Tag: slavery

Unfamiliar Faces – Lost to History: Afro Puerto-Ricans, Cubans, Jamaicans, Haitians

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Enslaved Afro Puerto Rican children

Though many students will learn about slavery in the U.S. at some point, our teachings are usually narrow in that we only learn about the European Slave Trade and the wrongs that Europeans have done. We won’t be told that we weren’t just dropped off in America. We won’t be told that every people, from Jews to the Five Civilized Native American Tribes, held us as slaves. We won’t be told of the difference between the Africans themselves who had slaves and those who were enslaved, and we won’t be told of the many different tribes and nations of black people that occupy the continent.

Contrary to popular belief, mostly brought on by television and movies, slave traders did not go into the interior of Africa to pick up any “African” but they were looking for a specific people. However, since the continent has been lumped up into one big mass, all blacks are assumed to be the same people and as a result, many ancient practices and truths faded from memory.

Engraving of Arab slave-trading caravan transporting African slaves across the Sahara.
Engraving of Arab slave-trading caravan transporting African slaves across the Sahara.

The trade of slaves across the Sahara has a long history. Dr. John Alembellah Azumah in his 2001 book, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa estimates that over 80 million black people died en route to the Islamic world. Having enslaved blacks about one thousand years before the Europeans, the Arabs had already identified the people of the book. That is the people of the covenant. The people of scripture. The chosen and the prophecies surrounding their captivity.

Indeed, they were not after just any African, but the ones who held principles that were distinct from the other tribes. Differing by way of culture and spirituality, these blacks could easily be spotted by way of their traditions. Olaudah Equiano, known as Gustavus Vassa, captured, enslaved, and then freed, told in his book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, of his life in Africa before the abduction.

Born among the Ibo people in the kingdom of Benin, along the Niger River, Olaudah recounts in his narrative of how they still held many Hebrew customs and traditions, such as the circumcision, the division of the tribes by twelve, and the marrying of their brother’s wife after death just to name a few. What is not recounted is that not only did Olaudah’s family uphold such traditions but so did many so-called African tribes.

That said, many of the slaves who came to Puerto Rico were from Congo, the Ashanti, Yoruba, Igbo and Bantu tribes. In all, 31 known African tribes were brought to the island from Central and West Africa through the slave trade but they weren’t the only ones.

Not only was Afro-Puerto Ricans largely made up of these Hebrew tribes, but so were the Jamaicans, Dominicans, Cubans, and so-called African Americans of today. Though we see each other as separate, the truth is that many of us (even if we’ve mixed) are all the same people and were all part of the dispersion.

Today’s lost to history segment focuses not on one individual but a group of individuals who have gone on to war within themselves due to the lost historical fact that we are not a different people but the same. Having been separated by land, we were taken from the same areas because we are descendent of the same people. The only difference is that we were dropped off in different places. Some to Jamaica, some to Haiti, some to Puerto Rico, and so on. As a result, some of us speak English, some of us speak Spanish, and some of us speak French.

Black Slaves, Native Masters

“I got Indian in my family.”

Is something I hear often among the black community. Even in my own family, my mom talks of how her dad was 100% Cherokee Indian and how our family were cow slaughters which explains my maiden last name which is Hereford, a kind of cow.

Black Slaves, Native Masters

However, while many black families are proud to proclaim their Native Heritage, what is rarely passed around our dinner tables is an important fact in American History. This fact being that even the 5 Civilized Indian Tribes held slaves. A lot of black people jump at the chance to proclaim the above statement because oppressed people typically wants to identify with other oppressed people but the truth is stranger than fiction. Native Americans were oppressed by Europeans but they both had black slaves. In fact, Native Americans knew the layout of the land better than anyone else and it was they who taught the Europeans how to track and to capture slaves. (This is why in last weeks Underground Episode the little boy asked the black slave, “You used to live with the Indians didn’t you? And you taught my daddy how to track.” He used to live with the Indians because he was their slave same as he is the slave to the little boys father. Underground is a very well written TV show).

“Though the harsh treatment of enslaved Africans largely paled in comparison to that of white slaveholders, Blacks still were treated as an underclass among Native Americas. The Five Civilized Tribes even established slave codes that protected owners’ property rights and restricted the rights of Blacks.”

(Barbara-Shae Jackson, The Atlanta Black Star)

What’s deep about my family history is this:

Cherokee is one of the tribes who took part in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (along with Chickasaw and others). In addition, the term “Cow-Boy” is also derivative of slavery. The slave boys who handled the cows were called cow boys. So when you watch Quentin Tarantino’s Django the content is actually not out of context far as the cow boy theme is concerned and my maiden name is potentially much more deep than we know.

“We Slipped and Learned to Read”

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It is common knowledge that slaves were lawfully restricted from learning to read and write. One less commonly stated fact however, was that slaves were not completely ignorant. They could not read and write English but this did not mean they could not read and write period. As strangers in a foreign land, many African American’s had no knowledge of English or even America itself and thus had to be re-educated. Something they were restricted from as slaves.

