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African studies in the West Indies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Alan Cobley
Alan Cobley*
Affiliation:
University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados
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Extract

From the eighteenth century onwards a handful of the millions of Africans who had been caught in the transatlantic slave trade and transported to the Americas began to set down their experiences of enslavement, and of the African societies they had left behind. The writings of individuals such as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano were among the first to attempt, to present the western world with a view of the African continent not coloured by racial prejudice or avarice. Thus it can be argued that the origin of the modern discipline of African Studies lies in the black Atlantic world. From that time on, products of the African diaspora from the Caribbean have played a key role in developing both a scholarly understanding and a politicised consciousness of the African continent and its peoples.

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Type
Articles
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 86 , 2001, pp. 3 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2001

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Footnotes

A revised arid extended version of a paper originally published in ‘Africa Forum’ on H-Africa, 25 February 2001.

References

1. It should be noted however that in recent years the descendants of Africans have been overtaken as the majority population in Trinidad and Guyana (on the South American mainland) by the descendants of people from the Indian sub-continent. They have also inter-mingled in some places with significant populations of Amerindian, European (especially Hispanic) and even Chinese origin.Google Scholar
2. The ‘Asquith Colleges’ have been described by John Hargreaves as ‘Colonial universities’;. They were established after World War Two with sponsorship from the (British) Colonial Development and Welfare Fund to provide training f or the rising indigenous elites in various parts of the empire. All of the others were in Africa: Khartoum University College (1947), the University College of Ibadan (1948), Makerere University College (1949), and the University College of Nyasaland (1955).Google Scholar
3. It was published as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 (New York and London, Monthly Review Press, 1970).Google Scholar
4 Rodney, W. to Ranger, T.O. 30.11.65, quoted in Rupert Lewis, Charles, Walter Rodney's Intellectual and Political Thought (Kingston, Jamaica, University of the West Indies Press & Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1998), pp.43–44.Google Scholar
5. ibid., pp.44.Google Scholar
6. Many of Rodney's talks from this time were published in The groundings with my brothers (London, Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1969).Google Scholar
7. Aside from his teaching and research, Professor Thompson expressed his Africanist consciousness in the naming of his children. His son) Obadele Thompson (named for the ancient kings of West Africa) is a world-class sprinter who won a bronze medal for Barbados at the Sydney Olympics.Google Scholar
8. The scheme is set put in Fierce, Milfred C., Africana studies outside the United States: Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean (Cornell University Africana Studies Research Center Monograph Series No. 7, 1991), Appendix C. Fierce also notes that some African history was taught, at the College of the Virgin Islands during the late 1970s (Appendix E).Google Scholar
9. Williams was himself a noted historian. His most influential work remains Capitalism and Slavery (First published in 1944 - republished by André Deutsch, London, 1964).Google Scholar
10. Comments by Fitzroy Baptiste in a public lecture delivered in Barbados in March 1998 entitled, ‘Developments in African history and the African diaspora at the University of the West Indies, 1968-1998’, to be published in Goodridge, R. (ed.) Thirty years of African Studies at the University of the West Indies (Department of History, UWL forthcoming).Google Scholar
11. The Valdez Commission on Secondary Education in Trinidad and Tobago, quoted by Fitzroy Baptiste in ‘Developments in African History’.Google Scholar
12. See, for example, Alleyne, Mervyn, Roots of Jamaican culture (London, Pluto Press, 1988), which builds on a wide range of work on African survivals in Jamaica since the 1960s.Google Scholar
13. Copies of the Bulletin and of the Journal can be found in the Library at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Jamaica. [An author and subject index to all nine issues, compiled by Rouse-Jones, Margaret, was published in African research and documentation, 42, 1986, pp. 11–19. Editor's note]Google Scholar
14. The major product of this project to date is Allsopp's Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford University Press, Oxford and London, 1996). Over the past two years a project has been under way at Cave Hill, funded as part of the European Union's Cariforum Cultural Programmes, to prepare a multilingual supplement to the Dictionary, with entries in Spanish arid French.Google Scholar
15. Unfortunately this experiment was short-lived; for resource reasons the course was discontinued in 1982: Margaret Rouse-Jones, ‘African studies in the English-speaking Caribbean’, in s, 40, 1986, pp.2-3. There have been occasional attempts to develop African language courses elsewhere in the Caribbean since that time; however none of these efforts have endured forGoogle Scholar
16. See Díaz-Briquets, Sergio (ed.), Cuban Internationalism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Pittsburgh, Duquesrie University Press, 1989). ‘Google Scholar
17. Moore, Carlos, Castro, the Blacks and Africa (Los Angeles, CA, Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988, esp. Chapter 19).Google Scholar
18. See for example the proposal made in a recent internet posting on ‘Afro-CubaWeb’ for the establishment of a ‘Department of Afro-Cuban Studies’ at me University of Matanzas: http://afroaibaweb.com/rritzsu.htmGoogle Scholar
19. Margaret Rouse-Jones, ‘African studies in the English-speaking Caribbean’, p.1.Google Scholar
20. One such approach is proposed in my article, ‘Forgotten connections, unconsidered parallels: a new agenda for comparative research on Southern Africa and the Caribbean’, African Studies 58, 2 (1999), pp.133–155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar