Archival documents provide scant insights into the experiences of recaptured Africans following their indentureship; they reveal little about how they organised their communities and their cultural practices. Despite this silence, it is evident that colonial administrators disapproved of the mode of living within recaptive communities. In 1852, John S. Gaskin, former enslaver and president of the Barbados legislature, wrote rather disparagingly about liberated African practices in his letter to the lieutenant governor of Grenada. A few years after their indentureship had ended, recaptives had separated themselves from the wider community, settled down on small plots of land and began to derive their living from crops such as cocoa, coffee, nutmeg, and ground provisions. From these practices, Gaskin concluded recaptives lived in a ‘savage’ state that ‘barbarise[d]’ those who joined them.Footnote ²

In creating independent communities – sometimes ethnically defined – pursuing alternative economic activities, migrating to Trinidad in pursuit of higher wages, and practising African-derived cultures, liberated Africans challenged the restrictions of post-slavery plantation labour, resolute in their desire to achieve autonomous and meaningful lives. These actions greatly aggrieved colonials for throughout Grenada and the British Caribbean, where since 1834 sugar production had been sharply declining. The imperial government had considered and introduced several measures to address this process: indentured immigration from Africa, China, India, Madeira, and Germany, mainly after 1836, the métayage system (1848), and the Encumbered Estates Act (1854). For a myriad of reasons discussed later, except in British Guiana and Trinidad, the combined weight of these measures failed to achieve the hoped-for reversal of sugar’s decline in the British Caribbean.

The key contributor to the failure of African immigration was, along with limited numbers of recaptives and the cyclical nature of arrivals, the determination of the recaptives to live as independent people, free of the exploitative conditions of contracted plantation labour. Oral narratives from liberated African descendants, Colonial Office correspondence and statistical returns, as well as nineteenth-century maps illustrate the struggles of liberated Africans and their descendants for self-hood. As part of those efforts, liberated Africans created independent communities and the traditions they practised within them enabled them to remain culturally distinctive.

The Decline of Sugar and Imperial Measures

Several factors led to the decline of sugar, once a staple commodity of agricultural cultivation. Estate owners and managers apportioned blame – for what they considered impending economic disaster – to the tendency of the newly emancipated Africans to ‘flee’ the plantations in search of self-determination. As discussed in Chapter 2, the movement away from contracted estate labour after emancipation was the least significant determinant. To augment sugar imports entering Britain and increase the revenue from sugar taxes, the British government introduced the Sugar Duties Act of 1846. The Act had an inadvertent effect, fuelling a seemingly incessant demand for slave-produced sugar in Brazilian and Cuban markets.Footnote ³

In their efforts to ease the economic hardships of West Indian planters, the Colonial Office encouraged landowners – particularly in their British Windward possessions – to adopt métayage, an agricultural production system based on sharecropping, which was introduced in 1848.Footnote ⁴ Many Grenadian planters were reluctant to adopt the system for they viewed it as a threat to their security, believing that it would decrease their earnings and lessen their control over the allocation of land and the distribution of labour. However, the decline of the sugar industry compelled some to reconsider, and the number of sugar estates operating under métayage was particularly high from 1850 to 1854.Footnote ⁵ Sharecropping permitted formerly enslaved Africans to lease estate lands from planters on which they often erected dwelling houses for their families and cultivated cocoa, sugar, and cotton in return for a portion of the agricultural production. This system proved advantageous for some cash-strapped planters because it allowed them to maintain their estates.Footnote ⁶ After a few years of the métayer working the land on a cocoa plantation, the proprietor resumed possession of the land with mature, full-bearing cocoa trees, and moved the labourer to a fresh garden in another location.Footnote ⁷ In this way, métayers planted entire cocoa estates, and facilitated the rapid expansion of the commercialisation of cocoa planting.Footnote ⁸

Between 1848 and 1855, cocoa production had trebled so much so that it was touted by some that cocoa ‘would prove the salvation’ of Grenada.Footnote ⁹ The demand was largely external because cocoa beverages had become popular in Europe and North America by the eighteenth century, but it was not until the last three decades of the nineteenth century that mass cocoa consumption grew, particularly of chocolate confectionery.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet, as during slavery, cocoa manufacture remained relatively low, occupying third place after sugar and rum.Footnote ¹¹ The métayers expanded cocoa cultivation but the system did not impact sugar production. In the 1850s, twenty-two sugar estates were abandoned and twelve of them converted to cocoa production.Footnote ¹²

The métayage system was a source of conflict between estate owners/managers and labourers. By the mid-1850s, opposition to the system was evident: over 80 per cent of planters opposed it. A stipendiary magistrate reported that planters believed métayage disrupted the general working order of the estate and increased idleness among the workers. Moreover, planters were often prevented from abandoning the system because the métayer could withdraw their labour.Footnote ¹³ Grenadian planters thus began to move away from métayage and looked towards indentured immigration when the scheme was sanctioned in 1840. Grenadian estate owners were encouraged by the subsidising of indentured immigration to the larger colony of British Guiana in the mid-1840s.Footnote ¹⁴ It was not until 1849, however, when the imperial government financed the cost of transportation vessels, that Grenada and other smaller islands participated in the scheme. Even then, sharecropping and indentured immigration overlapped as some estates continued to rely on métayage; in 1866, of seventy-two active sugar estates in Grenada, twenty-eight continued the system.Footnote ¹⁵

