In 2013, Mary Peters, a well-known marketeer in St George’s, recalled that her grandfather, John Langdon (or London Edwards), was born in Africa and came to Grenada following enslavement (Figure 10.1). He had retained an intense attachment to Africa, often reminding her: ‘Grenada ain’t far from Africa.’Footnote 1 Violently severed from their homelands, with their names, lives, and aspirations absent from written records and refused the prospect of a return journey, recaptured Africans like Peters’s grandfather, remained close to ‘Africa’, a psychological proximity clearly articulated in other oral narratives. The memory of Grenada’s geographical proximity to Africa may be read as the unquenched longing of a former recaptive to return to their homeland, a yearning that helped sustain their emotional attachment to home.
Figure 10.1 Mary Peters, a liberated African descendant, St George’s.
Oral testimonies like Peters’s rely on memory, which is of course selective and partial.Footnote 2 These accounts remain valuable, however: recovering biographical details helps create a picture of their ethno-linguistic and geographical origins, their individual and collective experiences of recapture and plantation servitude, and their aspirations, which are habitually omitted from mainstream archival sources.Footnote 3 Oral accounts I collected during my fieldwork on Grenada and in the Grenadian diaspora between 2009 and 2015, and those gathered by M. G. Smith during his research in 1952–3, fill in gaps, challenge, animate, and add meaning to the fragmentary archival records on recaptives.
Pervasive throughout these narratives is the belief that some of their ancestors were able to fly back to Africa if they had refrained from consuming salt. Salt avoidance is one of the ways recaptured peoples and their descendants constructed alternative narratives of return and conveyed their collective memory and identification of exile and indentureship. These oral testimonies, then, reveal the desire and aspirations of nineteenth-century Africans and their descendants and disclose the descendants’ relationship to their history – how they make sense of it, the meanings they imbue to the past, and the way it shapes their lives.Footnote 4
The closeness of Africa and the ways in which Africa moulded descendants’ lives can be seen in the interesting case of the liberated African ancestor of Malcolm X. His descendants, like those of many other people descended from nineteenth-century Africans maintain a liberated African diasporic consciousness – defined here as an awareness of their liberated African heritage that were retained in historical memories, myths of return, and cultural traditions. This consciousness is more visible among the descendants of recaptives than the enslaved because they arrived several decades following abolition and possessing a greater degree of autonomy to practise their respective cultures, established ethnic-based communities and revitalised their cultures through interactions with nearby Trinidad. Cultural traditions, such as saraka and African work, constitute a historical record that maintains collective memories, strengthens community solidarity, and counters colonial narratives about a people who were not interested in returning home.Footnote 5
African Names and Homelands in the Colonial Archives
Colonial archives present several challenges to the capture and interpretation of individual and collective experiences of recaptives. First, African names and ethnonyms were sporadically recorded; lists of the African names of recaptives have been located for only three of the twelve vessels that landed in Grenada. For the remaining nine ships, the names of the recaptive passengers are either missing or their African names were erased and replaced with imposed European names that were recorded; in the process, they concealed clues to the recaptives’ ethno-linguistic heritage. Recreating the life and character profile of an individual recaptive remains a challenging endeavour, particularly from the 1850s, when officials no longer regarded African recaptives as immigrants, believing them to be assimilated into the wider Grenadian population.
A second limitation is the severance, in ink by the writings of colonial officials and in practical terms, of recaptives from their African homelands. Recaptives who had been persuaded to sign labour contracts in Grenada were contractually denied the right to a return passage; certainly, colonial administrators found it hard to understand why the recaptives would want to return to Africa. Indeed, their supposed reluctance to return to Africa made recaptives an attractive solution to colonial officials and planters who desired to address the labour shortages on Grenadian plantations. As the lieutenant governor of Grenada mused in 1863, liberated Africans were much more ‘desirable’ than indentured Indians for they ‘[did] not look forward to a return to their own country’.Footnote 6 Africans were purportedly disinterested in returning home because of ‘clannish warfare’ and rampant fetishism: their employers were perceived as their ‘emancipators’.Footnote 7 The discourse of ‘rescuing’ Africans from violent and morally retrogressive conditions was used to justify the absence of contractual provisions for the return of liberated Africans; this was especially so in the case of recaptive arrivants from St Helena, which, unlike Sierra Leone, was not a place of settlement for recaptives.
The recaptive Africans were dispossessed peoples employed under exploitative terms that excluded paid return passages: it was these conditions that benefited the rapacious sugar planters who desired the imported labourers be permanently tied to their estates.Footnote 8 Except for the records revealing the endeavours of the 1st West Indian Regiment soldiers to return to Africa from Trinidad in 1837, there are no archival records that suggest liberated Africans in Grenada might have ever returned to Africa. Elsewhere in the British Caribbean, colonial authorities offered repatriation to liberated Africans and Kru emigrants arriving in British Guiana, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Although that opportunity was seized upon by some preferring to return to Sierra Leone, returning presented several barriers; uprooting once again was costly and Sierra Leone would have been unfamiliar territory to many of those emigrants. In all, one-third of Africans sent to British Guiana, Jamaica, and Trinidad were repatriated between 1843 and 1867; others remained and returned only after their indentureship had ended.Footnote 9
A particular feature of immigration to the smaller islands of Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia, and St Kitts was the absence of any requirement on the part of the planters to facilitate their labourers’ return home on expiry of their contracts. Those islands received recaptives from Sierra Leone and St Helena only after 1849; the previous year, a change of policy had retracted return passages.Footnote 10 The colonial authorities on the islands were not placed under any contractual obligation to facilitate the return home of their recaptive labourers, and there is no record that those Africans ever returned home.
