Knowledge production and the construction of ‘Africa(ns)’ in the Caribbean

Abstract

This article traces the roots of how knowledge on Africa was produced and reproduced in the Caribbean. The discussion ranges from the views of Las Casas, who initiated the idea of black chattel slavery, through to the views of Thomas Thistlewood (1750–1786), Edward Long (1774), Maria Nugent (1802–1805), Thomas Carlyle (1845), and J. A. Froude (1880) and beyond. Among the questions to be asked and answered are: how deeply embedded in history was this attempt to construct Africanness within the discursive space of Creole? What strategies were used to transform Africans into New World Creoles and place them in a dialectical relationship to African? How successful were enslavers in their efforts to decentre ‘nation’ or African ethnic identification and shift the enslaved's allegiance from Akan, Igbo, Yoruba, and so on to ‘Creole’ or Caribbean? The Caribbean has been affected by a historically constructed image that still influences self‐knowledge as well as global attitudes towards its citizens. This image, paraded as ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge,’ was the product of the minds and pens of generations of writers from the North Atlantic System, from Christopher Columbus (1992) through Edward Long (1774) to Lowell J. Ragatz (1928) and beyond. These writers appropriated the project of producing knowledge on the Caribbean for overseas consumption, introducing the Caribbean and its people to a wider public. The machinery of knowledge production, particularly about the colonial Caribbean, was fed by several factors that opened up a discursive space for its ‘producers’: the European colonisation of the region from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century; the subordination of the indigenous peoples; the expropriation of Caribbean resources for the development of Europe; rivalry among imperial powers; the continued migration to, and settlement of, Europeans in the region; the forced relocation of Africans to provide labour for European economic enterprises; and the creation of a racist socio‐political regime that dichotomised blackness and whiteness, ascribing a superior position to the latter. The early writings produced, especially descriptive accounts of Africa and Africans, were not necessarily the result of careful research grounded in truth and objectivity. Yet, this ‘knowledge’ was powerful enough to result in the condemnation of indigenous and African ethnicities to the experience of the colonial ‘Other’ and to have a lasting impact on Caribbean and African diasporic identity, imagination and consciousness. This is because the knowledge produced had a discrete political purpose: to support European imperialism and ‘dislodge and disorientate’ the Caribbean in a similar way that it did Africa and the Orients, following Nabudere's and Edward Said's formulations (Nabudere 1994). In other words, ‘knowledge about the distant “other” served the purpose of dominating it and exercising power and authority over it’ (Said 1992). In the specific context of slavery, as some of the works sampled in this article will illustrate, the purpose of the production of knowledge about Africa and Africans was to prolong slavery and colonialism, and to discourage self‐confidence among black people by demonising blackness and the geographical origins of African diasporic peoples and promoting whiteness (or even Creolité/hybridity) as the ideal. Of course, what colonial writers presented as knowledge about Africa and diasporic Africans was not allowed to go unchallenged. On the contrary, as this article will show, Caribbean scholars have engaged in an opposite project of reconstruction, constructing indigenous interpretations of the Caribbean experience, fashioned by explicit formulations and theoretical constructs, and offering the antithesis to the imperialist view of the Caribbean world. Before focusing on the (mis)representations of Africa and Africans, and the efforts of Caribbean scholars to reconstruct a more accurate image, this article will survey the historiography and the context within which the traditional knowledge system operated. It will be seen that even before Africans entered Caribbean space, the groundwork had already been laid in the historiography for the demonisation of the colonial ‘Other’, manifested in the writings about the indigenous peoples.