With an Introduction by Maureen Warner Lewis & Rupert Lewis

This is a re-issue of an important work that was first published in 1988 with the title of Roots of Jamaican Culture. Now 38-years later, at a time when Jamaicans have become increasingly keen to embrace their African heritage, this classic work is being re-published unchanged and unapologetically and appropriately titled African Roots of Jamaican Culture.

This is first and foremost a cultural history of the Jamaican people. In this respect it differs from existing historical works that have focused on the country’s political, economic and constitutional development. Prof Alleyne argues and demonstrates that Africans and their descendants have reconstituted aspects of African culture in Jamaica in music, art, dance, religion and, importantly in the context of ongoing contemporary debates – their language. In so doing, he has given us a foundational understanding of Jamaican culture and the corresponding worldviews out of which various cultural areas have been formed. For Maureen Warner-Lewis, who, along with Rupert Lewis, has written an Introduction to this new edition, what makes this work a classic in the writing of Jamaican cultural history is that it summarises how West and Central Africans, for 400 years under conditions of racialised chattel slavery and colonialism, created ways of living that built the foundations of Jamaican culture.

Mervyn Alleyne (1933-2016) was a former professor of linguistics at The University of the West Indies. He also held a professorship in English at the University of Puerto Rico. In addition to the current work, Prof Alleyne is the author of Comparative Afro-American: An Historical Comparative Study of English-Based Afro-American Dialects (1980) and The Construction of Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World (2002).