Despite their apparent disinterest and the barriers to repatriation, recaptives did desire to be reunited with their African homelands, and some made that reality. Oral sources disclose alternative accounts of return, particularly by human flight: they are prevalent in the oral narratives of liberated African descendants in Trinidad, Jamaica, and British Guiana. The narratives of the descendants of recaptured Africans on Grenada have yet to be examined.
Returning by Human Flight: Salt and Exile
For recaptured Africans, the inability to return to their homelands strengthened their desire and generated alternative narratives of return, solidifying an emotive attachment to their continent that remains potent today. Mary Peters’s grandfather who told her, ‘Grenada ain’t far from Africa’, was one of many Africans who had remained trapped in Grenada, unable to ‘fly back’ because they had ‘interfered with salt’.Footnote 11 Peters’s granduncles, however, had abstained from consuming that mineral and were thus able to return via human flight.Footnote 12 Human flight and its relationship to salt is prevalent in many narratives and cosmologies of the African diaspora. Salt is a crystalline mineral and many people of African descent in the Americas believed it had the capacity to obstruct one’s spiritual power, including the ability to fly.Footnote 13 In response to being questioned why salt is prohibited in ritual food prepared for the ancestors in ceremonies, Benedict Andrew, who observed African work as a child in the 1950s, inquisitively remarked: ‘Most of the African people now, they hardly use salt, because they give me a story I want to know how true it is. I hear the elders was saying that the African people are almost in the air, some say if you eat salt you can’t go in the air … if you eat salt you have to stay, you heavy.’Footnote 14
According to ethnomusicologist Lorna McDaniel, throughout the Caribbean elders express this myth of the ‘flying Africans’ with conviction.Footnote 15 Narratives of flight can refer to death, but also to acts of resistance such as suicide or repatriation. In 1803, on St Simons Island off the coast of Georgia, newly arrived Igbo Africans collectively drowned by walking into a body of water. In oral narratives and literary representations, that event has often been interpreted as an attempt to return to Africa by a deliberate act of suicide.Footnote 16 In fact, enslavers held the belief that suicides of enslaved people were provoked by the ardent desire to return to their homelands.Footnote 17
The origin and cosmological significance of human flight and its relationship to salt is varied and, at times, conflicting. Schuler explained that within the African diaspora, spirits or deceased ancestors are thought to not consume salt, so salt is taboo in spiritual rituals. Salt does, however, have several beneficial purposes. The use of salt is understood to repel bad spirits by hindering and interfering with their powers. There are claims that salt can facilitate special witch-like powers and enable flight back home to Africa.Footnote 18 On Grenada and its sister island of Carriacou, and throughout other Eastern Caribbean societies, blood-sucking female and male monsters, respectively named lougarou [French: werewolf] and soucoyan [Soninke: sukunya, man-eating sorcerer; Fulfulde: sukunyadyo, sorcerer or witch], are deprived of the ability to fly. They are literally grounded after using salt. Appearing human by day, the devious monsters shed their skin at night but can be destroyed by sprinkling salt on their skin. According to the myths, the monsters are afraid of salt, and its presence on their shed skin serves to deter them from re-entering their disguise. Similarly, salt, rice, or sand sprinkled or spilled close to the entrance of a room or house is intended to cause a delay in entering while the monster attempts to pick up the grains.Footnote 19
As well as keeping monsters in abeyance, salt can be used to strengthen or suppress an individual’s spiritual power. African work practitioner Norman Paul described how some Spiritual Baptists, fearing exposure of ‘unclean’ practices by their devotees, used to place salt in the followers’ mouths to prevent or halt a ‘revealing [spiritual] power’.Footnote 20 In Jamaica, the Kumina Queen interviewed by Schuler in 1971 explained that salt was never used in food prepared for the spirits in Kumina rituals.Footnote 21 West Central Africans in Jamaica, Haitian Vodun adherents, Surinamese Maroons, and African work devotees on Grenada, have all associated salt avoidance with strengthening rituals and supernatural powers, such as flight.Footnote 22
For the great majority of captives, human flight was the only hope to return home because the saline and deadly crossing of the middle passage posed a physical barrier between Africa and the Americas.Footnote 23 A French Creole song which originated from the era of enslavement in Carriacou speaks to the obstacle: ‘We shall go to Africa to meet my parents, the sea bars me.’Footnote 24 It was believed that the salt water blocked returns; this was similarly recalled by Schuler’s informants in Jamaica.Footnote 25 The association of crossing the ocean with witchcraft can be located in African cosmologies. For example, in Kongo cosmology, the land of the dead where deceased ancestors resided was reached by crossing a body of water, such as an ocean, which separated them from the land of the living.Footnote 26 This belief is not exclusive to Kongo cosmology; similarities are found in other Western Africa cosmologies.Footnote 27 The transatlantic slave trade – transporting people, ‘improperly and prematurely’, to America, the land of the dead, a place where the bodies of their loved ones were consumed – was perceived as a form of witchcraft.Footnote 28 Thus return to Africa involved a supernatural ability such as flight, which was usually possessed by witches.Footnote 29