Plantation owners hoped that indentured immigration would supply them with a steady labour force to prevent the further decline of sugar production and compensate for the irregular and unreliable labour that the newly freed workers were prepared to provide. In the early years of the second wave of African immigration that commenced in 1849, the planters’ hopes appeared to have been realised: it was observed that African Grenadians viewed indentured Africans as competition for employment. Realising the planters were no longer solely dependent on their productivity and had a choice of labourers, freed African Grenadians resolved to return to plantation work, albeit under relationships newly worked out with the proprietors.Footnote ¹⁶ The cordial relationship appeared to be short-lived. In 1851, planters once again found themselves in a quandary, uncertain they would be able to meet their labour needs because it was not entirely certain they would receive new African immigrants. It was wryly remarked that, observing the planters’ dilemma, African Grenadians had begun to ‘fall back into their irregular mode of working on the estates’.Footnote ¹⁷ A few years later, it was again noted that rather than encouraging African Grenadians to return to plantation work, the planters’ turn to immigration had resulted in their ‘emancipation’ from the necessity of plantation labour, enabling them to pursue their own economic interests.Footnote ¹⁸

The impacts of African immigration on sugar production, although temporary, are discernible. Writing in February 1849, the lieutenant governor described the recaptives who had landed directly from slavers in 1836–7 as a ‘great service to the colony’.Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, in 1836, Grenada’s sugar crop was 19 million lbs which remained relatively stable until the end of apprenticeship in 1838.Footnote ²⁰ The second wave of African immigration was followed by a short-term rise in sugar production. Following the arrival of the first emigrant vessel, the Clarendon (1849), the recaptives’ labour proved so advantageous to the planters that they were described by a stipendiary magistrate as the ‘greatest boon granted by the British government’.Footnote ²¹ Planters attributed the increase in production to the ‘assistance of liberated Africans’ and were fulsome in their gratitude to the government.Footnote ²² Yet their optimism was too early and short-lived. In the long term, African immigration failed to provide the much needed boost that would revive the declining sugar industry.Footnote ²³ Quite simply, the small scale of African immigration proved inadequate for meeting the requisite productivity level: recaptive migrants were insufficient in number to have a permanent impact on the sugar industry. Moreover, planters could not be certain of a regular supply of new immigrants; suppression activities during the era of abolition meant that limited numbers of recaptured peoples were transported to depots in Sierra Leone and St Helena, restricting the numbers sent to Grenada. Indeed, it was often the case that a British Caribbean colony would receive no more than a few hundred recaptives in any one year.Footnote ²⁴

The cyclical nature of African immigration to Grenada also proved unhelpful to planters. African immigration occurred in three waves, with a lengthy ten-year break between 1839 and 1849 and again in the ten years between 1850 and 1860. And finally, the length of indentureship ensured that Africans aged fifteen years and older spent as little as six months and no more than five years working under contract on plantations. The impact of the planters’ inability to secure a regular cheap and docile labour force was soon felt as the scale of abandonment of the sugar estates – which began in the immediate aftermath of emancipation and continued during the era of African immigration – became clear.Footnote ²⁵ For instance, in 1856, there were forty-seven derelict sugar estates that had been deserted by their owners since 1838, and nine others were in the process of closure.Footnote ²⁶

The introduction of Indian indentured workers had a temporary positive effect on production. In 1856, 6.7 million lbs of sugar was produced, but after Indian immigration commenced the following year, production rose to 11.1 million lbs, remaining relatively constant between 1857 and 1862, a period that witnessed the arrival of six of ten emigrant vessels from India.Footnote ²⁷ Like the African immigrants who arrived before them, the planters initially received the Indian workers as their salvation, and by the 1870s, claims were circulating that their productivity had caused several abandoned estates to be reclaimed.Footnote ²⁸ But soon the planters realised once again that they had been overconfident about the capacity of an immigration scheme that provided labourers on a scale too insignificant for the long-term sustainability of Grenada’s sugar industry. In contrast, in British Guiana and Trinidad, the much greater numbers of Indian immigrants halted the decline of sugar production in the two decades following emancipation and, by the 1870s, Indian labourers were the driving force behind its dramatic growth.Footnote ²⁹

Immigration was a partial solution to the revival of cane sugar production. From 1854, the British Parliament introduced a series of Encumbered Estates Acts in the British Caribbean. These acts allowed Caribbean planters – absentee and resident – to sell their estates with complicated debts to purchasers with the capital and lines of credit to rescue and bring encumbered estates back into production. Between the time the Grenadian Act was introduced in 1866 and when it was shelved in 1885, twenty-eight Grenadian estates had changed ownership under its provision and many other planters across the British Caribbean had similarly utilised those acts to rid themselves of their estate debts.Footnote ³⁰ While the Act could be lauded for relieving the economic strain of many planters, it failed to achieve its fundamental purpose: to prevent the demise of cane sugar. Between 1834 and the turn of the twentieth century, Grenada lost 119 sugar estates, and the island had undergone a decisive transformation from an exporter to an importer of muscovado sugar.Footnote ³¹

