Africa and the Caribbean: Overview The Caribbean, that region that encircles the Sea, shores and

the islands also called Antilles, is known for its thriving and diverse African Diaspora. In the Americas, only Brazil comes close to the Caribbean as a site for African-descended cultures and peoples. In fact, the Caribbean has the most concentrated cluster of Afro-descendents of any place in the world with the exception of Africa. The extraordinary yet agonizing transfer of African peoples and cultures into the Caribbean has been in the making for about five centuries. In the 20th century, after the broad abolition of racial slavery, many Caribbean societies embraced various forms of African cultural identity. Today, nearly every Caribbean country has elements of African heritage. Prior to the European conquest, the Caribbean region was densely populated with perhaps millions of indigenous people. The unexpected arrival of explorers from the other side of the Atlantic starting in 1492 led to the natives nearly total extermination. Only a few Indians survived fleeing to the mountains beyond European control, often intermingling with escaped Africans and other colonial defectors. [see INDIANS: OVERVIEW OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES] The rapid decline of indigenous Caribbean people coincided with the first importation of enslaved Africans. This Atlantic SLAVE TRADE brought about 11 million Africans to the Americas and over 40 percent of them came to the Caribbean, deeply shaping the region's population and cultures. Though the trade lasted for centuries, it took just decades for slave traders to replace the Caribbean indigenous population with Africans and their descendants. Since the 1550s, Afro-Caribbean people have been the dominant ethnic group in the region. The early years of Sugar and African slavery Around the 1440s, prior to any Spanish claim over the Americas, Portuguese explorers began to sell captive Africans, first to other Africans and then to Europeans to help fund their explorations along the African coast. Mostly abandoning crude kidnappings, the Portuguese developed transaction systems with strategic posts [Feitorias] on the African coast. Some African leaders resisted. But many African societies practiced forms of slavery, so other leaders, seeking business opportunities, helped the Portuguese create supply networks bringing captives to the foreign trading posts. By the 1500s, about when Hispaniola, the island occupied today by the DOMINICAN REPUBLIC and HAITI, fell to Spanish control, the Portuguese slave trade was well entrenched along the West African coast. Those who bought African workers exploited their talents in many ways, but SUGAR production came to define modern slavery. Asian traders had brought sugarcane from India to the Mediterranean, and by the 1200s plantations in southern Spain and northern Africa and on islands like Sicily, Crete and Cyprus were producing sugar for a new European market. When Iberians discovered fertile tropical ground on the Atlantic Islands of the Madeira, Cape Verde, the Canaries and So Tom, these locations became new hubs for sugar production. The work of processing sugar, with its around-theclock tending of cane-crushing mills and syrup boilers, did not attract free laborers. So, when the Spanish and Portuguese occupied these islands they exploited enslaved workers instead -- North Africans, Guanches [native Canarians], and other war prisoners. As this backbreaking work took its toll on the laborers, the colonizers replaced them with enslaved West Africans blacks. By 1480s, black Africans had become the most common enslaved workers on the Atlantic Islands, toiling on sugar plantations, early versions of the kind of estates that would dominate the Caribbean. [also see SUGAR AND SLAVERY] The Spanish invaded the Caribbean on the heels of the conquest of the Atlantic islands. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS and others were well acquainted with the sugar plantations of Madeira and 1

Canary Islands. It is not surprising, then, that enslaved Africans would become chief workers on Spains Caribbean estates. In 1503, theologians and others concerned with the moral implications of slavery lost an important campaign Financiers, who had invested in the exploration of the Indies, and others who argued that rebellion justified enslavement, convinced Queen Isabella to permit the sale of indigenous CARIBS into slavery. The TAINO people, whom Columbus had initially labeled meek and inclined toward Christianity, were also forced into forms of hard labor similar to chattel slavery. For, although the claim over the Americas was to evangelize the natives, the European colonists typically sought to enrich themselves by forcing others to work. Attempting to balance the need for revenue and