In the books there's only one Brown mentioned, that being Lavender obviously, but in the games there's more and they provide background to the family. For those not in the know the Browns semi-recently came from Jamaica (semi-recently back in 1890), which I found really interesting in terms of wizarding world implications. So of course I had to go look for the specifics, and this post gives some details on what I found.
Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert in African or Middle American history or racial relations. If anyone else more familiar with the matters under discussion chimes in I strongly urge you to listen to them instead of me.
What We Know from Canon
For further background reference, the other known Browns are Thomas Brown, owner of Tomes and Scrolls (bookshop) in Hogsmeade in 1890, and Belinda Brown who is a (seemingly high ranking) operative in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. We know their family has been in Britain for some decades by 1890, and that they were previously bakers. So we're going to be looking at how these African descent people ended up in Jamaica, how that reflects on the wizarding world, and how they made their way to Britain in early or mid 19th century to become respectable middle class people.
As for Lavender herself, whether you headcanon her as having darker skin (as per the early movies) or lighter skin (as per the later movies after she became a speaking part character), she might or might not be related to the Brown family in the rest of the series. That's a bit immaterial to the conclusions, but it does provide interesting possibilities for her character if they're actually related and she has Jamaican (and beyond) heritage.
Establishing Wizarding Jamaica
Jamaica was originally inhabited by the Taíno people starting maybe around the year 800 or so. They may or may not be of the Arawak language group, which gave us such words as barbacoa (barbecue), tabaco (tobacco), juracán (hurricane), hamaca (hammock), kanoa (canoe), among many others. Very influential in other words! The place itself was originally called Xaymaca, which 'Jamaica' is an approximation of. The Taíno arrived from the south, which indicates that there might have been contact with the mainland still a few hundred years later when 'Castelobruxo' was established (we know it's at least as old as Hogwarts, which was founded sometime in late 10th century). Thus, it's entirely possible that any (or some) Taíno witches and wizards attended the school from the very date of its founding. The population of the island reached up to 60,000 people in some estimates so there would have been a dozen or so wizards at least, even by fairly conservative estimates.
But that's before Columbus arrived, in May 1494, and the Portuguese took control of the island. The population of Taíno had plummeted to just some 2500 by the time the Portuguese were conquered in turn by the English over two hundred years later. Most Taíno died, although even in the real world some had escaped into the mountainous interior of the island and established refugee communities. Which is of course of interest to us because if there was any substantial number of these lucky escapees then there could have been witches and wizards among them. And of course, unless the Portuguese brought magical folk of their own then it's rather more likely for the witches and wizards among the Taíno population to have survived to escape, at least if they reacted quickly enough to the threat. Additionally, if it's indeed true that muggle diseases don't touch magical folk, that makes it even more likely that the surviving Taíno were heavily skewed towards witches and wizards. It's a complete unknown though whether they could establish contact with the mainland to attend 'Castelobruxo' if indeed they'd done so before Columbus's arrival, and we have no word on how wandless magic or indigenous American styles of magic work, let alone what type of travel and concealment spells they had developed. Depending on the specifics they might or might not have been a real help to the rest of their surviving community.
But I digress, we're looking for the Browns, which is to say people of African descent. That's where the English come in, they started bringing in huge numbers of prisoners and servants (mostly from Ireland), but also slaves, primarily of the Akan people (modern west African countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Togo). It's in fact fairly likely that being from Jamaica, the Browns are originally of the Akan. A fair number of these slaves also escaped and ended up living and mixing with the escaped Taíno in the mountains. Their combined communities became known as the Maroons. It's unlikely that if the slavers were muggle they would have managed to transport witches and wizards, but muggleborns, especially muggleborns born on the island, would definitely have had a good chance to be there and then manage the escape to join with the Maroon/Taíno communities. Considering even a clueless un-taught muggleborn's chances of escape compared to muggles, you could even say that muggleborn Akans might have greatly supplemented the magical population already present.
There's also various other interesting tidbits from this time period, like the possibility of wizard pirates. Jamaica was home base to many pirate operations in the 17th century when the English took over. Thus, it's plausible that there were wizarding pirate crews in the area even! Or, say, wizarding Taíno/Maroon pirate crews. If the Portuguese and the English didn't have wizarding folk in their service, how would they have stopped the Taíno or the Maroons from occasionally traveling between their mountain homes and the sea for their ships? This is definitely extra, but I had to include the information. Possible wizarding pirates! Now isn't that just a grand thought.
