African American Life and Labor
in British Colonial North America
AAS 101
Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2004
Lecture Outline
1. Race and Slavery: The Origins Debate
2. The Making of an Atlantic World: From
‘Societies with Slaves’ to ‘Slave
Societies’
3. The Atlantic World as Crucible in the
Making of African-American Cultures
I.
Race and Slavery:
The Origins Debate
In The Atlantic Slave Trade, historian Herbert Klein asks:
Why were Africans enslaved and transported to the
New World? Why were Africans the only ones
enslaved?
To these questions, we might add:
• Was race or racism an historical factor in determining
who got enslaved by whom in the trans-Atlantic slave
trade?
• Did a pre-existing racism, born of Western civilization,
cause “white” Europeans to identify “black “Africans as
singularly enslavable based on their biological (i.e., skin
color, sexuality, physiognomy) and/or cultural (i.e.
language, religious practices, etc.) inferiority?
• Or, did the growth of capitalism and an increasing
dependence on an African slave trade for New World
labor supplies cause Europeans to develop modern
racist ideologies as a rationalization for the enslavement
of Africans?
Map of Transatlantic/Mediterranean SlaveTrade
Map of Trans-Saharan and
African Trade Routes and Centers
Christian physician Ibn Botlan, writing in the eleventh
century:
“At the markets negresses were much in evidence; the
darker the uglier and the more pointed their teeth. They
are not up to much. They are fickle and careless.
Dancing and beating time are engrained in their nature.
They say: were the negro to fall from heaven to the earth
he would beat time in falling. They have the whitest teeth
and this because they have much saliva. Unpleasant is
the smell emitted from their armpits and coarse is their
skin.”
Muslim historian named Said al-Andalusi, writing in the
eleventh century:
“For those peoples … who live near and beyond the
equinoctial line to the limit of the inhabited world to the
south, the long presence of the sun at the zenith makes
the hair hot and the atmosphere thin. Because of this
their temperaments become hot and their humors
fiery, their color black and their hair wooly. Thus,
they lack self-control and steadiness of mind and are
overcome by fickleness, foolishness, and ignorance.
Such are the blacks, who live at the extremity of the land
of Ethiopia, the Nubians, the Zanj, and the like.”
Benjamin of Tudela, an Andalusian Jew who published an
itinerary of his travels through Africa in the twelfth
century:
“There is a people among them who, like animals, eat of
the herbs that grow on the banks of the Nile and in the
fields. They go about naked and have not the
intelligence of ordinary men. They cohabit with their
sisters and anyone they find. When the men of Assuan
made a raid into their land, they take with them bread,
wheat, dry grapes, and figs and throw the food to these
people, who run after it. Thus they bring many of them
back prisoners, and sell them in the land of Egypt and in
surrounding countries. And these are the black slaves,
the sons of Ham.”
In categorizing Africans and other foreign peoples
as racially/culturally inferior, Europeans – by
logical extension -- categorized themselves as
racially/culturally superior.
These ethno-centric prejudices, David Eltis
argues, led Europeans to give themselves an
“unconscious exemption” from enslavement.
This exemption extended to those who might
previously have been identified as “outsiders” –
convicts, debtors, infidels.
II.
The Making of an Atlantic World:
From ‘Societies with Slaves’ to
‘Slave Societies’
The African wing sought mainland products such
as slaves, and then gold, as the means to
finance short voyages along the coast. Leaders
expected to find people to raid or to trade with all
along the route.
The Atlantic wing sought exploitable but not
necessarily inhabitable land from which to
collect valuable wild products or to begin
agricultural production of cultivated products in
high demand in Europe.
Timeline of New World Charter
Settlements & Colonization
1452: Start of the 'sugar-slave complex'. Sugar is first planted in the
Portuguese island of Madeira and, for the first time, African slaves are put
to work on the sugar plantations.
1462: The Portuguese colony on the Cape Verde Islands is founded, an
important way-station in the slave trade.
1486: Portuguese settle the West African island of São Tomé. This uninhabited
West African island is planted with sugar and populated by African slaves by
the Portuguese. The settlement thus extended and developed the sugarslave complex that had been initiated in Madeira.
