AFRO 275 Book Notes (Freedom On My Mind) PDF

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AFRO 275 Book Notes- Freedom On My Mind Chapter 1: From Africa to America African Origins ● Scientists believe that Africa was home to the ancient ancestors of all human beings, who first originated in East Africa more than a million years ago ➢ From vast civilizations: Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia ● In the 15th Century, West Africans first came in contact with explorers, merchants and traders who launched the European settlement of the New World ➢ Their region of the African continent was divided into small village states and kingdoms and spoke many different languages ➢ All of these societies practiced slavery ➢ Well-established slave trading networks The History of West Africa ● Africa is the second largest continent in the world, after Asia- links the rich cultural worlds of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and sub-saharan Africa ● The prime meridian and the equator runs through the continent ● Africa has been home to many different societies ➢ Ghana, the first West African state → first trading empire ➢ Mali, a state within Ghana, emerged as an imperial power and controlled a large portion of western and central Africa between 1230 and 1500 → their most important ruler was Mansa Musa, a Muslim who became well known throughout Europe and the Middle EASt because of his 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca ➢ The Songhai Empire, a small kingdom that broke away from Mali in 1320 was home to flourishing economies and an active international trade → they controlled the city of Timbuktu, which was an important commercial center that gained widespread prominence as a center of Islamic culture under Songhai ruler Askia al-Hajj Muhammad ❏ The Songhai lost control of both Timbuktu and their empire in 1591, when a civil war divided their kingdom and opened it up to foreign invasion ❏ In 1591, Morocco captured and sacked Timbuktu and other Songhai seats of power ● By the 16th Century when the transatlantic slave trade took place, most of Africa was populated by many small societies of people who spoke different languages, worshipped different dieties and have diverse cultures ● The similar beliefs among the societies didn’t lead West Africans to unite around a single church or religious doctrine ● West Africa had a mixture of coastal swamps and rocky promontories, the coastline had a few natural harbors that could accommodate large boats ➢ West Africa’s inland waterways sustained extensive trade networks, with canoes carrying agricultural products, lumber, fish and slaves ● Political leadership was passed from generation to generation among matrilineal or patrilineal lines (mother to daughter or father to son)

Slavery in West Africa ● In both Europe and Africa, slavery was often a by-product of war → slave status was traditionally assigned to war captives ● European serfs acquired their unfree status during the war-torn Middle Ages when they placed themselves voluntarily under the control of powerful warriors who offered them protection in return for their service ● In West African societies, slave status was assigned to those convicted of serious crimes such as adultery, murder or sorcery → debtors were also enslaved ● Many female slaves of war frequently became members of their owners’ families via concubinage- a form of sexual slavery that typically ended in freedom if the concubine bore a freeman’s child ● Slaves in African societies were socially marginal and powerless, but there were limits to their subjugation ➢ They were generally employed in the same agricultural and domestic work that occupied other members of the community ➢ Retained a number of civic rights and privileges → they were permitted to educate themselves and were generally free to marry and raise children The Rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade ● Even though Europeans and West Africans lived in neighboring continents separated only by the societies of the Middle East, they were virtual strangers prior to the 15th Century ● Small numbers of people and goods had moved between the 2 continents via overland trade networks ● The Sahara Desert made overland travel between the two regions difficult and dangerous, while the powerful winds and currents off the Sahara coast had long prevented sea travel between Europe and Africa Europe in the Age of the Slave Trade ● When the Portuguese first began raiding West Africa’s sub-Saharan coast, Europe was not yet the conglomeration of powerful empires it would later become ● Portugal, one of Europe’s earliest nation-states, pioneered the navigation of the West African Coast ● Carracks and Caravels: small sailing ships that had two or three masts and were powered by both triangular and square sails ● In 1418 and 1470, the Portuguese launched a series of exploratory expeditions that remapped the oceans south of Portugal, charting new territories that one explorer described as “oceans where none had ever sailed before” ➢ Discovered new islands- Madeira, the Azores, Arguin, the Cape Verde Islands, and Sao Tome and Principe- provided the Portuguse a stepping-off point for expeditions farther down the coast, allowing them to reach the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 ● Sugarcane was a valuable crop previously grown primarily in Cyprus, Sicily and parts of Southern Spain ➢ Sugar was in short supply in Europe

