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 5 examines the myriad ways Africans contested their indentureship, arguing that these cultural and economic choices by first-generation recaptive Africans shaped the formation of African work on Grenada. Like the actions taken by enslaved Africans, recaptured Africans left estates temporarily or permanently to establish and maintain bonds with shipmates or those of similar 'nations'. For the majority, African languages were spoken along with French, and church attendance was irregular. Moreover, a preference was expressed for Roman Catholicism because it was compatible with their religious cultures. While many of these choices indicate adaptation to a creolised society, they also demonstrate that adaptation was gradual and measured.

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.

The introduction deals with the problematic concept of ‘paganism’ and the nature and variety of Europe’s pre-Christian religions, examining concepts such as animism, religious creolisation, ‘shamanism’, syncretism, and the ‘Christianesque’, as well as exploring the difference between conversion and Christianisation. The introduction argues for the use of the term ‘unchristianised peoples’ as the best one to describe its subject. It surveys the historiography of the last pre-Christian peoples and delineates and justifies the book’s chronological and geographical scope. The introduction critiques the concept of ‘pagan survivals’ in the traditional historiography of European religions, arguing for a tighter definition of pre-Christian religions, and outlines the nature and limitations of the sources available for studying pre-Christian cults.

Roberge’s chapter presents Bickerton’s creolisation as a catastrophic single-generation process that obtains from first language acquisition in abnormal circumstances. In the ‘interesting’ cases, at least, a pidgin provides the primary linguistic data, and an innate biological program of linguistic competence shapes the result. On this view (i) the formation of these languages points directly to humankind’s biological capacity to create language should the normal generation-to-generation means of transmission be disrupted; and (ii) creoles provide the most direct window possible on the properties of the human language faculty. In his chapter Roberge chronicles the development and reception of Bickerton’s creole and pidgin windows on the origin and evolution of language in our species through their entire arc. While posterity has firmly rejected Bickerton’s creole window on early human language, Roberge argues that the pidgin window, at least, holds some heuristic potential, though a great deal of work remains to be done.

Neither southern Africa’s archaeology nor its history or contemporary social and political structure can be understood without reference to its experience of colonialism and conquest or of the resistance to this. This chapter therefore looks at the archaeology of Portuguese exploration and subsequent settlement in Mozambique, as well as at the much more expansive colonisation of southern Africa set in motion by the establishment of a Dutch East India Company (VOC) base at Cape Town in 1652. It traces the spread of European settlement into the region’s interior, the emergence of new creolised populations on and beyond the frontiers of that settlement, the institutionalisation of the social, economic, and political structures that led to apartheid, and – crucially – the resistance of Indigenous societies to this. Chapter 13 also discusses the Mfecane and the emergence of the Zulu, Basotho, Ndebele, and Swazi states, among others, to emphasise their contemporaneity and potential connections with European settler expansion and to encourage comparative study of processes of state formation, migration, and population incorporation common to both.

This chapter investigates the evolution of rap music in Guadeloupe at the end of the 1990s. Based on ethnographic data and grounded in both postcolonial and decolonial theories, the chapter explores the relationship between Guadeloupe and American hip-hop, as well as the role local French Caribbean cultural politics served in enabling new constructions of belonging to take root in Guadeloupe hip-hop.

This chapter introduces kokomakaku, a stickfight ritual from the Dutch island of Curaçao. Documenting its evolution and development, the chapter shows how music can be used to reconstruct a possible historical, social and cultural timeline of an island. Kokomakaku embodies the cultural encounters and conflicts that mark Curaçao’s past and present, its development, likewise, representing localised struggles for status and self-definition.