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THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 4
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.
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
