African-American Culture and History
It would be a great mistake to begin a discussion of Black Culture with the arrival of twenty enslaved Africans who were chained to a Dutch man o' war that landed in Viginia in 1619.
It would also be a great mistake to say that the inhumanity of slavery
succeeded in obliterating any traces of African culture. Never forget that
despite bitter yearnings for what was lost the "song of (an) atavistic
land"endured.
(Afro-American Fragments, Langston Hughes)
In The Slave Community in the Antebellum South; A Story of Survival, John Blassingame writes:
The sophisticated research of ethno-musicologists, anthropologists,
and folklorists, coupled with the evidence in a large amount of primary
sources, suggests that African culture was more resistant to the bludgeon
that was slavery than historians have hitherto suspected. Sometimes
retention was facilitated by the adoption of a hands-off policy by planters
with African-born slaves.
Africa lies several thousand miles southeast of North American shores.
In ignorance Europeans referred to this land of immense size and
geographical diversity as the "Dark Continent", but in reality the land
was the home of a diverse people with well established political,
economic, and military systems. A majority of the Africans brought to North
America belonged to the Ibo, Ewe, Biafada, Bakang, Wolof, Bambara, Idibio,
Serer and Arada peoples.
Members of the larger, well-organized African States like the Yoruba,
Dahomey, Ashanti, Fulani, Mandingo and Hausa had centralized, fast-moving
cavalries and well-disciplioned armies that rarely fell into slave traders'
hands. It took the British, even with modern weapons, until the early
1900s to conquer these states
Arthur Schomburg's collection began as a response to a shallow comment that Africa had made no great contributions to civilization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as historical revisions now reveal that the so called Dark Ages often preserved and embellished the Greco-Roman Culture which was so dramatically revitalized in the Renaissance,the New Negro Movement, or the Harlem Renaissance, articulated by Alain Locke in 1925 must be seen as a phenomena that was nurtured in older movements which shaped and defined the Black experience.
Information about Africa's involvment in Pre-Columbian America can be found in:
They Came Before Columbus, by Ivan Van Sertima
History of the Conquest of Mexico, by Orozco y Berra
The Art of Terracotta Pottery in Pre-Columbian South and Central
America, by Alexander Von Wuthenau
Key Ideas about early African Culture can be found by researching information on:
Olmec Stone heads found in Mexico (800-7770 BC)
Abubakari the Second (circa 1311) and Trans-Atlantic Voyages
The establishmnet of Monasteries in Ireland by Egyptian monks
Students of African-American History can embark on this more
expansive study to avoid the trap of waiting until February's "African
Heritage Month."to understand that Africa's story weaves through
American History from the earliest times.