ABSTRACT
The Hutchinson Encyclopaedia defines an Afro-Caribbean as a ‘West Indian person of African descent’, and adds that Afro-Caribbeans are descended from West Africans, captured, or bought from African traders by Europeans, who shipped them to European colonies in the West Indies from the sixteenth century onwards, until the abolition of slavery, which occurred in different countries and colonies at different points in the nineteenth century. Afro-Caribbean social history in Britain and USA is dominated by the hideous history of slavery. European slave-traders were buying slaves from the West Coast of Africa in increasing numbers during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, particularly to provide labour for plantation development in the New World (the Caribbean and the Americas), colonised by European settlers. Afro-Caribbean religion is said to embody responses to oppression and exploitation, enabling the expression of spirituality, the formation of communities and hence social support and identity.
