By Dr. Rebecca Tortello Jamaican life in all aspects cultural, artistic, political, economic, scientific was borne out of a brutal system forged through an integration of people and place and emerged as a triumph of the human spirit. Illustration of Africans being captured and led to the ships for their long journey across the Middle Passage. Up until the early 1690s Jamaicas population was relatively equally mixed between white and black. (Senior, 2003, p. 446). The first Africans to arrive came in 1513 from the Iberian Peninsula after having been taken from West Africa by the Spanish and the Portuguese. They were servants, cowboys, herders of cattle, pigs and horses, as well as hunters. When the English captured Jamaica in 1655, many of them fought with the Spanish who gave them their freedom and then fled to the mountains resisting the British for many years to maintain their freedom, becoming known as Maroons (Senior, 2003, p. 5 and 446).
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 22:07:05 +0000
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