A sweeping, multidisciplinary study that analyzes and identifies some of the main lineaments of the Central African cultural legacy in the Caribbean. This long-awaited study is based on more than three decades of research and analysis. Scholars will be fascinated with the transatlantic comparative data. The author identifies Central African cultural forms in those areas settled in Africa by the Koongo, Mbundu, and Ovimbunde. (The modern-day locations of these three ethnic groups are present-day Congo, Zaire and Angola.) The book illuminates Caribbean thought and practice by comparison with Central African worldview and custom. The work is based on extensive primary and secondary sources, oral interviews, letters and diaries, folktales, proverbs and songs. In its multidisciplinary approach and depth, it highlights the debate concerning the origin and transformation of cultural forms in the Caribbean against a larger background of African culture, economy, colonialism, slavery, emancipation and independence. With its Central African focus, the book is a pioneering perspective on Caribbean cultural forms. A noted linguist, the author uses her knowledge of the most functional languages of the region, Spanish, English and French, to access creole languages, which gives the study a truly pan-Caribbean breadth. The book appeals to all interested in African diaspora studies, African and Caribbean history, linguistics and cultural anthropology. Central Africa in the Caribbean includes numerous maps, illustrations, and musical scores.
This reconstruction of one of the rare Caribbean slave narratives is an amplification, interrogation, and modification of its original texts by cross-reference with official documents, contemporary diaryentries and reports, present-day oral sources, and secondary analyses of plantation society. Accessing a variety of primary records, Maureen Warner-Lewis meticulously reconstructs a biography of enslaved Archibald Monteath, an Igbo, who was brought to Jamaica around 1802, became active in the Moravian Church and later purchased his freedom. Through Monteath's biography she explores the sociology of slavery from 1750 to the 1860s. Fieldwork conducted in Africa brings an important dimension to the work, and scholars of Caribbean history, church history, diasporic studies, Atlantic studies and Jamaica will find it of significant interest.
Buttressed by historical documentary sources, and by painstaking linguistic researches, Maureen Warner-Lewis offers a re-issue and thematic expansion of her classic collection of essays on the forced and voluntary migration to Trinidad of West and West-Central Africans during the 1800s, extending through both the slavery and post-emancipation eras. The essays then examine some of the African cultural practices and artefacts as recalled by the biological descendants of these migrants during interviews with the author in the 1960s and 70s. The wars caused by ethnic and religious contestations, economic advantage, and imperial expansionism are a significant theme in the literary repertoire, which however embraces love, the yearning for home, pride in ethnic and family identity, the pain of exile, the separation of death.The writer further explores the poetic techniques, musical genres and instrumentation, language patterns, athletic and masquerade traditions, economic arrangements, religious beliefs and rituals of the Yoruba, Kongo, Angolan, Hausa, and Rada (Dahomeyan) communities which this peasantry and urban labour force introduced or reinforced on the island. While some of these artefacts have withered away, or are now moribund, others continue to inform the still-evolving twenty-first century cultural life of the island.
