Afram history that's hardly ever talked about: Black Loyalist->Nova Scotion->Sierre Leone Creole

[Jemmy]

the ones who are aware of the obvious roots/connections most likely identify with both their new identity and their older, rooted one.

A lot of them are. I believe many want to come back too.

 

[Brer Dog]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

A lot of them are. I believe many want to come back too.

..before I did the knowledge on it, I had noticed that bahamians were the only west indians with negro spiritual, type songs. The guy below, who @im_sleep , once asked me about him

Gotta question...

Is there any strong cases of music similar to the blues in other parts of the diaspora?

I ask cuz I was hard pressed to find anything till I found this from the Bahamas

Refuting the myth that Black American music/culture is "Europeanized".





was a famous bahamian from andros island and he played a unique guitar style that blended blues + calypso and then later, I ran across this on the spences

 

[Jemmy]

..before I did the knowledge on it, I had noticed that bahamians were the only west indians with negro spiritual, type songs. The guy below, who @im_sleep , once asked me about him







Refuting the myth that Black American music/culture is "Europeanized".





was a famous bahamian from andros island and he played a unique guitar style that blended blues + calypso and then later, I ran across this on the spences

Knew about Liele and David George but didn’t know about Spence. Wow this is great info. I wonder if their descendants know about this and what more of them choose to identify as.

This could be perfect for when AA’s build with Caribbean nations on our own accord. Especially since we have descendants in the region. I know about Black Seminoles settling in Mexico but I heard a lot of them also settled in Cuba too. They were most likely Gullah Geechee. They all should be allowed some sort of dual citizenship. Technically it’s their natural birthright.

I know Queen Quet has been doing a lot of work tracking down Gullah Geechee descendants throughout the Caribbean and Mexico!salute to her too.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Knew about Liele and David George but didn’t know about Spence. Wow this is great info. I wonder if their descendants know about this and what more of them choose to identify as.

This could be perfect for when AA’s build with Caribbean nations on our own accord. Especially since we have descendants in the region. I know about Black Seminoles settling in Mexico but I heard a lot of them also settled in Cuba too. They were most likely Gullah Geechee. They all should be allowed some sort of dual citizenship. Technically it’s their natural birthright.

I know Queen Quet has been doing a lot of work tracking down Gullah Geechee descendants throughout the Caribbean and Mexico!salute to her too.

I've read about a few different streams (free blacks, black seminoles and other fugitive slaves) of blacks, from the USA settling in mexico

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I've read about a few different streams (free blacks, black seminoles and other fugitive slaves) of blacks, from the USA settling in mexico

There were all types of weird migrations of small groups of Diasporans

I was just reading about the attempt to assimilate AAs into Haiti after the Revolution.

Ironically, I was just reading up about Black Nova Scotian cuisine this afternoon so good timing on the thread.

The Scotians got to Sierra Leone and started fukking on White folks

 

[IllmaticDelta]

A Descendant From The Book! Dwayne Johnson-7 Generations of African-Canadian/Black Nova Scotian Heritage Traced From The Book Of Negroes.

Dwayne's father, born Wayde Douglas Bowles who was a amatuer boxer and former sparring partner to boxing legends George Foreman and Muhammad Ali and is best known as a retired professional wrestler who has made quite a name for himself around the globe and in particular the World Wrestling Federation, and wrestled under the ring name of Rocky"Soulman" Johnson. Eventually he would legally change his name from Wayde Bowles to Rocky Johnson.

Born in Amherst Nova Scotia in 1944, Dwayne's father comes from a family that has deep roots planted in NS since 1783, when one of the ships "The Joseph" mastered by captain James Mitchell carrying his great great great grandfather, James Bowles departed New York and arrived in Annapolis Royal, NS on Nov 9 1783. According to the ships boarding records,which is the actual Book Of Negroes, James was born a free man in 1755, most likely in South or North Carolina. Noted in that document it says he lived with a Issac Bowles before leaving to fight for the British Loyalist in 1778 during the American Revolutionary War. He was a member of the Black Pioneers, a all Black Regiment.

At the time any Black person, slave or free man, man or woman who came and fought for the British was promised complete freedom from slavery after the war was over. Even though the British lost the war, they had to make good on their promise, and thus granted some 3,000 Black Loyalist their freedom in one of their colonies in Nova Scotia. James Bowles was one of those 3,000 Black Loyalist that boarded ships in New York that left for NS and brought him to his freedom.

After about 10 years of being in Nova Scotia, we know that James eventually settled in Amherst, and had a son named Cornelius Bowles born in 1793. Although not much is known about Cornelius life, we do know according to census records he had a son named Stephen Bowles born in 1826 in Amherst. Stephen then had a son name John Bowles born in 1856 in Amherst. John would eventually have a son named James Henry Bowles born in 1888 in Amherst ,who is the father of Wayde Bowles (Rocky Johnson) and the grandfather of Dwayne Johnson.

Dwayne's grandfather James Henry Bowles was a hard working man who worked in a coal foundry providing for his family, but he had also aspired to be pro boxer, but unfortunately never realized his dream. Standing at 6 feet 7 inches tall and about 270 lbs, he was a very big man and legend has it that he was once known as one of the strongest men in NS ,after winning a strength contest at a fair, by lifting a church bell that weighed almost 500lbs, off the ground with his bare hands.

