Africa's Children

"Africa’s Children is a testament to one’s heritage, a belief in one’s ancestors, and a record of truth … no told!" – Dr. Henry V. Bishop, chief curator, Black Cultural Centre, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

Chronicling the history of Black families of the Yarmouth area of Nova Scotia, Africa’s Children is a mirror image of the hopes and despairs and the achievements and injustices that mark the early stories of many African-Canadians. This extensively researched history traces the lives of those people, still enslaved at the time, who arrived with the influx of Black Loyalists and landed in Shelburne in 1783, as well as those who had come with their masters as early as 1767. Their migration to a new home did little to improve their overall living conditions, a situation that would persist for many years throughout Yarmouth County.

By drawing on a comprehensive range of sources that include census and cemetery records, church and school histories, libraries, museums, oral histories, newspapers, wills, The Black Loyalist Directory, and many others, this is a history that has been overlooked for far too long.