Academics associated with the University of the West Indies (UWI) at Cave Hill will release Tides of
Exchange: The West Indian/Caribbean Footprint in Africa in early November 2026. The book comprises 25 chapters by 25 authors, including Back to Barbados: Barbadian Diaspora in Liberia – Sankofa and the Quest for Ancestral Reconnection, by Liberia’s Ambassador Lorenzo Witherspoon.
It is edited by three distinguished Caribbean academics. Glenford Howe, a senior researcher and policy specialist at The UWI Global Campus, internationally recognized for his work in Caribbean development, higher education, and Africa/Caribbean cooperation; Tara Innis, a Caribbean historian and Deputy Dean (Planning) in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the UWI Cave Hill Campus in Barbados; and Shelene Gomes, a sociocultural anthropologist at the UWI St Augustine Campus in Trinidad and an honorary research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
The book will be published in November 2026 by Ian Randle Publishers, an independent publisher based in Kingston, Jamaica, that has published fine books about the Caribbean since 1991 and whose primary focus is English-language readers. See https://ianrandlepublishers.com/tide-of-exchange-the-indian-caribbean-footprint-in-africa/
The relationship between Africa and the Caribbean is a story of tides, displacement, return, solidarity, and cultural exchange. These regions, separated by the Atlantic Ocean yet linked by histories of slavery, colonialism, and liberation, have interacted consistently for centuries.
This book explores the West Indian/Caribbean footprint in Africa through historical, political, medical, legal, cultural, intellectual, and trade perspectives, among others, arguing that these exchanges are best understood as reciprocal tides. These ‘tides’ embody the diaspora’s complexities: a people both shaped by Africa and later returning to shape it.
One of the earliest visible organized Caribbean presences in Africa was the settlement of Jamaican Maroons in Sierra Leone in 1800. After resisting British authority in Jamaica, the Maroons were exiled first to Nova Scotia, but discontent and harsh conditions prompted their relocation to West Africa. In Sierra Leone, they became part of Freetown’s social fabric, joining formerly enslaved Africans from Britain and North America. The Maroons contributed military skills and cultural practices, reinforcing the city’s identity as a diasporic crossroads. This episode reflects an early and direct “return” of Caribbean people to African soil, centuries before Pan-African political movements formalized such connections.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, West Indian seamen played an often-overlooked role in linking the Caribbean to African port cities. Working on merchant and imperial vessels, these sailors docked in Cape Town, Lagos, and other harbors along the continent’s eastern, southern, and southwestern seaboards. They carried not only labor but also culture: stories, music, and political ideas that contributed to the maritime subculture and cultural vibrancy of these port cities. In South Africa, Caribbean seamen mingled with African workers and sometimes became embedded in local communities. The mobility of these sailors underscores that the Caribbean footprint was not confined to military deployments or formal missions but also included grassroots networks of the working-class diaspora.
The Caribbean presence in Africa was also shaped by colonial service. From the late 19th century, West Indians served as clerks, teachers, nurses, medical officers, and administrators in British and French Africa. Their ambiguous role, as colonized subjects administering other colonized populations, speaks to the contradictions of empire. Simultaneously, the West India Regiment (WIR) fought in the East African campaign against German colonial forces. Their experiences reveal that Caribbean peoples were drawn into African theaters of conflict not as free agents but as conscripts and enforcers of empire, yet these encounters left enduring traces of connection.
One such person was George Stanfield Best, who, as a British subject, was conscripted into the British Army in 1914 when World War I broke out. After serving in the African Theatre, headquartered in North Africa, he emigrated to Liberia in 1926, where he met and married Lillian Porte, granddaughter of John Prince Porte, one of the 347 Barbadians who had emigrated there in 1865.
The 20th century brought more intentional and political engagement. Caribbean thinkers, activists, and legal scholars such as Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Henry Sylvester Williams, Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and Claudia Jones played central roles in shaping Pan-African thought and in building organizational bridges between the Caribbean diaspora and African nationalists. Padmore’s collaboration with Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and James’s mentorship of Kenyan and Nigerian students in London exemplify this intellectual exchange. Caribbean leaders also supported African struggles at the United Nations and within the Non-Aligned Movement. The post-independence period thus saw Caribbean states act as political allies in African liberation.
Caribbean professionals, particularly in medicine and public health, further strengthened these ties. Shared experiences in plantation medicine and tropical disease control left Caribbean doctors and nurses well equipped to assist newly independent African states facing similar health challenges. In recent decades, collaborations have emerged around HIV/AIDS prevention, non-communicable diseases, and community health systems, and the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the relevance of South–South cooperation in global health.
