Editorial: The African Diaspora
Henrique Cunha, Professor of Electrical Engineering
at the University of Ceara, Brazil, provides us with an insightful
analysis on African Technology in Colonial Brazil. He points out
that the contribution of Africans to the Brazilian economy and society
has been under-estimated. Numerous communities of Quilombos-of those
Africans who liberated themselves from Enslavement-assisted in the
process of Brazilian economy and industrialization over a two hundred
year period, according to Cunha.
Africans in Brazil contributed to the development
of technologies related to sugar production, gold and iron metallurgy
as well as building technology. Cunha argues that Brazil is an African
creation but because of a strong eurocentric intellectual tradition
embedded in a powerful racist ideological structure, there has been
a systematic marginalization of Africa-related fields of research
and a systematic reluctance to give Africans credit for their accomplishments
In her discussion, Katherine Harris shifts the focus
to Africans in the United States and the migration patterns associated
with the African continent over time. Voluntary and involuntary
migration trends are identified as they relate to the evolution
of African diasporas around the world. Harris is not only concerned
with the historical context of these various migration movements
but also some of the discussions and courses that have emerged in
the American Academy. Conceptualizations about Atlantic History,
the Black Atlantic, the Atlantic Slave Trade and other such intellectual
formulations have undoubtedly dominated the discourse. An important
aspect of the debate has centered around quantification. Harris
informs us of the DuBois database and the statistical package for
Social Studies Program.
The kind of issues raised by Professor Cunha have
been overlooked by a
generation of Africanist scholars. In-depth studies
on the impact of African technology on various sectors of the North
American economy are difficult to come by, for example. Emphasis
on the Atlantic Slave Trade, while instructive and of major intellectual
value to our knowledge and understanding of the African diaspora,
should now be linked to the study of Human Rights and various holocausts
in the international system. The on-going Mazrui-Gates debate over
the PBS production, Wonders of the African World, should indeed
lead to more in-depth studies of African Civilization in its various
Reflections on Haile Gerima's Sankofa and Oprah Winfrey's
Beloved have been included in this issue, thus facilitating the
intersection of film studies and African diaspora scholarship. We
thank all the contributors to this issue of AfricaUpdate.
Gloria Emeagwali, Chief Editor, AfricaUpdate
Return to Table of Contents
African Technology in Colonial Brazil
By Henrique Cunha, Jr.; Professor of Electrical Engineering,
University of Ceara, Brazil
African contribution towards the development of Brazilian
civilization still continues to be underestimated. It is almost
always reduced to contributions related to music, religion, capoeira,
eating habits, part of the national folklore and some words incorporated
into the national vocabulary. Within the interpretive eurocentric
schemes of Brazilian history and culture, there is a distinct separation
between physical and intellectual production, the first being totally
associated with the African and the second with the European. Despite
the large amount of tasks performed by Quilombos (communities of
enslaved Africans who liberated themselves) in-depth and global
study of these communities within the areas of Brazilian politics,
sociology, economics, history, philosophy and thought, is lacking.
Quilombos, communities of Africans who had escaped the slave system,
because of their large numbers, their long periods of existence,
their material, political and social organization are indeed of
great significance. They are important especially for the pressures
and constant threat they represented to the institution of slavery.
The Quilombos facilitated the transition from slavery to capitalism,
with its introduction of modernization and industrialization. The
Quilombos have existed for 200 years and continue to exist at the
present moment in significant numbers, retaining principles of political,
economic and social organization.
The main purpose of this article is to suggest interpretive
notions with respect to the intellectual contribution of enslaved
Africans with reference to African technologies used or developed
during the historical development of the country. The technologies
discussed here are those referring to technical expertise and production
in the Quilombos since there are few studies on the technological
and economic features of the Quilombos. Archeological and anthropological
studies, still need to be done in this area. The technologies commented
on here are those used in sugar production, gold production, iron
production and construction. We also make some introductory comments
on the status quo of African and Afro-Brazilian studies.
