France Ntloedibe. The Journal of African American History. Volume 91, Issue 4. Fall 2006.
The question of African survivals in African American cultures in the New Worlds has been the subject of a long and intriguing controversy among scholars, with the emphasis of late being placed on the tracing of origins. Some scholars have argued that the question of origins is unimportant with regard to understanding the development of African American cultures. This indifference to the historical roots of African American culture in the U.S. found expression in Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Black Folk: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Levine contends that “we have gradually come to recognize not merely the sheer complexity of the question of origins, but also its irrelevancy for an understanding of consciousness.” Yet W. E. B. Du Bois with regard to the black church reminds us:
First, we must realize that no such institution as the Negro church could rear itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in America. He was brought from a definite social environment -the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and sacrifice.
For Du Bois, we cannot explain the roots of African American culture without reference to Africa because African values, beliefs, and practices played a crucial role in the formation of African American cultures. It is basically these “historical foundations,” as this essay will show, that many scholars fail to take into account in their treatment of the origins of African American cultures in the New World. Small wonder we have been saddled with accounts that maintain that African captives, in the dehumanizing experience of the Middle Passage, lost their cultural heritage and simply became acculturated to Euro-American customs and beliefs.
Although much has been written to demolish this misguided notion for upholding white cultural hegemony, it is unfortunate that some authors still make that argument. For example, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price in The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective declared that “we do not believe … that those Africans who were enslaved and transported to the New World can be said to have shared a culture, in the sense that Europeans colonists in a particular colony can be said to have done so.” Mintz and Price believed that African captives came to the Americas as “more or less heterogeneous cargoes.”
The Africans who reached the New World did not compose, at the outset, groups. In fact, in most cases … it might even be more accurate to view them as crowds, and very heterogeneous crowds at that. Without diminishing the probable importance of some core of common values, and the occurrence of situations where a number of slaves of common origin might indeed have been aggregated, the fact is that these are not communities of people first, and they could only become communities by processes of cultural change.
According to these authors, African captives were a “heterogeneous crowd” made up of “disparate cultures and unintelligible languages with no prior contact.” Whereas in European immigration, various groups of people from similar regions traveled and lived together, the African captives were so dissimilar culturally and linguistically that they could not communicate with one another well enough to form communities. Mintz and Price do acknowledge that during the Middle Passage, African captives began to create an entirely new social structure and organization in the form of the “dyad” of two slaves sharing one space on the slave ship. “Various shreds of evidence suggest that some of the earliest social bonds to develop in the coffles, in the factories, and especially during the long Middle Passage were of a dyadic (two person) nature … The bond between shipmates, those who shared passage on the same slaver,” can be found “in widely scattered parts of Afro-America; the ‘shipmate’ relationship became a major principle for social organization and continued for decades or even centuries to shape ongoing relations.” However, it is Mintz and Price’s interpretation of the “shipmate relationship” that is highly questionable, and they go on to argue that “recent historical research on Afro-America … has taught us some of the dangers of extrapolating backward to Africa in the realm of social forms.” Unfortunately, it is the failure to “extrapolate backward” that is at odds with the evidence unearthed in this investigation.
Through an examination of African languages, patterns of slave importation, slave uprisings during the Middle Passage, baptismal rites, music, dance, and funeral rites, I argue that West Africans brought to the Americas shared much in common culturally. Despite the horrors of enslavement, common African cultural practices among the various African ethnic groups served as an organizing and unifying principle which armed African captives with some sense of solidarity and cultural continuity in their new environment. Neither cultural diversity nor linguistic multiplicity served as major obstacles to the development of African American cultures in the New World. That is to say, although the slave trade and slavery were horrific experiences, they were not destructive enough to destroy the sense of cultural “oneness” among different cultural groups of African captives. The question that guides this inquiry, with which almost every student of American slavery needs to grapple, is: How heterogeneous were the African captives brought to North America?
Linguistic Commonalities
Part of the answer to this question may be discerned from a closer look at the languages spoken in three West African regions-the Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea, and Congo Angola. Most African captives who were brought to North America came from these regions. According to linguist David Dalby, the Sudanic and Bantu languages spoken by the peoples in these regions have similarities in structure, vocabulary, and grammar. For instance, West Africans who lived in Senegambia region by the late 17th century spoke Mandingo and Wolof with ease. The linguists Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, who have written extensively on African languages, share David Dalby’s sentiments. “In Africa,” they remind us, “multilingualism is the norm rather than the exception.” It may be argued that it was because of this linguistic gift, namely, multilingualism, that Europeans, and the Portuguese in particular, found it profitable to use Africans as interpreters.
