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LINKING AFRICANS IN AFRICA AND THE AMERICAS

UNESCO SLAVE ROUTES EDUCATION CONFERENCE

 

Tulane University, August 21, 2000

By Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

              

  The hunger to know one’s past is universal among all human beings   The severed ties between Africa and the Americas is a festering  sore which affects the image as well as the self image of millions of peoples of African descent throughout the Americas. The UNESCO project, Routes of Slavery, aims to restore the links between Africans and their descendants severed by the Atlantic slave trade.

During the entire millennium which just ended,  elites of the Islamic world, of Europe, of the Americas, and of Africa gorged themselves on the blood of millions and millions of black Africans.   Centuries before the Portuguese began the maritime Atlantic slave trade, Arab traders began dragging enslaved Africans across the Sahara Desert as well as from East Africa to countries bordering the entire Mediterranean Basin.  In 1440, Portuguese traders arrived on the sub-Sahara West African Coast by sea and joined in this bloody feast.  Both the Arab and the European slave trades intensified after the Spanish and Portuguese began colonizing the Americas.  The Dutch, the British, and the French became major players in the Atlantic slave trade after 1650.  Millions and millions of Africans were torn violently from their homelands, separated from their families, often marched for many miles to the coast and stored like cattle in pens awaiting the arrival of Atlantic slave trade ships.  After these ships arrived, these innocent people were crowded like sardines in a can on filthy, stinking, disease-ridden vessels.  Many of them died while being transported to the coast, while stored in these pens awaiting the arrival of ships, and during these long sea voyages.  Many others died shortly after they arrived in the Americas.  Despite this devastating destruction of life, many Africans survived in the Americas and reproduced themselves.  Many millions of  people throughout the Americas are their descendants.  Many people in the Americas are their descendants and do not know it.

Who were our African foremothers and forefathers in the Americas?  Where did they come from?  Where did they go?  Until very recently, these questions were shrouded in mystery.  Many scholars believed, and some still believe that these questions are unknowable or unimportant.  But most African-American scholars and a few other scholars have continued to study these questions and we are now able to begin to answer them with some confidence.  Many scholars believe that few documents exist about Africans in the Americas.  But this is far from true.  There is vast documentation about Africans brought to the Americas.  Much of it has never been studied.  In fact, there is more documentation about Africans in the Americas than about Native Americans, Europeans, or Asians.  The reason for this abundance of documents is clear.  Almost all Africans and their descendants in the Americas were legally slaves and recorded in documents as property.  It is not the lack of documents that stops us from knowing about our African foremothers and forefathers in the Americas.  It is the lack of interest in, and systematic study of these documents.

Computerized, ralational databases are a great advance in research methodology over more traditional historical sources like published books and articles, administrative reports, and  travelers’ accounts.  The information going into them should be generally more reliable than that of other types of historical sources.  They can organize huge amounts of information into records and fields allowing for rapid retrieval of complex information as well as of calculations.  But we must keep in mind that databases have their weaknesses and limitations and do not tell us everything.   The relative reliability of historical sources is a very complex question not appropriate for discussion at an educational conference like this one.  Suffice it to say that databases need to be supplemented by using other types of sources as well.  My nearly completed book, Africa in the Americas:  Restoring the Links relies on several types of sources, including computer databases. 

During the past year, two computer database compact discs have been published.  Both of them organize some of this vast documentation about slaves and slavery in a form which can be quickly and easily searched and from which calculations and graphs can easily be created.  The Transatlantic Slave Trade:  a Database on CD ROM was released in December, 1999.  It contains over 27,000 voyages which left from African ports and which landed Africans throughout the Americas.  From my experience using this database, there is a widespread, serious undercount of documented as well as of undocumented voyages.  It is useless for the first 200 years of the Atlantic slave trade.  It is almost useless for Brazil before the 19^th century.  Its use of geographic terms like Angola, like Guinea, and many ports in the Americas needs serious work.  Direct voyages between various places in the Americas and Africa:  that is, the non-triangular trade, are certainly substantially undercounted.  Nevertheless, it can be relied upon for certain times and places to show broad trends, especially for the British Atlantic slave trade.  Roseanne Adderly has already discussed this database so I will say no more about it. 

The other compact disc is my Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1699-1860:  Computerized Information from Original Manuscript Sources.  This publication was released in March, 2000 and has received widespread attention from both print and television media in the United States.  BBC World News has interviewed me three times.  Not surprisingly, this media attention focuses upon the discovery and collection of the data rather than upon their analysis.  I hope to begin a more complex discussion here.