Brazil and African History
Brazil is a country with strong eurocentric intellectual
and educational traditions, mixed with a powerful racist ideological
structure. The participation of Afro-Brazilians students, university
workers and researchers in the universities either as students or
university workers and researchers is very little, perhaps not beyond
2% of the university population. Courses and seminars introducing
African history, geography and sociology from the past and the present,
at all levels of education (primary, secondary, university - graduate
or extension courses) are few. Of the 400 municipalities in existence
in the country only 5 produced projects introducing ompulsory courses
of this nature in the basic teaching syllabus. Only 3 states showed
any interest in the pedagogical updating of basic teacher training
so that teachers could have some fundamental information for the
task. To date, there are no programs at the undergraduate level
in African history in many leading Brazilian universities. Only
a few graduate programs have any academic activity related to Africa.
The same can be said for Brazilian studies or studies on race relations.
This picture gives an idea of the difficulties involved in introducing
new ways of focusing on the African contribution to the historical
and cultural formation of Brazil.
African Technology in Brazil
The Africans who were enslaved in Brazil continue
to be viewed as no more than manual laborers. Little or no emphasis
is placed on the intellectual and cultural baggage brought by the
African. However, emphasis on the African cultural and intellectual
participation points to new issue. Perhaps the most important issue
has to do with the intellectual production of the enslaved African
people. The second relates to the needs of the slave system. The
third issue is that Brazilian colonial economy perhaps would not
have survived without African technological knowledge. The fourth
matter is that colonial Brazil is an African cultural creation and
not a European one. It is a country deeply consolidated in Africa
and not in Europe. These questions will be taken up again in the
conclusions since I now propose to discuss the technologies themselves.
Science and Technology
Since the Industrial Revolution, both science and
technology in Western societies became formalized, not only in the
preparation of the scientist (or technologist), but also in the
procedures used to perform technological and scientific work. With
the technological revolutions, the links between science and technology
were greatly strengthened, with each depending heavily on the other.
During this century, technology, as well as science has gained great
public recognition. At the same time, during the same the period,
starting from the seventeenth century, Europe created the context
and rationale for African enslavement and colonization. The justification
of enslavement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were generally
racist. Anthropology was put in charge of reducing other intellectual
and scientific formalisms, to "primitivism." Scientific
and intellectual thought may well be defined as any form of systemization
of human knowledge which produces results in the context of need.
Within this line of thought, the recreations of African experience
in Brazil are the results of intellectual processes and are the
scientific or technological result of their systemization.
Formation of Colonial Brazil
Two cycles of economic production are of paramount
importance in the history of colonial Brazil: the sugar cane cycle
and the gold cycle. In both cycles, the building of houses, during
the gold period, in cities like Sao Joao Del Rey, Parati and even
Salvador, Bahia were markedly influenced by African technological
processes. Constructions made of various types of beaten earth and
tiles of clay or "adobe" were common in various African
regions. These constituted the basic building materials or this
period. Descriptions of the organization or construction work in
many places point to the existence of a black "master of construction,"
either an African or someone of African descent. Brazil produced
a rich religious architecture. This architecture retains fundamental
differences in the materials used when compared with the European
methods. The use of wood and the art of wood sculpturing takes us
back to the African regions known today as Angola, Zaire and the
Congo. The knowledge of producing sugar originally belonged to the
East Indians and later the Arabs. This knowledge was taken to Portugal
and the Azores and later Brazil. Nevertheless the processes had
African participation in its development. As regards the production
of sugar in Brazil, the technological innovations of grinding equipment
and wood screws were derived from African know-how. The making of
tools and pieces of iron in colonial Brazil was
also supervised by Africans. The first products of
the iron industry in Brazil occurred in the seventeenth century
and all the masters of production were African. Iron was known and
produced in the entire African continent in periods prior to the
twelfth century, during the Christian era. Gold is a traditional
product of at least two widely known regions of Africa. These are
regions of West Africa at the source of the Niger River where civilizations
like Mali and Songhai emerged
and also the Zambezi River in the region dominated
by the Monomotapa Kingdoms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
This empire was known for its large-scale export of the precious
metal through the port of Sofala in present day Mozambique. The
process of gold extraction developed in Brazil was African . The
extraction of gold in Brazil led to the search for Africans from
specific regions of the continent.