Like the Upper Guinea and Lower Guinea, Angola was relatively homogeneous linguistically. For instance, by 1680 all the people in Angola spoke the languages of various Bantu groups. According to Dalby, linguistic similarities more than differences in African languages explain, in part, why Africans are multilingual. “It should be added,” Dalby tells us, “that this multiplicity relates particularly to the individual vocabularies of African languages. Divergence in their structures, i.e., in their grammatical, phonological and semantic systems, are frequently less extensive than their divergences of vocabulary; and-relative to the structures of European languages-West African languages are found to share many widespread structural features.”
It is not argued that every ethnic community in the Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea, or Angola possessed a culture greatly similar to its neighbors. Neither should one overlook the fact that there were linguistic differences among various African groups in these regions. What it is suggested, however, is that even in areas where linguistic differences separated regions into culturally different societies—as was the case with most parts of the Upper Guinea—economic factors helped unify those areas. As historian Michael A. Gomez informs us:
In addition to speaking (in many instances) related (but not mutually intelligible) languages and maintaining similar social structures, Senegambians tended to be knit together by a wide-ranging system of trade. The Juula (or Jakhanke) merchants. Mandespeaking and Muslim, connected the coast with the interior in ways that facilitated not only the safe passage of commodities, but also the transfer of news, formal knowledge, and culture … People of varied ethnicity came together for purposes of commerce/or religion.
Although the linguistic situation in the Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea, and Congo Angola could not and was not duplicated throughout West Africa, it is clear that most of the West African regions involved in the slave trade were closer to one another linguistically than some scholars would have us believe. In his comprehensive analysis of African languages, Joseph H. Greenberg came to the conclusion that, although “the number of distinct languages is well above eight hundred … there are linguistic characteristics shared by large numbers of African languages which are infrequent and nonexistent elsewhere and help mark off Africa as a linguistic area” unified by similar use of “tone, the existence of nominal classification, and shared verbal derivations.” It was this similarity in grammar and vocabulary in African tongues, which enabled African captives, irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds, to communicate with one another when they arrived in the New World. Moreover, what made this possible was the fact that the majority of African captives who were brought to North America spoke languages that originally came from one source-the “Niger Congo and Kurdofanian” language group- which was spoken in almost all of the slave trading areas from Gambia to Angola. “Of the language of the Sea Island,” Sir Harry H. Johnson tells us, “the few words I have seen in print appear to be of Yoruba stock or from the Niger Delta,” a view reiterated by linguist Lorenzo D. Turner. It appears that Mintz and Price ignored or were unaware of these linguistic similarities in West African languages during the era of the Transatlantic slave trade.
Ethnic Preferences and Social Bonds
Sidney Mintz and Richard Price also argued that in New World “colonies in which Europeans from several different countries were found, they often maintained ethnic separation from each other. In contrast, it was not usual for culture-specific groups of Africans to have been able to travel together or settle in substantial numbers in the New World. This is one reason why we feel that the Africans who were brought to any specific New World colony could not be said to have had a single collective culture to transport.” However, it is perhaps strangely ironic that while there were attempts by some slave traders to separate their African captives, others frequently brought people with similar languages and cultures together, thus helping to perpetuate African linguistic and cultural continuity. One way slave traders and captains achieved this was through gathering slaves as quickly as possible from specific areas along the West African coast. This meant that a single ethnic group might account for numerous captives from a particular region who, upon their arrival in the Americas, would for some time speak their own African languages and observe many of their own cultural practices.
