ABSTRACT
The Kru influenced many of the cultures they contacted. Scholars have credited Kru mariners as the disseminators of an important idiom of pidgin English, but in contemporary musical expression, their influence is more sweeping. The Kru migrants cohabited with liberated African and indigenous women until 1880, when Kru women began to settle in the area. Vessels engaged in legitimate trade on the Windward Coast sporadically hired Kru from the end of the 1600s, and hiring became regular during the 1780s. Kru mariners were first recruited from five towns: Settra Kru, Nana Kru, Little Kru, Krobah, and King William’s Town. The third-largest natural harbor in the world, Freetown was the first major objective of Kru traffc in the late 1700s. The Freetown Kru community, as in other West African ports, divided into small groups with decentralized authority. The Kru along the coast in Liberia played a cane flute.