Although there are not many immediate Bowles family members still living in the Amherst region today, as the majority of Dwayne's family live in Toronto, and the Southern US, there are still many distant relatives that live in the area that can trace their roots to those early descendant's who's family name is written in the Book of Negroes.

A Descendant From The Book - Untitled

 

[audemarzz]

Bump

 

[IllmaticDelta]

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The Cross and the Machete: Native Baptists of Jamaica--Identity, Ministry and Legacy​

The series of events that led to the formation of the United States precipitated the removal of enslaved Americans who opted to serve the British rather than the patriots. Known as "black loyalists," these former slaves were dispersed throughout the Empire where they played key roles in Canada, England, Africa, and the West Indies. The Cross and the Machete discusses the influence of these individuals on the emergence of what has become known as Native Baptists in Jamaica. Devon dikk traces the formation of this association (I hesitate to say sect) from its inception in the eighteenth century to its influence on the Morant Bay Rebellion. Along the way readers are introduced to George Liele, Moses Baker, Sam Sharpe, Paul Bogle, George William Gordon, and a number of less well-known players in Jamaican history.

As pastor of the Boulevard Baptist Church, Devon dikk is well-positioned to undertake such a project. This book, a revised dissertation (University of Warwick), is a sequel to Rebellion to Riot: The Jamaican Church in Nation Building. Both publications in the series focus on Morant Bay. The Cross and the Machete is composed of seven chapters plus a foreword by Rex Nettleford. dikk's interest was tweaked by a reenactment staged with his congregation and by a lecture he delivered before a local historical society. Morant Bay is considered a key event in Jamaican history and most historians have, according to dikk, downplayed the importance of religion in their analyses. dikk calls for a more nuanced approach and he turns, like Paul Bogle and George William Gordon before him, to Native Baptists, examining their origins and theology as precursor to what he calls the "Native Baptist War of 1865" (Chapters 1-5). He prefers the term Native Baptist War rather than Morant Bay Rebellion because it suggests continuity with earlier events such as the Baptist War (1831). These chapters, however, function as context or background to event-analysis rather than as a history of Native Baptists. We nevertheless learn much about them. The remainder of this review will focus less on Morant Bay and the merits of event-analysis and more on what the book tells us about this unique formation.

dikk is correct in noting that Native Baptists have been accorded short shrift in most narratives and historical reconstructions. Although they have African elements and features they are not survivals or reinterpretations along the lines of Obeah, Myal, or Kumina, dikk traces their origin to the arrival of George Liele and Moses Baker in 1783. Armed with proclamations guaranteeing their freedom (and supported by sympathetic governors), they drafted covenants, constructed chapels (Windward Rd., Crooked Spring), and established congregations that crisscrossed the island. Rather than regurgitate a litany of now dated publications dikk should have heeded his "mantra" (p. xviii; "read everything") and mined the wealth of recent scholarship on loyalists and their diaspora. Had he done so he could have pushed these chapters beyond the text-centered method he criticizes (historical-critical) to realize the full potential of reader-response criticism (see pp. 17-20, 41). This is a critical point that bears elaboration. The island of Jamaica has produced several narratives (oral and printed) and the voice of Native Baptists was first silenced by the Colonial Assembly (anti-preaching laws, 1802-1804) and later co-opted and buried within the ink and pages of various mission histories (Baptist, Wesleyan, Presbyterian). dikk would have broken new ground had he brought his call for reader-response criticism to bear on liberating the voices imprisoned within these texts. This is not to suggest that he glosses these accounts. He does not. He deconstructs the identity popularized by missionaries and disseminated in novels and tabloids. We must bear in mind, however, that aurality has long been a primary means of communication and this legacy (Identity, Ministry, Legacy) is alive and well in the present, epitomized by those who recognize the divinity of Rastafari. dikk's failure to hear this is a shortcoming that speaks as much to the limitations of event-analysis as it does to the orthodoxy of his vision.

Liele and Baker drafted what they called covenants and Chapter 3 submits them to a close reading. These documents are all important because they open a window onto the past and offer the possibility of telling us about a critical juncture in the formation of this group. dikk, however, was neither the first nor the only scholar to have offered insights and commentary. Several versions, editions if you will, were codified in print. An original copy was placed on deposit in the Colonial Record Office by Liele (September 1795); a copy of this copy was printed (with modifications) by the Baptist Missionary Society (1796) and re-published in Baptist periodicals (General Baptist Repository). This copy was "lost" for a century only to be "rediscovered" during the 1960s when it was reprinted in a Baptist periodical (Foundations) and later submitted to a close reading by Mechal Sobel (1988:150-52). All documents are subject to multiple interpretations and each reading has contributed to our understanding of a problematic. Because Liele and Baker have been accorded the status of martyrs in Baptist narratives, dikk's account would have profited greatly had he stepped outside and turned his attention to deconstructing this iconography.

Morant Bay is a key but dikk glosses a legacy embodied by preachers such as Harrison Woods, Alexander Bedward, and others in the decades that followed. By limiting these chapters to background and confining his analysis to ur-types we learn little about the way Native Baptists constructed an alternate and oppositional history of the island and its people. dikk has nevertheless done a service by laying the groundwork for a story that remains to be told.

- BookmarkAuthorizationFailure

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