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African Diasporas: History and Historiography  

Mohammed Bashir Salau

People of African descent who migrated from their “homelands” constituted, and still constitute, important forces in many African cultures outside of their “homelands” as well as in many other cultures outside of the African continent. Historically, the migration of people of African descent from their “homelands” is mainly linked to the pre-20th century Muslim or Asian trade and the Atlantic trade as well as to the post 1980 globalization of the capitalist system. Even before the post 1980 globalization of the capitalist system deepened the crises in African states and resulted in the migration of skilled and unskilled Africans to places like the United States, Canada, Britain and the Middle East, some scholars had written on people of African descent in several parts of the world. Although the earliest among those who wrote on the subject before the 1980s did not employ the term “African diaspora” in their analysis, an increasing number of scholars who wrote after 1950 have used the term in question in their study of people of African descent in various parts of the world. The relevant literature written after 1950 features disagreement over the meaning of the concept “African diaspora” and point to diverse methodologies that are useful in working on the subject. This particular literature can be divided into three broad categories: works that deal with the Old African diaspora, works that deal with the New African diaspora and works that deal with both the Old and New African diasporas. The historiography shows that works situated in all of these three categories mainly offer competing view over three fundamental questions: why did Africans leave their “homelands” and settle elsewhere? What was the impact of this process on the societies they left? How did Africans who left their “homelands” integrate into their host societies or preserve their unique identities; or, more broadly, what was the impact of their arrival on the host society they entered? Despite the rapid strides that have been made since the 1960s in regard to addressing these questions or in regards to the scholarly study of the African diasporas in general, there is still no firm definition of the term “African diaspora.” Moreover, there are still other gaps in the scholarly knowledge of the subject.

Article

The African Methodist Episcopal Church in Africa  

Christina Dickerson-Cousin

In 1816, Richard Allen and other Black Methodists established the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Although this independent, historically Black denomination began in the United States, its early members and ministers had global ambitions. They intended for the AME Church to serve marginalized people of color around the world. Planting the institution in Africa played an important role in this vision. African Methodists began migrating to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the first half of the 19th century. In these locales, they hoped to find a respite from the oppression they faced in the American South. The AME Church grew in these regions and, later, in South Africa. By the AME denomination’s bicentennial year in 2016, there were six African episcopal districts spanning various regions of the continent. Women, both clergy and lay, have played significant roles in AME Church history. African women are a part of that historical pattern. Charlotte Manye Maxeke helped to initiate African Methodism in South Africa. Europa Randall facilitated AME expansion in Ghana. Louise York served as a pioneering educator at two AME schools in Liberia. Her daughter, Katurah York Cooper, established a thriving church in Monrovia. These and other trailblazing women assisted in the growth and development of African Methodism in Africa.

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African Music in the Global African Diaspora  

Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje

When researching music in the African diaspora, most scholars concentrate on the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade, which has been a trend since inquiries began during the mid twentieth century. Only since the late twentieth century have researchers started to consider musical repercussions from the involuntary and voluntary migration of Africans in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean. Using historical and musical secondary sources, the essay, African Music in the Global African Diaspora, devotes special attention to musicking during the enslavement of Black people in the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Atlantic Ocean worlds. In addition to a concise history of slavery and the enslaved, a description of instruments, musical traditions, performance practices, and meaning is presented for each diaspora. The degree that musical elements identified with Africa were retained and/or transformed, resulting in a fusion or blending of performance practices, is also explored. Because no single publication, heretofore, has focused on African music in the global African diaspora, the study fills a significant void in the literature and presents a more comprehensive view of the dispersion of African music inworld culture. The outcome provides a broader analysis and understanding of the power and impact of African music globally.

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African Religion and Healing in the Atlantic Diaspora  

John M. Janzen

Religion and healing are useful scholarly constructs in summarizing, consolidating, and interpreting a myriad of details from the historic African-Atlantic experience. For heuristic purposes, religion is understood as the worldviews, rituals, and supernatural beings that represent ultimate reality; healing is the understanding of, and responses to, affliction and misfortune, and the struggle to achieve wholeness. Combining religion and healing in an overview of the African diaspora experience will consider the following: original African worlds in four regional contexts in Western and Western Central Africa (e.g., Senegambia, Upper Guinea, Southern Guinea, Kongo-Angola); the traumatic middle passage refracted in the “broken mirrors” of memory; how this memory is mixed and reinterpreted with the New World experience of slave markets, plantations, maroon settlements, and during post-slavery, post-empire times; scholarly models of continuity and transformation; and modern constructions of religion and healing.

Article

African Religions in Brazil  

Luis Nicolau Parés

Despite their diverse political and cultural backgrounds, West Africans and West Central Africans shared some basic religious orientations. With a strong pragmatic focus on solving problems in this world, the dynamism and flexibility of their religious practices were critical for their quick reactivation within Brazilian slave society. The Atlantic transfer, however, deprived African institutions of their structural social basis so a complex innovative process of re-institutionalization was necessary to allow new forms of Afro-Brazilian religions to emerge. Ritual associativism first occurred around the colonial Calundu, mostly concerned with interpersonal healing and divination interactions, but rapidly saw the formation of parallel religious congregations inspired by an ecclesiastical mode of organization based on the initiatory recruitment of novices and the worship of multiple deities. Despite common elements of healing, divination, sacrifice, spirit possession, initiation, and celebration, the genesis of Afro-Brazilian religions was marked by astounding pluralism and eclecticism that led to a wide range of regional variation. The demographics and cultural specificities of the enslaved in each place, as well as local historical circumstances, determined distinct processes of creative synthesis among the various African traditions and between these and hegemonic Iberian Catholicism, Amerindian healing practices, and others. The circulation of ideas and priests across the country and between Africa and Brazil after the end of the Atlantic slave trade also added to the 19th-century consolidation of an Afro-Brazilian religious field. Despite a history of continuous discrimination and persecution, alongside occasional selective tolerance, Afro-Brazilian religions offered a unique space for the transformative reproduction of African values, behaviors, and forms of sociability, which had a long-lasting effect on Brazilian national culture. The temples’ struggles for legitimacy and recognition was expressed in a latent tension between those which claimed an alleged African ritual purity and those accused of syncretism, a divide to which scholars greatly contributed to and which has oriented their classificatory efforts.

Article

African Sailors in the Atlantic World  

Emma Christopher

African sailors changed the world. West African Lébou, Kru, Fante, and many others were highly skilled at crossing the rough surf of the Atlantic seaboard and had elaborate trading networks along the coast. When Europeans began visiting the continent, they lacked the same skills and so hired these canoe men to carry them safely to shore and load and unload their cargo. African mariners were employed by slave ships to convey captives out to the deep water. Appropriating their skills, Europeans also engaged such men to go on longer voyages as deep-sea sailors, cooks, and translators. Many other Africans carried boating experience with them into slavery, knowledge that could later help them to escape and make lives for themselves in one of the most egalitarian professions of the time. African sailors served in navies around the Atlantic world; they became pirates and privateers, hunted whales, and made voyages of discovery. The African diaspora, born on the rolling waves of the Atlantic, became closely tied to the sea as both the scene of slavery and its fight for liberation.

Article

Africans in the Indian Ocean World  

Richard B. Allen

The African diaspora in the Indian Ocean is inextricably intertwined with slavery and slave trading in an oceanic world that encompasses southern and eastern Africa, the Red Sea, the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf, South Asia, the Indonesian archipelago, and parts of East Asia. A combination of factors, including the cost of free labor, high morbidity and mortality rates from diseases such as malaria and smallpox, and the perceived attributes of different African peoples spurred the exportation by Arab, Muslim, and Swahili merchants of an estimated 2.9–3.65 million men, women, and children from diverse populations in southern and eastern Africa, Madagascar, and the Horn of Africa to Arabia, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, and Southeast Asia between 800 and c.1900. European involvement in this transoceanic slave trade began during the early 16th century and continued well into the 19th century. This diaspora’s legacy includes the presence of communities of African descent in modern Iran, India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.

Article

African Women in Film, the Moving Image, and Screen Culture  

Beti Ellerson

While African women in film have distinct histories and trajectories, at the same time they have common goals and objectives. Hence, “African women in film” is a concept, an idea, with a shared story and path. While there has always been the hope of creating national cinemas, even the very notion of African cinema(s) in the plural has been pan-African since its early history. And women have taken part in the formation of an African cinema infrastructure from the beginning. The emergence of an “African women in cinema movement” developed from this larger picture. The boundaries of women’s work extend to the global African diaspora. Language, geography, and colonial legacies add to the complexity of African cinema history. Women have drawn from the richness that this multiplicity offers, contributing on local, national, continental, and global levels as practitioners, activists, cultural producers, and stakeholders.

