African Heritage

African Influence in Slave Culture

Between the years 1450 and 1850, approximately 12 million slaves were brought from Africa to the New World. Around 5 percent of those slaves were taken to North America, forming the basis of today's African American population. The extent to which these slaves maintained their African cultural practices and passed them down to American-born slaves is a matter of debate.

Unlike European immigrants to America, Africans could not bring kinship systems, artifacts, heirlooms, or other formal ways of transmitting culture. Some scholars have argued that, because of the violent nature of their migration, blacks lost African cultural knowledge along their journey.

More recent scholarship, such as the work of Yale professor Robert F. Thompson, argues that black vernacular culture reflects African traditions and practices. Most black scholars argue that African American culture consists of both the African and the American character of how black people sustained mental sanity, spiritual health, and social life and political struggle, in the midst of a slaveholding white civilization.

There is much evidence to support the claim that African culture survived the journey to the Americas. Slave traders favored certain areas of the African coast, where they had established relationships with local traders. Those areas corresponded roughly to existing political and kinship groupings, so that Africans who shared linguistic and cultural practices were often kept together, both on the slave ships and when they arrived in North America. For example, a large number of slaves from Sierra Leone were taken to North Carolina. Angolan slaves were kept in relative isolation in areas of North Carolina as well.

Prior to coming to America, Africans based their social networks largely on kinship ties or where they lived. Once they arrived in America, they formed social groups based on shared languages. This created a crosscolony network that aided in preserving African culture and sometimes in mobilizing revolts. The New York Slave Revolt of 1712, for example, largely comprised “Coromantees” or slaves from the Gold Coast.

The survival of African cultural traditions is evident in the number of Africanisms, or cultural and linguistic property—such as sayings, myths, cultural practice, and food—that are part of black and American vernacular. Linguist David Dalby, for example, has traced certain American slang words back to Wolof, a language from the Senegambian region of Africa. These words include bogus, boggie-woogie, phoney, honkie, dig, jam, and jive.

African folk tales have also found their way into American myth. The Uncle Remus stories, for example, can be traced to West African folk tales. Other African myths that have survived in America are the Br'er (or Brer) Rabbit tale as well as various tales involving African-type trickster characters.

Many African cultural practices survived the journey to America because whites adopted them—a phenomenon known as transference. African American [Page 23]house servants, in particular, were in a unique position to “swap” cultural practices because of their proximity to white families. While white planters incorporated African culinary, linguistic, and folkoric patterns, slaves learned Anglo-American cultural standards.

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