The technologies discussed , as well as other cultural,
social and political realizations, were adapted and modified for
the new realities and demands of Brazilian colonial life. They can
be seen as the product of intellectual, scientific and technological
processes and were vital in the historical formation of Brazil.
If seen in this way, they offer a new perspective on enslaved workers.
We must recognize that the skill, expertise and knowledge of the
fundamental for the viability of colonial Brazil.
Return to Table of Contents
African Indigenous Science and Technology Site is
African Indigenous Science and Technology
has received a UNESCO award for being one of the top fifty of African
Return to Table of Contents
African Diaspora, Atlantic History and the TransAtlantic
by Katherine Harris, Central Connecticut State University
Beneath the headlines on Structural Adjustment Programs,
civil wars or South Africa's Government of National Unity, lies
another part of the discourse on African Studies. Several themes
are sparking inquiries on Africa as the millenium comes to a close.
These areas of inquiry the African Diaspora, Atlantic History and
the TransAtlantic slave trade Äare not new. But new scholarship
and technologies are igniting dialogues.
Columbia University's Colin Palmer probed the idea
of an African Diaspora in "Defining and Studying the Modern
African Diaspora." It was the lead article in an issue of Perspectives,
the American Historical Association's newsletter. The article was
a prelude to the Association's 1998 annual meeting featuring the
theme of migration.
Palmer pointed out that the discussion of Diasporan
History is not confined to people of African descent. He identified
Asian migrations and Jewish migrations and their formation of diasporan
communities around the globe. He listed Muslim migrations and the
diasporan communities they transplanted in the North, South and
Caribbean/West Indies regions of the Americas, and other parts of
Asia and Europe. Palmer accented the study of the African diaspora
and its complexity. It does not represent a single movement. He
identified five "African diasporic streams." The first
African diaspora began as a result of the movement within and outside
Africa about 100,000 years ago. Palmer suggested that this"African
exodus" was unique from later movements and it should not be
seen as a phase of later diasporic processes.
He identified a second major diasporic stream dating
it around 3,000 B.C.E. (Before the Christian Era). It was characterized
by the migrations of African communities in present day Nigeria
and Cameroon into other parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean.
The third stream was a trading diaspora. It involved
the movement of traders, merchants, captives and soldiers according
to Palmer. This third stream crossed geographical regions within
Europe, the Mediterranean, and areas of Western Asia, commonly called
the Middle East.
This resulted in African diasporic communities in
India, Portugal, Spain, the city states of Florence, Milan and other
areas of contemporary Italy, parts of Europe, western Asia and eastern
Asia. This "premodern African diaspora" predated Christopher
Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic Palmer concluded.
A fourth African diasporic wave intersects the Atlantic
trade in captured Africans destined for the Americas. Beginning
in the 15th century, this trade involved the forced migration of
an estimated 11 to 12 million Africans who worked as slaves in Europe
and the Americas according to Palmer.
The fifth diasporic phase during the 19th century
began after the end of slavery in the Americas
and continues currently. It involves the movement
of people of African descent and their relocation in a number of
societies. Palmer offered the example of Jamaicans moving to England.
He rejected the idea that this fifth diasporic formation involved
a sustained desire on the part of people of African descent to emigrate
Palmer recognized, however, that thousands of freed
Africans left diasporan
communities. They made the transAtlantic voyage for
Liberia and Sierra Leone. Such individuals as Martin Delany, Henry
Highland Garnet, Henry McNeal Turner, African American missionaries
like Althea Brown Edmiston, Reverend and Mrs. Sheppardson (who worked
in Congo), or Marcus Garvey and the Rastafarians supported the goal
of emigration. African Americans also traveled to late 19th-century
South Africa to reconstruct their lives in the ancestral continent.
But the modern diaspora, wrote Palmer, consists chiefly
of millions of people of African descent living in various societies.
He added that they are united by a past rooted, in part but not
exclusively in "racial oppression" and their resistance
to it. They share a common ancestral continental connection, emotional
bonds, similar problems of reconstructing their lives despite varied
cultural and political divisions.
