Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links

One of the glories of history is that it allows us to avoid overly abstract, static constructions blinding us to the richness and complexity of life. We need to study Africans in Africa and the Americas over time and place and avoid dealing with questions in isolation from broad patterns. The many millions of people dragged in chains from Africa to the Americas need to be rescued from the anonymity of generic Africans and studied as varied, complex peoples. This book argues that a significant number of Africans recorded in documents created in the Western Hemisphere identified their own ethnicities or those of other Africans. Despite the difficulties of identifying African ethnic designations recorded in various ways in several major languages in documents throughout the Americas and despite changing ethnic designations and identities over time on both sides of the Atlantic, these ethnic descriptions are key evidence linking Africans in Africa with Africans in the Americas.²

Conclusions from one place and time should not be extrapolated to all of Africa and the Americas. We need to place our questions within the framework of changing patterns over time and place and avoid broad generalizations projected backward in time. Studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are most frequent because there is more available evidence and documentation. But with the exception of religion, worldview, and esthetic principles, the last two centuries are not always likely to reflect the more distant past. Patterns of creolization in Sierra Leone during the nineteenth century cannot be extrapolated to creolization in the Americas at all times and places.³ Africans arriving in some regions in the Americas were not nearly as varied as Africans who were disembarked and resettled within a limited time period in Sierra Leone from recaptured ships. These recaptives were not slaves. If creolization meant Europeanization in Sierra Leone, it certainly meant no such thing in the Americas. Creolization was not the process of Africans melting into a European pot. Creolization was a continuum encompassing the entire population in American colonies with very heavy and sometimes quite specific African inputs. Africans landing in Sierra Leone during the nineteenth century learned English as the lingua franca. Africans landing in the circum-Caribbean learned Creole languages, which they or their forebears played a major role in creating and developing. Africans arriving in Brazil evidently created and learned the general Mina language of Brazil. It was based on Gbe languages during the eighteenth century and then on Nago/Yoruba languages with the influx of large numbers of speakers of the latter during the nineteenth century. Africanization was not a process affecting Africans and their descendants alone. The entire population was more or less Africanized in language use as well as in many other aspects of culture.

The impact of Africans on patterns of creolization varied greatly over time and among different places, depending on several factors. These include the patterns of introduction of Africans of particular regions and ethnicities; their gender proportions and their patterns of mating and parenting; how rapidly they began to reproduce themselves; the proportion and strength of the native American population; the extent of race mixture; whether the geography facilitated runaway slave communities; the economic, strategic, and military priorities of the colonizing powers; military and police uses of slaves; the extent and role of manumission; the labor demands of the major exports as the economy evolved; and policies of social control reflected in various European religious and legal traditions and institutions. But Europeans were not all-powerful, certainly not in matters of economy and culture. They, too, were strangers in a strange, dangerous, and hostile world. European power and control was often weak, especially during the early, most crucial stages of culture formation. Patterns of creolization differed throughout the Americas over time and place. In most places, the high percentage of males among Africans was a major factor limiting the possibility of creating ongoing, specific African enclave cultures. Some African ethnicities with high proportions of females—for example, the Igbo—had exogamous mating patterns and their reproductive rate was unusually high.

One of my quarrels with some specialists in African and transatlantic slave trade history involves their excessive attention to monolingual English-language sources. In English-language documents generated in the Americas, information about African ethnicities is rare. Newspaper advertisements and jailhouse records describing runaway slaves sometimes identify their ethnicities, but they do not necessarily reflect the ethnic composition of the slave population. For example, documents in English cannot shed much light on the proportions of Igbo in the slave population during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because Igbo ran away in higher proportions than others. Evidently, English-language documents generated in Africa, Atlantic slave trade documents, and other major sources translated into English do not help much either. David Northrup has stated: “There is little direct evidence of the origins of slaves, but it is possible to calculate the relative percentage of speakers of the major languages in the catchment basins of the region’s major slaving ports and to adjust these purely topographical calculations with information about population densities and slaving operations.”⁴

This approach raises some questions. First of all, we do not know the proportions of Africans from particular ethnicities shipped from the interior via these ports. We cannot assume that Africans of various ethnicities were being shipped out in proportion to where they lived. Our knowledge of trading and other patterns in the Bight of Biafra is limited by the fact that Europeans were confined to the coast until the mid-nineteenth century. The ambitious research project undertaken by David Eltis and G. Ugo Nwekoji might enlighten us about the proportion of Igbo captured by British anti-slave trade ships during the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Their project studies and databases the names and scarifications of Africans released from these voyages in Havana and in Sierra Leone. This appears to be a complex project, the results of which are not yet clear.⁵

By crossing the Atlantic, we can do better than that. African ethnicities recorded in particular places in the Americas do not allow us to draw conclusions about the numbers or proportions of a particular ethnicity exported from a particular African coast, especially since peoples brought from the interior were shipped to the Americas in increasing numbers and changing proportions over time. But we can speak with confidence about changing proportions of ethnicities appearing in descriptions of Africans in surviving documents generated in the Americas.

