The slave trade and the African diaspora

JOHN THORNTON

The diaspora of African people to the Americas as a result of the trans-atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, in terms of both the length of time and the numbers of people involved.

Imported African labor was vital to the development of the European occupied Americas, from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil, to the tobacco and cotton farms of North America and the mines of several South American countries. African forced migrants outnumbered European migrants, often many times, in every region except North America.

Beyond the demographic implications of the slave trade, the African Diaspora was a massive cultural movement. A significant portion of Africa's vast cultural diversity was transported to the Americas, and although as slaves Africans could not bring as much or re-create as much of their home culture as free migrants might have, they still contributed significantly to the visual, musical, and verbal culture of all the Americas.

Historiography of the slave trade and the African Diaspora

The study of the slave trade and the African Diaspora has had several primary themes over the past half century. One has been the long discovery of the volume and direction of the slave trade itself; a second examines how the slave trade worked in Africa and the impact it had on the continent; and a third seeks to understand how and in what ways African culture moved from Africa to the Americas.

The study of the volume and direction of the slave trade took its modern direction with Philip Curtin's pioneering census of existing literature in 1969, the first overall picture of the quantitative issue.¹ Curtin's work set off a wave of research, anchored for the most part in the painstaking discovery of the thousands of shipping records, reports, fiscal returns, and other mundane documents that would allow serious quantification to take place.

Understanding the origins of the slave trade and its impact on the contin­ent, the second theme, has proven harder than determining the numbers of people involved. The generation of scholars who studied African history in the 1960s through 1970s, while necessarily interested in the slave trade, did not generally study it systematically, as their primary interest was political history. The move toward more social history in the 1980s and 1990s was also quite focused on the domestic realities of African societies. Following this, there was a great fall-off in interest and research on the African societies that participated in the slave trade. Some works did not follow these trends, however. Robin Law's work on the Slave Coast was one of the pioneering works that integrated the slave trade into his understanding of the workings of Dahomey and its neighbors, and John Thornton's work on warfare also sought to understand the slave trade in terms of African military history.^[134] More recently Walter Hawthorne and Stephanie Smallwood have attempted to integrate understanding of the processes by which people were enslaved and transported.^[135]

In recent years, the third theme, that of the role of African culture in the formation of African American societies, has come to be predominant. Here the focus has been on the African Diaspora and the slave trade material has been analyzed primarily to determine what African cultures were most significant in which areas.

New insight into the ways African culture moved from Africa to the Americas comes from Ira Berlin's research on the role of “Atlantic Creoles” in the formation of African American culture.^[138] Berlin argued that some parts of Africa had been in touch for longer with European culture and segments of the African population brought elements of that culture with them. This idea was more fully developed by Linda Heywood and John Thornton, who studied the origins of African American culture in early English and Dutch colonies and linked them to West Central Africa, where European culture had made a profound impact, especially in the introduction of Christianity.^[139]

Other scholars, including Sylviane Diouf and Michael Gomez, have begun to pay special attention to Muslim slaves and their impact in the Americas.^[140] Joao Jose Reis drew special attention to the role of Muslim slaves in the Brazilian slave revolt of 1835 and more largely in Brazilian history.¹¹ Discus­sions of the role of Africans practicing Abrahamic religions in the Americas are likely to be highlighted as the religious life and influence of Africans is more thoroughly examined in the future.

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The slave trade

Slaves from some portions of Africa that eventually engaged in the Atlantic trade had been involved in the trans-Saharan slave trade since the tenth or eleventh century, so for many African regions, especially the West African savanna and Sahel, the export of people was not new. But for other areas of Atlantic Africa, the voyages of exploration initiated by Portugal after 1415 brought them into contact for the first time with people interested in acquiring slaves to carry outside the continent.

Initially the Portuguese raided the African coast and carried people away into slavery, but that period was short-lived, as Africans proved capable of defending their coast once the initial surprise wore off. After a series of diplomatic negotiations led by Diogo Gomes from 1456 to 1462, Portugal agreed to engage in peaceful trade in all commodities with the countries it met. When Portuguese ships reached Lower Guinea in the 1460s and 70s they did no raiding, but instead established peaceful trade from the beginning.

One of the surprising consequences of this turn from raiding to trading was its impact on the slave trade. Portuguese vessels never captured more than a few hundred people a year and suffered casualties of their own while raiding, but once the Portuguese established diplomatic relations with African leaders, they were able to purchase several thousand slaves every year. In part this was because Africans in the region that the Portuguese first reached had already established slave trading relations with the Mediter­ranean across the Sahara, but also because there and elsewhere there was already an established institution of local slavery in place.

In this case, “slavery” means primarily a legal system in which there was a class of people over whom other people had important powers, including the right to sell them. The aspect of African slavery that facilitated the Atlantic slave trade was not labor conditions or the social position of the slaves, but the legality of a transfer to foreigners who would carry the slave out of the country.

The slave trade and the African diaspora engagement with the Saharan slave trade, and the absence of early documen­tation about legal systems in many other areas makes the power to sell others difficult to trace. This lack of evidence lays open the possibility that the complex of legal obligations that rendered a person a slave was a new development.

