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In Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, Michael A. Gomez examines the creation of a distinct African American identity among slaves of differing African identities in colonial North America.
He draws largely upon the work of ethnologists to describe the cultural features of different African tribal groups and compares these with contemporary descriptions of slaves from colonial newspapers and the WPA’s interviews with former slaves in the 1930s. Gomez concludes of his analysis, “Prior to 1830, the movement toward race and away from ethnicity met with varying degrees of success relative to place and period, and in any case was significantly influenced by ethnic antecedents. In some cases, social stratification within the African American community can be related to preceding ethnic differences. But whether related to ethnicity or not, classism emerged as the principal obstacle to a race-based collective concept” (pg 4). Gomez’s analysis anticipates the work of Stephanie Smallwood in analyzing the difference between salt-water and country-born slaves.
Religion plays a key role in Gomez’s analysis. He argues, “The nature of the Islamic faith in West Africa was such that, upon transfer to North America, it tended to transcend the specific ethnicities of its adherents. Muslims in America, whether Fulbe or Mandinka or Hausa, had the capacity to relate to one another and to the non-Muslim world as Muslims” (pg 59-60). He believes “that Islam’s most enduring contribution to the African-based community was its role in the negotiation of intrasocial relations” (pg 82). Beyond organized religion, Gomez argues, “Significant portions of the West Central African metaphysical view survived the transatlantic passage, deeply influencing African American religion and culture” (pg 114). Even those who adopted Christianity did so while incorporating elements of African tradition, such as water baptism and ring shouts.
While West Central Africa was populated by various disparate groups, Gomez writes, “Once removed from the West Central African context and relocated to America, however, the commonality of the Bantu languages and cultures, their treatment as a single people y their captors, and the need to effect strategies of resistance necessarily encouraged the Congolese-Angolans to see themselves anew and forge ties of community” (pg 144).
Drawing on this cultural background, he continues, “Within the context of a political struggle, which is exactly what slavery was, it ceased to matter whether specific cultural forms could be maintained over increasing spans of time and space. What mattered instead was achieving a self-view in opposition to the one prescribed by power and authority. To this end, the African antecedent formed the wellspring of cultural resistance” (pg 155). This “restructuring of the African identity, principally involving a move away from ethnicity toward race, would have been greatly facilitated by the creation of a lingua franca emblematic of the African’s altered condition in the New World” (pg 180).
Gomez concludes, “Race as a unifying ideal was not imposed upon the community but was a concept suggested by the logic and reality of the servile condition and adopted and fashioned by those of African descent to suit their own purposes. That is, the creation of the African American identity was largely an internal process” (pg 220). Despite this, Gomez cautions that the appearance of racial solidarity opened itself up to fractures based on class. He writes, “Relative to whites, blacks have often sought to present themselves as a single people. Those doing the presenting have usually been privileged. But once removed from the presence of whites, fissures within African American society along class lines become readily apparent. The fact that cleavages were recognizable in the immediate aftermath of slavery means that their roots are to be found in the soil of slavery. The stratification of African America began somewhere” (pg 223).
