Commerce, Christianity and the Origins of the ‘Creoles’ of Fernando Po
During the early and middle years of the nineteenth century a Creole elite emerged on the island of Fernando Po. The origins of this lay in the fact that for the thirty years after 1827 the island was at the centre of European political and economic interests in the Gulf of Guinea. The short-lived British occupation of Fernando Po, 1827–34, established the town of Clarence and brought to the island a number of settlers, and in particular ‘liberated Africans’, freed from slave ships captured by the Royal Navy. The situation they faced in Clarence and the treatment they received, not least once the British government withdrew and a succession of British traders attempted to run the town, led to the emergence of a homogeneous society out of the various ethnic groups they comprised. This society was to be transformed by the development of a palm oil trade on the island, particularly during the 1840s. This led to the emergence of a group of middlemen between the Bubi producers of the interior and the European traders who collected oil from Clarence, and concurrently, to the stratification of Clarence society into a trading elite and a group of labourers and servants. This trading elite was attracted to the work of the Baptist Mission in Clarence after 1841, and in particular saw the value of the Mission in giving itself a distinct identity. Over time this elite and the Baptists drew apart, but this was not before the interrelation of social stratification with the work of the Mission had produced a class of Creoles whose descendants – the Fernandinos – still survive as a distinct group in Equatorial Guinea today.
La rumba congoleña en el diálogo afro-atlántico. Influencias caribeñas en África desde 1800 The congolese rumba in the afro-Atlantic dialogue. Caribbean influences in Africa from 1800
In the multiple paths in the slave Atlantic with forced displacement during and after trade we find how culture and identity is re-interpreted through African legacies resulting in different genres of African urban popular music. Congolese rumba, belong to an Atlantic dialogue beginning in other African areas two centuries ago, the evolution of this language and its sound through recordings taking place in the twentieth century. Living dialogue between Africa and its diaspora has produced a series of new identity and expressive narratives and with regard to African popular music is produced in a space of complex relationships back and forth through the creativity of diasporic processes. In the writings repeatedly we found the link with the Cuban rumba, considered as "raw material" of the Congolese rumba. In this article we want to emphasize how the influence of the Cuban rumba in the city of Brazzaville and Kinshasa sits and flourishes because of a previous Africanization (of Caribbean influence) and a interethnic musical language -in confluence with local languages-, through to the thousands of workers taking a creolized music, reflection of his own condition as a people at cultural crossroads caused by slavery and its abolition, beginning their journey in the early
The Career of Domingo Martinez in the Bight of Benin 1833–64
The career of Martinez provides a guide to the economic and political fortunes of the Brazilians in the coastal States of the Bight of Benin in the eighteen-forties, fifties, and early sixties. The first phase of his career took place while the Brazilian slave trade was still at its height; the second phase covered the successful Brazilian adaptation to the new commercial patterns involved in the introduction of the palm oil trade; the third phase took place when Brazilian commerce was in decline following increased British intervention and growing contact between European merchants and the African States. The graph of his political influence follows exactly that of his commercial affluence. In the early eighteen-forties he was a prominent figure in the confused politics of the Bight. In the late forties he was as influential in Dahomey as Francesco Felix De Souza had been in the previous decade. At the end of his life his importance had declined so much that he was unable to prevent the King of Dahomey entering into an agreement which would have dealt a final blow to his commercial position.