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Article

Bailey, Beryl Isadore Loftman  

Margaret Wade-Lewis

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

the first African American female linguist, early theorist in Pidgin and Creole linguistics, and educator, was born Beryl Isadore Loftman in Black River, Jamaica, West Indies. Her mother, Eliza Isadore Smith Loftman, was a teacher, and her father, James Henry Loftman, was an educator who became an inspector of schools. Because she was of the middle class, Beryl Loftman was expected to converse in Standard Jamaican English. Nevertheless, she valued the rhythm, music, and style of Creole: “Though I was forbidden to speak Jamaican Creole in the home during my childhood, my use of Standard Jamaican English was restricted to the earshot of my parents, teachers. … With my playmates, brothers and sisters, household help, and the country folk, I conversed always in Creole” (Bailey, “Creole Languages,” 3).

Loftman was the eldest of six children and she and her siblings Lucille Myrtle Kenneth Seymour and Howard who died ...

Article

Bathoen, I  

Maitseo Bolaane

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Kgosi of the Bangwaketse, was born at Tswaaneng, southern Gangwaketse, in Botswana. The eldest son of Kgosi Gaseitsiwe’s senior wife, Bathoen I was heir to the Bangwaketse chieftaincy. His mother was of the Batlhware people. He learned to read and write at a London Missionary Society mission (LMS) school. As the son of Kgosi, he became leader of the Maisantwa regiment, initiated in 1864 (Ngcongco 1977: 277). Bathoen became chief of the Bangwaketse in July 1889 after the death of his father, Gaseitsewe. The key events of Bathoen’s life related to the growth of British colonial power in this period. In 1885 Botswana became a British protectorate. Khama of Bangwato, Bathoen of Bangwaketse, and Sebele of Bakwena were key players during the period (1890–1891 when Britain s control over Botswana developed from a vague protectorate over the southern part to a more clearly defined though still in practice ...

Article

Black Caribbeans  

Alvin O. Thompson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 1998
Published online:
30 September 2010

Black slavery in the Caribbean was primarily an economic phenomenon although it had important political and social ramifications A large cheap docile labor force was the ideal the Europeans sought for their sugar coffee cocoa cotton and other tropical plantations The sparsity of the indigenous Caribbean populations in most of the islands at the time of the European arrival and their subsequent decimation by inhuman treatment and epidemic diseases introduced from Europe and Africa led to a critical shortage of labor for the new European plantations The geographical location of Africa and the collaboration of the African ruling classes with the European purveyors of the slave trade ensured continuous supply of slaves from that source Over time the introduction of Africans radically changed the demographic economic social and cultural landscape of the Caribbean Peoples of African descent today constitute the largest population groups in most of the islands and are ...

Article

Cardiff (Welsh Caerdydd)  

Charlotte Williams

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Capital city of Wales and home to one of the oldest black communities in Europe. The first black settlers were seamen from Africa, the West Indies, and America, and arrived in Cardiff around the middle of the 19th century. This was at a time when the city was enjoying a period of economic growth, having started on the road to becoming the major coal port by the late 19th century. Attracted by the prospect of employment, many seamen stayed and made the docklands area of Butetown (disparagingly known as Tiger Bay) their home. Many, too, married or befriended local white women and raised families. Indeed, such was the multiracial population of Butetown that it was popularly said you could see the world in 1 square mile.

Cardiff's economic growth was relatively short‐lived, however, and went into a steep decline soon after the First World War When returning Welsh servicemen ...

Article

Caribbean art, British responses to  

Leon Wainwright

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

The Caribbean region is more often stereotyped and dismissed in Britain than taken seriously as a location for art production, and has only ever reached small audiences, despite some significant exhibitions and critical attention.

1.Images and objects collected from the Caribbean during the colonial period

2.Migration of artists during the 20th century

3.Art reception in the 1960s and 1970s

4.Exhibitions of the 1980s and 1990s

5.Curatorial selection and its consequences

There is little consensus on what defines a coherent category of Caribbean art in terms of its geographical boundaries and cultural character and given its growing diaspora The region s Anglophone countries have contributed the most to art exhibitions staged in the United Kingdom the consequence of a shared colonial history and of migration Throughout the post Second World War period many artists from the Caribbean engaged in struggles for acceptance within the history of ...

