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.

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-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited.