Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

Abstract

The first written account of surfing, according to most scholars, dates to 1778 in Hawaii. Yet, as Kevin Dawson (a surfer himself) points out, those scholars are “a hundred and forty years too late, and some ten thousand miles off the mark,” because the first account of surfing was actually recorded in the 1640s on Africa's Gold Coast (p. 28). This is one of many surprises that readers will find in Dawson's enlightening Undercurrents of Power, which explores the “aquatic fluencies” of early modern Africans and African-descended people, concentrating on the eighteenth century (p. 2). Rejecting the “landlocked paradigms” that have, in Dawson's view, predominated in studies of the African diaspora, he shows how “waterscapes” served as crucial social, cultural, and working spaces on both sides of the Atlantic (p. 251).Dawson argues that people throughout Africa lived, worked, and socialized along rivers, lakes, and the sea and that the many aquatic skills they developed in those “amphibious culturescapes”—especially swimming, underwater diving, canoe making, and canoeing—were easily transferred to the Americas along with a host of cultural practices and spiritual beliefs about water (p. 4). The book is divided into two parts, the first on “swimming culture” and the second on “canoe culture,” with topical chapters that move between Africa and the Americas. Dawson contrasts the excellent swimming abilities of Africans and their descendants—who were proficient swimmers from early childhood—with Europeans, most of whom were either nonswimmers or bad swimmers who frequently drowned in maritime accidents. “Swimming pervaded Africans' muscle memory,” Dawson writes, “and was one of the easiest skills to carry to the Americas” (p. 12).Once there, enslaved Africans used their aquatic expertise in a variety of ways, including as a means of evading whites who tried to sexually abuse them and as a pathway to freedom. Enslaved men participated in “aquatic blood sports” such as shark and alligator fighting and raced canoes as ways of displaying bravery and masculine honor. In these and other ways, swimming “took on new meanings” under New World slavery, distinguishing slaves “from their poor-swimming enslavers” and “becoming . . . a form of cultural resilience and resistance” (p. 36). Dawson similarly stresses the “strikingly similar” designs of African and American dugout canoes as evidence of the “persistence of African canoe-making expertise” in the Americas in order to support his larger argument for cultural retention (pp. 102, 155).At the same time, the aquatic skills that Africans brought to the Americas and passed on to their children were central to the project of European colonization, with enslavers virtually everywhere putting Africans to work as underwater divers, salvagers of shipwrecks, and makers of canoes used to transport plantation produce. Dawson devotes considerable attention to the dangerous and difficult work of divers, who “pried concessions from enslavers, exchanging prowess for semi-independent lives of privileged exploitation” (p. 85). From the Pearl Coast of South America—which “probably generated more wealth than anywhere else in the Americas” before the discovery of silver in what is now Peru—to maritime colonies such as Bermuda and the Bahamas, which relied not on plantation agriculture but on salvaging shipwrecks, enslaved divers' labor enriched colonizers (p. 72). Europeans relied on African maritime expertise along Africa's Atlantic coast, too—most notably the canoeists who transported goods and captives between European sailing ships and African shores.Overall, Undercurrents of Power is an important contribution to the study of Atlantic slavery and the African diaspora that succeeds in illuminating the many ways that “slaves recreated and reimagined African traditions in New World waterscapes” (p. 251). Dawson's ability to synthesize a broad range of (mostly) English-language sources that document African practices of swimming, diving, boat making, and canoeing in West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America is impressive and should inspire scholars of Latin America to pay greater attention to the ways that waterscapes were central to the experiences of enslaved people throughout the Americas.