I’m curious if it is possible for an African American, who is descended from slaves in the Americas, to know that they descended specifically from Nigeria?
I ask because there was a youtube commentor on a theyoungturks video, who claimed to be black and that all black democratic voters are “brain washed”, and used some rather…dubious slang that gave off the impression of trying to impersonate a black person. Then he went on to say that his ancestors were from Nigeria, this is after describing how his family comes from slaves.
I grew up in a black family, and have known a lot of black families (black in this context meaning, descendants of American slaves) and I don’t know ANYONE who claims to know that their ancestors descended from any specific African country. In fact for many of us (including myself) one of the lasting tragedies of slavery is the fact that we can only get as specific as “western Africa” for our descent.
I’m 99% sure that this person is someone with an agenda, but is it possible for American blacks to know what specific country they came from? Also, in what systematic way did the slavemasters suppress this knowlege? From what I have read a lot of African customs and language was banned to be used on the plantation, but what kept them from telling their children where they came from, and keeping that knowlege?
I don’t know the details, but most African slaves were taken from a few regions. The descendants of slaves in America will likely have some ancestry in more than one of those regions. Some families maintained enough information about their family history to trace their ‘roots’ back to specific slave ships or place of origin.
This was the basis of Alex Haley’s novel Roots, and the mini-series based on it.
And was subsequently shown to be made up by Hayley out of whole cloth. The documents that Hayley claimed to have obtained his information from did not contain any such information. The US oral histories he collected were either denied by the people he attributed them to, or else obtained in return for payment. Combined with the fact that the African oral history he obtained is known to have been coached in return for money, the US oral histories are charitably described as untrustworthy.
IOW, “Roots” was a made up fantasy sold as truth by a very dishonest novelist. Maybe some slave descendants can trace their history back to Africa. Alex Hayley is certainly not one of them.
Richard Pryor had a routine about going back to Africa. He said he asked an African to guess what his ancestry was based on his appearance. The guy told him “Italian”.
Genetic markers can show a tie to specific families or tribes, but these do not correspond with modern national borders/geographical locations in west Africa. The nation-state is a recent construct there, mostly imposed by colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the slave trade predates it.
To use the already cited novel “Roots” (despite it false claims) does show how easy that can happen: children taken from the parents and sold elsewhere before they had learned to speak or were old enough to remember meant that oral tradition and history could not be passed on.
In addition, slaves usually lost their own names as they were replaced with Christian names (even without conversion, because it was easier to use for the slave owners and overseers). The slaves also had to learn English quickly in order to survive, and were thrown together from many different tribes with different languages.
If you must learn a new language, but can’t practise your old language any more because even your spouse, and all your work mates, speak a different language, you will quickly forget the language. (You can see this even with European immigrants, who had others to talk to, but Italian and Germans lost their language after two generations).
Given the uncertainy of slave life (the ever-present threat of being sold elsewhere, of families being seperated) it’s understandable that preserving the old traditions and names was too difficult and probably not considered important enough (compared to other useful information like underground railway or how to escape to the Indians).
In the novel, Haley uses two or three distinct words from a specific language - Kunta Kinte calls a guitar that word, a bowl this word, and a woman a different word - as explanation on how (through some mangling over the generations) he traced it back to an existing language.
It’s also interesting how drastically the style changes from the whole first part - the Kunta Kinte in Africa, which Haley copied from another author - to the next part which Haley wrote himself.
> I have not watched it, but I believe this is the point of African American Lives.
Watch this program. It tells you a lot about what can be known about the ancestry of present-day Americans with slave ancestry. A number of well-known black Americans had their DNA compared, first, with many DNA samples from all over the world and, second, with many samples from all over Africa. This allowed the host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to tell these people, first, what proportion of their ancestry came from Africa and, second, what proportion of their ancestry came from various areas in Africa. This lead to some interesting discussions. Gates had to tell Oprah Winfrey that there can’t be any truth to her family’s legend that their ancestors were Zulus. Her ancestry, like that of most black Americans, comes from a few areas in western Africa.
My grandmother says we have a long-ago ancestor who was from Nigeria.
I think this is no doubt true, but only in the same way that I’m pretty sure I have a descendent from the British Isles too. Nigeria was not a country back in slave times. Perhaps the individual would have referred to their home by a more localized name, but it is suspicious that this name isn’t mentioned in the family folklore. So yeah, I can see having “Nigerian” history, but it can’t be verified. Even DNA analysis can only tell me that I had one ancestor who hailed from that part of the world. It can say “Yeah, you have evidence of Nigerian ancestry.” But it cannot say, “You do NOT have Nigerian ancestry.” People often fail to recognize this.
