See also Miscellaneous: Texts and Sources
THE ATLANTIC WORLD
- Howard Temperley reviews John Thornton's AFRICA AND AFRICANS IN THE MAKING OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD
- History
Howard Temperley
TLS Friday October 30 1998
AFRICA AND AFRICANS IN THE MAKING OF THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1400-1680 By John Thornton. 340pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, Pounds 13.95 - 0 521 398564 9.
Such is the guilt evoked by the memory of the slave trade that Africans have commonly been represented as the passive victims of European exploitation. As John Thornton shows, this is not only inaccurate but derogatory. The considerations that determined the behaviour of African traders were much like those that moved their European counterparts. Africans, however, differed from Europeans in that they did not place a high premium on the ownership of land, so that ownership of labour, much of it supplied by slaves, constituted their principal source of wealth. As a result, trading in slaves and fighting wars to obtain them were already commonplace long before the first Portuguese mariners appeared on the West African coast. There were, moreover, already well-established external trade routes connecting sub-Saharan African states with the Mediterranean and Red Sea littorals. The European advent, far from being a "fatal impact", merely opened up new frontiers of opportunity which African elites hastened to exploit, trading not only in slaves but in gold, ivory, woven cloths, sandalwood, pelts and other items, all earlier exported by way of the camel routes of the Sahara.
Thornton is dismissive of the arguments of those who attribute the development of this commerce to European coercion. Quite apart from the problem of African diseases, Europeans lacked the military capacity to force their trade on slave merchants the world over. The African economy was much more varied and productive than has been commonly supposed. Most of the items imported consisted of goods that were not essential to Africans' well-being or survival. Later chapters deal with Africans' impact on the New World, where, before the nineteenth century, they outnumbered European settlers by a considerable margin. Not least among the book's many virtues is the evidence it gives of the remarkable speed with which hard knowledge is replacing uninformed speculation in the field of African Studies.
Howard Temperley
- Frank Bremer introduces the Winthrop Papers seminar on The History of the Atlantic World from the 16th to the 18th Centuries
-
H-NET List for African History and Culture [H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999
From: Frank Bremer, Millersville U
<fbremer@marauder.millersv.edu>
The Winthrop Papers Project at Millersville University
wishes to announce the launching of two new electronic
seminars, on The History of the Atlantic World from the 16th
to the 18th Centuries, and on Puritanism. Both of these
ventures will feature papers accessible via the web with
scheduled chat room discussion sessions.
Papers will be scheduled for the seminars on the approval of
the moderators. Access to the chat rooms will be by
individual passwords available from the moderators for an
individual seminar chat session.
We hope that by using this technology we can bring together
for stimulating discussion individuals who would find it
impossible to travel to institutionally based seminars or
conferences where similar papers might be presented.
For further information on these seminars go to:
www.millersv.edu/~winthrop
and click on the link at the bottom of the page.
- ITINERARIO 1999/2: ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE: THE NATURE OF ATLANTIC HISTORY
- Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999
From: Olaf Peters
<Itinerario@letmail.let.leidenuniv.nl>
ITINERARIO 1999/2
Subscribers of H-Africa will find some of the following
articles of interest. These articles are published in
_ITINERARIO_ 1999/2.
_ITINERARIO_ is the European Journal of Overseas History,
published quarterly by the Department of History at the
University of Leiden. Submissions are invited and may be
sent to: ITINERARIO, PO Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The
Netherlands. Subscription requests and inquiries may be
directed to: itinerario@let.leidenuniv.nl For information about back issues or the
Itinerario-conferences please visit our website:
http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/history/itin/itin.htm
CONTENTS ITINERARIO 1999/2 [include:]
ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE: THE NATURE OF ATLANTIC HISTORY
The Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1800: Expansion without Empire
PIETER C. EMMER & WILLEM W. KLOOSTER
The French Atlantic
SILVIA MARZAGALLI
The Iberian Atlantic
CARLA R. PHILLIPS
The British Atlantic World: Coordination, Complexity, and
The Emergence of an Atlantic Market Economy, 1651-1815
DAVID HANCOCK
'YES', There Is A Black Atlantic
DEBORAH WHITE
Atlantic History in Global Perspective
DAVID ELTIS
Teaching Atlantic History
ALISON GAMES
Itinerario's new web site is at www.itinerario.nl
- Lovejoy, P. E "The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery," SWHSAE, 2, 1 (1997) Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, II, 1 (1997).
- Abstract(1): Lovejoy argues that sufficient information exists about
individuals taken as captives in the slave trade to allow historians to
dispense with a generalized notion of a "traditional" African background
for New World blacks and, accordingly, to articulate the African-ness of
the black diaspora with ethnic and historical specificity. Lovejoy
concedes there are difficulties involved with absorbing the "extensive
documentation on the African-ness of the slave communities of the
diaspora," but he lays out a program for future diasporic studies.
Prominent in this program are the compilation of biographical data on
captives and slaves (including oral source material), the analysis of the
sites of the slave trade and movements of Africa-derived peoples, the
analysis of cultural activities, and an unprecedented form of
international, inter institutional cooperation, most notably among
African, American, and European institutions which promote education and
research.
"Il ne servirait a rien non plus de dissimuler nos propres résponsabilités
dans les désastres qui se sont abattus ou continuent de s'abattre sur
nous. Nos complicités dans la traite [en esclaves] sont bien établies, nos
divisions absurdes, nos errements collectifs, l'esclavage comme
institution endogene...."
Nicéphore Dieudonné Soglo
The UNESCO Slave Route Project
With these words, the Président de la République du Bénin launched the
UNESCO "Slave Route" Project on 1 September 1994 at the old slaving port
of Ouidah.2 To achieve world peace, Soglo continued, it is necessary to
come to terms with the legacy of slavery, not only the brutalities of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas but also
the legacy of the blood-soaked ritual houses in the royal palaces at
Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey. The "Slave Route" began
within Africa, and its impact was often severe for both deported Africans
and those who remained as slaves in West Africa as well.
The pursuit of the "Slave Route" represents a departure in the study of
the history of Africa and the African diaspora. Hitherto, Africa and the
diaspora have generally been discrete subjects of enquiry. Despite the
work of Pierre Verger, Roger Bastide, Melville Herskovits and others,
scholars have rarely pursued common links between Africa and the
Americas.3 To address this disjuncture in scholarship is the target of the
UNESCO Project, which aims to trace the slave trade from the original
points of enslavement in the African interior, through the coastal (and
Saharan) entrepots by which slaves were exported from the region, to the
societies in the Americas and the Islamic world into which they were
imported.4
The selection of Ouidah as the venue for the announcement of the Slave
Route Project was auspicious, since Ouidah had witnessed the deportation
of hundreds of thousands of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.5 The enduring memories of the trade were on display, as a tour
of museums in Ouidah, Porto Novo and Abomey revealed. The Porto Novo
palace was the venue for a display of contemporary Béninois art, which
depicted the tragedies of the slave trade in several mediums. The current
depiction of the African past through art stood in sharp contrast to the
racism of French society during the late nineteenth century as depicted
through posters and advertising from the age of the Scramble; the legacy
of slavery and the slave trade were readily apparent. The horrors of
slavery emerge in a most grotesque form in the Abomey palace of King
Ghezo. The walls of the shrine where thousands of war captives were
sacrificed contain the dried blood used to make the bricks. In this
setting, the opening words of President Soglo became all the more
poignant. As the President proclaimed, "we are all responsible for the
slave trade." At the closing of the colloquium, the Minister of Education
and Culture disclosed the fact that he is the son of a slave and that he
wanted to know about the descendants of his brothers and sisters in the
diaspora; the pain of the past era could not have been sharper. With the
UNESCO initiative, an effort is being made to bridge that almost
unbridgeable gap that separates the academic study of slavery and the
slave trade from a full and general appreciation of the heritage of Africa
in the diaspora and the modern world.
The emphasis on the "slave route" draws attention to the consequences of
the trade on Africa and the continuities that rooted the deported slave
population in Africa. Some slave descendants and former slaves returned,
particularly in the nineteenth century. And there seems always to have
been a small movement of individual freemen, especially merchants and
their sons, within the diaspora. The settlement of liberated slaves in
Sierra Leone and their subsequent dispersal represented one of several
patterns of population movement that was a consequence of the slave trade.
