A Variety of African Backgrounds 

African Americans searching for the African roots of their culture should begin by understanding that only about five percent of between 11 and 12 million enslaved Africans were brought to North America or to the United States.  Approximately 95 percent of the people exported from Africa were sold to "tropical America," the Caribbean basin.  Most of these exported Africans were taken from West and West-Central Africa.  The majority, perhaps more than 40 percent, came from West-Central Africa, the Congo-Angola region now known as contemporary Angola and the Republic of the Congo.  As much as 33 percent of the slave population came from West Africa.  The majority of the ancestors of African Americans, it seems, came from a part of Africa bounded by the river Senegal in the North and by Angola in the South.   The area of catchment, the known area from which the slaves were taken, extended along the West African coastal line from Senegal to Angola and perhaps as far as 500 miles into the interior.  That area included a variety of ethnic groups. 

Therefore, one of the first points to recognize in tracing the African roots of African-American culture is that enslaved Africans sold to North America came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.  About 25 percent came from ethnic groups such as the Bakongo, the Tio, and the Mbundu, groups from the Congo-Angola region.  About 23 percent came from the Yoruba, the Fon, the Nupe, and the Ibo, ethnic groups from an area from the Benin River to Cape Lopez, now contemporary Nigeria, Toga, and Gabon.   About 16 percent came from the Alkans, who inhabited the Gold Coast, now contemporary Ghana.  The Wolof, the Fulbe, and the Serer, Senegambian captives, made up about 13 percent.  Another six percent of captives came from Sierra Leone, four percent from the Blight of Benin, and less than two percent from Mozambique and Madagascar.  All of these people brought with them their own ideas about life, their own cultures, and their own cosmology.  Many of them spoke different languages, worshiped different gods, and had different ways of socializing their children.  So once they crossed the Atlantic, the problem that they confronted was how to forge, so to speak, a oneness, how to create some common ground out of this very diverse and heterogeneous background.  So even though Africa is the most heterogeneous of the continents, the Black people who created the United States came from a variety of backgrounds and cosmologies.  They began creating a culture when they began the process of establishing some basis for communicating with one another, interacting with one another, and forging a future. 
In spite of the cultural differences, there appear to have been some basic cultural understandings, that is to say, the people shared some very broad principles.  Almost all Africans believed in a Supreme Being, or Supreme God, and several lesser gods.  Many came from societies that we would consider matri-archal, many came from societies that practiced polygamy, many came from societies where thoughts reside in, and could be communicated by means of, a variety of locales, rivers, trees, and so on.  In America, in English, such rivers and trees would be called symbols, but the thought patterns of these Africans could not be expressed in English.  These broad principles and symbols probably created the basis for the shaping of this common ground.  But in tracing roots to Africa we must be careful about our generalizations, because Africa consisted of, even today, as many as 800 different cultures, each with its own traditions, values and ways of doing things.  Certainly Africans share many cultural elements, but with enormous variations, so a lot of generalizations that are made are very careless, presenting a picture of Africa that is static and homogeneous.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Ghana is not Angola, and Angola is not Tanzania. 

Creoles, the First African Americans, and Creolization  
 
In North America, the African population that came over as slaves had begun to reproduce itself by the 1730s.  Before the 1730s, the Black population had to be constantly replenished by the slave trade, because most Blacks either died without reproducing or died before reaching adulthood.  During the 1730s this changed and what emerged was a locally-born African-American population that we call creole Blacks.  These creole Blacks were the first African Americans, and their process of bridging African and American worlds is what we refer to as creolization.   African-Americans creoles, born after the 1730s, were unlike their ancestors in many respects because they were born in America.  By about 1820, almost 90 percent of Black American slaves were American-born.  We must, therefore, distinguish the African-born population, which became quite negligible by 1800, and the American-born Creole population that became dominant after 1820, because African-American culture begins with this Creole population.  In America the cultural presence of native Africans was very weak, because from the eighteenth century, the African population becomes a Creole population, a home grown population whose linkage and ties to Africa became less and less strong.  Once the Black American population began reproducing itself, over time it sustained a sexual balance between men and women conducive to additional growth.  By the nineteenth century that balance was 51 percent women, 49 percent men; a good ratio about what it is today for sustaining growth. 

In creating their culture, the Creole population, of course, built upon what they knew of the culture of their fathers and mothers.  And out of this process, this creolization and adaptation to a new environment would emerge and remain very much alive in certain cultural principles, such as religious ideas, worldviews, family structure, ways of socializing children, ways of cooking food, and so on.  In other words, although this Creole population had become dominant, it was not an entirely Europeanized or Americanized population. It drew upon African cultural strengths, manifested in funeral ceremonies, burial rites, the naming of children, beliefs in amulets, charms, hags, and witches.  Even the Muslim presence survived. The African roots of African-American culture lie, therefore, in a variety of cultural dynamic principles that the first Black Creole population blended and reshaped into the cultural principles and precepts of their American environment.  Black dance movements, the spirituals, the blues, and eventually jazz are probably products of creolization and adaptation to a new environment.  The current Black Islamic movement is probably a creolization of imported Muslim principles. 

