

In Barbados, in Guyana, in Trinidad, in East India the ethnic Muslim is considered to have a secret weapon in the form of a leprechaun figure called 'Bacchoo' who will settle on you if you infringe any of the contractual arrangements that you have with itinerant or travelling salesmen, or if you interfere with them in any possible way. We Afro-Caribbean people believe in obeah in the Eastern Caribbean, in Cuba they believe in "Santeria", in Haiti of course the universally-known and universally-misunderstood voodoo. I have been to Haiti, I went there in 1991 for a Voodoo ceremony and I listened to the voodoo drums and it was the same drumming that we use here for the tuk band, yes the same rhythms. I went there with a friend who is now Minister of Housing. We went in 1991 for a ceremony celebrating the August 1791 slave revolt which eventuated in the emergence of Haiti as the first black republic in the region. I say that to suggest there is perhaps more mystique than magic in these African religions, more reputation that people can put the evil eye on you or that voodoo can make you into a zombie, the living dead, because dispassionate historians have found no evidence of people who were zombified. Nevertheless, I place great credence on that story about the obeah-induced murder, Alfred has debunked it and it is possible that it is just that, a story, a clever exercise by a defence lawyer to get a man off. Such is the reputed power of obeah that we can believe anything.

There is a large body of socio-cultural and socio-philosophical, socio-psychological history which suggests that Afro-Caribbean people developed their own justice system and that the notion of the intervention of the supernatural that is involved to get revenge to establish a hierarchy of beliefs, a counter set of beliefs to that of the oppressor and all of this really feeds into the obeah etc, harnessing magic to bring instant rectification, instant redress of your ills.

Obeah women in Barbados come into their own when obeah men die out; in other words, harnessing the elements in society for magical use was the reserve of a man and our anthropologists like Jerome Handler who have done research on the grave cemeteries of these obeah people find several male Obi skeletons. How do we know they are obeah persons? Their "grave goods" are more extensive and contain bone, iron and sometimes gold which indicate higher status. They are also oriented a different way from the rest of the persons who have been buried. We find too that in a conventional religion, the fundamentalist religion that developed in the 20th century in Barbados and Caribbean territories, a number of women have emerged as shepherdesses, not only of this fundamental religion, Nazarene Church but also of Baptists etc, but only after their husbands died and left them. They became more or less heir-presumptives, but not on their own did they get preference ahead of men. You still have a patriarchical system, a patriarchical hierarchy here.

We could spend an entire day talking about Barbadian religion, suffice to say that it bifurcates into two strains, one being of the pure African which is manifested in the obeah tradition which is still submerged, which is still illegal. In fact there is only one Caribbean territory in which obeah has been legalised, even 160 years after slavery, and that is Guyana, and the entire rest of the Caribbean ridiculed the Guyanese for doing that because they still associate obeah with devil worship. The other strain of our Afro-religious system is a westernised stream - Africans in Barbados belong to western religious tradition, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Moravian. We just celebrated 200 years of a church, the Sharon Moravian Church established in 1799 by some Saxon brethren, United Brethren from Germany, distinctly and almost exclusively to cater to the spiritual needs of Afro-Barbadian slaves and that has been a continuous element in our history for the last 200 years. We also go to the extreme; black Barbadians now subscribe to North American churches, Christian Scientists, Mormons, Jehovah witnesses, Salvation Army, and course the fundamentalist ones, the Baptists, the Moonies - are they here? - no! and the Worldwide Church of God. You will find black Barbadians have no discrimination where religious worship patterns and buildings are concerned because one would think that they would not become part of the Mormons or the Worldwide Church of God because the ideology of those churches is distinctly anti-black. For example the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa and the Mormons have as an article of belief that blacks were created unequal to whites and that there should be no miscegenation. As you know that is what informed the Apartheid system, "there shall be no equality in church or state between black and white" so these are the churches which preach that we black people became black because we are descended from two people who indulged in incorrigible sin - Cain the world's first murderer and Ham who apparently polluted his father. In religious terms we are therefore "lesser persons" who are not of the 144,000 or the elect and the select but this is not important about African-Barbadians; they are eclectic, they are catholic, they are non-discriminatory now in their search for God, wherever he or she can be found (because my students believe that God is a woman, a woman's spirit that is). Therefore the wheel has come full circle with black Africans started out with a belief in a whole pantheon of Gods, the rivers, the trees, the fields, fertility etc and everyone was more or less a priest and could interpret God in his or her own way. Today transferred-Africans in Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean believe in all sorts and conditions of religious movements and beliefs about the same God. If you are disgruntled as a black Barbadian and displeased with your religious leader, the easiest thing now is to form your own church and utilise Afro-centred worship practices, shelter and religious emotionalism which is distinct from the sober worship practice of Europe and North America. In our fundamentalist churches a devotee testifies and screams and wails and shuts their eyes during prayers and incantations where they can express their own belief in God. Interestingly enough, African music, the same sort of rhythm which is associated with the Crop Over and the Holetown Festival and jollification and revelry, that is found more and more in our churches and not the sober organ type strains of "We thank we all our God". We have 31 versions of Protestantism here. We also have Muslims and Hindus. We have freedom of religion and this is why obeah can now easily become legitimate, so both Alfred and I will lobby so that obeah becomes decriminalised because it is a hangover of our slave experience.

