Afro-Caribbean or African Caribbeanpeople are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Africa. The majority of the modern Afro-Caribbean people descend from the Africans (primarily from West and Central Africa) taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro- or Black West Indian, or Afro- or Black Antillean. The term West Indian Creole has also been used to refer to Afro-Caribbean people,[8] as well as other ethnic and racial groups in the region,[9][10][11] though there remains debate about its use to refer to Afro-Caribbean people specifically.[12][13] The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.[14]
People of Afro-Caribbean descent today are largely of West African and Central African ancestry, and may additionally be of other origins, including European, Chinese, South Asian and Amerindian descent, as there has been extensive intermarriage and unions among the peoples of the Caribbean over the centuries.
During the post-Columbian era, the archipelagos and islands of the Caribbean were the first sites of African diaspora dispersal in the western Atlantic. In 1492, Pedro Alonso Niño, an African-Spanish seafarer, was recorded as piloting one of Columbus' ships. He returned in 1499, but did not settle.
In the early 16th century, more Africans began to enter the population of the Spanish Caribbean colonies, sometimes arriving as free men of mixed ancestry or as indentured servants, but increasingly as enslaved workers and servants. This increasing demand for African labour in the Caribbean was in part the result of massive depopulation of the native Taíno and other Indigenous peoples caused by the new infectious diseases, harsh conditions, and warfare brought by European colonists. By the mid-16th century, the slave trade from West Africa to the Caribbean was so profitable that Francis Drake and John Hawkins were prepared to engage in piracy as well as break Spanish colonial laws, in order to forcibly transport approximately 1500 enslaved people from Sierra Leone to Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).[15]
During the 17th and 18th centuries, European colonial development in the Caribbean became increasingly reliant on plantation slavery to cultivate and process the lucrative commodity crop of sugarcane. On many islands shortly before the end of the 18th century, the enslaved Afro-Caribbean people greatly outnumbered their European masters. In addition, there developed a class of free people of color, especially in the French islands, where certain individuals of mixed race were given rights.[16] On Saint-Domingue, free people of color and slaves rebelled against harsh conditions, and constant inter-imperial warfare. Inspired by French revolutionary sentiments which pronounced all men free and equal, Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines led the Haitian Revolution. When it became independent in 1804, Haiti became the first Afro-Caribbean republic in the Western Hemisphere and the first state which was both free from slavery (though not from forced labour)[17] and ruled by non-whites and former captives.[18]
19th–20th centuries
In 1804, Haiti, with its overwhelmingly African population and leadership, became the second nation in the Americas to win independence from a European state. During the 19th century, continuous waves of rebellion, such as the Baptist War, led by Sam Sharpe in Jamaica, created the conditions for the incremental abolition of slavery in the region by various colonial powers. Great Britain abolished slavery in its holdings in 1834. Cuba was the last island to be emancipated, when Spain abolished slavery in its colonies.
During the 20th century, Afro-Caribbean people, who were a majority in many Caribbean societies, began to assert their cultural, economic, and political rights with more vigor on the world stage. Marcus Garvey was among many influential immigrants to the United States from Jamaica, expanding his UNIA movement in New York City and the U.S.[19] Afro-Caribbean people, such as Claude McKay and Eric D. Walrond, were influential in the Harlem Renaissance as artists and writers.[20][21][22]Aimé Césaire developed a négritude movement.[23]
In the 1960s, the West Indian territories were given their political independence from British colonial rule. They were pre-eminent in creating new cultural forms such as reggae music, calypso and Rastafari within the Caribbean. Beyond the region, a developing Afro-Caribbean diaspora in the United States, including such figures as Stokely Carmichael and DJ Kool Herc, was influential in the development of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and the hip-hop movement of the 1980s. African-Caribbean individuals also contributed to cultural developments in Europe, as evidenced by influential theorists such as Frantz Fanon[24] and Stuart Hall.[25]
Notable people
Politics
Sir Grantley Adams – Barbados, politician and lawyer; the first and only Prime Minister of the West Indies Federation (1958–1962)
^"Archived copy". www.miamiherald.com. Archived from the original on 21 August 2013. Retrieved 3 September 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^"Archived copy". www.stats.gov.vc. Archived from the original on 11 September 2018. Retrieved 11 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^Cassidy, Frederic Gomes, ed. (2009). Dictionary of Jamaican English (2. ed., digitally printed version ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. p. 130. ISBN978-0-521-11840-8.
^Martin, Tony. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggle of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976.
^Tillery (1992). Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity. p. 42.
^Barceló, Margarita, "Walrond, Eric", in William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster & Trudier Harris (eds), Oxford Companion to African American Literature, New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 754.
^Nigel C. Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003: Oxford, Polity Press)
^Chen, Kuan-Hsing. "The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An interview with Stuart Hall," collected in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1996.
^"The Hon. Wendy Phipps". Ministry of Finance [St Kitts and Nevis]. 5 February 2019. Retrieved 31 January 2024.
External links
The dictionary definition of Afro-Caribbean at Wiktionary
