Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade

Abstract

This is an ambitious collective volume based on papers presented at a conference in 2000 at York University on the interactions between Africa and the Americas. Such connections have been themes in the historiography of the Atlantic world in varying degrees for the last several decades, particularly related to the African diaspora. The authors identify three stages of scholarly interest. On the oldest view, Europeans were mainly responsible for the creation of the Atlantic world. During the second stage, scholars identified and highlighted the role of Africans and their descendants as active participants in and contributors to the emerging Atlantic world. In the latest stage, scholars have begun to examine and demonstrate the “interactive linkages” across the Atlantic in which Africans and Europeans in Brazil (the editors emphasize Brazilians but the model can encompass many others) spent time in the Americas, were changed by their experiences, and returned or moved to Africa to influence developments there.Of the essays in this volume, three fit perfectly into stage three. Coleen E. Kriger reviews the literature of the study of African culture and calls for extending the agenda of stage-three scholarship by using more sophisticated methods of analysis and interpretation of Africa’s role in the Atlantic world and how it changed Africa. José Capela offers a case study showing the influence that connections with Brazil had on Mozambique in the period from the mid-seventeenth century into the nineteenth century, when people and ideas moved back and forth from Mozambique to Brazil, with ancillary ties to Angola and metropolitan Portugal. Elisée Soumonni examines the comparative and contrasting experiences and influences of the Afro-Brazilian communities in the West African ports of Ouidah and Lagos. The demographic essay by David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, and David Richardson expands knowledge of the carrying of slaves to the Americas and highlights the significant Portuguese role in that trade.The remainder of the volume’s essays fit more closely into the second stage, as most are case studies of African adaptation to and/or influence on the American societies they entered and helped to develop. The essays generally emphasize West Africa and Brazil, but there are several exceptions. Jane Landers surveys the communities formed by fugitive slaves throughout Spanish America as well as Brazil and shows how their members fused African groups and their traditions into hybrid communities with blended cultural and political constructions.Four essays show African influence on spiritual syntheses in the Americas. Elizabeth Kiddy demonstrates how Africans adapted to European religious forms by participating in Christian lay brotherhoods. Luis Nicolau Parés probes the influence of the African roots of Candomblé in the influence of the hierarchy of African divinities and cults from several West African cultures. The experience of the slave voyage across the Atlantic, Monica Schuler suggests, helped form African systems of belief in the Caribbean and the vision of a potential return to an idealized African homeland. Terry Rey reveals how African religious forms, especially those from the kingdom of Kongo, contributed to the evolution of beliefs and the agendas of three religiously inspired rebels in Saint-Domingue. Dale T. Graden investigates how Afro-Brazilians participated in the abolitionist movement in Brazil. João J. Reis reminds us that class identity influenced politics and at times trumped ethnic identity.All in all, this is a valuable collection by experts making full use of the tools of their fields. It reveals the contemporary development of ways of understanding the complexities of the Atlantic world and shows the evolution toward stage three studies.