Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (review)

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall challenges longstanding ideas about identity among African slaves in the Americas in her book. Part of her goal is to make slaves more visible as actors than they have been in the past, arguing that African slaves retained their ethnic identities in their New World communities in ways that many other scholars have ignored. Furthermore, as the subtitle indicates, she hopes that her study will enable people of African descent to rebuild shattered links between Africa and the Americas. Hall's own groundbreaking work on slaves in Louisiana, which resulted in the databases Louisiana Free Database, 1719–1820, and Louisiana Slave Database, 1719–1820, provided a foundation for this new study and helped to shape it.

The empirical evidence is impressive. Hall worked through a wide array of documents (including ship records, court records, and birth records) in four languages—Portuguese, French, Spanish, and English. Constructing databases has allowed her to construct statistical models that are convincing: more than twenty tables and charts—analyzing such factors as ethnic origins, the distribution of African names, gender balance, and slave prices—document the range of ethnic designations in places such as Louisiana, Cuba, Cartagena de Indias, Peru, and the British West Indies. In addition, Hall provides useful maps and magnificent illustrations to support her arguments about the ways in which African slaves held onto their ethnic identities even within this system of total oppression. These data allow Hall to make concrete assertions about ethnic identity and change over time in the ongoing process of creolization in the Americas. Like Michael Gomez, Hall challenges Melville Herskovits and others who believed that slaves in the Caribbean and Latin America retained more of their African culture and identity than their counterparts in North America. Hall's data show that although numerous ethnic groups were represented in slave communities throughout the Americas, there were clusters of slaves from a rather limited number of places. This clustering occurred for a variety of reasons, including the slave traders' need to work quickly on the coast; the distance between coastal ports on either side of the ocean; and opposition to the trade within African communities (78–79). The empirical evidence helps prove that within these clusters slaves often held onto their ethnic identification and cultural ways, even in North America.

Hall devotes the second half of the book to an examination of specific regions in Africa that supplied slaves to particular parts of the Americas, challenging widely accepted ideas about how the slave trade affected African communities. For example, she shows how critical slaves from Senegambia were in Spanish America, Brazil, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina, because owners were interested in slaves' skills as rice and indigo producers and as blacksmiths. In analyzing how slaves from Lower Guinea (the Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts) were clustered in various New World areas, Hall shows how the term "Mina" was used differently over time and place; though sometimes applied to slaves working as miners, more often it designated a particular group from the Slave Coast. In examining the presence of the Igbo in the Atlantic slave trade, Hall shows how Igbo deserve more attention than they have received. She explains the preference for Igbo women, but not men, in the New World. They were willing to mate with non-Igbo men and connect with the land where their children were born. Igbo women (and their offspring) were able to forge strong ties with their new communities. The final area analyzed is "the Bantulands" (West Central Africa and Mozambique). Hall shows how slaves from here ended up scattered throughout the Americas from the outset until the very end of the Atlantic slave trade, and how clusters of slaves from this region played a significant role in the development of African American communities from Brazil to the Caribbean and the United States.

This powerful book examines who made...