Tobago

Tobago was nominally Spanish from 1498 until the first British settlers arrived in 1625 but, as with Trinidad, the Spanish had little real interest in the territory. The Dutch landed settlers in 1628, but a Spanish and Amerindian force from Trinidad invaded and retook Tobago. The British landed again in 1639 and again the Amerindians fought them off. By 1674, when Tobago was ceded to the Dutch, the island had changed hands more than a dozen times. European policy at that time was that the island should be sufficiently desecrated as to hinder all development, so intense was the competition over it. The island was granted a neutral status from 1684-1763, which was virtually ignored. None of the European forces, save the British, stayed sufficiently long to impact the language situation.

With regard to the ethnic origins of the Africans of Tobago and their languages, the records are few. Elder (1988:16, 19) states that Congoes lived in the Tobagonian villages of Culloden Moor, Belle Garden, Pembroke and Charlotteville, as reported in ‘oral accounts of living informants’. Ibos are also mentioned in government records, and a Moravian minister apparently reported to the pioneering creolist Hugo Schuchardt in the 1880s that most Negroes at that time were Cramanti, with a few Ibos (Winer and Gilbert 1987).

Tobago was ceded to the British by the French in 1763, and from that year, the British proceeded to purposefully build a colony. Planters, mostly of Scottish origin, sailed from Barbados, Grenada, and other already colonized islands, as well as from Britain itself, with their slaves, to carve up the island into parishes and plantations as part of Britain’s great sugar enterprise. The colony started out as part of the Grenada government. Except for a very brief 12-year discontinuous French interregnum (1781-1793; 1802-3), the British formally governed Tobago until 1962, when the country of Trinidad and Tobago became independent. Tobago became a formal part of Trinidad and Tobago, as a ward of the colony, from 1899.

Although slavery was abolished in 1838, the plantation continued to be the focal point of Tobagonian life to a much greater extent than in neighboring Trinidad. The Tobagonian planters passed a number of laws after Emancipation in 1838 to keep the ex-slaves tied to the land by a metayage (share-cropping) system; this served to preserve the sugar estates initially but brought competition between the sugar work of the estates and the metayers’ trend towards developing other crops for internal trade. Sugar and cotton production gradually gave way to the production of cocoa, coconuts, hides, animals, vegetables and fruits. Skilled tradespeople, artisans, shopkeepers and seamstresses came to proliferate, and moved away from plantation work, with the result that the sugar economy collapsed in the 1880’s despite the planters importing labour from other islands for their estates. Nonetheless, the island of Tobago remained village-based in a way that Trinidad did not.

The continuation of such a social and economic state meant that the English lexicon Creole, which had undergone no noticeable effect from the brief French incursions to the island, remained intact.