Diasporic Africa

A Reader

Michael A. Gomez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814732779
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

Diasporic Africa presents the most recent research on the history and experiences of people of African descent outside of the African continent. By incorporating Europe and North Africa as well as North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this reader shifts the discourse on the African diaspora away from its focus solely on the Americas, underscoring the fact that much of the movement of people of African descent took place in Old World contexts. This broader view allows for a more comprehensive approach to the study of the African diaspora.

The volume provides an overview of African diaspora studies and features as a major concern a rigorous interrogation of "identity." Other primary themes include contributions to western civilization, from religion, music, and sports to agricultural production and medicine, as well as the way in which our understanding of the African diaspora fits into larger studies of transnational phenomena.

Part I
Transformations of the Cultural and
Technological during Slavery

This section establishes the connection between Africa and its diaspora as demonstrable and vital. Entirely written by historians, these three chapters explore such correspondences during slavery in the Americas. They interrogate the movement of technology, culture, and social organization from Africa to the Americas through the nineteenth century, breaking new ground with regard to ongoing debates about the specifics of such transfers.

Fred Knight’s discussion of textile-working as an African importation helps to organize the framework of the argument. He illustrates that the transfer and adaptation of African technology in the New World was one necessarily accompanied by an attendant social organization that would also undergo transition. He avers that indigo production in both South Carolina and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century was the result of a West African agricultural “knowledge system.” This especially involved the labor of women and included and was related to the cultivation of rice. Far from presenting uncomplicated “continuities,” Knight is careful to detail those multiple factors that also help to explain the rise of indigo in South Carolina. He underscores that straightforward, pristine transmissions of any kind probably exist only as an imaginary construct. We are indebted to Knight for his patient discussion of the processes by which dye was produced in West Africa, an explanation informed by substantial primary documentation. We also learn that indigo production in the Caribbean, particularly in Barbados and Jamaica, rose and fell in conjunction with global economic currents generated not only by the economies of sugarcane production, but also the costs of indigo cultivation in India. Africans enslaved in Jamaica would add to their own expertise in indigo production processing techniques borrowed from the Indian experience, a “synthesis” that finds its way to South Carolina, where it resulted in the rise of a unique planter culture. Knight’s contribution spans a considerable portion of the Atlantic world and is in fact global in its reach. As such, it is an important augmentation of the research undertaken by such scholars as Judith Carney (Black Rice: the African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U. Press, 2001]) and Peter Wood (Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion [New York: W. W. Norton, 1974]). There is strong inference here that evidence of additional examples of African technology transfer during the period of the slave trade is on the horizon.

From North America the focus shifts to more southerly terrain, where João Reis provides another example of how far the literature regarding the African connection to the diaspora has traveled beyond uncomplicated notions of retention and continuity. The technological considerations of Knight’s anglophone world connect with the kinetically and musically infused politics of lusophonic (Portuguese-speaking) space, where Reis focuses on Bahia (in Brazil). He follows the development of drumming and dance (batuque) in the first half of the nineteenth century, as it evolved from a form of black revelry celebrated along ethnic lines earlier to a much more ethnically homogeneous expression closely associated with slave insurrection. Along the way, Reis follows the shifts and turns in collective identities and relations between African-based groups, both enslaved and free, and African and crioulo (Brazilian-born). He presents a fascinating window into a decades-spanning debate between political and military leaders over the appropriate response to black revelry. For Reis, the issue is far from identifying the African origins of this or that cultural expression, but rather monitoring its unfolding and permutations for clues into the ways in which power and privilege were negotiated both within African-derived groups and between them and the slaveholding/supporting authorities. While always arguably a form of cultural rebellion, the batuque was certainly seen as precursory to sedition by the 1830s, a development concomitant with a series of Muslim- and Yoruba-based revolts. Stated differently, this essentially consistent cultural form acquired ever-changing investments of meaning for both the African-derived and authority-wielding communities with the passing of time, consistent with both the shifting demographics of the former and the evolving preoccupations of the latter.

The section ends with a chapter that also centers on Brazil, but extends its analysis to other parts of the Atlantic in ways that reinforce the observations not only of Reis, but also Knight and Archer (discussed in the next section). In fundamental ways, both Reis and Sweet provide rich insight into the cultural heritage of Brazil, but in his work, Sweet is concerned not so much with emendations in culture as he is with its erasure. More specifically, Sweet is concerned with calundu, a Central African practice involving spirit possession for purposes of divination. His study is an example of how certain African cultural forms have been decoupled from contexts of initial significance and otherwise (and subsequently) appropriated. Sweet is concerned with creolization as process, beginning with the unstable and contingent nature of “ethnicity” in Central Africa. Contesting the “creole” status of the “charter generation” of Africans arriving in Brazil in chains, Sweet argues that the calundu of Central Africans, introduced in Brazil by the seventeenth century, underwent certain alterities with the subsequent advent of West Africans. That is, an important “syncretism” took place among Africans of differing ethnolinguistic and regional backgrounds, such that calundu eventually came to represent a generic rather than ethnically specific gloss for African rituals. In this sense, what happens with calundu is the opposite of what occurs with batuque. The latter saw the culturally hegemonic rise of certain ethnolinguistic groups and therefore witnessed the transition from the diffuse to the particular. Having split into three different branches by the end of the eighteenth century, the religious components of calundu eventually merged with other religious diffusions with the progression of the nineteenth century, so that preceding African cultural forms were subsumed, in this case, by consequent ones. But calundu was apparently a hemispheric phenomenon, as Sweet turns up evidence for it in both Saint Domingue and what becomes the United States. His is a fascinating discussion and underscores that African cultural forms did not only change in response to European and Native American stimuli, but also as a consequence of intra-African exchange. Read correctly, Sweet’s contribution serves as yet another caution against not only a presumption of cultural and political stasis in Africa itself during the transatlantic slave trade, but a reading of the African presence in the Americas that equally fails to take into consideration a negotiation of interiority.

