The great Bajan poet Kamau Brathwaite reflected on the sometimes striking ways in which Caribbean cultures contained traditions and rhythmic patterns resembling those in West Africa. For Brathwaite, it was impossible to understand contemporary Caribbean—and, for that matter, African-American—culture without examining these African traditions, which had been transmitted across the Atlantic and transformed during the bloody centuries of the European slave trade. Rather than being ashamed of the oral tradition, which was an all-too-common reason for critics to eschew the Africanity in our contemporary Caribbean cultures, Brathwaite argued that we should embrace it, refusing to blindly follow the traditions of the European colonizers.
