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.

From the early twentieth century, African work was reshaped by the emergence of the Spiritual Baptist Faith. Chapter 9 focuses on border-crossing devotees who spread the new religion throughout several locales in the Eastern Caribbean, returning to Grenada with a reworked version of the Spiritual Baptist Faith marked by South Asian and non-Christian European characteristics. The incorporation of the Spiritual Baptist Faith into African work practice indicates some ways in which liberated African cultures were invigorated by African Caribbean practices.

Chapter 10 considers how descendants of nineteenth-century Africans remember their forebearers. It builds on Chapter 6’s discussion on the distinctiveness of liberated Africans by recovering some individual biographies, exploring how they constructed alternative narratives of return, and how the individuals remained close to Africa through their awareness of indentured histories and cultural traditions. These memories form a diasporic consciousness, shared with the descendants of a liberated African ancestor who was the great-grandfather of Malcolm X.

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.