There was a guy who came to my high school to talk about Africa, and he impressed some of the students by sizing them up and down a few times and guessing which part of the continent their ancestors came from. It didn’t matter what amount of admixture the students had…he could visually place them. He linked Maynard Jackson’s daughter to Ethiopia. People were crazy enough to believe in all of this.
It’s be a tad more accurate to say that the nation-states that currently exist in Africa are recent colonial constructs. West Africa did have nation-states that predated colonialism, just none which were able to resist the European invaders.
Plus, IIRC the British were actively intercepting the slave trade starting in 1833; so not a lot of the slaves by the end of the civil war were from Africa; most were born in the USA/CSA.
Plus, there would have been dilution and language/pronunciation issues. Nobody would remember “I’m from Nigeria”. If they were lucky, they would have some garbled name of some tribal homeland that one of 4 grandparents came from. Considering how mangled some of the European placenames are for Asian locales, it would surprise me if any names could survive intelligibly into the 1960’s.
Current African national boundaries are meaningless, but some ethnic links can be found. But those ethnic groups moved throughout Africa, so genetic markers aren’t automatically linked to a certain place.
I can appreciate wanting to know more about your ancestors. To study up on mine, I’d need to go check out baptismal records in West Galway. And other parts of that island–even the North.
For African-Americans, it’s obviously harder. The genetic bit might give a hint…
Slavery is a tragedy, but doesn’t this eventually happen to everyone due to the intermarriage of families from different countries + general genealogical forgetfulness? My only pre-North American ancestor I know the name of was Irish, but I have no reason to think I am exclusively descended from the Irish (and my surname suggests some Scottish ancestry on the other side). There must be millions of white people out there who don’t think of their ancestry as anything more specific than “western Europe.”
White people didn’t get their whole name changed. True, women lost their last name upon marriage, (which is why tracing female ancestors in genealogy is so damn hard that many hobby-researchers skip them), but the male names usually stays the same.
In addition, among Christians birth (baptism), marriage and death will be recorded in Church accounts. In many European countries (depending on what historic period it was) a civil authority would also keep some account of who lived in their city. Professional leagues would have membership rolls. And so on.
Although wars, fires etc. destroyed a lot of records; names with difficult spellings can get mangled or spellings changed during emigration; sometimes old records are thrown out when integrating churches/ communities/ towns into larger groups; etc. it’s still a lot more written evidence than for slaves.
Also, there were far less families torn apart compared to slaves. Even if 90% of a village die in the 30-years-war, or 1/3 of a town dies of the black plague, the written records in the churches etc. will survive.
Even if in the 19th century a part of the family emigrates to the Americas, many will be left behind who remember the family (usually only the strong, young, poor or political emigrated as they had best chances.)
I thought originally Haley marketedit as his real family history? Wasn’t that why there was such a huge uproar, because he went very publically to some remote African village claiming his research had led him there and how people recognized his few words as belonging to their language - and it turned out they hadn’t understood what he was on about, or were simply being polite by agreeing with his claims?
That’s pretty much a statement declaring that the basic facts are true - nobody would have nitpicked that conversations or behaviour of people 5 generations back who left no records were invented, but to claim that the basic lineage was correctly reconstructed when it’s not is a different claim.
Though his last chapters in the book are not only rushed, they show very obviously why so much history was lost (not only was the family originally split up, they later moved from the South to the West), making the claim of a reconstructed whole lineage obviously absurd.
And stealing about 1/3 to 1/2 of the book from another writer - not rewriting, but copy-paste-insertion - without any notice is beyond fiction or research, it’s despicable.
Forgot another way of records that applies to normal whites, but not to slaves: contracts for sale of things or labour, for buying or selling a house, lists of city council members…
Often the first thing that survives of a distant history is a tax record or sale of a cow or paying five bushels of grain for making a painting … because tons of that stuff was written (Esp. with bureaucracy and taxes!) - but church records exist only once. So bureaucracy survives everything else because they file in triplicate.
Before the nitpickers point out that slaves were sold: their names and occupations weren’t usually recorded on those contracts. I think it often says “Sold: 1 male black slave, about 20 years old, strong teeth, good worker, for 20$”. That’s different from a contract that says “I, George Smith, citizen of Munich, sell the house in Market Street 1 to Mr. Johan Miller. Witnessess are the following …” etc.
As far as I know, it was always marketed as fiction. Apparently it’s quite the rage for people to find out that fiction is made up.
I stand by my statement. The attempts by descendants of American slaves to find their origins based on available information was the basis for Haley’s novel. Since it was a work of fiction it shouldn’t surprise anyone that any or all of it was made up. And being plagiarized from another book written on the same basis simply supports my statement. Any latent anger at the author isn’t relevant to this thread.