It is not argued here that all African captives who were transported on a particular ship at a particular port came from the same area, but it can be argued that in most cases they came from a far more restricted area than Mintz and Price would have us believe. For example, a Portuguese ship, the Santiago, which visited the Upper Guinea coast in 1596, obtained all its captives from one place-Sierra Leone. The reality that slave ships were loaded at a single West African port had serious cultural implications. It meant that planters often made their choices among Africans who, if not culturally homogeneous, were in all probability linguistically and religiously compatible. Such choices were, of course, often dictated by slave traders’ economic considerations. Although historians Charles Joyner, Daniel C. Littlefield, and others noted that such ethnic preferences were often stereotypical and unrealistic, they, like Elizabeth Donnan, Philip Curtin, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, support the conclusion that large groups of particular West African “peoples” from a particular region were transported in a given period. This preference for certain ethnic groups from particular areas was noticeable in the southern colonies, as is evident from this advertisement in the Georgia Gazette in 1764: “To be sold at publik vendue, for ready money, on Thursday the 19th inst. at the plantation late John Spencer’s five miles from Savannah on the Augusta road, Nine New Negro Men, as likely as any brought into this province, lately imported from the Gold Coast.” Similarly, the Georgia Gazette on 14 January 1767 announced that “On Tuesday the 17th inst. will be sold at Savannah about 40 likely New Negroes, Consisting mostly of Men and Women, Lately from Gambia and Sierreleon.” Such preferences of certain ethnic groups were also a question of concern in the South Carolina colony, as this South Carolina Gazette of 1765 specifically noted: “Now selling, One Hundred and Fifty choice Gold-Coast Negroes … Directly from the Windward and Grain coast of Africa…”
Gold Coast captives were highly sought after not merely in the southern colonies, but also in other parts of the Americas such as Jamaica and Brazil where the patterns of slave trading seriously hindered any attempts at maximizing diversity. According to Curtin, 111,500 out of 138,300 Gold Coast captives, or Akan speakers, were shipped to Jamaica via British slave traders between 1751 and 1790. The high concentration of Akan speakers in Jamaica, dictated by economic considerations, would obviously reinforce linguistic homogeneity and thus encourage and perpetuate Akan-based cultural practices on the plantations. Brazil, like Jamaica, imported thousands of African captives from Angola. Although there were other ethnic groups, such as Fon, Yoruba, and Mina who were brought to Brazil, Africans from Angola were so highly valued for their economic utility that there was even a saying in the 17th century that “without sugar there is no Brazil and without Angola there is no sugar.” Given the perceived economic value of Angolans, and the fact that they comprised 50 percent (or more) of the enslaved Africans, it might not be excessive to suggest that in Brazil it was every slavemaster’s dream to have a high concentration of Angolans on his plantation. It might not also hurt to suggest that in Brazil such a high concentration of Angolans in Brazil, like Akan speakers in Georgia, South Carolina, and Jamaica, meant that slaves could easily find others who spoke their languages and shared other cultural traits in the area, thus helping to bridge the assumed unbridgeable linguistic and cultural divides posited by Mintz and Price.
Apart from ethnic preferences, wars waged in Africa to obtain captives who were then enslaved significantly contributed to the preservation of African cultural homogeneity in the New World since Africans captured in these wars were, in many instances, from the same conquered area. In this instance, an entire ship was likely to be loaded with people who were acquired from a limited cultural area, and who belonged to the same ethnic group, possessed the same culture, and indeed, spoke the same language. For example, the French slaver and sea captain Jean Barbot in 1764 indicated that “they were sure to find slaves at Coremantyn because the king of that region had just won the war over his African Company.”
At the same time, the suggestion that “social bonds” developed during the Middle Passage were “of a dyadic (two-person) nature,” is problematic as well. Orlando Patterson in The Sociology of Slavery, an analysis of slave society in Jamaica, argued that these “social bonds” were much more than “dyadic” as suggested by Mintz and Price, who give the reader the impression that social bonds were only between two slaves who “were chained to each other” on the same slave ship. In fact, according to Patterson, “all the slaves” on the same ships addressed each other as “shipmates.”
One experience did take place on the Middle Passage, which was of lasting importance, and paradoxically, of great subsequent comfort to the slave. It was the formation of the strong bonds of friendship among all the slaves on the slave ship. These friends became known in the West Indies as “shipmates” and their love and affection for each other was proverbial. Stewart tells us that the term shipmate “seems synonymous in their view with brother or sister,” and according to Kelly, “shipmate is the dearest word and bond of affectionate sympathy amongst the Africans … they look upon each other’s children mutually as their own.” It was customary for children to call their parents’ shipmates “uncle” or “aunt.” So strong were the bonds between shipmates that sexual intercourse between them, in the view of one observer, was considered incestuous.
It cannot be denied that the slave trade and slavery had a debilitating effect on African captives’ social bonds. Neither can one dismiss the fact that the Middle Passage had reinforced African social bonds, creating numerous “uncles,” “aunts,” “brothers,” and “sisters.” Social bonds among enslaved Africans carried meanings not discussed by Mintz and Price, and we must look to the origins of those bonds. In other words, when and where did this development occur, and under what circumstances?