Article

Caribbean Influences On American Food  

Alice Ross and Mark H. Zanger

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
30 September 2004
Published online:
01 December 2006

The Caribbean influence on American food has been continual for hundreds of years, initially in coastal areas of similar climate, from Texas to the Carolinas. The early Spanish involvement in the Caribbean brought Caribbean foods to Europe and Africa, from whence they quickly returned to North America. Spanish gold shipments attracted other Europeans to the area and brought about the colonization of eastern North America. Cheap Caribbean sugar, coffee, cocoa, and spices have influenced the palates and tables of all Americans. The peoples of the Caribbean islands have developed multicultural cuisines that have been affecting American cooking at all levels since colonial times.

Influence of the Caribbean on contemporary American food may predate Columbus, because there is some possibility that Caribbean Indians reached Florida and introduced tropical tubers, or chilies. The chain of influence began in 1492 as the varieties of maize beans chilies squash peanuts and cassava collected ...

Article

Caribbean, British colonies in the  

Jonathan Morley

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

‘Our hammock slung between the Americas’ is how Derek Walcott described the Caribbean, and inspection of a map of the region provides visual evidence for his words. To the west, the large islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico extend from the American mainland. To the east, northward from Venezuela we find Trinidad and Tobago; Barbados, a sedimentary deposit; Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia, Dominica, Montserrat, Nevis, and St Kitts (British), Martinique and Guadeloupe (French), forming the volcanic rim of the eastern Caribbean Sea; and further north, islands such as Anguilla, Barbuda, and Antigua cast leeward into the Atlantic. The map's lower‐right base is anchored in the massive territories of Guyana (British), Suriname (Dutch), and French Guiana, themselves dwarfed by Brazil.

1.Early contact

2.Entry of the British

3.The Anglo‐Dutch Wars

4.‘King Sugar’

5.Capitalism and slavery

6.‘The Williams thesis’

7.Problems of slave societies ...

Article

Cetshwayo ka Mpande  

Michael R. Mahoney

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Zulu king, was born in emLambogwenya, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, to the future King Mpande ka Senzangakhona and his wife Ngqumbazi. In 1839, shortly after Mpande defected from his brother King Dingane’s side in the war between the Zulus and the Boers, he officially declared that Cetshwayo would be his heir, even presenting him as such at a meeting of the Boer legislature that year.

As Cetshwayo grew up, he became involved in the various intrigues in the Zulu royal house. One of the main issues in these intrigues was the relative status of Mpande’s twenty-nine wives, each of whom came from a prominent family either within the Zulu kingdom or neighboring it. It has long been customary in polygamous households in this region for the husband to name one of his wives as inkosikazi, or chief wife with her eldest son being heir ...

Article

Colenso, Harriette  

Meghan Elisabeth Healy

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

British advocate for the Zulu kingdom and Anglican missionary, was born in Norfolk, England. She was the first of five children born to John William Colenso and Sarah Frances (Bunyon) Colenso, a couple whose universalistic Christian faith pushed them into repeated confrontations with ecclesiastical and colonial authorities.

In 1853 John Colenso was appointed the Anglican bishop of Natal, and in 1855 the Colensos established their home and mission station at Bishopstowe, near the colonial capital of Pietermaritzburg. Known as Ekukhanyeni (“the place of light” in Zulu), the Colensos’s mission station became a center of Christian schooling and evangelization in the colony. Ekukhanyeni also became a center of political agitation: Bishop Colenso advocated for the AmaHlubi Chief Langalibalele ka Mthimkhulu during the chief’s trial on charges of rebellion in 1874, and he supported the Zulu king Cetshwayo ka Mpande during and after the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.

Bishop Colenso ...

Article

Demography  

Barry Higman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 1998
Published online:
30 September 2010

Slave populations were never truly separate from the free populations within which they existed. The number and proportion of persons in a society who lived as slaves depended on a variety of factors, some internal and some external to the enslaved population. Growth in slave populations resulted from the external processes of enslavement, forced migration, and changes in the status of individuals within societies, and from the internal process of fertility (although some of the fathers of slave children were free persons). Population decrease resulted from changes in the status of the enslaved class at large—abolition and partial abolition—or in the status of individual slaves (through manumission, coartación or maroonage from forced migration and from mortality These events and processes linked enslaved and free people in complex ways In some cases slaves were able to exercise a degree of control over the demographic events whether by acts of resistance ...

