Cultural survival...

Over on Facebook someone wrote about the people who were brought from Africa to the New World as slaves:

• [They] ...survived being chained to other human bodies for several months in the bottom of a disease-infested ship during the Middle Passage, lost their language, customs and traditions, picked up the English language as best they could while working free of charge from sun up to sun down...

I might call this the Blank Slate Hypothesis of African-American language and culture. Anyway, I responded:

I'm sorry, but this is very misleading. The slaves off the boats still knew their languages and where they were from (although the countries they were did not exist in their present form). They passed this knowledge down as best they could. The descendants of slaves that I worked with in the Caribbean use words from African languages in their daily speech, as do many African Americans*. Where I worked, many people had a tradition of knowing what African ethnic group their ancestors came from (Kongo, Igbo, Mandingo, Yoruba, etc.). The Gullah people near where I am now (Northeast Florida) have hundreds of African words in their everyday speech. The idea that all this rich culture and language was erased by slavery is a convenient myth promulgated by whites; and it's been totally disproven by anthropologists (I am one) and others. 

I''ll give you just one example: the word 'juke' as in 'juke box'. This word was brought to the Americas by speakers of Fula, a West African language. In Fula it means to pierce, jab, penetrate, including sexually. The Juke Joint became the place you went to hook up; the Juke Box played the music. To this day, people where I worked use 'juke' as a word for getting pricked by, say, a cactus spine. There's a lot more to this (I wrote my dissertation on an Afro-Creole English from Grenada) but I think (hope) I've made my point.

There was pushback:

• [They] ... were taken to central slave-exporting ports, from where they were forced aboard TransAtlantic transport ships under brutally inhumane conditions. The "passengers" typically were a mixture of tribes and languages. Of course they lost their language, customs, and traditions.

And again, I responded:

And I am telling you that you are wrong. Sorry, but here's no polite way to say it. The idea that Black people "lost their language, customs, and traditions" was made up by White people to make Blacks seem subhuman. Many language features that they brought from Africa and incorporated into their speech over here were said to show mental deficiency, because, you know, they couldn't possibly be legitimate carryovers from somewhere else. You may not like it, but it's a fact. If you don't want to believe me, look for Lorenzo Dow Turner and Melville Herskovits, two of many scholars who have demonstrated the continuities between West Africa and African American languages and cultures.

• You are purporting that the enslavement of Africans did not deprive them of their language, culture or traditions because they have managed to retain a small remnant of each. That's preposterous.

I am arguing against the original proposition, which was that Africans lost ALL their culture and language in the slave experience. They did not. They carried with them more than a "small remnant." They mingled that with the languages and cultures they were embedded in in the New World: English, French, Spanish, etc. In each they created new languages out of English (etc.) and the "remnants" they brought. In some cases they continued speaking their home languages right into the present (Cuba, for example). Retention and creativity; I have spent my academic career studying this, and I know what the fuck I'm talking about.

Do you eat okra? The plant and the name for it come from West Africa (Igbo language). Have you ever called peanuts goobers? The plant is American, of course, but its African name (nguba) comes from Kikongo. Watch the Living Dead?  Zombie is from Kikongo zumbi or nzambi. And on and on....

The more interesting (to me) influences of West African are in the grammars developed by the slaves and their descendants.  That would be a whole 'nother thread I think, but one example: The West African languages I've studied don't have the English th sounds. So in the encounter, English words get reworked and th sounds become t or d: the > de; this > dis; and so on. Exactly this sort of thing was used by the racists to label Blacks "lazy"- because they didn't always pronounce our th's.  Some said they couldn't make these sounds because they had "lazy tongues" or "thick lips."  Of course, they can learn to make them because they are Homo sapiens. But it was (and sometimes still is) grist for the racist mill.

The Blank Slate Hypothesis of African American language and culture attributes any deviation from "standard" language and culture to cognitive deficiency, the inability to learn the presumedly more "advanced" language of whichever Europeans the slaves ended up among.  I wish I could write "attributed" in that last sentence, but it seems to be alive and well, and still a part of the folk model for some, at least.

*I use the term "African American" to refer to the descendants of slaves brought from Africa to the New World, all of which is really "America."

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Herskovits, Melville.  1966.  The New World Negro: Selected Papers in Afroamerican Studies.  Minerva Press.

Turner, Lorenzo D. 2002 [1949].  Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect.  University of South Carolina Press.