But for West Central Africa, and particularly the Kingdom of Kongo, the development of local literacy within a few decades of contact makes the pattern clear. King Afonso ι of Kongo (1509-42) wrote a lengthy series of letters to Portugal dealing in part with slavery and the slave trade. As early as 1514 he indicated that slaves could be purchased in existing markets in his country and that Kongo elites also held and retained slaves themselves. He also revealed that successful wars, such as one his army waged in 1512, resulted in the capture and enslavement of people, probably an important source of slaves for sale.

Afonso's correspondence also shows that there were rules within the country about who could be enslaved and who could not. In 1526 Afonso ruled that some slaves had been taken illegally and that Portuguese mer­chants had been at least complicit in the purchase of illegally enslaved persons. He subsequently established a committee to inspect slaves being prepared for export to insure that the legal conditions had been met. Subse­quent rulers even obtained the return of people who had been wrongfully enslaved. For example, slaves taken by the invading “Jagas” in 1570 and sold to Portuguese merchants were returned, as were over a thousand slaves captured by an invading Portuguese army from Angola in 1622.¹² Unfortu­nately nowhere else in Atlantic Africa has similarly detailed documentation of the development of the African legal background to the slave trade on the coast.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European commercial records do allow us to understand the mechanisms of purchase.

fortified to prevent runaways, guard valuable commodities such as gold, and protect the trading interests of the merchants from interlopers, rival commercial interests (often from other European countries), and pirates.

Europeans engaged in trade through factories around the mouth of the Senegal and of the Gambia, and in Sierra Leone. There was a large cluster of factories and forts on the Gold Coast (mostly modern Ghana) originally built to meet the need to secure gold while it was awaiting shipment, and factories were also established on the so-called “Slave Coast” mostly in modern-day Benin. Elsewhere, factories were intermittent: The Dutch maintained a factory near the ancient kingdom of Benin in the eighteenth century, but abandoned it around 1740; England in the 1720s and Portugal in the 1780s established factories on the Loango Coast (around the modern-day Republic of Congo), but they were both driven away by local forces.

The Portuguese colony of Angola, founded in 1575, was different from other European establishments in that it was a large area ruled directly from Lisbon and with a substantial armed force (mostly drawn from African allies and feudatories) that actively engaged in combat and captured slaves for export. Angola was the only place in Africa where slaves captured by European-led armies accounted for a considerable percentage of exports, although the Portuguese also acquired many slaves in Angola from commer­cial contacts and had factories in the interior as well.

Enslavement and sale

With the notable exception of Angola, most slaves that Europeans acquired for the whole of the Atlantic slave trade period were purchased from African sellers and not acquired by direct capture by Europeans or armies under European control. Some scholars have proposed, following leads opened up by Abolitionist writers in the eighteenth century, that European merchants were able to control the sale of munitions in such a way as to force otherwise reluctant African leaders to capture slaves in order to acquire weapons to defend themselves from rivals who accepted European military supplies, thus leading to what is often called the “gun-slave cycle.” A variant of this idea, largely used to explain the Saharan trade, proposes that the control of the trade in cavalry horses, which could not be bred in West Africa, was a similar means of leveraging potentially reluctant leaders of the Western Sudan to participate in the slave trade.

Other scholars have argued that Europe possessed a more highly developed economy than Africa, and that the productivity and efficiency of European workers allowed merchants to compel Africans to trade the few valuable commodities they had, which in many cases was only slaves. This balance of trade model supposes that Africans needed European suppliers to meet their needs for such things as metal goods and textiles, in which European industry was alleged to have an advantage.

Arguing against these interpretations is the absence of direct evidence for the manipulation of weapons sales in the extensive European commercial records that have survived. Instead, these show that European traders competed with each other in such a way as to prevent much in the way of trade manipulation. Moreover, there are many cases of military actions between African states that did not involve the use of European arms, especially in the first century of the slave trade. In addition, the direction, volume, and quality of European trade goods suggest that these were not so vital to African economies that Africans would trade for them if conditions were not profitable or acceptable. Africans often did produce high-quality metal goods and textiles, at times in remarkable quantities. Regions that produced the most textiles also sometimes imported the most, which indi­cates that the trade in textiles or metal goods was not simply established to make up for supposed shortfalls in African systems of production.¹³

Because the trade was in the control of African authorities, not every African region participated in the slave trade, even when they did trade in other commodities. The Ivory Coast (or Kwa Kwa Coast as it was sometimes called) traded with passing European ships in cloth and ivory, but rarely, if ever, in slaves. The same was true of the Gabon Coast in northern Central Africa, which received European merchants but rarely sold slaves. The most interesting case is that of the Kingdom of Benin, in today's Nigeria, which began trading slaves to the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century, but abruptly broke off slave trading around 1530. Benin continued to trade with Europeans, however, selling ivory, cloth, and pepper. Then in around 1716, during a civil war, Benin resumed slave trading only to stop again following the peace in 1732.¹⁴ The capacity to leave and enter the slave trade while continuing trade in other commodities strongly suggests that no African power could be compelled to trade in slaves through economic or military pressure alone.

Markets on the African coast were often closely controlled by the African polity where they were located or whose shores were visited by shipboard

1 ³ Thornton, Africa and Africans, pp. 13-42.