➢ In the Mediterranean, sugarcane was cultivated on large plantations by enslaved workers from Russia and the Balkans ➢ By the 1490s, Madeira was the largest European sugar producer The Enslavement of Indigenous Peoples ● Europe’s population boomed in the second half of the 15th century, making labor abundant and slave imports unnecessary ● The first Africans arrived in the Americas either with or shortly after Columbus, who may have employed African seamen on some of his voyages ● African workers were first used in the copper and gold mines of Hispaniola, which resumed importing them in 1505 ➢ These workers were needed because Spanish attempts to exploit the labor of the island’s native inhabitants, the Taino Indians, had met with limited success. ➢ During the first few decades of Spanish settlement, the conquistadors were able to extract forced labor from the Indians under the encomienda system, which permitted the Spaniards to collect tributes in the form of labor, gold, or other goods ● African slavery was also sanctioned by the Catholic Church, while the enslavement of Indians was more controversial ● In 1542, the Spanish government banned the enslavement of Indians within its territories The First Africans in the Americas ● Roughly 300,000 Africans landed in the Americas before 1620 ● Enslaved Africans supplied labor for Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Jamaica, Mexico and Peru ➢ They worked on sugar plantations after the island’s small store of precious metals had been tapped out and accompanied by the Spanish on military expeditions ● Many of the earliest Africans in the New World were ladinos- latinized blacks who hailed from Spain or Portugal, or from those countries’ Atlantic or American colonies ● Many European migrants to New Spain and Brazil brought black or mulatto (mixed-race) servants with them when they first settled in these regions ● Known in Spain as bozales, these African-born slaves quickly accounted for the majority of the New World’s slaves ➢ They were forced to do the most dirtiest, dangerous and demanding work ● The cultivation of sugarcane, one of the earliest slave-grown crops, was first introduced on Hispaniola and eventually spread throughout the Caribbean The Business of Slave Trading ● By the beginning of the 17th century, the Spanish and Portuguese had begun to lose their monopoly of the exploration and settlement of the New World ● Other European powers such as the Dutch, English and French began to claim territory in the Americas ➢ These powers also used slaves ➢ As a result, the transatlantic slave trade expanded rapidly

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➢ Europeans expanded the trade by traversing large stretches of the African coast For Europeans, the slave trade remained a coastal exchange that took place largely in their West african trading centers ➢ Elmina Castle- the earliest trade center on the southern coast of present-day Ghana ➢ The castles on present-day Ghana’s Gold Coast offered European merchants a secure harbor for their vessels and access to African markets trading in goods as well as people The Portuguese controlled the early transatlantic slave trade by virtue of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas- an agreement between Spain and Portugal granting the Western Hemisphere to Spain and Africa and Asia to Portugal Asientos- agreements After Spain and Portugal became enemies in the 1640s, the Spanish transferred their business first to the Dutch and then the British, who dominated the 18th century transatlantic trade European slave ships carried on a triangle trade that began with the transport of European copper, beads, guns, ammunition, textiles and other manufactured goods to the West African coast ➢ During triangle trade, slave ships transported enslaved blacks from the West African coast to the slave ports of the New World ➢ The ships then returned to their European ports of origin laden with profitable slave-grown crops, including sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and later cotton ➢ This trade fueled the economic development of Europe, supplying much of the raw material and capital that propelled European powers into the industrial age ➢ The trade was equally crucial to the economic growth of the Americas, supplying European colonists with much of the labor they needed to make the New World settlements profitable The trade was largely tragic for Africans The transatlantic slave trade imposed almost unimaginable suffering on the millions of individual Africans who survived their capture and sale ➢ The transatlantic slave trade is known as a triangle trade because it took shape around an exchange og goods that involved ports in 3 different parts of the world