Besides the slaves taken off slave ships and settled in Sierra Leone,6
other former slaves returned from Brazil, especially after the suppression
of the Male revolt of 1835.7 A few came from the United States, the
Caribbean and other parts of the diaspora, a migration that tended to
increase after the emancipation of slaves in the different parts of the
Americas.8 As these demographic patterns suggest, the return of former
slaves and their descendants to Africa was one mechanism by which the
diaspora influenced West Africa. "African history" not only followed the
slave route to the Americas and the Islamic world, but "diaspora history"
came back to Africa with the repatriates, thereby complicating the African
component in the evolution of the diaspora. The African diaspora came to
embrace Africa itself.
A revisionist interpretation of the dispersal of enslaved Africans in the
era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and by extension to the Islamic
world and the Indian Ocean basin, concentrates on the role of Africa in
the genesis and ongoing history of the diaspora. This revisionist approach
emphasizes the continuities in African history and the extension of that
history into the diaspora. The identification of disjunctures in that
history is essential, but in contrast to previous interpretations of the
diaspora, these disjunctures are analysed in terms of the continuities
that have been largely overlooked. There were often concentrations of
slaves from similar backgrounds in particular slave societies in the
Americas, and in some cases where the number of slaves was sufficiently
large, several distinct historical backgrounds had a determining influence
on the formation of identifiable communities. That is, in most parts of
the Americas, slaves tended to perceive of themselves in terms of
communities that had roots in Africa.9
Although the relevance of the African background is usually admitted, the
continuities and discontinuities of African history in the diaspora are
usually minimized or ignored.10 With rare exceptions, such as the
identification of a Muslim factor,11 it is as if Africa had little impact
on the development of slave society and identity in the Americas, except
in a generalized sense.12 Marketing behavior, credit institutions,
religious rituals, naming practices, funeral ceremonies, and other
features of culture are recognized as sharing traits with a generalized
and often timeless Africa, but there has been little attempt to
demonstrate how these cultural traits developed in the context of specific
historical situations in Africa from which identifiable groups of enslaved
Africans actually trace their provenance. Identification of cultural
traits is hardly sufficient for the purposes of analysing the development
of the African diaspora, however.
The analysis and discussion in this paper depends upon the concept of
diaspora.13 A diaspora, like the ethnic group with which it is identified,
requires the recognition of a boundary; those on one side are associated
with the homeland, if there is one, and those on the other side are in the
diaspora. Individuals define themselves in opposition to their, often many
and varied, host societies through the identification with the homeland
and other diaspora communities. Individuals in the diaspora are usually in
contact with the homeland, however irregular and indirect. Political and
environmental factors can temporarily disrupt or impede this interchange,
but the diaspora ceases to have meaning if the idea of an ancestral home
is lost. While abroad, individuals maintain their social identity by
living in communities which trace their origins to the homeland. As the
case of the Jewish diaspora demonstrates, the inability to access a
homeland for a prolonged period can prompt a quest that in itself becomes
an important component of the identity of the diaspora. In the case of the
African diaspora, identification with the homeland varied considerably. In
many places, individuals participated in organized communities whose
origins in Africa distinguished among several ethnic, religious and
political backgrounds. White masters and overseers regularly acknowledged
ethnic and religious differences among slaves in the conduct of the
economic life of plantations. Their perceptions of differences among
slaves are important in reconstructing the hidden dimensions of slave
communities, but only through careful study.
Slaves, as was the case with members of other diasporas, did not readily
accept the categorization of their masters and hosts, the "African-ness"
of the diaspora emerged in tandem with the evolving racism that provided
the moral and liminal means of upholding the enslavement of blacks. In
general discussion, masters referred to all slaves as a category, rarely
distinguishing among them as individuals. Racial designations and
stereotypes blur the historical identities of the various ethnic
communities that formed under slavery. How and when racialist influences
shaped slavery and the lives of slaves obviously varied. Racial
stereotyping was constantly reformulated, just as ethnicity and community
were perpetually redefined under slavery. Diasporas had their particular
tensions with their host societies; in the Americas that tension expressed
itself through racism.
Enslaved Africans defined their membership in their own communities in a
variety of ways, often involving layers of identity with overlapping and
frequently competing interests. As with other diasporas, enslaved Africans
subordinated internal divisions and differences in language, religion, and
other aspects of culture to their circumstances. The different
sub-cultures of the diaspora developed an orthodoxy that was
"traditional," indeed "creole."
Diasporas, as made very clear in the case of enslaved Africans, operated
outside of or along side the political and legal structures of the host
countries where members of the diaspora found themselves. In many
circumstances, people join larger diasporas, often loosing any sense of
cultural purity as a sub-group. In the African context, there were a
number of diasporas, and these were made up of slaves and free-born alike.
Moreover, past relationships, including pawnship, apprenticeship, enforced
marriage or concubinage, and indenture, might well influence the
interaction among members of the diaspora. Surely people who spoke the
same language must have discussed their personal histories.
Creolization and African History
The discussion the African diaspora here stands as a critique of the
"creolization" school.14 According to this interpretation, enslaved
Africans did not generally share a common culture; their religious
beliefs, languages, and social structures varied too greatly to influence
the economies and societies of the Americas more than on occasion. The
African dimension was marginal in the genesis of the societies of the
Americas, according to this interpretation: the diverse ethnic and
cultural backgrounds of the slave population ostensibly limited the extent
to which the African background could provide a common core.
The "creolization" school emphasizes the needs of enslaved Africans to
generate defensive mechanisms to protect themselves from the arbitrary
brutality of slavery; that is "creolization" was essentially a reaction to
slavery. Cultural "survivals" have symbolic and ritual value in this
interpretation, but otherwise have little substance in bridging the
Atlantic gap. The extent to which strong African influences affected the
process of "creolization" generally remains an understudied topic. To what
extent did enslaved Africans perceive their personal histories as a direct
continuation of their experiences in Africa?
While the "creolization" theorists have emphasized the amalgamation of
diverse cultures and historical backgrounds into a set of common
sub-cultures, revisionists search for the African component in the
evolution of the "Afro-American", "American", "Latin", and "Caribbean."
Revisionists shift the emphasis from the birth of a new culture and
society to the maintenance of ties with the homeland. The exchange of
ideas and people between the diaspora and the homeland under slavery and
as a consequence change was not only mediated through Europe but in far
more complex ways. To what extent were enslaved Africans able to determine
their cultural survival; to what extent were they agents in the
continuation of traditions and the re interpretation of real historical
events? This emphasis on agency and continuity questions the Eurocentrism
and the American-centrism that have dominated much of slave studies.
Instead, Africa and the various layers of its diaspora are perceived
within a world perspective that attempts to understand historical patterns
and change without being tied to nationalist, ethnic or racial
considerations, but rather tries to explain them.
The pursuit of African history into the diaspora demonstrates how slaves
could create a world that was largely autonomous from white, European
society.15 Too frequently, the discussion of the African background has
been too vague to establish many concrete links with the homeland. As
Melville Herskovits and others have demonstrated, it is possible to
identify "survivals" or "Africanisms" that link people of African descent
to a common, albeit vague, background.16 But it is premature to conclude
that there was no continuous historical experience for the enslaved
Africans who came to the Americas. Enslaved Africans were victims of their
predicament, but were still agents of their own identities within the
confines of slavery. As an extensive scholarly literature now documents,
slaves were often successful in asserting their autonomy from white
society and European culture. The analysis of the "African" content in
this quest for autonomy varied considerably among the different areas of
slave concentration in the diaspora. Specialists studying Brazil have long
appreciated the dynamism of these links. By contrast, the study of the
United States, until recently, has largely ignored the specific African
backgrounds of the enslaved population. Thus Herbert Gutman uses
contemporary documentation to examine family patterns and the roots of
Afro-American society, but is unable to tie specific individuals or groups
to the historical context of the contemporary Africa from which enslaved
people were drawn.17 This "near-autonomous" approach identifies a creole
population without much African content. The challenge is to correct the
Eurocentrism that has dominated slave studies by establishing the
significance of specific "survivals" in historical context.
The failure to study enslaved Africans in the Americas from the
perspective of African history is largely a result of the way in which
African history developed as a sub-discipline. The effort to identify an
autonomous African past consciously or not affected the decisions of
scholars to concentrate on particular themes in African history that were
divorced from the study of slavery in the Americas. This political
decision separated the study of Africans in the Americas from the history
of continental Africa, and Afro-American Studies or Black Studies remained
virtually distinct from African Studies. The rise of pseudo-historical
Afro-centrism in this context is hardly surprising. Afro-centrism promotes
an attitude that counteracts racism and emphasizes Africa's place in the
Americas and other parts of the diaspora. But Afrocentrism has denied
itself the rigors of historical methodology. The revisionist approach to
the study of religion, ethnicity and culture in the Americas corrects this
ahistoricism by emphasizing African history; the evolution of slave
cultures in the Americas was tied to a specific set of African contexts
that must be analyzed historically. The context of enslavement and the
experiences of slaves in Africa before deportation to the Americas then
become relevant.