It was obvious that slave owners understood that their control over the slave had to supersede the physical. To keep a slave in bondage, not just physically but spiritually and mentally, slave owners knew they had to invent a much stronger rope than one that wrapped itself around the Magnolia. To do this, they realized that knowledge is power and this realization became the beginning of slave codes throughout the United States that put restrictions on slaves learning to read and write. This included, most especially, reading the bible.

However, ironically, it was the reading of the bible and listening to the speech of their slave masters (who often spoke openly around blacks they assumed ignorant) that helped coach slaves into the reading process. The law was specific, reading or even teaching reading both had death penalties. Still, persistent as they were, slaves still found a way to by pass the law, slipped, and learned how to read. For many slaves reading and writing meant, if not physical freedom, mental and spiritual freedom. They could use it as a tool to escape slavery physically or write of the horrors of the institution as did many in the famous slave narratives. The following is an excerpt from a writing done by Janet Cornelius and published by Clark Atlanta University on slaves and literacy:

“Despite the dangers and difficulties, thousands of slaves learned to read and write in the antebellum south. Few left traces of their accomplishments, but 272 ex-slaves who told how they learned to read and write during slavery provide insight into the literacy process within the slave community. For slaves, literacy was a two-edged sword: owners offered literacy to increase their control, but resourceful slaves seized the opportunity to expand their own powers. Slaves who learned to read and write gained privacy, leisure time, and mobility. A few wrote their own passes and escaped from slavery. Literate slaves also taught others and served as conduits for information within the slave communication network. Some were able to capitalize on their skills and literacy as a starting point for literacy careers after slavery ended. Historians of education have drawn a distinction between bible literacy, whose prime motive was the conservation of piety and liberating literacy (slaves used the bible to learn to read), which facilitates diversity and mobility.”

– by Janet Cornelius, Phylon (1960-)

Vol. 44, No. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1983), pp. 171-186
Paper Published by: Clark Atlanta University

Race and Rights

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When did race and rights become separate entities? Since when has the black problem in America not have to do with both race and rights? Dare you to walk the streets of the 1920s and 40s and 50s with your prophet scented blood and expect to transgress the law of separatist signage. That “Whites Only” sign ain’t there by mistake. The one that says Negroes like you must order from the back door. Yo money may be colored like your skin but green has always been worth more than brown. I don’t like to have to go back to slavery. After all, it ain’t like I lived it and yet I can never forget what it feels like. But since we on the subject of feeling, I’m feeling like the same blood pulsing underneath my ancestor’s skin now pulses through mine so what they felt I feel it too. Perhaps I too was a slave long ago and its just taken me this long to find my voice. So, therefore, let me tell you something about what it means to be a slave. A slave is never granted the same rights as a free man, not a physical slave or a psychological one. An inferior race is never granted the same rights as a superior one. Thus anything that’s got to do with rights has also got to do with race. For the Black problem in America has always been centered around identity and always will be. Rights would have never been a problem if the problem wasn’t race. If the hierarchy of the superior and the less superior didn’t exist. If black people never walked around with bywords and proverbs tattooed on their skins there wouldn’t have been a need for them to watch movies in the Nigger Heaven1 of southern movie theaters. Would have been no need of me taking my seat alongside Miss Parks or Miss Morgan all them years ago. A Black Man’s rights and his race are always connected here, like the careful structure of his bones before he emerges from his mother’s womb. It’s the yearning for freedom written in his DNA. Black America’s rights have always and always will be centered around their identity because their problem is not physical it is spiritual. And because a spiritual problem has been long fought with physical weapons the condition of black people in America continues. And so their fight has always been and always will be centered around their freedom.

1. Nigger heaven, n. a designated place, usually the balcony, where blacks were forced to sit, for example, in an integrated movie theater or church as part of Jim Crow Laws.

Harriet Ann Jacobs – Our Self-Published Ancestor

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By now many people are familiar with Harriet Jacobs, the African American writer who escaped slavery in 1842 after hiding in an attic above her grandmothers home for seven years. Harriet’s testimony was one of the many inspirations for the first book in my Stella Trilogy. Stella, like Harriet, was born a slave but did not know it as a young girl–not until after her mother died. But that’s not all Harriet and Stella have in common. Harriet’s biography “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” was also a Self-Published book back in 1861, under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

Olaudah Equiano

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At the age of forty-four Olaudah Equiano wrote and published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa. Written by himself, he registered this writing at Stationer’s Hall, London, in 1789. More than two centuries later, his work was recognized not only as one of the first works written in English by a former slave, but in his narrative, Equiano recalls his childhood in Essaka (an Igbo village formerly in northeast Nigeria), where they practiced Israelite customs and traditions before both he and his sister were kidnapped and sold into slavery.