Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave-Trade and the Creation of African 'Nations' in the Americas

Abstract

There is abundant evidence that, throughout the Atlantic world in the era of the slave-trade, many enslaved people identified themselves, or were so identified by others, as members of African-derived named groups. Much of this evidence is ascriptive, and was used by Europeans to identify individual slaves in terms of ‘types’ of Africans. The enslaved people themselves, however, could be active agents in defining the names of these ‘nations’, as Christian Oldendorp found in the Lesser Antilles c.1770. In attempting to define one such group of displaced Africans, Oldendorp noted that the ‘Negroes call one of their own nations Kassenti, but the nation calls itself Tjamba [Chamba]’. He then explained that, ‘because they usually called out Kassenti, that is, I do not understand you, when they fell into the hands of the marauding Amina [Akan], the latter have given them that expression as a name.’ In general, the structure of the transatlantic slave-trade tended to concentrate rather than to disperse peoples from broad regions into a limited number of entrepots, with the great majority sent from just one or two ports per African coast. The remarkable new slave-trade database of over 27,000 voyages published in 1999, hereafter referred to as the Du Bois Database, suggests that 76 per cent of Gold Coast slaves were sent from two places; in the Bight of Benin, about two-thirds were taken from just one site; and in the Bight of Biafra nearly 80 per cent were shipped from two ports. This tendency toward concentration occurred largely because commerce in human cargoes ran on credit, which required personal relationships, and on coercion. On the European side, merchants and captains specialized in certain coasts because they had to meet demands for particular assortments of trade-goods, and did so at the sufferance of local African trade-kings; enforcement of European mercantilist policies further limited points of trade on any one coast. On the African side, coastal elites drew on regional