Webster’s  II New College Dictionary defines the word “kraal”  1. as a native village typically consisting of huts surrounded by a stockade.  2. An enclosure for livestock.

Professor Gilbert Sprauve shed some light on other applications of the word “kraal” as it relates to this cultural study of the Virgin Islands.

Concerning the word “kraal:”

The authoritative Van Dale Groot Woordenboek,  Nederlands-Engels dedicates only a few lines to the word kraal. Even so, much of its significance is connected to the English word bead. Less than one line relates the word to the principal connotation we have focused on for this manual. “[ruimte voor vee] corral => (in Z. Africa) kraal; (cattle pen).”

This word came to the Caribbean with multiple meanings, some related to agrarian and urban organization and development and others to cartographic conventions. On the one hand, some eighteenth century maps designated what we know as the Caribbean Sea as the Caribbean Kraal. [Did those map makers see this part of the globe as set off by some bead-like bodies of land, or is it that these small dots of land mass jutting into the Atlantic were viewed as a barrier-like fence vis-à-vis the ocean to the south, east and north?]

My late neighbor on St. John, Captain Neptune Richards, a farmer most of his life and owner of Estate Sussanasberg, regularly pronounced “kraal” when he spoke of the officially listed Coral Bay on the East End of St. John. Historians, in fact, suggest to us that the place name derived from its geography and early use as a corral of sorts.

“Kraaling” is also a term used even today among fishermen in the Virgin Islands to signify a stage in the catching and marketing of fish. When a large “school” of fish–especially jacks, bonitos or yellowtails--have been “rounded” in a seine and it is known that the market will only bear a part of the catch, it is customary among some fishermen to empty the seine into a section of a bay that has been fenced in–sometimes with rocks and other times with regular farm fencing supported by upright poles–so that the portion needed for the market on any one day can be retrieved and the remainder kept alive for future trips to the market.

We employ “kraal” as a title for this culture study with the last of these connotations foremost in mind.