African Roots and the Caribbean Basin 
 
While, undoubtedly, there are African influences in the Americas, those influences are strongest in places like Brazil, Haiti and Jamaica; places that had a longer tradition of contact with Africa by means of the slave trade.  Only about half a million slaves came from Africa to the United States.  So, of four million American slaves by 1860, three and a half million were born in America, were Americanized, and were westernized.  The Caribbean basin differed.  In places like Brazil, about four or four and a half million African people were imported and enslaved, so places like Brazil always had a constant rejuvenation of African cultures.  America never needed rejuvenation from Africa.  America differed from Brazil, Jamaica, and Haiti in that the slave population in America reproduced itself and sustained that growth.  For most of the other societies of the hemisphere, the slave population, for a variety of reasons, did not reproduce itself and did not have an annual rate of natural increase.  That is why those societies had to depend upon Africa for new slaves, and this very dependence meant that the cultural influences of the African societies were the strongest in those societies. There were certain diseases that were present in Brazil at the time that were not present in the United States.  The mortality rates of children in those societies were very high.  They did not have the kind of sexual balance that sustains a population.  They generally had two or three men to each woman. 

Difficulty of Tracing Specific African-American Roots  
 
Finding specific roots is difficult.  The shipping points from which the slaves were dispatched were sort of general catchment areas.  If, for instance, ships went to Elmina Castle, which is now a part of Ghana, with a cargo of 400 slaves, these slaves would have come from a variety of ethnic groups, most having been captured in war.  The ship's records would simply state the ports of departure.  Finding the port of departure tells historians too little.  Slaves may have come from the adjacent ethnic groups.  There is no way to be certain of the origin of slaves, and, of course, when Africans arrived in Mexico City, or South Carolina, or New York, they were renamed. They didn't speak English, and no one was interested enough in their ethnic background to record it. Specific linkages are almost impossible to establish.  If one can find the name of a particular ship a person came on, which is a task in itself, and the place the ship may have come from, Ghana for instance; then maybe an African American can say I am from this ethnic group or that ethnic group.  Specific ties beyond that are just guess work. 

Obvious Roots: Blues, Jazz, Dance, Gullah 
 
Little of African culture remains in pure form in African-American culture.   Blues is specifically rooted in the African musical scale.  The form grows out of the inability of slaves to find corresponding tones on the western musical scale.  Jazz is rooted in the rhythms of African drums, the forms of jazz from the freedom of the African "master drummer."  In many African tribes, all participants had fixed drumming patterns.  Controlling the entire pattern, the master drummer could vary the beat and structure.  Black American dance movements are rooted in African dance movements.  The Spirituals reflected African harmonics.  Gullah, a distinctive dialect spoken mainly on coastal South Carolina, is a combination of several African languages and English.  More specific roots than we now have can probably be established for language patterns, thought patterns, blues, jazz, spirituals, and dance.  Searches for these roots are pleasant challenges for African-American students and scholars. 

The Greatest Root: Strength from Africans Never Defeated 
 
The slave trade ends in 1808, but the remarkable thing is the natural increase of the slave population. By 1860 there are about four million slaves and half a million free Blacks, but most of them are born in America.  By 1860, about 95 percent are American born.  That indicated, of course, that these people showed remarkable resilience and strength in laying the foundations of the Black family despite the fact that many families were separated.  In spite of the fact that only one out of three Africans enslaved remained with an original family member, their cultural ties to those families enabled them to create ways of living that maintained African ties.  In the nineteenth century, 29 percent of slaves born in America were separated from their families.  Yet these people were able to draw upon their inner resources, to pick up the pieces, and to survive.  There were also a variety of challenges to slavery including escape, flight, violence, documented rebellions, Nat Turner's of 1831 being the most famous, and many, many conspir-acies.  Although a significant number of African-born people and their children became Christians, there was still a very strong Muslim presence into the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth century.  The Muslim presence today is not a twentieth century creation; it's an extension of the Muslim presence Africans originally arrived with.  Many African Americans continue to maintain their traditional African beliefs and African traditional religions, so Christianity, in fact, was not the dominant belief system until after slavery ended.  The majority of American slaves up to 1863, despite the fact that they were born right in America, were not Christian.  Christianity is a post-emancipation development.  In African-American culture, enormous and very strong African religious elements survived.  Muslims as well as traditional African beliefs survived.  But the important thing about our Black past is that despite the fact that African Americans and others in the disaster are buffeted, debased, and mistreated in a variety of ways, Black people have never been vanquished.  Slaves were never defeated psychologically.  They found ways and opportunities to maintain their psychic strength and sanity. 

The most poignant part of the Black odyssey was the ability of Africans to survive under the difficult circumstances of slavery and to manifest a lot of internal strength, and a lot of resolve.  Though not unscarred, they walked away able to begin the process of making freedom work.  That ability is probably the greatest root of African-American culture. 

• Abu S. Abarry and Molefi Kete Asante.  African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources.  Philadelphia: Temple University, 1996.

• Colin A. Palmer.  Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America, Volume I: 1619-1865. New York:Harcourt Brace, 1998.

• James A. Rawley.  The Transatlantic Slave Trade.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.