1492: Christopher Columbus “discovers” the New World, setting foot on an
unidentified island he named San Salvador (modern Bahamas).
1493: On his second voyage, Columbus again reaches the New World
(modern Dominica). On this voyage he initiates the first transatlantic slave
voyage, a shipment of several hundred Taino people sent from Hispaniola to
Spain.
Timeline of New World
Charter Settlements & Colonization
1500: Pedro Cabral of Portugal “discovers” Brazil, landing at Porto Seguro,
near Bahia.
1505: first record of sugar cane being grown in the New World, in Santo
Domingo (modern Dominican Republic).
1509: Columbus's son, Diego Cólon, becomes governor of the new Spanish
empire in the Carribean.
1510: the start of the systematic transportation of African slaves to the New
World: King Ferdinand of Spain authorises a shipment of 50 African slaves
to be sent to Santo Domingo.
1513: Juan Ponce de Leon becomes the first European to reach the coast of
what is now the United States of America (modern Florida).
1520-22: Magellan “discovers” the Pacific; expedition is first to circumnavigate
the globe
“Societies with Slaves”
v. “Slave Societies”
Defining features:
• place of slavery within economy
• influence of master-slave relationship on
other social relations
• place of slaveholders within ruling class
In “societies with slaves” . . .
• slaves are marginal to central productive
processes
• master-slave relationship is not model for
all social relations
• propertied elite includes others besides
slaveholders
In “slave societies” . . .
• slavery is at center of economic production
• master slave relationship is model for all
social relations (e.g., husband-wife,
parent-child, employer-employee)
• ruling class is dominated by slaveholders
How do “societies with slaves”
become “slave societies”?
key factor:
discovery of a commodity – an exportable
staple -- that could command an
international market
Chesapeake (Virginia, Maryland)
• Tobacco (beginning early 17th C.)
Cultivating Tobacco in Virginia, 1798. (Sketched from life near Fredericksburg
Low Country (South Carolina,
Georgia, and Florida)
• naval stores (rosin, turpentine, tall oil, pitch)
• indigo
• rice
Rice cultivation on the Ogeechee, Near Savannah, Georgia, ca. 1867
What was the impact of the
“Plantation Revolution” in the
Americas?
“What distinguished the slave plantation
from other forms of production,” historian
Ira Berlin notes, “was neither the
particularity of the crop nor the scale of its
cultivation. The plantation’s distinguishing
mark was its peculiar social order, which
conceded nearly everything to the slave
owner and nothing to the slave.”
Virginia Black Codes, 1723:
“It is reenacted that if slaves are found notoriously guilty of
going abroad at night or running away and lying out and
cannot be reclaimed from such disorderly discourses, it
shall be lawful to direct every such slave to be punished
by dismemberment, or any other way not touching life.”
III.
The Atlantic World as Crucible
in the Making of AfricanAmerican Cultures
What impact did the Diaspora – including
African capture in Africa, the Middle
Passage, and New World resettlement -have on the maintenance, transformation,
and transmission of African cultures?
New World Destinations
of Atlantic Slave Trade
The Frazier-Herskovits Debate
• Beginning in the 1930s, the African-American
sociologist E. Franklin Frazier argued that
African culture among African-Americans was
almost totally destroyed under the brutal
conditions of the slave trade, Middle Passage,
and New World slavery
• At about the same time, the white anthropologist
Melville Herskovits was arguing for significant
African cultural survivals among African
Americans.
Frazier’s Thesis: Unique Conditions of
American Negro Slavery Result in
Further “Ethnic Cleansing”
“In the English colonies on the mainland, and later in the
United States, [the slaves] were widely scattered on
plantations which had fewer slaves on the whole than did
the plantations in the West Indies. On the plantations in
the southern states the Negro sloughed off almost
completely his African cultural heritage. The African
family system was destroyed and the slave was
separated from his kinsmen and friends. Moreover, in the
United States there was little chance that he could reknit
the ties of kinship and old associations. If by chance he
encountered slaves with whom he could communicate in
his native tongue, he was separated from them.”
