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Transcription: [00:08:50]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
and the way they even cut umm the meat into certain shapes like saltfish and thing.
[00:08:57]
(stutters) identical this is seen particularly in Haiti where if you take photographs you won't be sure if you're in Africa or in the Caribbean.
[00:09:05]
and then there's the language, the way the people speak.
[00:09:09]
I had a remarkable experience in Barbados one night. When I was passing a Church one of our people's Churches.
[00:09:16]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
Yeah
[00:09:17]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
Not an established Church but an Afro-Caribbean Church. And it always- it had always been said that Barbados, my island, had no African culture.
[00:09:20]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
Yeah
[00:09:27]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
and I was- I stopped to listen to these... you know- these worshipers and although they were Barbadian, I suddenly realized that I couldn't understand what they were saying for one moment
[00:09:39]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
Yes
[00:09:40]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
and then as I went on listening I realized that the pattern and the rhythm was really Igbo.
[00:09:45]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
mhm
[00:09:46]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
now that gave me the first breakthrough into understanding my own culture in Barbados,
[00:09:50]
which is, in fact, an Igbo culture, which accounts for the fact that Barbados does not seem, evidently, to have an African culture,
[00:09:59]
because the Igbo culture being what we call acephalous,
[00:10:03]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
uh huh
[00:10:04]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
you know there's no symbolic head in the Igbo,
[00:10:06]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
yeah
[00:10:07]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
unlike the Yoruba, and tends to be very introverted, very submerged,
[00:10:10]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
yeah
[00:10:11]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
and therefore, the Barbadian, African survival tends to be very hidden
[00:10:15]
{SPEAKER name= "Brooks B. Robinson"}
uh huh
[00:10:16]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
and it is at that moment that I recognized that the continuity of language played a very important part in an understanding of the connection between Africa and the new world.
[00:10:28]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
now in some of the.. uh later...writings of the development of creole society in Jamaica, uh, other exiles, black and blue matter of poems, etc. those works, are you developing a different kind of theme?
[00:10:43]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
not a different theme but deepening the theme, which is really my real interest of what is the Caribbean.
[00:10:48]
{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}
mhm
[00:10:49]
{SPEAKER name="Daniel Kunene"}
You see because um some- peop...
[00:10:51]