Black people in the Americas... The recent discovery by an Australian academic and historian Emma Christopher, of Sydney University, that helped to determine that the roots of Cubas Ganga lie in a remote village in Sierra Leone, from where it is thought their relatives were sold into slavery more than 170 years ago, is remarkedly different and brings fresh air to the global African studies. See full report ~ m.bbc/news/world-latin-america-25876023 This must be a story of a century. Personally, I have come across different people attempting to locate the roots of different African communities to certain areas of the continent. Some have been quite general, in a sense that they use predictability values and other scientific measures to determine places of origin for our brothers and sisters in the Americas and the Caribbean. Very few investigations come this close. There are many reasons why it is always almost improbable to trace roots of African descendants to one tribe, area or village. Slave trade was a huge commercial enterprise whole sole business was selling people as if they were commodities. Africans were treated as species without souls and spirituality. To avoid riots, as they happened in Haiti and other parts of the Americas, slaves from different regions were mixed, thus leaving them without a common or related language(s) to enable them to communicate. Moreover, work in sugarcane fields and mines did not enable them to form communities. The master was always in control. In addition, many people were removed before the continent welcomed European colonialists and settlers, who subdivided land into smaller smaller territories called states. As it is, it is likely that people were removed the south east of coast of Africa before the land was divided into now seemingly unrelated states of South Africa, Mocambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Tanzania. But literature would always point to Mozambique and Angola as the only sources of slaves in Southern Africa due to their Portuguese connection. Slave trade was a cooperation between Europeans to kill Africans and deprive them of their being. Arrested development. [For further reading, I recommend Walter Rodneys book: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa] My trips on the American continent took me deep into heart of African communities abroad. Central America remains one of the most under reported places on earth withstanding the fact that it is a home of a large number of Africans in the Americas. Of course, the countries smaller and with lesser populations compared to Brazil, Ecuador, the United States, Colombia and the rest of the Caribbean nations. But the number of African descendants remain significant and quite diverse. Central America comprises Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and parts of Mexico. What was always interesting, for me at least, is that most Afro-communities are completely removed and or separated from their African places of origin, physical roots. This served to prove how much impersonal and inhumane slave trade was. But also nobody bothered to keep documentation on where many people originated. Across the Americas, we have not even been able to ascertain if some people went across the Atlantic prior to the discovery of the New World. However, what we know is that people, under Transatlantic slave trade, were forcibly removed from the continent against their will, with the majority coming from the west coast of Africa. When Dr. Maina Mutonya and I visited the remote towns in the west coast of Mexico, we were astonished to see remnants of Africa there, yet Mexico keeps on declaring that „there are no black people in Mexico.” Many of the people in the Costa Chica area were not even aware of their heritage. When they saw us Africans, something clicked in their heads that they could be originating from somewhere. One person pointed out that he just thought that his skin color was merely dark since most people in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, including the native Americas, were generally darker. The „mestizaje (miscegenation) ideology in Mexico only recognized the Spanish/European and native American roots, thus ignoring the huge presence of African gene in the DNA of the Mexican society, for example. As such, most people tried to find their sense of origin and or belonging using existing parameters. What was astonishing though is that many people still look African in spite of mixing and cultural pollination with local indigenous tribes. Also, the music and dance kept the African identity alive. My travels to the Caribbean coast of Central America was even more interesting. This is where African communities exist in larger numbers, sometimes mirroring the people on the Caribbean islands. Their settlement stretches from Veracruz in Mexico, and go down to remote places in Guatemala/Belize, Honduras (Roatan Island, La Ceiba and Sambo Creek), Nicaragua (Bluefields and Bay Islands), Costa Rica (Port Limon), and Panama. Central America has four major groups of African descended peoples which include: Afro-mestizos, Afro-Antilleans, Garifuna and Miskitos. Nicaragua has the largest population of African descent in Central America and approximately two-thirds of that group resides in and around Bluefields, at the mouth of the Escondido River and the Caribbean Sea. In fact a source claims that, „The population of Nicaragua is highly mixed, but not so much as found in El Salvador and Honduras. The mixed “native-African-European” population known as mestizo makes up 69% of the population.” Their historical links to the continent unspecified. In Tegucigalpa, I came across a young anthropologist Andoni Castillo, whose research focused on the origins of the Garifuna language and its linkages to Africa. The Garifuna „are descendants of West African, Central African, Carib and Arawak people.” Castillo discovered more than a thousand words that trace their roots from the Mandinga language spoken in Mali. Although the anthropologist had not traveled to Africa but his groundbreaking work holds a promise that in the long run Africans can be reunited. Forget about the famed „Lula moment” - the black skin color does not make life easy for Africans in the Americas. As a result many people do not even want to be identified as African descendants.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:19:51 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015