These societies have not been entirely divorced from their origins and some have diverged
quite considerably given the cultural and seemingly instinctive inheritances from the ethnic and
racial origins of those who occupy this space and the inter-blending of them producing special
and differentiated societies. Marcus Garvey had once said that the peoples who occupy this
region – this Caribbean, this Antilles – would one day form a civilisation on which the sun would
shine as ceaselessly as it shines on the empire of the North. Maybe he should have said
civilisations (plural) based on the linguistic, ethnic and cultural admixtures which marked the
predominant Dutch, Spanish, French and English traditions of Caribbean countries (Duncan,
2007).