Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Culture

Abstract

Students of Afro-America interpret variously the cultural materials carried by the descendants of the African slaves brought to the New World. Some see those materials primarily in terms of the struggles that slaves waged to perpetuate and protect the African heritage they carried with them into the horrors of slavery. Others view those same materials in terms of slaves’ creative capacity to synthesize new cultural forms from their ancestral knowledge, mixed with elements of Native American and European cultural legacies. Both of these positions have something in their favor, and both, carried to extremes, fail to explain what really happened.For a long time, popular (and racist) opinion held that nothing of African culture had survived in the Americas. But in the second quarter of the twentieth century, that view was sharply refuted by the oeuvre of anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits. In the last 30 years, new theoretical commitments have emerged. Many can be ranged along a continuum—from nothing African to everything African—and the debate continues. On the plus side, far more data are now available than ever before. But it is as difficult as ever to accord the answers finality, if one seeks to deny either the maintenance of African heritage or the processes of culture building in the Americas.Warner-Lewis, who aims at a balanced weighting of continuity and innovation, purports “to synthesize information concerning the Central African presence in the Caribbean, and . . . analyses and identifies some of the main lineaments of the Central African cultural legacy in the region” (p. xix). To do so, she must endow her materials, on the one hand, with a coherence and intactness they may lack; on the other, she must accord every datum historical significance. Thus, for example, she advances “the proposition that the survival and/or the continued use of even one African lexical item in a West Atlantic [New World] location is evidence of an integral link . . . between the particular ethnolinguistic group—or even one individual of this group—and the practice or belief to which the term relates” (p. xxii; italics added). This working hypothesis may be provable, but it is not self-evidently true.Her 12 chapters document this argument with both lexical and ethnohistorical materials on such subjects as domestic life, rites of passage, and religion—this last at considerable length. A brief review cannot deal usefully with the data, which are copious, but a few comments may not be out of place. Language is a good place to begin, since the author gives it such weight.There is absolutely no doubt about the lexical contribution of African languages (perhaps particularly those of the Niger-Congo family) to the creole languages of the Caribbean and the European dialects spoken in the region. But the very existence of creole languages contrasts with the importance of African lexical items, because it signals the absence of an earlier lingua franca in such societies where creole languages took that role. In the case of Haitian Creole, both lexical items and also some of the syntax (and no doubt phonology) are African in origin. Yet it would be reckless or insouciant to deny that Haitian Creole evolved from a pidgin within colonial Saint-Domingue, even were one to contend that a majority of the slaves there were once Kongo speakers.This assertion does no reflect any reluctance to give Africa, its peoples and their cultures, their due. It concerns, rather, the social and linguistic conditions that the slaves in each colony had to live under and adapt to. Creole languages are “very African”; they are not “pure” anything. They were created under pressure, and though they likely began as the restricted idiom of slave and master, they became the language of slave and slave and finally of parent and child, and thereby creoles. To write this does not qualify a single whit Warner-Lewis’s arguments regarding Central African contributions to Caribbean cultures. That Central African languages lived on in the speech of Caribbean peoples is important, but the creole languages spoken there must also be recognized as the distinctive New World creation of the descendants of those Central Africans.The author wants us to recognize how much Central African material, most of it lexical, persists in Caribbean life. I, at least, both accept that this is true and believe that it is an important truth. But the book ends by heavily stressing the fluid, heterogeneous nature of culture, the ebb and flow of forms and words, the overlapping of categories, the intermingling of peoples and cultures—a veritable thesaurus of qualification that shows just how important synthesis, innovation, invention, and change have been in the creation of Afro-Caribbean cultures. After setting forth all that could possibly be attributed to Central Africa, the author leaves us to contemplate the vast social and institutional constructions within which that material is embedded.