Article

Atlantic Slavery and the Slave Trade: History and Historiography  

Daniel B. Domingues da Silva and Philip Misevich

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

Article

Combat Games in the Black Atlantic, 17th–19th Centuries  

Matthias Röhrig Assunção

Combat games are attested in Africa from the time of the transatlantic slave trade and throughout the 19th century. In the agricultural societies in the rainforest of West and West Central Africa, wrestling was the most common form, while pastoral societies in the savannahs of central and southern Africa excelled in stick fighting. Fist fighting, slap boxing, and kicking also constituted the base of combat games in some locations. The enslaved Africans and their descendants made use of these bodily techniques in the plantation societies of the Americas and the Indian Ocean. The new oppressive context of slavery led to adjustments of techniques and practice. Stick fighting was widespread in Brazil and the Caribbean, whereas wrestling only became important in the United States. The previously rather marginal techniques of kicking and head butting became central to capoeira, ladja, and moring, even though it is difficult to establish precise genealogies. Bodily techniques were onlys one aspect of the complex cultural reinvention of combat games in the Atlantic world. African religious practices such as protections from supernatural forces and broader cultural meanings were incorporated into African-derived and creole combat games. While keeping some of their former social function, combat games in the “New World” also acquired new, contradictory meanings as either tools of resistance, spectacle for monetary gains, or even instruments of oppression. They provided an early example of globalization of bodily techniques and cultural meanings, and the most successful ones, such as capoeira, continue to expand worldwide to this day.

Article

Diaspora Tourism  

Bayo Holsey

Since the 1990s, diaspora tourism has become a significant cultural and economic enterprise within several West African nations. The conservation of important sites related to the history of the slave trade, particularly Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle in Ghana and the Slave House on Gorée Island and Senegal, along with the development of the Slaves’ Route in Benin, has led to burgeoning numbers of diaspora tourists in these nations. Although this particular form of travel took off in the 1990s as a result of a growing African American middle class and the simultaneous rise in their level of interest in the history of the slave trade, temporary diasporic travel to West Africa has a much longer history. From the very moment of independence, the development of diaspora tourism industries has been a goal of several African nations. Pan-African festivals held throughout the 1960s and 1970s sought to capture this tourism market and to celebrate historical and cultural connections as well as to encourage economic investment. More recent state-sponsored events such as Emancipation Day and PANAFEST in Ghana have similar goals. For the tourists themselves, diaspora tourism often represents much more than leisure travel. Oftentimes framed as a “homecoming” or a “pilgrimage,” the trips can have deeply personal and even spiritual significance. They occur in the context of anti-Black racism in the home nations of tourists who therefore may seek a sense of belonging within Africa. Many want to learn more about the history of slave trade in order to understand the struggles of their ancestors. Diaspora tourism thus is both an economic enterprise, firmly situated within neoliberal logics, and a potentially oppositional act for Black subjects in the context of global White supremacy. It has also influenced the ways in which continental Africans view the history of the slave trade and their relationship to the African diaspora.

Article

Digital Approaches to the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade  

Daryle Williams

The robust, sustained interest in the history of the transatlantic slave trade has been a defining feature of the intersection of African studies and digital scholarship since the advent of humanities computing in the 1960s. The pioneering work of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, first made widely available in CD-ROM in 1999, is one of several major projects to use digital tools in the research and analysis of the Atlantic trade from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Over the past two decades, computing technologies have also been applied to the exploration of African bondage outside the maritime Atlantic frame. In the 2010s, Slave Voyages (the online successor to the original Slave Trade Database compact disc) joined many other projects in and outside the academy that deploy digital tools in the reconstruction of the large-scale structural history of the trade as well as the microhistorical understandings of individual lives, the biography of notables, and family ancestry.

Article

Donas, Nharas, and Signares: Women Slave Traders in Atlantic Africa  

Hilary Jones

Donas, nharas, and signares belonged to a class of women who obtained high social and economic standing in Africa’s west and west central region from the age of the European encounter to the era of mercantile companies and transatlantic slavery. These women owned slaves consistent with the notion of “slavery” or institutions of marginality within their specific West African and West Central African societies. As women who lived in close proximity to European military and mercantile installations on the Atlantic coast, they acted as cross-cultural brokers between European merchants and officials and African elites. Whether through marriages arranged by lineage elders or by relationships of convenience between African women and European men, donas, nharas, and signares entered contractual unions with European men. From the late 16th to the early 19th centuries, these relationships originated Afro-European families and established Afro-European men and some women as a propertied class along Africa’s Atlantic coast. Infamous in the texts of traveler’s accounts written by European men and a few Afro-European men, documentation of this era of women’s influence and their role in the Atlantic commercial system largely resides in European administrative reports and population data, court records and notarized documents, and published and unpublished genealogies.

