In the 1880s, an unnamed, elderly Black woman guided Hesketh Bell, a colonial administrator, to a spring in Grenada. Bell was curious to learn about natural mineral sites after hearing of their medicinal healing properties and their ‘uncanny’ reputations that spread ‘dread’ among the Black population.Footnote ¹ Bell was dismissive of the fear these places inspired among African Grenadians, and he was determined to see the spring for himself. After much searching, he found a guide to show him the spring’s location and share their knowledge of the practices associated with this healing water source.Footnote ² That his guide was a Black woman is significant; although colonial archives render her a marginal or subordinate subject, she possessed profound knowledge of the Grenadian landscape and topography, and her expertise was invaluable for Bell’s understanding of the springs and central to conceptualising African work practice.Footnote ³ Near the spring’s opening, Bell observed some flowers and small heaps of kola nuts strewn around the ground; later, he would write of how he had stumbled upon a range of ‘queer-looking’, ‘mysterious’, and incongruous objects: ‘rusty nails, feathers and fishbones and such like “Obeah” were suspended on the branches of the bushes all around’.Footnote ⁴ So strange to him were these objects that Bell experienced ‘a different sense of place’ – one that was typical of European male officials.Footnote ⁵

Bell’s narrative should be read cautiously: nineteenth-century Europeans in the Caribbean had little understanding of African cosmologies and generally dismissed unfamiliar practices with the catch-all term ‘obeah’.Footnote ⁶ Originating with enslaved peoples throughout the British Caribbean – and Grenada was no exception – obeah encapsulated a range of beliefs and ritual practices which drew on the diverse cultural origins of enslaved Africans. These included directing supernatural forces and recitation of incantations for good fortune, for protection against harm or avenging wrongs, divination, and healing.Footnote ⁷ Obeah played a social role in the lives of enslaved Africans and formed part of their weaponry of resistance. So feared was obeah by Europeans that it captured the attention of colonial officials, generating colonial legislative acts, court proceedings, correspondence, and travel narratives, such as that by Hesketh Bell.

However, from my observations of ceremonies called ‘African work’ and conversations with African work practitioners, it is apparent that the scene described by Bell was not, in fact, evidence of obeah. Rather, it was a shrine which features within an identifiable religious system originating from the Yoruba peoples of West Africa: Orisa worship, or African work, as it came to be known in Grenada. The seemingly disparate elements – the flag-like material, the cutlass, the flowers, the kola nuts, and the cross – are emblematic of the reinvention of this shrine in a new landscape, characterised by a fusion of African, European, and Creole religious expressions.

Within African work, spiritual workers commonly erect a shrine, altar, or stool for the veneration of the deities, called orisas. In Bell’s account, the shrine is dedicated to Ogun – the orisa of iron, warfare, and hunting – symbolised by iron objects, such as the broken cutlass and nails. In modern Grenada, and commonly throughout the Americas and West Africa where Orisa is practised, iron implements, such as a cutlass, are permanently embedded in Ogun’s stool.Footnote ⁸ The Ogun stool in Moyah, St Andrew, is a walled structure, painted green with black corners (colours associated with Ogun) and features red flowers, a glass of water, a broken cutlass (in front of the bamboo stick), a cutlass propped up on the left wall, and several depictions of axes and cutlasses (representing Ogun) carefully drawn on the back and side walls (Figure 1.1).Footnote ⁹ A large bamboo stick is embedded in the centre of the stool, carrying a large flag outside, and is accompanied by several more bamboo sticks from which colourful flags flutter.

Figure 1.1 Ogun stool, Bishop Peters’s yard.

The stool, recently redecorated, was built in 1995.

Photo by author, Moyah, 2 September 2023.

Flowers, often offered for the deities Osun and Yemanja, are important in African work and sometimes placed alongside the cutlass.Footnote ¹⁰ Kola nuts, used in several West African cultures for divination, feature in African work, as do the feathers of sacrificed fowls – for their claimed protective functions.Footnote ¹¹ Lastly, the wooden cross that Bell encountered was not out of place. Roman Catholicism and other Christian traditions are often reinterpreted and incorporated into African work.Footnote ¹² Bell’s description of the items at the spring speaks to the fusion of diverse cultural influences in the making of African work in late nineteenth-century Grenada. Further, although mediated through Bell, the Black woman’s depiction of the worshippers and dancers at the springs – ‘Africans’, African-born peoples, ‘old Creoles’, African Grenadians, and ‘coolies’ (a derogatory term for descendants of indentured Indians) – is significant for what it reveals about the various communities who contributed to the fashioning of African work. ‘Lived, expressed, and imagined’ by displaced peoples, both enslaved and indentured, the mineral spring was an oppositional space providing a critique of Euro-Christian spaces and ideologies.Footnote ¹³

To understand African work, it is necessary to comprehend the input of the ‘old Creoles’ – those formerly enslaved on the island, who will be referred to as African Grenadians. The ethno-linguistic backgrounds of African Grenadians are largely represented in the Nation Dance, a danced ceremony, which provides a valuable understanding of how Africans in Grenada recreated – to some degree – their cultures and identities. The Voyages Database provides another way in which to understand these backgrounds by tracing the routes of captives from their African hinterlands to Grenada. A range of other sources – including oral interviews, Grenadian newspapers, missionary reports and memorials, and church histories, as well as Bell’s account – highlight traditions, cultures, and languages, rubbing together, such as the Nation Dance, obeah, saraka, Roman Catholicism, and Creole French. These diverse elements laid the cultural foundations of a Creole society, which would shape the recreation of the cultures of liberated Africans. The following discussion will also consider the nature of Grenada’s brutal racialised system of forced labour from its foundations in the seventeenth century, through to the period of emancipation in the 1830s. It examines enslaved peoples’ pursuit of economic and survival strategies, and how these in turn shaped their identities, beliefs, and experiences.

Grenada’s first peoples were the Arawakan-speakers, who inhabited the island in the pre-Columbian era, before they were displaced by the Kalinago people. From the early sixteenth century, the Kalinago attacked Spanish ships and settlers, enslaving Europeans and Africans on the island. During the next century, the English twice attempted to establish a plantation colony, though both efforts were repulsed by the Kalinago. The Kalinago were eventually quelled after warring with French colonists during the 1650s, a war that led to the near extinction of the Kalinago. From 1664, the French West India Company assumed control of the island, and five years later, African captives were brought again to the island. In 1674, Grenada came under the control of the French crown.Footnote ¹⁴ French control ended in 1763, almost exactly a century after it had begun, when Grenada, along with St Vincent, Dominica, Tobago, and the Grenadines, were ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1756–63).Footnote ¹⁵ From 1763, Britain rapidly expanded Grenada’s sugar cultivation and, consequently, the numbers of enslaved peoples sent to the island increased significantly.Footnote ¹⁶ By the 1770s, the island was the second most valuable colony in the British Caribbean.Footnote ¹⁷

The Voyages Estimates Database shows that approximately 148,327 Africans were transported to Grenada; of these, 127,588 survived the tumultuous middle passage and landed on Grenada between 1669 and 1808.Footnote ¹⁸ Arriving in Grenada, ship captains commonly brought aboard ‘some of their countrymen’ already living on the island, who would explain to the traumatised Africans their purpose in Grenada.Footnote ¹⁹ They were then sold at market, before being led away to start new lives on the plantations, where they were put to work. At the start of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans were most likely to be placed on indigo estates. By the middle of that century, the British had assumed control of the island, leading to an influx of British merchants, and sugar production rapidly expanded to meet increased demand in Europe.Footnote ²⁰

Unlike many neighbouring British Caribbean islands, Grenada’s economic fortunes were never completely dominated by sugar production. The mountainous topography of the mainland rendered parts of the island unsuitable for cultivating sugar cane, particularly the western side.Footnote ²¹ Sugar production was centred in the less mountainous eastern parts of the island, particularly in the parishes of St Patrick and St Andrew; by the mid eighteenth century, half of the island’s sugar estates were concentrated in these two parishes.Footnote ²² Significant amounts of coffee and cocoa were also cultivated but sugar dominated. To summarise the importance of sugar production, by 1805, 36 per cent of 337 estates were under sugar cultivation; 25 per cent were producing cocoa, coffee, and cotton; 18 per cent were used to cultivate ground provisions; and the remaining 21 per cent of the land was given over to wood, pasture, and bush.Footnote ²³

Creating Meaningful Lives: Economic and Survival Strategies during Enslavement

On the estates, morbidity and mortality rates among African labourers were high because they suffered harsh working conditions, violence, and poor nutrition – and toiled long, backbreaking hours from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, except Sundays.Footnote ²⁴ According to George Brizan, the Grenadian historian, chattel slavery destroyed the ‘African personality’; it ‘terrorised the mind, and consumed the body of the African slave’.Footnote ²⁵ Yet their misery was never so totalising as to secure their complete subordination to white domination. Enslaved men, women, and children refused to accept their subjugated status and sought their freedom. They drew on their respective African cultures and resources encountered in Grenada to resist enslavement and to create meaningful lives. These elements would prove influential in the lives and cultures of liberated Africans following 1836.

