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THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 3
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.
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
