Hebrewisms of West Africa from Nile to Niger with the Jews

Abstract

Robert T. Hill of the United States Geological Survey, writing towards the close of the last century, was emphatic in his statement: "The Jamaican negroes are sui generis; nothing like them, even of their own race, can elsewhere be found-not even elsewhere in the 'West Indies. They are omnipresent. The towns, the country highways, and the woods ring with their laughter and merry songs: they fill the churches and throng the highways, especially on market-days, when the country roads are black with them: and they are witty and full of queer stories and folk-lore." 1 He is speaking of the native Blacks, the real peasantry of the Island. During a five-years' residence in Jamaica, when much of the time was spent in the "bush" in close contact with the simple unaffected children of the soil, the present writer, in his turn, was deeply impressed by a striking difference between the Jamaican Black and all the other negro types that he had ever encountered.