Abandoned sugar estates were not entirely unproductive: many of their former labourers seized opportunities presented in the wake of the planter’s departure and turned to cultivating sugar cane, using the estates’ wooden mills. In 1858, some of these labourers had, reportedly, become lessees of large plantations.Footnote ³² More commonly though, abandoned sugar estates were sold off in small lots to the freed peoples and the newly arrived indentured Africans and Indians who grew mainly cocoa, but also coffee, nutmeg, and ground provisions.Footnote ³³ The latter included sweet potatoes, yams, bananas, and vegetables, which the labourers carried to markets and dispatched to Trinidad and other colonies.Footnote ³⁴ By 1866, of the 140 estates under cultivation, 51 per cent produced sugar, 40 per cent cultivated cocoa, and 8 per cent – mainly on the sister island of Carriacou – grew cotton.Footnote ³⁵ By the 1880s, cocoa had gradually replaced sugar as the main export commodity. Sugar production had fallen to a mere 3.1 million lbs; 7.5 million lbs of cocoa was produced by 1888. Sugar production was considered so negligible that it was no longer recorded in the statistical returns after 1894; cane cultivation was solely for domestic consumption. Export figures for sugar and cocoa depict the nineteenth-century reality: in 1896, a mere 30,240 lbs of sugar against 10.1 million lbs of cocoa.Footnote ³⁶ These imperial measures – métayage, the Encumbered Estates Acts, and indentured immigration – could not prevent the decline of sugar, which had begun around 1834.

‘Imbued with a Restless and Dissatisfied Spirit’: Freedom Strategies

Another reason behind the failure of the scheme to force thousands of Africans into indentureship was that they were not permanently attached to estates, as planters had expected. Once their term of indentureship expired, many Africans emulated the ambitions of the formerly enslaved after emancipation and determined to create distance between themselves and contracted plantation labour. It is disappointing that so little archival information exists that could shed light on the post-indenture experience of Grenada’s first wave of recaptives. There is, however, some evidence about the experiences of the second and third waves of African migrants after their contracts expired. The approval of the scheme to indenture recaptive Africans from Sierra Leone and St Helena in 1840 generated more local and imperial correspondence. Records at the Office of the Governor General on Grenada reveal that in June 1852, of the 1,035 indentured Africans assigned to estates between 1849 and 1850, 72 per cent remained on their estates. Strikingly, 45 per cent were children and youth under fifteen years of age. By December of that year, the number of Africans remaining on estates had fallen to 61 per cent.Footnote ³⁷ Although 271 more recaptives arrived on the Tartar (1860), the Akbar (1861), and the Athletoe (1862), at the end of 1862, only 259 Africans continued on the estates. In June 1863, their numbers were augmented – marginally – by 115 new indentured Africans who arrived on the Barbara Campbell, the last emigrant vessel.

Yet their numbers made scant difference to the plantation force. Months later, in December, there were just 278 liberated Africans on plantations.Footnote ³⁸ By 1867, a mere twenty-eight Africans were working on plantations, and just a year later, there were no Africans in regular employment on Grenadian estates.Footnote ³⁹ Clearly, contract labour – even if waged – held little appeal for the former indentured labourers, who much preferred the autonomy of independent smallholding, which could be combined with plantation work where necessary.

A similar pattern was observed among the Indian labourers who were sent to Grenada from 1857 onwards. In 1875, just 134 of the 2,567 Indian labourers who had arrived were indentured. The majority of those who remained on the island were said to have been working ‘where they please and when they pleased’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, liberated Africans and Indian labourers enacted various economic strategies to realise their visions of freedom and avoid engaging in contracted plantation labour. It seemed the planters were unable to maintain migrant labour of any ethnicity: Governor Colebrooke of the Windward Islands admitted in 1853 that those Africans who had left their original estates of indentureship had been ‘guided by the same motives which influenced the creoles’.Footnote ⁴¹

Disputes over wages appeared to be a perennial source of tension between the planters and their workforce. Liberated Africans pressed for higher wages, negotiated increases with their employers, or when unsuccessful, left their estate for higher wages elsewhere. In the early 1850s, Robert Keate, lieutenant governor of Grenada, complained that the recently time-expired free Africans utilised similar strategies employed by formerly enslaved Africans, bemoaning the fact they ‘changed their localities and their employers without restriction’.Footnote ⁴² His grievance was apparently shared by others; the stipendiary magistrate for St John and St Mark complained that many of the African labourers ‘imbued with a restless and dissatisfied spirit’ went from ‘estate to estate’ to negotiate higher wages from proprietors.Footnote ⁴³ In 1851, magistrates observed that of the 109 labourers on the estates in St John and St Mark, twenty-eight left to find better compensated labour on other estates both within and beyond those parishes.Footnote ⁴⁴

