THE ATLANTIC WORLD
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- 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.
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Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and
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ISSN:
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OTHER
REFERENCES
Curtin, Philip D. The
tropical Atlantic in the age of the slave trade 1991. 47 p.
Law, Robin and Kristin Mann, West Africa In
The Atlantic Community: The Case Of The Slave Coast, William And Mary Quarterly
1999 56(2) 307-334
Mann,
Kristin & Bay, Enda G. (Eds.) RETHINKING
THE AFRICAN DIASPORA: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight
of Benin and Brazil
Notes, index. 160pp.
UK . FRANK CASS, 071465129X HB, 071468158X PB 2001
HB GBP45.00 PB GBP18.50
Nine essays that indicate that a dynamic and continuous movement of peoples east
as well as west across the Atlantic forged diverse and vibrant reinventions
and reinterpretations of the rich mix of cultures represented by Africans
and peoples of African descent on both continents.
Solow, Barbara L. Slavery and
the rise of the Atlantic system. Cambridge, Mass.: W.E.B. DuBois Institute for
Afro-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.html
International Seminar on the History of the
Atlantic World, 1500-1800, Bernard Bailyn, Director
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/index.html