piety, the Crown in 1503 allowed a seemingly safe tribute system, and in 1512, it also issued the Law of Burgos to regulate colonists behavior with Indians. The Crown intended to shepherd Indians into CHRISTIANITY while also making them work. But, despite legitimate concerns for the Indians welfare, disease, overwork, and abuse largely eliminated the native labor force by 1550. Without much fanfare, enslaved blacks began appearing in Spains new American colonies. Most had been born in slavery among Christians in Spain and Portugal. Some Spanish merchants gained individual permission from the Crown to send enslaved blacks to the Indies. In 1502 Juan de Crdoba sent an enslaved black man as his business agent to Hispaniola. That same year Nicolas de Ovando, the islands new governor, more typically arrived from Europe with various enslaved blacks to work in the fields. Ovandos slaves escaped from bondage and joined with rebellious Tainos. Yet Spaniards continued sending enslaved workers. For example, Alonzo de Hojeda brought five enslaved Moors to the Caribbean. And PONCE DE LEN carried some enslaved Blacks with him to occupy PUERTO RICO in 1508. DIEGO COLUMBUS, Christopher Columbus son and the new Hispaniola governor, convinced the Crown to allow the open importation of enslaved Africans. He complained that the Indians could not break the rocks that contained the islands GOLD. In 1510 King Ferdinand officially proclaimed open the African slave trade to the Indies. In fact, his first set of instructions bid the transportation to Hispaniola of 250 enslaved persons as soon as possible. Though the document does not identify the workers origins, there is little doubt that Ferdinand intended them to be Africans. From this moment, the Caribbean virtually moved closer to Africa. Ships loaded with captive Africans began arriving in Hispaniola to replace the dwindling Indian population in the mines. By 1520 this mineral wealth had reached its peak. Following HERNN CORTES conquest of Mexico in 1521, Spaniards began leaving the Antilles in throngs. About the same time, the Crown decided to promote the sugar industry on the Caribbean islands instead of mining. The intention was to keep colonists profiting and the colonies viable. As a direct result of the Crowns incentives, Hispaniolas first sugar mill began operating in 1520, staffed by a few remaining Indians and newly arrived Africans. In 1527, Hispaniola had 25 sugar estates, all of them now mostly worked by enslaved Africans. This increase required a similar growth in slave imports. The population of incoming captives soon outgrew that of the colonists. By the 1540s, Hispaniolas enslaved population grew to about 12,000, compared to 1,000 free residents. In addition the Italian traveler Girolamo Benzoni reported in 1542 that there were more than 7,000 MAROONS [runaways] living outside of slavery. The maroons continued menacing SANTO DOMINGO even after the 1560s. The Crown did not focus with the same intensity in Puerto Rico and CUBA as it did in Hispaniola, but the overall pattern of European colonization on these islands was similar nonetheless. After eliminating the Indians, or pushing them into hiding or assimilation, colonists turned to Africans for labor, and increasingly came to depend on agriculture instead of mining. 2

In the 1600s, as the Spainsh Empire turned its attention away from the Antilles to the mineral wealth in mainland regions of modern day MEXICO and Peru, its European rivals gained a foothold in the Americas. The French, Dutch and the English coveted Spains colonial wealth, and repeatedly attempted to seize it. For that purpose, they commissioned privateers and encourage PIRATES to plunder Spanish possessions. [see FRENCH IN THE CARIBBEAN; BRITISH IN THE CARIBBEAN] The end of the 1500s and beginning of the 1600s were a period of high piracy in the Caribbean in which the Spanish relied even more on enslaved blacks to protect and build its empire. They worked constructing forts, mining copper, cutting timber, building ships or growing food for the Spanish military. Of the 20,000 individuals who lived in Cuba in 1610, for example, about half were enslaved blacks. They provided a vital portion of the skilled labor in the islands royal arsenals and shipyards. In the 17th century, despite its waning power in Europe and the loss of American territory to its rivals, Spain was still able to defend its major sea lanes and Caribbean ports. This was in part possible because of the crowns dependence on enslaved blacks and the intensification of the slave trade in the region. The Slave Trade Africa became Portugals exclusive concern after signing the Treaty of Tordesillas with Spain in 1494. The two kingdoms agreed that Spain would have exclusive rights to the western route to the Indies while Portugal would have a monopoly on the