Frazier’s thesis emphasized the
destruction of African languages
and kinship ties
The Herskovits Thesis cited
evidence of African cultural
“retentions” or “survivals”
Myth #1
Since the Negroes were brought from all parts of the African continent,
spoke diverse languages, represented greatly differing bodies of
custom, and as a matter of policy, were distributed in the New World
so as to lose tribal identity, no least common denominator of
understanding or behavior could have possibly been worked out by
them.
Herskovits’ reply: This is far from the truth. In light of population
distribution in Africa itself, with respect to the location of European
slaving factories, as evidenced in the documents of the period, and
as proved by the survival of African personal names, place names,
names of deities, and specific traits of culture where these survived
in the New World, the region where the slavery took its greatest toll
was a relatively small part of Africa; while of these slaves the major
portion was drawn from certain fairly restricted areas lying in the
coastal belt of West Africa and the Congo. In many respects, the
entire area of slaving may thus be thought of as presenting a far
greater degree of unity than is ordinarily conceived in the face of
New World contact.
Myth 2
Even granting enough Negroes of a given tribe had the opportunity to live
together, and they had the will and the ability to continue their customary
modes of behavior, the cultures of Africa were so savage and relatively so
low in the scale of human civilization that the apparent superiority of
European custom as observed in the behavior of their master would have
caused and actually did cause them to give up such aboriginal traditions as
they may have otherwise desired to preserve.
Herskovits’ response: This has been seen to be poor ethnology and
poorer psychology. The evaluation of one culture in terms of another
has been given over by modern ethnologists for many years, since it
has become increasingly apparent that lacking adequate criteria,
customs can only be subjectively compared in terms of better or
worse, higher or lower. This means that scholars drawing
comparisons of this nature have merely reacted to their own
conditioning, which has given them a predisposition to bring in
verdicts which favor their own customs and to place differing
cultures on levels that are deemed less advanced.
In recent years, scholars have revisited the issue of African
ethnicities and cultural survivals in the New World. Aided by
new technologies and methodologies, they ask:
• How culturally heterogeneous were the slaves who
came to America?
• How successful were Africans in interacting with other
Africans who shared their culture in the setting of
American plantation, mine, or town?
• What were the dynamics of cultural development that
changed the various African cultures into Afro-Atlantic or
African-American cultures?
Anthropologists define culture as “the total lifeway of a
society,” including
•
•
•
•
•
•
kinship
political structure
language
aesthetics (art, music, dance, literature)
material culture
religion
These bundles of traits coexist and are more or less
harmonized within a given society.
Some cultural traits are more “flexible” or “variable”
– family structure/kinship
– aesthetics (art, music and dance, literature)
Some are more “fixed” or “stable,” and are thus
more resistant to change.
– language
– religion
Cultural change is a response to both
internal and external dynamics
• Internal dynamics include shifting political forces,
environmental changes, population growth, etc.
• External dynamics include interaction with other
cultures, whether voluntary or involuntary
How do these dynamics apply to
the transformation of African
cultures in the New World?
What variables/conditions affected the
learning of English by slaves?
• Age of immigrant
• Degree of contact with creoles and whites
(related to work assignments)
• Predisposition to learn the new language
• Linguistic abilities
Language Skills in Runaway Ads
Virginia Runaways Database (search for
keywords, such as “English,” “tongue,” etc.)
Geography of Slavery Database (pull down
menu under “skills” and click on “foreign
language ability”)
Examples of Gullah
1. Everyday activities
Bumbu – for “to carry in the hands”
Nam – “to eat”
Nini – “female breast”
Tima – “to dig
Tutu – “excrement”
2. Kin terms or nouns denoting age/sex
Da – “mother/elderly woman”
Dindi, do, and li – “child”
Na – “mother”
Tata – “father”
3. Interjections and exclamations
Ban! – “it is done!”
Dede – “exactly”
Kange – an exclamation indicating shock
Ki -- -- also indicates shock