A Béké are the white Creoles descended from the first European, usually French, settlers and planters mainly in Martinique, but also in Guadeloupe. The Békés are less than one percent of the population on both islands, numbering 3,000 on Martinique and 2,000 on Guadeloupe, yet they control much of the local industry.
A Béké are the white Creoles descended from the first European, usually French, settlers and planters mainly in Martinique, but also in Guadeloupe. The Békés are less than one percent of the population on both islands, numbering 3,000 on Martinique and 2,000 on Guadeloupe, yet they control much of the local industry.
==Etymology== The term is possibly derived from Martinican Creole, originally from an African language. Berbice Dutch had a similar word (bɛkɛ) which also referred to a white person. The origin of the term is unclear, although it is attested in colonial documents from as early as the first decade of the eighteenth century. Possible origins for the word include Kalabari ̣bekín ̣bọ ("white person" ) and Ashanti m’béké ("man in power").
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).