African route. Portuguese merchants were therefore the lawful providers of African captives to Spanish colonists in the Caribbean. At first, they received individual asientos, the Spanish royal license to sell slaves in its colonies. But in 1562 the Englishman JOHN HAWKINS assembled a group of financiers to invest in the slave trade. He set sail for the African coast where he hijacked a Portuguese slaving ship near modern Sierra Leone. Hawkins took the enslaved Africans and sold 301 of them to Spanish colonists in the Caribbean. The extraordinary profits he brought home generated English interest in the slave trade. French and Dutch ships were also challenging Spanish supremacy in the Caribbean and the Portuguese control of the Atlantic Slave Trade. From the Iberian perspective, they were all pirates. Thus, in 1595 the Spanish Crown tried to regularize the trade by officially giving the Portuguese a monopoly over the asiento. From the 1620s to the 1650s, England and France claimed their own colonial settlements in the Caribbean. While they initially used INDENTURED SERVANTS, these new colonies turned also to the African slave trade. The importation of African captives intensified after 1660, when sugar estates began to outpace TOBACCO farms in SAINT-KITTS, BARBADOS, ANTIGUA, MARTINIQUE and GUADELOUPE. From the mid-1660s, the number of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic more than doubled. In 1634, the DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY occupied the islands of ARUBA, BONAIRE AND CURAAO. In 1662, after they captured Elmina and other Portuguese trading posts on the West African coast, the Dutch made Curaao the center of their slave trade in the Caribbean, and the source of thousands of slaves heading into French and Spanish colonies. When France succeeded in putting a member of its ruling Bourbon family on the Spanish throne, it appeared likely that French slave traders would dominate commerce with Spains colonies. But in 1713, the British gained the Spanish asiento, or slave-trading license, and with the exclusive rights to this niche market they raised slave trading profits to record heights. European imperial competition over colonial profits in the slave business, but especially in sugar, had a huge impact on the African diaspora in the Caribbean.

In the 1700s, sugar became a mass market commodity in Europe, a staple of the middle class diet and eventually for the working classes too. This made Caribbean sugar colonies into the most valuable overseas possessions of France and Great Britain. These empires believed that to increase sugar production they had to enlarge the enslaved working population in the colonies. A powerful example of this was SAINT-DOMINGUE, which grew from an abandoned part of Spanish Hispaniola in the early 1600s to become France's most valuable colony and the most valuable European colony in the world by the 1780s. Saint-Domingue produced more sugar than all the British Caribbean colonies combined, and it was also a leading producer of COFFEE. Indigo and cotton were also important products. The colonys extraordinary production level was directly related to its enormous population of enslaved blacks. In the single year of 1789 ninety-nine slave ships arrived in Saint Domingue unloading more than 27,000 enslaved men, women and children. The colonial censuses for that year say that 455,000 enslaved people lived in the colony, together with 31,000 whites and 28,000 FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR. By the eighteenth century the triangular route that European slave ships took was becoming somewhat standardized [American ships followed a less triangular course]. Most vessels departed from European ports loaded with manufactured goods specifically chosen for the African market, including cloth, iron tools, tobacco, rum and cowry shells from the Indian Ocean. They traded these with African merchants in exchange for enslaved people and provisions. These ships then crossed the Atlantic, following the trade winds to the eastern Caribbean. From this point captains could stop in the Lesser Antilles, or proceed west to Saint-Domingue or Jamaica. Those bound for Spanish markets often went to a continental port like Cartagena in modern day COLOMBIA. There they sold or traded their enslaved people for products like sugar, coffee, cacao and cotton. Colonial merchants, however, would have to fill several shiploads with these commodities to pay for the costly African captives. The late eighteenth century was the zenith of buying, transporting and selling Africans into Caribbean slavery. Changes in ship design and more precise navigation drastically reduced the time it took to carry captives across the Atlantic thereby increasing the number of enslaved people reaching the Americas. These changes even cut the