Article

Dutch Slave Trade in the Atlantic, 1600–1800  

Pieter Emmer and Henk den Heijer

The Dutch share in the Atlantic slave trade averaged about 5 to 6 percent of the total, but the volume differed sharply over time. The beginning of the Dutch transatlantic slave trade can be dated to 1636, after the Dutch West India Company (WIC) had acquired its own plantation colony around Recife in Brazil. In order to set up a regular trade in slaves, the WIC also took Elmina on the Gold Coast and Luanda in Angola from the Portuguese. The slave trade to Dutch Brazil was short-lived, and after the loss of Dutch Brazil and Luanda, the WIC as well as private merchants from Amsterdam started to sell slaves to colonists in the Spanish, English, and French Caribbean via Curaçao, the WIC trade hub in the region. In 1667, in addition to the small colonies of Berbice and Essequibo, the Dutch conquered Suriname and during the 18th century established Demerara. The Dutch slave trade became more and more focused on these plantation colonies. Between 1700 and 1725, after the Dutch had been banned from selling slaves in foreign colonies, the Dutch slave trade declined, but the volume increased again after 1730 when the WIC lost its monopoly and private shipping companies were allowed to enter the trade. In addition, Amsterdam-based investors poured money into the Dutch plantation colonies expecting windfall profits from a new cash crop: coffee. These profits did not materialize, and the majority of the planters in the Dutch plantation colonies went bankrupt. These bankruptcies, another war with Britain, and the French occupation caused the Dutch slave trade to decline sharply. The last Dutch slave ship sailed to Suriname in 1802. In 1814, the Dutch government yielded to British abolitionist pressure and abolished the slave trade in the hope of regaining its colonial possessions occupied by Britain.

Article

Encounters Between Ethiopia and Europe, 1400–1660  

Matteo Salvadore

By the early 1400s, diplomatic representatives and pilgrims from the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia had traveled to the Italian peninsula for political and religious reasons. In doing so, they inaugurated an era of Ethiopian–European relations that unfolded for more than 200 years: Ethiopians reached multiple locales across Latin Europe to forge political alliances, acquire technology, and pursue religious knowledge. They drew the attention of European observers, especially those with an interest in the overseas. Secular and religious personalities, but also average merchants, began their quests for the Ethiopian highlands, lured by the tales of their visitors who were believed with growing certainty to be subjects of the mythical Prester John, the imaginary Christian sovereign believed to rule the Indies. Their journeys enabled cultural exchanges, technological transfer, and the forging of one of the first Euro-African political alliances, that between the kingdoms of Ethiopia and Portugal. In the 15th century, Ethiopian pilgrims flocked to Rome, and diplomatic representatives found hospitality in the Venetian Republic and at the Aragonese and papal courts. Concurrently with Ethiopian arrivals in Europe, European adventurers and representatives began reaching Ethiopia, eventually leading to the establishing of Portuguese–Ethiopian relations. The exchanges climaxed with a Portuguese military intervention to support the Ethiopian monarchy against the sultanate of Adal in 1541. In the decades following the conflict, Jesuit missionaries began operating in the country: after a difficult inception in the 1620s, the fathers experienced ephemeral successes, followed by a dramatic expulsion that ended early modern Ethiopian–European relations.

Article

Freedom Suits in the Ibero-Atlantic World  

Cristina Nogueira da Silva and Mariana Dias Paes

Throughout the period when slavery was a legally sanctioned institution in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds (c. 1500–c. 1888), Africans and their descendants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas approached courts and other institutions to claim their entire or partial freedom. Known as “freedom suits,” these lawsuits allow access to their conceptions of freedom and justice. Mobilizing a common normative framework, enslaved individuals advanced their own interpretations regarding norms that governed slavery and freedom. This common framework, however, acquired specific meanings in different regions, depending on the configuration of the relationship between slave and owner as well as on the agency of the enslaved themselves. Enslaved women and men advanced numerous arguments in courts, but their chances of success varied widely. In the long term, these lawsuits were fundamental in determining the directions that the institution of slavery took in the Ibero-Atlantic world.

