The persistence (and resistance) of African institutions in the West Indies

To what extent can we take Mother Earth's cosmogony as a purely personal vision? It might appear that we are able to distinguish here the simple manifestation of contemporary Creole patterns from more limited and selfconsciously ‘African’ representations and also from her own distinctive innovations. That may be neat, but mistaken. An ‘innovation’ is only an innovation within and against some continuing tradition out of which it develops, and from which individuals derive their images and concerns.

Such a continuing existence of the past in the present is an enduring concern for Caribbean studies in considering a society grounded in a particular moment of Western capitalism, a political history well documented since its inception. Scholarly literature on personal life in the West Indies follows two rather distinct lines of approach. Principally there is the synchronic study of the ‘matrifocal’ Black household, its individuals, sentiments and productive relations.

The second approach also considers contemporary social relations but is concerned with the extent to which existing patterns of experience and action among the Creole working class reflect those African societies from which the slaves were once torn. This latter area of debate was first laid out by Melville Herskovits in 1941 in his book The Myth of the Negro Past, where he developed its characteristic terminology – ‘syncretism’, ‘retention’, ‘survival’ and ‘reinterpretation’. He postulated a continuum of African retentions in African–American societies ranging from the Bush Negroes of Surinam (with maximal retention), through Haiti, the British West Indies, to the urban Blacks of the United States.