Palmer posed the question: How should these diasporic
streams be studied? Though he stated that the inquiry should begin
with Africa, he urged rigorous scholarship on diasporan African
communities in the Americas and around the globe. Assumptions should
be tested regarding ethnicity, loss of language, cultural values,
and collective memory. Several other considerations might be added.
African diasporan communities are indelibly connected
to slavery and the slave trade. Discussion of a slave trade raises
enormous controversy too as to why it began, its function, and the
distinctions between prisoners-of-war, people as spoils of war and
property. Why did the TransAtlantic slave trade from Africa to the
Americas leave such a tortured paradoxical legacy linking
Atlantic relations between Europe, Africa and the
The fourth diasporic stream, however, is critical.
Autobiographies written during that era provide
personal insights and might be used more extensively.
A brief list includes Oluadah Equiano, Venture
Smith, Nancy Prince, Harriet Jacobs or Occramer Marycoo.
Scholars might utilize slave narratives and autobiograpical works
in French, Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish.
Some courses do incorporate regional treatment of
African Diaspora. This is another important aspect of understanding
that these communities exist not only in the United States, but
in Canada, Mexico,
Caribbean/ West Indies, Central and South America.
Return to Table of Contents
Conferences and Courses
The African Studies Committee at Central Connecticut
State University was a co-sponsor of the conference "Bridging
the disjuncture between Continental and Diasporan Africans,"
November 1998. The conference featured presentations on esthetics,
diasporan maroon societies, health and contemporary economic and
cultural links between Africa and the Diaspora.
Advertisements for positions to teach the Diaspora
appear in various journals. A position on The African diaspora,comparative
slavery and the African Diaspora, History at Indiana University
was advertised in (AHA, November 1997, pp. 58, 59). Another position
on Modern Africa also stressed developing field in African Diaspora
(New York University position advertised in AHA, September, 1998,
Return to Table of Contents
In a working paper, Harvard University's Professor
Bernard Bailyn,"The Idea of Atlantic History," provided
the context for the concept of "Atlanticization." He explored
the colonial period of Anglo-American history, the "new Atlantic
community," the "Atlantic system" the Atlantic Charter.
These updated versions of the concept "Atlanticization"
emerged as an oppositional camp first to challenge fascist governments
of World War II and to challenge the former Soviet Union and its
satellite governments. Bailyn is director of International Seminar
on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1800.
Scrutiny of Atlantic History reveals variations in
Spanish imperial rule with its bureaucracy of governors, judges,
clerics required to return to Spain and a colonial elite which limited
access to political power of American-born Creole elites (Bernard
Bailyn, "The Idea of Atlantic History," p. 17.) Spain's
colonial holdings were Considerable and the cultural linguistic
presence has been lasting in the Americas. Surveys of the Dutch,
Portuguese, French, Danish or other colonial empires also provide
insights on distinctive and similar traits.
Books on Atlantic History tend to identify several
themes in Atlantic History such as the migration of European population
and its ecological consequences. Atlantic History is connected to
related topics of the modern world system. The era covers the chronological
period intersecting the Age of European Exploration of the Americas
and the TransAtlantic slave trade and forces an examination of conceptual
models of the "core-periphery" relationship involving
Europe, Africa and the Americas.
Courses taught in various colleges and universities
on Atlantic History include the following examples. "Maritime
History & Practical Seamanship," with fourteen days aboard
ship on the ship Bounty sailing from Boston Harbor, Summer 1999,
is a survey of sea power in the Atlantic World and beyond during
the early modern period in Europe and the Americas. "Reform
and Revolution in the Atlantic World," "History of the
Atlantic World, 1450-1800," "The Atlantic World in the
Age of Empire," "Spain and the Atlantic World," and
"Slavery and the Atlantic Basin" provide an idea of the
multifaceted approach to studying Atlantic History.
Atlantic History has a number of dimensions, which
connect to Diasporan History. Despite the complexity and violence
of the slave system, African and European families became intertwined.
