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.

One-fifth of recaptives landing between 1836 and 1837 were involuntarily enlisted in the West Indian Regiment in Trinidad. The rest of the recaptives were required to sign contracts of indentureship, most commonly on sugar and cocoa plantations. The contractual obligations of indentured Africans were shaped by the same terms of apprenticeship imposed on formerly enslaved peoples following emancipation, and their survival and resistance strategies similarly recalled those previously enacted by African Grenadians. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the various indentureship schemes on the island, including the experiences of the recaptured at reception depots and their contractual requirements. It also explains the preference for African as opposed to South Asian labourers, and how the ideas about civilising Africans informed the campaigns and arguments of both supporters and opponents of the scheme.

On modern-day Grenada, African work is the most enduring and significant cultural inheritance of both enslaved and liberated Africans. Using oral narratives produced by M. G. Smith in 1952-3 and collected by this author between 2009 and 2023, Chapters 7, 8, and 9 complicate Smith's early twentieth century conceptualisation of African work as a surviving cultural practice of a large group of Ijesha-speaking Yoruba recaptives. Chapter 7 delineates Yoruba aspects of African work, arguing that some Yoruba influences can be located beyond the Ijesha. Yoruba cultures appealed to a diverse audience, leading to the Yorubisation of various African beliefs. Eventually, Yoruba-derived religious cultures came to be known as 'African' in response to local circumstances, such as the rejection of exogenously imposed labels by practitioners and the appeal from the broader African-descended population.

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 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.

Liberated Africans sought freedom and solidarity during their enlistment and indenture that impaired the process of creolisation. Chapter 4 draws out their experiences from several documentary accounts; these often neglect the physical and emotional trauma endured during the crossing. It examines the coercive nature of enlistment, allocation to the estates, the nature of work regimes, and how recaptives wrestled with those conditions. The chapter stresses the restrictions liberated Africans experienced, the ways local and imperial forces sought to 'civilise' them, and how recaptives drew on shared African histories and experiences in the homeland and the Caribbean to pursue freedom.

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 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.

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.

The epilogue reflects on some of the stark differences between the Grenadian and Trinidadian and Tobagonian religious climates and considers recent efforts to revive Yoruba culture on Grenada, reiterating the ways African work within the Eastern Caribbean Sea is co-constructed and interrelated - yet also marked by difference. It emphasises the book's aim of providing a study of Africans who, arriving decades after the abolition of the British slave trade, radically shaped the religious and cultural landscape of Grenada. It argues for the need to move beyond emphasising unidirectional culture flows as is characteristic of the creolisation- survival debate to examining the historical processes by which African work has been recreated, reconfigured, and rejuvenated by local factors as well as the movement of peoples, commodities, and ideas around the Eastern Caribbean Sea and beyond.