There's one more thing I have to mention that's of interest here in the basic setting though, and that's the language. It's fairly likely that the wizarding Taíno and their surviving muggle brethren retained enough community to have kept their language, which the escaped Akan slaves that joined them could easily have picked up. If indeed Taíno and Akan wizarding community or few survived on Jamaica, there's a good chance they would have kept on speaking their original language, or at least a mixture of Taíno and Akan languages which is closer to what happened in the real world. What I'm getting at here is it's likely they kept referring to the island as Xaymaca in their own language. Whether later more organized Jamaican wizarding community (post-International Confederation of Wizards) kept the original name in the face of English conventions is anyone's guess. It's a convenient shorthand for this post though, so from here on out I'll be using 'Jamaica' to refer to the muggle side and 'Xaymaca' to refer to the wizarding side.
ICW and Xaymaca's Role in the Post-ISOS World
Next we have a problem and the name of that problem is the International Statute of Secrecy (ISOS), which came into effect in 1692. That's two hundred years after westerners arrived in Jamaica. Is it plausible to say that if a (partially or mostly) wizarding community of Taíno and later Akan was established on the island, that no wizarding officials in Europe noticed or were notified of their existence? This is a problem elsewhere in the Americas too. Just how much did the International Confederation of Wizards know of the American wizarding communities, and was there any formal contact between them? Were indigenous American wizarding communities involved in setting up ISOS? Because that's the question, isn't it. We know MACUSA at least is fully on board with it and ensures that the muggles don't find out about magic, but were indigenous communities of America part of that decision?
Impossible to say for sure, really. But there are some details that might help. The easy integration of the Jamaican (Xaymacan) Browns into wizarding Britain seems to hint that there might have been an official process of moving from Xaymaca to Britain through wizarding routes. We'll cover in more detail later why the Browns had to have come from a wizarding community instead of being muggleborn slaves raised with the muggles. Whether that ease of movement comes from Xaymacan authorities having established relations with British wizarding authorities, or from British wizarding authorities having gone fully colonial and taken charge of the Xaymacan communities, we can't say for sure. But for the ISOS to have taken effect on the island, either Xaymaca was part of the ICW by 1692 or British wizards had formally claimed Jamaica as being under their rule and thus were responsible for ISOS upkeep there. I guess in the lack of canon evidence we each need to decide for ourselves whether or not we think that wizarding Britain was fully colonialist or not. Who was in charge in the end doesn't affect the broad strokes of this meta, but it's definite that one of the aforementioned possibilities is fact.
As for me, I think that if ICW really wanted to set up ISOS on indigenous people's land, they would have faced quite a bit of resistance from said indigenous people if the decision was entirely one-sided. At the very least those people would have wanted something in return for their cooperation. Something like full independence from colonialist schmucks, say? An America full of unwilling wizarding communities would have been a nightmare to deal with when what you want is secrecy. I'm on the camp of independent indigenous wizarding communities having existed the whole time and being equal members of the ICW since 16th century or so. I don't think the Statute of Secrecy would have succeeded in the Americas otherwise.
So I repeat, while it has no concrete implications in this meta, I'll be going forward with the assumption that Xaymaca was an independent country the whole time and a member of the ICW, just the same as any other established communities of indigenous people in the Americas.
The Slavery Problem
Let's go a bit forward in history. After the Statute was implemented at the end of the 17th century, 18th century brought hundreds of thousands of (mostly Akan) slaves to Jamaica for the sugarcane industry. There were also various rebellions and even several wars against the Maroons (1728-1740 and 1795-96), the first of which the Maroons won. Of course, the English then proceeded to incite the second war and won it, and the Maroons went back to non-entities on the political map of Jamaica, and in the real world were basically eradicated in fact, but I digress. Slave trade was abolished 1808 (so no new slaves were brought in after that, although children of slaves continued to be born to slavery), slavery itself was technically abolished in 1834, although continued in practice in Jamaica until 1838. Are you starting to see the problem here? Hogwarts Legacy takes place in 1890. We've now reached times when the Browns moved from Jamaica to Britain, and were well enough off to set up a bakery and school their children enough for them to become bookstore owners and Ministry operatives. If the Browns were muggleborns or even wizarding folk hidden within the slave populace, would they have had the wealth or the skills necessary for that?
