'Sou-sou': Black immigrants bring savings club stateside

decentralised crowd-funding and peer-to-peer finance models, alternative currency systems, and co-operative risk-sharing systems.

Being so close, yet outside the purview of American law, has been a source of Bahamian prosperity in one way or another for generations, particularly for those seeking to protect profit from taxation. The Bahamas are well-known as a tax shelter. The bulk of banking on the islands is offshore, meaning that the accounts are held by noncitizens and no

The Bahamas took a distinctly different course in relationship to the history of money-making than much of the region. African Americans who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War settled there to be free. Many of them came from the Low Country. In 1818, Great Britain declared that all enslaved Africans who set foot in the Bahamas would be

The Clotilda’s group of Africans lived on the margins of Mobile life during the first half of the 1860s. After the war ended, however, and they found they could not get back across the ocean to Benin, the Africans founded their own colony, Africatown, in a clearing in the middle of a pine forest just north of Mobile. Cudjo Lewis was one of the surv