The cultural tide is perhaps the most palpable. Jamaican Maroons’ Gumbe music, and subsequently reggae, calypso, and dancehall, became powerful symbols of resistance and identity across Africa, often serving as soundtracks for resistance, protest, and liberation struggles. At the same time, African spiritual practices, culinary traditions, and performance forms remained alive in the Caribbean, giving Caribbean visitors to Africa a sense of cultural familiarity. These exchanges have deepened in the 21st century through musical fusions, diasporic festivals (such as carnivals), and academic collaborations.
In 2024, the Sankofa Pilgrimage to Barbados brought four hundred Liberian descendants of Barbadians, along with many from across the Caribbean, for a weeklong homage with kith and kin.
The establishment of CARICOM’s diplomatic mission in Nairobi in 2019 marked a new phase in these exchanges. This initiative formalized the Caribbean presence on African soil and opened pathways for economic, educational, and cultural cooperation. At the same time, diasporic communities of West Indians and Caribbean people living in African cities, from Nairobi to Johannesburg, continue to embody the living currents of connection.
From Maroons in Sierra Leone to seamen in South African ports, and from soldiers in West and East Africa to Pan-African intellectuals in London and Accra, the West Indian and Caribbean footprint in Africa is broad and multifaceted. These stories illustrate not a single moment of “return,” but a series of tidal movements, ebb and flow, push and pull, across centuries. Conceptualizing these connections as tides of exchange highlights their dynamic, reciprocal character and underscores that the Caribbean is not only a child of Africa’s diaspora but also a complex contributor to Africa’s modern histories and futures.
Notably, three presidents of Liberia were of Barbadian ancestry, one of whom was born in Liberia.
Contributors to this volume include specialist historians, anthropologists, statesmen, development experts, and others, drawn from academies in the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, as well as from countries across the African continent, many of whom are in the diaspora, exemplifying the very essence of the reciprocal exchange this work aims to highlight.
When, at his daughter’s urging in 2013, Ambassador Lorenzo Witherspoon began building on the oral history of his family’s West Indian origins, it was a search for truth, and he did not imagine where it would take him. At the time, Loyce Witherspoon was pursuing an undergraduate degree in International Development & Political Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. On a bright spring day, she was invited by friends from the Caribbean to join them for a meeting of the university’s Caribbean Club.
After initially protesting that she was not from the Caribbean, she recalled secondhand accounts from her father about his maternal great-great-grandfather, John Prince Porte, who emigrated to Liberia from Barbados in 1865, and about his grandfather, George Stanfield Best, who had come in 1926 from Trinidad via the African Theatre in North Africa, where he had fought during World War I as a British subject. Succumbing to their constant coercion, she relented and attended the meeting. Upon returning to her apartment, she promptly called her dad, insisting, as her friends had, that he conduct thorough research into the Porte family’s ancestral origins in Barbados.
At the time, the family knew that their Porte patriarch’s ancestral origin was Barbados, as confirmed by the April 6, 1865, passenger manifest of the brig Cora and by his tombstone in the Christ Church cemetery on Porte Hill in Crozierville. What they did not know then was that George Stanfield Best, the husband of Porte’s granddaughter, Lillian, was also a Barbadian. His family had migrated to Trinidad in search of work during the sugar revolution in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) in the late 18th century, distinct from the earlier 17th-century sugar revolution on islands like Barbados and Jamaica. Family records listed his Caribbean origin as T&T, not Barbados.
The only recorded and organized mass emigration of free people from Caribbean states to any part of Africa resulted from the 1862-1864 agitations on the island and from negotiations between President Daniel B. Warner of Liberia (led by then-Secretary of State Edward Wilmot Blyden) and Sir James Walker, Governor of Barbados. The talks followed the implementation of the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 and the expressed desire of African Barbadians to return to Africa.
On April 6, 1865, 346 African Barbadians departed Barbados for Liberia. This group produced three Liberian Presidents, several Secretaries of State, Supreme Court Justices, Diplomats, Judges, Academics, Educators, Clergy, and Businessmen.
In 2020, 157 years after their arrival, the story of the Porte family was self-published. Portes Find A New Home in Liberia – Story of the Post-Emancipation Emigration of the John Prince Porte Family from BARBADOS, West Indies, to Liberia, West Africa in 1865, & The Family’s Quest for Ancestral Citizenship marked the first published account by a descendant of one of the seventy-two families that emigrated to Liberia in 1865, describing their post-arrival life in their new home.