Africans lost their family names, in most instances. New names and
migratory patterns were connected to European movement throughout
the Atlantic World.
What about uncoerced African migrations? Donald Wood,
"Kru Migration to the West Indies," Journal of Caribbean
Studies, pp. 266-282. Kru live between River Cess and Grand Cestos
on the coast of Ducoh, contemporary Liberia. The Kru had not been
enslaved and made the journey as authentic volunteers to the Caribbean
1840s and 1860s and worked on sugar estates, joined British navy
merged with African diasporic communities in British Guiana, Trinidad
and Jamaica. The US Navy also lists Kru seamen on registry and paid
After the British passage of the General Emancipation
Act of 1833, ending slavery, Africans arrived in the Caribbean/West
Indies region as indentures. They became a part of the post-slavery
labor system which Maureen Warner-Lewis portrays in
Guinea's Other Suns, The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture (The
Majority Press, Dover, MA, 1991).
The Atlantic experience of Africans also intersected
the eighteenth century revolutions during the Enlightenment. In
Senegal Africans in Rufusque, Goree, Dakar and Saint Louis sent
cahiers to France during the 1789 French Revolution. In 1848, Senegal
sent delegates to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris.
Atlantic societies in Africa such as Freetown, Sierra
Leone and Monrovia, and Liberia were also influenced by the political
republican liberalism of the era, but the preence of millions of
slaves in the African Diaspora was a constant reminder that liberty
was compromised across the Atlantic.
Atlantic History, however, poses a number of issues
in understanding the Diasporan communities which emerged along the
Atlantic seaboard in North and South America. Palmer questions the
notion of "a Black Atlantic," a term used by Paul Gilroy
as a synonym for the modern African diaspora. One problem is that
the term excludes the Indian Ocean and part of the Atlantic basin.
Palmer wondered whether the term conflates and homogenizes the unique
experiences of persons of African descent in Canada, the United
States, Brazil, and other parts of South America or the Caribbean.
He asked, is there an oppositional White Atlantic? Is the term "Africology"
useful as an analytical tool or does it imply "a kind of racial
or ethnic essentialism which should be questioned (Palmer, "Defining
and Studying the Modern African Diaspora," pp. 25)?
Clearly explorations of Atlantic History and the African
Diaspora have much to reveal about the
sequence of events which produced both. The connection
between these two areas of inquiry, however, is the TransAtlantic
Return to Table of Contents
The TransAtlantic Slave Trade
Scholars analyzed this topic in high tech fashion
at Harvard University April 25-26, 1998. Using a "Statistical
Package for Social Sciences," David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt,
David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein compiled a partial record
of TransAtlantic slave trade voyages. Between 1527 and 1866, perhaps
37,000 ships plied the slave trade between Africa and the Americas.
For the nineteenth century, the fifteen "Reports of the Directors
of the African Institution," published in London from 1811
to 1826, contain a variety of slave voyage data during the initial
period when British diplomats were negotiating to end the transtlantic
Some analysts have estimated that slave traders launched
as many as 54,000 voyages. However, the DuBois Research Institute
has data for 27,233 transatlantic slave voyages, 1527-1867, on the
CD-ROM disk. The data set includes 22 maps.
Records list tonnage and ownership of ships, trading
patterns, crew mortality, duration of voyages, age, gender, mortality,
duration of voyages, age, gender, mortality and ethnicity of African
captives.African agency is uncovered. For example, the Database
lists captives who died during revolt in the Middle Passage. Dramas
abound: an insurrection on the British slave ship Thomas left a
small crew to steer the ship back to Africa; the freeing of hundreds
of Angolan children from between the 21" inch decks of a ship
bound for Brazil; 600 African captives died in a gunpowder explosion
on the British ship Pallas off the coast of Africa.
The DuBois database contains information on Job ben
Suleiman, transported from Futa Jallon on the slave ship Arabella
by Captain Pike; Samuel Crowthers, taken from the Yoruba kingdom
of Oyo on the Esperanza Feliz; and a young girl child
from Senegambia transported July 1761 on Phillis by ship captain
Peter Gwynn. The child's African name was not recorded. But her
purchaser, John Wheatley named her after the slave ship. History
knows her as Phillis Wheatley, the African muse.