Article

Dinka  

Robert Baum

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The Dinka people, who number approximately 1.5 million (though estimates vary), are divided into twenty-five subgroups, each of which has its own name. Each once occupied a distinct territory. Each group is further subdivided into a number of lineages based on patrilineal descent (descent through the father’s line). The groups were led politically by a chief from a dominant lineage within the group, but his authority depended on general consensus and the cooperation of individuals. The religious authority of each group’s spear master (chosen from a second prominent lineage) complemented the primarily secular power of the chiefs. The spear master represented the power of tradition and the authority of the ancestors. Like their Nuer neighbors, the Dinka derived their livelihood mainly from cattle raising, though the cultivation of millet, fishing, and hunting were important supplemental activities.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Dinka expanded their control over southern Sudan ...

Article

Ethnicity and Race in the Military  

Bruce White

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
13 April 2000
Published online:
01 December 2006

Ethnicity and race have been less troubling military questions for the United States than for nations where ethnic and racial competition, political power struggles, or caste systems have had a military dimension. Nonetheless, both factors have created military dilemmas for Americans from the earliest colonial settlements. Before the Revolutionary War, many white colonists, who considered blacks biologically and culturally inferior and poor material for soldiers, were also afraid of arming slaves and free blacks and of losing their labor services. Sometimes blacks were excluded from the colonial militias, particularly in the South, but military need could overshadow racial fear, such as during the French and Indian War. Some slaves were even granted their freedom for wartime military service.

Ethnocentrism suspicion of loyalties and loss of labor also militated against the military use of some non English immigrants but the need for frontier defense in the eighteenth century contributed to the ...

Article

Fuze, Magema  

Hlonipha Mokoena

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

, Zulu printer, tutor, and author, was born near present-day Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. All that is known about his paternal genealogy is that his father, Magwaza, was the son of Matomela, who was the son of Thoko, and that the amaFuze (the Fuze people) were a sub-clan of the amaNgcobo (the Ngcobo lineage); his maternal genealogy is unknown. His exact birth date is also unknown. The estimate year is based on John William Colenso’s guess that the young Magema was twelve years old when Colenso, the Bishop of Natal, met him in 1856. Even these facts do not accurately establish Fuze’s identity, however, because at various times in his life he was known by different names. At birth, he was given the name “Manawami,” but he was soon nicknamed “Skelemu” (derived from the Afrikaans word skelm meaning rascal or trickster because of his repeated prophecy to his ...

Article

Gagoangwe  

Judith Imel Van Allen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

mohumagadi (queen or queen-mother) successively of the Mmanaana Kgatla and BaNgwaketse (subgroups of the BaTswana in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, present-day Botswana), was born around 1845. She was also regent of the BaNgwaketse for her grandson, Bathoen II, later a prominent leader in colonial and postindependence politics. Gagoangwe was a daughter of Sechele I, king (kgosi) of the BaKwena, and his wife Mokgokong. As a child, Gagoangwe put out the eye of a servant, and her militantly Christian father, asserting both the biblical injunction of “an eye for an eye” and a certain equality among BaKwena, allowed the servant to blind his own daughter in return. She later became known as the “one-eyed queen.”

Gagoangwe first married Kgosi Pilane of the Mmanaana Kgatla, but in 1875 eloped with Bathoen I, heir to rulership (bogosi of the BaNgwaketse and later married him Gagoangwe was a devout Christian and an ...

Article

Gawrang II, Abdul Rahman  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

mbang (king) of the Chadian Baguirmi kingdom, was born in the middle of the nineteenth century. In his youth, his predecessor Ab Sakin battled numerous internal and external foes to retain his title as mbang. Bagurimi had long been dragged into disputes between its neighbors: the kingdom of Bornu to the west and the kingdom of Wadai to the east. Since the successes of Wadai’s dynamic ruler Sabun in the early nineteenth century, Wadai had treated Bagurimi as a vassal state. Ab Sakin tried to break free from Wadai, and a Wadaian army destroyed the Bagurimian capital of Massenya in 1871 in retaliation. Ab Sakin continued to fight against the Wadai and other claimants to the throne of Baguirmi. Yusuf, Sultan of Wadai, decided to impose a new king on Baguirmi more favorable to Wadai’s influence. At Ab Sakin’s death in 1884 Yusuf ensured the victory of Abdul ...

