“I tried to keep their voices in my head”
In his novel Someone Knows My Name, Lawrence Hill provides a fictional account of an enslaved girl’s life.1 His protagonist, eleven-year-old Aminata Diallo, tells of her childhood in the fictional town of Bayo in the eighteenth century, her capture and enslavement, and her subsequent freedom and return to Africa. Although a work of fiction, the book gives readers a feel for how the millions of anonymous men, women, and children taken into slavery might have lived before being forcibly taken to the Americas. It is particularly poignant because it is written from the point of view of a child. The young Aminata paints a rather mundane picture of childhood in her village as she comes of age, assisting her mother, a midwife, in her duties, learning how to read Arabic from her father, and preparing to become a woman. Everything is snatched away when she is kidnapped by African slavers, taken to the coast, and loaded on a ship bound for the Americas. Throughout her life, as she is sold several times, given a new name, and endures hardship and sorrow, she clings to her name, Aminata Diallo, and to her identity as an African and “freeborn Muslim.” She retains memories of her homeland throughout her life.
Aminata’s story could be that of the real-life ten-year old Priscilla, enslaved on the coast of Sierra Leone in 1756. Taken to the United States, she was sold to Elias Ball, a prominent South Carolina planter. Priscilla undoubtedly endured great hardship. Like the novel’s protagonist, she lived long enough to have children, ensuring the continuation of her lineage in the United States. Hill’s heartbreaking account of Aminata’s life personalizes the slave trade and slavery in ways historical accounts often cannot. It allows us to get at the emotions that being forcibly wrenched from one’s homeland must produce. His fiction wonderfully captures how a child understood and came to grips with enslavement.
The millions of Africans like Aminata Diallo enslaved in the Americas came from diverse societies with complex political, religious, and social organizations and institutions. Scholars now know the regions in Africa from which those who ended up in the Americas came—Senegambia, Sierra Leone, Windward Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa, and Southeast Africa. Africans forcibly taken from their homelands came from many different backgrounds, from small segmented societies to more centralized polities, villages, towns, cities, chiefdoms, and kingdoms. They came from nomadic and sedentary societies and were farmers, fisherman, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers. Most came from kin-based societies, where ties to family by blood and through marriage were central. These societies practiced a variety of religions and produced art, music, and architecture. They were diverse in their attitudes toward those who belonged to their societies and those who did not. Some of the communities that produced enslaved Americans already had their own—African-based—slavery. Others had little experience of slavery. A woman in fifteenth-century Mali under the reign of Mansa Musa would have lived out her life in an entirely different setting and manner than her counterpart in the Kingdom of Kongo, depending on her marital status, religion, kinship ties, and class. The experiences of women of slave origin in both societies, however, would have been comparable.
Kinship in African Societies
Although there are periods in African history we cannot easily or accurately reconstruct, scholars now know a great deal about African civilizations before their encounter with Europe, and about ways of life in communities stretching down the West African coast. Most African societies were kin-based, consisting of clans and extended families, descendants of a common ancestor. Kinship was a major principle of social organization in African societies, and kinship practices operated in all types of societies from small village communities to more centrally organized state polities. They connected people through blood and marriage. In these societies, “a person was a person only insofar as he or she belonged to a broader community.” Kinship ideology enabled the survival of the group, and Africans understood the importance of cultivating and maintaining family ties, as this was crucial to defining one’s place in a group. A Yoruba proverb reinforces this idea: “Your extended family members act as your closest apparel.” In other words, kin members, like clothes, are the closest thing to a person’s body.2
A world defined by kinship relationships, not unlike European feudal society, was not always ideal, for along with the rights it guaranteed came burdens and a set of obligations. Because these societies had beneficiaries and providers (takers and givers) and dominants and dependents, there were often tensions and strains. Social and family obligations could be irritating. As a contemporary Nigerian proverb explains, “We cannot choose who our relatives should be, even though we may come to like some better than others.” Although these obligations could be onerous, membership in a kin group accorded an individual ties of affection, a sense of belonging, and unquestioned affiliation to a group that brought love, respect, protection, and identity. In the many communities in West and Central Africa, biology was important, but kinship was not always defined through blood ties. Family ties were often socially constructed, and fictive kinship relations, based neither on ties of blood nor of marriage, were common in Africa, as they would later be in the Americas. In other words, individuals not related by blood could be considered family with the same rights, duties, and obligations as those with blood ties.
Age was revered in African societies. Elders, both men and women, played important roles in kinship systems, often making decisions concerning family issues, keeping members in check, overseeing the community’s customs, laws, and traditions, and controlling access to land and the means of production. Deemed wise because of their length of time on earth, older members of a group commanded respect from the young in all social relations. Though they did not hold unqualified superiority, they wielded tremendous power because, as a common adage maintains, “Old age does not come in just one day.”3 For that reason, despite the complexity of a community’s social organization, kinship ideology often prevailed. In other words, family ties were sometimes more important than political alliances or ties based on a common religion.
