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date: 13 February 2025

Aquatic Culture in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora, 1444–1800locked

Aquatic Culture in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora, 1444–1800locked

  • Kevin DawsonKevin DawsonDepartment of History, University of California, Merced

Summary

Early modern Atlantic Africans developed similar canoe-making and canoeing traditions. Rather than treating water as physical and mental barriers, Africans wove fresh-waterways, salt-waterways, and adjoining landscapes together to create seamless waterscapes of social, cultural, spiritual, political, and economic meaning and belonging. Waterscapes and aquatic fluencies expanded Africans’ cultural horizons by tens of thousands of miles, as they swam and canoed across their surfaces, dove into their depths, and surfed their waves.

African maritime architecture developed to allow dugouts to negotiate particular hydrographic challenges. African dugouts differed from those crafted by Amerindians, Europeans, Oceanians, and Asians. Accounts suggest that the general shape of dugouts has remained fundamentally unchanged for hundreds of years. However, this does not indicate technological stagnation, as designs continuously evolved with important innovations significantly informing performance and usage, as reflected by surf-canoes. Surf-canoes were innovative watercraft designed to navigate surf-zones—the dynamic space where waves break—that remained off limits to European and American vessel and mariners, forcing them to rely on African expertise to link African and Atlantic markets. In an age with few energy sources—when most societies harnessed wind, animal, and, perhaps, river power—Atlantic Africans used wave power to slingshot surf-canoes laden with fish or tons of cargo ashore, even as the surf threatened to capsize and destroy surf-canoes. While Oceanians rode waves in outrigger canoes, Atlantic Africans are the only known peoples to bridle waves’ energy as part of their daily productive labor.

African dugouts on both sides of the Atlantic were crucial to transatlantic trade and European expansion. Little scholarship has been devoted to African dugouts. Green coastal waters important to many Africans’ experiences cannot be separated from the deep blue seas traversed by Western mariners, as it is not enough to describe how Europeans crossed oceans without considering how they got ashore. Traditional lines of inquiry have relegated African-descended peoples and their ability to shape the historical processes to the background, assuming they were passively affected by European circumstances. Virtually all the goods and many of the 12.5 million enslaved people exported out of Africa were transported in canoes to awaiting merchant and slave ships, with surf-canoes bearing much of this load.

In the Americas, enslavers quickly realized that African canoe-making and canoeing traditions could be profitably exploited. Most plantations were constructed along broad shallow waterways, similar to African waters, to facilitate the shipment of slave-produced cash crops to seaports. Hence, many planters employed captives as canoe-makers and canoeists to link their plantations to overseas markets.

Subjects

  • Slavery and Slave Trade

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