If African history holds the key to the diaspora, then the study of the
diaspora must begin in Africa, not in the Americas or elsewhere. The
African diaspora has to be dissected in its entirety. The personal
histories of individual enslaved Africans then have to be examined for
historical patterns that stem from Africa. By examining the African
history of the trade, the focus shifts. Instead of focussing on the
Americas, the method follows cohorts of slaves from Africa to the various
places in the diaspora to which they might have gone, whether in the
Americas, Islamic North Africa, or elsewhere in Africa. Inevitably, a
focus on the Americas selects slaves that were assembled in each slave
economy (Jamaica, Bahia, Cuba, etc.), regardless of the different places
of origin of these many slaves. The study of slave culture from this
American context emphasizes the common features of society and thereby
focussing on "creolization;" the origins of individual slaves are
ambiguous and generalized. By contrast, slaves can be followed from the
different parts of Africa by extrapolating from known shipping records,
verifying such data in the Americas. This approach balances the
homogenizing tendency of the creolization model. It follows enslaved
individuals who coalesce as communities, either on the basis of Islam,
other religious and cultural institutions, and/or language.
African History in the Americas
The contributions of anthropologists aside, it is time to add an
historical perspective that is rooted in African history to the
examination of slavery in the Americas. The slave trade and the movement
of identifiable groups of people have to be tied to specific historical
events and processes in Africa, and it must be demonstrated what was and
what was not transferred to the Americas. From this perspective, specific
historical circumstances determined who was exported and who was not, and
these circumstances might well have influenced who was active in promoting
adjustments under slavery and preserving knowledge of Africa. The
different reasons for enslavement have to be distinguished as crucial
variables in determining what factors were important to the enslaved
population. Whether an individual became a slave as a result of war,
famine, commercial bankruptcy, judicial punishment, or religious
persecution mattered. The conscious deportation of political prisoners has
to be distinguished from impersonal transactions in the fairs and
market-places of Africa. Instances of "mistakes" need to be documented as
a means of determining why individuals ended up in the Americas or North
Africa who legally should not have been so enslaved. Such examples include
arbitrary alterations in the terms and conditions of pawnship, failure to
ransom kidnapped victims, and "panyarring", i.e. the seizure of
individuals for debt or other compensation.18 Slaves can be examined as
individuals and as recognizable groups of people who had personal and
collective histories.
I am suggesting that the methodologies and research results of the past
several decades of Africanist history can be used much more effectively in
the examination of the conditions of slaves in the Americas than has been
the case until now. In the process of applying these methodologies and
research results, we will also know more about the history of Africa
itself. Specifically, because it is now possible to say much more about
the identities of the enslaved people who were brought to the Americas
from Africa, we can now see the slaves of the Americas as not just an
enslaved black population but also as Africans who constituted a displaced
population that behaved in ways that were similar to other displaced
people at other times. The fact that people were forcibly transported from
Africa in the case of slaves should not disguise the similarity with other
migrations. By comparing the movement of slaves across the Atlantic with
other trans-Atlantic migrations, it is possible to see Africans as active
agents in reformulating their cultural and social identities in the
Americas, despite the oppressive setting to which they were subjugated.
The issue of agency is important in unravelling the history of Africans
outside of Africa. Scholars have taken the conscious actions of slaves
into consideration in studying slave resistance, even extending their
analyses to the ethnic origins of those involved in revolt and marronage.
The extent to which specific historical situations influenced this
resistance has not been explored sufficiently, however. The study of
religion, cultural expression (including music, cuisine, naming patterns,
etc.), and social relationships (kinship, ethnicity and ship-board
friendships) also hinges on the recognition that people found ways to
determine their identities on their own terms. Much more so than
previously, these aspects of slave culture are not perceived as
"survivals" but rather as features of conscious and not-so-conscious
decisions by people themselves in selecting from their collective
experiences those cultural and historical antecedents that helped make
sense of the cruelty of slavery in the Americas. While many slaves were
brutalized to the extent that they died without entering into meaningful
and sustainable forms of social and cultural interaction with their
compatriots, many other slaves more or less successfully re-established
communities, reformulated their sense of identity, and reinterpreted
ethnicity under slavery and freedom in the Americas. More than simply the
foundation for individual and collective acts of resistance, these
expressions of agency involved the transfer and adaptation of the
contemporary world of Africa to the Americas and were NOT mere "survivals"
of some diluted African past. Despite the "social death" of which Orlando
Patterson speaks,19 slaves created a new social world that drew on the
known African experience. Certainly the horrors of enslavement, the rough
march to coastal ports and the trauma of the Middle Passage affected the
psychological and medical health of the enslaved population, but not to
the extent imagined by Elkins, at least not in most cases. While their
resurrection from Patterson's "social death" was distorted by chattel
slavery, many enslaved Africans were none the less fit enough to
participate in the "200 Years' War" of which Patterson also writes.20
From the perspective of Africa, therefore, it is fruitful to examine the
condition of slaves in the Americas on the basis that they were still
Africans, despite their chattel status, the deracination that accompanied
their forced migration, and the sometimes haphazard and sometimes
deliberate attempts of Europeans to destroy or otherwise undermine this
African identity. I am not here suggesting that enslaved blacks conceived
of themselves in pan-African terms of recent times; the evolution of such
solidarity has to be examined historically for different times and
different places. Rather, I am arguing that many slaves in the Americas,
perhaps the great majority, interpreted their lived experiences in terms
of their personal histories, as anyone would, and in that sense the
African side of the Atlantic continued to have meaning. Often slaves,
former slaves, and their descendants still regarded themselves as Africans
-- in the broad sense that they had come from Africa, no matter whether
they reinterpreted that identity in reformulated ethnic terms (Nago,
Coramantee, Mandingo, Pawpaw, etc.), in religious terms (Male/Muslim,
Kongo Christian, animist), or in some other manner. Efforts to return to
Africa by boat or by joining the world of the ancestors through suicide
have special meaning in this sense. They are perhaps the starkest examples
of the continued association with Africa for some slaves.
The process of creolization comes much more in focus when the merger of
cultures -- European and African -- is perceived in terms that are more
equal than is often the case. The Africa that entered the creole mentality
was neither static nor ossified. We can go beyond the pioneering work of
Herskovits and his students, who identified sets of cultural traits --
"survivals" -- that provided colour to the sub-culture of slaves and their
descendants. This anthropological approach explores the formulation of
distinct societies in the context of slavery; current research is adding
an historical perspective to this analysis. For many slaves in the
Americas, Africa continued to live in their daily lives. That experience
included a struggle to adapt to slavery in the Americas and to
re-interpret cultural values and religious practices in context, but
frequently maintaining a clear vision of the African past and more than a
fleeting knowledge of developments in Africa after arrival in the
Americas. Only when fresh arrivals stopped coming from a specific homeland
did the process of creolization take root.
Problems of Methodology
As I have suggested, enslaved Africans sometimes interpreted their
American experience in terms of the contemporary world of Africa, and
consequently, efforts to understand their situation in the Americas has to
take full cognizance of the political, economic and social conditions in
those parts of Africa from where the individual slaves had actually come.
That is, the conditions of slavery were shaped to a considerable extent by
the personal experiences and backgrounds of the slaves themselves. They
brought with them the intellectual and cultural lens through which they
viewed their new lives in the Americas, and they made sense out of their
oppression through reference to Africa as well as the shared conditions of
auction block, mine and plantation. How to get at this carry-over of
experience presents difficulties for historians and other scholars, but
there is no reason to doubt that there was a transfer of experience, any
more than was the case with other immigrants, whether voluntary or
involuntary.
As a first approximation, it is essential to unravel the complicated and
often incompletely-known movement of individuals from point of enslavement
to coastal port and from there to the different parts of the Americas.
This exercise includes a study of the demography of the trade, an effort
which has made considerable advances in the past 25 years, since the
pioneering study of Philip D. Curtin.21 Despite ongoing critique and
revision, the regional origins of slaves by specific time period and
according to age and sex are now known with reasonable certainty. The
correlation of these quantifiable data with local political events and
economic factors in broad outline is now possible as well.22 The numbers
in themselves do not blame or condemn the participants in the slave trade;
no matter how they are viewed - large or small - numbers cannot adequately
express the terrible suffering of the people who were caught up in the
trade. What demographic analysis can do, however, is contribute to our
knowledge of the regional and ethnic origins of the exported slave
population. Statistical data are therefore useful in determining why, when
and how individuals were enslaved and indirectly may assist in revealing
what aspects of personal experience were important to slaves in the
Americas.