1

In an Ocean of Blue
West African Indigo Workers
in the Atlantic World to 1800

Frederick Knight

The forests gave way before them, and extensive verdant fields, richly clothed with produce, rose up as by magic before these hardy sons [and daughters] of toil.… Being farmers, mechanics, laborers and traders in their own country, they required little or no instruction in these various pursuits.

—Martin Delany¹

Between 1740 and 1770, colonial South Carolina emerged as one of Great Britain’s principal suppliers of indigo, used as a blue textile dye. South Carolinian indigo gained a reputation as a middle-grade commodity, next in quality to the highest grade produced in Guatemala and the French Caribbean. In 1750, the colony exported approximately 87,000 pounds of indigo. Between midcentury and the American Revolution, South Carolina’s indigo exports expanded more than tenfold to over one million pounds per year.² During the South Carolina indigo boom, the colony also increased its imports of workers from West Africa, particularly from the Gold Coast, Windward Coast, and Senegambia region.³ An infusion of African workers, who carried experience with indigo production, fostered the crop’s development.

In this chapter, we will focus on a case study of the Lucas estate in South Carolina in order to establish the impact of African workers on South Carolina indigo production. The chapter also places the development of indigo in South Carolina within a larger context by looking at the impact of African indigo workers on the larger Anglo-American world. On both sides of the Atlantic, African workers lived in an ocean of blue. A number of sources have portrayed Eliza Lucas Pinckney as the principal agent of South Carolina’s indigo production. For instance, agricultural historian Lewis Cecil Gray, who made a lasting impact on the field, wrote, “The credit for initiating the [indigo] industry is due Eliza Lucas, who had recently come from the West Indies to South Carolina, where she resided on an estate belonging to her father, then governor of Antigua.”⁴ In a similar fashion, one recent colonial historian has written, “Eliza Lucas (later Pinckney) especially labored to introduce West Indian indigo cultivation.”⁵ In addition, Pinckney has been the subject of biographies, children’s books, and a novel that mythologizes her “innovations” in indigo.⁶ However, the focus on Lucas Pinckney obscures the ways in which African workers played a significant role in the shaping of indigo plantation development in South Carolina, as well as in other British American colonies.

Like most planters in colonial South Carolina, the Lucas family made their fortunes from their rice plantations, which depended upon African workers not only for physical labor but also for their expertise with the crop. Indeed, some colonial officials were aware of the expertise of African workers. For example, one colonial official from neighboring Virginia remarked, “We perceive the ground and Climate is very proper for [rice] as our Negroes affirme, which in their own Country is most of their food, and very healthful for our bodies.”⁷ African workers begat rice, which in turn begat more African workers experienced with rice, and the crop became the colony’s most important export.⁸ With increased flows of labor from Central and West Africa, coastal South Carolina attracted planters and prospective planters to the colony, and the Lucas family entered the Carolinas in this spirit. By 1713, John Lucas of Antigua established and owned in absentia a number of Carolina rice plantations. In 1738, his son George left Antigua to live on the Carolina estates. His political aspirations soon called George Lucas back to Antigua, leaving his daughter Eliza with the authority to take charge of his property for him. She managed three plantation sites, one at Wappoo, where the family lived; one at Garden Hill on the Combahee River, a fifteen hundred acre property that produced pitch, salt pork, tar, and other commodities; and a three thousand acre rice plantation on the Waccamaw River.⁹

In the early 1740s, the Lucas estate began and eventually succeeded with indigo experiments. Previous generations in South Carolina had tried indigo production, yet the Lucas experiment is notable because it produced the crop on a larger scale than their predecessors and inspired many more planters to turn to the crop. How did this conversion to indigo production happen? A number of factors shaped indigo production in South Carolina, including changes in the supply structure of indigo to Great Britain from India, inputs of knowledge from India and the Caribbean, and the opportunities created by a wartime crisis. Furthermore, as this chapter discusses, the colony’s African workforce contributed knowledge to indigo production, as many of them brought, along with rice production skills, experience with the dye across the Atlantic.¹⁰

During the years of the transatlantic slave trade, a substantial number of workers in West Africa cultivated and processed indigo as part of their daily work activity. They did so despite the disruptions caused by the traffic in human cargo and the influence of European imports on West African craft production. For instance, a group of West African weavers added a dimension to their craft by unraveling imported cloth and interweaving the foreign thread with locally spun thread to produce new textile designs.¹¹ Though imported fabrics shaped African cloth production, the imports were unable to dislodge local textile weavers from their craft. During this period, imported textiles constituted only 2 percent of West Africa’s clothing needs, so the output of indigenous cotton workers, spinners, dyers, and weavers far outweighed the textile...