A close look at immigration to and from Grenada and indeed many other islands reveals multiple circuits of migration; formerly enslaved and indentured Africans, Indians, Maltese, and other groups of post-emancipation immigrants to Grenada permanently or temporarily migrated to nearby Trinidad seeking higher wages.Footnote ⁴⁵ The current rate of wages in Grenada was ten pence a week compared to one shilling and three pence a week in Trinidad.Footnote ⁴⁶ In St Andrew, one magistrate reported in 1853 that of the 337 Africans located in the parish, only ninety-two remained on their original estates, while many had migrated to Trinidad.Footnote ⁴⁷ One newspaper commentator wearily noted, ‘It is the old story over again: the labourers [African Grenadians] left for Trinidad in numbers in 1838 and following years, and were superseded by liberated Africans and Coolies; now they also emigrate, and we are left to find out who can be got to take their place.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Oral evidence also reveals the voluntary migration of Grenada’s indentured Africans to the developing economy of nineteenth-century Trinidad.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Warner-Lewis interviewed a woman in Trinidad, who recounted that her Yoruba-speaking grandmother was originally located in St Patrick parish on Grenada before migrating to Trinidad.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yoruba recaptives and their descendants travelled around the Eastern Caribbean Sea, intervening in and transforming religious practices in their new locales, and in turn rejuvenating practices at home. As will be seen in the following chapters, these inter-island movements of formerly enslaved and indentured Africans invigorated and transformed African work and the Spiritual Baptist Faith.

For Africans who stayed on Grenada, a viable route to economic independence was by securing land either through purchase or lease.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, so widespread was the movement towards land ownership that the colonial secretary remarked that in less than three years following the end of their indentureship, the majority of Africans had become either ‘landowners or squatters’.Footnote ⁵² In St Mark and St John, the local magistrate observed that some liberated Africans preferred an ‘independent life’ to contracted labour on sugar plantations, choosing instead to rent and cultivate portions of land in neighbourhoods where their ‘countrymen’ had previously settled, supporting themselves through the produce of their gardens.Footnote ⁵³ This impetus to acquire land – whether owned or leased – sent a clear message to estate owners: Africans had no desire to remain on plantations, but preferred to cultivate their own land. Away from the estates, they could build and strengthen ties with shipmates or peoples from similar cultural and geographic backgrounds. From their beginnings as indentured peoples without property rights, Africans became small proprietors and occupiers – living off the produce of their lands: ground provisions, cocoa, and charcoal.Footnote ⁵⁴ In fact, an exceptional case was reported in which a liberated African man who arrived during the first wave of African immigration in 1836 had become the lessee of a small cocoa plantation by 1850; in that year, he made an application to indenture on his plantation one of the recaptured Africans on the Atlantic (1850). However, the magistrate report does not indicate whether this application was successful.Footnote ⁵⁵

Recaptured Africans and their descendants probably played a significant role in the burgeoning maritime industry of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Grenada and the wider Lesser Antilles. Following the collapse of the sugar industry, shipbuilding, fishing, turtling, and whaling industries attracted many Black labourers in the Eastern Caribbean, including recaptured Africans.Footnote ⁵⁶ In 1911, Frederic Fenger, an American yacht designer and sailor who sailed throughout the Lesser Antilles, twice referred to the mastery of Africans of ‘Yaribai’ descent in the sailing and whaling industries. In the first reference, Fenger enlisted the assistance of a man he called ‘Friday’ in the capital city of St George’s, Grenada. Although it is unclear which of the two men used the ethnic identifier, Friday is described as having ‘the blood of the Yaribai tribe of Africa in him’.Footnote ⁵⁷ As recaptured Africans formed the majority of the African-born population in the mid to late nineteenth century, such ethnonyms in early twentieth-century material likely refer to their descendants, perhaps the second or even third generation.Footnote ⁵⁸ Furthermore, as established in the previous chapters, the Yoruba were well represented among recaptured peoples.

Friday’s environmental knowledge and expertise undoubtedly impressed Fenger: the American wrote that his guide ‘knew the winds, currents, sharks, the heat, and the fever’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, Friday was in command of the Glen Nevis, a small sloop that sailed from Grenada to St Vincent and then to St Lucia carrying ice.Footnote ⁶⁰ Fenger anticipated Friday would help him locate a ‘native’ experienced in navigating within the archipelago: ‘If I would sail from island to island after the manner of the Carib, why not seek out the native and learn the truth from him?’Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, Friday auspiciously introduced him to a sixteen-year-old Kalinago, reportedly the ‘only Carib’ in Grenada and the survivor of a volcanic eruption which had destroyed his family and home in nearby St Vincent (Figure 6.1).Footnote ⁶² Fenger wrote that the unnamed Kalinago fished alone far out on the banks, venturing to places ‘in his little canoe where the negroes dared not’. Apparently, he had been swept out to sea for a day and a night; but the residents ‘gave him no thought for he always came back, guided by that instinct and fearlessness so often mentioned by the early Spaniards’.Footnote ⁶³ The expertise of Friday and the Kalinago youth were critical in his navigation of the Lesser Antilles. Fenger wrote: ‘From these two I learned the secret of the winds which depend on the phases of the moon.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Fenger’s narrative records the presence of his African guide on numerous occasions, working with, or advising the American. He repeatedly referred to Friday as ‘my man’ and thereafter ‘my Man Friday’ – a colonial trope culled from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) novel, wherein the protagonist Crusoe, also purportedly alone on an island, renamed an Indigenous man Friday after the day on which they first met.Footnote ⁶⁵

Figure 6.1 Kalinago teenager of St George’s, Grenada (1911).