Although not all contemporary events in Africa continued to have meaning
to people once they arrived in the Americas, the reasons for enslavement
and deportation almost certainly did. There are at least two ways of
getting at these underlying factors: first, through an understanding of
the history of specific regions, states, and places in as much detail as
possible, and second through biographical accounts of individuals and a
sociological analysis of such accounts. This approach can help in
understanding not only where individual slaves came from and how they were
enslaved but also can assist in analyzing the process by which individuals
formed new communities and new identities under slavery.
The first task is the assignment of all historians of Africa and clearly
does not only relate to the study of slavery and the slave trade. Indeed,
the relative importance of trans-Atlantic slavery is subject to debate in
the study of the African past.23 This agenda of historical reconstruction
is now being pursued both in national universities within Africa and among
scholars world-wide to an extent that is often daunting to specialists and
perhaps more so to non-specialists. For scholars of slavery in the
Americas who seldom venture across the Atlantic to the homeland, the rapid
and voluminous changes in documentation and analysis are a special
problem. It is hard enough staying abreast of advances in any area of
specialization, and crossing the Atlantic to look closely at African
history is a big task. But difficulties duly considered, it is fully as
important to keep abreast of advances in African history as in European
history. The proper study of slavery in the Americas requires the study of
two, overlapping diasporas -- European and African -- and their
inter-relationships with their home cultures and societies and with each
other.24 Unfortunately, but perhaps to be expected if no longer
acceptable, the African dimension has suffered from an inferior status and
neglect while the European background and ongoing history have not.
The methodology that is required to uncover the active linkages between
Africa and the Americas must begin with a comprehensive knowledge of
African history. Then the same historical techniques must be applied in
reconstructing the past of Africans who were forcibly moved to the
Americas as in the migration of Europeans into their diaspora. It is a sad
comment on the state of slave studies in the Americas that this common
sense is often ignored. Some of the best scholarship makes assumptions
about the African past that abuse standard historical methodology;
including the central importance of chronology, the examination of change
over time, the critique of all available source material, the insistence
that later events and phenomena not be read back into the distant past,
and other aspects of the discipline that are or should be taught in
virtually every introductory history course.
In defiance of these fundamental principles of historical scholarship,
slave studies are too often imbued with ahistorical generalizations about
the nature of the African past. Raboteau identified the problem as
unavoidable because of a lack of sources "for writing the history of
nonliterate cultures." In his study of slave religion, he found that
"written [European] sources contemporaneous with the slave trade
are...often marred by ethnocentric bias, but as a genre they do give a
general, if distorted and fleeting, view of some elements of religious
belief and practice in West Africa during the centuries of the slave
trade."25 But is the problem with sources their scarcity? The UNESCO Slave
Route Project has already demonstrated that sources are extensive, though
widely scattered. Breakthroughs in technology that allow the scanning of
primary documents onto the computer suggest that the problem will soon be
an excessive quantity of material from archives that many specialists have
never been able to consult. The question of biased sources is a problem
common to all historical research, and hence Raboteau's comments on the
ethnocentrism of European sources are not unique to the study of the
African diaspora.
The technique that many scholars have adopted in overcoming the supposed
paucity of sources is the application of anthropological observations from
the twentieth century to the past.26 "When correlated with later
anthropological accounts," according to Raboteau, "some of the distortion
and confusion can be neutralized (though it would be naive to assume that
some modern accounts of African religions do not also suffer from bias)."
But can anthropological insights be used without verification through the
usual methods of historical scholarship? Without the verification of
contemporary documents, the findings of anthropology are nothing more than
speculation. Unfortunately, specialists of slavery in the America
generally have failed to document their analysis of religion and culture
on the basis of the lived experiences of the enslaved Africans
themselves.27 In discussing Igbo customs and practices, for example,
Sterling Stuckey uses twentieth-century data to demonstrate the continuity
and longevity of African customs and practices, but he does not establish
how and when culture was transferred.28 The result is bad anthropology and
even worse history. A critical examination of the condition of slaves must
begin in Africa, and that examination must use the same rigorous
historical methodology that characterizes other areas of history.
In Raboteau's words, the issue is "the question of the historicity of
`traditional' African cultures."
Can it be assumed that African cultures and religions have not changed
since the close of the Atlantic slave trade a century ago? To simply use
current ethnological accounts of African religions without taking into
account the possibility of change is methodologically questionable. Due
to pressures from without -- intensified Muslim and Christian missions,
European imperialism, Western technology and education -- the growth of
African nationalism during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
African traditional religions have changed and continued to do so....
Besides external pressures to change, there are also indigenous
processes of change within traditional African societies
themselves....29
Despite Raboteau's caution, the examination of religion is usually treated
in static terms; it is not shown what people believed and how they
expressed these beliefs in different times and places. Nor has there been
any serious attempt to demonstrate how religion was related to ideology
and political structure. Instead, the concept of "traditional African
religion" has been presented as an unchanging force that was all-embracing
over vast parts of the continent; observations from a variety of sources
are merged to fabricate a common tradition that may or may not have had
legitimacy. For want of historical research, the religious histories of
Africans from the Bight of Bénin, the Bight of Biafra, Kongo, and the
interior of Angola are accordingly reduced to the meaningless concept of
"traditional". Hence the concept "traditional" has little functional or
analytical use.30
The same standards of historical reconstruction should apply to the study
of the African religious tradition as in the examination of the impact of
Christian missions and evangelicalism and the spread of Islam. Unlike the
study of "traditional" African religion, the conversion of slaves to
Christianity in the Americas has been the subject of extensive research.
Consequently, scholarly analysis has not been prone to ahistorical
generalization, except with respect to the African background. Until
recently, moreover, the African contribution to the spread of Christianity
in the Americas was overlooked. As Thornton has demonstrated, some
Africans from Kongo and Angola were already Christian before reaching the
Americas, and hence enslaved Christians were also a factor in spreading
the faith among slaves in the Americas.31 Thornton's discovery indicates
that the interaction between African religious traditions and Christianity
was more complex than previously thought. Moreover, the context for
analyzing the conversion to Christianity includes Africa as well as Europe
and the Americas. Clearly the complexities of African religious history
are blurred because there has been little research done on this important
topic. The possible exception is the study of Islam among slaves, where
the historical context of enslavement has sometimes been identified with
concurrent political developments in West Africa.
Another area of analysis that is particularly fraught with ahistorical
generalizations concerns issues relating to ethnicity.32 With few
exceptions, the study of slavery in the Americas has tended to treat
ethnicity as a static feature of the culture of slaves. Twentieth-century
ethnic categories in Africa are often read backwards to the days of
slavery, thereby removing ethnic identity from its contemporary political
and social context. Michael Mullin, for example, is certainly correct in
noting that "tribal" is no longer "good form", but not for reasons he
supposes, and certainly "ethnicity" is not "a euphemism for tribal", as he
claims.33 The concept of ethnicity is a particularly valuable tool for
unravelling the past because it is a complex phenomenon tied into very
specific historical situations. By contrast, Gwendolyn Hall's account of
Africans in colonial Louisiana traces the movement of a core group of
Bambara from Africa to Louisiana, although for whatever reasons, Hall has
not been able to carry her findings forward very far.34 What does it mean
that "Bambara" arrived in Louisiana in the eighteenth century? To answer
this question requires a detailed study of how the term "Bambara" was used
in different contexts at the time, not only in Louisiana but also in other
parts of the diaspora and in West Africa. Since specific ethnic
identifications had meaning only in relation to other ethnic categories,
their importance has to be examined with reference to the boundaries that
separated different ethnic categories from each other, including the
political, religious, and economic dimensions of these differences and how
these changed over time. Certainly historical associations with Africa
were also essential features of these definitions of community, and rather
than being static, the links with Africa were seldom disconnected from
events across the Atlantic.
Ethnicity underwent redefinition in the Americas. On the one hand,
European observers developed categories for African populations which
involve problems of interpretation: The "Chamba" of slave accounts refers
to the Konkomba of the upper Voltaic region, not the Chamba of the Benue
River basin in Nigeria; Gbari are an ethnic group referred to as Gwari by
Hausa-speakers, but Gambari is a Yoruba term for Hausa; Nago is a
sub-section of Yoruba speakers but was sometimes used as a generic term
for Yoruba; Tapa refers to Nupe. These labels had meanings that have to be
deciphered in context. In the Sokoto Caliphate, conversion to Islam often
meant becoming Hausa, which became the language of commerce and empire.