transatlantic mortality rates from about 20 percent in the sixteenth century to less than one-half this level. Also, the European governments subsidized the African trade, making it illegal for their colonists to buy from foreign ships and using their navies to defend their slave trading routes and depots along the African coast. And, while they have initially restricted their African slave trade by assigning it to monopolies, by 1730s most have opened it up to all of their national merchants in selected ports. More traders hustling the open market in a highly efficient system were now satisfying the Caribbean estates seemly insatiable labor demands. If he had concluded successful trades and navigated uneventful ocean crossings, a ship captain might bring back to Europe a sum many times greater than the initial investment. However many things could go wrong with this complicated series of voyages, including rebellions, bad market conditions, illness, storms and hostile ships. Debates over the trades profits have yielded diametrically opposed numbers. Roger Anstey has proposed a 10 percent annual profit, while Joseph Inikoris more recent studies have suggested an average of 27 percent. The businesss risky nature seems to point to high, but volatile returns. Slave traders bound for the Caribbean took about 80 percent of their captives from a vast coastline that stretched for 3,500 miles [5,600 km] along the West and Central African coast. In modern terms, this began with the nation of Senegal in the north to Angola in the south. It also penetrated 4

into the African interior, between 500 to 1,000 miles [800 to 1,600 km]. About 20 percent overall came from the region of Mozambique in southeast Africa. The list of African ports involved in this commerce changed many times in the long history of the trade. African coastal rulers and merchants controlled the supply of captives, so events in Africa were responsible for most changes in the location of the trade. Leaders who became involved in wars sold their captives to European ships and these profits encouraged Africans to fight each other and raid unprotected villages deep in the interior. During the 1400s, the Portuguese took most of their captives from the Senegambia region, the modern nations of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau. In the 1500s, when they began shipping enslaved Africans to Spanish Caribbean colonies, the Portuguese moved south toward the West Central region of Africa, or modern-day Congo and Angola. This region would eventually supply up to 44 % of the all the enslaved people shipped out of Africa. After the 1670s, as English slave traders began to outnumber other European merchants, new coastal areas became major exporters. The English favored the Bight of Benin [western modern-day Nigeria and southeast Niger] and the so-called Gold Coast [modern Ghana, Burkina Faso, eastern Ivory Coast, and southern Niger]. After 1807 the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade and the British Navy began to suppress it. Under pressure, traders shifted their focus mostly to the Bight of Biafra (an area that included western Cameroon and eastern Nigeria) and Sierra Leone. [see ABOLITION OF THE SLAVE TRADE] The French government tolerated slave trading to its Caribbean colonies up to 1830. The trade in captives to the Spanish Caribbean, most notably to Cuba, continued until 1866. African and African-style cultures in the Caribbean Caribbean planters kept track of what they believed were the African ethnicities of their enslaved people because they saw certain types suited for specific kinds of work. However, the ethnic labels Africans received from traders were often inaccurate. Usually labels merely described the port where traders had purchased an individual, who might have originally lived hundreds of miles away. Nevertheless, planters had little interest or respect for the cultures of the people they enslaved. Even after emancipation, Caribbean eliteswhites but also people of African ancestrycontinued to see African cultures as liability; they attached more value to individuals who had better absorbed European cultural values. This was so even in Haiti, where African-born blacks had been essential to overthrowing the colonial regime. Haitian intellectuals in the 1800s, from POMP-VALENTIN VASTEY to ANTNOR FIRMIN, attacked anti-Black racism, but believed that New World Blacks, not native Africans, would one day regenerate the African continent. The traditional explanation assumed that since Africa had insignificant cultural development, the captives would have lost their modest culture in the Middle Passage. This belief supposed that enslaved Africans were a sort of blank slate when they arrived in the Caribbean and that their music, family patterns, languages, or religions were flawed attempts to emulate European colonists. This thinking would predominate until the 1920s, when cultural movements like Negritude would embrace African roots of local culture [see, FERNANDO ORTIZ, LYDIA CABRERA; AIM CSAIRE; JEAN PRICE-MARS] This intellectual drive marked a shift away from considering enslaved Africans as passive victims. Black Caribbean cultures were evidence of the many ways enslaved and free Blacks have shaped their own lives. Broadly speaking, since the 1930s scholars have described the general impact of African cultures on the Caribbean in two ways. 5

