African Voices in the African American Heritage.

African Voices in the African American Heritage. By Betty M. Kuyk. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xxx, 256. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-253-21576-5; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-253-34204-X.)

Melville Herskovits's The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941) and John Blassingame's The Slave Community (New York, 1972) are still seminal works in slave community studies. These works opened the doors to numerous studies on slave agency, culture, and African cultural retention. In this tradition, Betty M. Kuyk's African Voices in the African American Heritage examines slave culture from an African philosophical and cultural perspective. Incorporating the scholarship of historians and anthropologists studying precolonial West Africa, she provides readers with a clearer understanding of how enslaved Africans transferred their culture and social structure to slave communities in the South. Kuyk contends that from 1808 to 1861, 54,000 native-born Africans, many of Kongo descent, were smuggled illegally into the United States via the Gulf of Mexico and the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. As a result, Kuyk argues, slave culture in the Sea Island regions of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida resembled Kongo culture.

The first part of the text examines Sam Gadsden's family tree. Using Gadsden's oral history interviews, Kuyk brilliantly reconstructs the Kongo origins of his family. According to Kuyk, in 1818 Dutch traders illegally smuggled Gadsden's family from the Kongo. Kuyk surmises that Gadsden's great-grandfather Kwibo Tom was the son of a prince of the Viii people who traded cloth with the Dutch. The Dutch tricked Kwibo Tom and his family into boarding their ship and, instead of engaging in trade, brought the family to South Carolina as slaves. Nevertheless, Kwibo Tom and his family continued to practice African customs, such as naming ceremonies and identifying land by the names of landowners.

The second part of the text explores the influence of African culture on African American religion and the artwork of Sam Doyle of South Carolina and William Traylor of Alabama. This is the strongest portion of the text. Similar to Gadsden, both of these men had African-born relatives. Kuyk notes that Traylor's work was influenced by multiple African cultures. Slave owners from Virginia and Georgia moved to the black belt of Alabama and took their African--born slaves with them. As a consequence, by the 1820s and 1830s, there were myriad African cultures in central Alabama where Traylor lived. Doyle and Traylor's work demonstrates a West African aesthetic that reflects African philosophical concepts of balance, gender, family, community, and spirituality. Although these artists embraced Christianity, Kuyk argues that it was an African Christianity.

The discussion of African cultural influence on the Independent Order of St. Luke is a less convincing section of the text. St. Luke, an African American secret society, was founded in Baltimore in 1866 and provided charity and economic assistance to its members. Kuyk compares St. Luke's rituals and initiation ceremonies to those of the Agbalanze ethnic association in Nigeria. According to Kuyk both organizations were secret societies and stressed the significance of money, but these comparisons are coincidental. The burial rituals and other symbols of St. Luke resembled the ceremonies of the Prince Hall Masons, a group founded in the 1780s. Kuyk cites William M. T. Forrester's Degree Ritual of the Independent Order of Saint Luke (Richmond, Va., 1894) as a source for information on St. Luke, and this reviewer believes that Forrester himself may have been or known a Prince Hall Mason and may have modified the St. Luke rituals he recorded.

Overall, this work adds to the expanding field of slave community studies and African diasporic scholarship. More scholars are beginning to reveal African cultural retention in antebellum America. Moreover, Kuyk's use of an African perspective to interpret the Sea Island oral interviews and her training in precolonial African history complement one another and demonstrate the complexity, influence, and ingenuity of enslaved Africans.

Connecticut College

DAVID A. CANTON