The African Background: Political and
Social Organization
Although kinship structures were at the heart of many societies, African communities had diverse social and political structures. Along the West and West Central African coasts and further inland, small fishing and farming villages existed alongside more centrally organized states and kingdoms. New social and political organizations developed over the centuries as migration, environmental changes, and other influences affected how and where people lived.
Given that most enslaved Africans eventually settled on plantations, it is important to understand the role of agriculture in African societies. Settled communities began to emerge in Africa about 20,000 BCE along the Nile River. In West Africa farming communities emerged around 3000 BCE. With greater settlement and stability came increased social and cultural change, resulting in the emergence of a multiplicity of cultures. As food-producing economies developed, populations were more firmly tied to territories. In Western Africa, large and dense populations resulted in the growth of primarily agricultural societies and the development of iron-working technology. Agriculture also provided increased interaction between settled communities for mutual benefit through trade, intermarriage, and a search for security and protection. As larger, long-term settlements developed, methods were devised to cope with issues of conflict and cooperation. Farming communities usually had abundant land, but labor was scarce. Wealthy individuals could often control labor and gain greater access to land, intensifying class and, to some extent, gender differences. It was in these more settled societies that social inequalities such as slavery could be found.
As people became more sedentary, they continued to organize themselves in a variety of ways, forming different types of government and administrative structures. By the fifteenth century, some populations chose to organize themselves into states; others remained in stateless organizations with little concentration of authority. Stateless societies such as the Igbo had no political or professional class as such, but did have structured authority such as a council of elders. The Igbo in Nigeria had no kings, but although a ruler was absent, authority was not. Age, knowledge, and personal achievement often provided standards by which authority was established, with communities choosing to solve their problems as a unified body. Disputes were typically settled without resort to force, and the units in which they were settled were small, such as a “palaver” presided over by community elders. This meant that a wide population had a relatively equitable amount of political influence. Furthermore, in these societies social mobility was often based on merit rather than inherited status. The fame of Chinua Achebe’s fictional character Okonkwo, for example, “rested on solid personal achievements.” His father had not been well regarded in the village of Umuofia, but Okonkwo “was clearly cut out for great things” and, though a young man, “was already one of the greatest men of his time. Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered.”4
Some communities formed into centrally organized states or kingdoms with a concentration of authority in the form of a ruler (a chief or king) who wielded authority as a full-time occupation. States and kingdoms were highly structured, administered and organized by a small elite, able to mobilize their people and resources effectively, and capable of offering increased protection. The region known as the Western Sudan made an early transition from hunting and gathering to sedentary culture through animal domestication, the development of agriculture, and the formation of states. The Western Sudan stretches from the Sahara Desert to the north and the tropical rain forests of the Guinea coast to the south. The name derives from the Arabic term bilad-al-sudan, meaning Land of Blacks, a consequence of the area’s significant relationship with the Arab world. Beginning in the fifth century a number of powerful states and kingdoms arose in this locality, largely as a result of trade.
With more settled and organized ways of life made possible in a centralized state, Africans opened themselves up to new experiences and interactions. For example, the impulse to express themselves artistically is evidenced by the many rock art and paintings uncovered by archaeologists. Depicting the everyday life of these communities, they allow us to see how people lived. In the Western Sudan the introduction and spread of Islam, predominantly through the artery of trade, was a major development. The new religion and the trade that often accompanied it became important aspects of life in African societies south of the Sahara after the fourth century. The rise of the great empires, such as Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and Kanem Bornu, among others, contributed to this trend. While populations from these regions did not end up in the Americas in significant numbers, the influences of trade and religion from the three major empires figured in the history of regions further south, from which Africans were taken. Furthermore, these kingdoms played a significant role in African American consciousness and connection with Africa.
Trans-Saharan Trade and African Kingdoms
Long-distance trade across the Sahara went on for many centuries before Europeans encountered African societies. Berber pastoralists in the northern Sahara were traders long before they made contact with populations further south of the desert. The introduction of the camel in the first century CE changed the nature of trade. In contrast to the horses and pack oxen previously used in trade, the camel facilitated larger-scale and longer-distance trade. During the third and fourth centuries, the use of camels spread among Berber nomads of the northern Sahara, becoming the major form of transport by the fifth century. This ungainly animal, with its ability to withstand desert conditions, revolutionized the scale and scope of the trans-Saharan trade, allowing traders to travel longer distances, and explore and establish new trade routes. Berbers and the Sudanese populations in the Sahel region (Serer, Soninke, Songhai, and Wolof, among others) were major participants in the trade. Trading settlements quickly developed on both sides of the Sahara Desert as Africans from various places engaged in economic and cultural exchanges. The Sahel, or “shores” of the desert, with settled towns where caravans were offloaded and reloaded for transport across the desert, was a point of contact. As commerce increased, the products of sub-Saharan Africa—and the area’s black population—became more accessible to the Mediterranean world and later to Europe via North Africa. Trade in West African gold expanded and demand for other goods, such as ostrich feathers, ivory, and furs, increased. The trade routes featured people as well as goods, establishing an African slave trade.5
The trans-Saharan trade brought many changes to West African societies. It increased their awareness of a larger world, brought new goods to their people, and led to social and political changes. As trade items such as gold, salt, and ostrich feathers were exported from the region, horses, cloth, beads, and metal goods made their way into the Western Sudan. Perhaps the most important development was the exposure of West Africa to Islam. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Islam spread from Egypt to the Maghreb region and south of the Sahara into West Africa.6 The religion’s first converts were nomadic desert-dwelling Berbers, who then became key to its spread in West Africa. Berbers introduced Islam further south through the trans-Saharan trade, first to the Saharan nomads, later to populations in the Western Sudan. Islam won converts among traders and rulers, for a long time remaining the religion of these two elite groups, while making little impression on commoners. In later centuries it would spread more widely, either peacefully or through force. By the sixteenth century, Islam, well established in the Sudanic regions, became a familiar part of the cultural landscape, if not a widely practiced religion.