1 ⁴ A. F. C. Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 1485-1897 (London: Prentice Hall, 1969). traders. In many of these, a complicated process involving taxes and fees was established, which then regulated pricing systems for acquiring slaves. Depending on the exact situation, the state or its agents had special control over the trade and often demanded more lucrative conditions for their own slaves before allowing private African merchants to sell slaves.

Where the trade was in the hands of a large coastal state, such as Dahomey, the state might control a substantial share of the exports, espe­cially of slaves as they were so often captured in a successful military campaign that took place under state direction, and from which the state itself took a sizable share. In places such as the Gold Coast where coastal sovereignty was fragmented, merchants might be the most important sup­pliers. For example, the Akani merchants from the interior sent regular caravans down to the coast with the captives of the powerful Asante kingdom, but any given coastal state might serve as much as a transit point for people enslaved further inland as for the victims of campaigns within the coastal region. Such a situation was even more pronounced in the Niger Delta region, where the city-states that managed the final stages of slave exports might be dealing with people who had already changed hands half a dozen times between their original captivity and their final export.

Testimony of coastal merchants, European visitors, and of slaves them­selves given in the Americas allows us to see the usual means by which people were enslaved: through warfare; the illegal activities of bandits and highway robbers; judicial action by courts through fines or to settle debts; and sometimes sale by relatives. While these categories are easy enough to establish, it is much harder to determine the proportions of people falling into each category. There is no statistically valid sample for any period or region that allows us to determine the relative balance between enslavement in war, banditry or court action. Some suggestive and non-quantitative data points to warfare as the leading reason for enslavement, followed fairly closely by banditry, with judicial enslavement following a fairly close third. Of course, the historical circumstances may well determine the proportions: When major wars were ongoing, most would have been military captives; in periods of political instability or loss of order, banditry might be more important; and in periods of peace and stability perhaps judicial enslavement would lead the group.

It seems most likely that detailed knowledge of the state of politics in all the regions from which Africans were exported could be the secret to understanding the pattern of enslavement. Dahomey, for example, was a stable state with strong internal order and thus unlikely to supply many

The slave trade and the African diaspora people through banditry, but we also know that it engaged in regular, even annual, campaigns against its neighbors, which sometimes resulted in the enslavement of thousands of unfortunate people. Despite Dahomey's repu­tation as a ferocious military kingdom, it frequently lost its wars, and with this its own people were captured and sold as slaves; in other cases the wars might have gone favorably for Dahomey's armies from a geo-strategic point of view, but did not result in many captives. Given the sometimes strict laws of Dahomey, the kingdom may also have exported a fair number of people judged guilty of crimes.¹⁵

In the Niger River Delta, on the other hand, a plethora of village commu­nities dotted the landscape and there was no central authority. As a result banditry and petty inter-village wars prevailed in the capture and sale of people. The Arochukwu Oracle, a religious institution often called upon to settle disputes between parties, sometimes seized slaves as penalties and was alleged to have engaged in its own slave capture and sales. Oftentimes, people would be enslaved and pass through many hands before reaching the Atlantic traders.

At times, the disorder of civil war might result in a surge in banditry that would feed the slave trade. In the Kingdom of Kongo, for example, expan­sionary wars directed against southern and eastern neighbors fed the trade, but when Kongo expansion stopped in the early seventeenth century, the country only sold slaves during intermittent civil wars that took place during interregna. It managed to repel attacks by Portuguese Angola and even managed to have slaves taken in some of these wars returned to Africa. But when Kongo declined into lengthy civil war following its defeat by Portugal in 1665, internal strife between rival candidates for the throne became the primary means by which its people were enslaved.

At times, permanent raiding forces also contributed, as the southern Saharan nomads did in the capture of slaves in the Senegambian region, intervening in wars, serving as mercenaries, and sometimes raiding on their own volition.¹⁶ The Portuguese colony of Angola also sometimes served in this capacity, during its expansionary wars against Ndongo and its neigh­bors in the seventeenth century. When military operations were no longer successful to its east, it shifted to attacks on southern neighbors through its outpost at Benguela in the eighteenth century.

1 ⁵ Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960 (Cam­bridge University Press, 2003).

1 ⁶ Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

The volume of the trade and its impact on Africa

A massive investigation of slave trading records in the last quarter of the twentieth century has defined a widely accepted estimate of the total numbers of Africans who left their home continent bound for America in European ships at somewhere around thirteen to fifteen million, the disparity largely being due to variable estimates of smuggling and poor accounting.¹⁷ Because of the incredible mortality of the slave ships, only around eleven to twelve million of those Africans reached their American destinations alive. Around a million Africans were exported between the start of the trade and the mid-seventeenth century; some nine million were exported between the mid-seventeenth century and the English decision to abolish its slave trade in 1807. British abolition and its lobbying of other countries to follow suit notwithstanding, more than three million more Africans were exported to the Americas (primarily Brazil and Cuba) in the sixty years after 1807, almost as high an annual rate as that of the most active years of the eighteenth century.

