Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (review)

Abstract

Slavery and Ethnicities in Americas: Restoring Links. By Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 225. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $34.95.)Reviewed by Mechal SobelGwendolyn Midlo Hall's latest book, Slavery and Ethnicities in Americas, is an unusual work. As subtitle Restoring Links indicates, Hall's key aim is to establish existence and significance of links between particular ethnic groups in Africa and groups of enslaved in Americas, but work first presents her credo in regard to enslavement and American history.Hall has been a social activist since she was a young woman. Made aware of injustice suffered by blacks in Jim Crow era by work of her father-whom she has described as the only lawyer in state [of Louisiana] who would accept police brutality complaints by black folks-she early became involved in social action through Communist Party, only outside group helping poor blacks to organize for self-protection and political and economic rights in those dangerous times.1When Hall later became an academic, she clearly continued on a committed path. Her use of words Truth and Reconciliation (xiii) as title for her preface makes it clear that she regards her work as a historian as critical to future social change. Hall has taken on challenge to establish that, contrary to what is still widely accepted, specific regions and ethnicities . . . made major contributions to formation of new cultures developing throughout Americas (xv). She holds that these ethnic groups had a profound impact upon economy, culture, esthetics, language, and survival skills of societies in America, but that and their descendants have received very little recognition for their contributions and sacrifices and very few of benefits (xvi). Her work is intended to play a role in changing this.Published in 1992, Hall's groundbreaking study of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana was based on extensive records she uncovered indicating that majority of slaves brought to Louisiana between 1719 and 1731 were from Senegambia. It was their culture that Hall found dominant in general cultural development of society.2 When she published her full data set in 2000, including African slave names, gender, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, and slaves' testimony and emancipations of 104,000 enslaved Louisianans, she provided a body of evidence that most historians had not known was recorded and had not imagined could be accessed.3Close to ten thousand individuals in this database apparently reported their own ethnicity, generally some years after they arrived in Louisiana, and Hall builds on this to argue that it is an important reflection on identity of enslaved. She holds that ethnicities of earliest Africans often had a continuing and decisive influence on their Creole descendents, on Africans who arrived later, and on wider society (169). While Hall states that Louisiana data she collected and analyzed cannot be assumed to be a blueprint or a template for all diaspora, she is fully convinced (and fairly convincing) that it is: that Africans of particular ethnicities were brought in waves to particular areas of Western Hemisphere; that these Africans retained an awareness of and defined themselves by these ethnicities; and that while their religion, worldview, and esthetic principles had a long life, different historic events account for pace and content of change in regard to much else (166).Hall's research and publications placed her in middle of an acerbic academic battle, involved with relatively new school associated with Paul Lovejoy at York University in Toronto. …