The spread of Islam in West Africa would later contribute to its spread in the Americas through captured and enslaved Muslim men and women. The fictional Aminata Diallo, who guessed her birth date to be 1745, was born a Muslim. The ruling classes of the great empires often converted to Islam, at least in name, and the new religion played an important part in the fortunes of the Western Sudanese states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai.
Ghana, the earliest of these states, reached the height of its power between the fifth and thirteenth centuries. Its major ethnic group, the Soninke, were largely settled farmers and fishermen. Ghana grew on the strength of the trans-Saharan trade as its rulers became rich and powerful with the expansion of the gold trade. During the height of its power, the gold trade flourished, bringing visitors to the kingdom from North Africa and the Arab world. All remarked on its great wealth. Ghana’s decline began at the end of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. As it fell, other states, such as the Susu kingdom, broke away, rising to power. Known for its iron working and military power, by the end of twelfth century the powerful Kante clan had emerged as leader, with Sumanguru Kante at its head. Under Kante, the Susu seceded from Ghana, and he ruled until his defeat by the Malinke.
Oral tradition credits Sundiata Keita with founding the Mali Empire in 1235. Overcoming adversity, this legendary ruler consolidated several Malinke chiefdoms to build a great empire. The most famous of Mali’s kings, Sundiata, is remembered for his military power.7 Subsequent rulers Mansa Musa (1312–37) and Mansa Suleyman (1341–60) strengthened the administrative machinery of the kingdom, building on the work of Sundiata. Under Mansa Musa, in particular, Mali enjoyed stability and good government as well as unprecedented wealth and economic prosperity, attracting traders from north and south. Mali took advantage of trade with populations north of the Sahara, profiting from participation in the trans-Saharan trade. Commerce increased, with merchants coming from as far away as Egypt and Morocco. Both Musa and Suleyman were Muslim converts and used their network and connections with the Islamic world to bring trade and knowledge to the empire. Mali’s decline began around the second half of the fourteenth century as the kingdom of Songhai came into its own.
Songhai too rose predominantly through trade brought by Muslims from the north and the Arab world. Strong rulers built up the kingdom until its decline in the sixteenth century. Likewise, Kanem Bornu, situated in the region around Lake Chad, rose to prominence in the eleventh century. Largely pastoralist, the kingdom grew through trade, reaching its height in the thirteenth century. Other kingdoms rose and fell, propelling change, dislocating populations, and generating migrations of all sorts.
Although documents tell us mostly about elites in these three successful kingdoms, occasionally we gain a glimpse of the lives of ordinary men and women. When the Arab traveler Ibn Battuta made his way south into Mali in 1352 during the reign of Suleyman, he described the hospitality Africans extended to him, their cultural and religious practices, and their customs. Battuta also described the lives of women, a picture Aminata Diallo would likely have recognized. In Walata, he marveled at the beauty of women, their relative freedom, and the matrilineal customs of the society, which traced descent through the mother line: “Their women are of surpassing beauty, and are shown more respect than the men. The state of affairs amongst these people is indeed extraordinary. Their men show no signs of jealousy whatever; no one claims descent from his father, but on the contrary from his mother’s brother. A person’s heirs are his sister’s sons, not his own sons. This is a thing which I have seen nowhere in the world except among the Indians of Malabar. But those are heathens; these people are Muslims, punctilious in observing the hours of prayer, studying books of law, and memorizing the Koran. Yet their women show no bashfulness before men and do not veil themselves, though they are assiduous in attending the prayers. Any man who wishes to marry one of them may do so, but they do not travel with their husbands, and even if one desired to do so her family would not allow her to go.”8 Indeed, the fictional Aminata’s picture of her family life shows her very independent mother traveling long distances alone and her father according her great respect. But Battuta also observed inequalities in the communities he visited, making it clear there were subservient groups.
West and West Central African Communities
Further down the coast similar societies emerged. Agriculture and iron working were just as important to these communities, and many of the same patterns in political development emerged. African people in the Senegambia, the Rice and Slave Coasts, and the Gold Coast lived in kin-based societies, developing their own ways of life and adapting to their environment. For our purposes, the emergence of states such as Benin, Oyo, and Asante in West Africa and Kongo, Lunda, and Lundu in West Central Africa are important. Benin, located in what is today southern Nigeria, emerged with village communities as the basic political unit. Kinship was the basis of social interaction, and agriculture and fishing were the mainstays of the economy. Over time kingship developed, with a more complex and centralized political mode of organization.
