Clearly the condition of slavery, however bad it was, was not sufficiently bad to prevent the development of a reasonably self-sustaining slave community. This community, though often demographically unbalanced, nevertheless managed to create a Creole generation and thus had the potential to maintain and transmit its own culture. But what type of culture developed among the slave societies of the Atlantic basin?

Historians have traditionally been divided on this issue, some arguing that the slaves maintained an African culture and that African influence was significant in the resulting Afro-Atlantic culture, others maintaining that the cultural disorganization of slave society made them much more dependent upon the culture of the Europeans or Euro-Americans. Modern research has dispensed with the original dichotomous positions of the 1940s. Current thinking, while hardly reaching a consensus, can be well represented by the work of Mintz and Price, anthropologists who have sought to understand the dynamics of the formation of Afro- American, and specifically Afro-Caribbean, culture. They begin by arguing that the conditions of the slave trade and slavery prevented the direct transmission of African culture to the Americas. In the first case, African culture was not homogeneous enough to constitute a single cultural block; instead, dozens, if not more, independent cultures were involved (Map 5). Second, the slave trade tended to randomize slaves, grouping those of disparate cultures together, unlike European migration, which tended to occur in blocks of people from the same area traveling and settling in the Americas together.