Yoruba settlement in TrinidadThe casting adrift of the Yoruba to the Americas began with the intense political jockeying and civil unrest in the Yoruba Empire and outlying Yoruba-speaking kingdoms of West Africa from the close of the eighteenth century and throughout most of the nineteenth. It would appear that there were Yoruba among the slaves of French and British planters in the British colony of Trinidad before the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade in 1807. But their social significance increased proportionately with their numbers during the second half of the last century.Other noticeable African ethnic groupings at this time were the Congo, Igbo, Fula, and Kru, with oral sources adding Hausa, Mandingo, Chimbundu, and Allada ('Rada'). Some of these had been slaves, others were soldiers in the British ranks displaced when England lost the American War of Independence, but most had been slaves liberated by the British Navy. The latter were then recruited by the British government and the West Indian plantocracy from Sierra Leone villages, dockyards in Freetown and St. Helena, and slave-ships scuttled near Caribbean waters.But the 8,000 Africans legally documented as entering Trinidad between 1841 and 1867 were far outnumbered by Creoles, that is, persons born in the Americas. By the 1861 census, of a total population of 84,438, only 6,025, or 7.15% had been born in Africa. African and European Creoles totalled 46,936, and their strength was augmented by 11,716 from other British Caribbean colonies. 1 This meant that the new nineteenth-century arrivals entered a political construct which was a construct of European colonialism in which asymmetric power roles had already been established. Superiority was based on economic power, which by and large coincided with pale skin color.During their three-to five-year indenture, Africans were employed as field hands on sugar estates, cutting, weeding, hoeing, planting, or doing 0165-2516/90/0085-0009$2.00