How much actual African culture is there in Afro-American culture ?

I wondered last evening :

What happened to get most of the Black people in the US to be shown as Afro-American as if it was one uniform culture ?

Is it that most of the African cultures were lost because of slavery taking people from many different places ? Or is there another reason ?
 
There is a term, "social death", which is used in sociology and the history of slavery and genocide.

While there are several aspects of both fields in which this term is relevant, in the context of your question, social death refers to the dehumanization and desocialization of slaves.

During the height of the Atlantic slave trade, slaves were first stripped of individuality by traders and owners--usually given new names, forced to wear specific clothes or none at all, sometimes branded or otherwise marked. Then, they were stripped of their previous socialization through such things as enforced Christianity (thus taking away or at least submerging previous religious practices) and the restriction of independent social structures, often to the point that slaves were denied any expression of individual cultural identity.

It must also be noted that whippings and other forms of torture went hand in hand with this, which has been demonstrated psychologically to contribute to a loss of identity.

These initial slaves then had children who were subjected to similar treatment and grew up in a subjugated society with little independent identity. And so on and so forth until emancipation.

What comes out of this is a newly-free community that has firstly been formed out of many different cultures across Africa, and secondly has been unable to preserve very many of their ancestral traditions and practices. So, in many ways, the African-American community--at least the slave-descended majority--was forced to start from scratch and the culture of their former owners.

With that being said, Pan-Africanism and movements like the Nation of Islam did make attempts to reignite their particular ideas of African culture in the community. Their accuracy and success is and was wildly variable and largely down to opinion (as many cultural things are).

Ultimately, though, the modern African-American community is far more defined by they and their ancestors' experiences in the Americas than what came before. This doesn't mean that African-Americans do not have a "claim to Africa", as it were. Just as with someone whose ancestors freely immigrated rather than being kidnapped and tortured, African-Americans have not lost the right to identify as they want.

But in terms of music, food, ideology, philosophy, etc., etc.? African-American culture is uniquely American in these regards; I would even go so far as to say said culture is an intrinsic and integral part of the wider American milieu. And it is ultimately because of the process of enslavement that this is so.
 
Ok, thank you for this very complete explaination, that is a very complex phenomenon. Now that I have specific leads to guide my researchs, I'll be able to search further :eek:
 
I wondered last evening :

What happened to get most of the Black people in the US to be shown as Afro-American as if it was one uniform culture ?

Is it that most of the African cultures were lost because of slavery taking people from many different places ? Or is there another reason ?

Slavery is surely the biggest reason, but also, it has been a very long time since their ancestors left Africa for the Americas. How many of us really preserve the culture of our ancestors from 300 years ago? It is still harder when you are in the minority.
 
One interesting thing to note is that black culture in the Caribbean and Brazil remained far more African because they were based around sugar plantations rather than cotton plantations.

Cotton plantations generally had ~40 slaves on each so it was viable to buy slaves from different ethnic groups and you only had 1-3 from each, forcing them to speak English to communicate and form social groups. This resulted in cultural death with not enough people to maintain the native language, rituals, music and traditions. Sugar plantations required several hundred slaves on each so this was unachievable, meaning a lot more African languages, religions and music was maintained.

Interestingly rice plantations, while smaller, required recruiting slaves with higher individual skill levels. This meant there were only a handful of ethnic groups, who had familiarity with rice picking, that could be used, and the ethnic breakup didn't happen. This is the reason for Gullah culture on the coast of the Carolinas, which is far more African than African Americans as a whole.
 
One interesting thing to note is that black culture in the Caribbean and Brazil remained far more African because they were based around sugar plantations rather than cotton plantations.

Cotton plantations generally had ~40 slaves on each so it was viable to buy slaves from different ethnic groups and you only had 1-3 from each, forcing them to speak English to communicate and form social groups. This resulted in cultural death with not enough people to maintain the native language, rituals, music and traditions. Sugar plantations required several hundred slaves on each so this was unachievable, meaning a lot more African languages, religions and music was maintained.

Also, the tropical sugar plantations were death traps due to the heat, diseases and more difficult manner of harvesting sugar compared to cotton. Slaves were regularly worked to death and new slaves constantly had to be imported. So throughout the slavery period, a large proportion of the slaves would have been born in Africa, whereas in the USA, most by 1860 were native born and had no direct experience living in Africa.

Then, following emancipation, on the sugar islands the ex-slaves were often the majority (sometimes 90 % or more) of the population so it was easier for them to maintain their culture.
 
As previously stated here, there is a lot going on, but the almost absolute disappearance of African culture within the black population of US slaves has to do with the complex history of slavery.

United States: Slaves were native, born, lived, married, died within the US. Protestantism meant a much more strict adherence to the Bible. Lack of free slave communities never kept some traditions specifically black alive.