African cosmologies provide further ways to understand the association between salt and supernatural powers. Schuler, however, warned of the difficulty in differentiating between European and African beliefs about salt, since both groups made similar associations, and because Africans were exposed to European beliefs in Atlantic Africa.Footnote 30 Nevertheless, delineating meanings in African cosmologies is useful for understanding parallels in the African diaspora. In Kongo cosmology, the living derive their spiritual powers from the dead, and because salt keeps away the dead spirits, the mineral is to be avoided: contact with it causes weakness, especially among those who are preparing for war ceremonies or other important tasks.Footnote 31
The association of salt with spiritual power can also be seen in Christian baptism rituals introduced to Kongo by the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century. Such traditions involved placing salt on the initiates’ tongue. It was believed by the Kongolese that because evil people and spirits abhorred salt, they would avoid contact with a baptised person. In the Americas, West Central Africans who understood that to be baptised meant eating salt believed that through salt abstinence, one could resist conversion and other elements of European culture – and thus retain their spiritual powers.Footnote 32
In Yorubaland, the ritual significance of salt is distinct from that of the Kongo. According to a babalawo, a priest of Ifa in Osun State, Nigeria, salt abstinence was not traditionally practised among Orisa adherents.Footnote 33 Rather, salt was a popular mineral: in the early 1980s, the anthropologist Andrew Apter observed that at the king’s annual Yemoja (Yemanja) festival in Ayede, Yorubaland, salt was used to neutralise bad medicines directed at a king by his rivals or by enemies of the high priestess of the orisa Yemoja.Footnote 34 Salt could also be used to sweeten human relations and to pay ritual respect to or enlist the support of an orisa in Yorubaland.Footnote 35 Indeed, salt is one of the preferred foods of Yemanja in Brazilian Candomblé.Footnote 36 In Grenada’s Yoruba-based African work, Norman Paul explained that salt was in fact requested by the orisa Osun to cleanse and was required as an offering to the orisa Ogun before making a request for blessings. Relatedly, Paul also described how salt was used in his healing work to destroy evil spirits. Lastly, sacrificial food was to be prepared without salt to ensure that the saints remained present in the African work ceremony.Footnote 37 In Paul’s African work, salt was a cleansing and propitiatory force. Schuler elaborated that the use of salt in order to make someone or a situation ‘sweet’ can be seen as meaning pleasant, peaceful, docile, and submissive.Footnote 38 Thus in the Americas, West and West Central Africans may have associated the consumption of salt with submissiveness and ‘acceptance of bondage from which they could not “fly”.’Footnote 39 This applied to enslaved and liberated Africans as both were given allowances of salted foods, such as cod, mackerel, herring, and salt.Footnote 40 Flight and salt abstinence thus are elements of a narrative of resistance to bondage.Footnote 41
Although the intimate association of salt with spirits and the cosmological significance of ocean crossings are considerably more apparent in Kongo cosmology than Yoruba, salt avoidance is salient in Yoruba-derived African work. This may indicate another element of creolisation: the incorporation of a West Central African belief into a mainly Yoruba-inspired belief system as documented elsewhere in the Americas. It could also be the case that the saraka ritual’s salt taboo shaped African work. Another process linked to creolisation, Africanisation, can be observed in African work. Indeed, one of Smith’s informants insisted that people of African birth, descent (African parentage), or ritual inheritance (adopting African spiritual belief systems), possessed not only the ability to fly back to Africa but also to return to Grenada, and that this was evidence that the ‘real work’ – African work – was ‘effective’.Footnote 42 In that account, repatriation and ‘re-emigration’ are claimed as evidence for the efficacy, potency, and authenticity of African work practised by ‘African’ people. The ability to travel between both places accentuates their proximity and perhaps signifies the role of the homeland in forging or authenticating recaptive communities and practices in Grenada. In this sense, Africa may be seen as a place of spiritual renewal for African work adherents.
Mrs Christine McQueen, an African work practitioner, recounted the importance of salt abstinence.Footnote 43 According to McQueen, the participants in African work ceremonies had formerly prepared food without salt, and when the food was ready, it was placed in a calabash and taken to Levera Beach, a local river, as an offering to the orisa, Osun. Crucially, McQueen connected salt avoidance with human flight: she had heard from her parents that her grandparents were among those who ‘flew from Africa to Grenada and couldn’t fly back’ because they had consumed salt.Footnote 44 While flight to Africa may refer to death or repatriation, flight to Grenada defies forced transportation and may distinguish recaptives from the enslaved, even though both groups were unwillingly severed from their homelands.