The first way, retention, stresses how captives in the Caribbean reconvened in new locations around ethnic groups from similar African origins. This allowed for the dissemination of African cultural and religious traditions. But perhaps the clearest evidence of cultural transmission is the role of African ethnicities in rebellions against slavery. [see SLAVERY, RESISTANCE AND REVOLUTION] Until at least the 1770s, African-born leaders led most of the largest uprisings in the Caribbean. In the 1730s, hundreds of experienced warriors were sold into slavery in the Caribbean as part of a civil war among the Akan-speaking people in what is today the nation of Ghana. Akan-speaking people, who the English called Coromantees, may have had a hand in the 1701 Christmas uprising in Antigua, the 1675 revolt in Barbados, and in the 1673 revolt in JAMAICA. But the 1730s saw these Africans mount an even greater challenge to the slave system, with the SAINT JOHN SLAVE REVOLT OF 1733 and the ANTIGUA SLAVE REVOLT OF 1736. Coromantees were also active in the TACKY'S REVOLT in Jamaica in 1760. After about 1770, leaders born in the Caribbean became more conspicuous, heading many of the regions slave rebellions, including the HAITIAN REVOLUTION [see TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE; BUSSAS REBELLION]. And yet, one of the key elements in the success of the Haitian Revolution is now thought to be hundreds of veteran warriors from civil wars in the Kongo region. The military tactics and royalism of many groups of rebel warriors in the Haitian Revolution appears to be directly linked to the fighting styles and political ideologies of the Kongo. Another aspect of slave resistance in the Caribbean directly linked to African ethnicities was the creation of maroon communities escaped slaves who found ways to live permanently outside of bondage, often in villages in remote mountains or deep in the rainforest. CUDJOE, the founder of one of the most important groups of MAROONS IN JAMAICA, was said to have been a Coromantee. The clearest connection between the Caribbean and specific African cultures is perhaps most perceptible in Cuban history because the slave trade continued there until 1866. Spanish authorities had allowed Blacks in the 1500s to organize confraternities and self-help associations along African cultural practices. Whites supervised these guilds, called cabildos de nacin, but blacks elected their own leaders and organized their own processions, dances and fund raising. The sugar boom of the 1800s brought new waves of captives from Yoruban lands in modern-day Nigeria today into Cuba, bolstering the Afro-Cuban tradition. Blacks from this region, known as Lucum to Cuban slave holders, recreated a secret society known as Abauku modeled on the kp Leopard Society they had known in their homelands. The Abaku was highly secretive, and was perhaps involved in the APONTE SLAVE CONSPIRACY of 1812 and the ESCALERA CONSPIRACY of 1844. As early as 1836 its members included island-born blacks, Africans from the Congo region, and even Whites. These and other organizations provided a setting in Cuba in which SANTERIA, PALO AND OTHER NEOAFRICAN RELIGIONS flourished with specific African elements. For example, Cuban orishas, or spiritual beings in Santera, connected with expressions of Olodumare [divinity] in the Yoruba traditional religious systems. Similarly, the musicians in these organizations modeled their instruments, especially in percussion, on musical instruments used in Africa. These instruments also entered Cuban popular music. An example of this is the conga drum, which became important in Cuban popular music after the 1940s when ARSENIO RODRIGUEZ appropriated it from the Santiago Carnival into his son band. [see TRADITIONAL MUSIC; CUBAN MUSIC AND DANCE; MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS: PERCUSSION] Yet this analysis claiming that blacks rebuilt specific pieces of African culture in the Caribbean leaves much of the Afro-Caribbean unexplained. A second approach, which Sidney Mintz, Richard 6