Fenger, Alone in the Caribbean (1917).

Figure 6.1 long description.

Figure 6.1Long description

Photograph of a Kalinago teenager from St. George’s, Grenada, taken in 1911. The teenager is wearing a plain shirt and is seated outdoors, with a stone wall in the background. The image is from the book Alone in the Caribbean by Fenger, published in 1917.

Beside the ‘desert-island-adventure narrative’ of both writers, Fenger’s invocation of Crusoe is interesting for another reason: the protagonist was an enslaver en route to Africa to procure captives when he was shipwrecked and landed on the island of Tobago, between Grenada and Trinidad.Footnote ⁶⁶ Defoe’s Crusoe must have felt remarkably close for Fenger reminisced: ‘It was good to be a Robinson Crusoe again.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Accompanied by, and drawing upon Indigenous and African expertise, contrary to this suggestive book title, Fenger was by no means alone in the Caribbean.

In the second reference, Fenger praised the skill and expertise of twelve whalemen as they pursued their sometimes perilous activities at Île-de-Caille, an island located between Grenada and Carriacou. These whalemen were reportedly all African ‘with here and there a shade of Portuguese and Carib, or the pure Yaribai’ (Figure 6.2).Footnote ⁶⁸ That the Portuguese and the Yoruba feature in Fenger’s narrative is unsurprising as from the mid nineteenth century both groups were introduced as labourers. The environmental competence of recaptured Africans and their descendants, including their aquatic knowledge, enlarges our understanding of the types of work they participated in, correcting the one-dimensional reductionist representations as solely plantation workers.Footnote ⁶⁹

Figure 6.2 Frederic Fenger and African whalemen in the Grenadines (1911).

Fenger, Alone in the Caribbean (1917).

Figure 6.2 long description.

Figure 6.2Long description

Historical photograph featuring Frederic Fenger and African whalemen in the Grenadines, 1911. The group is seen in a boat on the shore, with individuals wearing hats.

There were compelling reasons why first-generation Africans put estate life and labour wholly or partially behind them. One such factor was the desire to secure families and to do so often meant leaving estates to reside with a spouse. Colebrooke took the view that marriage was pivotal to shaping Africans’ decisions to leave estates.Footnote ⁷⁰ As seen with Houston, who changed estates to join his wife, whom he had married in Grenada, securing ties with kin could mean re-joining plantation life as a labourer, in effect exchanging one plantation environment for another.Footnote ⁷¹ Freedom-making was complex and carried various meanings for liberated Africans. Absconding did not always mean an escape from plantation labour to freedom; rather, it was predicated upon being part of a community of kin – free or unfree.Footnote ⁷² Relatedly, Africans married spouses from different parishes, as evidenced by several marriage registers. For example, in the parish of St Mark in 1861, ‘Edward (African)’ of St Mark married ‘Anne Matree (African)’ from St Patrick.Footnote ⁷³

In bargaining for higher wages, migrating to Trinidad, acquiring plots of land, and withdrawing wholly or partially from regular field labour, most recaptive Africans escaped becoming permanent labourers on their original estate of indenture; they strove to be independent of plantation labour and challenged its restrictions, and to cement unions through establishing their own families and through marriage. This, along with the small scale, limited duration, and irregularity of African immigration, were decisive factors in the failure of the African immigration scheme to halt the decline of sugar production.

‘An Independent but Savage Life’: The Creation of Liberated African Settlements

Africans established free communities such as Munich where they could pursue a greater degree of independence (Figure 6.3). An 1853 report observed that many liberated Africans who had arrived in 1849 and 1850 had formed several ‘independent settlements’ around the island within several years expiry of their indentureship.Footnote ⁷⁴ The report did not disclose the names of these settlements, though fieldwork carried out in the mid to late twentieth century identified eight villages thought to have been settled by recaptive Africans and where elements of their culture still survive today: Munich, La Poterie, and Conference in St Andrew; Concord and Black Bay in St John; La Mode and Rose Hill in St Patrick; and Laura in St David.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although significant numbers of liberated Africans moved within and outside their original parish of indenture to reunite with family and friends – or for better wages on the island of Trinidad – it is useful to consider the numerical size of groups of the second wave of arrivals who served out their indentureship on plantations near where those villages would emerge. More recaptured Africans were sent during that wave than any other: 1,055 Africans, over one-third of all African arrivals landed on Grenada between 1849 and 1850. Within the space of ten months, four vessels arrived, three within a 40-day period.

Figure 6.3 Liberated African villages.

Adapted from Golbez/maps, ‘Blank map of the parishes of Grenada’.

