Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

This chapter discusses the experiences and interactions of the people held captive on the ships. These people, torn from their homes and communities, were thrown together in “anomalous intimacy” once aboard a ship (101). To comprehend the diasporic identity they formed, Smallwood examines the recorded indigenous traditions and accounts of contemporary European observations to appreciate who these African people understood themselves to be before their enslavement.

Dialects of Akan, Guan, Ga, Ewe, and Gbe could be found among the cargoes assembled at the Gold Coast—usually, there were at least three, if not four, distinct languages to be heard aboard. A ship’s ethnic makeup was dependent on the complex, fast-changing politics and shifts of power on the Gold Coast. For example, the Asante state’s rise to power changed the volume and makeup of the cargoes of enslaved people from the Gold Coast. European cartographers provided a helpful framework for the socio-ethnic landscape with maps that labeled the regions with names and their observations and notations about the people who lived within those territories.

Smallwood goes on to discuss one of the known recorded Asante traditions regarding the origin of matriclans and the matrilineal system of descent that was common to the Gold Coast’s Akan-speaking groups.