3 Review(s)

Buttressed by historical documentary sources, and by painstaking linguistic researches, Maureen Warner-Lewis offers a re-issue and thematic expansion of her classic collection of essays on the forced and voluntary migration to Trinidad of West and West-Central Africans during the 1800s, extending through both the slavery and post-emancipation eras. The essays then examine some of the African cultural practices and artefacts as recalled by the biological descendants of these migrants during interviews with the author in the 1960s and 70s. The wars caused by ethnic and religious contestations, economic advantage, and imperial expansionism are a significant theme in the literary repertoire, which however embraces love, the yearning for home, pride in ethnic and family identity, the pain of exile, the separation of death. The writer further explores the poetic techniques, musical genres and instrumentation, language patterns, athletic and masquerade traditions, economic arrangements, religious beliefs and rituals of the Yoruba, Kongo, Angolan, Hausa, and Rada (Dahomeyan) communities which this peasantry and urban labour force introduced or reinforced on the island. While some of these artefacts have withered away, or are now moribund, others continue to inform the still-evolving twenty-first century cultural life of the island.