African departures in the slave trade were regionally diverse, but relatively steady throughout most of the period. Almost half of the enslaved left from West Central Africa; of the remaining group, Lower Guinea supplied about a third and Upper Guinea only about 15 percent. In the decades following British abolition, the slave trade concentrated on fewer and fewer areas, with West Central Africa providing by far the largest percentage and the ports of Lower Guinea many fewer but more than the rest of Africa. Southeast Africa (Mozambique in particular) was a late entry into the slave trade, but it contributed a fairly large number in the last years of the trade.

Africans were purchased primarily to perform labor in the Americas, and ships' captains and American buyers had specific preferences: They primarily wanted adult males in good health, although they also wanted some women; children for the most part were not as much in demand. Because Europeans did not capture the slaves themselves, however, they were often forced to take people of ages or genders that were less desirable.

Over a fairly long time period, males made up between 60 and 65 percent of the cargoes, though shorter periods and specific areas might differ from this norm. From the Bight of Biafra (mostly modern eastern Nigeria) in the

1 ⁷ The following, and all statistical information on the slave trade, is largely based on David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) and the supporting website “Voyages: The Transatlan­tic Slave Trade Database,” http://slavevoyages.org.

The slave trade and the African diaspora eighteenth century, for example, males might have been as little as 57 percent of the cargoes, while in the Mozambique trade in the eighteenth century males made up over 70 percent.

Children were also not taken as much as adults. In general children made up around 25-30 percent of all cargoes, but there were substantial anomalies: In the late trade of the nineteenth century, for example, children made up nearly half of all the slaves taken from West Central Africa and over a third from the other regions. At this late stage, in fact, because of the predomin­ance of West Central Africa among the exporting regions, nearly half of all the enslaved arriving in Caribbean ports (virtually all to Cuba) were children.

The sheer numbers of people involved and their age and sex ratios were likely to have had an impact on the overall population. This impact is magnified when we consider that many were enslaved as a result of violence and for every person who left Africa on a slave ship there were others who had died in combat, as a result of collateral damage (famine from destroyed crops, for example) or while traveling to the coast and awaiting shipment. Total population would in all likelihood have declined as the export of people depopulated areas, especially in the later centuries of the trade when the losses were both relatively high and concentrated in relatively few regions.

While it is difficult to determine the demographic impact of any popula­tion movement without statistical information, and Africa has very little for this period, some ideas have been advanced, mostly focused on impacts on the size and demographic structure of the population. For example, simulation models predict that the sex-skewed loss of population would alter sex ratios in West Africa to about 80 men per 100 women in the adult age brackets, but in West Central Africa the lower total population and high export levels would reduce the male to female ratio to much lower numbers. In fact, a study of the Angolan census of 1776 does point to a male to female ratio of 43 to 100, meaning that there were more than two adult women for every man in the region at the time. At the same time, the relatively low loss of children meant that sex ratios for children hovered close to the normal 100 to 100 ratio.¹⁸

The potential impact of this population loss would be manifold. First, because the losses were mostly borne by adults, the dependency ratio, that is

1 ⁸ Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Thornton, “The Slave Trade in Eighteenth Century Angola: Effects on Demographic Structures,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 14 (1980): 417-28.

the ratio of working and productive adults to the non-productive and dependent population (mostly children), would be much higher than expected. This in turn would mean that the remaining population, mostly females, would have higher levels of labor to support the relatively large number of dependants.

In addition, in societies with a structural division of labor, the amount of work each adult man had to perform would be higher as there would be fewer men relative to the number of people they were supplying. Divisions of labor might be hard to adjust, as skills normally acquired by males during the socialization process could not be easily learned by adults. Agricultural skills and industrial skills were often assigned to sexes, and this work would either be underperformed or would have to be compensated for by imports. These theoretical models combine categories such as export numbers, on which there is good statistical data, with those such as total population on which documentation is poor, but there is a little anecdotal evidence to support their conclusions.

It is much harder to judge non-demographic impacts on Africa. For example, some scholars contend that participation in the slave trade caused African societies to become more unequal, or that it led to a rise in militarism. Others assert that all African losses in wars and related famines and other social dislocations were the results of the slave trade, which assumes that African wars had no other causes.¹⁹ In fact, decisions about going to war were almost always freighted with non-economic consider­ations, rivalries between families and states, geo-political considerations, commercial maneuvering, and other factors that have led humans to fight each other over the ages.²⁰

At the same time, however, no African ruler was likely, when considering a war, to leave out the costs of fighting and the supply of munitions. To the degree that Africans did purchase and use European manufactured weapons, the probability that a successful campaign would also be able to pay the cost of these weapons might have played a role in the decision. Indeed, the prospect of capturing and selling enemy subjects in exchange for the weapons of war, often obtained on credit, might tip the balance of decision making toward war. On the other hand, the outcome of war was frequently uncertain - states that started wars did not always win them. In a study of

1 ⁹ Manning, Slavery and African Life; Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

²⁰ Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa.

