Chapter 8 troubles two assumptions in liberated African scholarship. First, it shows that liberated Africans did more than renew and displace pre-existing African Caribbean cultures. Second, it argues that rather than being evidence of the survival of a homogenous group of Yoruba speakers, African work in Grenada has been shaped by interactions with pre-existing Creole cultures. By foregrounding exchange, intervention, and stigmatisation within and beyond the region of the Eastern Caribbean Sea, this chapter shows the ways in which Yoruba cultures were cross- fertilised with the Nation Dance, Roman Catholicism, obeah, saraka, and Indian cultures - thus contributing to the making of African work from the mid nineteenth century.

This chapter introduces African work and lays out the book's key argument: African work in Grenada is not a residue of recaptive Yoruba peoples but emerged from exchanges on and beyond Grenada. It examines the nineteenth-century slave trade, British suppression, the displacement of Yoruba speakers, and the various indentureship schemes in the British Caribbean. It provides a critical examination of the historiography of Grenada's African-derived religious cultures and recaptured Africans and shows how the book re-conceptualises the cultural legacies of recaptured Africans, particularly through 'un-islanding' the Orisa religion. This introductory chapter also outlines the wide range of sources used in the work, such as oral, archival, and ethnographic material.

Chapter 3 challenges long extant narratives about the ethnic homogeneity of Grenada's liberated Africans. Using archival evidence and M. G. Smith's unpublished field notes, it provides a demographic profile of liberated Africans detailing their ages, genders, ethnicities, linguistic groups, and geographical origins. The chapter argues that examining their backgrounds provides an understanding of their cultural legacies, specifically the African cultures that were carried to Grenada, and how these impacted the formation of African work.

Chapter 1 establishes the local context of the introduction of liberated Africans to Grenada and outlines the emergence of a plantation society built on unfree African labour. By emancipation in 1838, the formerly enslaved Africans had become a peasantry closely associated with Roman Catholicism and had developed Creole French, the Nation Dance, obeah, and saraka from their multiple African heritages and experiences in the Americas. They had survived and resisted enslavement through practising those cultures and by withdrawing fully or partially from plantation work, cultivating provision grounds, acquiring land, and forming villages; some of them migrated to Trinidad. These strategies and cultural practices were drawn upon by liberated Africans to refashion their own lives and cultures.