Provision-ground cultivation was a pragmatic economic strategy fostered in the Americas, which the descendants of the enslaved, and indentured Africans, would continue. Growing and producing their own foodstuffs not only enabled enslaved people to improve their nutritional needs but also empowered marketeers to accrue some income through the sale of surplus foodstuffs, providing a measure of economic agency. Plantation owners were legally required to provide enslaved peoples on their estates with weekly rations of salt and saltfish, and an annual quota of clothing; families were entitled to a house. Where land was insufficient, enslavers were legally obliged to provide additional food rations.Footnote ²⁶ These laws were not always enforced, and in practice, each enslaver determined the quantity of rations distributed.Footnote ²⁷ Food rations were generally always poor in quantity and quality and enslavers placed responsibility for supplanting the meagre rations onto the enslaved people themselves, apportioning them plots of land. The overall land area given over to provision grounds was extensive, matching the area under sugarcane provision in the 1820s.Footnote ²⁸

By law, enslaved people were entitled to twenty-eight working days each year to cultivate ‘their’ land, on which they grew vegetables, fruits, and herbs.Footnote ²⁹ Apportioning part of their plantation lands to the enslaved populations for their personal cultivation was more a matter of expediency than altruism on the part of the plantocracy. Enslavers accrued several benefits from the labour and care enslaved people devoted to their provision lands: it reduced expenditure on food for the enslaved people, displacing their responsibility for food security onto the enslaved themselves and it served to reduce ‘theft’ from the plantocracy. It also tied enslaved people to the plantation and helped enslavers exercise control over enslaved people – the threat of reduced time to cultivate their plots was a weapon wielded by the planters to secure conformity.Footnote ³⁰

Enslaved Africans rallied against the oppressive plantation system through their enactment of multiple forms of resistance. They founded several maroon communities, formed of enslaved women, men, and children who had escaped from plantations and took refuge in the mountains, especially around the parishes of St John, St Andrew, and St David in the mid to late eighteenth century. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, due to greater success by enslavers in apprehending fugitives, maroon numbers are thought to have waned.Footnote ³¹ Nevertheless, maroons joined the Black and free coloured (mixed African and European ancestry) populations during the Fédon rebellion (1795–6), Grenada’s only enslaved peoples’ revolt, led by Julien Fédon, a free person of colour. During the 1790s, numerous revolts and conspiracies took place across the Caribbean, mostly notably the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the maroon uprising in Jamaica (1795), and the Kalinago revolt in St Vincent (1795).Footnote ³² These direct assaults on the plantocracy are argued to have been inspired by the French Revolution and arose from local demands – freedom, equality, and independence from colonial rule.Footnote ³³

During the sixteen long months of the Fédon-led rebellion, 7,000 enslaved Africans died, along with 1,000 whites and free people of colour. Around forty rebels were executed and an estimated 400 others – mainly of the free coloured population – were deported to Honduras.Footnote ³⁴ The plantocracy sustained economic damage and loss valued at £2.5 million sterling.Footnote ³⁵ The days of enormous plantations were over, never to be fully re-established. In their place, enslavers implemented a new production culture based on smaller estates and an agricultural peasantry, marking a decisive shift away from the established sugar monoculture. In terms of the scale, damage, and duration of the rebellion, it has been described as the closest equivalent in the English Caribbean to the Haitian Revolution.Footnote ³⁶

Enslaved peoples persisted in their efforts to secure freedom, but large-scale attacks were the exception and not the norm. Enslaved peoples waged daily resistance, including malingering, feigning illness, arson, acts of sabotage such as killing plantation animals, and running away. Some of these actions were severe enough to bring offenders up against the law, and many appeared in the island’s slave court proceedings in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁷ Based on the French Code Noir of 1685, the law defined enslaved peoples as property and prescribed forms of punishment, such as whipping for stealing and escaping. Additionally, under French rule, enslaved Africans were forcibly baptised and instructed as Catholics – which would sculpt the island’s African-derived cultural landscape.Footnote ³⁸

Some enslaved individuals turned to poisoning their enslavers as a show of resistance to their unfree status. In 1806, an unnamed enslaved man was accused of working with ‘obye’ in his attempt to poison an estate manager. That he had ‘acquired ascendency over the other Negroes’ marked the accused as a threat to the colony and he was sentenced to death by hanging, and after his death, his head was to be severed and placed on a pole, as a visible warning to others who might consider following suit.Footnote ³⁹ Another enslaved labourer, Mary Ann, from New Hampshire Estate in St George, was charged in 1815 with supplying arsenic and other poisonous substances to another enslaved person who planned to poison the plantation manager. Mary Ann was sentenced to fifty lashes on the estate and another fifty on the public parade, after which she was to be confined in chains in the gaol until an opportunity arose to remove her from the island.Footnote ⁴⁰ The severity of these punishments – death and banishment – is indicative of the extreme threat poisoning posed to the plantation order.Footnote ⁴¹

The 1825 Consolidated Slave Act of Grenada placed responsibility on enslavers to provide religious instruction and baptism for the enslaved and laid down some measure for their welfare. The enslaved were to be allowed breakfast and lunch breaks during the workday. It also prescribed the number of lashes that could be inflicted as punishment for insubordination. Women with five or more children were given fifty-two days each year to cultivate their own grounds; children could no longer be separated from parents, nor could married Africans be separated. These changes led to some improvement in the material conditions of the lives of enslaved peoples, but abuses continued because enslavers and legislative officials did not always adhere to these new rules.Footnote ⁴² That enslavers wilfully disregarded the legislation can be seen during the period of apprenticeship, which followed the abolition of slavery in 1833.

Economic and Survival Strategies during Apprenticeship, 1834–1838

Following the passage of the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833, which freed all enslaved persons in the British Caribbean in August 1834, former enslavers received compensation to the sum of £20 million for the loss of their ‘property’.Footnote ⁴³ Just under 1,000 claims were made by Grenadian estate owners, including a claim of £8,985 for 353 enslaved men, women, and children by John Wells, the manager of Baillie’s Bacolet Estate, St David.Footnote ⁴⁴ Many labourers on Bacolet Estate were literate and had access to newspapers and conveyed the news of impending freedom to their community; ‘few’ were ‘ignorant of the tidings brought by every packet’, and Wells feared the current ‘quiet state of affairs’ would no longer be sustained should the labourers hear of the proposals being debated in the House of Commons in the weeks preceding passage of the Act.Footnote ⁴⁵ The correspondence of John Wells to the London-based merchants Thomas and William King offers a rare glimpse into the anxieties of enslavers, counterbalanced by the resistance strategies of enslaved Africans on the eve and in the aftermath of emancipation.