Price and Andrew Apter pioneered, is the concept of CREOLIZATION also described as syncretism. Creolization stresses the ways in which black Caribbean people influenced each other with innovations and adoptions of various cultural influences to create cultural practices that we today describe as neo-African. It asserts that culture mixing is universal. This approach argues that what is considered to be an original Caribbean or American manner of creating new cultures is actually also very African. It shows how enslaved Africans deposited in different places learned and invented new ways of speaking, worshiping, eating, and living just to communicate and live. These include the many religious, musical or artistic traditions that appear to be African, but which have no clear African antecedents, since they evolved in the Caribbean differently from anything in Africa. The Yoruba diasporic communities that have moved between Havana in Cuba and Lagos in Nigeria have shown examples of this process of creolization. They have created religious and cultural identities that have fluctuated between Cuban and Nigerian affiliations. They have also developed cultural markers that are neither exclusively Cuban nor Nigerian. The Antillean Waltz is another model of this transformation. It began on Curaao, and then spread to the rest of Netherlands Antilles. [see ARUBA, BONAIRE, AND CURAAO] Like all neo-African cultural expressions, it reflects these islands entangled history of colonization and slavery. It is a mixture of Indian, African and European musical elements forged during the time before and after emancipation. Historians have found its origins among eighteenth-century Curaao blacks -- Africans called manquerons, who the colonys slave merchants had decided were unsellable. Many worked for the local elite, playing European music. Gradually, black musicians included African aesthetics in the form of small drums, off-beat phrasing and occasional polymeter, accentuating and embellishing the European music they were forced to play. The fluid social context and strategic locations of the Dutch Caribbean had put these musicians in contact with diverse cultural currents, which also found their musical expressions in what today we know as the Antillean Waltz. Similar examples of exchange and recreations are clearly perceptible in Caribbean food, language, identity and other aspects of culture. Moreover, recently, James Sweet and other scholars are leading a neo- Herskovitian revival that revises the Mintz-Price approach. Their efforts center on Africa as they search for the African origins of diasporic communities in Brazil and Caribbean regions. Africa and Resistance Following Emancipation After slavery, Afro-Caribbean people found that many things remained the same; societys scorn for African and neo-African cultures, the political powerlessness of black people under colonial rule, their poverty in a region that was producing raw materials for the global economy. The long ostracized Haitian state, which France was the first to recognized in 1825, but not after it paid an undue indemnity for the planters loss in 1804, is an acute example of the Afro-Caribbean postabolition plight. In response to this situation, which reached its pinnacle during the GREAT DEPRESSION of the 1930s, black intellectuals wrote scientific treatises, works of history, and poetry exalting and affirming the Caribbean African experience. In this period, which coincided with the shift in scholarly orientation toward the black Caribbean, NATIONALISM was a powerful force leading to the recognition of the value of folk cultures. As intellectuals in the Spanish speaking Caribbean explored their islands distinct identities, and as British colonies gradually moved towards INDEPENDENCE in the 1950s and 1960s, and French colonies chose political integration with France in 1947, all began to investigate and celebrate their many African cultural heritages. [see JEAN PRICE-MARS; JOSE MARTI; AIM CSAIRE; CLR JAMES; ERIC WILLIAMS; MARCUS GARVEY; ALEJO CARPENTIER; and LUIS PALS MATOS] The new recording and broadcasting technologies of the early twentieth century allowed African-inspired styles of Caribbean music to develop new forms and reach new audiences in 7

Europe, Latin America, and the United States. [see CUBAN MUSIC AND DANCE; JAMAICA: MUSIC AND DANCE] On a more local level, forms of Caribbean cultural expression including oral literature and religion conveyed messages of personal dignity, resistance to oppression and spiritual transcendence honed over centuries of slavery. For people of the British Caribbean, London and New York became important meeting places during the first half of the 20th century. Jamaicas Marcus Garvey, for example, mingled with African nationalists in London in the years before WORLD WAR I. He found, however, that in 1914 Jamaicans were unsympathetic to his movement for panAfrican unity. Things changed when he moved to New York in 1916. Here Garvey mobilized thousands of people with his UNIA