ABSTRACT

Perhaps the most significant occurrence, which had the greatest impact on the shaping of the modern Anglo-Caribbean, was the more than two centuries of African enslavement. As a result of slavery, the region’s historical recollection has been divided into four great periods including the pre-slavery societies, slave-societies, also termed plantation societies, the post-slavery societies, and then post-independence societies; independence is often recalled as the penultimate expression of black emancipation in the region, as regional historians have found it difficult to separate slavery from colonialism. Slavery was a political, legal, economic, and social system, which transformed the overwhelming number of incoming Africans into what some historical anthropologists have termed the “New World Negro.”1 At emancipation in 1834, while the majority of regionally born and resident whites still affectionately referred to European kingdoms as their home, for the overwhelming majority of non-whites the new world was their final destination with many having only vague memories of an increasingly estranged culture and people in a remote land. The racism and legal disadvantages which underpinned the slave societies in all territories, lasting centuries, had created a myriad of African descended people whose identities were, and remain, difficult to determine and catalog, while those of the white population remained fixed and attached to ideas of racial and sometimes ethnic purity, religion and wealth. Under the imperial system that operated until the end of slavery, each colony was permitted to have its own local assembly, which passed laws to benefit their planter classes. As a result, there were significant differences in the laws governing race, identity, personhood and rights from one colony to another. In the older Leeward Island colonies, with the exception of Barbados where the “one-drop rule” was codified into law, the ability to gain rights was directly linked to a genetic movement away from Africaness.2 The emergent group of mixed race individuals, legally divided into slaves and Free Coloureds, often represented an in-between group who, though disadvantaged when compared to the dominant white populations, were granted greater rights, which re-affirmed an improvement by virtue of having some white blood. The “Free Coloureds,” like all “freed” people, strove to gain the legal privileges of personhood, subjecthood, and citizenship, which required them to relinquish their African and black identities and erase any trace or mention of an African identity if they were to have any chance at social mobility or even mere

acceptance as a “free” person. After emancipation, there was an even greater effort by all non-white groups to cease being Africans, which had long been established as a disadvantageous identity, and begin the process of transformation into Creoles or Negroes.3 For one section of Coloureds however, the aim was to attain the status of White as emancipation removed the last legal barriers to them attaining the long desired status. In the decades that followed emancipation the members of this group undertook a project, which would eventually lead to a mass exodus, and a later dying off, of its members as they yearned for whiteness. Many historians have found it an extremely difficult task to categorize people’s identities especially when there are a significant number of factors, which may affect such categorizing. The use of the term African during the seventeenth century through to the modern period, except as understood by modern PanAfricanists, would normally be understood in the Anglophone Caribbean as a designate for those born or coming from Africa. Indeed the notion of being part of an African Diaspora is often rejected by many contemporary regional inhabitants who favor the use of the all-encompassing terms “black” or “West Indian.” This is in part because many acknowledge or believe that they have a mixed ancestry, while others have continued to reject Africa as a land and place with which they have no real connection to, other than through genetics and history. Indeed by the mid-1700s the creole slaves of the Leeward Islands, those born and raised in the Americas, had begun to separate themselves by using the term African as a term for those coming from Africa, while using the term “Negro” inter-changeably with that of “Creole” to refer to themselves. The situation was further compounded by the fact that while whites often pejoratively used the term “Negro” to refer to those who called themselves “Coloured,” some blacks also termed some mixed race persons “White” while calling others “Black”; often to designate which Coloureds had shown some affinity to the black slave population’s causes. Discussing coloured freedmen in the pre-emancipation British West Indies, Arnold A. Sio correctly highlighted the problem of lack of historical sources to construct a complete history of the entire group, which was sub-divided into a number of cultural, economic, and political spaces.4 This lack of sources for the non-elite Coloureds has led to historians often using the terms Coloured, Brown and middle-class interchangeably.5 This pattern reflected not only the contents of available sources, but also the interpretation and understanding of the peculiar economic, socio-political, and cultural history where class and skin color were inextricably linked until the mid-twentieth century.6 There was also the problem of the intersection of slave status and racial status as there was a significant number of mixed race slaves, as well as a significant number of freed blacks. Censuses for Antigua used a simple three-tier division of the society, which has led to a contemporary oversimplification of then notions of identity among the population.7