Afro-Trinidadian Erotic

Afro-Trinidadians comprise approximately 34.1% of the Trinidad and Tobago population per the 2011 CSO census — the second-largest ethnic group, narrowly behind Indo-Trinidadians. The community descends primarily from enslaved Africans brought to British colonial Trinidad between approximately 1797 (when the British took the island from Spain) and 1834 (British emancipation), with smaller pre-1797 Spanish and French colonial slave-trade arrivals. Source populations were predominantly West African (Yoruba — the foundation of Trinidad Orisha religion — Akan, Igbo) and West-Central African (Bantu-Kongo). Concentrated in Port of Spain, San Fernando, the western coastal urban zone, and Tobago (which has an Afro-Tobagonian-majority population approximately 85% of the Tobago island population). The community is the cultural source of Trinidad-style calypso, soca, steelpan (the steel drum, the world's only acoustic musical instrument invented in the 20th c., emerging from Afro-Trinidadian working-class neighborhoods of Port of Spain in the 1930s-1940s), Trinidad-Carnival traditions, and substantial Caribbean-cultural innovation. Tobago is overwhelmingly Afro-Tobagonian and culturally distinct from Trinidad, with stronger continuous African cultural retention in some traditional contexts (the bele dance, tambrin music).