organization, and with its newspaper, The Negro World, which reached circulation in the millions. In 1920, he organized in Harlem the first of four International Conventions of the Negro Peoples of the World that included various African leaders. His ideas and influence came to help shape nationalist movements in Africa. The Black, Green, and Red colors of his movement found their way into the flags of several African countries, as well as the Black Star of Ghana, so named after Garveys Black Star Liner. London was even more important as a meeting ground for anti-imperialists from Britains Caribbean and African colonies. In 1940 Garvey died there after successfully transplanting his UNIA back to Jamaica from New York. Trinidads Sylvester Williams was a central figure in organizing the first pan-African Congress in London in 1900. In 1935, a number of West Indian intellectuals in London organized against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, including CLR JAMES, AMY ASHWOOD GARVEY and GEORGE PADMORE. Padmore, originally from TRINIDAD, was already active in the Communist Party in the United States and on the European continent. But in London he grew increasingly active in African nationalist circles, befriending future African leaders like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. Padmore helped organize the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester England in 1945, at the end of WORLD WAR II. And he became a central advisor to Nkrumah, playing a major role in the elections that led to the independence of Ghana from British control in 1957 and organizing the first All African People's Congress in 1958 in Accra, Ghana's capital. Since the 1930s, pan-Africanism in the English-speaking Caribbean had a spiritual, as well as political resonance. Street preachers like LEONARD HOWELL combined Garveys pan-African political rhetoric with charismatic Christianity to produce the idea of Africa as a place of spiritual redemption for Black Caribbean people. By the 1950s RASTAFARIANISM, which accepted the Ethiopian Emperor Hailie Selassie as the living god, had emerged in Jamaica as a religious movement that rejected not only British imperialism but the nascent nationalism of the Jamaican middle and working classes. Drawing on the Old Testament notion of returning to Zion, the Promised Land, Rastafarians in the early 1960s sent groups to live in Ethiopia. But conditions in this part of Africa were as difficult, if not more so, than in Jamaica. By the 1970s Rastafarianism became an international cultural phenomenon, associated with leading reggae stars like BOB MARLEY. The African orientation of this movement became more spiritual than political, rejecting western materialism rather than advocating a physical return to Africa. Since around the same period of the 1930s, intellectuals like Fernando Ortiz had described the many ways in which African cultures have shaped Caribbean identities. But it was only after THE CUBAN REVOLUTION of 1959, when FIDEL CASTROs government forged directed ties with various regions of Africa. These ties were more than cultural and intellectual. From 1961 to 1989, thousands of Cuban troops fought in a number of African civil wars and revolutions, most notably in Angola, from 1965 to 1989. [see CUBA'S WARS IN AFRICA]. Dennis R. Hidalgo 8

Further Reading: Apter, Andrew Herman. Beyond words: discourse and critical agency in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 Heywood, Linda M., and John K. Thornton. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Inikori, Joseph E. Africans and the industrial revolution in England: a study in international trade and economic development. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Klein, Herbert S., and Ben Vinson. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Manuel, Peter, Kenneth M. Bilby, and Michael D. Largey. Caribbean currents: Caribbean music from rumba to reggae. Temple University Press, 2006. Miller, Ivor L. Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba. University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Mintz, Sidney W., and Richard Price. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Beacon Press, 1992. Otero, Solimar. Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World. University Rochester Press, 2010 Sweet, James H. Recreating Africa. University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Price, Richard. First-time: the historical vision of an Afro-American people. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Random House, 1984. Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Whitten, Norman Jr. and Arlene Torres. Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean. Indiana University Press, 1998. Thomas Foster Earle, K. J. P. Lowe, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2005.