Latin America: Slaves were foreign born, death rates were so high. Constant new arrivals kept traditions alive. Along with Catholicism and the syncretic faiths of Santeria, Voodoo and others created a new African-esque cultural tradition for Blacks in Latin America. Finally escaped slaves communities in the highlands and jungles are something the US never really saw (there were in Florida but Andrew Jackson took care of those)
 
The links between the West African kora and the banjo seem a clear continuance (altered as it was) of African traditions. It's hard to find an English-language review of a kora player without the reviewer noting the link between their music and American blues.
 
The links between the West African kora and the banjo seem a clear continuance (altered as it was) of African traditions. It's hard to find an English-language review of a kora player without the reviewer noting the link between their music and American blues.

And some linguists think that the word "banjo" may be derived from the Kimbundu language.
 
I've heard that there is some Celtic influence in modern day Afro-American culture, sine a lot of the indentured servants the early slaves would've worked with were Scottish and Irish (not trying to propagate some sort of Irish Slave myth), is that accurate or plausible?
 
not trying to propagate some sort of Irish Slave myth

As ... far as I know, there were some Irish slaves. Forced into simili slavery because of British oppression, or even selling themselves as slaves because they couldn't afford to be alive. It didn't work the same way as the Slave Trade in africa, but it also achieved the result of having Irish people forced in slavery. The fact of calling them "contractual servants" doesn't change the truth.

The only thing I don't know about is if such a situation reached the US or if what happened in the East Indies stayed in the East Indies. So the Irish slaves wouldn't necessarly be relevant to Afro-American culture concerning the US
 
As ... far as I know, there were some Irish slaves. Forced into simili slavery because of British oppression, or even selling themselves as slaves because they couldn't afford to be alive. It didn't work the same way as the Slave Trade in africa, but it also achieved the result of having Irish people forced in slavery. The fact of calling them "contractual servants" doesn't change the truth.

The only thing I don't know about is if such a situation reached the US or if what happened in the East Indies stayed in the East Indies. So the Irish slaves wouldn't necessarly be relevant to Afro-American culture concerning the US

I know there were Irish indentured servants and penal workers in America, but I don't think they were outright enslaved in the Thirteen Colonies or the United States.
 
I know there were Irish indentured servants and penal workers in America, but I don't think they were outright enslaved in the Thirteen Colonies or the United States.

They weren't legally slaves, no, but I would argue that indentured servitude was close to indistinguishable from debt bondage as practiced by many ancient and medieval cultures (and incidentally the most common form of modern slavery). The Irish (and other groups, but they're not directly relevant part of this discussion), forced into poverty by a long history of English exploitation*, essentially sold themselves to (again, often English) early plantation owners as "short-term slaves" in exchange for being brought to the New World.

While the brutality of the system certainly paled in comparison to chattel slavery, indentured servants were either not paid or paid very little, often subject to corporal punishment, and in some cases had actually been kidnapped and coerced into contracts (see Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait, 1971). It was certainly a system of slavery and is recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as such.

*Note that I'm not trying to take a nationalist viewpoint here, but it's undeniable that it was the pro-English aristocracy put in place and supported by the crown that brutalized Ireland.
 

CalBear

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As ... far as I know, there were some Irish slaves. Forced into simili slavery because of British oppression, or even selling themselves as slaves because they couldn't afford to be alive. It didn't work the same way as the Slave Trade in africa, but it also achieved the result of having Irish people forced in slavery. The fact of calling them "contractual servants" doesn't change the truth.

The only thing I don't know about is if such a situation reached the US or if what happened in the East Indies stayed in the East Indies. So the Irish slaves wouldn't necessarly be relevant to Afro-American culture concerning the US
Being an indentured servant is vastly different than being a chattel slave (i.e. livestock) or even a serf who is tied to the land.

It is not a good or even reasonable life during the period of indenture, which is why it is generally illegal today around the world, but there is a an ocean of difference between "work without pay for 7 years and in return you will receive passage across the Atlantic to North America and 40 acres of land (to use one well known example). To begin with your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are not literally livestock to the holder of your contract. Further, the contract is exactly that, a contract. At the conclusion you can walk away free and clear. There were considerable differences between the situation in North America proper to those that existed in "sugar islands" and in the somewhat later use of Indian laborers indentured across much of the British Empire.
 

It is vastly different from chattel slavery, but it remains a recognized form of slavery (which I'm not entirely sure you were disagreeing with), just like debt bondage. Having a contract doesn't make it any less a form of temporary enslavement, and even if it did, many were coerced or manipulated into signing said contracts. It also doesn't mean that there might not be Irish influence on plantation culture (which I believe @Mako-Tochan was responding to).

Regardless, your point is an important one to make. Indentured servitude is drastically different from chattel slavery.
 