By the fifteenth century, Benin was the most powerful empire in the forest region of West Africa. One of its first rulers, (Oba) Ewuare, built up the empire, strengthening its capital and seat of power. Subsequent leaders expanded the empire toward the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Benin began to decline in the late seventeenth century, as many of its vassal states broke away. Ife and Oyo, two important Yoruba states, were strategically located between the forest regions and the Western Sudan to the north, giving them a trade advantage.
Oyo, in particular, built up its power as result of trade with these regions and later with Europeans. The Alaafin, believed to be a sacred ruler personifying reincarnated ancestors, served as the link between the living and the dead and governed based on the idea of divine right. As in Benin, trade with Europeans was important to this community. Oyo began to decline gradually in the late eighteenth century. The Akan-speaking people located in what is today the country of Ghana built up their power beginning in the late seventeenth century when Osei Tutu consolidated the Asante Empire. Gold was central to its growth and success through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All these West African kingdoms, located on the edge of the forest region, took agriculture and fishing as their mainstays because of their location near rivers such as the Volta and the Niger. They also made use of mineral resources native to their environment. Trade with neighboring communities and later with Europeans became central to the development of these states and empires.
Kongo originated with small communities that sprang up along the banks of the Congo River. Largely fishing and agricultural societies, they had, by the fifteenth century, organized themselves into more centralized political systems. Early accounts of Kongo described it as a highly bureaucratic state with close to four hundred thousand people and many vassal states. Kinship relationships still remained significant, in particular the role of fictive kinship as a way of mobilizing people. As in Mali, women played important roles. In his examination of elite women in the kingdom of Kongo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the historian John Thornton argues that women accessed power by influencing their male relatives, noting that “women with the right genealogical position, of acceptable age and connections to males, could exercise influence and—at a later period—real power in their own right.”9 As in the Western Sudan, commerce was important as Africans traded with each other and later with Europeans. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several states along the West African coast built up their power due to trade with Europeans, particularly the slave trade. Oyo, Dahomey, Asante, and Benin, all centralized states, reached their power at the height of the slave trade. Many men and women from these societies found themselves enslaved on plantations in the Americas, often as a result of internecine wars.
The stateless societies along the West African coast also saw their women and men forcibly removed to the Americas. While it has been more difficult for scholars to reconstruct the histories of communities that were not centralized, and those leaving none or few written records, we know something of some of the populations inhabiting a stretch of the West African coast line known as the Upper Guinea Coast, stretching from the Gambia to Sierra Leone. The Rice Coast region in particular, in the countries that are now Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, proved to be significant to the United States. The region was inhabited by ethnic groups such the Baga, Nalu, Balanta, Fula, Jolonke, Mandinka, Temne, and Mende, whose communities were largely agricultural. Known for their rice growing and other agricultural techniques, these communities were multilingual, multiethnic, and mobile, with overlapping and multiple identities. It would not have been unusual for women and men to marry outside their ethnic group, or to practice Islam while also adhering to their traditional religions. The historian Donald Wright, for example, describes the village communities making up the precolonial kingdom of Niumi in the Gambia River region. Men and women in Niumi had “several levels of identity,” including family or kinship, class, village, and an identity with the kingdom itself. Further down the coast in the region of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, village communities were the principal form of social organization.10
Indigenous Religious Practices in African Communities
Regardless of their form of government or social organization, Africans placed a high value on their religious beliefs. West and Central Africans had a wide variety of belief systems. Religion permeated people’s lives and their everyday activities. Africans developed religious systems that conformed to their lifestyles and were reflected in their prayers of gratitude in bounteous times and entreaties in times of need. Like kinship, religion conferred identity on the individual and the group. While there was no universal religion, some similarities can be identified. Africans approached their religious beliefs holistically, with little or no lines or divisions between the spiritual, natural, social, or political worlds, and practices were often intimately related to their concepts of culture, language, and ethnic identity. These governed marriage and death, farming and hunting, and community living.11
The function of religion in these societies, as in others around the world, was to unearth the meaning of life, to understand the proper relationship among humans, between humans and spiritual powers, and between humans and the natural world. African religions also sought to understand and explain the persistence of evil and suffering. Important to religious practice was upholding proper behavior and enforcing rules. Belief in the afterlife ensured adherence to the prescribed codes. These ideas could be found in sacred oral traditions, passed down through the generations, as well as through education gained during rites of passage ceremonies and through the performance of rituals.
Oral traditions and stories were important to African religious beliefs. Origin stories in particular were significant for explaining how communities came to be. The various traditions of origin found in African societies illustrate how people understood their world, performed rituals, and explained why and how things happened to them. Art and dance were vital to religious practices, whether in the form of masking traditions, the wearing of particular cloths and colors, the specific design of an object or material, or the direction and steps a dance might take.
