Following their indentureship, Africans continued to exercise economic and cultural autonomy by migrating to Trinidad for higher wages - establishing relationships with the larger Yoruba community there and impacting the local development of African work. Liberated Africans in Grenada also practised African- derived traditions and organised themselves in ethnically defined communities. Chapter 6 maintains that rather than assimilating into the African Grenadian population and losing their separate histories and identities, liberated Africans remained a distinctive category from the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans, in part because of their post-indenture experiences. In their resolve to resist labouring on plantations, recaptured Africans formed independent communities, pursued independent economic activities, migrated to Trinidad for higher wages, and recreated and practised African cultures. Their strategic decisions, along with sugar's decline after 1834, ultimately led to the failure of the African immigration scheme and laid the conditions for the establishment 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.