practically inescapable mark of degradation and bondage.
_________________
Source:
Gary Nash, The American People
, (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), p. 63.
AFRICANS BECOME AFRICAN AMERICANS
In the following account historian Allan Kulikoff describes the transformation of African culture
into African American culture in the 18th Century Chesapeake colonies and suggests examples
of the various African, and in rare instances, European cultural traits that would eventually
comprise the new "creole" culture once native-born slaves outnumbered African arrivals.
__________________________________________________________________________
Newly enslaved Africans possessed a few building blocks for a new social order under
slavery.
Many did share a similar ethnic identity.
About half the African arrivals at Port York
during two periods of heavy immigration were Ibos, Ibibios, Efkins, and Mokos from Nigeria,
and another fifth came from various tribes in Angola.
From 1718 to 1726, 60 percent came from
the Bight of Biafra (the Ibo area); between 1728 and 1739, 85 percent were imported from Biafra
or Angola.
Most new slaves spoke similar languages, lived under the same climate, cultivated
similar crops, and shared comparable kinship systems.
When they arrived in the Chesapeake,
they may have combined common threads in their cultures into new Afro-American structures.
Once they entered the plantation world, African immigrants had to begin to cope with
their status
....
When they reached their new homes, Africans were immediately put to work
making tobacco.
Most were broken in on the most routine tasks of production. Nearly two-thirds
of them arrived between June and August, when the tobacco plants had already been moved from
seedbeds and were growing rapidly.
The new slaves' first task was weeding between the rows of
plants with hands, axes, or hoes.
These jobs were similar to those that Ibos and other Africans
had used in growing other crops in their native lands.
After a month or two of such labor, slaves
could be instructed in the more difficult task of harvesting
....
Not only were Africans
forced to work for harsh masters in a strange land but masters usually stripped them of their
names, their last personal possession.
Africans imbued names with great meaning, and naming
often followed a ceremony at birth or coming of age
....
Masters in the Chesapeake, without
ceremony, forced Africans to adopt English names and required that they be used in daily
exchanges between whites and blacks.
At least four-fifths of African youths age ten to fifteen,
whose ages and names were recorded in York and Lancaster counties at the peak of the slave
trade, received English names. Only 3 percent of these 465 slaves kept African names. Six
maintained day names, used in many African communities to indicate the day of birth: four were
Cuffy (male name for "Friday"), one was Jacko,
(Quacko, male name for "Wednesday"), and
one Juba (female name for "Monday").
Eighty slaves, however, might have persuaded their
masters to allow them to retain Anglicized versions of African names. Three names were
especially common. Twenty-four boys were named Jack, an English version of Quacko, and