Dahomey's wars of the eighteenth century, for example, Werner Peukert noted that Dahomey only won about a third of them to a level that allowed the export of many slaves; one third were inconclusive; and they lost another third of their military encounters and with them their own people.²¹

Middle Passage

Once Africans were enslaved and brought to the coast, a process that is very poorly documented and understood, they stood for sale to Europeans and Americans to bring them across the sea. Transatlantic voyages, in fact all long seaborne voyages, were difficult and dangerous, even for free people going from Europe to America, but there was really no maritime experience quite like the Middle Passage. While it was not unusual for travelers to die at sea, slave voyages routinely killed some of their cargoes and at times very many, and in fact the crews of the ships died at almost as high a rate as the slaves.

Well-managed voyages, with proper provisions, ventilation and sanitation, adequate food, and minimum crowding might cross with little or no mortal­ity, though they could hardly be described as comfortable. In fact statistics show that voyages of the mid-eighteenth century with experienced captains could bring cargoes safely across the Atlantic. Careful and experienced sailors suffered both low losses and high profits, and were able to make many voyages. The problem was that very many captains only made one voyage and their inexperience, and often their greed, caused very high mortality of their human cargoes. Even the survivors suffered greatly. Voyages often failed and usually a voyage with high mortality was ruinously unprofitable, which meant that overall profitability was quite low.

The length of the voyage was an important factor in determining how difficult the Middle Passage could be for the slaves. A voyage from West Africa to the Caribbean took three months on average, though in the nineteenth century that fell to about two and a half months thanks to improved ship technology. Voyages to Brazil, on the other hand, took about one month and had the lowest mortality of all. The longer the voyage, the higher the mortality, especially since longer voyages had greater probability of running out of food or fresh water. Dehydration was particularly danger­ous as the voyage took place in tropical latitudes with high temperatures,

²¹ Werner Peukert, Der Atlantische Sklavenhandel von Dahomey, 1740-1797: WirtschaJtsan- thropologie und Sozialgeschichte (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978). and the crowded conditions and security measures meant that the slave holds would be consistently very hot. The difficulty in providing for adequate waste removal meant that aside from dehydration, fecal-borne diseases could spread rapidly and kill many people quickly and make almost everyone seriously ill.^[142]

The voyage, coming as it did relatively soon after the capture and an often brutally supervised trip to the coast, could only have been traumatic. Occasional reports by people who traveled on the ships recount wailing, screaming, and crying as the ships left their African loading points to cross the Atlantic. However, the necessity of the slaves living and suffering together in close quarters also meant that they often cooperated with each other and formed in this way very tight bonds of friendship, which carried over into their lives in America. “Shipmate” (in English America) or “malungu” (in Brazil), to name just two, were terms that indicated two people had known each other in the Middle Passage and retained that special relation­ship in the New World.

The process of bonding was either helped or hindered by the ethno- linguistic diversity of the slaves on board. Diversity could result from the slave ship engaging in “coasting” as many ships from North America did, visiting first one point and taking a part of a cargo and then moving down the coast to perhaps two or even three more points to finish the cargo off. Clearly this would bring in a very diverse cargo and might make it harder for people to communicate or cooperate, though of course there would still quite likely be numbers of people from the same ethno-linguistic group on the ship.

At the other extreme, ships that made a voyage to a single point in Africa and took all their slaves there might encounter a situation in which a large war supplied all the slaves from that area at the time. In this case the enslaved people might speak the same language, have lived in near proximity to each other, and even be related. Not all single-stop voyages concentrated close neighbors, of course, and there might be considerable diversity even in a single-stop voyage if the supply came from several different interior sources.

Bonding and perhaps slaves' military service in Africa may help to explain shipboard revolts, which obviously require a community to form and take up arms. A remarkably high number of revolts took place in ships departing from Senegambia, far more than any other place. While Senegambians did come from diverse communities, there may well have been concentrations from specific wars in the interior. Moreover a common religion, Islam, may also have allowed ethnic boundaries to be crossed.^[143]

Life and labor in the Americas

From a strictly statistical viewpoint the majority of the Africans transported to the Americas came to produce sugar. Nearly two-thirds were shipped to the sugar-producing regions of Brazil and the Caribbean. Next to sugar was mining, mostly in southeastern Brazil, which absorbed perhaps another 15 percent. Together sugar and mining accounted for about three-quarters of all of Africa's human exports. The labor regimes in those regions were nothing short of murderous; in addition to high death rates from accident and disease, these areas had low rates of reproduction due to the relative shortage of adult women. Those women who did survive were burdened with low rates of reproduction and even higher rates of infant mortality, as around four out of every ten babies died before their first birthday, a very high rate even by seventeenth- or eighteenth-century standards.^[144]

On the other hand, those Africans who went to areas where the regime of labor was lighter, such as growing provision crops and some of the cash crops, craft production, or domestic service, typically had higher rates of survival and higher birth rates. The best example of this was the North American population, which was self-sustaining by the middle of the eight­eenth century and was growing rapidly by natural increase by the time of the American War of Independence.

The consequence of this demographic regime was that the heavy labor areas of the New World never obtained a self-sustaining population, and thus a large percentage, or at times a majority, of the African-descended population was born and socialized in Africa. This feature made African cultural elements much more important than in areas where labor regimes were lighter. These elements were also more important during the period of slavery than they would be in later periods, when people of African ancestry were more likely to be American born. American-born slaves (often called “creoles”) were socially dominant in labor regimes that centered on supervision, personal service, and craft production, and they later became dominant in heavy labor areas as well.