I looked up numerous sources describing life and skill level of the slaves in Jamaica around that time period (such as here, here, or here), before and after they were freed, but was unable to find any mention of skilled bakers or cooks in Jamaica or the Caribbean in general. Certainly that doesn't mean that they couldn't exist, although based on the sources it seems rather unlikely. Could they have been first freed in 1838, then gained skill as bakers in Jamaica, and finally immigrated to Britain with their newly found skills? Could be. But perhaps a more likely explanation is that the Browns were part of the Xaymacan wizarding community, which would have been rather more well off being defended by magic than the muggle Maroons we know basically died out on the island. It would give them skills, it would have let them accumulate wealth for several generations which they then used to establish themselves in Britain, and Xaymacan wizarding authorities (whether indigenous or British overlords) would have made the immigration process to Britain vastly easier than it would have been for just any unskilled poverty-ridden newly released slave the kind of which Jamaica was full of at the time.
For more tidbits to help us look into this, let's look at Thomas Brown, proprietor of Tomes and Scrolls in Hogsmeade. He's by no means a spring chicken, has some grey and everything. Yet he talks of his 'family' having come from Jamaica, as if he was born in Britain himself. So how old is he? We don't know for certain, although the grey in his hair certainly helps. Google says that Black people typically start to go grey around mid-40s. So let's say the Browns arrived in Britain fifty years before Hogwarts Legacy, around 1840. That would give them only two years to between actual abolishing of slavery in Jamaica and their moving date, to gain the skills and the wealth necessary to immigrate and set up shop. Realistic? Not so much. Conclusion is they must be from a Xaymacan wizarding community, probably some kind of Maroon settlement that escaped the muggle Maroon eradication of the late 18th and early 19th century by means of magical defenses.
But what could have triggered their moving to Britain from the newly liberated Jamaica? Well. Perhaps Jamaica wasn't so liberated yet and they moved earlier than 1840, that's only the estimate for the latest they had to have moved by. Perhaps the early Browns saw the grand promises of the abolition of slavery and saw that their muggle brethren on the island still suffered, were still slaves. Perhaps they got fed up with waiting. Perhaps they did stick around to see the actual abolishing of slavery, but wanted better opportunities for their children. Jamaica was an incredibly restless and disease-ridden place by mid 19th century, anyone would have wanted out. But in the end, there's any number of reasons they could have left Jamaica, and unfortunately there's no way to tell for sure.
Xaymacan Culture, and Various Possibilities
Well. There's no use figuring out what kind of place the Browns came from geographically and historically if we still don't know anything about their culture, right? Lots of possible implications there. So let's take a brief look at the Taíno and Akan cultures and what they might have produced in a wizarding context.
The Taíno and Akan are actually fairly similar in many ways. Both societies were originally matrilineal in some ways, for the Taíno in kinship and inheritances, including inherited social status, for the Akan in kinship and inheritances including social status (Akan surnames though, are patrilineal instead). Gold jewelry was favored in both cultures, and chairs in both were traditionally reserved for the nobility only. Quite curious actually how many details they have that are the same! It's no wonder that even in the real world these two people blended so readily into the Maroons when forced into general proximity.
It unfortunately proved beyond me to find details of the indigenous Akan religion (which continued to be practiced in one form or another by almost all slaves in Jamaica regardless of their originating culture), but as for the Taíno, they worshiped (worship) deities and ancestral spirits via statues, and were led by a priest class that were also healers. I've remarked on it before I think, with the post on Salazar Slytherin's origins, but cultures like these do make it sound as if in the wizarding world it's the magical folk who might have had high status in a lot of the world. That might give a bit of insight into the social structure of their communit(ies), wizarding folk were likely highly respected. Also, traditional Taíno food was mostly vegetarian supplemented by little things like eels and lizards, since that's what was available. That might come into play if looking at traditional foods in relation to the Brown family, such as in a fic say!
But what I'm actually getting at here, is that while Thomas Brown's features do look stereotypically African in the game, it's entirely possible that his blood and cultural heritage is partially Taíno instead, since we have already established that it's most likely his family was from the Xaymacan Maroon communities.
Which leads us back to Lavender Brown. If she's related to the other Browns in the series, is she about to inherit from her mother or other female relative perhaps? Does her jewelry signify more than just a teenage girl's fancy? The patterns on her clothes? (the Akan in specific are known for incorporating mythological symbols in their art, and that includes clothing and jewelry) Has she inherited any Taíno or Akan magical practices? Does her interest in Divination tie in with her cultural heritage? Is she vegetarian or does she prefer vegetarian food that would remind her of her family's home cooking?
All very good questions! Maybe with a little further digging one could set up a quite fascinating cultural heritage for her and her family. This is where I bow out though. Go wild, should the topic of Lavender Brown and the Brown family in general interest you.
A sculpture titled 'River God (Stone resin of an Original Carved statue)' by sculptor Thomas Brown. In a medium of Stone Resin and in an edition of 1/9.