A similar practice was observed by Carl Romain, who recalled in the 1950s that African work ceremonies were held near Concord. These were popular gatherings attracting the majority of Concord residents, some two hundred people at times. Romain recalled how as a child he had observed practitioners carrying food to the river to make sacrifices, probably for Osun. Neither the food brought to the water, or that laid out in rows on fig leaves placed on the ground (saraka), contained any salt. Romain reminisced about his childhood: how he had been told stories about sacrificial food prepared without salt, an old tradition brought to Grenada, and how adults continued to uphold that ‘African belief’.Footnote 45 However, Romain himself did not share the adults’ belief in the power of salt to affect the human capacity to fly, and he and other children flouted the salt prohibition, concealing their own supplies of salt, which they took with them to ceremonies to add to their own food.Footnote 46
That salt avoidance is known as an ‘African belief’ and is associated with ‘African work’ signals the adaptation of cultural practices to recreate an ‘African’ world view, one that superseded ethnic and regional specificities. The fact that salt abstinence is no longer prevalent in saraka and some African work ceremonies may point to a decline in an African world view among twenty-first century African Grenadians. Nevertheless, the memories of salt, its prohibitions, and its uses, as well as the many myths woven around it by Grenadians, demonstrates the persistence of alternative narratives of return well into the twenty-first century.
That ‘African belief’ was sustained in the saraka sacrificial ritual – a sacrifice of food, drink, and cigarettes for the ‘Old Parents’, the deceased ancestors of the family. Food offerings are made to the ancestors for the blessings and continued support they bestow on their descendants. Only after the ancestors have received their portion is the rest of the food shared among the living, with the children receiving theirs before the adults.Footnote 47 Rice, cou-cou, pigeon peas, and several meats are served. Traditionally, portions of food are placed on green banana leaves and laid on the ground for children to consume. Food is also served on plates or containers and distributed to attendees or to the wider community (Figure 10.2).
Figure 10.2 River Sallee Saraka.
Salt abstinence in the saraka tradition reveals the relationship between African descendants, their cultural traditions, and their histories. Incorporated by African work adherents, saraka embodies narratives about a collective past rooted in the historical experience of exile that serve to create social solidarity in the present.Footnote 48 In 2010, Ms Lizzy (d. 2023 at 106 years), who organised the annual River Sallee saraka, explained that in the ‘old days’ including salt in ceremonial food was prohibited, although in modern times the prohibition has largely ended.Footnote 49 Norman Paul recollected in 1953 that salt prohibition was practised in a saraka ritual during a Nation Dance ceremony held when his grandmother was alive.Footnote 50
Saraka is a tradition that largely derives from the enslavement period, and while it is integrated into African work and the Nation Dance, it also functions as a ceremony in its own right.Footnote 51 As explained in Chapter 1, saraka derives from the Arabic term sadaqa (free-will offerings) and was brought to Grenada by enslaved African Muslims, probably from Manding peoples from Senegambia.Footnote 52 In the late eighteenth century, before the arrival of recaptives, the number of Muslims among ‘Mandingo’ Africans was large enough to be remarked upon by Mr Spooner, an agent for Grenada and St Kitts. Spooner was particularly interested in the authority that marabouts – Muslim religious leaders – exercised over enslaved Africans, comparing it to the power held by obeah practitioners.Footnote 53 During the era of abolition, the Muslim population would have certainly been augmented by Africans from Central Sudan and Yorubaland sent across the Atlantic, arriving in Grenada as liberated Africans.Footnote 54 For instance, on the Brandon (1849), Hausa people originating from Central Sudan (north of Yorubaland) were identified among the recaptives originally boarded at the Bight of Benin.Footnote 55 Muslims were documented in mid nineteenth-century Grenadian censuses before the arrival of indentured Indians in 1857: four Muslims were recorded in the 1844 census, and sixteen in the 1851 census. After 1851, the number quadrupled as a consequence of the number of Muslims among liberated Africans.Footnote 56 Indeed, in 1851, the governor-in-chief of Barbados noted that indentured Africans were mostly ‘mohammedans or idolators’.Footnote 57 Thus, bearing in mind the areas of West Africa from which the recaptives originated, it is likely they carried with them saraka traditions that bolstered the pre-existing practice.
In modern-day Grenada, the annual saraka is held in only two parishes – St Patrick (in the village of River Sallee) and St Andrew (in the village of La Poterie). These parishes are significant: bearing the highest number of sugar estates, the majority of liberated Africans were concentrated in them. The Grenada census of 1851 indicates that most Africans resided in the parish of St George (including the capital, St George’s), followed by the parishes of St Andrew and St Patrick, where 37 per cent of the individuals of African birth resided.Footnote 58 In 1901, 59 per cent of the residents of African birth lived in St Andrew and St Patrick, reflecting a decline of African-born residents living in St George and a growth of those residing in St Andrew and St Patrick.Footnote 59 Thus, saraka’s persistence may be attributed to the settlement patterns of liberated Africans. Through the practice of salt abstinence in saraka, liberated African descendants and spiritual workers convey an active relationship to a history of recapture, indenture, and their ancestors’ aspirations of return. This history and the memories that it generates empower descendants to see themselves as members of a liberated African diaspora – those who have ‘never work slave with people’.Footnote 60
Intriguingly, oral evidence suggests that such narratives of return were also held by other post-slavery indentured immigrants. Ms Elutha of Concord, St John, of African Grenadian descent, related the story of Muraj and other Indians who ‘flew’ to Grenada.Footnote 61 On arrival, the Indian labourers had been divided up and indentured on several estates around the island. Similar to liberated Africans, Ms Elutha spoke of some among the older Indian labourers at Woodford Estate, St John, who borrowed from the African practice of salt abstinence and were thus able to fly back to India.Footnote 62 It is unclear whether indentured Indians and their descendants held those beliefs and taboos regarding salt, or whether they were constructed by African Grenadians to describe the migratory experience of Indians. However, as the majority of Indians remained in Grenada, such historical recollections indicate a relatable historical trauma among indentured peoples of dislocation, cultural alienation, and yearning for their homeland.
Recovering Liberated African Biographies
Over 150 years after the arrival of liberated Africans on Grenada, several individuals proudly claim descent from that group and can recount biographical details, adding rich texture to what is known about their ancestors’ backgrounds, migration experiences, and cultural traditions. The 2013 account by Lennox Thomas (1952–2020), who resided in England, specifically mentions the ethnic origin of one of his ancestors and discusses certain cultural practices that are remnants of recaptive history. According to Thomas, his great-great-grandfather was a Yoruba man named Ogun Balogun who had arrived as a child on Grenada after the abolition of the British slave trade.Footnote 63 That Thomas was able to identify his forefather as being of Yoruba origin with a Yoruba name is unsurprising, given the preponderance of this ethno-linguistic group among nineteenth-century arrivals.
Across the Atlantic resides Thomas’s uncle, Bobby Thomas, born in 1918, who lives in Belair, St Andrew, Grenada. Bobby Thomas remembers that his grandparents, including his grandfather Balogun, were from Africa. He fondly recited songs in Yoruba and Creole, although he did not know the meaning of the Yoruba phrases.Footnote 64 Balogun was named Housten by the British (likely Scottish) owners of the estate on which he laboured.Footnote 65 The Anglicised name may provide some indication as to which estate Balogun worked on. Like the Houston from the Clarendon who was imprisoned after he left his original estate of indenture to join his wife, Balogun could have been renamed after Robert Houston, the Scottish owner of Tivoli Estate in St Andrew. Indeed, Bobby Thomas, the descendant of Balogun, lives just 3.7 miles from where Tivoli Estate was located.
Mary Peters’s (b. 1930) narrative also adds valuable detail to the piecemeal evidence of the lives and perspectives of nineteenth-century Africans. Peters claimed descent from a liberated African man and related the story of how her grandfather and several of his brothers arrived on Grenada. They had sailed to Grenada from Africa on a boat on which they used to cook, presumably for themselves – a detail that is indicative of an emigrant vessel rather than a slave ship. Indeed, Peters was quite adamant that they had not ‘enter[ed]’ Grenada during ‘the slavery time’.Footnote 66 She recounted that her maternal grandfather, Mr Langdon, was born in Africa and took passage to Grenada in a boat following emancipation. He could not return to Africa ‘by flight’ like his brothers because he had consumed salt during his days in Grenada.
Mary Peters recalled that her grandfather was born in Africa in a town called ‘Senegog’ (perhaps Senegambia). She did not know the circumstances of his arrival in Grenada, but soon after he arrived, he worked on Beausejour Estate in St George and later married a Grenadian woman. Grandfather Langdon used to fast and cut his hair at certain times of the year, which may suggest he was a follower of Islam. Peters provided another insight into her grandfather’s world view that may support this: Grandfather Langdon had decried Christmas as a pagan festival, an intriguing fragment suggestive of his resistance to Christian evangelisation. In addition, Peters remembered that her grandfather was physically unique: he carried a ‘stripe’ on one side of his face.Footnote 67 Grandfather Langdon’s face had carried that mark since he was a young child; it is possible that ‘stripe’ refers to facial scarification, or what in the Americas was sometimes referred to as ‘country marks’.Footnote 68 She could also recall that her grandfather wore an ‘African’ earring in one ear.Footnote 69
Peters’s memory of her grandfather was likely passed down from her parents because she was still a young child when Grandfather Langdon died at the age of 115. If his age was accurate, Langdon could have arrived in Grenada as a young man from Senegambia via Sierra Leone, and lived to the mid-1930s, when Mary would have been a young child. Unfortunately, Peters was not able to remember any further information about her grandfather, including when he arrived in Grenada or details about his wife.Footnote 70 A journey on an emigrant vessel, an African place of birth, voluntary repatriation, facial scarification, and personal objects associated with Africa provide intriguing glimpses into the individual lives and realities of nineteenth-century Africans.
