This growing demand for African labour in the Caribbean was in part the result of massive depopulation caused by the massacres, harsh conditions and disease brought by European colonists to the Taino and other indigenous peoples of the region.
[1] By the mid-16th century, slave trading from Africa to the Caribbean was so profitable that Francis Drake and John Hawkins were prepared to engage in piracy as well as break Spanish colonial laws, in order to forcibly transport approximately 1500 enslaved people from Sierra Leone to San Domingo (modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic).
In 1804, after 13 years of war, Haiti, with its overwhelmingly black population and leadership, became the second nation in the Americas to win independence from a European state when the army of former slaves defeated Napoleon's invasion force.
During the 19th Century, further waves of rebellion, such as the Baptist War, led by Sam Sharpe in Jamaica,[8] created the conditions for the incremental abolition of slavery in the region, with Cuba the last island to achieve emancipation in 1886.
[10] From the 1960s, the former slave population began to win their independence from British colonial rule, and were pre-eminent in creating new cultural forms such as reggae music, calypso and Rastafari within the Caribbean itself.
In the early 21st century, the pop singer Rihanna, with her racy costumes and jet-set life style, seems to epitomise a growing sense of cultural self-assertion and cosmopolitanism amongst Afro-Caribbean young people.
But, despite many such obvious individual successes, millions of Afro-Caribbean people across the region continue to face serious historical challenges, including, the eradication of widespread poverty and joblessness in major population centers like Haiti and Jamaica.