In fairness to Mintz and Price, it should be pointed out that designating a non-biological relation as “uncle” or “aunt” was not the creation of the Middle Passage. In fact, the words for uncles and aunts were used by Africans both in a biological sense and to express respect for the elderly, a practice still in use in Africa today. Patterson pointed out that in Jamaica their parents’ shipmates were called “uncles” or “aunts” as a sign of respect, and this was yet another example of African words and practices that survived in the New World because of the common linguistic and cultural background of Africans enslaved in the particular locations in the Americas.
Solidarity and Resistance
The database on The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, which has been made available by Cambridge University Press and identifies nearly 26,000 slaving voyages between 1519 and 1867, provides a great deal of evidence on the Africans’ resistance to enslavement during the Middle Passage. Historian Johannas Postma noted that these data “suggest that one in every ten slave transports experienced slave rebellion of some sort, and that as many as one hundred thousand slaves may have lost their lives in them.” This level of resistance suggests that during the Middle Passage the African captives were something more than “heterogeneous crowds” and were able to communicate and cooperate in attacking their captors. At the same time, the account by Amasa Delano, captain of the American ship, of the revolt led by Babo on the Spanish ship Tyrol in December 1800, presents detailed information on the solidarity that existed among African captives that made insurrection not only possible, but successful. After seizing control of the ship, Delano reported that the African captives “held daily conferences, in which they discussed what was necessary for their design,” and eventually “they asked him whether there were in these seas any [N]egro countries, where they might be carried, and he answered them, no; that they afterwards told him to carry them to Senegal.”
In the case of the successful revolt aboard the Little George in June 1730, the ship was at sea for only five days before the African captives “got off their irons” and attacked the crew, took over the ship, and returned to the Guinea coast. In the famous revolt aboard the Amis tad in 1839 led by Joseph Cinque, linguistic similarities among the captured facilitated cooperation and communication. “Though they spoke different dialects,” Helen Kromer tells us, “most were Mendis, and certain words they all knew were similar. They turned to Cinque, their natural leader, who urged them to revolt.” Kromer also argued that although “not all of them could converse with any fluidity, they were able to make themselves understood.” P. Sterling Stuckey and others have noted that in the case of the organized resistance and revolts in North America, enslaved Africans and African Americans demonstrated a sustained capacity to work in concert, and thus it appeared that upon arriving in the New World, enslaved Africans not only experienced cultural solidarity with those from a shared linguistic background, but also developed social bonds based on their common circumstances as enslaved laborers in the American plantation economies.
Dance, Music, and Religious Rituals
In addition to language, cultural practices, and the responses to unjust oppression, dance was a reflection of the commonalities of West African cultures because of shared dance movements. Writing in 1750, Rev. Griffith Hughes, the Anglican rector of the Barbadian parish of St. Lucy, noted that “the Negroes in general are very tenaciously addicted to the Rites, Ceremonies and Superstitions of their own Countries, particularly in their plays, dances, music, marriages, and burials.” These dances, music, and burials observed by Hughes were African practices that were transferred to the New World. African dances, especially the Ring Shout, served as a guiding and organizing principle through which enslaved Africans, irrespective of their ethnicity, achieved cultural oneness. “Whatever their differences in language,” P. Sterling Stuckey reminds us, “slaves from many different ethnic groups might easily, at such a ceremony, assume their places in the circle, dancing and singing around the deceased, whether in Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Maryland, the District of Columbia, or elsewhere.” Thus, African captives arrived in the New World with certain cultural traits in their hearts and their minds, and reconstituted them in the New World. It is, therefore, hardly claiming too much to suggest that dance was one of the African cultural practices that survived the Middle Passage. Moreover, the slave trade actually helped to transfer and preserve dance practices in the Americas. A slave-ship surgeon, Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, described in 1788 how the African captives were forced to dance to help maintain their stamina:
Exercise being deemed necessary for the preservation of their health, they are sometimes obliged to dance, when the weather will permit their coming on deck. If they go about it reluctantly, or do not move with agility, they are flogged; a person standing by them all the time with a cat-o’-nine-tails [a whip with nine leather straps] in his hand for that purpose. Their music, upon these occasions, consists of a drum … The poor wretches are frequently compelled to sing also; but when they do so, their songs are generally, as naturally may be expected, melancholy lamentations of their exile from their native country.