Social groups and identity

The slave trade delivered Africans to the Americas from many cultural groups and regions of Africa. However, the process was not uniform and the diversity of cultures found among Africans in various parts of the Atlantic World was itself very uneven. There were, for example, “waves” in which the trade was dominated by people from one region: Spanish America experienced a Senegambian wave in the late sixteenth century, and the whole of the Atlantic went through an Angolan wave in the first half of the seventeenth century, when usually at least half and often virtually all the slaves arriving were from Angola.^{[145] [146]} Mexico and Pernambuco in Brazil were particularly affected by this Angolan wave, as were the early Dutch, English, and French colonies.

Patterns in later periods varied as well. While Pernambuco remained supplied largely from Angola (nearly 90 percent), and Rio de Janeiro did as well (99 percent), in Bahia people from the “Mina Coast” (the region defined mostly by modern Benin and Togo) made up more than half. But for much of Brazil's later history Bahia and Amazonia both split their imports between just two coastal regions of Lower Guinea and Angola. Such two-nation combinations took place elsewhere. In Saint Domingue before its revolution, slaves from Congo and from Benin made up more than 80 percent of the arrivals.

For most American regions, however, Africans came from many if not all of the African exporting regions without any one group predominating. In this way, cultural diversity was the norm in most European colonies in the Caribbean (with Saint Domingue being the exception) and in most of North America.

In many of the American colonies, Africans appear on records with indications of their “nation” or “country” that relate to the African region from which they originated, and study of the inventories helps to further elaborate the cultural heritage they brought from Africa. The national designations do not appear to relate to specific African ethnicities or polities, but rather to larger areas defined by common languages or the presence of regular interactions between people speaking a common lingua franca. They are, in other words, cultural designations and not political ones, and they took into consideration people who were related through networks of cultural and economic interaction.

The “nations” appear to have had considerable meaning to the Africans living in the Americas. Most African-born people were members of a nation and they participated in national activities. Owing to the high mortality, especially among the African born and newly arrived, the most common national activity was funerals, and there is abundant evidence that masters permitted slaves to attend national funerals. There were also cultural events of an unspecified nature, which in English were sometimes called “country plays.” These events allowed the participation in religious and cultural activities familiar from Africa and, more than that, allowed people to speak in their native languages with others. As such, the presence of a sense of national solidarity permitted the continuation of African lan­guage and the reconstruction of African cultural practices in the Americas. Because African-born people were a strong presence in the heavy labor sectors of the economy, there was a constantly renewed African infusion throughout the period of the slave trade, although the surviving children of that group and of the more privileged slave community created a different cultural pattern.

However much Africans might have wished to labor and socialize with people from their home cultures in the Americas, for most regions outside Brazil they were forced to reside in one place. Security measures as well as labor regimes created fairly fixed residential communities in towns or on plantations and mines. These residential communities were multi-national and culturally diverse. It was inevitable, therefore, that Africans in such communities would form bonds of friendship with at least some people from other African nations.

On large estates it might have been possible for people to find enough others from their nation that they could still have maintained their closest bonds with people of the same nation, but for people from minority nations or on smaller social units this was impossible. Intense cultural interaction thus tended to be the norm. Where data exists on the national origins of couples united in marriage (in Catholic regions) or forming households, there was a strong tendency for people to marry within their own nation, but people from smaller nations and a percentage of those from the larger ones formed bonds with people from another nation.

The multi-national nature of the residential unit meant that African languages were unlikely to survive in those areas. Since all the African laborers on American estates had to learn at least a smattering of the colonial language spoken there, this language became a lingua franca for the estates, and would become the native language (or at least one of the native languages) of American born people. While the African-born might struggle to speak a pidgin form of the colonial language with limited grammar and vocabulary, the American-born mastered a creole form of the language, with full grammar and vocabulary, but different from the standard form of the language spoken by Europeans.

In this situation, African born slaves continued speaking their home languages with fellow nationals and used their knowledge of the colonial language in a pidgin form when communicating with non-national Africans, creoles, and Europeans. If those slaves formed child-bearing bonds with slaves that were not from their nation, the children would most likely learn only the colonial creole language as a native language. For those born of same-nation unions, the parents might well transmit the language of their forefathers to their children, but these children, unlike their parents, would also acquire native proficiency in the creole form of the colonial language. Second generation unions would not have the same cultural or linguistic restraints as those of first generation people and the African language simply would not survive past that. It was only because of the constant influx of newly enslaved that one could still find many speakers of African languages at the end of the period of the slave trade.

If the multi-national nature of residence put negative pressure on language retention, it had quite a different effect on other aspects of African culture borne by slaves to the Americas. Musical performances, for example, were radically shaped by the cultural environment of the American world into new and unique forms. Africa had an extremely diverse musical culture, but unlike languages, which are learned in childhood and require great effort to learn as adults, taste in music is effortlessly acquired, and thus a person sampling musical performances might easily adopt new forms or accept changes in old ones.