Hence the recognition of Hausa-speakers in the diaspora does not
necessarily establish that these "Hausa" have much in common with
twentieth-century "Hausa", since many probably were non-Hausa in origin.
The imposition of European labels for African populations further
compounds the problem, since these were not necessarily the names used by
enslaved Africans themselves. As the study of ethnicity in Africa has
demonstrated clearly, ethnic identities and can only be understood in
context of the times; present ethnic categories cannot be applied
backwards in time any more than present religious practices can be.
Ethnicity, religion and culture of the enslaved population kept changing.
Before the abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans, new
slaves were constantly arriving and thereby infusing slave communities
with new information and ideas which had to be assimilated in ways that we
do not always understand at present. The movements of former slaves, both
before British abolition and especially afterwards, continued these
contacts. Being "Nago" in Bahia in the early nineteenth century was not
the same as being "Yoruba" in West Africa, but uncovering the difference
and what was meant by these labels at the time is a major task whose
undertaking must inform any analysis of the slave condition.
Resistance to Slavery and the Abolition Movement
While the African dimension has sometimes been emphasized in the analysis
of slave resistance in the Americas, the study of resistance is too often
divorced from a study of the abolition movement. The emphasis on African
history that is being advocated here suggests that these two subjects
should be treated together; the preliminary work on the ethnic component
in slave resistance should now be supplemented with an investigation of
the role that Africans played in the abolition movement and the spread of
anti-slavery doctrines. Once more the issue of agency and the African
background are paramount. Resistance and abolition must be re-examined in
the light of the additional research being conducted in Africa and after
renewed consideration of methodological issues arising from the
interpretation of new data.
The study of the African component of slave resistance may appear to be
the exception to the general state of slave studies, which has tended to
pay more attention to the European influences on the Americas rather than
the continuities with African history. Palmares is identified as an
"African" kingdom in Brazil; an early and important example of the
quilombos and palenques of Latin America which also often revealed a
strong African link.35 In Jamaica, enslaved Akan are identified with
rebellion and marronage; they are considered responsible for setting the
course of cultural development among the maroons.36 Despite the
identification of the ethnic factor, however, most studies of slave
resistance fail to examine the historical context in Africa from which
these rebellious slaves came. Whether or not there were direct links or
informal influences that shaped specific acts of resistance simply has not
been determined in most cases.
Because the African background has been poorly understood, perhaps,
scholars have tended to concentrate on the European influences which
shaped the agenda of slave resistance. Eugene Genovese, for example, has
argued that there was a fundamental shift in the patterns of resistance by
slaves at the end of the eighteenth century, which he correlated with the
French Revolution and the destruction of slavery in St. Domingue.37 Before
the 1790s, according to Genovese, slave resistance tended to draw
inspiration from the African past, but the content of that past remains
obscure in Genovese's vision. With the spread of revolutionary doctrines
in Europe and the Americas, slaves acquired elements of a new ideology
that reinforced their resistance to slavery. The process of creolization,
which introduced slaves to European thought, brought the actions of slaves
more into line with the revolutionary movement emanating from Europe.
Genovese's interpretation further highlights the problem of identifying
the impact of African history on the development of the diaspora. Scholars
who are not well versed in African history seem to have a cloudy image of
the African contribution to resistance and the evolution of slave culture.
Perhaps it is to be expected, therefore, that European influence is more
easy to recognize than African influence. For Genovese, following the
earlier lead of C.L.R. James,38 the French Revolution had such an obvious
impact on the St. Domingue uprising that the African dimension is not
relevant. As Thornton has demonstrated, however, even the uprising in St.
Domingue had its African antecedents, especially the legacy of the Kongo
civil war.39 Moreover, influences from Africa remained a strong force in
the struggle against slavery well after the 1790s, especially in Brazil
and Cuba, where there was a continuous infusion of new slaves from Africa,
often from places where slaves had been coming for some time. The complex
blending of African and European experiences undoubtedly changed over
time, but until African history is studied in the diaspora, it will be
difficult to weigh the relative importance of the European and African
traditions.
Rebellion and marronage were fundamentally political acts, but except for
a vague notion that the African backgrounds of slaves influenced the
decisions of slaves to conspire, there has been very little attempt to
correlate slave resistance in the Americas with events in Africa. None the
less, there are clear examples of such overt links, as in the case of the
Male uprising in Brazil in 1835.40 Muslim slaves from the Central Sudan,
many seized in the jihad associated with the foundation and expansion of
the Sokoto Caliphate, were responsible for staging this revolt, which
erupted almost thirty years after intensive and active discontent among
the slave and former slave population of Bahia, particularly those
identified as Nago and/or Muslim. As I have argued elsewhere, the uprising
of Muslim slaves in Ilorin in 1817 and again in the early 1820s, which was
an extension of the Sokoto jihad, was a much more likely source of
inspiration for Muslims in Bahia than the slave revolt in St. Domingue.41
Indeed many Muslims in Bahia appear to have been political prisoners who
were deliberately deported to the Americas from the Sokoto Caliphate. This
case highlights the role of agency to an extent that fleshes out earlier
attempts to trace resistance to an African background. The wave of Muslim
unrest began a decade after the uprising in St. Domingue, and while the
French Revolution may have had an influence, the unrest in Bahia can be
better understood within the tradition of jihad in West Africa than with
revolutionary events in Europe.
Not all the unrest in Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century is
to be identified with the Muslim population, however. There was also a
series of disturbances that are traced to the Yoruba-speaking population,
which included both Muslim Yoruba and other Yoruba who worshipped Orisha
and were associated with one of the Catholic Lay Brotherhoods. These
differences, too, related back to Africa and the changes underway in the
Nigerian hinterland in the first several decades of the nineteenth
century. Moreover, many enslaved Yoruba converted to Islam in Bahia,
particularly in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Despite the increasing
number of Muslim Yoruba, leadership still rested in the hands of clerics
from the Sokoto Caliphate, many of whom were identified as Hausa or Nupe,
and some of whom came from Borno. Considering the level of literacy among
this enslaved Muslim community and the political and religious origins of
their enslavement, it is perhaps not surprising that events in Bahia had a
strong component of African history.
These conclusions which link events in Bahia with the foundation and
consolidation of the Sokoto Caliphate and the resulting political
disorders among the Yoruba are based on biographical information of
individual slaves exported from the Central Sudan. In an initial survey,
108 biographies were collected. While additional data are being collected
in different parts of the diaspora, these preliminary profiles of slaves
include the names of individual slaves, their religion, the approximate
date of enslavement, the approximate age at time of enslavement, the
method of enslavement, the route to the coast for export, and
ethnic/geographic designations of origin.42 On the basis of my data, it
appears that 95 per cent of Central Sudan slaves who were deported to the
Americas in the first half of the nineteenth century were young, adult
males, most of whom had military experience and indeed were prisoners of
war. Most were Muslims. Such a concentration strongly suggests that the
historical context in which these individuals were enslaved had an impact
on their sense of identity in the Americas. From these accounts, the jihad
of Usman dan Fodio emerges as a major factor in the export of slaves to
the Americas.
The transition in the patterns of resistance which eventually merged
African and European historical experiences ultimately resulted in a
movement to abolish slavery itself. The reasons for this fundamental
development arose directly out of the condition of slaves in the Americas
as well as the European Enlightenment. Whereas in Africa slavery, pawnship
and other forms of social oppression had been common, there is no evidence
of wide-spread opposition to these institutions. Opposition to slavery in
Africa was largely confined to the individual actions of disgruntled
slaves.43 The fact that some slaves were exported to the Americas because
masters found them difficult to control or manage indicates that
resistance to slavery was to be found in Africa. Efforts to redeem family
members and to ransom prisoners from bondage sometimes checked abuses, and
flight from slavery was common in some parts of Africa. Islamic
prohibitions against the enslavement of Muslims and a reluctance to sell
Muslim slaves to non-Muslims placed some limits on slavery, but otherwise,
there does not appear to have been a movement to abolish the slave trade
or emancipate slaves in Africa before the nineteenth century. Despite acts
of resistance that can be traced back to Africa, abolitionist ideas do not
seem to have been formulated among slaves before they reached the
Americas.