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It is vastly different from chattel slavery, but it remains a recognized form of slavery (which I'm not entirely sure you were disagreeing with), just like debt bondage. Having a contract doesn't make it any less a form of temporary enslavement, and even if it did, many were coerced or manipulated into signing said contracts. It also doesn't mean that there might not be Irish influence on plantation culture (which I believe @Mako-Tochan was responding to).

Regardless, your point is an important one to make. Indentured servitude is drastically different from chattel slavery.
Today it is acknowledged as a form of slavery, and rightly so. Even the version of indentured/forced service imposed in the Indian continent in the 1830s was arguably limited duration slavery (much as was the case with "company towns" attached to places like coal mines where the debt to the company store could never be repaid on the wages being offered), especially since the British Empire started it hard on the heels of the abolition of chattel slavery.

The version most commonly seen in North America, however, while obviously unbalanced considering the labor/reward payoff, was closer to an apprenticeship system of the era, albeit without the usual training in a profession, and with far more adults as indentured servants. It is remarkable how much of the pre-ARW white population of North American arrived via the indentured servant system.
 
There are Afro-American influences in language (African-American Vernacular English has a lot of influences that can be traced back to Africa), cuisine (gumbo, jambalaya, etc.), music (banjo, etc.) and many other places, but only influences in most places with some exceptions like the Gullah culture.
 
K, so like this is gonna be a long post:

"The search for origins, is an act of speculation, an attempt to weave a fiction of origins and subgeneration. It is to render the implicit as explicit, and at times to imagine the whole from the part."
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1988: xxiv

It varies but I feel the question is kinda reductive. Africaneity cannot simply be quantified in a simple way because its entrenched within the social fabric of african descended communities of the United States in many subtle and not so subtle ways.

Taking a quote that speaks of double consciousness Dubois states
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn't bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

In Paul Gilroy's book of "The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness" he posits that the directionality and conditions of the not only the slave trade but the Euro-African interactions from the 15th century onwards in the pre and early colonial world shapes and shifts the way Africans seen and engaged not only amongst themselves but the the broader Atlantic Ocean littoral in the initial Charter Generation. As of the 20th century and now though

Examples: The "Gullah" are often perceived as being the most "African" population of the United States: Their dialect, food ways, cultural ways, lack of intermixture etc... But no one ever takes a moment to consider Louisiana even with its very large mixed race population retain a creole, food way, religious and cultural expression that is along similar veins of engaging and being.

We ignore the Seminole Freemen who themselves are an expansion of "Gullah", as well as other populations related to the Sea Islands and/or the American mainland of the late 18th and early 19th century: The Mericans of Trinidad and Tobago, the Macagos Americans of northern Mexico, the Samana Americans of the Dominican Republic
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But I'd like to ask another question: do we take time to recognize the subaltern world of American Blacks of the Mainland United States?

I do not necessarily agree in the acceptance in the narrative that "African" culture was merely destroyed. It like all processes of Creolization transmuted. Much like AAVE and its precursors that derived before their enslavement on the West African coast.

These characteristics that seem "washed down" were in fact consolidated due to external forces creating a new iteration of identity. To religion we have the formation of "Invisible Institutions"; foundational black congregations with a rather subversive worldview and mindset of a Christianity seeking to instill a sense of this subservience to that of syncretization with the forms of worship and paradigm much aligned with say Vodou, Palo, Santeria & Candomble. In fact after the 1812 War the American Black slaves brought to Trinidad ancestors of Mericans introduced Spiritual Baptist and Shango Baptist faiths giving a lens of religious practices Blacks did amongst themselves when whites were not looking.

No one who ever wrote about this sort of topic in the past will ever fully know what life was truly like for American blacks from the pre-1900s; be they white or the sanitizing eyes of elite American blacks all too anxious to show their parity to American Whites.

We also see in the United States and the Americas the dispersal of music, foods ways and religious practices that were absorbed into non-black communities are basically being washed of its origin rendering outside of the idea of what you might say is "African".

In closing I'm saying all this to mean that your search for hard set things overshadows the way in which the vast majority of the culture of enslaved American blacks persists into the present day or at least the post-reconstruction era and the great migration, it just evolves like culture in general.

Also i'll just add that even after 300-150 years on this goddamn rock and mixing with many different groups there are still people who maintain the identity of being Malagasy so yeah that adds some context to like just how the whole "Whites mixed up all the slaves so they wouldn't have an identity" quip folks make.
 
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There are Afro-American influences in language (African-American Vernacular English has a lot of influences that can be traced back to Africa), cuisine (gumbo, jambalaya, etc.), music (banjo, etc.) and many other places, but only influences in most places with some exceptions like the Gullah culture.

Jambalaya is from Occitan, not from Africa. It is technically, the Occitan rendering of Catalan Paella.

How does one distinguish vihuela from the ‘banjo’? It seems that a European origin of the banjo is more likely.

Gumbo though, is probably an unique Afro-Louisianais creation, as opposed to a direct origin from Western Africa.
 
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