Afro-Caribbean

Afro-Caribbeans
Total population
c. 30 million
Regions with significant populations
 Haiti 8.9 million
 Cuba 4.9 million
 United States 2.88 million[1]
 Jamaica 2.5 million
 Dominican Republic 1.1 million
 Puerto Rico 461,498
 Trinidad and Tobago 452,536 [2]
 Bahamas 372,000
 Guadeloupe 403,750
 Martinique 330,000
 Guyana 290,000
 Barbados 253,771
 Suriname 202,500
 Saint Lucia 173,765
 Curaçao 148,000
 French Guiana 131,676
 Grenada 101,309
 Belize 93,394
 Antigua and Barbuda 82,041
 U.S. Virgin Islands 79,000
 Dominica 72,660
 Saint Kitts and Nevis 38,827
Languages
Languages:
English
English Creole
Caribbean
Jamaican, Trinidadian, Tobagonian, Bahamian, Guyanese, Bajan, Grenadian, Belizean, Saint Kitts, Vincentian, Surinamese
French
French Creole
Haitian, Antillean
Spanish
Spanish Creole
Caribbean Spanish
Portuguese
Portuguese Creole
Papiamento
Dutch
Yoruba
other West African languages
Religion
Predominantly:
Minority:
Related ethnic groups
Afro-Latin Americans, Liberian, Americo-Liberian

Afro-Caribbeans are Caribbean people who trace their ancestry to Africa. Other names for this ethnicity include African-Caribbean (especially preferred among the United Kingdom branch of the diaspora), Black Caribbean, Black West Indian, Afro-Antillean or Afro-West Indian. The term was not used by West Indians themselves but was first coined by Americans in the late 1960s.[3] Between the 16th and 19th centuries, European-led triangular trade brought enslaved West African people to work on Caribbean islands, primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Many Afro-Caribbeans also have non-African ancestry, such as European, South Asian, Middle Eastern and Amerindian, as there has been extensive intermarriage and unions among the peoples over the centuries.

Although most Afro-Caribbean people today live in French, English and Spanish-speaking Caribbean nations, there are also significant diaspora populations throughout the Western world – especially in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France and the Netherlands. Both the home and diaspora populations have produced a number of individuals who have had a notable influence on modern Western, Caribbean, and African societies; they include political activists such as Marcus Garvey and C. L. R. James; writers and theorists such as Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon; US military leader and statesman Colin Powell, whose parents were immigrants and Jamaican musician Bob Marley.

History

16th–18th centuries

During the post-Columbian era, the archipelagos and islands of the Caribbean were the first sites of African diaspora dispersal in the western Atlantic. Specifically, in 1492, Pedro Alonso Niño, an African-Spanish seafarer, was recorded as piloting one of Columbus' ships. He returned in 1499, but did not settle. In the early 16th century, more Africans began to enter the population of the Spanish Caribbean colonies, sometimes arriving as free men of mixed ancestry or as indentured servants, but increasingly as enslaved workers and servants. This increasing demand for African labour in the Caribbean was in part the result of massive depopulation of the native Taino and other indigenous peoples caused by the new infectious diseases, harsh conditions, and warfare brought by European colonists. By the mid-16th century, the slave trade from West Africa to the Caribbean was so profitable that Francis Drake and John Hawkins were prepared to engage in piracy as well as break Spanish colonial laws, in order to forcibly transport approximately 1500 enslaved people from Sierra Leone to San Domingo (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic).[4]

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European colonial development in the Caribbean became increasingly reliant on plantation slavery to cultivate and process the lucrative commodity crop of sugarcane. On many islands shortly before the end of the 18th century, the enslaved Afro-Caribbeans greatly outnumbered their European masters. In addition, there developed a class of free people of color, especially in the French islands, where persons of mixed race were given certain rights.[5] On Saint-Domingue, free people of color and slaves rebelled against harsh conditions, and constant inter-imperial warfare. Inspired by French revolutionary sentiments that at one point freed the slaves, Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines led the Haitian Revolution that gained the independence of Haiti in 1804, the first Afro-Caribbean republic in the Western Hemisphere.

19th–20th centuries

In 1804, Haiti, with its overwhelmingly African population and leadership, became the second nation in the Americas to win independence from a European state. During the 19th century, continuous waves of rebellion, such as the Baptist War, led by Sam Sharpe in Jamaica, created the conditions for the incremental abolition of slavery in the region by various colonial powers. Great Britain abolished slavery in its holdings in 1834. Cuba was the last island to be emancipated, when Spain abolished slavery in its colonies.

During the 20th century, Afro-Caribbean people, who were a majority in many Caribbean societies, began to assert their cultural, economic, and political rights with more vigor on the world stage. Marcus Garvey was among many influential immigrants to the United States from Jamaica, expanding his UNIA movement in New York City and the U.S.[6] Afro-Caribbeans were influential in the Harlem Renaissance as artists and writers. Aimé Césaire developed a négritude movement.

In the 1960s, the West Indian territories were given their political independence from British colonial rule. They were pre-eminent in creating new cultural forms such as reggae music, calypso and rastafarianism within the Caribbean. Beyond the region, a developing Afro-Caribbean diaspora in the United States, including such figures as Stokely Carmichael and DJ Kool Herc, was influential in the development of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and the hip-hop movement of the 1980s. African-Caribbean individuals also contributed to cultural developments in Europe, as evidenced by influential theorists such as Frantz Fanon[7] and Stuart Hall.[8]

Notable people

Politics

Science and philosophy

Arts, sports and culture

Main groups

Culture

See also

References

  1. ↑ Results   American Fact Finder (US Census Bureau)
  2. ↑ "Trinidad and Tobago 2011 population and housing census demographic report" (PDF). Central Statistical Office. 30 November 2012. p. 94. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 October 2017. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  3. ↑ Committee on Foreign Affairs, United States Congress House (1970). "Hearings". 2: 64–69.
  4. ↑ Some Historical Account of Guinea: With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave Trade, p. 48, at Google Books
  5. ↑ Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and David Eltis, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Harvard University. Based on "records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas". Stephen Behrendt (1999). "Transatlantic Slave Trade". Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00071-5.
  6. ↑ Martin, Tony. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggle of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976.
  7. ↑ Nigel C. Gibson, Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (2003: Oxford, Polity Press)
  8. ↑ Chen, Kuan-Hsing. "The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An interview with Stuart Hall," collected in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1996.
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