ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the Middle Passage and the experience of slavery were capable of eroding African customs, traditions, and cultures, or the memories of their customs, traditions, and cultures in a new environment. The co-modification of Africans has become so pervasive that even an Afrocentric scholar like Gay Wilentz argues both for and against African continuity in the Diaspora. The chapter views that the cultures that emerged in the plantations of the New World in general and Belize in particular, were not a real continuation of African life. It questions the theory of racial, ethnic, and cultural transformation the so-called Creolization theory, which seeks to emphasize assimilation, both cultural and biological. Creolization theory is simply an attempt to de-Africanize: an attempt that started immediately after emancipation. The subject of African culture in the New World has received a disproportionate space in books and scholarly journals.
