Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas

This brief, wide-ranging work explores the identities that enslaved Africans brought to the New World during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, with the intention of reeducating people about “the links among Africans throughout the Americas with Africans in Africa” (p. xvi). Separate chapters cover each of the four main African regions from which slaves were brought. The Americas receive less systematic coverage. There are many references to the West Indies, Brazil, and parts of Spanish America, but the main emphasis is on the United States.To this formidable task Gwendolyn Midlo Hall brings considerable expertise in the history of slavery in Louisiana (including an impressive archival database used in the book’s many tables and appendix); familiarity with the relevant literature on slavery, including that in Spanish and French; and an impressively comprehensive knowledge of recent historical writing on Africa and the slave trade. The author also brings a rather polemical agenda. Although she casts her argument as a corrective to “some scholars” (unnamed) who “deny the existence of self-conscious groups among any Africans on either side of the Atlantic” (p. xvii), this camp seems purely imaginary and their simpleminded position easily refuted. Hall takes more serious issue with David Eltis, Richard Price, John Thornton, and this reviewer, whose positions are sometimes presented with great care and other times reduced to unrecognizable caricatures. Rather than advancing the discussion, in many cases Hall returns to positions taken by much older pioneering researchers. Despite abundant newer research, W. E. B. Du Bois (1915) is used as the authority on the volume of the slave trade and its effects on Africa (pp. xiii – xiv, 8); Eric Williams’s 1944 thesis on capitalism and slavery is judged to have “held up very well” (p. 20); and she resurrects a threadbare argument that slavery in Africa was mild, even in the case of concubinage and, presumably, human sacrifice.These polemics will annoy some readers, but the book’s more fundamental flaw is the simplistic way in which it deals with cultural boundaries, cultural transmission, and cultural change. Though Midlo Hall would not agree, it is probably fair say that the two main approaches to this subject are by those who see identities as the outcome of a process that took place as individual Africans were enslaved, transported, and relocated in the Americas, and those who emphasize the cultural products that Africans brought to the Americas. For the former, culture is fluid and adaptive; the latter tend to see culture as more rigid and “survivals” as evidence of continuity. The two approaches can be complimentary, but polemics have poisoned meaningful dialogue. Hall undermines her effort to play a mediating role by regularly championing the latter camp, even when the evidence she presents seems to favor the former.Space permits only one example. Chapter 2 shows that “ethnic” identities in the Americas often only indicated African coasts of origin, that evidence of slaves’ self-identification dates from decades after their arrival, that slaves regularly borrowed personal names from other ethnicities (both African and European), and that only 20 percent of the African-born slaves in her Louisiana database used African names (and only 7 – 11 percent of Louisiana-born slaves). From this Hall concludes, “Africans continued to identify with their particular African and ethnic and regional origins long after they arrived in the Americas,” and “African ethnic and regional identities survived for a longer period of time than most [sic] historians and anthropologists believe” (p. 54). A more balanced reading of her evidence is that some such survivals occurred and some general identification with an African place or people, whether one’s ancestors or not, persisted but diminished over time.To demonstrate specific African survivals, Hall uses a very loose definition of culture on both sides of the Atlantic, the elasticity of which facilitates (and blurs) her central thesis. In Africa, she argues, rural villagers possessed “national” identities and cultures that corresponded with language boundaries, as well as wide-ranging regional cultures, often based on the strange category of “mutually intelligible languages” (p. 107 and passim). Although such conscious identities would have been rare among rural people anywhere in the early modern world, this elasticity enables her to equate the identities that evolved in the Americas both with particular modern ethnicities whose emergence in Africa can be documented only after the slave trade (Igbo, Yoruba, Ibibio) and with identities that reflected a coast or port through which (as she is quite aware) quite diverse peoples passed (Chamba, Kongo, Mina, Kalabari). Because she often uses the simplified and amalgamated identity categories that developed in the Americas as proof of their existence in Africa, her thesis is also undercut by circular reasoning.Despite some self-serving polemical passages, the book’s conclusion is an elegant and sensible appeal for collaborative scholarship and recognition of diversity and complexity in dealing with culture formation in the Americas. It is testimony to a book that might have been

Ancient history · Argument (complex analysis · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Genealogy · History of Africa · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History

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