Central to many African religions was a belief in a supreme being responsible for the creation of the universe. Although variations on how important the supreme being was and the role he/she played could be found among cultures of West and Central Africa, most conceived of the supreme being as a remote figure with minimal involvement in the daily lives of individuals. Although distant, the supreme being was responsible for giving life and judging the conduct of individuals after death. For example, the Yoruba believe that their supreme being, Olorun (Olodumare), gives life to a newly born child and controls his or her destiny. Likewise, when a person dies, Olorun decides his or her fate and determines whether the person will become an ancestor or go for eternity to the place of broken pots, reserved for those who led destructive lives. The place of broken pots, like hell, was believed to be hot, heated with peppers rather than fire.
Ngewo or Leve, the supreme god of the Mende of Sierra Leone, is said to have created the universe before withdrawing to the heavens. Some accounts of Leve cast the god as female. Although remote, the supreme being continued to oversee the destinies of Mende people. The creator and supreme being Nzambi a Mpungu, central to Kongo/Bakongo cosmology, spoke of two worlds: the land of the living (nza yayi) and the land of the dead (nsi a bafwa), divided by a body of water. Though separate physical spaces, life in both places went on simultaneously, affecting one another. Sun and moon traveled around both lands, making it day for the living when it was night for the dead and visa versa. The dead lived similar lives to the living but in a separate physical realm. This idea, that dead individuals had the capacity to interact with those they left behind, can be found in many African religious traditions.
Ancestor reverence and a belief in spirits were also central to African religious belief systems. People attained ancestor status in different ways. Among the Jola of Gambia and the Yoruba of Nigeria, only those who led good lives could become ancestors. In some belief systems ancestors were more present in the lives of the living than the supreme being. Some communities believed ancestors had mystical powers. While benevolent for the most part, they could also be capricious if they thought they had been neglected by the living. For that reason those left behind made sure the ancestors were not forgotten.12
Lesser nature spirits played a substantial role in African belief systems. These were spirits designated as helpers by the supreme being, deriving their powers from him/her. The Yoruba Orishas, perhaps best known in the Americas, had special power and distinct characteristics with specific duties. Spirits such as Oshun, a female deity associated with water and femininity, Ifa, a spirit of divination (the practice of finding the cause and significance of events), or Shango, god of thunder, were greatly revered by the living. They influenced the daily lives and activities of people more meaningfully and were often feared more than the supreme being figure in the cosmology.
Lesser spirits sometimes identified themselves to humans through spirit possession. Believed to have more control and power over people’s everyday lives than the supreme being, they had specific functions in the life of the community. In Kongo people believed in lesser spirits (simbi/bisimbi), each of which had its own function.13 The Jola of Gambia associated lesser spirits with fishing, governance in the community, blacksmithing, women’s fertility, male initiation, and rain. In an agricultural society with patrilineal forms of kinship, spirits deemed important often reflected the needs of a farming community: rain, an abundance of crops, and so on. In other African societies lesser spirits were linked to oceans, rivers, springs, and other places in the natural world. The Dogon of Mali believe lesser spirits are connected with specific forces of nature. Nommo, an ancestral spirit, is linked with the life-giving properties of water. Displeasing the spirits could be the difference between a bountiful harvest and famine, and people did all they could to follow the rules.
A central aspect of many African belief systems was the attempt to understand and explain suffering and evil. Because people needed to explain what brought harm to their communities, spirits or other humans were often blamed for things that could not otherwise be explained. Eshu among the Yoruba spirits was believed to be a purveyor of negative events and occurrences. Other societies attributed suffering and bad luck to spirits. Humans were also targeted as the source of evil in some contexts, accused of being responsible for death, illness, and other misfortunes. Accusations of witchcraft and wrongdoing were common, particularly in troubled times. In the centuries during which the slave trade flourished, and as Africans encountered Europeans coming to the continent with their own religions, societies ravaged by loss doubtlessly called on elements of their religions for succor.
Africa, Europe, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
The encounter with Europe would immeasurably alter those civilizations. When the first Portuguese ships sailed down the coast of West Africa, the lives of men and women in Africa would change forever. The Portuguese first reached West African shores in 1443 at the mouth of the river Senegal. This began a centuries-long link between the two continents that had considerable ramifications for people of African descent globally. By 1462 the Portuguese had sailed down the coast to Sierra Leone. Twenty years later Portuguese traders built a trading fort they called Sao Jorge da Mina (later Elmina) in what is today the nation of Ghana. A relationship initially beneficial to Africans and Europeans alike soon disintegrated into great suffering as a transition from trading in goods to trading in human beings ensued.