Article

Gaspar, Dona Florinda Josefa  

Mariana P. Candido and Monica Lima

Dona Florinda Josefa Gaspar (c. 1791–1862) was a prosperous trader born in Benguela, Angola in the late eighteenth century. The daughter of a local ruler, a soba, she married a Brazilian-born exile. As commercial partners they engaged in long-distance trade connecting different markets, selling cattle, salt, and enslaved people. Like other merchant women along the Atlantic coast, Dona Florinda Josefa Gaspar relied on her family connections to guarantee business benefits. This increased her visibility in historical documents. The couple controlled many dependents and land plots in Benguela. When her husband relocated to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the 1830s, Dona Gaspar joined him. In Rio de Janeiro, they settled in the Valongo neighborhood, a prime location for the arrival and sale of enslaved Africans. Dona Gaspar traveled back and forth between Rio de Janeiro and Benguela in the following years, probably for business and to maintain contact with her sons, who remained in Benguela to represent the interests of the family. She died in Rio de Janeiro in 1862, a prosperous immigrant who owned real estate, enslaved people, and luxury goods. Her life is an example of the presence of free African women who crossed the Atlantic World during the height of the transatlantic slave trade.

Article

Godinho, André do Couto  

Lucilene Reginaldo

André do Couto Godinho was born in 1720 in the Brazilian captaincy of Minas Gerais, in the town of Mariana, and died in the Kingdom of Kongo, probably around 1790. Born not only a slave but the slave of a slave, he went on to obtain his freedom, becoming literate, later studying at a university, and finally going on to serve as a missionary in Africa. Between the beginning of his life, in Brazil, and its end, in Africa, he spent a number of years in Portugal, in the cities of Coimbra and Lisbon. While his life story is certainly extraordinary, it provides a window into the possibilities of, and strategies for, social and geographic mobility of free and freed black people in different parts of the Portuguese Empire during the second half of the 1700s. Retracing André Godinho’s footsteps is an exercise in micro-history, a technique that, when used as a counterpoint to a more global analysis, offers fresh insights into familiar subjects, with the seemingly insignificant details of an individual life raising questions that would have gone unnoticed in a strictly macroscopic analysis. André’s path in life, as a free man of color helps understand the larger historical contexts that defined the possibilities, choices, and limitations of his personal history. Godinho’s story provides insights into African descendants’ possibilities for social ascension, also clarifying the limitations imposed by emerging social hierarchies based on skin color and slave origin.

Article

Habshis and Sidis in India  

Omar H. Ali

Africans and their descendants in India are variously referred to as “Habshi” and “Sidi,” as in much of South Asia. The Afro–South Asian communities that formed in India have origins that date back at least two millennia. There is evidence from at least the 1st century ce of systematic trade between Ethiopia and India. Over the course of the following two millennia, tens of thousands of Africans would arrive in a range of capacities in different parts of South Asia—India, Pakistan, Bengal, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. Prior to the 20th century, most Africans were taken as slaves via the Indian Ocean slave trade, serving as soldiers in the case of men and, in smaller numbers, domestic workers and concubines in the case of women. Many, however, came on their own volition as merchants, sailors, scholars, or explorers, while still others worked as mercenaries or as musicians—sometimes both, as with the African Cavalry Guards of the Nizam of Hyderabad, in what is now the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. Some Habshis and Sidis rose to significant positions of authority through the military and as court officials, such as Malik Ambar, the 17th-century general and regent minister of Ahmednagar in India’s Deccan. Others became rulers of their own dynasties, such as the Nawabs of Janjira along the western coast of India. Most people of African descent in the region, however, lived their lives like most South Asians, poor and politically marginalized, yet with their own creativity and community. The contributions of Africans and their descendants—in terms of their labor, languages, religion, art, music, dance, cuisine, and stories—form part of the complex, vibrant, and overlapping cultures and societies that comprise India and the region as a whole.

Article

ibn Said, Omar  

Mbaye Lo

Omar ibn Sayyid (Said is the more prevalent Anglicized version of his name; 1770–1863), a West African Muslim scholar, was enslaved in North Carolina from 1810 until his death in 1863. Omar was captured in Futa Toro, modern-day Senegal in 1807 and transported to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1808, and he spent the first two years of his American life enslaved on a plantation there. He left behind a body of Arabic writings including his 1831 autobiography, which was the subject of two limited translations in the 19th century by Alexander Cotheal in 1848 and Isaac Bird in 1863; a more elaborated translation was produced by John Franklin Jameson in 1925. Since the 1980s, Omar has attracted scholarly interest as a striking example of the presence of enslaved Muslim scholars in the antebellum United States. The Library of Congress has created an Omar ibn Said Collection of documents in English and Arabic to serve as a resource for research on slavery and Islam in America. North Carolina governor Roy Cooper declared May 23, 2019, Omar ibn Said Day.