Spiritual Baptists are the latest in a line of infusions into our religious body and Spiritual Baptists are extremely African in worship practice, in regalia and in music. They use a lot of drumming and African rhythms and they are decidedly African Christians. There is a lot of syncretism here. It is not a Barbadian product, it came here in 1957 from Trinidad. Baptists had been there in the post-emancipation period, because Trinidad received a lot of free Africans after 1838.

Someone asked a question - were the Africans who were brought here enslaved before they came here? The jury is still out on this. The initial judgment of historians was that these people had been slaves and that the European did them a whole great favour by releasing them from a fate worse than death which is perpetual slavery and possibly slaughter and sacrifice and bringing them here and subjecting them to the kind of mercies they did -kind of out of the frying pan, into the fire. Other persons argue that everyone in Africa was free, and that there was no slavery and that the Europeans did a horrendous deed in bringing Africans from their idyllic fields to this region. The truth is somewhere in between. What we have found is that initially somewhere between 1500 and 1700 when Barbados took off as a slave market, the recruitment exercise of these persons was by capture, simple body snatching, shanghaiing. It didn't work initially in England because many of the poor whites were also captured and used the three F's - force, fraud or fear - to procure persons who came unwillingly. We find that from the 1700's to the mid-1900's in Africa certain empires developed as slave-raiding and slave trading entities, Oyo, Sokoto, Benin and the greatest one of all, Dahomey had an empire as large as the entirety of western Africa, and engaged in extensive slave trading. For that purpose they traded in arms, the initial stock-in-trade which Europeans bought was iron, tin and copper goods and by the 19th century they bought firearms which were utilised to force people into subjection and to transport large numbers of Africans.

Some estimates of the number of Africans who came to the Caribbean and to the Americas are as many as 40 million, dispassionate scholars now say it is between 10 and 15 million who came over a period of 4 centuries. It is obvious that some of those persons had been in a situation of bondage in Africa, it is also obvious that not all of them had been slaves and some were actually snatched, and we know that whole villages, whole groups of people were sold into slavery. The slave trade became a useful exercise or useful way of getting rid of rivals, twins and defeated enemies in battle, persons, even of royal blood, some princes of royal houses came to the Caribbean as slaves. But in the next set of forced migration to the Caribbean, Indians and Chinese, one also found in that Brahmins, Mandarins came as well as Coolies, the manual labourers came so it was a kind of trade wherein any number could play, force, fear or fraud. People also volunteered to come as slaves when they saw that their friends and loved ones were brought. Children, babies in arms, pregnant women, all people came on the slave trade and, as I say, the jury is still out as to whether the large number of them were slaves when they came here. We think that the first group of Africans that came to Barbados were captured. Ligon the first historian suggests that; also Richard Dunn in his book "Sugar and Slaves" suggests that up to 1713 Barbados was stocked with Africans who were captured by the Englishmen and brought here rather than being sold by people of their own colour. We know that people are rather sensitive on this issue because in the 20th century as we move into the 21st, when you are looking to apportion blame for the slave trade, the Jews can say that they did not sell their brothers, then we tell them that Joseph’s brother sold him. There was a slave trade between Israel and Egypt, but the rest of the world can say "you can't blame us, your people sold yourselves, so you in the Western hemisphere were sold to the Europeans by your own people". So we are there in a kind of situation which is psychologically unmanageable. There was a slave trade in Africa, particularly in East Africa as the Arabs for centuries sold Africans to people in the eastern borders of the Mediterranean, thus the name "Slav" became attached to those darker-skinned persons who now live in Georgia, Armenia, Macedonia, Yugoslavia etc who are dark Europeans and there are obvious African genes (blood) in them.

There is also a notion that whites were enslaved here. The Amerindians were enslaved and friars like Montesinos and Las Casas complained about the forced working in the mines for Spaniards to bring up increasingly decreasing quantities of gold and silver, all the bullion was dug to make Spain wealthy was done by Amerindian hands. Soldiers lived off of that and each had an area of land and all of the Indians living there were his to utilise and work in what area he wanted. Amerindians were killed, they were shot down like birds or like frogs, as a kind of prelude to Hitler experiments were carried out on them by Europeans, and the main thing is that they were overworked and thus they died of overwork, and exposure to European diseases such as influenza to which they had no immunity, not just syphilis and smallpox but influenza, so they definitely were enslaved and there is no doubt about that and they went from about a million to about 30,000 in about 50 years and that is genocide.