In addition, music, especially performed music at funerals or plays, tends to fall into the hands of a limited number of particularly skilled and talented individuals who support themselves by receiving the patronage of the rest of the community. In order to win their patronage, African musicians had to adapt their music to appeal to the many African cultures that were repre­sented in their communities. Thus musical forms that combined elements drawn and reworked by talented musicians from multiple cultures, blended to please as many constituencies as possible, quickly emerged in the Americas.

The producers of this new American music stood to benefit if they could also include elements drawn from the music of their European and Euro­American masters, as winning their patronage promised even greater rewards. Thus African American musicians adopted instruments and musical elements from European cultures as well. In the process they created a powerfully evocative musical tradition intended to win the patronage of many different communities. As a result the roots of much of modern world music were shaped in the early globalization of the slave community in the Americas.

The forces that shaped music also shaped other artistic forms, including the most obvious one of dance, but also verbal and visual art. At present, however, there has not been enough solid research to comment on precisely how and in what ways African patterns of speech (especially through creole languages) have shaped the culture of their descendants or the wider world, or what African descended artisans, craftsmen, and even professional artists have drawn on to produce things that are distinctive.^[147]

Religious life

While much of Africa followed traditional religions, several large regions had come to embrace Islam (in northern West Africa) and Christianity (in Kongo in Central Africa). Traditional religions were formed and altered through a process of continuous revelation; that is the understanding that messages from the Other World were received more or less constantly and potentially could change at any time. Those who claimed religious authority did so largely by constantly demonstrating that they could receive and interpret revelations and advise clients on what the Other World required. While a priesthood was found all over Africa, it was precarious, and constantly in danger of losing its authority if it could not prove its ability to render successful advice on weather, personal fortune, and moral behavior.

Traditional African religion was not automatically bounded by a fixed (or discontinuous) set of revelations, nor by an ethno-linguistic community. A deity, a spirit, an oracle or a human intermediary that emerged in one area or within one community could travel to other communities, as long as its efficacy (and hence its reality) was demonstrated. Thus a priest from the Yoruba-speaking Oyo Empire could bring a deity with him to the Fon- speaking community in Dahomey, or followers of a shrine in the Ga­speaking community of Accra could argue that another shrine found in Twi-speaking Fante had greater power and efficacy than their own shrine.

The African penchant for continuous revelation also shaped how Christian­ity and Islam were received. Islam's earliest arrival, in the eleventh century, took place through a revelation made by the miraculous ending of a famine through Islamic prayer. Likewise the arrival of Christianity in Kongo in 1491 was vouchsafed by revelations and miracles. In both cases, however, local thinkers incorporated a great deal of the flexibility of the day-to-day experience of continuous revelation into a Christian or Islamic tradition.

In both Islamic and Christian Africa, people schooled in the more fixed traditions of the Abrahamic religions sought to reform the local versions of these religions. In West Africa this took the form of revivalists seeking to bring local practice into line with the prevailing norms in the core Islamic regions. Such movements were periodically effective, in the seventeenth century in Senegal under Nasr al-Din, in the eighteenth century in Futa Jallon (modern day Guinea), and again in Senegal under Abd ar-Raman and much more widely in the nineteenth century.

In Christian Central Africa the movements usually came from outside. The Italian Capuchins sought tirelessly to reform Kongo's and Portuguese Angola's Christianity to conform to Counter Reformation ideas without notable success, as state authorities in both regions showed little enthusiasm for putting resources behind the reforms. The most striking movement, in fact, the Antonian Movement in Kongo led by a Kongo woman named Beatriz, was not intended to return Christianity to some European original root but was itself in the form of a continuous revelation accompanied by miracles and preaching a radical Kongo-centered version of Christianity.

As Africans crossed the sea to America they brought their religious understanding with them, especially as the majority came as fully socialized adults. A fairly large number, perhaps a third, came from regions which had a Christian or Islamic background, and the rest from areas where those religions had made little or no progress. They expected, in both cases, to discover deities and supernatural beings in the Americas as they did in Africa, but they probably did not expect to find the same ones, with the exception that Christians and Muslims knew of a universal god.

We know, too, that they brought with them the religious tools necessary to find those supernatural beings, thanks especially to the investigations of the Inquisition in Spanish and Portuguese America. They made use of divination techniques to achieve continuous revelation, and for many these revelations brought Christian saints, indigenous American spiritual entities, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and perhaps entities from no other tradition. The survivors of those who died on the way probably also confirmed that ancestors were translated to the spiritual world.

In time, these revelations resulted in conversion to Christianity. In Protestant North America, mass revelations took place during the first (eighteenth century) and second (nineteenth century) Great Awakenings, though the outcome was not always the same for the African descended converts as it was for European Americans. The Africans continued to accept continuous revelation as conjure in North America and often through Vodou, Calinda, and other religious manifestations that appeared as heterodox to Christians from Europe or America.^[148]

Christians from Central Africa sometimes evangelized their fellow slaves, at least in the Virgin Islands and Brazil, but surely elsewhere as well. Muslims had their own encounters with America. While it appears that most African Muslims simply accepted the American continuous revelations and became Christian, those of the more reformist traditions refused to yield. They prayed according to Islamic law, made talismans from verses of the Qur'an, and often resolutely remained Muslim. In Brazil, in particular, they used reformed Islam to lead revolts.^[149]

Resistance

Slave owners in the Americas bought Africans primarily to work for them and, in order to extract maximum profit from their workers, forced African slaves to work long hours often without adequate rest and food to sustain the labor. The desire for quick profits, especially when supervision was in the hands of intermediaries for overseas owners, often led to ruinously harsh conditions with high mortality and morbidity rates from malnutrition, sleep deprivation, and accidents. Virtually all witnesses to the American slave regime thought it extremely rigorous, more than any regime in regular practice in Europe, and Africans must also have recognized it as a harsh regime.