The Long Middle Passage ● The African communities that surrounded the European slave trading settlements rarely sold their own people into slavery Capture and Confinement ● The transatlantic slave trade was a dirty and dangerous business for everyone involved ➢ It began in the interior of Africa, where African traders purchased slaves and marched them to the coast ● Coffles- slaves traveled in chain groups bound together to prevent escapes ➢ In addition to wearing the restraints, slaves in the coffles were often forced to work as porters for the trader, carrying loads of food and other goods ● Barracoons- temporary barracks ➢ Conditions in the barracoons were awful ➢ Slaves were fed only enough to keep them alive ➢ Stripped of their clothes, lived in crowded are

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➢ There were no toilets or other facilities for human waste If they were healthy, some captives tried to escape, but their attempts had limited success

On the Slave Coast ● Once purchased, the slaves in the barracoons usually parted company with the African middlemen and were paddled out to new prisons aboard the slave ships ● While anchored in the deep water off the coast, slave ships were targets for marauding pirates and the naval ships of hostile European powers ● Bilboes- iron hand and leg cuffs (always in short supply) Inside the Slave Ship ● The journey from Guinea to Caribbean island ports, which were generally the first stop for slave ships bound for North America, lasted 50 to 90 days ● Throughout the slave trade, men outnumbered women by a ratio of roughly 2:1 while children under 15 became increasingly common over time ● Male slaves were generally kept in the ship’s hold, where they experienced the worst of the crowding ● Women and children, by contrast, were usually housed in rooms set apart from the main holdsometimes together, sometimes separately Hardship and Misery on Board ● Suicides were common both during the Middle Passage and after the captives arrived in the New World ● During the ocean passage, many captives were either unwilling or unable to eat enough to stay alive, and they resisted their captors’ attempts to force-feed them ● The great cause of death during the Middle Passage was disease ➢ Scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) ● The holds of the slave ships had no toilets, bathing areas, or facilities set aside for the sick, so the African captives who came down with infection had to endure the acute of cramping and diarrhea caused by it while shackled to one another in airless confinement ● Captives also died from smallpox, measles, and ophthalmia (a blinding eye infection) The Slave Trade’s Diaspora ● Between the 16th century and 19th century, when the slave trade finally ended, more than twelve million black captives departed Africa for the New World ➢ Most came from West Africa, where they were captured or purchased by West African slave traders who sold them to European traders operating along the coast ● After 1730, traders based in North America also began to participate in the transatlantic trade ● Approximately 3% of African captives arrived in the Americas before 1600 ● The number of enslaved Africans in the New World began to increase in the 17th century as other European powers joined the Spanish and Portugeuse in establishing settlements there Key Terms ● Diaspora- the dispersion of any people from their original homeland

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Carracks- a large merchant ship of a kind operating in European waters in the 14th to the 17th century Guanches- a member of an aboriginal people speaking a Berber language who formerly inhabited the Canary Islands, and were absorbed after the Spanish conquest in the 15th century Taino Indians- a subgroup of the Arawakan Indians(a group of American I ndians in northeastern South America), inhabited the Greater Antilles (comprising Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola [Haiti and the Dominican Republic], and Puerto Rico) in the Caribbean Sea at the time when Christopher Columbus' arrived to the New World Encomienda- a grant by the Spanish Crown to a colonist in America conferring the right to demand tribute and forced labor from the Indian inhabitants of an area Ladinos- a white clover of a large variety native to Italy and cultivated for fodder in North America Bozales- a slave, recently brought to a colony from Africa Elmina Castle- erected by the Portuguese in 1482 às Castelo de São Jorge da Mina, also known as Castelo da Mina or simply Mina in present-day Elmina, Ghana. It was the first trading post built on the Gulf of Guinea, and the oldest European building in existence south of the Sahara Asiento- seating Triangle Trade- used to refer to the trade in the 18th and 19th centuries that involved shipping goods from Britain to West Africa to be exchanged for slaves, these slaves being shipped to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar, rum, and other commodities which were in turn shipped back to Britain Coffles- a line of animals or slaves fastened or driven along together Barracoons- an enclosure in which black slaves were confined for a limited period Cash Crop- any crop that is considered easily marketable, as wheat or cotton Bilboes- an iron bar with sliding shackles, formerly used for confining a prisoner's ankles Tight Packing- captains believed that more slaves, despite higher casualties, would yield a greater profit at the trading block...