African Canadian Culture

In every community, people tend to have their own heritage that is kept to themselves, and thusly lost in the past eventually. When an entire group from the same culture is moved from one place to another, you have a continuation of the culture and heritage, as opposed to the suppressed understanding you come to when you try to mix groups. Nova Scotia contains a pocket of African Canadian culture unlike any other place in Canada, described as “a vibrant self-contained community that has existed relatively undisturbed for more than 200 years” by Tom Mason, writer of Open to the World, spring 2006. Nova Scotia has a rich, largely unchanged African Canadian community.

If there’s anything you can say about the African Canadians living in Preston today, it’s that they’ve stuck to their guns over the years, and they’ve refused to modernize with the rest of Nova Scotia. The Preston today looks striking similar to the Preston of 200 years ago, with small wooden houses, barns and sheds scattered around the area, the people living here have held on to what is considered to be the essence of African heritage. At the center of the town a large modern building can be seen, the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, and its walls form a memorial to “one of the oldest and most vital historic waves of Nova Scotia immigration”

Many people visit the center each year in droves, often Africans looking to discover more about their own heritage and where they have come from as a culture. Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali, Stevie Wonder, Desmond Tutu, and the deceased Rosa Parks have all visited this small cranny in Canada (not to mention Nova Scotia) to discover themselves. Henry Bishop, the Black Cultural Centre’s chief curator has said The African American community is particularly interested in this because they don’t know a lot about their family trees or their history. By getting to know our community, it allows them to fill in some of the blanks of their own heritage. Three hundred years ago, we may have all been family. We’re all pages ripped from the same book.” (Bishop, 2006)

When you ask anyone when the African families first came to Nova Scotia, you would usually get the response “When the Underground Railroad allowed them to come.” But that is in fact off by around 200 years. The African Nova Scotians who came to live in Preston came there around the time of Napoleon, and the entire area was settled by freed black slaves of the time. Because the communities within Preston (East Preston, North Preston, Cherrybrook, and Lake Loon) were all settled by the freed slaves with no outside support from anyone else, the community has developed the way the members of the community want it to.