The further deracination accompanying the ocean voyage and the humiliation
of racial stereotyping that followed in the Americas fundamentally altered
the perception of slavery as an institution for many slaves. Individuals
who had previously not been noted as opponents of slavery as such now had
to struggle against their bonds in the Americas to the point that many
became firm opponents of the institution. In the Americas, there were
added dimensions to this resistance, especially reactions to the racial
characteristics of chattel slavery. This fundamental difference from the
condition of slaves in Africa emerged gradually, although the roots of
racial categories were established early. Acts of resistance that combined
indentured Irish workers, African slaves, and Amerindian prisoners did
occur, although in the end these alliances disintegrated.44 Furthermore,
slaves did not consolidate ethnic identifications on the basis of colour,
but it was widely understood that most blacks were slaves and no slaves
were white. Although there were black, mulatto and American-born slave
owners in some colonies in the Americas, and many whites did not own
slaves, chattel slavery was fundamentally different in the Americas from
other parts of the world because of the racial dimension.
The association between the abolition movement and African resistance to
slavery is a controversial point. Abolitionism is usually attributed to
European thought, especially as expressed by Enlightenment thinkers in
Britain and in northern North America. David Brion Davis and other
scholars have provided useful, even insightful, analysis of this
phenomenon, but the premise of much of this analysis overlooks the slaves
themselves.45 It is worth remembering that in St. Domingue, slaves were
responsible for their own liberation, and as noted above, the antecedents
for their uprising can be traced to the Kingdom of Kongo as well as
Revolutionary France.46 How slaves transformed their African experiences
into revolutionary action against the institution of slavery still has to
be explored. Even specialists of Africa have inadvertently overlooked the
importance of black abolitionist thought and action. Thus Martin Klein
writes: "There is no evidence...that slavery was seriously attacked in any
part of the world before the eighteenth century. The abolition movement
had its origins in a change in European consciousness."47 Klein attributes
this change to the Enlightenment, thereby ignoring changes in thinking
that were taking place among slaves and former slaves in the Americas.
However, as Hilary Beckles has argued, there was an "indigenous
anti-slavery movement" among Africans in the Americas. That is,
abolitionism was as much a BLACK response to slavery as a European
phenomenon, and hence the concentration on the abolition movement in the
standard literature as a WHITE, European movement is only part of the
story.48 It remains to be seen how Africans who were subjected to slavery
in the Americas transformed their ideas about slavery. Institutions of
servitude, including slavery, that were acceptable in Africa and to which
many Africans had been exposed even before their own enslavement were no
longer acceptable in the Americas. The conditions of slavery in the
Americas were such that the ideological framework that countenanced
slavery was transformed into abolitionism.
Implications for Studying Slavery in the Diaspora
Once we consider issues of agency, identity, and community in the
Americas, which in effect is a logical extension of this kind of research,
it is clear that many slaves perceived of themselves in the historical
context of their time, not only in the Americas but also in Africa itself.
In emphasizing the central place of Africa in the slave experience, my
intention is to highlight the importance of agency. While it is often
claimed that slaves were active participants in shaping the societies of
the Americas, and many studies of slave resistance often come close to
demonstrating that active role, I am suggesting that enslaved Africans
cannot be fully appreciated as agents of their own fate, no matter how
much they were constrained by chattel slavery, until there is greater
appreciation of the lived experiences of slaves in Africa itself. Rather
than maintain a few cultural "survivals" that are quaint and symbolic,
enslaved Africans brought with them political issues and live
interpretations of their own predicament. It is worth stressing that there
was a continuous stream of enslaved immigrants coming from Africa during
periods of growth and prosperity. Hence individual colonies in the
Americas often received slaves from the same places in Africa, thereby
updating information, rekindling memories and reenforcing the African
component to the cultural adaptations under slavery. The extent to which
linkages with Africa were maintained or declined into insignificance needs
to be established. The ways in which enslaved Africans subsequently
interpreted their conditions in the Americas and the Islamic world lies at
the heart of the African contribution to the process of creolization, the
forms of resistance, and the extent of accommodation with the slave
experience.
There are in fact different paradigms for considering the communities of
enslaved Africans in the diaspora than those currently being used: Besides
being slaves, Africans in diaspora belonged to immigrant populations and
they constituted what amounted to refugee communities, forced to migrate
in different ways than modern refugees, who themselves are frequently
forced to move. Like immigrant communities and refugees in other times and
other places, enslaved Africans identified with communities which
maintained links with their countries of origins in a variety of ingenious
ways. Enslaved Muslims in Bahia, for example, considered themselves as
belonging to the world of Islam; their educational system and common
prayers were not "survivals" but active attempts to maintain and extend
that world.
Based on my preliminary research, it is apparent that there is extensive
documentation on the African-ness of the slave communities of the
diaspora, but there is an additional problem facing historians attempting
to examine such materials. First the material is widely scattered; in my
case in at least thirty different countries; second an analysis of this
material requires a thorough knowledge of African history for specific
regions and specific periods, which is not easy to acquire by
non-specialists; third, analysis also necessitates a full understanding of
the different parts of the diaspora, which is just as difficult to acquire
as the knowledge of African history; fourth, there is the problem of
language; in my case Portuguese, French, English, Spanish, Arabic, Hausa,
Nupe, Yoruba as a start; fifth; such study requires the full discipline of
historical methodology -- the use of contemporary documentation to examine
historical change, not twentieth-century anthropological data read back
into history; sixth; a good understanding of the latest theories on
ethnicity, particularly as advanced by historians studying ethnicity in
colonial contexts, such as southern Africa and elsewhere. Is it possible
for such research to be done? In my opinion, this type of work can only be
done through extensive, international collaboration among scholars.
As a guideline for future research, I am suggesting that information that
has often been passed over for want of significance to researchers needs
to be re-examined. Specifically, biographical data needs to be gathered,
collated, compared, and analyzed with the assistance of specialists who
know the history of the time period and area from which individual slaves
came in Africa. These biographical data are far too extensive for
individual scholars to collect, although it is scattered and may not
appear to be numerous enough to be significant in the context of other
research. Only through a massive international collaborative effort will
it be possible to harvest this abundant resource. Equally important, the
details of cultural "survivals" -- names, attributes of culture, kinship
relationships, religious observances, etc. -- must be collected in situ,
that is, the exact wording of references with full supporting context has
to be recorded so that specialists of African history can have the
opportunity to debate the possible meanings of the data.
Oral source material is also essential. The extent of such data is not
even known; much data have been collected scientifically by scholars, but
other data has been preserved haphazardly by contemporary observers and
the descendants of slaves. Because of the methodological difficulties in
collecting and examining these materials, the effort at analysis must
again be collaborative and involve Africanist specialists as well as the
actual collectors and researchers who have uncovered or who are
re-examining such materials. Undoubtedly there is also material among
existing communities of the descendants of former slaves, both in the
Americas and among those who returned to Africa.
Sites and monuments that require urgent inspection, together with the
collection of available oral and written documentation that explain their
significance, must also be a focus of research. Such sites include the
locations of returned freed slaves in Africa and cemeteries and religious
shrines in the Americas. The linkages to the historical record that may be
revealed in such locations will vary considerably. Cultural activities,
including carnivals and sanatoria festivals, offer possibilities for
identifying and isolating the ongoing historical connections among
Africans in the Americas and in Africa. This focus of research is intended
to be suggestive, and nothing more. The purpose is clear -- to uncover the
interactions between Africa and the Americas during the days of slavery
and thereafter correct the historical balance. The bias that emphasizes
the linkages between Europe and the Americas inevitably distorts the
context of creolization and the development of the modern societies and
cultures of the Americas. The revisionist approach being proposed here
directly challenges the marginality of Africa to the development of the
diaspora and thereby to the process of creolization.
The oppression of European masters and the pull of the international
market for primary products may have set the conditions of slaves in the
Americas, but in adjusting to these conditions, enslaved Africans
nonetheless reinterpreted African issues and modified useful institutions
in their quest to make sense out of their conditions and to establish a
new identity in the diaspora. This identity began in the context of events
and experiences in Africa but over time and after generations evolved into
the pan-African identity of Peter Tosh's lyrics: "Anywhere you come from,
as long as you're a black man, you're an African".49
Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented as the Bradford Morse
Lecture at Boston University, April 1995. I wish to thank David
Richardson, Robin Law, Philip Morgan and Brenda McComb for their comments.