Under the Abolition Act of 1833, enslavers throughout the British colonies received compensation for the loss of their human property. In 1835 James Hay, owner of the Tuillieries and Munich Estates in St Andrew, received compensation in the sum of £3,589 for the loss of 135 men, women, and children.Footnote ⁷⁶ There is no information about the lives of the enslaved on those estates following 1834, but as elsewhere in the British Caribbean, they did not receive compensation for the loss of their freedom; instead they were forced into apprenticing without wages for their former enslavers. In exchange for their free labour, apprentices were to receive lodging, food, clothing, medical assistance, and be allowed to retain their provision grounds. Children under six years of age living on estates were automatically freed, though the 1833 act gave mothers the option to apprentice them; notably, only six children were apprenticed in the Windward Islands between 1834 and 1838.Footnote ⁷⁷ In addition, to varying degrees, women also withdrew their labour from the plantations and plantation owners responded by withdrawing allowances.Footnote ⁷⁸ In an attempt to undermine this resistance, in 1849 and 1850, eight liberated Africans were indentured at the Tuillieries Estate. It can be assumed that the owner of Munich Estate did not replace enslaved labour with African indentured labour between 1849–50, as there is no record that liberated Africans were assigned to that estate. Much more is known about the estate itself – a former sugar plantation of 242 acres, Munich ceased operation as a sugar estate sometime after the compensation payment; by 1882, Munich Estate was reported to be a mixture of ‘wood & bush, with patches of mango & plantains – occasionally pasture’. By contrast, Tuillieries remained a sugar estate in the 1880s.Footnote ⁷⁹

Using an 1854 cholera report, the Grenadian historian George Brizan noted the presence of a district called Munich established sometime after 1838.Footnote ⁸⁰ As the 1854 cholera report referred to Munich as a ‘district’ – a term used for official or business purposes denoting an area with fixed borders – rather than a village or an estate, it is very likely that by the 1850s Munich had ceased sugar production. A 1930s map of the island showed Munich to have evolved as a village.Footnote ⁸¹ Commonly, villages established in the post-emancipation era adopted the names of former estates in the area. The date of Munich’s establishment is uncertain, and it is not known whether it was initially established as a free village by formerly enslaved peoples and later settled by liberated Africans. It could also have been formed later by recaptured Africans between March 1850 and January 1851, when their year-long indentureship ended.

Two sugar estates contiguous to Munich received new assignments of recaptured Africans in 1849 and 1850: Bacolet, sixteen Africans, and two to Great Bacolet.Footnote ⁸² Overall, St Andrew received 22 per cent of the 1849 and 1850 arrivals. Large groups of Africans were also indentured on sugar plantations near the village of La Poterie, St Andrew, which bore the name of the estate in the area and was likely established after emancipation.Footnote ⁸³ In 1825, Poterie Estate was listed as either a coffee or cocoa estate.Footnote ⁸⁴ Information for the compensation claim for Poterie Estate is not available, and between 1849 and 1850, no Africans were indentured there. By 1882, the estate was cultivating cocoa and spices.Footnote ⁸⁵ On the Upper Conference and Lower Conference Estates, Col. James Harvey and his wife Margaret Harvey made a successful compensation claim in the sum of £8,462 for 306 enslaved peoples in 1835.Footnote ⁸⁶ Their heirs, the new owners of the estate in 1849, turned to recaptive labour, indenturing twenty Africans.Footnote ⁸⁷ By 1882, only the Upper Conference Estate was operating as a sugar estate; the greater part of Lower Conference Estate was covered in wood and bush, and provisions and fruits, such as plantain and mango, were cultivated.Footnote ⁸⁸

Eleven per cent of the 1849 and 1850 arrivals were indentured on estates in St John. There is clear evidence that relatively large groups of Africans were located near the villages of Concord and Black Bay, which took the name from estates in the area. It is not clear when the villages were established. Aeneas Barkly, the owner of Concord, Black Bay, and Palmiste Estates, died shortly after receiving £12,095 in compensation for 469 enslaved peoples on the plantations.Footnote ⁸⁹ The new owners transitioned to the use of recaptive labour in 1849, as did Woodford Plantation. Fifteen Africans were indentured at Concord Estate, likely a cocoa or coffee estate, and sixteen at the Black Bay sugar estate. A further fifteen were indentured on Palmiste, another sugar estate to the northeast of Concord, and sixteen on Woodford, probably a coffee or cocoa estate to the south of Black Bay and Concord.Footnote ⁹⁰ By 1882, Concord’s chief produce were cocoa and spices, while Black Bay’s produce remained dominated by sugar.Footnote ⁹¹

In St Patrick, where 37 per cent of the second wave of immigrants were indentured, sizable groups of Africans were located near the village of La Mode.Footnote ⁹² According to available maps, there was no estate of that name and therefore no record of receiving recaptured Africans. However, Africans were indentured on estates in the immediate vicinity. La Fortune, Marli, Morne Fendue, and Snell Hall were sizable sugar estates with a combined enslaved population of 528 in 1835.Footnote ⁹³ In 1849 and 1850, eighty-eight recaptive men, women, and children arrived as indentured workers on the estates: twenty at La Fortune; twenty-one were indentured on Marli, a sugar estate; twenty-six at Morne Fendue; and twenty-one at Snell Hall.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1882, except for Snell Hall, all the estates still produced sugar.Footnote ⁹⁵