The Essay will discuss the 1865 post-emancipation emigration of 346 African Barbadians to Liberia. Building on the reflections of journalist Kenneth Y. Best in his biography, ALBERT PORTE, A Lifetime Trying to Save Liberia, it will delve into the published account by Ambassador Lorenzo Witherspoon and his daughter, Loyce B. Witherspoon, descendants of one of the Bajan families (Porte) that emigrated to Liberia. It will also provide the backstory and an account of the 2024 SANKOFA Pilgrimage to Barbados, the first-ever mass pilgrimage of Bajan-Liberian families, shepherded by this Porte family researcher and organized in conjunction with the Government of Barbados.
The history of the African diaspora is often framed by displacement and dispersal, yet it also encompasses powerful traditions of return, settlement, and belonging. Ambassador Witherspoon’s essay examines one of the most significant yet understudied examples of organized Black migration from the Caribbean to Africa: the 1865 emigration of 347 Barbadians to Liberia. Through the intertwined histories of his Porte family and the Crozierville community, it traces how migrants forged new lives on African soil while preserving cultural memories, social practices, and identities rooted in Barbados. Moving across generations, the piece combines family history, ancestral research, and personal reflection to illuminate enduring connections between Africa and its diasporas. It culminates in the contemporary Sankofa Pilgrimage to Barbados, revealing how descendants continue to negotiate questions of origin, belonging, citizenship, and heritage. In doing so, the chapter exemplifies the central concerns of this volume: recognizing Africa not merely as an imagined homeland but as a lived site of reintegration, community formation, and the ongoing reconstruction of diasporic identities.
The 2020 publication of Portes’s Find a New Home in Liberia prompted an ask from the Barbadian Prime Minister that could not be ignored or refused: “Bring my people home”! This was a call to Ambassador Witherspoon, following a quite eventful meeting in her Ilaro Court office in July 2021, to plan a sojourn for descendants of Barbadian ancestors.
Portes Find A New Home in Liberia, along with Back to Barbados: Barbadian Diaspora in Liberia – Sankofa and the Quest for Ancestral Reconnection, and Ambassador Witherspoon’s contribution to Tides of Exchange serve as inducements for fellow Barbadian-Liberians to document and publish the rich stories of their Barbadian ancestors’ lived experiences and contributions to the building of the Liberian nation-state.
The Sankofa Pilgrimage to Barbados, held May 6-13, 2024, brought together more than 400 Liberians of Bajan and Caribbean ancestry, including former Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who served as a Special Eminent Guest, for an event the entire Caribbean had never before seen.
The itinerary for the 2024 Sankofa pilgrimage to Barbados demonstrated sponsor value through high-visibility events spanning heritage, scholarship, culture, business, and public commemoration:
- Heritage and scholarship: Heritage Island Tour, Barbados National Archives Genealogy Marketplace, Barbados Museum & Historical Society film screenings, and a University of the West Indies colloquium.
- Commemoration and dialogue: Sankofa Commemorative Ceremony at Bay Street Esplanade (where Barbadians departed for Liberia) and a Fireside Discussion with President Sirleaf.
- Culture and community: Business Roundtable, Prime Minister’s Reception, Barbados-Liberia Oistins by Night cultural event, and a commemorative service at James Street Methodist Church, where the Thanksgiving service was held before the 1865 departure for Liberia.
Together, these events delivered an immersive, professionally executed experience with strong reputational, cultural, and community impact, demonstrating Sankofa’s ability to convene leaders, families, institutions, and communities around a credible international heritage agenda.
Building on this momentum, the Africa Barbados Heritage Initiative (TABHI), a 501(c)(3) foundation founded by Ambassador Witherspoon and registered in Liberia and the United States, is planning Sankofa: The Return (to Barbados) for August 4-11, 2027, during the Season of Emancipation, with more than 500 participants expected. The sequel will broaden participation, deepen institutional partnerships, and position Barbados as the focal Caribbean point for diaspora heritage engagement.
Sankofa: The Return is a sponsor-ready heritage and diaspora engagement initiative that offers partners visibility, institutional alignment, community impact, and cultural diplomacy value through a globally resonant story of return, remembrance, and reconnection. Corporate and other sponsors are welcome to partner to bring the 2027 program to life.
The event offers sponsors a distinctive opportunity to support heritage, cultural diplomacy, and diaspora engagement through a high-profile program that links Barbados, Liberia, and the wider African diaspora. Its significance lies in being the only recorded organized mass emigration of free people from a Caribbean state to Africa.
Tides of Exchange: The West Indian/Caribbean Footprint in Africa will be available for purchase in November 2026.
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