This book has demonstrated the value of combining the study of data from transatlantic slave trade voyages with descriptions of African ethnicities in documents from various times and places in the Americas. It establishes the value of databasing both types of information to allow for refined studies over time and place. The result is more subtlety in the questions asked and reasonably confidently answered. We can now begin to link Africans in Africa with Africans in the Americas.

I have argued here that for various cogent reasons Africans from particular regions and ethnicities were often clustered in the Americas. These reasons include the systems of winds and currents linking various African coasts with various regions in the Americas; traditional trade networks among European, Afro-European, American, and African buyers and sellers; the timing of the transatlantic slave trade involving increasing numbers of African coasts over the centuries; and the preferences of masters in American regions for particular African peoples. Africans from particular coasts and ethnicities often arrived in waves clustering them in specific places in the Americas.

African ethnicities arriving during the early, formative period of a particular place often continued to be preferred. These preferences were sometimes exercised energetically and effectively in the slave trade. As explained in chapter 3, the transshipment trade seems to have increased clustering as preferences among buyers were further implemented. Supply factors were certainly crucial. David Geggus argues that St. Domingue planters were reluctant to employ West Central Africans on sugar estates.⁶ Gabriel Debien argues that West Central Africans were clustered on coffee estates because those estates were created later when the Atlantic slave trade had shifted heavily toward West Central Africa.⁷ In Louisiana, the growth of the sugar industry in Orleans and St. Charles parishes coincided with an escalating, massive influx of West Central Africans into the transatlantic slave trade. They were clustered perhaps not so much by choice as by availability in places where demand for labor on sugar estates increased sharply.

What do these findings imply for culture formation in the Americas? Let us turn briefly to Suriname, relied on heavily in the influential Mintz-Price thesis. By collapsing the time span in their study of the transatlantic slave trade to Suriname, Mintz and Price concluded that Africans arrived as an incoherent crowd whose particular cultural identities and characteristics disappeared almost immediately after they landed in the Americas. They then generalized this finding to all of the Americas and dismissed the significance of particular African regional cultures and ethnicities in the formation of Afro-American cultures everywhere. But the Mintz-Price thesis does not even apply to Suriname, where there was a Gold Coast phase and then an almost entirely West Central African phase during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Africans were never an incoherent crowd, not even in Suriname. The Mintz-Price thesis is insightful when it argues that African American cultures and Creole languages were formed early and had an ongoing impact on those who came after. Roger Bastide argues, in contrast, that those who arrived late and in large numbers exerted the preponderant cultural influence. The Bastide thesis tends to be an ahistorical, static approach to culture formation, tracing contemporary “survivals” to contemporary ethnicities and regions in Africa.⁸ There is no doubt that massive late arrivals of Africans from particular regions and ethnicities impacted the existing cultures in an ongoing process of creolization. But the influence of those who came first maintained an edge by creating the earliest Afro-Creole languages and cultures to which newcomers had to adjust to a significant extent.

There is much to be learned from the Mintz-Price thesis. It makes important arguments having genuine validity: that Creole languages and cultures formed quickly and that African cultures were not preserved in a pickled form in the Americas but were subjected to the process of creolization over time. But these early cultures were not simply abstract, African American cultures. They were quite distinct regional cultures, which developed in response to an array of factors, including the patterns of introduction of Africans over time from various regions and the clustering of various African ethnicities arriving from Africa in waves. The earliest Africans often had a continuing and decisive influence on their Creole descendants, on Africans who arrived later, and on the wider society. David Geggus argues that in St. Domingue the early impact of Africans brought from the Bight of Benin explains the extensive, deeply rooted, resilient voodoo religion in Haiti, which still survives strongly and continues to evolve and change.⁹ Between 1725 and 1755, 39.4 percent of Atlantic slave trade voyages arriving in St. Domingue came from the Bight of Benin, bringing in a large number of Aja/Fon/Arada/Ewe along with their vodun gods. In Martinique during this same period, 48.7 percent of Atlantic slave trade voyages arrived from the Bight of Benin. These Africans understood each other’s languages well. Scholars have recently stressed Kongo influence on Haitian voodoo.¹⁰ These interpretations are not contradictory. They are based on the massive introduction of West Central Africans during the last half of the eighteenth century and the very substantial impact of those peoples on the ongoing process of the creolization of religion in St. Domingue. The creolization of religion followed a different course in Cuba, where the Bantu impact was more direct and unadulterated. To the present day, Palo Mayombe, a traditional Kongo faith, has had a strong influence in Cuba and among Cuban immigrants to the United States and the circum-Caribbean. In Cuba, although Yoruba gods and Santeria are often stressed, Kongo influences in folklore and religion are powerful as well. Religious influences from the Bight of Biafra are reflected in Afro-Cuban religious beliefs and practices, stemming from the significant introduction of Karabalí into nineteenth-century Cuba. Candomble in Brazil reflects the massive introduction of Nago/Lucumi/Yoruba during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in Bahia.¹¹

