Chapter 5 - The Caribbean

Summary

Overview

None of the current inhabitants of the francophone Caribbean territories (with the exception of some 4,000 or so descendants of assorted Amerindian tribesfolk in Guyane) are indigenous to the region. The Amerindian tribes (Caribs and Arawaks) that circulated in the region at the time of the arrival of the Europeans were annihilated within a few generations of the establishment of French settlements in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the 1630s. As land was cleared, the Caribs were unceremoniously transported to the inhospitable shores of nearby Dominique to make way for the colonisers. The subsequent creation of a plantation economy by the white planters was only made possible by the slave trade that operated for over two centuries and led to the influx of hundreds of thousands of black slaves from West Africa. In the nineteenth century the demographic mix in the region was further enriched by the immigration of indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent and by Levantine traders. All of these elements (including mixed-raced descendants of the now extinct Amerindian tribesfolk) have contributed to the physiological mix that constitutes the Caribbean population. Consequently, the vast majority of the current inhabitants descend from peoples who have all arrived in the last four centuries from a variety of ‘elsewheres’: from Europe, Africa and more recently various parts of Asia.

It is not surprising then that literature from the French Caribbean obsessively explores issues relating to identity.