2. Also commonly spelled Whydah in English.
3. Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe du
Bénin de Todos os Santos du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1968); Roger
Bastide, Les religions africaines au Brésil: vers une sociologie des
interpénétrations de civilisations (Paris, 1960); Melville J. Herskovits,
The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941). Also see, for example,
Herbert H.S. Aimes, "African Institutions in America," Journal of American
Folk-lore, 18 (1905), 15; Melville J. Herskovits, "On the Provenience of
New World Negroes," Social Forces, 12 (1933), 247-62; Gonzalo Aguirre
Beltran, "Tribal Origins of African Slaves in Mexico," Journal of Negro
History, 31 (1946); Gabriel Debien, "Les origines des esclaves aux
Antilles," Bulletin de l'Institut d'Afrique Noire, sèr. B, 23 (1961);
Gabriel Debien, Plantations et esclaves à Saint-Domingue (Dakar, 1964).
4. Doudou Diène, "A New International Project: The Slave Route," The
UNESCO Courier (October 1994), p. 29. A volume of papers presented at the
UNESCO Symposium in Ouidah is to be published.
5. Bonny and Calabar in the Bight of Biafra and Cabinda, Benguela, and
Luanda in West-Central Africa were also significant exporters of slaves
and may well have been more important than Ouidah in certain decades, but
there is no question that Ouidah was one of the major ports. According to
a sample of 8,945 voyages carrying approximately 3,327,000 slaves between
1595-1867, Ouidah appears to have been second only to Cabinda in numbers
of slaves exported to the Americas; see David Eltis and David Richardson,
"The Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1595-1867," unpublished
paper presented at the Social Science History Meeting, Chicago, 1995.
6. David Dalby, "Provisional Identification of Languages in the Polyglot
ta Africana," Sierra Leone Language Review, 3 (1964), 83-90; P.E.H. Hair,
"The Enslavement of Keels Informants," Journal of African History, 6
(1965), 195-203; Adam Jones, "Recaptive Nations: Evidence Concerning the
Demographic Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth
Century," Slavery and Abolition, 11:1 (1990), 42-57.
7. Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Bénina and Bahia
17th-19th Century (Ibadan, 1968), pp. 532-66; Lisa A. Lindsay, "'To Return
to the Bosom of their Fatherland': Brazilian Immigrants in
Nineteenth-Century Lagos," Slavery and Abolition, 15:1 (1994), 22-50;
Jerry Michael Turner, "Les Bresiliens - The Impact of Former Brazilian
Slaves upon Dahomey," Ph.D. thesis, unpublished, Boston University, 1975;
an early attempt to study the return of former slaves to the Bight of
Bénin; see also the forthcoming doctorat d'état of Bellajimin Codo on the
history of the Afro-Brazilians in the République du Bénin.
8. See, for example, various studies in Joseph E. Harris, ed., Global
Dimensions of the African Diaspora, 2nd ed. (Washington, 1993) including
Akintola J.G. Wyse, "The Sierra Leone Krios: A Reappraisal," pp. 339-68;
S.Y. Boaki-Siaw, "Brazilian Returnees of West Africa," pp. 421-40; St.
Clair Drake, "Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism," pp. 451-514.
9. In addition to the early literature on the ethnic origins of enslaved
Africans, cited above in fn. 2, the following studies represent the
current state of research on the ethnic origins of slaves: David Pavy,
"The Provenance of Colombian Negroes," The Journal of Negro History, 52
(1967), 35-58; Walter Rodney, "Upper Guinea and the Significance of the
Origins of Africans Enslaved in the New World," Journal of Negro History,
54 (1969), 327-45; W. Robert Higgins, "The Geographical Origins of Negro
Slaves in Colonial South Carolina," The South Atlantic Quarterly, 70
(1971), 34-47; Maureen Warner, "Africans in 19th Century Trinidad,"
African Studies Association of the West Indies Bulletin, 6 (1973), 13-37;
Harold D. Wax, "Preferences for Slaves in Colonial America," The Journal
of Negro History, 58:4, (1973), 371-401; Russell R. Menard, "The Maryland
Slave Population 1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four
Counties,"William and Mary Quarterly, 32 (1974), 29-54; Gabriel Debien,
Les esclaves aux antilles françaises (XVIIe - XVIIIe siècles) (Basse-Terre
et Fort-de-France, 1974); B.W. Higman, "African and Creole Slave Family
Patterns in Trinidad," Journal of Family History, 3 (1978), 163-80; Allan
Kulikoff, "The Origins of Afro-American Society in Tidewater Maryland and
Virginia, 1700 to 1790," William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978), 226-59;
Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society in
British Mainland North America," American Historical Review, 85 (1980),
44-78; Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1850 (Princeton,
1987), especially Appendix A, "African Sources for the Slave Trade to Rio
de Janeiro, 1830-1852", pp. 371-83; David Geggus, "Sex Ratio, Age, and
Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade," Journal of African History, 30
(1989); David Geggus, "The Demographic Composition of the French Caribbean
Slave Trade," in P. Boucher, ed., Proceedings of the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Meetings of the French Colonial Historical Society (Lanham, Md,
1990); David Geggus, "Sugar and Coffee Cultivation in Saint Domingue and
the Shaping of the Slave Labour Force," in Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan
(eds.), Cultivation and Culture: Work Process and the Shaping of
Afro-American Culture in the Americas (Charlottesville, 1993), pp. 73-98,
318-24; Mieko Nishida, "Manumission and Ethnicity in Urban Slavery:
Salvador, Brazil, 1808-1888," Hispanic American Historical Review, 73:3
(1993), 361-91.
10. For example, Herbert S. Klein in his African Slavery in Latin America
and the Caribbean (New York, 1986) implies an "African" nature to slavery
in the Americas, but other than slaves being black, there is no clear
attempt to identify the historical significance of this factor. Similarly,
John W. Blassingame in his The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the
Antebellum South (New York, 1979), pp. 3-48, identifies African
"survivals" without connecting them to historical events and processes.
Finally, in the interpretation of Leslie B. Rout, Jr. in his The African
Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1976),
it would appear that the African experience in Spanish America had little
to do with anything that had happened in Africa, other than the act of
enslavement itself.
11. See, for example, Michael Gomez, "Muslims in Early America," The
Journal of Southern History, 60:4 (1994), 671-710; Allan D. Austin,
African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (New York, 1984);
Austin, "Islamic Identities in Africans in North America in the Days of
Slavery (1731-1865)," Islam et sociétés au sud du Sahara, 7 (1993),
205-19.
12. Thus Michael D. Naragon scarcely mentions the ethnic backgrounds of
slaves, despite the title of his study: "Communities in Motion:
Drapetomania, Work and the Development of African-American Slave
Cultures," Slavery and Abolition, 15:3 (1994), 63-87.
13. See Joseph E. Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora,
2nd ed., (Washington, 1993), especially Elliot P. Skinner, "The Dialectic
between Diasporas and Homelands," pp. 11-40; and George Shepperson,
"African Diaspora: Concept and Context," pp. 41-50. Also see Earl Lewis,
"To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of
Overlapping Diasporas," American Historical Review, 100:3 (1995), 765-87.
14. Kamau [Edward] Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in
Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford, 1971); Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The
Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston,
1992), originally published as An Anthropological Approach to the
Afro-American Past (Philadelphia, 1976). The concept of merging cultures
was developed earlier by Philip Curtin, Two Jamaicas, 1830-1865: The Role
of Ideas in a Tropical Colony (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), among other
scholars.
15. Earl Lewis has referred to this school of thought in American
historiography as the "near total autonomists" and includes Sterling
Stuckey, George Rawick, John W. Blassingame, Leslie Howard Owens, Herbert
G. Gutman, and Lawrence W. Levine. See Earl Lewis, "To Turn as on a Pivot:
Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas,"
American Historical Review, 100:3 (1995), 772.
16. The search for "survivals" or "Africanisms" was initially associated
with the anthropological research of Melville J. Herskovits; see The Myth
of the Negro Past (Boston, 1941). Also see Roger Bastide, African
Civilizations in the New World (New York, 1971). For a recent addition to
this approach, see Joseph E. Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American
Culture (Bloomington, 1990).
17. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925
(New York, 1976), pp. 327-60. For similar problems, also see Charles
Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana,
1984); Joyner, Remember Me: Slave Life in Colonial Georgia (Atlanta,
1989).
18. cf. Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy (eds.), Pawnship in Africa: Debt
Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, 1994).
19. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, 1982).
20. Orlando Patterson, "Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical
Analysis of the First Maroon War, Jamaica, 1655-1740", Social and Economic
Studies, 19, 3 (1970), 289-325.
21. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969).