In this lecture, I shall demonstrate how my Louisiana databases can be used by teachers and students seeking to discover which Africans were likely to be the ancestors of peoples in various countries throughout the Americas.  Once the most frequent African ethnicities who lived in particular regions in the Americas are calculated, a detailed study of each of them can be made, answering many interesting questions about them.  I will demonstrate my analysis of one people, the Wolof.  By using such databases, students can be motivated to learn more about the African people or peoples who were most likely, and in some cases, certainly to have been their ancestors while at the same time the students are being taught how to use computers and computerized relational databases as research tools.

First of all, let me explain what my Louisiana Slave Database is.  Throughout the Americas, slaves were listed as property and therefore described and inventoried after the master died, when they were bought and sold, when they were reported as runaways, when they were interrogated or testified in court cases, including when they conspired to revolt or actually revolted against slavery, and when they were described in several other types of documents including wills, marriage contracts, leases, mortgages, seizures for debt,  reports of  death,  and when they were freed.   In some places in the Americas, their birthplaces in Africa and the Americas, including their African ethnicities, were listed as part of these descriptions.  Such documents, largely unstudied, exist systematically and abundantly for St. Domingue and for Cuba, but no one suspected that they existed for any slave system in the United States.

I was surprised and thrilled to find that Louisiana documents dating betwen 1719 and 1820 contain a great deal of information about the birthplaces of the slaves.  Their African ethnicities which were listed as their “nations.”  Because of the quantity as well as the detail and complexity of this information in Louisiana documents, I concluded that the only sensible way to deal with it was by creating databases.   I started my first databases in 1984.  It dealt with Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana between 1771 and 1802.  Findings from these early databases were published in 1992 in my book, Africans in Colonial Louisiana.^[i]   The National Endowment for the Humanities began to fund an expansion of the research into Louisiana documents in 1991.   Patrick Manning was my co-investigator.  This contract continued through August, 1996 and, with the generous support of several other funding agencies,  resulted in, among other things, the Louisiana Slave Database and the Louisiana Free Database.  In our renewal contract with the NEH for 1993, we had promised to create about 40,000 records, each record describing an individual slave. The Louisiana Slave Database contains well over 100,000 records (individual slaves) and 114 fields:  bits of comparable information.  The Louisiana Free Database involves manumissions of individual slaves and contains well over 4,000 records and 62 fields.  These databases were created almost entirely from original manuscript documents, very few of which had been previously discovered or studied.  Complete document retrieval information is included in each record.    The Louisiana Slave Database also includes all clearly documented voyages bringing enslaved Africans from various African coasts to Louisiana as well as from transshipment ports in the Caribbean and from the East Coast of the United States.^[ii]

Most of the excitement generated about my databases has focused on its uses for African-American genealogy.  Several people have already been able to find the African ethnicity of their ancestors by using these databases.   They contain hundreds of thousands of names and allow us to link the names of slaves with the names of masters.  They contain considerable information about the family relationships among the slaves:  mothers and children, brothers and sisters, and much more rarely after the French period, between husbands and wives and between fathers and children. 

But their uses for genealogy is only one aspect.  They can answer much broader questions about Africans and other slaves in Louisiana.  This lecture focuses upon some of the main questions which can be posed to my databases.  Some questions  are: how, where, and when were African ethnicities identified?  Which coasts did the Africans arrive from?  When and how did they arrive?   Where were they sold?  Where were they located after they were sold?  To what extent do African coasts as defined by European slave traders indicate common ethnicities and/or identical, mutually intelligible, or closely related African languages?  What  can we learn about proportions of ethnicity and gender among Africans exported from various African coasts from Louisiana documents over time?  What do marriage patterns in accordance with ethnicity and varying reproduction rates by ethnicity tell us about the probable African ancestry of African-Americans with deep historic roots in Louisiana?   What were some of the health problems of females and males?  What do mean price studies by age, origin, gender, racial designation, skills, African region, and ethnicity tell us about which slaves were considered most valuable?   What percentage of African names were retained by African-born slaves and their Creole descendants?  What do some of these African names mean?  Which genders, racial designations, age groups and ethnicities were most likely to be freed? How and by whom were they freed?  What was the relationship of the freer to the freed?  What implications do these findings have for studies of the impact of African ethnic and/or regional cultures upon regions and locations throughout the Americas?  Many of these questions can be posed and reasonably confidently answered because of the richness and variety of information contained in these databases.

We can only deal with a few of these questions here.  First, I will project a few calculations and graphs and explain them.  Then I will make a study of one particular African ethnicity, the Wolof using data mining with the software program SPSS:  Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.  Then I will ask for questions from the audience which I can, hopefully, demonstrate how to answer.

 

Origins of Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages to Louisiana.  Numbers arriving by African Coast by Epoch.