Falconbridge was not alone in this view. The French and Dutch also issued similar orders, requiring their captives to carry drums aboard ships to promote their physical fitness before arrival in the New World. These accounts, only a few of the many that exist, suggest the extent to which the Middle Passage allowed African captives to preserve their forms of dance.
In as much as dance and music were organizing and unifying principles of African culture, water baptism reflected the unity of West African culture and served as a source of substantial group cohesiveness because it allowed people of different languages and religious perspectives to engage in the ceremony at the same time. In the New World enslaved Africans and African Americans who embraced “Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior” in their baptismal ceremonies did so in a context that was analogous to African rituals. In West Africa and the New World, baptismal and funeral ceremonies reinforced a strong sense of communalism-the need to help each other and work together. For example, July Ann of Halfen, Mississippi, recounted that, “I was baptized in the Tangipago River right here in Osyka, an’ all de folks wus shoutin’ and I went down in de water shoutin’—I tell y’ou I never wus so happy as I wus dat day, an’ I is been a good Christian woman ever since I was baptised.” Thus, July Ann was not baptized alone. “She was,” according to historian Michael A. Gomez, “baptized into a community of believers, along with a number of other individuals.” That is to say, in baptism emphasis was placed on the value of the group rather than the individual. “Through baptism,” Gomez continues, “one became [a] integral part of the whole.”
The ritual of baptism generated a powerful group cohesiveness that transcended ethnic differences in the African American community. Baptism was a communal experience that bridged Mintz and Price’s assumed unbridgeable cultural differences. The Virginia storyteller Simon Brown noted this group cohesiveness when he recalled how slaves would “come from all ‘roun’—in buggies an’ carts an’ on mule-back”—to participate in baptismal ceremonies. Since a great number of Africans, including Angolans, the Bakongo, and others, were enslaved in Virginia, Brown’s account reinforced the idea that baptismal rituals served as a means of creating the basis of cultural unity despite ethnic or social differences.
Funeral rites significantly bridged cultural divides among enslaved Africans and African Americans as much as, or perhaps more than, the ring shouts and baptismal rituals. The Mende and Temne captives who took over the Amistad indicated that “their funeral customs resemble much of those prevalent among other tribes in Africa.” John W. Barber witnessed and wrote about these Mende funeral rites.
The funeral is attended with weeping and mourning, so loud that the stillness attending exercises of this kind among us seems to them surprising, and to be accounted for only on the grounds of insensibility … Going to the grave in great numbers, they remove the earth at the head of the corpse and deposit a vessel filled with food.
The burial practices among these Mende and Temne captives had striking similarities to the funeral rites that took place on plantations in various parts of the South. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson found that “the fusion of slaves from the Gold Coast, the Congo Angola area, and other parts of the Guinea Coast in Southern slavery could mean the reinforcement of the African notion that the funeral is the climax of life and that the dead should be honored by having their possessions placed upon the top of their graves.” In E. C. L. Adams’s Tales of the Congaree, African American folktales collected in the 1920s, Tad, the narrator, declared that “everybody should pay proper respect to de dead”; and seventy-eight-year-old Hamp Kennedy recalled that: “When a nigger died, we had a wake an1 dat was diffrunt too frum whut ’tis today. Dey neber lef a dead nigger ‘lone in de house, but all de neighbors was dere an’ helped.” “The wake,” as historian David Roediger described it, reflected a sense of collective responsibility; it was a “highly personal bidding of farewell to the corpse in which each mourner paused at the coffin to say good-bye. That this intimate act, which was often coupled with an embrace of the corpse, was based upon African traditions is clear not only from the prevalence of such personal leave taking among West African tribes, but also from the testimony of ex-slaves.” Funeral practices, like music, dance, and baptism, generated group cohesiveness among Africans and African Americans enslaved in North America. Moreover, the similarities in the rituals and cultural practices in West and Central Africa meant that Africans who were captured and forced together during the Middle Passage should not be considered “heterogeneous crowds.” Indeed, on the basis of the cultural and linguistic commonalties, these African captives were able to create common cause and solidarity even before setting foot on the European or American slave ships.
This essay suggests that common West and Central African cultural practices provide a suitable reference point for understanding the origins of African American cultures in the New World. More importantly, it should be clear that African captives relied upon organizing and unifying principles of African culture—language, dance, baptismal practices, funeral rites—to enable them to cope with the horrors of slavery and to create a social and spiritual environment in the New World. Their cultural background sustained them as they adopted and created new practices and institutions that allowed them to survive the oppressive conditions of American slavery.