Creole studies is a contentious field, but there is a common consensus that plantation creoles resulted from second-language acquisition amidst uniquely deprived input, the idea being that the disproportion of learners to speakers on the typical colonial plantation acted as a "filter" upon European languages. In this talk I will suggest that the presumed causal link between plantation demographics and the appearance of plantation creoles is mistaken. A wealth of evidence converges upon placing the emergence of these creoles as trade/work pidgins in West African trade settlements, established by Europeans and staffed by Africans during the slave trade. Furthermore, upon examination the conception of plantations as language filters is less sociolinguistically tenable than traditionally thought. The thesis is motivated in part by an anomaly hitherto neglected in creole studies, the fact that creoles repeatedly failed to emerge in plantation colonies run by Spain. I will present a revised account of the birth of these languages which explains this anomaly and others, the goal being a genesis theory which can both tackle the range of data unearthed since the late 1960s while also retaining refutability.