Europeans had little knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa before the fifteenth century, although European mapmakers had produced rudimentary maps of Africa as early as the thirteenth century. Drawn largely from rumors and hearsay, what they knew was scanty and rife with misinformation. Although some contact had occurred between Europeans and Africans from East and North Africa, not until the Portuguese made their first maritime voyage south did Europeans gain more information about these societies. The trans-Saharan trade had allowed African goods to flow into Europe long before direct encounters. By the time the Portuguese sailed for the coast of Africa, for example, West African gold was already being used to mint European coins. As news of African wealth abounded, more Europeans came, attracted by gold and possibilities for more trade.14
In 1482, when Diogo Cão sailed down the West African coast to the river Congo and encountered the Kingdom of Kongo, he was the first European to travel that far south, opening the way for significant events in the relationship between Europe and Africa. This was one of the first meaningful and well-documented relationships between an African ruler and his European counterpart. As illustrated in subsequent correspondence between Manikongo/King Affonso of Kongo and King Henry of Portugal, the early relationship between Portugal and Kongo was founded on mutual exchange and respect, as Europeans pursued knowledge of the African societies they encountered and Africans brokered trade with the newcomers from across the seas.15
The Portuguese were the first to trade with Africans, but other European nations soon entered the trade, including Spain, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Denmark. The initial relationship between Africans and Europeans was that of host and guest. Africans extended courtesies under prevalent customs of hospitality as gifts and information were exchanged, but in African territories Europeans followed African rules. But in the ensuing years, as African rulers and traders became more dependent on European goods, they lost much of the power they had wielded. The relationship was not one-dimensional, as African men and women engaged with Europeans in particular ways. Women, for example, often married or had sexual relationships with European men. While we know that some of these relationships were coercive, it was sometimes in the interest of women to enter into them. Likewise, men chose to trade with Europeans for a variety of reasons, including aggrandizement, protections, and political ascendancy.16
The exchange of goods other than humans continued until the settlement of the Americas. This development prompted a shift in terms of trade and changed the fate of some Africans forever. Millions of men and women were drawn into a network of trade that resulted in their enslavement. In the Americas they encountered bondage as they had never understood it before, for while slavery was common in many parts of the world, racial slavery would emerge in the New World.
Slavery and slave trading were not unfamiliar to some African societies. Scholars have recognized slavery as a universal phenomenon practiced in societies all over the world long before the Atlantic slave trade era. While Atlantic slavery has largely come to be associated with the institution, its nature in other societies has long been understood. Recent studies have examined these institutions in greater deal, making a distinction between “societies with slaves,” where slavery was one of many systems of labor, and “slave societies,” in which slave labor and slavery served as the foundation of a social and economic order. Both forms of slavery could be found in Africans societies in the coastal regions of West and West Central Africa, although most scholars agree that societies with slaves predominated in these regions. But slavery was not one-dimensional.17
It is important to understand that African societies were not static. The nature of slavery changed over the course of the many centuries this book examines. Furthermore, as demand for labor intensified in the Americas, the nature of slavery in Africa also changed. In some societies the enslaved were a minor part of the labor force and were not crucial producers; in others they were central to production.
Slavery developed in different ways in the places where it existed. Enslaved men and women were treated as outsiders, as people without a history. Held against their will by the threat of force or through coercion, they could sometimes nevertheless have a great deal of autonomy, and their status or position could change over time. With no ties or links with those considered members of the society (even the lowest classes), enslaved men and women were completely dependent on the will of their owners, making them vulnerable. Although they were not unique in the work they did or in the fact that they had no control over their lives, there were marked differences in the rights of the enslaved. Members of a clan or kin group could be put in temporary conditions of servitude. What often distinguished those considered slaves was their perceived rootlessness and the absence of kinship ties.18
In societies where slavery came to be recognized as an important institution, lack of ties to a community, absence of family connections, and inability to access land often distinguished slaves from other workers. This was particularly true in the case of women, who performed similar tasks regardless of their status as slave or free. Given that in some African societies enslaved women were often preferred as wives because they lacked kinship ties, they frequently performed the same tasks as the free women who were members of the lineage. Some scholars have argued that because of their value in African societies as child bearers and farmers, they were not initially sold in large numbers to Europeans. However, women would not be spared in the centuries to come.19
By the eighteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade came to define the connection between Europe and Africa, changing the nature of slavery in societies where it existed and introducing it in others. Yet African men and women did not always accept the notion of trading in human beings. While many participated actively in the trade, scholars have noted that there was also active resistance to the slave trade. Africans found various strategies to counter the devastation wrought by the slave trade.20
Enslavement
The forced enslavement of Africans across the Atlantic began with the initial transportation of Africans to European cities and to islands off the African coast. Some of the earliest African captives were taken directly to Portugal between 1441 and 1443 to be used for local labor purposes. As Europeans settled the Caribbean Islands and the Americas, the need for labor intensified, and in 1502 the first Africans were transported directly from Africa to the Americas. This enforced movement of Africans to the Americas intensified in the middle of the sixteenth century as Europeans found a need for more labor. Millions of men and women were enslaved before the transatlantic slave trade came to a halt by the end of the nineteenth century.