Article

Gbaya  

Eric Young

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

The Gbaya, who speak a Niger-Congo language, number more than a million, mainly in the west of the Central African Republic. Fleeing Fulani slave raids and holy wars connected with the founding of the Sokoto Caliphate, the ancestors of the Gbaya migrated to the region from present-day northern Cameroon and Nigeria in the early 1800s. They incorporated many of the indigenous inhabitants, creating the six basic subgroups of the Gbaya. Fulani continued to raid the Gbaya region each year to capture slaves for sale, both in the Caliphate and to trans-Saharan caravans.

The traditional Gbaya political organization was decentralized, with village chiefs acting as symbolic leaders and judges rather than political rulers. Only in emergencies were war chiefs temporarily elected, as among the Banda. In war, age sets insured unity by cutting across clan identities. The clans managed trade with foreigners, marriage arrangements, and religious customs.

French ...

Article

Gobana Dacchi  

Mohammed Hassen Ali

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Oromo political and military figure in Ethiopia, was born in 1821 into a noble Christian Oromo family. Menilek of Shawa’s escape from the prison of Emperor Tewodros II and his return to his kingdom in 1865 catapulted Gobana onto a wider historical stage. Gobana submitted to Menilek and put his immense wealth, experience, and legendary military talent at the disposal of the young king. In return, Menilek appointed Gobana as abagaz (chief of the palace guard), which marked the beginning of his spectacular rise to power.

Gobana Dacchi was given the task of conquering the surrounding Oromo and other ethnic groups in Shawa. Gobana accomplished this with speed, through threat of force and promise of local autonomy. He allowed Oromo leaders to keep their lands in return for payment of tribute to Menilek. Gobana Dacchi brought significant changes to the territories newly added to Menilek’s kingdom. He established katamas ...

Article

Harlem  

Marcy S. Sacks

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

The black presence in New York City dates back to the earliest years of Dutch colonization in the early seventeenth century. Over the generations, as the population of Manhattan increased in size, the once relatively scattered black population gradually became more concentrated within fewer geographic regions of the city. The 1800s witnessed the beginning of an uptown march, as the black population that had been centered in the working-class district of Five Points on the lower tip of the island early in the century faced residential pressures, leading it to shift its hub into modern-day Greenwich Village, then to an area known as the Tenderloin situated approximately between Twentieth and Fortieth streets. Though racial prejudice limited their housing options, black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century nevertheless lived in fairly heterogeneous working-class communities alongside ethnic whites.

The turn of the twentieth century however witnessed a precipitous growth in the black ...

Article

Hate Groups  

Theodore W. Eversole

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

The range of American organizations that can be accurately labeled “hate groups” is wide, but in general they share a common ideological commitment to intolerance and racism. These groups often manifest a willingness to use violence or the threat of violence to achieve their aims. Such entities function on the political fringes of a liberal democracy and feed on the suspicions, hatreds, and frustrations of people who see minorities as the root of all evil. Such philosophies deny both reality and the rational. Hate groups thrive on assumptions of supposed racial superiority, and commonly see themselves as defenders of a threatened but undefined American culture.

Historically and conceptually these groups are not new but have in various forms and disguises existed for years They are a reactive force to changing domestic circumstances such as late nineteenth and early twentieth century Catholic and Jewish immigration as well as African American liberation ...

Article

Iloo, Makoko  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

king of the Tio kingdom of the Téké people, was born at the village of Ngon, near the Gamboma River in modern Republic of the Congo. He belonged to a royal lineage since his probable grandfather, Opontaba, had been king. His kingdom engaged in several wars against Bobangui slave traders who lived north of the Malebo Pool on the Congo River in the mid-nineteenth century. The pool served as a vital meeting place for slave and ivory trading and had been controlled by Téké leaders for several centuries. Bobangui forces ultimately forced Iloo to make some concessions toward their demand for trading rights on the pool in the 1850s or 1860s. Between 1865 and 1870 Iloo was elected king by a group of powerful noble leaders The monarchy did not pass down directly from father to son among the Téké Kings were chosen by negotiations between a council of ...