In sum, the process of creolization in the Americas varied greatly over time and place, depending on the many varying factors discussed above. Creolization in Africa differed sharply from creolization in the Americas. As in most places in the world, it was an internal process as peoples from various ethnicities met and mingled as immigrants, conquerors and conquered, traders and consumers. European and Afro-European influence was important near the Atlantic coast in Africa, but that influence on the enslaved Africans sent to the Americas should not be exaggerated. As we have seen, after the Atlantic slave trade began, the Portuguese lançados played a major role in creolization along coasts, rivers, and other trading centers in Africa where they were allowed into or could force access to the interior. Portuguese-based Creole languages developed in São Tome and in the Cape Verde Islands. Portuguese and Cape Verde merchants brought Cape Verde Creole to the Upper Guinea coast. In Upper Guinea, the early Afro-Portuguese established themselves in trading enclaves. But Mandingo continued to be the major language for communication and trade. In his book first published in 1627, Alonso de Sandoval wrote, “The Wolofs, Berbesies [Serer], Mandingas [Mandingos], and Fulos [Fulani] can ordinarily understand each other, although their languages and ethnicities [castas] are diverse, because of the extensive communication all of them have had with the damnable sect of Muhammed, no doubt to the great confusion of the Christians.... Among them the Mandinga are innumerable, being spread throughout almost all the Kingdoms, and thus knowing almost all the languages.¹² In 1735, Mandingo (“Mundingoe”) was still described as the most common language spoken throughout Greater Senegambia, followed by Portuguese Creole, the language best known by Britons ¹³

In the Americas, creolization was a more radical process. The economies and cultures were based on decisive Native American influences, especially in the highlands of Latin America, but just about everywhere else as well. Europeans and Africans arriving in the Americas were strangers in a strange world. It was a violent, insecure place where survival was often more important than prejudice. As a result, the most adaptive cultural elements from four continents were embraced, although their non-European derivation has never been adequately acknowledged. This radical biological and cultural cross-breeding is the basic strength of the Americas.

Culture formation varied from place to place. Each American region has to be examined separately over time to discern the prevailing patterns of introduction of various African peoples and their influences on the formation of culture in the ongoing process of creolization. This is not a simple task. It requires much new research using documents currently known and others still to be discovered. It requires a reasonable level of subtlety and sophistication and an open mind. It will not do to collapse time in simple, aggregate counts of transatlantic slave trade voyages to various places in the Americas. The transshipment trade in newly arrived Africans must be given due weight. The most frequent ethnicities must be disaggregated and studied. If one can identify in documents the presence of significant numbers of African ethnicities at different times and places, that information should be databased to allow for comparative, relational studies. Much work remains to be done before we can arrive at confident answers. Although the French Archives Coloniales in Aix-en-Provence has a huge collection of bound volumes of notarial documents from St. Domingue listing African ethnicities, the data there still remain to be thoroughly studied. Rich documentation about African ethnicities can be found in courthouses and archives throughout Cuba. The destruction of Brazilian documents involving slavery has been greatly exaggerated; important ones continue to exist throughout Brazil.¹⁴

Improved conceptualization and methodologies and new research are necessary for studies of the United States. Historians who have excessive faith in surviving documents no doubt neglect the transshipment trade from the Caribbean to the British mainland colonies as well as to Caribbean colonies of other nations. More knowledge about the transshipment trade from the Caribbean during the eighteenth century could alter the accepted wisdom about the rate of natural growth among slaves in British North America and the low proportions of Africans within the slave population during the eighteenth century. Except for slaves arriving with their masters from Barbados when Carolina was first colonized, it is not credible that the slave trade from the Caribbean brought significant numbers of Caribbean-born slaves. Slaves transshipped from the Caribbean were surely overwhelmingly African-born, very likely new arrivals from Africa. Many African foremothers and forefathers in the United States arrived no doubt on documented and undocumented voyages from the Caribbean. Anglophone historians need to widen their focus and become more proficient in the use of documents and the historical literature in other languages. Scholars who study the African diaspora in the Americas, regardless of their native tongue, need to learn how to create and use relational databases.