Eleven per cent of the 1849 and 1850 arrivals were located in St David.Footnote ⁹⁶ They were sent to several sugar estates near where the village of Laura emerged, particularly Morne Delice and Corinth. By 1837, 176 enslaved Africans worked on the Morne Delice and Corinth Estates, which later employed 26 recaptured Africans.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although Laura does not appear as an estate in the available maps or compensation records, emigration correspondence records fifteen Africans were indentured there.Footnote ⁹⁸

Mapping the number of liberated Africans attached to or on nearby estates in 1849–50 supports oral narratives that identify Munich, La Poterie, Conference, Concord, Black Bay, La Mode, Rose Hill, and Laura as liberated African villages. There is no oral or other evidence of liberated African villages in the parish of St Mark and St George where, respectively, 2 and 18 per cent of recaptives were indentured; perhaps the numbers of Africans in St Mark were too small to establish durable communities, and some Africans may have moved to other parishes, such as St Andrew and St Patrick, where larger numbers of their countrymen and countrywomen resided. Establishing independent villages illustrates how Africans sought independence from plantation life and autonomy over their own affairs. For instance, in 1852, a stipendiary magistrate criticised their desire for freedom, complaining that in such settlements, Africans sought to avoid the ‘control of authority’ and to work at their own ‘pleasure’.Footnote ⁹⁹ This report provides an important glimpse into the agricultural and commercial activities of liberated African women: in these independent villages, the magistrate wrote that women were mainly employed in manufacturing manioc, also known as cassava, into farine, farine starch, and cassava bread, and carried these items, along with charcoal, made by their ‘reported husbands’, to the nearby markets for sale.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The manufacture and sale of cassava by former apprentices was reported in 1839 on the provision grounds of Baillie’s Bacolet Estate, St David, which were mainly dedicated to the cultivation of this root vegetable.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Perhaps the liberated Africans who were to settle in the nearby village of Munich adopted that pre-existing practice. Munich today remains distinctive in the cultivation and manufacture of cassava, reflected in its identity as the ‘Home of the Cassava Producers’ (Figure 6.4). The primary producers and sellers of cassava are women, some of whom claim descent from liberated Africans. In the 1950s, Munich was described as a liberated African settlement by the anthropologist, M. G. Smith, who carried out ethnographic research in Grenada and Carriacou in 1952–3. Smith recorded that Munich was a ‘village of liberated African slaves’ captured by the Royal Navy after 1838.Footnote ¹⁰² He also noted that Munich specialised in cassava production, and the particularly closed nature of that community. Smith wrote that the people of Munich displayed a ‘remarkable community solidarity, marrying among themselves, and specialising in cassava production. Munich people were looked down on by the rest of Grenada, for their origin, community closure, and cassava cultivation until food shortages in the last war made Munich cassava very welcome. The Munich folk has their own back.’Footnote ¹⁰³

Figure 6.4 Munich: home of the cassava producers.

A sign at the entrance to Munich (a). Crushing the cassava plant using a grated wheel (b). After crushing and drying, the cassava is heated in a large copper bowl (c).

Photo by author, Munich, 10 February 2010.

Smith identified three villages as liberated African settlements, though his published and unpublished material focuses largely on Munich. Indeed, in present-day Grenada, it is in Munich where memories of orisa veneration and liberated African identity are most pronounced. Munich also remains distinctive through the claims of some residents to a specific identity based on their forebears’ experience of indentureship, rather than of enslavement. This claim is not as strong in the other villages settled by liberated Africans. In Munich, there is a consciousness and pride among some residents that their forebears were born in Africa and never enslaved in Grenada. According to resident Mark Felix: ‘Fellows here [in Munich] didn’t work slave … the only Caribbean country is Munich that never work slave with people!’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Felix’s reference to Munich as a ‘country’ signals the distinctiveness and autonomous nature of the village. Such historical memories of indentureship are part of the collective narrative of Munich, one in which residents remain conscious of their identity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The people of Munich were also remembered to have elected ‘chiefs’ up until the 1930s. Grenadian historian Caldwell Taylor recalled a man called Papa Roberts as one of the last chiefs elected by the Munich Africans.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is not clear why the practice of electing chiefs ended, but it may be due to the decline in some of the village’s African elements. Papa Roberts was consulted to adjudicate local disputes. Benedict Andrew (1946–2013) recalled Roberts used to do this by ‘hanging up two plates’; should the plates clash, whosoever consulted him would win their case in court.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Andrew described Papa Roberts as a ‘chief’ and explained how he and other elders controlled access to the village: Europeans on horseback were denied access to their village.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The election of chiefs who controlled access indicates a degree of autonomy and the closed nature of Munich. Unfortunately, there is little information on Papa Roberts; Smith never met him because Roberts had died when Smith began fieldwork in the early 1950s.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Smith’s unpublished field notes, however, contain what is likely to be an oral reference to Papa Roberts: an African man called ‘Old John Roberts’ who died in the late 1930s; elsewhere Smith wrote of a man called ‘Old John’ in Munich, described as a well-known ‘Shango man’ after the Yoruba orisa of that name. He had recently died leaving behind a ‘book of songs written in African tongue (Yoruba)’. Intriguingly, his informant told him that Old John had brought this book from Africa. Smith planned to locate it, but it is not clear whether he was successful.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Deprived of most personal items including clothing, it is highly unlikely that prized possessions would have survived the acute traumatic and dislocating experience of transatlantic enslavement. Anthropologist Jerome Handler has provided documentary evidence of the presence of beads, amulets, metal, or bone jewellery. Perhaps these items were acquired from crew members during the middle passage, or in Sierra Leone and carried across the Atlantic.Footnote ¹¹¹ In St Helena, archaeological excavations attest to the personal items – a copper bracelet and necklaces made of glass beads, horns, and cowry shells among them – of liberated Africans who perished on the island.Footnote ¹¹² Perhaps recaptives took those precious items with them on departure from St Helena. Larger items such as books would probably not have survived shipment across the ocean. Moreover, these cherished personal items were unlikely to have been acquired from settled recaptives at St Helena, where only 3 per cent of recaptives remained.Footnote ¹¹³ Further, between 1849 and 1850, all St Helena’s recaptives, having been forced onboard slave ships at West Central African ports were probably speakers of West Central African languages rather than Yoruba.

