ABSTRACT
The West Indian communities are of special interest to the social scientist since they bridge the gap, as it were, between West African and British-North American cultures. In many respects the populations still resemble those of the countries from which their ancestors were abducted to work as slaves on the sugar plantations. There is appalling poverty, malnutrition, low standards of housing, not only among the rural smallholders and seasonally employed labourers, but also in the slums surrounding the larger cities. Adult illiteracy, magical beliefs and practices are widespread; schooling is not available for all children and is often irregular and of poor quality; and the language of the majority of homes is a dialect or kind of pidgin which differs so markedly from Standard English that children virtually have to learn a new language to be educated. But at the other end of the scale, there is considerable industrial development (e.g. oil and pitch in Trinidad, bauxite in Jamaica), in addition to agricultural exports and a lucrative tourist industry. There is too a comparatively large middle and upper class who run the economy, and who-unlike Africans — successfully operate pohtical democracies, and have generally absorbed western ideas and values, as has the middle-class negro in the United States. Thus a fuller understanding of the intellectual and emotional development of the West Indian should be relevant to the psychology of the United States negro, and particularly to that of the large body of West Indian immigrants and their families in Britain.
