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Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: “Lucumi” and “Nago” as Ethnonyms in West Africa1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Robin Law
Robin Law*
Affiliation:
University of Stirlingand York University, Ontario
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Extract

Ethnicity was evidently critical for the operation of the Atlantic slave trade, on both the African and the European sides of the trade. For Africans, given the general convention against enslaving fellow citizens, ethnic identities served to define a category of “others” who were legitimately enslavable. For African Muslims this function was performed by religion, though here too, it is noteworthy that the classic discussion of this issue, by the Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba in 1615, approaches it mainly in terms of ethnicity, through classification of West African peoples as Muslim or pagan. Europeans, for their part, regularly distinguished different ethnicities among the slaves they purchased, and American markets developed preferences for slaves of particular ethnic origins. This raises interesting (but as yet little researched) questions about the ways in which African and European definitions of African ethnicity may have interacted. Both Africans and Europeans, for example, commonly employed, as a means of distinguishing among African ethnicities, the facial and bodily scarifications (“tribal marks”) characteristic of different communities—a topic on which there is detailed information in European sources back at least into the seventeenth century, which might well form the basis for a historical study of ethnic identities.

In this context as in others, of course, ethnicity should be seen, not as a constant, but as fluid and subject to constant redefinition. The lately fashionable debate on “the invention of tribes” in Africa concentrated on the impact of European colonialism in the twentieth century, rather than on that of the Atlantic slave trade earlier—no doubt because it was addressed primarily to Southern, Central and Eastern rather than Western Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 24 , January 1997 , pp. 205 - 219
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997

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Footnotes

1.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the African Studies Association, San Francisco, November 1996. My thanks to Christine Ayorinde for her assistance in identifying material on “Lucumi” in Cuba.

References

2. For early documentation of which, see the incident in 1682, when Abora and Kormantin, both members of the Fante confederacy, were at war, but it was noted that captives taken in the fighting were not available for export, because “they dare not sell them for they are all of one country.” Bodleian Library, Oxford: Rawlinson C746, Richard Thelwall, Anomabu, 9 August 1682.

3. Barbour, Bernard and Jacobs, Michelle, “The Mi”raj: a Legal Treatise on Slavery by Ahmad Baba” in Willis, John Ralph, ed., Slaves and Muslim Society in Africa (2 vols.: London, 1985), 1:125–59.Google Scholar

4. Again, for an early example, see the complaint from Barbados to the Royal African Company in West Africa that a cargo of slaves “by you styled Gold Coast Negroes, we here found not to be so, but of several nations and languages, as Alampo [Adangme], the worst of Negroes, Papas [Popo] and some of unknown parts, and few right Gold Coast Negroes among them, which are here presently now discerned by every planter or inhabitant of this island from any other sort of Negroes.” Rawlinson C746, Edwyn Steed and Stephen Gascoigne, Barbados, 12 May 1686.

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23. Ortiz, Fernando, Los negros esclavos (Havana, 1987), 41–56.Google Scholar Other Lucumi subgroups named by Ortiz, which are not readily identifiable, are “Engüei” and “Epa.”

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41. Sandoval, , Tratado, 126 (referring to “lucumies estrangeros”).Google Scholar

42. Bràsio, António, Monumenta Missionaria Africana (1st series, 14 vols.: Lisbon, 1952–1985), 8Google Scholar: no.135: Colombin de Nantes, São Tomé, 26 December 1640; Dapper, , Naukeurige Beschrijvinge, 491.Google Scholar

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48. Algemeen Rijksarchief, The Hague: TWIC.1024, J. Bruyningh, Offra, 14 March 1680; Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter, AN): Dayrie, Jakin, 12 August 1728.

49. van Dantzig, Albert, The Dutch and the Guinea Coast, 1674-1742: A Collection of Documents from the General State Archive at The Hague (Accra, 1978)Google Scholar, no. 234: Diary of Ph. Eytzen, Whydah, 3 May 1718.

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80. d'Avezac-Maçaya, M., Notice sur le pays et le peuple des Yébous en Afrique (Paris, 1845)Google Scholar, translated in Lloyd, P.C., “Osifekunde of Ijebu” in Curtin, Philip D., ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1967), 245-46, 248.Google Scholar

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83. Cf. the argument of Matory, “Return,” on the use of the term “Gege” for speakers of Aja-Ewe languages.

84. Cf. Law, Robin, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550-1750 (Oxford, 1991), 306.Google Scholar