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Buckra or Backra is a term of West African origin. It is mainly used in the Caribbean and the Southeast United States. Originally, it was used by slaves to address their white owners. Later, the meaning was broadened to generally describe white people.
"Buckra" has been found in many variants, successively bacceroe, bochara, backra, baccra, bakra, buckera, buckra, bockra, [1] and more. It probably derives from the Ibibio and Efik Annang word mbakara, meaning (white) European or master. [2] The word traces back to the 16th and 17th century slavery when slaves were transported from West Africa and Central Africa to plantations into the Caribbean by European colonizers.
Initially, it was used by slaves to address their white owners and their overseers. Later, the meaning was broadened to generally describe white people. After the abolition of slavery, the word survived to refer to white people, usually used by black people in the US in derogatory meaning.
From about the 16th century, enslaved West Africans, notably Igbo and Ibibio, were shipped to Jamaica to work on plantations. A book by Allen Eric about Jamaica, published in 1896, is titled "Buckra" Land — Two Weeks in Jamaica. It mentions the word buckra, "meaning man", used by Jamaican black people to greet strangers. [3] In Jamaican Patois, both Bakra [4] and Backra [5] are translated as (white) enslaver. In Jamaica, the written form and educated pronunciation is "buckra"; in folk pronunciation, "backra" similar to the source "mbakara". [1]
In Sranan Tongo, a creole language in the former Dutch colony Suriname, the usual spelling is Bakra, originally referring to the white slave-owner on a plantation, or a white master in general. [6] Nowadays, it primarily refers to a Dutch white person but may also generally mean a white person.
Also in Guyana, the original meaning was white plantation owner, later a white person, or even an important non-white. [7]
Barbados has a history of colonization and slavery, too. From the 1630s, when Barbados had become an English colony, large numbers of poor indentured Irish people were brought to Barbados to work on sugar plantations. Other whites, such as military prisoners, widows, and orphans, brought to plantation owners to work in the fields were shipped to the Caribbean, effectively as poorly paid and treated servants and workers. [8] In Barbados, these endogamous poor, white-skinned people were also called "poor backras" or "buckras". [9]
In the second half of the 17th century, tens of thousands of indentured settlers of Barbados migrated to the other colonies when they did not secure the little piece of land they were supposed to get after the expiration of their contract. Many moved on to the North American mainland. [9] South Carolina, particularly, was founded by settlers from Barbados who brought many enslaved Africans with them. These slaves spoke an English-based Creole language that later became known as Gullah. This Creole was allowed to develop because enslaved Africans in coastal South Carolina had limited contact with Whites or Blacks from other areas of the South. This Creole is still spoken today by descendants of the Gullah people in the South Carolina and Georgia low-country region. [10]
Today, "buckra" is still used in the Southeast United States by descendants of slaves, most notably the Gullah people, referring to white people. [1] It refers especially to the poor, although the buckras were, in the eyes of the enslaved black people, the wealthy class in former times:
"De nigger was de right arm of de buckra class. The buckra was de horn of plenty for de nigger. Both suffer in consequence of freedom."...(Moses Lyles, a former slave in South Carolina, speaking in the 1930s). [11] As noted in this 1916 publication, there was also the white trash level of buckra, referred to by both Southern races as "poor buckras"...locally pronounced "po' buckras". [12]
Gullah is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people, an African-American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina.
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
The Gullah are an African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Their language and culture have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms as a result of their historical geographic isolation and the community's relation to their shared history and identity.
Obeah, or Obayi, is a series of African diasporic spell-casting and healing traditions found in the former British colonies of the Caribbean. These traditions derive much from traditional West African practices that have undergone cultural creolization. There is much regional variation in the practice of Obeah, which is followed by practitioners called Obeahmen and Obeahwomen.
Bajan, or Bajan Creole, is an English-based creole language with African and British influences spoken on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Bajan is primarily a spoken language, meaning that in general, standard English is used in print, in the media, in the judicial system, in government, and in day-to-day business, while Bajan is reserved for less formal situations, in music, or in social commentary. Ethnologue reports that, as of 2018, 30,000 Barbadians were native English speakers, while 260,000 natively spoke Bajan.
Redleg is a term used to refer to poor whites that live or at one time lived on Barbados, St. Vincent, Grenada and a few other Caribbean islands. Their forebears were sent from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Continental Europe as indentured servants, forced labourers, or peons.
Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.
Kaiso is a type of music popular in Trinidad and Tobago, and other countries, especially of the Caribbean, such as Grenada, Belize, Barbados, St. Lucia and Dominica, which originated in West Africa particularly among the Efik and Ibibio people of Nigeria, and later evolved into calypso music.
Gullah Jack, also known as Couter Jack and sometimes referred to as "Gullah" Jack Pritchard, was an African Methodist and Hoodoo conjurer, who Paul Pritchard enslaved in Charleston, South Carolina.
Bahamian Creole, also described as the Bahamian dialect, is spoken by both white and black Bahamians, although in slightly different forms. Bahamian dialect also tends to be more prevalent in certain areas of the Bahamas. Islands that were settled earlier or that have a historically large Afro-Bahamian population have a greater concentration of individuals exhibiting creolized speech; the dialect is most prevalent in urban areas. Individual speakers have command of lesser and greater dialect forms.
Atlantic Creole is a cultural identifier of those with origins in the transatlantic settlement of the Americas via Europe and Africa.
Mbakara is a word in the Annang, Efik and Ibibio languages used for those in the Western world. Rather than be seen as a normative category, it is the description of a relationship between Africans in the West African coast of Calabar and their European counterparts from the West with whom they traded. The name Mbakara has been interpreted by various writers as a shortened form of the phrase Mbaka nkara in Annang and Ibibio meaning "divide and rule". Among those groups, as elsewhere, Westerners came to be identified with colonialism.
Sierra Leonean Americans are an ethnic group of Americans of full or partial Sierra Leonean ancestry. This includes Sierra Leone Creoles whose ancestors were African American Black Loyalists freed after fighting on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War. Some African Americans trace their roots to indigenous enslaved Sierra Leoneans exported to the United States between the 18th and early 19th century. In particular, the Gullah people of partial Sierra Leonean ancestry, fled their owners and settled in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and the Sea Islands, where they still retain their cultural heritage. The first wave of Sierra Leoneans to the United States, after the slavery period, was after the Sierra Leone Civil War in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the American Community Survey, there are 34,161 Sierra Leonean immigrants living in the United States.
Igbo Jamaicans were trafficked by Europeans onto the island between the 18th and 19th centuries as enslaved labour on plantations. Igbo people constituted a large portion of the African population enslaved people in Jamaica. Jamaica received the largest amount of enslaved people from the biafra region than anywhere else in the diaspora during the slave trade. Some slave censuses detailed the large number of enslaved Igbo people on various plantations throughout the island on different dates throughout the 18th century. Their presence was a large part in forming Jamaican culture, Igbo cultural influence remains in language, dance, music, folklore, cuisine, religion and mannerisms. In Jamaica the Igbo were often referred to as Eboe or Ibo. There are a substantial number of Igbo language loanwords in Jamaican Patois. Igbo people mostly populated the northwestern section of the island.
Coromantee, Coromantins, Coromanti or Kormantine is an English-language term for enslaved people from the Akan ethnic group, taken from the Gold Coast region in modern-day Ghana. The term was primarily used in the Caribbean and is now considered archaic.
Black Barbadians or Afro-Barbadians are Barbadians of entirely or predominantly African descent.
The Sierra Leone Creole people are an ethnic group of Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people are descendants of freed African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Liberated African slaves who settled in the Western Area of Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1885. The colony was established by the British, supported by abolitionists, under the Sierra Leone Company as a place for freedmen. The settlers called their new settlement Freetown. Today, the Sierra Leone Creoles are 1.2 percent of the population of Sierra Leone.
The Irish slaves myth is a fringe pseudohistorical narrative that conflates the penal transportation and indentured servitude of Irish people during the 17th and 18th centuries, with the hereditary chattel slavery experienced by the forebears of the African diaspora. Some white nationalists, and others who want to minimize the effects of hereditary chattel slavery on Africans and their descendants, have used this false equivalence to deny racism against African Americans or claim that African Americans are too vocal in seeking justice for historical grievances. It also can hide the facts around Irish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. The myth has been in circulation since at least the 1990s and has been disseminated in online memes and social media debates. According to historians Jerome S. Handler and Matthew C. Reilly, "it is misleading, if not erroneous, to apply the term 'slave' to Irish and other indentured servants in early Barbados". In 2016, academics and Irish historians wrote to condemn the myth.