As established in earlier chapters, Yoruba speakers were sent in sizable numbers via Sierra Leone, where hundreds of recaptives were detained at African depots awaiting transportation to Grenada. Opportunities to procure objects from Sierra Leone were limited: Grenada’s recaptives were recruited directly from reception depots, rather than from among those settled in the colony. Further, to avoid being discouraged from emigration, they were isolated from resident liberated Africans, and exposed only to recruiters. Thus, whether transplanted from Yorubaland, acquired in Sierra Leone, or reconstructed on Grenadian soil, the significance of Old John’s book to Munich’s Africans supersedes any verifiable African origin; instead, it is indicative of the ways in which Africa is evoked by liberated African communities. The narrative of a direct African origin was likely created to underscore proximity to an African homeland, thereby bolstering their religious authority and strengthening their unique past and present identity in post-slavery Grenada.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Official documents offer no insights into the ethno-linguistic organisation and cultural practices of mid to late twentieth-century liberated Africans within these independent communities. Indentured Africans were not subject to close monitoring, and Indian labourers, who were arriving in larger numbers, captured the attention of colonial bureaucrats. However, scant evidence indicates that Africans created settlements with those of shared or similar backgrounds. In his annual report on liberated Africans, the stipendiary magistrate for St Patrick, Nathaniel Roach, briefly noted that Africans joined their ‘countrymen and women, of a much older residence in the island’ in forming small settlements.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Later, in the mid-1850s, a colonial official expressed difficulty in distinguishing between the formerly enslaved and liberated Africans; he did not suggest how they could be differentiated but concluded that the latter were believed to have been largely absorbed into the wider Grenadian population.Footnote ¹¹⁶ There is a dearth of official documentary evidence concerning liberated Africans after 1854, which may indicate that they had largely assimilated. However, using oral narratives and the limited written sources supports the argument that liberated Africans continued to remain a distinctive group after the 1850s through forming independent communities, and by practising cultural traditions and constructing narratives of return. In Munich, Africans remained distinctive by congregating in the village, engaging in various forms of commerce such as cassava production, and maintaining a link to an African past through the affirmation of an African identity. Liberated African descendants in Munich maintained their special status as descendants of Africans who, although they had experienced indentureship, did not experience chattel enslavement on Grenada.

That liberated Africans’ determination to resist their reduction to units of labour impeded their absorption into Grenadian society is evident, for, as colonial officials came to realise, their assimilation took longer than expected and was a more complex process than immigration officials had envisaged. Recaptives left the estates, purchased land, and migrated to secure better wages. They also re-established bonds with their countrymen and countrywomen, elected chiefs, and became renowned for cassava production. One hundred years later, anthropologist M. G. Smith established through extensive fieldwork that liberated Africans and their descendants were culturally and economically distinct from the formerly enslaved population.

Munich’s peculiarity can also be seen in the remnants of specific cultural elements, which are stronger there than in other villages settled by liberated Africans. By practising and remembering their distinct cultural heritage, the people of Munich have maintained a link to their African past, demonstrating a diasporic consciousness, and as a result, have not assimilated completely into Grenadian society. Unlike enslaved Africans, liberated recaptives had more autonomy to practise and recreate their cultures. Creolisation was slow – a consequence of their cultural similarities and the autonomy they exercised over their social organisation, particularly after their indentureship expired. The most prominent cultures remembered and currently or formerly practised by residents of Munich who claim descent from liberated Africans are those of the Yoruba region. Such elements have enabled the descendants of liberated Africans in Munich to relate to an African homeland. Identification with Africa as their homeland has been retained through a variety of religious practices such as African work.

In Grenada, African work – the veneration of Yoruba deities which is sometimes also referred to in the anthropological literature as ‘Shango’, after the orisa of that name – is a combination of dance, music, healing, divination – elements which have, over time, incorporated other elements including various Christian features derived from African Grenadian traditions. The origins of African work are grounded in the arrival of a large, ethnically homogenous group of recaptured Yoruba, whose impact elsewhere in the Caribbean has been understood as renewing and reinforcing existing African-derived cultures. However, the multiple reworkings of African work, inspired by local, regional, and transatlantic exchanges, complicates this view.