The 1833 act defined a new form of tied labour relationship – an interim period of apprenticeship – between the enslaved and the plantation owners.Footnote ⁴⁶ The terms of the apprenticeship system required that the formerly enslaved throughout the British-held Caribbean – except for Bermuda and Antigua – continue to labour on the plantations for their former enslavers without pay for up to forty-five hours weekly. At the beginning of the apprenticeship system in Grenada, 77 per cent of Black labourers were fieldworkers (praedials) and they were now required to continue to work for the next six years. Non-agricultural workers, such as tradespersons, domestics, and other non-fieldworkers (non-praedials) were required to work for another four years. In exchange for their free labour, apprentices were to retain their provision grounds and to receive lodging, food, clothing, and medical assistance. Once having served the requisite forty-five hours, the apprentices could tend their grounds as they had formerly, eating what they grew and marketing surplus produce. Should they choose to, the apprentices could also hire out their labour for wages for the remainder of the working week. These forced agreements for work and wages were based on a master–servant relationship, similar to the ‘unfree contractual labour law’ regulated by the Master and Servant Act in Britain.Footnote ⁴⁷ Largely unsupervised by the senior courts, they were enforced by justices of the peace and magistrates. An ‘uncooperative’ worker who breached the terms of their contract could be punished by whipping, imprisonment, forced labour, and solitary confinement.Footnote ⁴⁸

A month before the new system commenced, anticipating resistance from the apprenticed workers, colonial administrators ordered the increased presence of police and constabulary forces across the island. In July 1834 – a few days before their apprenticeship period began – apprenticed workers on the Bacolet Estate rose in protest, mounting a strike that was only suppressed with the assistance of the 1st West India Regiment. Of the protesters, Wells wrote the women were the ‘most outrageous’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Other apprenticed workers pursued different strategies, including claiming and obtaining their freedom. It was observed by Grover Kemp, a Quaker visiting Grenada, that many labourers saved money by burying it in the ground, and when their apprenticeship began, some offered their ‘masters £50 sterling to buy off their apprenticeship’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Running away (even if only temporarily) had been a response by disgruntled enslaved people to their condition, and, as apprentices, they continued to demonstrate their opposition to their status, risking, if caught, being sentenced to hard labour and lashes.Footnote ⁵¹ Rather than escaping and leaving behind loved ones, others sought to negotiate better contracts, including wage bargaining and improvements to their labour conditions, such as working specific days and/or hours, and receiving free medical care for themselves and their families.Footnote ⁵²

In May 1838, information reached the Bacolet Estate that the controversial apprenticeship was to be immediately dissolved, ending apprenticeship two years earlier than planned for praedial workers. Praedials, however, unaware that their term would expire in 1838 – at the same time as the non-praedials – were determined not to work after that date. They worked slowly, performed little work, or downed tools completely.Footnote ⁵³ In June 1838, Lieutenant-Governor Joseph Doyle penned a letter to be read to the praedial labourers, announcing that their apprenticeship would end in August 1838, rather than in 1840. In his letter, Doyle urged the labourers to continue working ‘well and regularly’ and ‘quickly’ for wages. He insisted they should show ‘gratitude’ to their employers for granting them ‘complete freedom, two years before they were obliged to do so’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although describing himself as their ‘friend and governor’ who would ‘never deceive’ them, Doyle was aware that their longed-for ‘freedom’ was far from complete.Footnote ⁵⁵ In a letter to the Governor of Barbados in May 1838, he outlined his views on the purpose of apprenticeship, which was to ‘obtain at as cheap a rate as possible, the greatest amount of combined labour on every estate, and that inducements will be held out to the people to enter into contracts for long terms, and with the new term of contract servants, the people would in fact continue apprentices’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Apprenticeship had been proposed as a strategy to manage the transition from enslaved to contracted labour.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, it was primarily intended to benefit the planters and the economy and had little regard for the well-being of apprentices.

Their ‘Imperfect’ Idea of the ‘Benefits of Freedom’: Post-emancipation Era, 1838

Emancipation Day on 1 August 1838 marked the legal ending of enslavement. Although emancipation ushered important changes in the lives of the formerly enslaved, full freedom was yet to be realised for they continued to face various forms of labour control and coercion.Footnote ⁵⁸ Those without other means of support were legally required to enter into labour contracts or risk punishment for refusal.Footnote ⁵⁹ According to the Master and Servants Act adopted in Grenada, labourers were to work a nine-hour day, but employers were empowered to extend or reduce their working day. Employers also had absolute discretion to determine allowances, including houses and provision grounds. Breach of contract, absenteeism, and ‘ill behaviour’ by the labourers were to be punished by heavy fines or imprisonment with hard labour. Resident workers received irregular subsistence wages – 35 per cent less than for plantation work during the apprenticeship system.Footnote ⁶⁰ Hence, even after emancipation, African Grenadians were still being denied the benefits of a free wage-labour market, and just as they had reacted to ill-treatment during slavery and apprenticeship, they made their dissatisfaction known.

On the Bacolet Estate, relations between the newly freed and their former enslavers continued to deteriorate, and unrest persisted after 1 August 1838, as labourers petitioned for better wages and increased hours to work on their provision grounds.Footnote ⁶¹ Their demands were described and were criticised by the plantocracy and missionaries as Black workers’ ‘imperfect’ idea of freedom.Footnote ⁶² An 1848 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Report complained that labouring men became ‘idle’, refused to accept reduced wages, abandoned their families, formed new connections, and demonstrated ‘evil habits and passion’.Footnote ⁶³ However, both men and women preferred uncontracted labour, for by increasing their income (often by a combination of provision-ground cultivation and wage labour), African Grenadians could improve their quality of life and enjoy a more stable family and domestic life.Footnote ⁶⁴

Soon after emancipation, driven by the imperative to secure themselves of a regular supply of labour, planters introduced a labour-rent system, which became widespread by 1850.Footnote ⁶⁵ Rent was deducted from wages earned on the estates, so that if an individual did not work, they could not keep their house. These tenancy agreements were exploited by planters to induce women and their children back onto estates.Footnote ⁶⁶ On the Samaritan Estate in St Patrick, the labour-rent system provoked strong dissent, prompting the authorities to deploy troops. Labourers refused to give up their homes, protesting that their houses had been given to them by the queen. Armed with cutlasses and other items, the Samaritan residents were believed to be ringleaders in the strike that affected six estates across the island.Footnote ⁶⁷ Such clashes between employers’ offers and labourers’ expectations resulted in conflict which produced a labour crisis for several months following emancipation.Footnote ⁶⁸ Wells wrote: ‘We are now even in a worse state than we were during the apprenticeship and the people are more ungovernable than ever.’Footnote ⁶⁹

The newly freed peoples’ insistence that the queen had given them possession of their employer’s property and agricultural land for their livelihoods demonstrates the importance of provision lands to African Grenadians in enslavement and in freedom. Cultivation and the sale of foodstuff and sundry items, such as charcoal, was integral to their survival.Footnote ⁷⁰ For most, these activities provided an income that helped to supplement low wages, though market competition and other factors meant few were lifted well out of economic precarity. A measure of economic security could be achieved through more ambitious entrepreneurialism – by purchasing land.Footnote ⁷¹ At Bacolet, Wells complained to London merchants, Thomas and William King, of the reliability of labourers: some would work one week, but would withdraw their labour the next week in order to ‘cultivate their provision grounds to which they march off quite unconcerned before our face and if remonstrated will reply “they have nothing to eat and must plant their grounds”’.Footnote ⁷² Similar reports were received from across all the island’s parishes, and some from the island of Carriacou, sister island to Grenada.Footnote ⁷³

At Bacolet, labourers were unwilling to work in the fields for longer than twenty-eight to thirty hours per week. Most were ‘industriously employed’ the remainder of that time producing farine (farina), which sold readily at markets for £8 sterling per puncheon. Great quantities of this flour, which required expert preparation to extract its poisonous toxins, were shipped to the French Caribbean. The provision grounds of the Bacolet Estate were mainly cultivated with cassava, the root vegetable from which farine derives. The harvesting, washing, pressing, and baking of cassava was a lengthy process, involving several people. Wells reported cassava production was the work of ‘elderly members of families on the estates and the idlers’.Footnote ⁷⁴ This activity was to be continued by liberated Africans throughout various parishes, and today is chiefly the preserve of women descendants of recaptives in Munich.Footnote ⁷⁵

Along with the labour-rent system, the métayer system of sharecropping was introduced in 1848 to provide the planters with a steady supply of cheap labour. Adopted by many Windward Island sugar planters, the métayer system required the labourer to work on the planter’s land, for which they were paid in kind rather than cash, receiving a portion of what was produced. Sharecropping allowed planters to maintain their estate operations and to sustain export volumes without any significant decline. However, it meant labourers could not work their own land, and the inequality was compounded when they received an unfair share of the crop. Inevitably, the métayer system resulted in conflict between estate owners and Black workers.Footnote ⁷⁶

Many freed people invested their earnings from their marketing activities into purchasing land on which they built their own houses – in time creating villages of freed people. Many of these first villages to spring up after 1839 took the name of the estate in the area, including areas where liberated Africans were to settle later, such as La Mode in St Patrick and Munich in St Andrew.Footnote ⁷⁷ The number of villages established after emancipation is unclear; however, information is available on the number of people living in villages. By 1846, 13 per cent of the population lived in villages located on the margins of estates.Footnote ⁷⁸ In St Andrew, it was stated that a large village of around 510 people had been built near the town of Grenville by labourers who had purchased land and become free settlers. The villagers cultivated ground provisions, ran small shops, and occasionally worked on adjacent estates.Footnote ⁷⁹ By 1849, the number of labourers residing in these free villages had almost doubled, with the greater number of them located in the parishes of St Andrew, St Patrick, and Carriacou.Footnote ⁸⁰ Some of these villages would be settled by liberated Africans following the expiry of their indentureship contract.