The experiences of West Central Africans are also evident in descendants’ or local communities’ historical memories. The first of these reveals that some Africans organised themselves by ethnically identifiable units such as ‘Anango’, ‘Shango’, and ‘Congo’. Smith’s informant in 1953, Willie Shears, described how Kongo people lived ‘in boundary with Shango people’; Shears called the latter ‘Anango’ – an ethnonym for Yoruba speakers in the Americas.Footnote 71 Smith recorded that Kongo people lived in specific areas such as Byelands, La Filette, and Pearl Lands, in St Andrew, and that his informant was able to identify specific individuals who resided in those areas.Footnote 72 This suggests that, similar to the Yoruba villages of Munich, Concord, and La Mode, there were also villages formed by peoples of West Central African descent.
West Central Africans were certainly located on estates around these villages; in the case of Pearl Lands, they were directly located on the estate of that name but in relatively small numbers. With two exceptions in 1849, the vast majority of estates did not receive more than four Africans per vessel – most received just one or two Africans.Footnote 73 Those small allocations can be explained by the material conditions in St Helena, where West Central Africans boarded ships to the Caribbean. Mass disease, overcrowding, and malnutrition adversely affected recaptives, causing one in three to perish, thereby constraining the numbers of recaptives drafted onto emigrant ships.Footnote 74 A second narrative, the collective historical memory held by the residents of Harford Village in St Andrew, animates the statistical data on estate distribution. Some residents revealed that a road in their village, officially called Two Congo Road, was named after two ‘Kongo’ women who were sent to the village by Europeans following the abolition of slavery. This memory suggests that those two women were indentured on a nearby estate. The women were remembered in the collective memory for so long because, it was claimed, they argued frequently with each other.Footnote 75 A newspaper record depicts another street in Grenada which bears a West Central African ethnonym, suggesting that it was named after or by West Central Africans. It is unclear whether Green Street was given the name during slavery or in post-emancipation days, or whether it was named thus by Africans, African Grenadians, or Europeans, but Green Street, a central street in the city of St George’s, was ‘inelegantly styled, “Congo Barracks”.’Footnote 76
Before detailing the third narrative, it is helpful to consider further references to West Central Africans in nineteenth-century newspapers that underscore their prominence on Grenada during that era. In one such newspaper account, George African, also known as Badjoe, was committed to prison on St Mark for theft in September 1863, though he escaped shortly after. Badjoe was later captured, but not before he had constructed for himself a ‘comfortable hut’ made of boughs and branches covered with ‘guinea grass’ and leaves. According to the notice of his capture, Badjoe had demonstrated an ‘independent spirit’ observable in ‘an almost half civilised Congo’.Footnote 77 It was unclear whether the author of the notice used ‘Kongo’ as a West Central African identifier or applied it more generally to African people. It is also uncertain whether Badjoe was a liberated African; however, in newspapers from the mid to late nineteenth century, it was common to see the appellation ‘African’ following an individual’s name, which suggests an African birth. For example, the following names are found in court case details and tax and parochial board notices in newspapers: Henry African, David African, Frank African, Louis African, Daniel African, and Edward African.Footnote 78 Indeed, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, liberated Africans on Grenada and in the wider British Caribbean constituted the overwhelming majority of the African-born population.Footnote 79
In the late nineteenth century, the following West Central African ethnonyms were recorded in a Grenada newspaper: King Congo, Swanna Congo, and Matthias Congo.Footnote 80 As with the case of the missing West Central African Peate discussed in Chapter 5 specific forms of African ethnic labelling such as ‘Congo’ were unique identifiers that reflected the distinctiveness of recaptive Africans and their descendants in the post-emancipation British Caribbean.Footnote 81 Indeed, the visibility of West Central Africans and their descendants in the late nineteenth century echoes the fact that from 1860, all Africans were conveyed to Grenada via St Helena and, further, all slave ships arriving in St Helena were recorded as departing from West Central African ports.
The third narrative also sheds light on the presence of West Central Africans and provides harrowing descriptions of an individual’s recapture and forced indentureship, a traumatic event often absent from archival records. In 2014, Denise Roberts, a resident of Canada, recalled that her great-grandfather, Wellington Thomas, arrived on Grenada as a young child after emancipation. Roberts recorded her grand-aunt (b. 1927) recounting Thomas’s story, which Thomas himself told her when he was in his sixties. Wellington Thomas proudly described himself as a ‘full-blooded African from Congo’.Footnote 82 He arrived on Grenada at age fourteen aboard ‘one of the last slave ships’ to arrive on the island.Footnote 83 Using this small detail, it is possible to confidently estimate that Thomas had been born in West Central Africa around 1846–9.