American labor demands transformed Africans into human commodities. The historian Stephanie Smallwood describes the process: “The method by which traders turned people into property that could move easily, smoothly through the channels of saltwater slavery took the form of both physical and social violence. Along the coast, captives felt the enclosure of prison walls and the weight of iron shackles holding them incarcerated in shore-based trade forts or aboard ships that functioned as floating warehouses as captives were accumulated.”21 Women, men, children, and sometimes the elderly were transported on slave ships across the Atlantic Ocean, leaving loved ones behind. Aminata Diallo, the young protagonist in Hill’s novel, expresses surprise at her capture, asserting her humanity as she cries out to her captors: “This is a mistake. I am a freeborn Muslim.” Her pleas are to no avail, and all she can do is ask, “How could this be? I prayed that this was a dream.”22
Scholars estimate that between 12 million and 15 million Africans left Africa during the course of the trade as Africans were transported from regions in the Upper Guinea Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, and West Central Africa. They came from diverse ethnic groups—Ewe, Yoruba, Mende, Temne, Malinke, Kongo, and others—and many of them, like Aminata, were practicing Muslims. Enslaved Africans contributed greatly to the development of American colonies and, as we shall see, had a lasting demographic impact on those regions. Recent scholarship shows the various regional, religious, and cultural origins of Africans brought to American shores, allowing for greater understanding of their influences on the societies in which they settled.23
The United States, which did not grow labor-intensive sugar as did the Caribbean colonies, received less than 5–7 percent of the total number of Africans who settled in the Americas. These Africans came from a wide variety of places, including the Senegambia region, Sierra Leone, the Bights of Benin and Biafra, the Windward Coast, and a small number from Southeast Africa. The United States received Bambara, Igbo, Mandingo, and Mende people, among others. Recently scholars have also highlighted the important role of West Central Africans, who made up about one-third of the Africans brought to the United States. An estimated sixty thousand West Central Africans could be found dispersed in the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland and, in smaller numbers, elsewhere in the country.24
The departure of large numbers of men and women left a void in the societies from which they were taken. This wrenching of millions from their homeland, loss of lives, and separation from family brought many changes. While slave merchants and rulers prospered, production capacity and manpower were lost, hindering African development and creating insecurity in the population left behind. Scholars have examined patterns of social organization that emerged during the slave trade era and the changes wrought to African communities. Work by archaeologists illuminates the trade’s impact on social organization, cultural practices, and economic relations. While scholars have long recognized its effect on labor needs, retardation of market industries, and economies, these examinations are now revealing other consequences—depopulation in some areas, evidence of large-scale movements as Africans fled their communities to settle new ones further inland or took refuge in European settlements. People fleeing enslavement constructed defensive villages, towns, and cities away from places they could be captured. As one scholar writes, “The period can be considered one of major demographic upheaval characterized by new manifestations of power and cultural memory that had profound effects on the way people lived in and thought about the world around them.”25 For those unfortunate men and women who could not escape enslavers, the route to their final destination in the Americas was terrifying.
Middle Passages
While the ship’s voyage across the Atlantic Ocean has traditionally defined and shaped our understanding of the Middle Passage, enslaved Africans often endured several middle passages. The path to enslavement began at the moment of capture and continued with the long journey to the coast, confinement in a slave fort, boarding the ship, and the journey across the ocean. Mahommah Baquaqua in 1854 describes his capture: “In the morning when I arose, I found that I was a prisoner, and my companions were all gone. Oh, horror! I then discovered that I had been betrayed into the hands of my enemies, and sold for a slave. Never shall I forget my feelings on that occasion; the thoughts of my poor mother harassed me very much, and the loss of my liberty and honorable position with the king, grieved me very sorely.”26 Belinda, “the African,” a seventy-year-old woman petitioning the Massachusetts legislature in 1783, remembers her captivity and transportation to America. During the ship’s voyage, “Scenes which her imagination had never conceived of, a floating world, the sporting monsters of the deep, and the familiar meeting of billows and clouds, strove, but in vain, to divert her attention from three hundred Africans in chains, suffering the most excruciating torment; and some of them rejoicing that the pangs of death came like a balm to their wounds.”27
The moment of capture has also been described in fiction by the Afro-Canadian writer Lawrence Hill and the African American novelist Alex Haley, who depicted the capture and subsequent enslavement of his protagonist Kunta Kinte in similar terms. These fictional accounts echo the real experiences of the enslaved on the ship’s journey to the Americas. Aminata Diallo narrates her long journey from where she was captured to the coast, as the coffle picked up more captives along the way. She tells of attempted escapes and recapture and of death and separation as enslaved Africans are taken farther and farther from their homes.
The voyage to the coast could last several weeks to months before an enslaved individual embarked on a ship. On the coast the enslaved could languish for weeks in slave forts or barracoons. In his famous autobiography, first published in 1789, Olaudah Equiano describes his enslavement in Africa in great detail, outlining his initial capture and sale to several African owners before even leaving the continent. Having been for several months imprisoned in factories on the continent, Equiano wrote of his arrival at a coastal port in West Africa: “The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board.”28 On the coast the enslaved were “processed,” branded with hot irons to indicate to whom they “belonged,” perhaps baptized (to guarantee their salvation if they were to die en route), and either housed at a slave fort until loaded on ships or, as in Equiano’s case, loaded directly on a ship.