Curtin's study is regularly revised, extended, and amplified. For a recent
assessment, see Paul E. Lovejoy, "The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade
on Africa: A Review of the Literature," Journal of African History, 30
(1989), 365-94. The current project to standardize the various statistical
studies at the W.E.B. Dubois Center, Harvard University, is an outgrowth
of a generation of scholarship; see, for example, Eltis and Richardson,
"The Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1595-1867," unpublished
paper presented at the Social Science History Meeting, Chicago, 1995.
22. For preliminary attempts to correlate the export trade with
developments within Africa, see Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in
Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983) and Patrick
Manning, Slavery and African Life (Cambridge, 1990).
23. Cf. Joseph E. Inikori, "Ideology Versus the Tyranny of Paradigm:
Historians and the Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on African
Societies," African Economic History, 22 (1994), 37-58.
24. In his otherwise suggestive article, "Writing African Americans into a
History of Overlapping Diasporas," Earl Lewis pays scarcely any attention
to the historical background of enslaved Africans in Africa and therefore
has little to say about the development of the African diaspora. For an
example of how Africanists might interpret the influence of the diaspora
on the white societies of the Americas, see John Edward Philips, "The
African Heritage of White America," in Joseph E. Holloway, ed.,
Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 225-39.
25. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion. The "Invisible Institution" in the
Antebellum South (Oxford, 1978), 325-26 fn.
26. In constructing "the world they made together", Mechal Sobel, for
example, relies extensively on twentieth-century anthropological accounts
to gain insight into eighteenth century events and developments; see The
World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century
Virginia (Princeton, 1987).
27. Even such classic studies as Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The
World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974) fall into this trap. Consequently,
the juxtaposition of the African religious tradition and Christian
conversion is an inadequate mechanism for examining the development of
slave culture. At its worst, this approach fails to grasp the major
developments in the historical reconstruction of the role of religion in
Africa in the specific context of the slave trade.
28. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture. Nationalist Theory and the
Foundations of Black America (Oxford, 1987).
29. Raboteau observes that "religion, particularly religious myth and
ritual might be among the most conservative elements of culture." See
Slave Religion in the Antebellum South, 325-26 fn.
30. Until recently, this failure to examine contemporary religious
expression and experience within Africa during the period of slave exports
can partially be excused for want of historical study by African
historians, but this is no longer the case. See, for example, the
excellent research of Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550-1759
(Oxford, 1991). For other studies, see George Brandon, Santeria from
Africa to the New World (Bloomington, 1993); and Guéin Montilus, Dieux en
diaspora. Les Loa Haïtiens et les Vaudou du Royaume d'Allada (Bénin)
(Niamey, 1988).
31. cf. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic
World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge, 1992), although at times Thornton may have
overstated his case with respect to the extent to which Africans from the
interior of West-Central Africa were already Christian before reaching the
Americas.
32. Many studies consider ethnicity, although rarely in detail and without
an attempt to explore the meaning of different ethnic identities in Africa
and the Americas at the time. See, for example, Daniel C. Littlefield,
Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina
(Baton Rouge, 1981); Peter M. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial
South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974).
Demographic data including ethnic identification on slaves in the British
Caribbean has been tabulated by Barry Higman; see Slave Populations of the
British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984), but the meaning of the
different ethnic labels in historical context has yet to be studied.
Similarly, David Geggus has explored French shipping and plantation
records to identify ethnic patterns but without analyzing the historical
origins in Africa in detail; see "Sex Ratios, Age and Ethnicity in the
Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records,"
Journal of African History, 30 (1989), 23-44. Karasch's study of ethnicity
in Rio de Janeiro is largely static as well; see Slave Life in Rio de
Janeiro, 1808-1850.
33. Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance
in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana and
Chicago, 1992), p. 14.
34. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development
of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992).
35. See the excellent studies in Richard M. Price, ed., Maroon Societies:
Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1979);
Patterson, "Slavery and Slave Revolts," 289-325.
36. cf. Monica Schuler, "Akan Slave Rebellions in the British Caribbean",
Savacou, 1 (1970), 8-31. Also see Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of
Jamaica, 1655-1796 (Trenton, N.J., 1990); and Barbara Klamon Kopytoff,
"The Development of Jamaican Maroon Ethnicity," Caribbean Quarterly, 22
(1976), 33-50.
37. Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave
Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, 1979).
38. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution (New York, rev. ed., 1963).
39. John K. Thornton, "`I am the Subject of the King of Congo': African
Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution," Journal of World History,
4:2 (1993), 181-214.
40. João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835
in Bahia (Baltimore, 1993); also see Pierre Verger, "Yoruba Influence in
Brazil," ODU: Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies, 1 (1955).
41. See my "Background to Rebellion: The Origins of Muslim Slaves in
Bahia", in Paul E. Lovejoy and Nicholas Rogers (eds.), Unfree Labour in
the Development of the Atlantic World (London, 1994), 151-180. It should
be noted that my interpretation of the African component in the Male
Revolt builds on the earlier interpretation of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Os
Africanos no Brasil (Sao Paulo, 1932), 93-120; and Pierre Verger, Flux et
reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe du Bénin de Todos os Santos
du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1968).
42. See Paul E. Lovejoy, "Origins of Muslim Slaves in Bahia," especially
pp. 176-80; and Lovejoy, "The Central Sudan and the Atlantic Slave Trade,"
in Robert W. Harms, Joseph C. Miller, David S. Newbury, and Michele D.
Wagner (eds.), Paths toward the Past: African Historical Studies in Honor
of Jan Vansina (Atlanta, 1994), 345-70.
43. There has been little study of resistance to slavery in Africa before
the late nineteenth century, but see my "Fugitive Slaves: Resistance to
Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate," in Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance:
Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst, 1986),
71-95 and "Problems in Slave Control in the Sokoto Caliphate," in Lovejoy,
ed., Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade (Madison,
1986), 235-72.
44. Hilary McD. Beckles, "The Colours of Property: Brown, White and Black
Chattels and their Responses to the Colonial Frontier", Slavery and
Abolition, 15, 2 (1994), 36-51.
45. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca,
1966).
46. Thornton, "African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,"
181-214.
47. Martin A. Klein, "Slavery, the International Labour Market and the
Emancipation of Slaves in the Nineteenth Century", in Paul E. Lovejoy and
Nicholas Rogers, eds., Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic
World (London, 1994), 201.
48. Contrast Hilary McD. Beckles, "Caribbean Anti-Slavery: The
Self-Liberation Ethos of Enslaved Blacks", Journal of Caribbean History,
22, 1/2 (1990), 1-19 with Davis, Problem of Slavery in Western Culture or
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848 (London,
1988). Similarly, Seymour Drescher frames his historical questions about
abolition in terms that ignore the African contribution to the
anti-slavery movement; see Capitalism and Antislavery: British
Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 1987).
49. "African", from Peter Tosh, "Equal Rights", 1977.
SWHSAE Main Page
Comments/questions to SWHSAE mailbox at slavery@h-net.msu.edu
© 1997, Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and
Emancipation.
ISSN: 1090-6231
OTHERREFERENCES
Curtin, Philip D. Thetropical Atlantic in the age of the slave trade 1991. 47 p.
Law, Robin and Kristin Mann, West Africa InThe Atlantic Community: The Case Of The Slave Coast, William And Mary Quarterly1999 56(2) 307-334
Mann,Kristin & Bay, Enda G. (Eds.) RETHINKINGTHE AFRICAN DIASPORA: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bightof Benin and Brazil Notes, index. 160pp.UK . FRANK CASS, 071465129X HB, 071468158X PB 2001HB GBP45.00 PB GBP18.50
Nine essays that indicate that a dynamic and continuous movement of peoples eastas well as west across the Atlantic forged diverse and vibrant reinventionsand reinterpretations of the rich mix of cultures represented by Africansand peoples of African descent on both continents.
Solow, Barbara L. Slavery andthe rise of the Atlantic system. Cambridge, Mass.: W.E.B. DuBois Institute forAfro-American Research, Harvard University; Cambridge [England]; New York:Cambridge University Press, 1991.
LINKS
American Historical Association roundtable discussion"The Atlantic World: Emerging Themes in a New Teaching Field."
http://www.mtsu.edu/~jhwillia/atlantic.html
Syllabus:
History 534
English 634
Culture and Contact: The Atlantic World, 1400-1800
Prof. Erik Seeman, Department of History, SUNY-Buffalo
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~seeman/534syllabus.htmlInternational Seminar on the History of theAtlantic World, 1500-1800, Bernard Bailyn, Director
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/index.html