 

    TABLE  1.  BROAD CATEGORIES OF BIRTHPLACE OF SLAVES

LOUISIANA 1723-1820

	MALE	%	FEMALE	%	TOTAL	%
La. Creole	5,187	53.4%	4,525	46.6%	9,814	33.0%
African	10,340	66.8%	5,130	33.2%	16,099	54.1%
Caribbean	745	52.8%	665	47.2%	1,414	4.7%
Anglo	1,129	52.0%	1,042	48.0%	2,183	7.3%
Indians	87	43.3%	114	56.7%	207	0.7%
Other	40	76.9%	12	23.1%	52	0.2%
TOTAL	17,528	60.4%	11,488	39.6%	29,707	100%

 

Calculated from the Louisiana Slave Database.  Gender missing = 753 records (2.5%).  Trans-Atlantic slave trade voyages excluded. Birthplace Unidentified: French period 1719-1769, 3,641 (29.8%); Spanish period 1770-1803, 13,853 (46.5%); Early American period 1804-1820, 45,140 (72.1%).

54.1% of slaves with identified birthplaces were African.  Could be an undercount, because 5,980 (57.7%) slaves of unidentified ethnicity had African names.

 

DEMONSTRATE.  Choose origin<7 Bar chart by gender.  Then by decade.

TABLE 2. EIGHTEEN MOST FREQUENT ETHNICITIES   BY GENDER

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Excluded. Totals Include Missing Genders.

REGION	ETHNIC	MALE	%	FEMALE	%	TOTAL
Senegal	Bamana	413	88.6%	53	11.4%	468
	Manding	617	66.9%	305	33.1%	926
	Nar/Moor	101	74.3%	35	25.7%	136
	Fulbe Wolof	160  363	76,2% 60.8%	50  234	23.8% 39.2%	211   598
S.LEONE	Kisi	51	59.3%	35	40.7%	86
	Kanga	210	61.9%	129	38.1%	339
BENIN	Fon	126	51.9%	117	48.1%	243
	Konkomba/Chamba	276	66.5%	139	33.5%	417
	Hausa	122	91.7%	11	8.3%	133
	Mina	430	68.5%	198	31.5%	628
	Nago/Yorub	247	69.0%	111	31.0%	359
	Edo	38	57.6%	28	42.2%	68
BIAFRA	Igbo	287	54.8%	237	45/2%	526
	Ibibio	61	74.4%	21	25.6%	84
	Calabar	88	59.6%	59	40.1%	147
W.CENTRAL	Congo	2,064	69.1%	924	30.9%	3,035
EAST AF TOTAL	Makua	67 5,721	65.7% 67.8%	35 2,721	34.3% 32.2%	104 8,508

 

DEMONSTRATE:  Afeth by Gender, NO GRAPHS

The following table shows African Region of Origin and Includes Africans whose coastal origins alone were given as well as Africans of known ethnicities.

 

         Table 3.  African Regions of Origin, Louisiana Slaves, 1723-1820

Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages Excluded. Totals Include Missing Genders

Region	Male	%	Female	%	Total	%
Senegambia	1,700	71.2%	687	28.8%	2,399	23.9%
Sierra Leone	1,041	66.4%	527	33.6%	1,570	15.7%
Gold Coast	68	70.5%	28	29.2%	97	1.0%
Bight of Benin	1,285	67.3%	624	32.7%	1,941	19.1%
Bight of Biafra	440	57.8%	321	42.4%	765	7.6%
W Central Africa	2,153	69.3%	952	30.7%	3,151	31.4%
Mozambique	90	69.2%	40	30.8%	132	1.3%
TOTAL	6,777	68.1%	3,179	31.9%	10,029	100%

         Table 4.  African Regions of Origin, Louisiana Slaves, 1723-1820.

       Identified African Ethnicities Only

Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages Excluded. Totals Include Missing Genders

Region	Male	%	Female	%	Total	%
Senegambia	1,689	71.1%	686	28.9%	2,383	27.0%
Sierra Leone	340	63.2%	198	36.8%	538	6.1%
Gold Coast	9	60.0%	6	40.0%	15	0.2%
Bight of Benin	1,276	67.7%	610	32.3%	1,891	21.4%
Bight of Biafra	440	57.8%	321	42.4%	765	8.7%
W Central Africa	2,135	69.2%	951	30.8%	3,133	35.4%
Mozambique	78	67.8%	37	32.2%	117	1.3%
TOTAL	6,777	68.1%	3,179	31.9%	10,029	100%

 

 

DEMONSTRATE:  AFREGION BY GENDER EXCLUDING ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE VOYAGES, WITH GRAPH.