The ordeal of the Middle Passage frequently continued with the “coasting” of the ship along the West African coast, as it picked up more human cargo until it finally sailed for the Americas. This process could last weeks, sometimes months. All the while men, women, and children were tortured by their memories of those dear to them. In Hill’s fictional account, Aminata struggles to hold onto memories of her parents: “I tried to keep their voices in my head,” she remembers, “but I could not feed those thoughts. Each and every time they were starved, flattened, and sucked out of my mind.”29 Eventually, those loved ones and homes would be physically left behind as the ship sailed to the Americas.
The journey across the Atlantic could take several months, depending on time of year, port of sail, and type of ship, among other factors. We know much about these voyages, and the experience for those enslaved aboard those vessels was horrifying. Baquaqua proclaimed about the slave ship, “Its horrors, ah! who can describe? None can so truly depict its horrors as the poor unfortunate, miserable wretch that has been confined within its portals. . . . We were thrust into the hold of the vessel in a state of nudity, the males being crammed on one side and the females on the other; the hold was so low that we could not stand up, but were obliged to crouch upon the floor or sit down; day and night were the same to us, sleep being denied.”30
Enslaved Africans resisted their capture whenever they could, whether by running away from barracoons on the coast, jumping overboard in coastal waters, or outright revolt on the seas. Slave revolts were frequent on voyages across the Atlantic. Scholars estimate that there were around four hundred shipboard revolts during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, the most memorable perhaps being the rebellion of enslaved men and women aboard the Amistad in 1839. Led by Sengbe Pieh (also known as Joseph Cinque), the captives succeeded in taking over the ship. They hoped to sail back to Africa, but unfortunately, the surviving ship’s crew navigated the ship to the United States, where the ship was seized. A famous court case regarding the question of the enslaved’s status ensued. The Amistad case made headlines in its day as the courts tried to decide whether the African captives were illegally enslaved or whether they were, in fact, property. Sengbe Pieh and his compatriots were represented by former president John Quincy Adams, who defended their right to freedom on both moral and legal grounds. The court ruled in their favor and they were released. 31
The experience on board created a bond among those who survived the journey, forming ties of friendship and kinship as they endured the long journey to an unknown world. In his examination of African captives on board the Emilia, a slave ship bound for Brazil in 1821, Walter Hawthorne has explored the slave ship “as a place where individuals died but communities were born.” Long-lasting relationships were created by those lucky enough to end up in the same place on the other side of the Atlantic. This “community of shipmates” and the bonds they established were “the foundation upon which new communities were constructed and reinforced preexisting identities.”32 Though fictional, Alex Haley’s central character, Kunta Kinte, movingly illustrates how these ties were created over the course of the voyage:
Cross-section of a Brazilian slave ship.
(From Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 [London, 1830]. From Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.)
The steady murmuring that went on in the hold whenever the toubob [white men] were gone kept growing in volume and intensity as the men began to communicate better and better with one another. Words not understood were whispered from mouth to ear along the shelves until someone who knew more than one tongue would send back their meanings. In the process, all of the men along each shelf learned new words in tongues they had not spoken before. Sometimes men jerked upward, bumping their heads, in the double excitement of communicating with each other and the fact that it was being done without the toubob’s knowledge. Muttering among themselves for hours, the men developed a deepening sense of intrigue and of brotherhood. Though they were of different villages and tribes, the feeling grew that they were not from different peoples or places.33
Thus even before landing on American shores some men and women from the continent had become “Africans,” as they would later be designated.
As men, women, and children made their involuntary journey to the Americas, they did not leave Africa completely behind. Although they left loved ones and life histories in their various homelands, they took much with them. As Smallwood writes: “Each person pulled onto the slave ship embodied a social history: one or more distinctive places that were called ‘home’ and an indelible web of relationships comprising ties with immediate family and the extended network of kin.”34 The enslaved took memories and cultural patterns, including kinship structures and ideas about how families should interact and function, from the particular communities from which they hailed. They took memories of kin and community: mothers, fathers, spouses, and children they would never see again. Years after being enslaved, Venture Smith would remember his father as “a man of remarkable stature. I should judge as much as six feet and six or seven inches high, two feet across his shoulders, and every way well proportioned. He was a man of remarkable strength and resolution, affable, kind and gentle, ruling with equity and moderation.”35 Likewise, throughout Hill’s narrative his fictional heroine recollected her parents and her homeland, and the values they had given her.
Africa and the idea of Africa would, in the ensuing centuries, comfort and strengthen enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants in the United States. Africans retained words, idioms, and other elements of their languages. They clung to religious and sacred beliefs, which sustained them through their ordeal, and kept alive oral traditions and origin myths that would help them explain their plight and understand the new world they were encountering. They maintained ideas about good and evil they would use to recognize friends and enemies in the Americas, and memories to remember those they had left behind. Africans held onto ideas about how to organize themselves politically and an understanding of the social and cultural formations that had sustained them throughout their lives. They kept memories of enslavement within their communities, which they doubtlessly compared to their new lives in bondage. Most important, the many women and men taken from the continent held onto their resilience and strength, which nourished them in their new lives as enslaved people. They would pass on all of these things to successive generations of African-descended people in America.