Reassembling Africa: a leading anthropologist proposes an essential library for understanding the Black Diaspora in the Americas.

It is estimated that 12 million to 15 million people taken from Africa were shipped to the Americas over an almost 400-year period beginning in the 16th century. We are most familiar with those who came to the North American colonies, but more went elsewhere in this hemisphere. At Spelman College, Dr. Sheila S. Walker has organized the Year of the Diaspora to promote understanding of how these stolen laborers contributed to the technology, wealth and culture of the Americas. For Black History month, BIBR asked Dr. Walker to suggest a reading list for understanding how Africans both shaped and adapted to the Americas.

In 1996, I organized an international conference, "The African Diaspora and the Modern World," in order to discuss some of the most fundamental issues for understanding the African Diaspora in the Americas. From conference presentations and interviews with participants, I edited the volume African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas and produced the video documentary Scattered Africa: Faces and Voices of the African Diaspora. In order to discuss the Diaspora, one must first know who constitutes it and where it is located. It comes as a surprise to many in the United States that the majority of the Diaspora neither lives in North America nor speaks English.

Portuguese-speaking Brazil has the largest Afrodescendant population in the Americas and the second largest in the world after Nigeria. So the world's second-largest African nation is in the Americas. The Spanish-speaking communities of North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean, along with Brazil, constitute the great majority of the estimated 200 million African Diasporans in the hemisphere. All countries in the Americas from chile to Canada have African-descended populations that have made significant contributions to them.

Unfortunately, many of the books about this majority are neither translated into English nor easy to know about outside of their regions. But this essay will reference only those available in English.

The foundational contributions of Africans and their descendants to the creation and development of the Americas have been denied, minimized and distorted throughout the hemisphere based on Eurocentric socioeconomic systems and scholarly traditions. It is therefore important for African Diasporans to tell our own stories on our own terms from an Afrogenic perspective, a perspective that grows out of the experiences and interpretations of African and African Diasporan communities. African Roots/American Cultures privileges the voices of African and African Diasporan scholars and cultural leaders in discussing our own communities and experiences, without, of course, excluding useful contributions from others. It includes, for example, articles by members of the large African-descended populations of Brazil and Venezuela, as well as by members of the Afro-Argentinean and Afro-Uruguayan populations that are claimed not to exist by presumably authoritative sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica.

To really understand the Pan-American African Diaspora it is essential to view it as a single unit of analysis and to see the societies and phenomena within it from a comparative perspective that allows common themes to emerge. In doing so, we see, for example, the essential roles of Africans and their descendants in the creation of the technological foundations and the economic wealth of all of the societies of the Americas. And we begin to understand the transatlantic slave trade not as a random unskilled labor migration, but as a deliberate and specific recruitment process of skilled labor leading to a massive brain drain and transfer of technology from Africa to the Americas. African knowledge of the gold mining that enriched Europe and the rice and other crop cultivation that nourished and determined the tastes the Americas are prime illustrations.

It is also important to situate the African Diaspora in the Americas within a global context, and to relate the societies and phenomena of the Diaspora to the specific African origins that account for many of their structures and meanings. African ethnic and regional groups brought to the Americas cultural elements that continue to manifest in gastronomy, in everyday and esoteric language, in religion and spirituality, in arts and crafts, in aesthetics, in the gift of celebration.

Bibliography for a Scattered People

The articles in African Roots/American Cultures (Rowman & Littlefield, September 2001) address many of these issues that are fundamental for understanding the Diaspora, as do the following volumes:

* Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Howard University Press, June 1993) historian Joseph E. Harris's edited volume based on the first African Diaspora conference organized in the United States at Howard University in 1979, situates the African Diaspora in the Americas in a worldwide context that includes the African presence in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Asia. It also addresses the issue of returns to and impacts on Africa of African descendants, especially from the United States and Brazil, but also from England and from Jamaica through Nova Scotia in Canada.

* Anthropologist St. Clair Drake's Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology (University of California Center for AfroAmerican Studies, February 1991) also situates African descendants within a global context, examining issues of racism and colorism over time and across geographies.

* Historian Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (Oxford University Press, April 1987) explores how Africans began to redefine themselves in the Americas. An essential consideration for understanding the Diaspora is the ways in which the estimated 12 to 15 million members of African ethnic and regional groups who survived the voyage to the Americas were transformed into the national African Diasporan identities of the hemisphere. Slave Culture uses the Ring Shout of the United States and other spiritual circle dances of the Americas to discuss the transformation of various African peoples who found themselves together in the Americas into the African Diasporan identities of today.

