Africa

As the ancestral homeland of many early Americans, Africa was vital in shaping American culture. From the 16th to the 18th century, African societies were neither more monolithic nor static than European ones; they differed greatly and changed over time. The huge continent of Africa consisted of diverse populations with rich histories, practices, and institutions that constituted various cultures. European traders encountered complex and varying forms of government, economies, religions, and arts that had characterized Africans’ lives for many centuries. Contrary to the belief that developed among many Europeans to justify slavery, Africa was not “inferior” to Europe in any of these ways.

Nearly all the African peoples brought to British North America came from the coast and interior of western and west-central Africa. English slavers frequented the ports north of the Congo, bringing many slaves to North America during the early years. Later in the 18th century more slaves came to English colonies from the Portuguese ports of Luanda and Benguela. Approximately one-quarter of the captured population came from the coast of what is now southeastern Nigeria. About 15 percent each came from Senegambia (the land between and around the Senegal and Gambia Rivers), the Gold Coast, and the coast between and including current day Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast. The peoples inhabiting these areas spoke several hundred mutually unintelligible languages and practiced social customs that, in some extremes, were as different from one another as they were from those of Europeans.

African societies also differed politically from one another. Governance ranged from highly militaristic and hierarchical empires, such as Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, to village states, to relatively stateless societies. In many places local identity, customs, and language differences militated against any widespread unity. Individual allegiances were normally to the extended family and the village. Sometimes the allegiances extended more broadly to a kinship group or a clan; sometimes they spread beyond to a larger political unit—a state or an empire. Relations did, however, traverse political and language boundaries. Long-distance traders moved across political boundaries, religions and secret societies spread and provided a commonality in larger areas, and historical events occasionally united groups. However, most frequently, people from western and west-central Africa possessed a worldview idiosyncratic to their own group.

African economic interests varied, revolving around agriculture, industry, and commerce. Diverse occupations of Africans captured and sold in the slave trade reveal the variety of economic activities that existed before Europeans arrived. Farmers, the largest group captured, grew rice, millet, maize, yams, and manioc or harvested bananas, plantains, and palm products. Other early African captives came from long traditions as blacksmiths; weavers; potters; workers in bronze, copper and gold; and traders who had wide-ranging movements over the continent. Others had been herders and fishermen. Even musicians, priests, and the nobility numbered among the captives.

The variety of Africans’ artistic expressions flourished long before Europeans’ arrival, and they continued, albeit transformed, despite the trans-Atlantic slave trade. MUSiC, DANCE, song, sculpture, and carving flourished throughout the continent, and these ART forms traveled to the New World with the captives. Africans spoke many languages, only a few of which were written. Instead, a vibrant oral literature preserved communities’ traditions and stories. Proverbs played important roles in greetings, songs, and folktales.

Indigenous religions commonly involved ancestor veneration, consistent with the family or kinship group as the fundamental unit of social organization. The spirits of ancestors exercised the principal religious influence upon most groups. Indigenous religions continued often side by side with religions that later appeared. Initially some rulers reluctantly accepted Islam, which appeared in sub-Saharan Africa at Bornu around the late 11th century. Although quite different from indigenous religions, Islam was embraced more readily than Christianity. That Christianity did not establish a foothold until the Portuguese established Missions in the 16th century should not come as a surprise, for it preached human unity while simultaneously enslaving Africans.

Slavery had long existed as an economic and social institution among many of the agrarian societies of western and west-central Africa. However, slavery varied considerably among African societies and through time. Some western Africans sold slaves along with gold and spices in commerce that led across the Sahara to North Africa. By the 17th century some Africans had become partners with Europeans in the maritime slave trade, but bondage in Africa exhibited fundamentally different characteristics from slavery in the New World. Unlike European and American bondage, African slavery frequently was characterized by personal relationships between masters and slaves and by a chance for slaves to obtain their freedom and be accepted as equals. Moreover, African slavery was neither hereditary nor racially based.

As in most places where slavery existed, African societies usually obtained slaves by violent means, warfare being the most common method. Another technique involved condemning people to slavery through judicial or religious proceedings for civil crimes or religious offenses. Frequent and severe droughts and famines also forced some Africans to sell themselves or their relatives into slavery so that families might survive. Finally, while many slaves in sub-Saharan Africa were women, western traders primarily sought men as laborers in the colonies.

Africans were the largest group of immigrants, albeit involuntary, to British North America in the 18th century, and the labor of these slaves and their descendants accounted for much of the prosperity of the southern colonies and of America itself. Their African heritage, which many maintained in the New World, shaped the nature of slave communities as well as the culture of early America. See also SLAVE RESISTANCE; SLAVE TRADE.

Further reading: John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

—Leslie Patrick