Migration from Grenada represented another route to economic security for the freed people or, at least, presented opportunities to improve their financial standing. According to Lieutenant Governor Doyle in 1842, African Grenadians had migrated in large numbers due to the ‘cruelties and oppression’ practised towards them by the Grenada planters.Footnote ⁸¹ Trinidad, and to a lesser extent, British Guiana, were favourite destinations because both offered comparatively high wages to emigrants whose labour was much welcomed. Trinidad, in particular, was facing an acute shortage of plantation labour, for like their Grenadian counterparts, Black workers there were also seeking independence from field labour, and movement from the estates was facilitated by the island’s large areas of cultivable land.Footnote ⁸²

Back at home in Grenada, even before apprenticeship ended, Wells reported that advertisements were being circulated and posted, encouraging labourers to migrate, and to take advantage of their future employers’ incentives to exchange the exploitation of Grenadian planters for the promise of superior conditions in Trinidad. Employers there offered to advance the amount of their term of apprenticeship, free passage, high wages, house, land, and medical attendance.Footnote ⁸³ In 1839, it was estimated that hundreds of Grenadian labourers were arriving monthly in Trinidad.Footnote ⁸⁴ By 1841, Wells noted there were ‘no less than 3,000’ Grenadian labourers in Trinidad, and feared that outward migration to Trinidad would be the ‘ruin of Grenada’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Managers of Trinidadian estates were accused of seducing Grenadian labourers, such as the manager who wrote to Grenadian workers in Trinidad offering them free passages back to Grenada.Footnote ⁸⁶ Planters also encouraged the return of labourers by publishing letters purportedly written by Grenadians who had emigrated to Trinidad, warning workers to beware of inducements to leave Grenada. For example, one letter written to dissuade labourers against emigration to Trinidad was signed using the ethnic identifier ‘Ebo Jim’ and complained of extreme living conditions, food scarcity, and irregular, late wages.Footnote ⁸⁷

Pre-empting the prospects of a labour shortage, in 1838, island administrators passed laws intended to combat emigration. Their efforts had little effect, for the Colonial Office in Britain prohibited legislation which prevented Black free movement.Footnote ⁸⁸ African Grenadians joined streams of thousands of other labourers from the Eastern Caribbean migrating to Trinidad. Some left Grenada intending to be absent from the island for a short period of time, while for others, emigration represented a new start in a new land. This was a pattern that would be followed by liberated Africans and indentured Indians decades later, following the expiration of their indentureship.

Under insufferable physical and psychological conditions, African Grenadians took several measures in the quest for survival and freedom that would shape the experiences of liberated Africans: they cultivated provision grounds, established villages, and migrated to nearby Trinidad. Several aspects of African Grenadian religious culture, discussed in detail below, were also formative in shaping the experiences and legacies of nineteenth-century African arrivals.

The ‘Power of Their Congo Divinities’: The Nation Dance, Saraka, and Obeah

Africans from various linguistic heritages and geographical backgrounds converged on the island of Grenada to reorganise, reimagine, and celebrate their African heritages, forming the Nation Dance, obeah, and reformulating saraka. These traditions were conspicuous enough – dominating Hesketh Bell’s narrative. He wrote that although discouraged by enslavers and clergy, Africans ‘clung desperately’ to their ‘deep-rooted notions’, ‘the same superstitions as were rife in Guinea and on the Congo’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Bell lamented that Africans in Grenada ‘reposed more trust in the power of their Congo divinities than in the God of the Buckra [white people]’.Footnote ⁹⁰

The Nation Dance illustrates the complex and creative ways in which enslaved Africans and their descendants chose to remember and recognise their cultural similarities and differences.Footnote ⁹¹ Although representative of multiple African backgrounds, McDaniel stressed that ‘no single stylistic factor can be drawn to establish the exact ethnic musical convention in the songs or to link them to specific musical cultures’.Footnote ⁹² Over time, respective African cultural practices underwent significant transformation as they were replayed and reimagined within a new landscape. The ceremony is commonly held to commemorate life events such as weddings, or during burial rituals, to supplicate in times of ill health or ill fortune, or to engage tourists or celebrate political events. Currently, the Nation Dance ceremony is conducted within a circle formed by a crowd, enclosing male drummers and women singers and dancers. Following warm up songs and Beg Pardon songs - an appeal to the ancestors for forgiveness for wrongdoing – the songs, dances, and drum rhythms of nine nations are performed.Footnote ⁹³

There are approximately 120 songs in the Nation Dance repertoire, which are sung in French Patois, interspersed with some African and Arabic words. The nation songs commence in the following order: three Koromanti, three Igbo, and three Manding, followed by Banda, Arada, Kongo, Temne, Moko, and Chamba. Following this, an intermission occurs around midnight, a saraka (food offering) is held, and food is shared among the guests. A portion of this food, which has been prepared without salt, is offered to the ancestors. At the end of the ceremony, ‘secular’ dances are performed, mainly for entertainment, which are said to delight the ancestors.Footnote ⁹⁴ An early nineteenth-century account offers a rare description of such dances: in 1812, it was observed Africans in town held ‘great dances sometimes through the week, and always on Sundays. There is a great number of different ones, every Tribe, or Nation, having their own Country Dance.’Footnote ⁹⁵

Written evidence, however, does not allow us to trace the origins and development of the Nation Dance. According to oral tradition, though, the danced ceremony is believed to date back to the mid to late eighteenth century, with some accounts suggesting a mid seventeenth century genesis.Footnote ⁹⁶ Several archival fragments – legislative acts, fictionalised descriptions, and travel writing – reveal the socio-political role of practices integral to the Nation Dance and the ways they were maligned by the colonial elite. Drumming and playing of loud instruments were prosecutable acts during enslavement, and these instruments form the fulcrum of Grenada’s Nation Dance. Three goatskin wrapped drums are usually used: the boula drums, played flat on the ground and in groups of two, and a cutter drum, played at a slight tilt and covered with a string of pins. Drums are accompanied by chac-chacs, calabashes filled with dried corn seed. The Big Drum, another title for the Nation Dance, is also used to refer to the cutter drum, which guides the movement of the dancers.Footnote ⁹⁷

The slave acts of 1788 and 1825 made no mention of the Nation Dance, although assemblies of enslaved peoples and the use of the drum, blowing shells, or other loud instruments were forbidden, and enslavers could be fined for knowingly permitting these activities.Footnote ⁹⁸ Instruments and gatherings were prohibited for they were known to have been implicated in communicating about and organising uprisings.Footnote ⁹⁹ This concern was grave enough for the justice of the peace to issue a notice in the island’s newspaper in 1798, urging other justices to prevent the drumming and blowing of instruments and the assembling of enslaved people.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Although the 1766 and 1788 acts outlawing such activities had not been repealed, on some estates, enslavers permitted the practice. In his appeal to enslavers, the justice described that at times when fugitive Africans were ‘numerous and troublesome’, they descended from the woods to ‘mingle in the dance’ where the drum was permitted.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It was at these gatherings, he insisted, that fugitive Africans planned insurrections with the enslaved to plunder their masters’ property. The timing of this notice is noteworthy: two years earlier, the momentous Fédon Rebellion had been brutally suppressed, and the plantocracy was still reeling from its economic and social effects. The justice cautioned:

Providing further evidence that drumming gatherings were sites of incendiary activity, the justice evoked Tacky’s 1760 revolt in Jamaica. On that island, an act prohibiting drumming was passed immediately following the suppression of Tacky’s revolt, for ‘there was the fullest conviction of the said Insurrection having been planned at those Drumming Assemblies, which had been very frequent before it’.Footnote ¹⁰³ The justice contended that such was the ‘good nature’ of enslavers that they permitted drumming congregations for the merriment of the enslaved, but in actual fact, he continued, these gatherings were spaces of moral debasement, rendering enslaved peoples ‘unfit’ for labour. Calling for the regulation of the drum and gatherings of the enslaved, the justice recommended that ‘cheap fiddles’ be substituted for the drum, which he thought would not be missed by the enslaved, thereby demonstrating his ignorance of the cultural and spiritual significance of the drum to Africans.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Drumming restrictions persisted even after enslavement: in 1845, three people were convicted of drumming on Sabbath day.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Hesketh Bell similarly informed his readers in 1889 that various dances were repressed during slavery as they were thought subversive: the ‘gathering together of so many slaves in one place’ was perilous to the stability of the plantations for many rebellions were ‘concocted under the cover of these gatherings’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Yet, where possible, enslaved Africans endeavoured to circumvent suppression: Bell wrote of Africans who would often walk for several miles on Saturday nights to another location where a dance was taking place. Although such accounts do not specify the nature of these dances, it is not unlikely some of them would have been Nation Dances. Indeed, Bell depicted several features of the Nation Dance: a circle shaped by dancers, secular dances of the ‘kalenda’ (Kalenda) and the ‘belair’ (Grand Belair), and the ‘baboula’ (boulas) drum.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

More than a decade later, ethnically defined dances were depicted in an extract of a fictional work, The Slave, or Grenada in 1794 and 1795. In this 1828 account, the anonymous author described two ‘distinct and very dissimilar’ dances held about a hundred metres from each other in the town of Gouyave, St John, attended by enslaved peoples from nearby estates and further afield. The first dance, identified as belonging to the ‘Congo nation’, was depicted as ‘savage’ and ‘licentious’ in nature.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ As in the structure of the Nation Dance, singers and drummers in their account formed a circle enclosing one or two pairs of male and female dancers. The excerpt described how several instruments were played: the ‘banjan’ (banjo) or ‘African lute’, a tambourine, a pipe similar to a pandean flute, a goat-skin covered drum, and a rattle (described as a calabash filled with pebbles or seeds from the canna plant). The rattle, known as chac-chac by practitioners, and the goatskin drum are typical in Nation Dance ceremonies.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The second dance, the ‘war dance’ of the ‘Coromanti and Mandingo deities’ was performed at midnight by an enslaved man ‘disfigured with his country marks, upon the face and breast’, indicating an African birth.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Intriguingly, while in contemporary Carriacou the Koromanti and the Manding are separate dances within the Nation Dance, they are the only two nations that form part of a second ceremony, also occurring after midnight, fittingly called ‘Midnight Cromanti’ and ‘Midnight Manding’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The former, associated with a mock stick fight, may explain the author’s description as ‘war-like’; indeed, McDaniel described the Koromanti as a warrior nation.Footnote ¹¹² In this dance, the author again depicted instruments that resemble those used in the Nation Dance: the ‘shoc-shoc’ (chac-chac) and the ‘doubling drum’ (possibly in reference to the boula drums, which are played in pairs).Footnote ¹¹³

Although fictitious and sensationalised, the writer’s portrayal of the circle of dancers, the drums, the chac-chac, and the presence of multiple African nations, sharply resonate with ethnographic descriptions of the Nation Dance. Beyond this, the source is useful for understanding this tradition in the British imaginary. Appearing in two parts, and over two separate newspaper issues, this source would undoubtedly have been read by many of the island’s elite. The publication of the extract indicates an awareness of, or at least an interest in, the various ethno-linguistic African groups and the diasporic ‘nations’ they formed based on these heritages.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Significantly, the nations mentioned by the author – ‘Coromanti’, ‘Mandingo’, and ‘Congo’ – appear alongside Igbo, Banda, Arada, Temne, Moko, and Chamba in the Nation Dance.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The Koromanti nation, representing Akan and non-Akan peoples captured and sent through Gold Coast ports, is known as the ‘first nation’. Accordingly, following warm-up songs, Koromanti songs, drum rhythms, and dances are the first to be performed.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the Koromanti dance, a dancing space called the ring is created and two overlapped towels are arranged in the shape of a cross, and placed in its centre as a symbol for the path of entry for the ancestors.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Crucially, the towels are formed according to four cardinal points of the universe, an arrangement reminiscent of the kalunga, the water boundary between the living and the dead in Kongo cosmology.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Interestingly, the cruciform shapes are interpreted according to African cosmology, rather than a Euro-Christian framework. Perhaps the rough wooden cross observed by Bell (noted at the beginning of this chapter) may be viewed in the same light.

Following the laying of the towels, the dancer enters the ring formed by practitioners and audience, submits with a low crouch, and makes a petition for pardon. All Koromanti songs are known as Beg Pardon songs.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Koromanti certainly shaped, or ‘Koromantised’, non-Akan elements of the Dance. Partly crafted in the post-emancipation period, the ‘Koromanti Beg Pardon’ song invokes the Yoruba deity, Oko.Footnote ¹²⁰ This Yoruba god is likely to have been embraced while Carriacouans worked and lived in Grenada and Trinidad, and on their return, they infused this liberated African aspect in their Dance. Such circuits of migration in the Eastern Caribbean Sea region and its impact on the Nation Dance and African work will be considered in Chapters 7–9.

Gold Coast captives were numerically significant among Grenada’s enslaved, constituting 20 per cent, or one-fifth, of all captives sent to Grenada. Their numerical strength and their early arrival accounts, in part, for the prominence of the Koromanti within Grenadian religious cultures.Footnote ¹²¹ Another consideration is their reputation as warriors, feared as the ‘most formidable’ group among the captive Carrriacouan population.Footnote ¹²² In several Koromanti songs, praise for Coromanti Cudjoe, a revered ancestor in the Nation Dance, is entangled with accounts of enslaved rebellion. In oral narratives, Coromanti Cudjoe is leader of the Jamaican Maroons, who was captured by the English and sent to Carriacou in 1739; in another retelling, he was a companion of Fédon, the leader of the 1795–6 Grenada rebellion, and had in fact fled to Carriacou following the revolt’s suppression.Footnote ¹²³ The relationship between Cudjoe and anti-imperial warfare underscores the militaristic and rebellious quality to the Koromanti nation songs.Footnote ¹²⁴ People known as the Koromanti may have also influenced the etymology of obeah: obayifo in Twi, meaning ‘witch’, is commonly cited by scholars as the origin as the search for its etymology has favoured words that can be translated into English as ‘witchcraft’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Nevertheless, as with the Big Drum, several scholars have concluded that the term obeah derived from the convergence of multiple African heritages.Footnote ¹²⁶

The next dance to be performed is that of the Igbo, representing both Igbo and non-Igbo speakers from the Bight of Biafra. According to Voyages, more enslaved peoples were embarked at the Bight of Biafra and bound for Grenada than any other region, constituting 35 per cent of all captives.Footnote ¹²⁷ This may account for the belief of the Koromanti dominance over all other nations apart from the Igbo.Footnote ¹²⁸ Due to the prominence of the Igbo, McDaniel conjectured that the Nation Dance was once governed by a three-nation congress consisting of the Koromanti, the Igbo, and the Manding. As with the Koromanti, three songs of this nation are played. The Igbo song ‘Iama Diama’ is characterised by nationalist sentiments; a phrase in the song is translated as ‘Nothing can harm the Igbo’.Footnote ¹²⁹ For the twentieth-century African work practitioner, Norman Paul, this nationalism was expressed by his Grenadian grandmother: in 1953, he recalled a song, ‘Ibo, lele lele’, his maternal grandmother taught him which meant she belonged to the Igbo family and will not ‘live for the other nation, she will trample them’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Embedded in the same song is a likely response from another nation, perhaps the Arada, proclaiming ‘Igbo is a bad Nation, Dahomey’.Footnote ¹³¹ This suggests that the Big Drum is more than a reflection of national groupings; according to the Nation Dance historian Ashie-Nikoi, the tradition signifies the personality of enslaved peoples, and their experiences and responses to enslavement.Footnote ¹³²

In the same year, another African work leader, Miss Clive (1893–unknown), claimed that both her parents were of dual heritage: her mother was of the ‘Ibo-Manding’ nation and her father’s group was ‘Ibo-Coromanty’.Footnote ¹³³ It is not insignificant that these nations are, respectively, the first three to be performed in the ceremony. That these African work leaders claimed Igbo ancestry, suggests the prominence of this nation, but also that the concept of nation continued to be meaningful, even as Miss Clive and other African Grenadians adopted and espoused a new spiritual practice introduced by recaptured Yoruba.