Barbados was totally uninhabited when the Europeans came here. Barbados is 90 miles to the east of St. Vincent which still has Amerindians, so-called Caribs. At the time of Columbus, Barbados had none. We historians keep wondering what happened because the first Europeans to write about Barbados is Pedro a Campos, a Portuguese in 1536, who gave the name to the island "Los or Las Barbados" which means "the island of the bearded figs" or "the island of the bearded men". Even about the name we are not conclusive. Were there bearded men whom he saw or bearded trees? Certainly the island has a lot of bearded fig trees. He came here in 1536 and left a set of wild hogs to provide food for future visits but he never came back and the island remained untenanted for another 89 years. It was only in 1625 when the Englishmen came and the first permanent European settlement did not happen until 2 years later, 17 February 1627, so Barbados remained a conundrum, an enigma within the rest of the Caribbean.

To go back to the question of whites as slaves, English law after 1475 prohibited slavery among Englishmen. The nearest the English had to slavery was a form of servitude called "villeinage", very close to "villain", only "e" substitutes for an "a". A villein was the lowest level of person within a medieval situation living in baronial lands. He was permanently a renter and was obliged to give service in work and military service to the lord of the manor. He transferred that status of villein to his children and his children's children. He was a permanent underclass person. That was abolished in 1475 by Henry VII and consequently any Britons among you know that your alternative national anthem is "Rule Britannia, Britannia Rules the Waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves" and that comes from the 1475 dictate of Henry VII. Englishmen could not be slaves but they could be "Christian servants" which is a subterfuge, a euphemism. Those first few Englishmen and women who came here, as I said, were young and restless teenagers; they were made into bond servants. You find in the literature evidence that they were sold for 1500 pounds of sugar or for some other element in barter, but that term 'sold' has to be examined carefully. It was their labour that was sold, they were indentured persons, they were contract labour, they were immigrant labour and, as you know, a contract labourer loses his rights temporarily for the purpose of his residence and his work. He becomes a non-person, more or less a slave. Now the indentured servant, the "white slave", if you call him that, in Barbados served for 5 years in the first instance. He could serve for another 5 years, by the end of which, he was a free person, and he actually did not transfer that status to his children and I think the most famous indentured servant of all was a Welshman called Sir Henry Morgan who came to Barbados as an indentured person, served here, did his time, moved on to Jamaica and became a gentleman farmer there, but found it slow going and became a pirate. He made his pile there and resumed his legitimacy so much so that he entered politics and became Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. So much for an indentured labourer.

There is still some controversy about the status of the first whites in Barbados and elsewhere and people argue on it. In Barbados we still have a white underclass. Up to four months ago a philanthropic lady discovered that they were in my parish, St. John, which is the home of the Poor Whites, families of whites who did not more than 3 times per week eat cooked meals, and these are descended from those initial groups of poor whites who came here three and a half centuries ago. The term "Redlegs" applies to them.

Back to the Africans and to the cultural contributions they made to Barbados. Also in our cultural baggage which our people brought to the Caribbean was music and not just drum music, but the mouth organ, the one string guitar, the banjo, the wooden xylophone and other musical instruments like that. African rhythms, syncopation, drumming and polyrhythmic music which have survived over the last three and a half centuries and find their exciting representation and manifestation now in our Crop Over Festival and our calypso. Calypso is an African form of music which pervades the Caribbean. We must ignore the names by which these musics are called, "mambo", "samba", "cha cha cha", "rumba", "calypso", "meringue", "zouk" in the French Caribbean territories. You can remove all of those names and put the term "African derived popular music". When you go through out the Caribbean, you can go to Costa Rica, to Limon and you hear the music there, and you come to the mainland of South America Rhumba in Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, you go south to Brazil - samba. You come up through the islands from Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados etc and the beat, the rhythm is the same; it goes faster, sometimes slower, and we call it by different names, but the African music is there and that music which emphasises what is called "hot rhythm", danceable music. The dance is attached to those musics, those which emphasise the waist and the pelvis, and there are jerky rhythmic dances; you will see them at the Holetown Festival tomorrow, and these are unstructured dances, not the graceful ballet of Europe, but jerky rhythmic dances, sometimes orgiastic, suggesting fertility or copulation, and some libertinism in that sexual frenzy is exhibited as well. This is the music of the equatorial people and I do not suggest, as some people argue, a lack of civilization, these people are not savages. It is an enthusiasm for life and one finds that during the slave period this was perhaps the only area of African art apart from the culinary tradition which the white elite allowed because there were slave orchestras. Africans played at almost every plantation banquet and there was a festival called "Crop Over" in Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean. It was at the end of the harvest, which could have been the yam harvest in Africa or the sugar harvest in the Caribbean or the wheat, oats and barley festival in England, but coincidentally it was held around the end of June. It was at that time that the drum-oriented music of the Caribbean was performed in all of its splendour and that drum music has remained. It is found in the churches, it is found in our regimental bands in Trinidad, not so much in Barbados, but elements of revelry on our public holidays from Christmas right through the year. The drum-oriented sounds and drum-developed music can be found in Barbados. One of the reasons is that music is a universal language; as Bob Marley said "hit me with music, one good thing about music when it hits you, you feel no pain." That was one of the cultural elements from Africa which seemed to overcome all kinds of boundaries.