Eltis, Richardson, Behrendt and Klein provide imputed
variables (p.15). They write that "The imputed variables are
derived directly from the data set, but are rarely compilations
of raw data." The most apparent of the imputed variables are
geographic. The 372 locations where slave ships were built, registered,
or cleared for a slaving voyage are organized into just the fifty
places or regions shown on the accompanying maps.
The numbers of captured Africans is in dispute. Paul
Lovejoy's "The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,"
Journal of African History, 23 (1982), pp. 473-501, estimated that
"367,000 slaves left Africa between 1450 and 1600," pp.
African sources reveal a dimension of the trade. Abdoulaye
Ly's La Compagnie du Senegal (Paris, 1993) lists 21 ships going
to Senegal and concludes that 16 of these were slave ships; 8 brought
African captives to France and 8 took African captives to the French
West Indies; it is only possible to identify 7 of the ships.
Joseph Inikori, based at the University of Rochester
in New York, has recently given "a preferred global figure
of 15.4 million for the European slave trade." Adjusting for
those carried to the offshore island and Europe, this implies 14.9
million were destined for the Americas (see Cahiers d'Itudes Africaines,
32 (1993), 686).
The Omohundro Institute of Early American History
and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia, hosted a sequel to the April
1998 workshop. The conference entitled, "Transatlantic Slaving
and the African Diaspora: Using the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Dataset
of Slaving Voyages," September 11-13, 1998, took place Williamsburg.
Conference Planners anticipated 280 participants. Seven hundred
Presenters read 47 papers. They offered insights on
the correlations of ethnicity. For example, "Ethnicity among
Africans in North America" by Lorena S. Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation. Gwendolyn M. Hall, Professor of History Emerita, Rutgers
University, offered a paper on "Ethnic Selectivity in the African
Slave Trade to Louisiana: Comparing the DuBois Database with the
Louisiana Slave Database." African scholars explored issues
of demography and politics: ElisJe Soumonni, Universit‚ Nationale
du Benin, Contonou, presented "Slave Trade and African Society,
Politics, and Culture." Joseph Inikori, University of Rochester,
read his work on "The Known, the Unknown and the Unknowable:
Evidence and Evaluation of Evidence in the Measurement of the Transatlantic
A panel on Resistance and Memory chaired by Robert
L. Hall of Northeastern University included the following papers:
David Richardson, University of Hull,
"African Agency and Resistance on the African
Coast" and Jane G. Landers, Vanderbilt University, "African
Resistance in the Spanish Caribbean."
Key questions exist on public access to research.
The Statistical Package for Social Sciences program CD-ROM of the
DuBois Research Institute Database has been released. The
CD-ROM works best with a browser such as Netscape.
While this CD-ROM works on PCs, it has not been formatted
to run on MacIntosh. Since many secondary schools have MacIntosh,
this may affect accessibility of some students to the CD-ROM. Access
to the Database by African scholars is also in question.
Other issues regarding a timetable for the end of
slavery affect the accuracy of data on the TransAtlantic Slave trade.
Slavery ended in Puerto Rico in 1873; in Cuba in 1884 and in Brazil
in 1886. If the slave trade continued despite the British ban and
the US ban by 1808, what might more thorough investigation reveal
regarding the numbers of voyages and captured Africans transported
to the Americas?
Return to Table of Contents
"Selected Internet Sources of Information on
Africa and the African
Diaspora" from the New York Public Library's
Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture. http://gopher.nypl.org/research/sc/
Colin Palmer, "Defining and Studying the Modern
Perspectives, the American Historical Association
Newsletter, vol. 36,
no. 6, September 1998.
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of
the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992).
Marvin Lunenfeld, 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter-Sources
and Interpretations (D. C. Heath, p. 42).
Barbara Solow, ed., Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic
System (New York, 1991).
Atlantic History Seminar Website http://www.fas.harvard.edu/atlantic/index.html.
