Afro-Caribbean people

Afro-Caribbean people

Afro-Caribbean store in Kilkenny, Ireland
Total population
21,711,860+
Regions with significant populations
Haiti	8.9 million
United States	2.88 million
Jamaica	2.5 million
Dominican Republic	1.7 million[1]
Cuba	1.0 million
United Kingdom	1.0 million[2]
Trinidad and Tobago	452,536[3]
Guadeloupe	403,750
Canada	383,533
Bahamas	372,000
Puerto Rico	342,000
Martinique	330,000
Guyana	290,000
Barbados	253,771
Suriname	202,500
Saint Lucia	173,765
Curaçao	148,000
French Guiana	131,676
U.S. Virgin Islands	80,868
Grenada	101,309
Belize	93,394
Antigua and Barbuda	82,041
Dominica	72,660
Saint Kitts and Nevis	38,827
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	98,693[4]
Languages
English English Creole Caribbean Jamaican, Trinidadian, Tobagonian, Garifuna, Bahamian, Guyanese, Bajan, Grenadian, Belizean, Saint Kitts, Vincentian, Sranan Tongo French French Creole Haitian, Antillean Spanish Caribbean Spanish Papiamento Yoruba Other West African languages
Religion
Predominantly: Christianity Minority: Islam Baháʼí Judaism Traditional African religion Afro-American religion Obeah Rastafari Santería Orisha Trinidad Orisha Yoruba Vodou Others
Related ethnic groups
Afro–Latin Americans, Americo-Liberians, African Americans, West Africans

Afro-Caribbean people or African-Caribbean people are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Africa. The majority of the modern African-Caribbeans descend from Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro or Black West Indian or Afro or Black Antillean. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.^[5]

People of Afro-Caribbean descent today mainly have between 60-100% African ancestry with their remaining DNA being of non-African ancestry, such as those of European and South Asian or native Caribbean descent, as there has been extensive intermarriage and unions among the peoples over the centuries.

Although most Afro-Caribbean people today live in English, French and Spanish-speaking Caribbean nations and territories, there are also significant diaspora populations throughout the Western world—especially in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France and the Netherlands. African-Caribbeans have maintained their African culture and heritage, and traditional African religions, like Santeria (a mix of Catholicism and Yoruba Orishas) are still being practiced. For this reason, in some Caribbean countries, African languages are being spoken, like Igbo and Yoruba in Cuba, and Brazil (South America) . Both the home and diaspora populations have produced a number of individuals who have had a notable influence on modern African, Caribbean and Western societies; they include political activists such as Marcus Garvey and C. L. R. James; writers and theorists such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon; US military leader and statesman Colin Powell; and musicians Bob Marley, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna.

History[]

16th–18th centuries[]

During the post-Columbian era, the archipelagos and islands of the Caribbean were the first sites of African diaspora dispersal in the western Atlantic. Specifically, in 1492, Pedro Alonso Niño, an African-Spanish seafarer, was recorded as piloting one of Columbus' ships. He returned in 1499, but did not settle. In the early 16th century, more Africans began to enter the population of the Spanish Caribbean colonies, sometimes arriving as free men of mixed ancestry or as indentured servants, but increasingly as enslaved workers and servants. This increasing demand for African labour in the Caribbean was in part the result of massive depopulation of the native Taino and other indigenous peoples caused by the new infectious diseases, harsh conditions, and warfare brought by European colonists. By the mid-16th century, the slave trade from West Africa to the Caribbean was so profitable that Francis Drake and John Hawkins were prepared to engage in piracy as well as break Spanish colonial laws, in order to forcibly transport approximately 1500 enslaved people from Sierra Leone to San Domingo (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic).^[6]

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European colonial development in the Caribbean became increasingly reliant on plantation slavery to cultivate and process the lucrative commodity crop of sugarcane. On many islands shortly before the end of the 18th century, the enslaved Afro-Caribbeans greatly outnumbered their European masters. In addition, there developed a class of free people of color, especially in the French islands, where persons of mixed race were given certain rights.^[7] On Saint-Domingue, free people of color and slaves rebelled against harsh conditions, and constant inter-imperial warfare. Inspired by French revolutionary sentiments that at one point freed the slaves, Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines led the Haitian Revolution that gained the independence of Haiti in 1804, the first Afro-Caribbean republic in the Western Hemisphere.