Wellington Thomas’s memories of his early life in Africa included spending time in the field with his father, eating wild meat, undergoing his rite-of-passage ceremony, and attending rituals in his village. His childhood in West Central Africa ended abruptly when he was one day violently boarded onto a slave ship and transported across the Atlantic Ocean. At some point during the journey, he heard loud noises and presumed they derived from revolts or the sound of physical punishment being administered. The noises may have occurred in the course of the vessel’s capture by the Royal Navy anti-slave trade squadron. Years later, Roberts’s aunt recalled that the ship had stopped at several ports, and several weeks into the journey, Great Grandfather Thomas was landed on Grenada – following a declaration by a European that slavery was over.Footnote 84 It is possible the declaration was made in St Helena, where recaptives from various regions of West Central Africa were disembarked for adjudication and given tickets of emancipation before being transported on emigrant vessels to the Caribbean.
Thomas was indentured on the Conference Estate in St Andrew. Maybe he journeyed on the Akbar (1861), the only ship to have supplied the Conference Estate with recaptives in the 1860s. Just two Africans – a woman and a boy – were recorded arriving there on the Akbar.Footnote 85 The available evidence strongly suggests that this boy was fourteen-year-old Wellington Thomas. The young man had to learn to communicate through signing because no one on the estate understood his language. This would have been a common experience for West Central Africans, who were allocated to estates in smaller numbers than West Africans. According to Roberts’s grandaunt, ‘survival meant learning Massa’s language’, but he struggled to speak ‘like the other people’ on the estate and was shouted at, shoved, and beaten when he made mistakes.Footnote 86 This description of Thomas’s assimilation shows what was clearly a distressing and violent process: such brutal descriptions rarely appear in the writings of bureaucrats.
Following the end of his indentureship, Thomas married a Yoruba woman – likely of liberated African descent – and settled in Moyah, St Andrew. Thomas died in the 1940s at the age of ninety-five, but Roberts’s grandaunt remembered how he used to teach his children and grandchildren ‘Congolese’ songs and dances.Footnote 87 By analysing the recorded songs and phrases that her grandaunt remembered, Roberts has identified the language as Lingala, spoken by Bangala peoples along the Congo River.Footnote 88
Finally, the relationship between descendants and their African past is observable in the case of Malcolm X, one of the twentieth century’s most renowned African Americans, and his liberated African ancestor. The scholar and activist Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in the US state of Nebraska in 1925. His mother Louise Little (née Norton) was born in St Andrew, Grenada, in 1894.Footnote 89 According to the scholar Jan Carew, who interviewed him in 1965, Malcolm X was ‘shaped in no small measure by his Grenadian mother’ who was a Pan-Africanist and Garveyite. It was in Grenada that Louise Little first became aware of Marcus Garvey, the early twentieth-century Jamaican-born Black nationalist intellectual, from her uncle who travelled to New York. Louise Little later migrated to North America, where she frequently read Malcolm X and his siblings writings by Garvey and articles in the West Indian, the Grenadian nationalist newspaper.Footnote 90 According to Wilfred Little, Malcolm X’s older brother, Louise Little hid Garvey in her house and wrote letters for him while he was on the run from the FBI.Footnote 91
According to family narratives, Louise Little’s mother (Malcolm X’s grandmother) was Edith Langdon. Edith was brutally raped at age eleven by Edward Norton, a white Scotsman, who very quickly fled the island after committing that sex crime to avoid punishment by the Langdon family.Footnote 92 Edith Langdon gave birth to Louise Little in 1894. Malcolm X later wrote that his mother was ‘glad that she had never seen’ her white father. X himself remarked he ‘learned to hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me’.Footnote 93 Edith Langdon died while giving birth to one of Little’s siblings, and Louise Little’s grandmother, Mary Jane Langdon, assumed responsibility for her upbringing. However, as Mary Jane spent much time away from home, Louise Little’s aunt, Gertrude Langdon, became her ‘surrogate mother’.Footnote 94
Secondary accounts of the maternal background of Malcolm X do not usually proceed any further than the records of Louise Little’s death. In the parish records of St Andrew, however, the 1919 marriage entry of Gertrude Langdon (who resided in Richmond, St Andrew, and married Joseph Orgias) records that Gertrude’s father was Jupiter Langdon, deceased.Footnote 95 This is corroborated by interviews with Malcolm X’s maternal family on Grenada that reveal Gertrude’s parents – Malcolm X’s great-grandparents – were Samuel Jupiter Langdon and Mary Jane Langdon.Footnote 96
What more can be discerned about Samuel ‘Jupiter’ Langdon, the great-grandfather of Malcolm X? According to Langdon family oral sources collected by novelist and scholar Merle Collins and historian Erik McDuffie, Samuel Langdon and Mary Langdon were born in modern-day Nigeria and arrived on Grenada as liberated Africans.Footnote 97 The family histories record that Samuel Langdon was born in 1825, worked as a carpenter, and purchased land in La Digue, St Andrew.Footnote 98 Purchasing plots of land from estates or near estates on which liberated Africans had worked tirelessly was commonplace; on the plantations, recaptives cultivated subsistence crops and nourished relationships with loved ones that sustained them during their period of bonded servitude. Samuel Langdon died at the age of seventy-six in 1901.Footnote 99 Mary Langdon was born in 1848 and was considerably younger than her husband. She survived him by fifteen years, passing away in 1916 at the age of sixty-eight.Footnote 100 Apart from the birth records of the Langdons’s children, scholars have not offered any written archival evidence about Samuel himself. The documentary evidence that follows aims not to verify family oral accounts but rather to explore ways in which they animate documents by prompting historians to draw connections between an assortment of fragmentary documents.
Due to the infrequent recording of liberated African names, it is not possible to uncover the Langdons’s African names or trace which ship carried them to Grenada. Collins referenced family oral narratives that indicate an arrival in the 1860s and singles out the year 1863. In that year, John Langdon, attorney for two estates in the locality of where Samuel and Mary Langdon settled at La Digue, St Andrew, secured 36 recaptives on Mirabeau and St Cyr Estates combined.Footnote 101 However, an 1860s arrival casts doubt on the Langdons’s Nigerian origin because all recaptives landing in Grenada in that decade were embarked at West Central African ports.
Scouring through genealogical records at the Family History Center (FHC) reveals a significant piece of new evidence – the death record of an African-born individual named Samuel Langdon – permitting further connection between Samuel Langdon and the attorney John Langdon. It was John Langdon who reported the details of Samuel Langdon’s death that are recorded in the FHC registry.Footnote 102 From that entry, it can be deduced that Samuel Langdon was born in 1823, sixteen years after abolition of the British slave trade. Langdon would have indeed arrived in Grenada as a liberated African, sometime between the years 1836 and 1863.Footnote 103 Significantly, his date of birth is only two years apart from that detailed in oral accounts.Footnote 104 The brief tabular entry reads: Name of the party: ‘Samuel Langdon’; Place of birth when known: ‘Africa’, Name of party giving the information: ‘John Langdon’; Age: ‘76’; Place, or in whose house the event occurred: ‘Petit Esperance’ (St David).Footnote 105 The date and age at his death, 1901 and seventy-six respectively, is identical to that remembered in family oral narratives.Footnote 106
Is there sufficient evidence to firmly state that the progenitor of Malcolm X was Samuel ‘Jupiter’ Langdon, born in Africa? Archival documents are partial, however, oral accounts certainly support the claim. Did the proximity to an African-born ancestor influence the African nationalism of Louise Little and that of her uncle, Egerton Langdon, son of Mary and Samuel Langdon, who introduced Louise to Garveyism? Oral sources are consistent with this assertion. Carew, who interviewed Malcolm X in 1965, wrote of the immense influence of his mother, a Pan-Africanist and Garveyite. In addition, McDuffie stated that Jupiter Langdon provided Little and her family with a ‘direct link to Africa and to the memory of slavery’.Footnote 107 He reflected:
[the] descendants of Mary Jane and Jupiter Langdon still own the land where Jupiter Langdon is buried. I had the privilege to visit this grave. It was incredibly moving. It’s on the side of a hill outside the town of La Digue on the eastern side of the island. The grave faces the Atlantic Ocean which is so telling that both Jupiter and Mary Jane came from Africa and represents the roots and routes of this family.Footnote 108
This transatlantic Black consciousness held by some of the Langdon descendants is rooted in the indelible memory of a liberated African ancestor.
Significantly, in an interview with the Jamaican Daily Gleaner in 1964, in response to a question about whether his outlook and philosophy as a racialised Black man in America was influenced by his Caribbean heritage, Malcolm X recalled his mother’s relationship to her African past:
most people in the Caribbean area, are still proud that they are black, proud of the African blood, and their heritage; and I think this type of pride was instilled in my mother, and she instilled it in us, too, to the best degree she could. She had – despite the fact that her father was white – more African leanings, and African pride, and a desire to be identified with Africa.Footnote 109
These statements evidence how two liberated Africans in Grenada – Samuel and Mary Langdon – contributed to a transatlantic Black radical intellectual tradition of and beyond the twentieth century.
Africa was closer to recaptured peoples than officials ever conceived; the proximity to an African homeland appears as a vivid and recurrent theme in several historical memories. Due to the recentness of their arrival, there is a more ardent, and at times more specific, connection with Africa among liberated African descendants. A diasporic consciousness that is part of a wider Black Atlantic world view with roots in Africa was symbolically reinforced within the saraka tradition; salt, emblematic of a disjuncture with a homeland, was cautiously avoided or emphatically remembered. Although not solely held or remembered by liberated Africans and their descendants, the salt taboo, largely constructed in the diaspora from a medley of African ritual beliefs and practices, demonstrates the way in which Africans displayed a desire to return to Africa, spiritually or physically.
As the written record habitually rendered individual Africans invisible or reduced their lives to brief lines in death or land records, the act of remembering African individuals is an act of recovery. Through these oral narratives, more is known about the individual lives of recaptives, their names, place of birth, ethnic backgrounds, world views, traumatic recapture, cultural alienation, and the construction of ethnically based settlements. African birth and traces of African pride of individuals in the archives, such as Malcolm X’s great-grandfather, would influence Malcolm X’s world view. These sources then do more than recover: they reveal how individuals such as Malcolm X make sense of their histories and how it shapes their lives.