Igbo Nation Dances are often propitiatory in nature, danced for reconciliation and to request pardon; they also express gratitude for an abundant harvest.Footnote ¹³⁴ Some Igbo Nation Dance songs are imbued with a sense of longing for home, and McDaniel associated these sentiments with the myth of the ‘flying Africans’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Relatedly, Manding songs, which follow the Igbo nation songs, symbolise human flight, or rather, the inability to fly. The Beg Pardon songs of the Manding feature dance movements bearing resemblance to a grounded bird that is unable to fly, reflecting enslaved peoples’ yearning for home.Footnote ¹³⁶ Across several songs, in fact, various actions encourage spirit flight.Footnote ¹³⁷ After the dancing of the nine nations, a midnight intermission follows to petition or remember deceased relatives, and their interaction with the living. A libation is poured onto the earth and the animals awaiting slaughter. Then, a meal of rice, cou-cou (cornmeal), pigeon peas, and several meats is prepared and shared among the guests. Next, the second part of the ceremony commences, featuring the Midnight Koromanti and Midnight Manding dances.Footnote ¹³⁸

Parents’ Plate, the ancestral meal, is either cooked separately or taken from the main saraka and is reserved exclusively for deceased relatives. Placed on a table in the main bedroom of the sponsor’s house, the plate is filled with rolled balls of rice and cou-cou, accompanied by a lighted candle, a glass of water, a bottle or pint of rum, and a small bouquet of flowers. Family members queue to place items on the table and, as a sign of respect to the ancestors, it is forbidden to glance back before laying down the food.Footnote ¹³⁹ The table is then guarded by an elderly relative, known as the gan-gan, a healer, a term of Kongo origin.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ As salt hinders the power of flight, this mineral is withheld from ancestors’ meals, thereby enabling their capacity for flight. As discussed in Chapter 10, this practice signifies a collective past of exile and aspirations for a physical return to Africa. In this way, saraka and the Nation Dance represents an expression of Carriacouans ‘relationship with their past and their adoration of another world’.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Although the saraka is a critical element of the Big Drum, it can also be held in other cultural contexts. A saraka, including the Parents’ Plate, is integral to the Tombstone Feast, a wake or burial ceremony where a tomb is erected for the deceased ancestor.Footnote ¹⁴² At a communal village feast, known as a maroon, a saraka is organised in response to a spiritual dream, following a successful harvest, to request rain during the dry season, or to honour the spirits of departed family.Footnote ¹⁴³ In mainland Grenada, an annual thanksgiving saraka occurs shortly after Good Friday in two villages on the island: River Sallee and La Poterie. In this festival, traditional food is placed on trays and carried to the open pasture. A competition ensues whereby trays are judged according to the foods and their overall presentation, and the winner is given the honour of organising the Nation Dance the following year. The feeding of the children is an integral part of any saraka feast. In mainland Grenada, food is spread on banana leaves.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Children are fed separately, for it is believed they are closer to the ancestors. Where all children cannot be identified by those serving, it is said that the sponsors of the saraka may in fact be entertaining deities appearing as children.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Following the feeding of the children, a Nation Dance ceremony is held. However, as the writer Merle Collins observed in 2006, this takes a different form than in Carriacou: nations are no longer celebrated as distinct groups, representing the ways saraka has evolved in mainland Grenada.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Saraka was carried to the Americas by enslaved Muslims from various regions in West Africa. Indeed, there are multiple derivations of the Arabic term sadaqa (freewill offerings) among peoples of these regions: the Fulani of Guinea, Senegal, Nigeria, Niger, and Mali use the word sadaqa; the Wolof of Senegal call the charity sarakh; the Mandinka of Senegal use the term sarakha; the Yoruba saraa; the Malinke of Guinea, the Juula of Côte d’Ivoire, and the Hausa of Nigeria call the giving charity saraka.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Yet saraka in Grenada may be more than a linguistic and cultural amalgamation of multiple African groups. Uniquely, the Manding is possibly the only Muslim group represented in the Nation Dance as Islam spread throughout the Western Savanna region through trade and marabouts from the fifteenth century and jihads from the late seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ If the Manding are in fact the only Muslims within the Nation Dance, it is likely this group is responsible for the introduction of the integral saraka tradition. Indeed, an eighteenth-century account by Mr Spooner, an agent for Grenada and St Kitts, noted identified the presence of Muslims among ‘Mandingo Africans’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

There is no single region inhabited by the ‘Manding’. In the Americas, this ethnonym is generic, and applied to Africans pushed through the Upper Guinea Coast (Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast – present-day Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia) who spoke Mande languages, particularly Manding languages such as Mandinka, Maninka, Bamana (generally non-Muslim), and Juula.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Thirty per cent of Grenada’s captives were taken from these regions: 14 per cent from the Windward Coast; 11 per cent from Sierra Leone; and 5 per cent from Senegambia.Footnote ¹⁵¹ However, those labelled as Manding were likely to have included Africans originating beyond the Upper Guinea coast; Africans from the Gold Coast and Bight of Benin interior may have been captured by Juula traders.Footnote ¹⁵² Later in the nineteenth century, the saraka tradition was augmented by African Muslims from Central Sudan and Yorubaland during the era of abolition.Footnote ¹⁵³

Manding Muslim priests were renowned for their healing practices. In fact, as a measure of their importance, Spooner remarked that their ‘Mirabous’ [marabouts] had as much influence over their sick as ‘obeah men’ held over other Africans.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Obeah was fundamental to the ways in which bonded peoples recreated ways of being, surviving, and fighting the oppressive plantation economy. It was prosecutable when it involved rebellion and other acts of resistance, such as poisoning, or when intended to cause injury to an enslaved person, for such an act was to damage property.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Religious scholar Tracey E. Hucks described obeah as an ‘Africana spiritual system of holistic healing and healthcare’, offering a range of expert services to enslaved peoples.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The knowledge and expertise of obeah practitioners were regularly consulted for reproductive concerns, such as abortifacients to control fertility. Abortifacient use was seen as a criminal act, particularly since children born into bondage were commodified as marketable property.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Colonial archives contain several cases of enslaved and free peoples accused of or charged with obeah practice. In 1816, Julien, an enslaved man, was charged with practising ‘obi’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The details of his punishment reveal the potency of white fear of obeah: in addition to receiving twenty lashes, Julien was to be confined to the stocks, with his obi bag suspended from his neck. His head was to be half shaved and the obi bag, with its contents, was to be burnt, and the ashes thrown in his face.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

Following abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, laws were passed which aimed to ‘ameliorate’ slavery by reducing corporal punishment, increasing the number of estate hospitals, admitting evidence by enslaved peoples in court, encouraging marriages and Christian instruction, and supporting reproduction, thereby improving the overall condition of the enslaved population.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ One such act was the Consolidated Slave Act of 1825 which prohibited the use of ‘art and mystery’ to ‘affect life or health’ and the possession and use of items thought to be used by obeah practitioners.Footnote ¹⁶¹ These included poisonous drugs, pounded glass, parrot beaks, and the teeth of dogs and alligators. It also made unlawful meetings formed with the purpose of administering oaths sealed by the drinking of human blood mixed with rum or grave dirt. Punishment for such practices could include lashes, death, or transportation.Footnote ¹⁶² In 1833, Pierre, a free African-born man, known amongst the enslaved as a healer and doctor, was sentenced for transportation for practising obeah. Fourteen years was to be served on the Woolwich hulk in England and another fourteen years in New South Wales.Footnote ¹⁶³

Even after the abolition of slavery, colonial officials continued to criticise African-inspired beliefs, and practising obeah remained a prosecutable offence. In St Andrew parish, the stipendiary magistrate was of the view that the ‘superstitious influence’ of the fear of obeah ‘retard[ed] their moral advancement’, making African Grenadians unfit for the ‘common occupations of life’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In 1891, one William, alias ‘Dr Willie’, was imprisoned for three months with hard labour for practising obeah – to reassure himself a successful wager on a horse race. Police found Dr Willie surrounded by ‘bones of various animals, bottles of noxious stuff and other uncanny objects’. He absconded from the scene but was captured. When bail was refused, Dr Willie appeared in court, the magistrate expressed great regret at his inability to inflict a heavier punishment on the defendant. The local newspaper provides a description by the accused of his practice: Dr Willie described himself in court as a ‘doctor of weeds’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Cases such as Dr Willie’s illustrate the centrality of plants in African-derived health and well-being traditions, and the use of obeah in healing practices. In his book on obeah, Bell observed that there were ‘hundreds of plants possessing valuable medicinal properties still unknown’ to European medical practitioners in the Caribbean. He continued:

The services offered by obeah practitioners was so highly valued that Bell observed that enslaved people reverted to European medical doctors only after consulting the ‘obeah man and bush doctor’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Returning to the Nation Dance tradition, the next nation to be performed is the Banda. The image of a grounded bird appears within the Banda dances, where dancers enact a fowl feeding from the earth, raising its head to swallow, intervening between heaven and earth.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The geographical origin of the Banda nation is uncertain; McDaniel proposed that they possibly originated from Central Africa, or the Gold Coast interior, and were captured during an Asante invasion in the mid eighteenth century. ‘Banda call me-o’ and other Banda songs include Akan names which may favour the former origin.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ If the Banda’s origins are to be located in the Gold Coast interior, it is conceivable that the nation may have developed from the Muslim-influenced Banda kingdom of West Central Ghana and if so, they may have contributed towards the development of saraka.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ In Carriacou, McDaniel was unable to locate anyone who claimed Banda ancestry, although practitioners confirmed that Banda people had once lived on the island.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Following the Banda, songs, dances, and drumming of the Arada nation are played. Deriving its name from the coastal kingdom in the Bight of Benin, Arada represents Gbe speakers (Ewe, Fon, Aja, and others) from the interior of this coastal area.Footnote ¹⁷¹ During enslavement, 4 per cent of Africans destined for Grenada were forcibly embarked at Bight of Benin ports. Arada dances are performed for healing and exorcism, but also to endow blessings on those sowing seeds for crops.Footnote ¹⁷² Significantly, the Arada may have been responsible for the presence of Legba, the Fon trickster deity, which has influenced the Nation Dance in a nuanced way. Three introductory songs in the ceremony are similar in function to the Legba invocation in larger rituals, such as those of the Rada community in Trinidad. It could also be that this larger community in Trinidad influenced the Nation Dance. A further possibility which will be explored in Chapter 8 is that, contrary to McDaniel’s assertion that Yoruba people were neither enslaved nor indentured in Carriacou, a small number of post-emancipation Yoruba or Fon arrivals were also responsible for the Legba veneration in the Nation Dance.Footnote ¹⁷³ Indeed, the Bight of Benin was the main embarkation point for liberated Africans, particularly the Yoruba who would carry their spiritual understanding of the trickster god, which they knew as Esu-Elegba, also recognisable by the Fon.

The subsequent nation is the Kongo nation, and these dances are often performed as a group, where the dancers bend their waist shuffling, imitating servitude.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The Kongo song ‘Kongo Beké’ speaks to the fluidity and transformation of African identities. Beké meaning ‘white man’ likely derives from the Igbo becca denoting elements introduced by outsiders, or its other form, bukra to the Ibibio and Efik term mbakara, meaning white man or one who governs.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The ethnonym ‘Kongo’ represents a broader range of Bantu-speakers from West Central Africa, from where 11 per cent of captives were taken to Grenada. Smaller numbers of Bantu-speakers were sent to Grenada compared to those from the Gold Coast; first arriving as enslaved peoples in 1669, although it is not unconceivable that Bantu speakers were among those the Kalinago seized from Spanish ships in the sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Could then West Central Africans be responsible for the emergence of a nascent Nation Dance? From evidence gleaned from oral narratives, the Nation Dance ambassador Winston Fleary (1943–2019) proposed three possible origins of the tradition. In one of them, enslaved Kongo peoples mutinied on a slave ship off the coast of Union, near Carriacou, and arrived on the island as free peoples, carrying the Nation Dance tradition.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ This certainly supports a West Central African genesis, explored by Ashie-Nikoi and matched by Voyages data which records West Central Africans as the first direct arrivals.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

Following the Kongo are the Temne, who lived along the coast of Freetown to Port Loko and further inland in the Sierra Leone region. Eleven per cent of captured Africans sent to Grenada originated within this hinterland, yet the Temne had a greater cultural impact on the Nation Dance than their small numbers may suggest.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Researchers John Angus Martin and Joseph Opala show that Temne’s disproportionate presence is attributable to several factors. The London-based merchant trading firm, Grant, Oswald & Company, operated Bunce Castle in Sierra Leone. One of the firm’s associates acquired a substantial plantation on Carriacou, and eventually enslavers associated with the firm, came to own the larger part of Carriacou. This connection facilitated their trafficking of a large number of Africans, including Temne speakers, from Sierra Leone to Grenada, and then on to Carriacou.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Another factor for the disproportionate influence of the Temne was the shuffling of imprisoned Temnes from Sierra Leone to Grenada by numerous ships outfitted in late eighteenth-century Liverpool. Martin and Opala both suggested that the Temne were probably concentrated on the eastern side of the island, where they were forced to labour on plantations owned by the same Liverpool and London enslavers who trafficked them into Grenada.Footnote ¹⁸¹

It is possible that some Temne arrivants were free peoples: a managing partner of Grant, Oswald & Company conveyed free African masons, carpenters, and shipbuilders at Bunce Island to British East Florida, and it is plausible that other skilled Africans were employed by another associate who owned a sizeable Carriacou plantation. These free Africans may have exercised a degree of autonomy and established themselves as a distinctive group on the island. Their relatively large numbers and geographical concentration, and the likely presence of free Temne, may have encouraged the formation and persistence of the Temne nation.Footnote ¹⁸² An additional reason for the strength of the Temne nation may be found in the arrival of recaptured Temne. In 1836, several Temne were among the Africans on the recaptured vessel Negrinha who were indentured on the mainland. For the formerly enslaved Africans, the landing and settlement of the Negrinha recaptives would have been an astonishing and intriguing event, for these recaptives were the first African arrivants since the cessation of the slave trade in Grenada three decades earlier (see Chapter 3).Footnote ¹⁸³ Perhaps some of these new Africans on the mainland heard of their countrymen and countrywomen on the sister isle, and joined them, introducing fresh elements that rejuvenated the Temne nation.

The song ‘Temne Woman-o’ is thought to convey the deep-seated trauma of separation from family and country, referring to a Temne the original chanters could no longer physically envision. Another interpretation is that the song refers to the death or disappearance of a fugitive Temne woman. Both interpretations communicate separation engendered by slavery and the methods by which people sought to escape slavery’s grasp.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ In attempts to mitigate the pain of estrangement, the Carriacou Temne nation recently rekindled links with their ‘lost family’ in Sierra Leone. In 2016, through the efforts of scholars, Temne descendants in Carriacou, Sierra Leone officials, cultural leaders, and Temne representatives visited Carriacou and exchanged gifts and artefacts with their counterparts in Carriacou. A larger group of representatives returned to Carriacou in November 2022, among them fifty delegates from Sierra Leone.Footnote ¹⁸⁵

The Moko nation is associated with the Ibibio from the Bight of Biafra but could also represent a wide range of peoples who departed from ports of the lower Cross River.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Together with the Igbo, they would have been among the 35 per cent of Africans who embarked at the Bight of Biafra bound for Grenada.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Their numerical significance led some scholars to support a Biafran source for the word obeah. Specifically, the Ibibio group has been cited as a possible origin, where abia meaning practitioner or herbalist corresponds with a core element of obeah practice.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Interestingly, within the Koromanti song, Moko serves as an ethnic identifier linked to the Koromanti Nanny, who fought in the Second Maroon war in Jamaica. Nanny is referred to as ‘Nani Moko’.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Donald Hill noted that it is likely the memories of these Jamaican Maroons stemmed from the arrival of Koromanti and Moko Africans sent by the British to Carriacou in chains following the Maroon war and who carried with them praises of these two leaders embedded in song.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

The final nation to be danced is the Chamba, a term used by the English to denote peoples from the north of Asante empire or Gur language speakers north of Ghana, who would have been forced to join other Africans at Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin ports before being shipped to Grenada.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Perhaps the ‘O Yé Anansi O’ in the Chamba repertoire is indicative of their relationship with the Asante, for it praises Anansi, an Akan deity. Ashie-Nikoi proposes that in fact the Anansi reference represents deference to the position of the Koromanti in the Nation Dance.Footnote ¹⁹² Less is written about the style or character of Chamba dances. As with the Arada dances, they were once associated with healing and spirit exorcism.Footnote ¹⁹³

It is evident that not all Western African peoples are represented in the Nation Dance; smaller groups may have joined larger clusters, or, over time, certain nations are likely to have been eclipsed by larger ones. In addition, there was a high degree of borrowing among these national groupings, with phrases or deities associated with one nation being represented or venerated in another. Of particular interest to this book is the glaring absence of a Yoruba nation: the Bight of Benin was the least used embarkation region on the Western African coast for ships carrying enslaved peoples to Grenada, yet during the era of abolition, the reverse was the case. Yoruba peoples would dramatically alter the cultural landscape of Grenada from the mid nineteenth century, adding their own distinctive facets into the Nation Dance and adopting saraka and obeah for their own spiritual needs.