The TransAtlantic Slave Trade
SPSS Database prepared by David Eltis, David Richardson,
Stephen D. Behrendt, Herbert S. Klein Jeffrey Bolster, and Black
(Harvard University, 1997).
Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade (Simon and Schuster,
Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America
(New York and London: Routledge, 1997
Keith R. Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman
World, 140 B.C.-70 B.C. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1989).
W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave
Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870 (Schocken Books,
Inc., New York,
Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation
Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
David B. Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds, More
than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana UP, 1996).
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism
and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730-1830 (Madison, WI, University of
Waldemar Westergaard, The Danish West Indies Under
Company Rule (1671-1754) (New York, 1917).
Enriqueya Vila Vilar, Hispano-America y el Comercio
de Esclavos (Sevilla, 1977), Cuadro 2, 1, Cartagena, 1599-1600,
which arrived at Cartegena from 2 July 1599 to 24
Jean Mettas, Repertoire des expeditions negriPres
fran‡aises au XVIIe siPcle, eds. Serge and Michele Daget,
2 vols. (Paris, 1978,
1984), Vol. I.
Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island
and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807 (Philadelphia, 1981).
David Richardson, ed, Bristol, Africa, and the Eighteenth-Century
Slave Trade to America (Bristol, 1991)
Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade,
1600-1815 (London, 1990).
Lloyd's List, 3 January 1769; "The Diary of Antera
Duke," in Daryll Forde, ed., Efik Traders of Old Calabar (London,
Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census
Herbert S. Klein, Angola Slave Trade in the Eighteenth
Century, 1723-1771 ; Slave Trade to Havana, Cuba, 1790-1820; Slave
Trade to Rio de Janeiro, 1825-1830.
David D. Moore, Site Report: Historical & Archealogical
Investigations of the Shipwreck "Henrietta Marie" (Key
West, Florida, 1997).
David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson
and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. A Database
on CD-ROM for use
on any DOS, Windows, or OS/2 computer, on MacIntosh,
Apple CD-ROM drive with ISO 9660 File Access System extension, or
other ISO. Use of Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer
recommended (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
The Atlantic Slave Trade: Demographic Simulation http://www.whc.neu.edu/simulation/afrintro.html
Return to Table of Contents
by Haines Brown, CCSU History Department, emeritus
It is increasingly evident that the African continent
will leap past the costly struggle to upgrade its legacy means of
communication, largely based on wire, to embrace the wirelesstransmission
of both voice and data. It looks like it will bypass fiber altogether.
There are 14 million copper phone lines serving 800
million Africans. The U.S., in contrast, has 169 million lines for
a quarter of that population. Because under neoliberal conditions
capitalist investment must always maximize its return, a highly
developed infrastructure, such as that of the West, discourages
the adoption of new technologies unless there is a path leading
from an existing infrastructure. Without as much capital tied up
in infrastructure, and because of globalization Africa can start
out with the newest technologies.
This is why Africa is enjoying new investments in
satellite and cellular wireless communications that combine voice
calls and data networking. Major telcoms are already building big
wireless network projects in many developing parts of the world,
such as Siemens in China, Lucent in Peru, Nortel and others in the
Balkans, Indonesia and Ethiopia.
It would be wrong to identify such technologies solely
with Internet, for the immediate use is more for control systems
and remote alarms, and for vertical applications such as banking,
ATMs, point of sale terminals, and inventory tracking. However,
where per capita income is too low to support services such as these
found in the more developed world, leverage comes from petty enterprises
such as the enormously popular local telephone centers. These have
often expended to provide computer access to Internet. Thus 10%
of phone lines in West Africa are used by telecenters, and there
are projects afoot in Southern Africa, with local initiatives for
distance learning and medical teleconferencing. It is for these
reasons that people are eying Nigeria as having the greatest potential.
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Sankofa vs. Beloved
By Nancy Otter, student of African History through
Like Moses, Haile Gerima and Toni Morrison understand
that freedom means more than getting the people out of slavery.