* Historian Michael A. Gomez's Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Tranformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, March 1998) describes how groups from the major areas of Africa who found themselves in the United States--those from the Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, Sierra Leone, the Akan-speaking areas of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, the Igbo of Nigeria, and Bantu-speaking populations from West Central Africa--exchanged their distinctive African "country marks" to develop an African American identity, often through collaboration in struggles against the institution of enslavement.

* Historian Rachel E. Harding, in Refuge in Thunder: Candomble and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (University of Indiana Press, February 2003), undertakes a similar task for the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil, which has the nation's largest African-descended population. Her analysis situates the locus of the transformation of various Central and West Africans peoples into Afro-Brazilians within the evolution of the Candomble, the Afro-Brazilian religion that is the basis of much of the culture of Bahia.

* In The Big Drum Ritual of Carriacou: Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight (University of Florida Press, November 1998), ethnomusicologist Lorna McDaniel challenges the contention that Africans and their descendants did not leave written records of their history and culture. She finds these records written in the words of the songs of the big drum or nation dances of the Caribbean island of Carriacou, in which Manding, Coromanti, Igbo, and other African identities continue to exist in songs and dances of contemporary rememory.

* Linguist Maureen Warner-Lewis analyzes the continued West African Yoruba linguistic and larger cultural presence in Trinidad Yoruba: From Mother Tongue to Memory (University of Alabama Press, January 1996) and the Central African Bantu-speaking presence in Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Space, Transforming Culture (University Press of the West Indies, January 2004).

* Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the African Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, January 2002), edited by historian Linda M. Heywood, presents articles about the African background and American presence of Bantu-speaking peoples, the Africans most ubiquitous in the Diaspora, and how they perpetuated their culture in Brazil and Guyana in South America, in Haiti in the Caribbean, and in Spanish Florida and the South Carolina Low Country in the United States.

The Centrality of Spirituality

The important place occupied by writings about religion of African origin in the Diaspora reflects the centrality of spirituality as a locus of the preservation of African culture in the Americas.

In his beautifully illustrated Voodoo: Search for the Spirit (Harry N. Abrams, April 1995), Laennec Hurbon traces Haiti's now officially recognized religion from its African origins to its current manifestations. And Leslie G. Desmangles in The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (University of North Carolina Press, January 1993) demonstrates the negotiation and syncretism that occurred between African religious forms and imposed European religion. Sociologist George Brandon's Santeria From Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories (Indiana University Press, March 1997) traces Yoruba religion from West Africa to its evolution in Cuba and spread to the United States. And cultural organizer and scholar Marta Morena Vega, in The Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santeria (One World/Ballantine, September 2000) shares her experience with religion of African origin from her grandmother's East Harlem apartment to her initiation into the religion of the Yoruba Orichas in Cuba. And the forthcoming book by dance anthropologist Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Cuban Yoruba, Haitian Vodou, and Bahian Candomble (University of Illinois Press), successfully undertakes the daunting task of portraying the three major African-derived sacred dance traditions of the Americas.

In fiction, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (originally published in 1983, reissued by Plume in October 1992) takes an unlikely middle-class African American New Yorker through a spiritual transformation in which she finds her roots in a nation dance on Carriacou. And Maryse Conde's monumental historical novel Segu (Penguin USA, September 1998) traces the odysseys of members of a Bambara royal family from Segou in Mali.

Lest we mistakenly believe that such diasporically focused awareness and writings are a recent phenomenon, we should know that two illustrious foremothers opened the way more than half a century ago with accounts of their fieldwork experiences in the Caribbean. Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, novelist and playwright, wrote about Jamaican and Haitian culture of African origin in her Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (Perennial, reissued January 1994) and about similar phenomena among U.S. African Americans in the southern United States in Mules and Men (Perennial, reissued January 1994).

And Katherine Dunham, the anthropologist, choreographer and dancer, is responsible for codifying and spreading African Diasporan dance around the world. She wrote about her experiences among the Maroons of Jamaica in Journey to Accompong (Greenwood Pub. Group, January 1972) and of her field research on religion and dance in Haiti in Island Possessed (University of Chicago Press, June 1994).

Dr. Sheila S. Walker, Ph.D., is the William and Camille Cosby Endowed Professor in the Social Sciences at Spelman College in Atlanta. She has done extensive field research and participated in cultural activities throughout Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas, and has many scholarly and popular publications. Most recently she edited the volume African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas and a video documentary Scattered Africa: Faces and Voices of the African Diaspora. Dr. Walker has a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in political science, studied at the Sorbonne and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in anthropology. Dr. Walker offers her expertise through a list of important books about the African Diaspora in "Reassembling Africa" on page 14.

Dr. Sheila S. Walker is William and Camille Cosby Professor in the Social Sciences at Spelman College.