Sun Bailante

But what does it mean exactly to be Creole? Creole is something of an inheritance from the darkest times of history when the French, Spanish, Portuguese and Netherlanders decided to conquer the world especially Africa, the Americas and Asia.

They realised that it was not economical to the employ people in the colonised countries to take care of their farms, cultivate, works in the mines and so on.

Hence they decided that people from Africa were of a different colour and non-Christian therefore didn’t have a soul and could be submitted to slavery. We have made some short-cuts here but broadly the context is now set up.

Also, at that time there were some tribal wars in the west coast of Africa and the colonisers used these conflicts to buy slaves who would be brought to the Americas, the Caribbean islands and many other places as Reunion, Mauritius, Cap Verde, Madagascar….

Many died on the ships but many survived to live in atrocious conditions.

These slaves didn’t understand the language of their masters and were not literate. Also, they tried to replicate their words using what they could hear and adding elements of their own language.

This is how the various Creole languages are born as deformations of the coloniser’s language by the slaves.

Nowadays, various islands use Creole as main language at home or in the street whilst the language of he old coloniser is used at school, at work or in the administrations.

Amongst the places where people speak Creole you will have Reunion, Mauritius, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Haïti, Cabo-Verde…

 
Creole are also the people who come from these places and are proud to be!