19th–20th centuries[]

In 1804, Haiti, with its overwhelmingly African population and leadership, became the second nation in the Americas to win independence from a European state. During the 19th century, continuous waves of rebellion, such as the Baptist War, led by Sam Sharpe in Jamaica, created the conditions for the incremental abolition of slavery in the region by various colonial powers. Great Britain abolished slavery in its holdings in 1834. Cuba was the last island to be emancipated, when Spain abolished slavery in its colonies.

During the 20th century, Afro-Caribbean people, who were a majority in many Caribbean societies, began to assert their cultural, economic, and political rights with more vigor on the world stage. Marcus Garvey was among many influential immigrants to the United States from Jamaica, expanding his UNIA movement in New York City and the U.S.^[8] Afro-Caribbeans were influential in the Harlem Renaissance as artists and writers. Aimé Césaire developed a négritude movement.

In the 1960s, the West Indian territories were given their political independence from British colonial rule. They were pre-eminent in creating new cultural forms such as reggae music, calypso and Rastafari within the Caribbean. Beyond the region, a developing Afro-Caribbean diaspora in the United States, including such figures as Stokely Carmichael and DJ Kool Herc, was influential in the development of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and the hip-hop movement of the 1980s. African-Caribbean individuals also contributed to cultural developments in Europe, as evidenced by influential theorists such as Frantz Fanon^[9] and Stuart Hall.^[10]

Notable people[]

Politics[]

• Sir Grantley Adams – Barbados, politician and lawyer; the first and only Prime Minister of the West Indies Federation (1958–1962)
• Jean-Bertrand Aristide – politician, priest and head of state, Haiti
• Dean Barrow – head of government, Belize
• Maurice Bishop – Grenada, revolutionary leader
• Paul Bogle – Jamaica, political activist
• Ertha Pascal Trouillot – Haiti, first Black female president in the world, lawyer
• Juan Almeida Bosque – Cuban revolutionary and politician
• Dutty Boukman – Haitian freedom fighter
• Forbes Burnham – Guyana, head of government
• Bussa – Barbados, freedom fighter
• Stokely Carmichael – Trinidad-born, civil rights activist and leader in the US
• Mary Eugenia Charles – Dominican head of government
• Perry Christie – Bahamian, politician and lawyer
• Henri Christophe – Haiti, revolutionary, general and head of state
• David Clarke(sheriff)- Barbudan, Former Sheriff of Milwaukee
• John Compton – Saint Lucia, politician and lawyer
• Paris Dennard-Grenada, former CNN political commentator
• Jean-Jacques Dessalines – Haiti (est. 1804), revolutionary, general and first head of state of independent Haiti
• Papa Doc Duvalier – dictator of Haiti, 20th century
• Marcus Garvey – Jamaica, politician and writer, founder of UNIA and active in US politics from 1916–1927
• Philip Goldson – Belize, politician
• Sam Hinds – Guyana, head of government
• Hubert Ingraham – Bahamian, politician and lawyer
• Toussaint L'Ouverture – Saint-Domingue, revolutionary, general and governor
• Joseph Robert Love – Bahamian-born, medical doctor; Jamaican politician and political activist who influenced Marcus Garvey
• Antonio Maceo Grajales – Cuban revolutionary and general
• Michael Manley – Jamaica, politician
• Jon Miller-Montserrat, Conservative Review, BlazeTV Host
• Nanny of the Maroons – Jamaica, freedom fighter
• Candace Owens-British Virgin Islander, PragerU Radio and Founder of Blexit
• Lynden Pindling – Bahamian politician, and first Prime minister of the Bahamas
• Samuel Jackman Prescod – Barbados, first elected Afro-Caribbean politician in the House of Assembly
• Sam Sharpe – Jamaica, freedom fighter
• Solitude – Guadeloupe, freedom fighter
• Eric Eustace Williams – Trinidad and Tobago politician, writer and head of government
• Colin Powell – Jamaican descent, US Army General, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Kamala Devi Harris – Jamaican descent, first African American and first Female Asian American and First Female Vice President of the United States

Science and philosophy[]

• Frantz Fanon – Martinique, writer, psychiatrist and freedom fighter
• Hubert Harrison – St. Croix, writer, orator, educator, critic, and race and class conscious political activist based in Harlem, New York
• Stuart Hall – Jamaican philosopher
• C. L. R. James – Trinidad and Tobago, activist and writer
• W. Arthur Lewis – Saint Lucia, economist and Nobel Prize recipient
• Pedro Alonso Niño – Afro-Spanish explorer
• Arlie Petters – Belizean mathematician
• Walter Rodney – Guyanese activist and writer
• Mary Seacole – Jamaican nurse and hospital director

Arts and culture[]