For Moses and his people this meant homeless wandering (perhaps
literally, certainly spiritually) for forty yearsÄlong enough
(in those days) for the generation born in slavery to die. It included
many harsh tests of faith, and lessons in Mosaic law and morality.
It also allowed forty opportunities to practice the Passover injunction,
part of the price of liberation, that each generation annually re-enact
the people's history of enslavement as if we had been there ourselves,
so that we never forget.
Gerima begins Sankofa with a similar demand as the
voice over the drumming calls upon the spirits of "stolen Africans"
to claim their stories of both suffering and rebellion. Gerima sends
African American model Mona on a spiritual journey, not across the
desert, but through time, to a pre-emancipation Louisiana plantation,
like Moses, asking Mona to experience her people's history as if
she were there.
On her journey, Mona becomes the enslaved Shola,working
in the plantation owner's house. She loves and admires Nunu and
Shango, an African and a West Indian, who do know another way. Through
these two characters especially, Gerima demonstrates that connection
to African roots provides both concrete skills and spiritual/intellectual
strength crucial to resistance. Nunu brings language, stories, powers
and rituals from her pre-enslavement life in Africa. Shango is a
healer and a herbalist with a profound understanding of the value,
and the price of freedom. Connection to African roots also shows
Shola/Mona an alternative community as Shango and Nunu introduce
her to the free people who live in the hills and whose lives are
focused on the needs and traditions of Africans in America, rather
than the needs and culture of the plantation owners.
In addition, Gerima reminds us over and over of the
power of the mother/child connection, and the horror and grief that
ensue when that connection is severed or corrupted. He reminds us
that Christian European culture also acknowledges this vital link
through the image of the Virgin Mary and child Jesus which haunts
Nunu's corrupted son, Joe. Gerima seems to be calling people to
connect not only literally to their mothers, but also to Mother
Africa, as he emphasizes the power of this dyad.
Through Nunu and Shango, Shola/Mona begins to acknowledge
the injustice of her own situation, and to see the possibility of
change. For her, and for Gerima, the wellspring of such understanding
is the establishment of a link to her ancestral home. Gerima drives
home the dual message that connection to the past illuminates the
present, and that failure to make such a connection makes us hapless
victims of it (as Shola is victimized by the plantation owner, and
Mona by the photograpaher).
Toni Morrison's Beloved also addresses issues of enslavement
and liberation, and of the past and its power in our lives. The
central issue of the novel is the formerly enslaved Sethe's determination
to kill her own children rather than see them returned to enslavement.
Within this story, Morrison weaves three powerful
themes. The first of these is that it is the fact of enslavement,
not just its specific conditions, however brutal or innocuous they
may be, that makes it abhorrent. It is Sethe's mother-in-law, Baby
Suggs, who brings this point home as she reviews her life from her
deathbed. She recalls that denial of self, of dignity, of self-determination,
and the inability even to name oneself or one's children were the
constants, and the deepest insults of enslavement. These are its
basic truths. Brutality is only one of the ways these insults are
Baby Suggs also voices Morrison's second theme. In
her forest temple, Baby Suggs reconnects the spiritually wounded
of her community to their own human beauty and preciousness, to
their collective strength, and to the natural world. These are all
connections which the daily experiences of enslavement worked to
sever. Baby Suggs reminds her congregation that isolation and self-hatred
are toxic residues of the past, which must be purged before the
people will be truly free.
In contrast to Sankofa, however, in which connection
to the past brings clarity and liberation, the past in Beloved threatens
to smother Sethe and drive everyone she loves away from her. It
comes to her first in the form of the ghost, and then a physical
incarnation of Beloved, the one baby Sethe succeeded in killing
when the slavers came to recapture her. The ghost incarnate gradually
takes charge of Sethe's every moment, thought and gesture, driving
away her surviving sons, her lover, her sanity.
Only Sethe's youngest daughter, Denver, remains, and
it is through her that the final theme of the story is exposed.
In these two stories, then, the past is much more than what-happened-when.
It is a dynamic force whose power over us must be recognized as
well as controlled. It demands homage as the maker of the ground
on which we walk today, but we must take care not to let it rule
our present and devour our future.
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