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THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 7
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.
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