Slaves in turn sought to escape from this demanding regime by run­ning away or by engaging in low-level resistance, violence, and refusal to cooperate. Day-to-day resistance, such as deliberately working slowly, breaking tools, or otherwise disrupting production, is difficult to document or to prove, although it seems likely that it took place. Running away for a few days, which in French colonies was termed petit marronage, was one form of resistance used often as a bargaining device, in that workers would absent themselves and return voluntarily.

Beyond simply running away, it was not uncommon for slaves to take up armed resistance. Most often, the aim of the armed resistance was a break out, an escape from slavery to travel to an inaccessible area or to join with unconquered indigenous people. Only rarely was resistance an attempt to take over whole areas or engage in revolutionary action. Most runaways went to or founded small village-sized communities in inaccessible areas and simply sought to keep away from their masters. At times, however, these villages might grow to be very large or multi-settlement conglomerations that took on significant military potential. Communities of runaways might in turn raid the plantations and free people or capture them to be wives or to expand their numbers. They might also welcome additional runaways.

These communities were dangerous in the eyes of the planters not because a few slaves had escaped, but because the formation of communities gave people still in slavery a target to run away to, which would allow people to run away singly rather than as an armed group. As a result colonial governments sought to eliminate them, first by armed force, but when that failed, they usually made agreements that recognized the runaway commu­nity and then allied with it either to defend the colony against other rebels or to return runaways. Such agreements covered such communities as those formed by the 1612 Mexican runaways, or the Palenque community in New Granada (Colombia) in 1693. TheJamaican Maroons agreed to similar terms in 1739 and 1740 and then kept them; they returned runaways regularly and assisted the colonial government in putting down the revolt of 1760.^[150]

Sometimes runaway communities grew truly large, as did the one that formed in the hinterland of Pernambuco, Brazil in the 1630s. As runaways from the Portuguese-Dutch war over Pernambuco fled in larger and larger numbers, the community eventually grew into a regular state with as many as 30,000 residents in several large towns and dozens if not hundreds of villages. Determined Portuguese campaigns failed to stop it, and a peace agreement was ultimately rejected by the majority of the rebels. In 1694, a large Portuguese-indigenous army took the main town and occupied it permanently. Although the state of Pernambuco, which had threatened the whole colony, was broken, the smaller communities remained intact.³¹

On occasion revolts do appear to have had taking over the colony, or a portion of it, as a goal. This was alleged to be the objective of the Jamaican revolt of 1760, and it was, of course, the eventual effect of the Haitian Revolution that began in 1791 and took advantage of a complex geo-strategic environment to create an independent state as Haiti in 1804.

The history of the African Diaspora has changed considerably from its origins in the study of the slave trade, and now it has become much more complex and multi-faceted. Africans are increasingly regarded in his­tory as more than just mute workers brought against their will to form a silent backdrop to American history. The history of their African homelands, and the nature of their cultural lives and influences have all come more to the fore in the last forty years of study. Yet, their study is far from complete, many sources are as yet untapped, or only lightly tapped, and far more work remains to be done before the process of assessing the significance of the African Diaspora is complete.

FURTHER READING

Barry, Boubacar, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Bennett, Herman, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexicans (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).

Berlin, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997).

Brown, Ras Michael, African Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Brown, Vincent, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Campbell, Mavis, The Maroons of Jamaica: 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal (Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1990).

Carney, Judith, Black Rice: The Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

³¹ John Thornton, “Les Etats de l'Angola et la formation de Palmares (Bresil)," Annales: HSS 63 (2008): 769-97.

Craton, Michael, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009 [original edn. 1982]).

Curtin, Philip, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, 2 vols. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975).

The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Diouf, Sylviane, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York University Press, 1998).

Dubois, Laurent, The Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Eltis, David, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Eltis, David and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

Gomez, Michael, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Green, Toby, The Rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589 (Cam­bridge University Press, 2011).

Greene, Sandra, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996).

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

Hawthorne, Walter, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 (Portsmith, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

Heywood, Linda M. and John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Founda­tion of the Americas, 1585-1665 (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Klein, Herbert, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Law, Robin, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550-1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford University Press, 1991).

Lovejoy, Paul, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Miller, Joseph C., Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

Mintz, Sydney and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).

Morgan, Philip, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Northrup, David, Africa's Discovery of Europe, 1450-1850, 2nd edn. (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). Reis, Joao Jose, Slave Rebellion: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

Rucker, Walter, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formatian in Early America (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).

Schwartz, Stuart, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Smallwood, Stephanie, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Sweet, James, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Thornton, John, A CulturalHistory of the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 (London: Routledge, 1999).

Young, Jason, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press, 2011).