A French Paradise: The Persistence of Catholicism and Creole French

Among the array of seemingly unusual items Bell observed at the spring, he described as incongruous one particular item: the wooden cross. Cruciforms however were, and still are, integral to the Nation Dance and African work, representing the interweaving of Christianity with African-inspired traditions, as African Grenadians crafted a Creole culture that spoke to their evolving needs. Oral traditions from two prominent practitioners illustrate how the Nation Dance and Christianity were both incorporated into their spiritual lives. In 1962, May Fortune, an acclaimed Carriacouan Nation Dance practitioner and Roman Catholic was asked by the American folklorist Alan Lomax if practising the Nation Dance made her less Christian. She responded to the contrary and remarked that in fact, the Roman Catholic priest ‘appreciated’ the saraka tradition.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Another Nation Dance specialist, the legendary Sugar Adams, was convinced saraka was central to a Christian way of life: he believed holding a saraka was ‘part of being a good Christian’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ So integral was saraka to African Grenadian Christianity that one 1984 report on the island’s religious climate observed that ‘superstitions’, such as saraka, obeah, and the ‘African dance’, were routinely ‘inserted’ into the Roman Catholic faith.Footnote ¹⁹⁶

Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, became an intrinsic part of African Grenadian religious cultures. In the mid seventeenth century, Roman Catholicism accompanied French settlers and was absorbed into the French Creole culture.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ During periods of British rule (in the late eighteenth century), the English language and Anglican Church shaped the island’s vernacular language and religion, despite the continued presence of French nationals.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, Anglicans were convinced that there were three main obstacles to their work on the island. The first was the influence of the Roman Catholic priests over the enslaved. The second was the ‘powerful influence of old Negroes’, who could converse with the new arrivants in their ‘country language’ and were thus able to impart to them the religious beliefs of African Grenadians.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The last obstacle was the ‘negro French’ spoken by the enslaved Africans.Footnote ²⁰⁰

Although the English language came to be melded with Creole French during British rule, the following reports written during the late decades of the eighteenth century and during the mid nineteenth century, demonstrate the persistence of Creole French and the Roman Catholic faith amongst Grenada’s Black population. In 1793, Dr Finlay, the Wesleyan Methodist, wrote that while missionary efforts were ‘fairly successful with English speaking Negroes’, they had made little progress among those under Roman Catholic influence.Footnote ²⁰¹ Finlay averred that the ‘French negroes [were] generally the most ignorant’.Footnote ²⁰² Reverend Shrewsbury, another Wesleyan Methodist minister, who arrived on the island in 1818, similarly described the enslaved as ‘ignorant’, and lamented that they had ‘no desire for anything besides a few lighted candles and wooden gods’.Footnote ²⁰³ It is possible that these wooden figures represented African deities, though Shrewsbury provides no clues as to their meaning or purpose.

Provisions within the Consolidated Slave Act of 1825 allowed for the baptism and instruction of Africans as Protestant Christians, measures prohibited in the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Hitherto, the plantocracy largely believed that to permit the enslaved to receive Christian teachings would disrupt plantation life, fearing that the enslaved would claim equality with their owners, and might reject their subordination.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Indeed, the Fante-born abolitionist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who, as a child was kidnapped and transported to Grenada around 1770, had witnessed an enslaved person receiving twenty-four lashes ‘for being seen at a church on a Sunday, instead of going to work in the fields’.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Following the passing of the Consolidated Slave Act, there was sustained proselytisation by missionary groups and the established churches. The British government increased the number of Anglican rectors to provide religious instruction, and they also paid a salary to Roman Catholic priests. The Presbyterian Church opened in 1833 and was the fourth denomination to arrive on the island; its ministers also received a salary from the government.Footnote ²⁰⁷

During this time, Wesleyan Methodists continued to complain of the ‘imposing superstitions of Popery’ amongst enslaved Africans in Grenada.Footnote ²⁰⁸ William Goy, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary who began to evangelise on estates in 1817, similarly described the response of enslaved Africans as disappointing, for they spoke French Creole, and had been influenced by French Roman Catholicism.Footnote ²⁰⁹ According to Goy, the extent of their attachment to French Creole and Catholicism was such that enslaved Africans believed there was a ‘French Paradise’, for French speakers and an ‘English Paradise’, the latter to which ‘good Englishmen would go’.Footnote ²¹⁰ Goy wrote that as enslaved Africans spoke French Creole, they feared that becoming Methodists, in death they would be cut off from their loved ones, being consigned to the English Paradise where they would be unable to converse with anyone.Footnote ²¹¹ Eternal separation from deceased kin constituted a crisis, and their religious decision making was ultimately predicated upon African world views rather than sectarian concerns.Footnote ²¹² To carry out his work effectively, Goy learnt to preach in French Creole, which he described as a difficult language as it was ‘a strange amalgam of Old Norman French with West African languages, complicated by peculiarly African pronunciation and abbreviation’.Footnote ²¹³ Despite the efforts of the missionaries and Anglican church, by 1836, nine-tenths of apprentices were affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ²¹⁴

The persistence of French Creole and Roman Catholicism continued after emancipation in 1838. The peasantry that emerged at this time was associated with Roman Catholicism and spoke French Creole as their native tongue. After 1838, a number of French nationals had remained in the island to sustain these religious influences.Footnote ²¹⁵ In a history of the Roman Catholic Church in Grenada, Raymund Devas maintained that after 1836 ‘great efforts’ were made by several religious societies to ‘draw away the black and coloured peoples from the Catholic faith’, however, these were largely unsuccessful.Footnote ²¹⁶ By 1851, 63 per cent of Grenadians were reported to be Roman Catholic; 31 per cent Anglican; 5 per cent Wesleyan; and 0.8 per cent Presbyterian.Footnote ²¹⁷ Catholicism would also attract large numbers of liberated Africans and characterise their associated cultural traditions. Moreover, Creole French, developed during enslavement is, along with Yoruba, a key language in African work ceremonies.

By the mid nineteenth century, the cultural and economic choices of enslaved peoples during and after enslavement had laid the foundations of Grenada’s Creole society. The ethnic and cultural composition of slave society moulded the cultural traditions of recaptives arriving in the mid nineteenth century. Despite the number of people who subscribed to Christian denominations, African influences were an important part of a Creole culture drawn from the various ethnic and religious backgrounds of enslaved peoples. Enslaved people looked to African-inspired traditions such as obeah and saraka to cater for their spiritual and social needs. These traditions were drawn upon by liberated Africans in Grenada to recreate African work. Further, enslaved Africans drew on their cultural, linguistic, and ethnic similarities to survive the extreme challenges within Grenada. A key example of this is seen in the Nation Dance which reflects the ethno-linguistic composition of enslaved society, where several Western African groups are represented as nations; notably, except for the Yoruba, who were numerous among recaptives sent to Grenada during indentureship.

The peasantry that emerged following emancipation was one fully experienced in responding to the challenges of the plantation economy. Villages were established on the edges of estates, and workers continued to provide for their family through a combination of estate work, provision-ground cultivation, and at times, temporary or permanent migration to nearby Trinidad. In imposing their own meanings on emancipation, African Grenadians failed to satisfy European colonial expectations that the freed people would become a cheap and regular labour force. That the freed peoples had their own priorities created instability and unpredictability in the labour supply. To fill the ‘void in the labour market’, planters and government looked to immigration to revive sugar production.Footnote ²¹⁸ One solution they seized upon was to recruit captives caught up in the illegal trafficking of Africans from 1836.