Interesting excerpt from Odeen's article:
But if the Islam that came with African slaves did not survive the conditions of slavery, the name “Fulah” came to be used as a descriptive of indentured Indian Muslims and their descendants. The Blacks who labelled them Fulahs clearly knew Fula-speaking Africans who were Muslims.
The enslaved African Muslims arriving in Guyana were Fulani peoples. probably brought in from/through regions approximating today's Guinea/Liberia/Sierra Leone. These were obviously the first Muslims into Guyana.
So when larger numbers arrived with the Indian indentures, the term "fullah man" had already been established in the creolese lexicon to describe a Muslim. These Fulani people had to be around in the late 18th/early 19th century because that is when Guyanese creolese began to develop. Prior to that the slaves spoke Dutch Creole, now an extinct language.
What i not known is that subtantial numbers of Africans arrived in Guyana after 1838, coming in either as indentures (mainly from Sierra Leone), or as people who were being illegally transported to Cuba or Brazil, intercepted by British ships, and then transferred to Guyana. It is believed that Agricola and Ithaca owe their origins to these people.
We do not remember that not every Afro Guyanese lineage comes from slavery, just as we do not know that the first Muslims in Guyana were West Africans. That is because these African populations were absorbed into the larger creole (Guyanese, Bajan and other West Indians) and their identities subsumed into the dominant narrative of the Christianized descendant of slavery.
So when people celebrate Arrival Day, please note that it is nit just Indians (or sometimes we also remember Chinese and Portuguese) who arrived as freed men to work on the estates. It is also post slavery Africans.