AFRICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO AMERICAN CULTURE

4Th year Teacher´s Training College

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AFRICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO AMERICAN CULTURE

Joseph E. Holloway Ph.D

Scholars have long recognized African origins in the linguistic forms and the cultural traits of African Americans, and thus assumed that these Africanisms were derived principally from West Africa. There has been much debate over the origins of African culture in the U.S. The classic debate between Melville J. Herskovits and E. Franklin Frazier is still relevant.  To revisit it briefly, Frazier believed that Black Americans lost their African heritage during slavery; thus, the African American culture evolved independently of any African influences.  Herskovits argued the opposite that it was not possible to understand and appreciate African American culture without understanding its African linkages and carryover calledAfricanisms. Current scholars are more concerned with using a transnational framework to examine how African cultural survivals have changed over time and readapted to diasporic conditions while experiencing slavery, forced labor, and racial discrimination.

The new scholarship suggests that the West Africans contributed primarily to Euro-American culture whereas people who came from the vast Bantu speaking areas of Africa, to the east and south of West Africa, are those most likely to have left an African cultural heritage to African Americans.  Plantation slavery tended to acculturate West Africans relatively quickly, yet unwittingly encouraged retention of African traditions among others.

Enslaved Africans, not free to openly transport kinship, courts, religion, and material cultures, were forced to disguise or abandon them during the Middle Passage.  Instead, they dematerialized their cultural artifacts during the Middle Passage to rematerialize African culture on their arrival in the New World. Africans arrived in the New World capable of using Old World knowledge to create New World realities.

Africans, and their descendants, contributed to the richness and fullness of American culture from its beginnings.  Their contributions in early America, for which they have received little or no credit, include the development of the American dairy industry, open grazing of cattle, artificial insemination of cows, the development of vaccines (including vaccination for smallpox), and cures for snake bites.

African stories and folklore, such as the Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Chicken Little tales originated in Africa, and were absorbed into America’s culture of childhood and laid a foundation for American nursery culture.  Despite the limitations imposed by slavery, Africans and their descendants made substantial contributions to American culture in aesthetics, animal husbandry, agriculture, cuisine, folklore, folk medicine and language.  This chapter examines African contribution to American culture.

AFRICAN RICE CULTIVATION

The major contribution of enslaved Africans was in agriculture.  In the 1740s, rice from Madagascar was introduced to South Carolina’s farming economy. Africans, experts in rice cultivation, were transported from the island of Goree, off the coast of what is now the Senegambia, to train Europeans to cultivate this new crop.

The first successful cultivation of rice in the New World was accomplished in the South Carolina Sea Islands by an African woman who later showed her owner how to cultivate rice.  The first rice seeds were imported directly from the island of Madagascar in 1685; Africans supplied the labor and the technical expertise for this new crop industry.  Africans off the coast of Senegal helped train Europeans in the methods of cultivation and those who specialized in rice cultivation were imported directly from the island of Goree.  Africans were able to successfully transfer their rice culture to the New World.  The method of rice cultivation used in West Africa and South Carolina was identical.  Enslaved Africans used three basic systems: ground water, springs, and soil moisture retention, or high water table.  These three systems are found on both sides of the Atlantic, and formed the basis for South Carolina’s antebellum economy.

Early Africans brought with them highly developed skills in metal working, leather work, pottery, and weaving. Senegambians were employed as medicine men (root doctors), Blacksmiths, harness makers, carpenters, and lumberjacks. These trades were passed down to other enslaved Africans by the skilled African craftsmen in an apprentice-type fashion.

Traditional African food culture has been preserved even today in many areas of American cuisine, as in the technique of deep fat frying, southern stews (gumbos), and nut stews.  Okra, tania, Blackeyed peas, kidney and lima bean were all brought on slave ships as food gathered in Africa for the Africans during the transatlantic voyage.  Fufu, a traditional African meal throughout the continent, was eaten from the Senegambia to Angola and was assimilated into American culture as “turn meal and flour” in South Carolina.  Corn bread prepared by African slaves was similar to the African millet bread.  In some of the slave narrative reports, “cornbread” was referred to as one of the foods that accompanied them to the New World.

AFRICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO AMERICAN “COWBOY” CULTURE

The first major contribution by Africans to North American society was in the arena of cattle raising. When the Fulani (or Fula) people from Senegambia, along with longhorn cattle, were imported to South Carolina in 1731, colonial herds increased from 500 to 6,784 some 30 years later. These Fulas were expert cattlemen and were responsible for introducing African husbandry patterns of open grazing now practiced throughout the American cattle industry.  Cattle drives to the centers of distribution were innovations Africans brought with them as contributions to a developing industry. Originally a cowboy was an African who worked with cattle, just as a houseboy worked in “de big House.” Open grazing made practical use of an abundance of land and a limited labor force.

Africans and their descendants were America’s first cowboys.  Most people are not aware that many cowboys of the American West were Black, contrary to how the film industry and the media have portrayed them.  Only recently have we begun to recognize the extent to which cowboy culture has African roots.  Many details of cowboy life, work, and even material culture can be traced to the Fulani, America’s first cowboys, but there has been little investigation of this by historians of the American West.

Contemporary descriptions of local West African animal husbandry bear a striking resemblance to what appeared in Carolina and later in the American dairy and cattle industries.  Africans introduced the first artificial insemination and the use of cows’ milk for human consumption.  Peter Wood believes that from this early relationship between cattle and Africans the word, “cowboy” originated.

As late as 1865, following the Civil War, Africans whose responsibilities were with cattle were referred to as “cowboys’ in plantation records.  After 1865, whites associated with the cattle industry referred to themselves as “cattlemen,” to distinguish themselves from the Black cowboys.  The annual North-South migratory patterns the cowboys followed are directly related to the migratory patterns of the Fulani cattle herders who lived scattered throughout Nigeria and Niger.  Not only were Africans imported with the expertise to handle cattle, but the African longhorn was imported as well, a breed that later became known as the Texas longhorn.

Much of the early language associated with cowboy culture had a strong African flavor.  The word buckra (buckaroo) is derived from Mbakara, the Efik/lbibio work for “poor white man.”  It was used to describe a class of whites who worked as broncobusters, bucking and breaking horses.  Planters used buckras as broncobusters because slaves were too valuable to risk injury.  Another African word that found its way into popular cowboy songs is “get along little dogies.”  The word “doggies” originated from Kimbundu, along with kidogo, a little something, and dodo, small.  After the Civil War when great cattle roundups began, Black cowboys introduced such Africanisms to cowboy language and songs.

TALES OUT OF AFRICA

In the area of folklore, Brer Rabbit, Brer Wolf, Brer Bear, and Sis’ Nanny Goat were part of the folklore the Wolof brought by way of the Hausa, Fula (Fulani), and the Mandinka.  Other West African tales of a trickster Hare were also introduced.  The Spider (Anansi) tales appeared in the United States in the form of Aunt Nancy and Brer Rabbit stories.  All the stories of Uncle Remus, as retold in the Sea Islands, are Hausa in origin via the Mande (Mandinka).  These African tales laid the foundation for American nursery rhymes.

These stories found their way into American culture as told by slaves.  The Chicken Little story is also part of this tradition, and originated unaltered from Africa. The Hare and Hyena, corresponds to Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox tales.  African slaves who fled to the Creek Indian Nation introduced these West African Trickster tales, which were also adopted by the Seminoles.

THE CONGO SQUARE

Le placed du Congo, Congo Square, is in old New Orleans.  An ordinance of the Municipal Council, adopted on October 15, 1817, made the name of this traditional place law.  It was considered one of the unique attractions of old New Orleans, ranking second only to the Quadroon Ball.  At the square, women wore dotted calico dresses with brightly colored Madras kerchiefs tied

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