Customer Reviews

Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links

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This book is an introduction to the expanding analysis of slave trade, slavery, and other records that give us a concrete look at what parts of Africa and which societies and cultures, the millions of slaves who were brought to the New World came from and where they went. Contrary to the earlier model that slaves were a culturally atomised group, the research by Hall and other contemporary scholars has disclosed that slaves from particular areas in Africa often went to particular places in the Americas. This was a product of trading routes, geography, political divisions, and slave marketers views that Africans from particular areas had particular skills or behavior patterns that made them attractive to particular purchasers.

Rather than an atomization of different African cultures, the Americas were populated by accumulations of Africans from particular regions who continued and adapted the culture they possessed in Africa and created new African American cultures.

Hall's book is decisive for anyone involved in the serious study of slavery either in the Americas and Africa, not only due to her content,but due to the way that she outlines the source material of records of the different slaving countries as well as the new databases of slavery records being developed on an international level.

Her book attempts to show the broad outlines and covers all of Africa and all of the Americas. As such she cannot go into a richer detail. Her work on Lousiana does this. For a more detailed look at these questions as they purtain to Africans in the current United States, Michael Gomez's _Exchanging our Country Marks_ is a necessary companion to this book. Both titles are required reading for anyone who wants to really know about African American history and identity, as well as the impact of slavery on Africa.

Anyone who has travelled extenisvely in Africa is aware of the diversity of ethnic and tribal groups. Anyone who has then travelled or perhaps recalled their previous experience in the Americas is shocked to realize then that the African diaspora in the Americans must reflect this, or at least used to reflect this diversity in some way.

This book does an amazing job in contributing to our understanding of the nature of the African diaspora in AMerica, from tribal to language to ethnic groups in the new world. We see now that slaves originated from certain ports and thus from certain groups in western Africa and eastern Africa. The Bantus from eastern Africa and Islamis ensalved peoples of western Africa. Usually the Africans who were enslaved in the interior by Arab slave raiders came from certain tribes, usually those tribes who had dared to resist or not convert to Islam, sometimes local tribal groups were employed to war against neighboring groups. In this certain tribes simply became factories for creating surplus people to be enslaved. A fasctinating story.

Seth J. Frantzman

My initial reason for getting this book was to complement my genealogical research and to hopefully gain some insight into where particular African ethnicities tended to be distributed in the United States as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. In my opinion, the author seriously missed the primary interest of her audience. For whatever reason (possibly due to the paucity of ethnic documentation in records of the North American colonies/states), the author chose to focus primarily on the importation patters of Brazil, St. Domingue, and Cuba. When she did touch upon the North American colonies, the vast majority of her focus (90% at least) seemed to be only on Louisiana.

While I can appreciate the author's explanation that the American planters and others involved in the slave trade to the United States were less focused on the African tribal/ethnic identities of their slaves, this gap in information renders the book almost wholly useless for genealogical researchers interested in any state other than Louisiana. There was brief mention of the primary composition of slaves in the Chesapeake region of Virginia, but barely any mention of those coming through the port of Charleston (the primary source of slaves for the Carolinas and Georgia, and thus for points further West).

In short, the book will provide the reader with a lot of good information concerning what ethnicities tended to be enslaved the most, and therefore provide a bit of a laundry list for further research. However, one must be prepared to use their own extrapolation and/or further research to make this information more useful in regard to other areas of the U.S. besides Louisiana.

This is an informative Book. I recommend it to anyone seeking to know the past in this area.