• Carlos Acosta – Cuba, ballet dancer
• Beenie Man – Jamaica, artist and musician
• Frank Bowling – Guyana, painter
• Aimé Césaire – Martinique, fiction writer
• Celia Cruz – Cuba, singer
• Stacey Dash – Barbadian descent, actress
• AngelaMaria Davila- Puerto Rican poet
• Eddy Grant – Guyana, singer and musician
• Edward W. Hardy – Puerto Rican, composer and musician
• C. L. R. James – Trinidad, historian, essayist and journalist
• Wyclef Jean – Haitian singer, composer and activist
• Earl Lovelace – Trinidad, novelist and writer
• Luis Palés Matos - Puerto Rican poet
• Bob Marley – Jamaica, singer and musician
• Ziggy Marley (Bob Marley’s son) - Jamaica, singer and musician
• The Mighty Sparrow – Grenadian/Trinidadian singer and composer
• Trinidad James - Trinidad, rapper
• Zoe Saldana – American actress of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent
• Nicki Minaj – Trinidad, rapper and singer
• Sean Paul – Jamaica, dancehall artist
• Sidney Poitier – Bahamas, first actor of African American or Afro-Caribbean descent to win an Academy Award-winning in the USA
• Rihanna – Barbados, singer
• Chevalier de Saint-Georges – Guadeloupe, composer
• Bebo Valdés – Cuban musician
• Corinne Bailey Rae - singer of Kittian descent
• Derek Walcott – Saint Lucia, poet, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Sports[]

• Kirani James - Grenada, Grenada's first Olympic Gold Medalist and World's Fastest 400m runner from 2012-2016
• Omar Amir-Bahamas, professional wrestler in the Ohio Valley Wrestling Arena
• Deandre Ayton – Bahamas, #1 Overall Pick of the 2018 NBA Draft and player for the Phoenix Suns
• Ozzie Albies – Curaçao, MLB player for the Atlanta Braves
• John Barnes – Jamaican-born English footballer
• Usain Bolt – Jamaica, Olympics gold medalist and world's fastest man
• Kingsley Coman – Guadeloupe, football player
• Tonique Williams-Darling - Bahamas, 400m runner and Olympic gold medalist
• Tim Duncan – St. Croix (Anguilla parentage), basketball player
• Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce – Jamaica, athlete
• Thierry Henry – Guadeloupe, football player, best French scorer
• Buddy Hield – Bahamas, NBA player for the Sacramento Kings
• Kenley Jansen – Curaçao, MLB player for the Los Angeles Dodgers
• Brian Lara – Trinidad, cricketer
• Anthony Martial – Guadeloupe, French football player
• Shaunae Miller – Bahamian, 400m and 200m runner and Olympic gold medalist
• Burgess Owens-Barbadian-born,former American football player
• Sir Vivian Richards – Antigua, cricketer
• Teddy Riner – Guadeloupe, Judoka
• Darren Sammy – Saint Lucia, cricketer
• Kimbo Slice – Bahamian boxer and MMA fighter
• Sir Garfield Sobers – Barbados, cricketer
• Karl-Anthony Towns – Dominican republic, #1 overall pick in the 2015 NBA Draft, NBA player for the Minnesota Timberwolves
• Marcellus Wiley - Martinican American,Former American football player and FOX Sports commentator/host
• Adam Sanford - Dominican cricketer
• Jayde Riviere - Dominican, Football Player

Main groups[]

• Afro-Antiguan and Barbudan
• Afro-Bahamian
• Afro-Barbadian
• Afro-Bermudian
• Afro-Colombians
• Afro-Costa Ricans
• Afro-Cuban
• Afro-Dominican (Dominica)
• Afro-Dominican (Dominican Republic)
• Afro-Grenadian
• Afro-Guatemalan
• Afro-Guyanese
• Afro-Haitians
• Afro-Hondurans
• Afro-Jamaican
• Afro-Kittian and Nevisian
• Afro-Mexicans
• Afro-Nicaraguan
• Afro-Panamanian
• Afro-Puerto Ricans
• Afro-Saint Lucian
• Afro-Salvadoran
• Afro-Surinamese
• Afro-Trinidadians and Tobagonians
• Afro-Venezuelan
• Afro-Vincentian
• Belizean Creole people
• Other members of the African diaspora in or from the Caribbean

Culture[]

• Afro-Caribbean culture
• Afro-Caribbean music
• Afro-Caribbean religion

See also[]

• Afro-Latin Americans
• African diaspora in the Americas

References[]

External links[]

• The dictionary definition of Afro-Caribbean at Wiktionary