Review: Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660

by Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton

In their new study on Central Africans and Atlantic Creoles, John Thornton and Linda Heywood take a fresh look at old historiographical questions that have plagued historians for decades: was the slave trade forced on Africans? What kind of cultures did Africans bring with them to the Americas? Was African slavery founded on race-based or economic grounds? Thornton and Heywood begin their investigation in West Central Africa and work their way westward across the Atlantic. Rejecting both a race-based and purely economic approach, Thornton and Heywood use Ira Berlin’s work on Atlantic Creole Culture as a starting point. According to Berlin, the Charter Generation of Africans who helped to form the foundation of Dutch and English colonial America (after being seized from Portuguese ships in privateering expeditions) were well versed in an Atlantic Creole culture that had developed around coastal towns and ports. This Creole background allowed enslaved Africans to better manipulate and navigate new situations, resulting in a comparatively high rate of manumission and freedom. Starting in the mid-17th century, a Plantation Generation not widely exposed to Atlantic Creole culture replaced the Charter Generation. This shift was accompanied by an increasing rigidity in the legal definition of slavery and a decrease in manumission rates. Thornton and Heywood work within the Atlantic Creole framework while critiquing and expanding upon Berlin’s description of the Charter Generation.
According to Thornton and Heywood, the Charter Generation owed its Creole culture less to port towns than it did to West Central African history. West Central Africa, which included the kingdoms of Kongo, Angola and Ngondo, was an unusually “homogenous” region of Africa whose inhabitants, regardless of political affiliation, spoke one of two sub-variations of Bantu-family languages, Kikongo and Kimbundu. The region was also unique in its relationship to Portugal. Beginning at the end of the 15th century, Kongolese leaders initiated contact with Portuguese traders, missionaries and diplomats. Royal children were sent to be educated in Portugal and many Kongolese converted to Christianity. Alfonso I, who reigned at the beginning of the 16th century, supported the spread of Christianity throughout his kingdom, an initiative that was enthusiastically continued by his heirs. In 1595, Kongo was recognized by the Papacy as an Episcopal See and São Salvador became a cathedral. The Portuguese conquest of Angola in 1575 also helped to spread Christianity and Atlantic Creole Culture in West Central Africa.
Christianity was not the only element of Portuguese culture that West Central Africans assumed, nor did it “wipe out” African religious practices but it was a primary indicator of a hybrid Creole culture that was developing throughout the region. Thornton and Heywood make it clear that the Christianity adopted by the Kongolese was neither forced nor fully “orthodox.” The Kongolese and other Africans mixed Christian practice with “local religious concepts” (62) like territorial deities and ancestor worship.

Thornton and Heywood’s use of religion as a primary indicator of Creole culture raises several questions. What, for example, does it mean to be truly “converted” and can a mass baptism count as an introduction to Atlantic Creole culture? There were numerous Jesuit and Dominican missionaries who refused to recognize Kongolese and West Central African Catholicism, but this does not mean that belief was not “genuine,” nor should it suggest that Atlantic Creole culture was limited to elites. While Thornton and Heywood are of aware of the complexities of the meaning of religion, they regard partial adoption and modification of Christian practice as the definition of Creole culture, thus making the issue of conversion less problematic. They also argue that the refusal of some missionaries to accept Kongolese Christianity is evidence of the exact creole religion they are trying to identify. If Creole Christianity is by definition hybrid, then it should follow that some orthodox Catholics would reject its legitimacy. This flexible approach to religion focuses on the cultural and practical aspects of religion and allows Thornton and Heywood to find Creole Christianity in locations without recognized churches.
Another difficulty raised by an argument about cultural impact is the challenge of defining the influence of a particular “culture”: how can cultural change be quantified? And how can cultural geography be charted? Finally, even if elites are converting to Christianity and developing fluency in Atlantic Creole culture, how much does this say about non-elites? Thornton and Heywood do their best to address these issues, though a lack of sources means that some answers remain tantalizingly partial. Aside from Christianity, they see evidence of Atlantic Creole Culture in naming practices, music, food, clothing, burial practices, architecture and language. So a Portuguese name, for example, indicates Christian baptism and at least minimal contact with Creole Culture.
In order to assess the geographical impact of Atlantic Creole culture, the authors turn to institutional evidence (existence of churches), political relationships, cultural indicators (Portuguese naming practices) and military activity. They argue that Atlantic Creole culture was strongest in the urban centers of Kongo and Angola, where Africans came into direct contact with Portuguese and Luso-Africans, though it also spread to Ndongo and Matamba and outlying areas. Useful maps sketch the spread of Creole Culture outlined in their argument. As the maps illustrate, military activity played a crucial role in the expansion of Creole Culture. Christian practice “heightened the centrality of Christianity among even the rural population,” (174) and Christian rituals were incorporated into warfare. Since parts of West Central Africa suffered from continuous warfare during the first half of the 17th century (often initiated by the Portuguese, whose slave trade benefited from chaos) this also ensured that West Central Africans, many of whom were Christian and acquainted with Creole Culture, would make up the majority of African slaves shipped to the Americas. Between 1607 and 1660, an average of 9,000 captives were exported annually to the Americas.
These West Central African captives, some of whom were Christian and many of whom were acquainted with Atlantic Creole Culture, became the Charter Generation that Berlin found to be so culturally adaptable. While they did not represent the entire Generation, West Central Africans were the “vast majority” (236) and their already homogenous language and culture, minimal ethnic enmity and familiarity with European culture meant that the Atlantic Creole Charter Generation “possessed the means to set down their own cultural patterns in the Americas” (238). Still, the impact of the Charter Generation varied from colony to colony. In Barbados, the Chesapeake, New England, and the rural parts of Dutch New Netherland, “the Charter Generation comprised [only] a small faction...of the larger settler group” (240). In other colonies like Bermuda, Tobago, the Guianas, and urban New Amsterdam, meanwhile, the Charter Generation made a larger portion of the population and had a more lasting effect on the “less homogenous and less Creole subsequent generations of Africans” (240). In the Americas, evidence of the Central African Charter Generation’s Atlantic Creole background can be found primarily in descriptions of their religious practice (Catholic rituals and baptism) and naming practices (Portuguese names of their
cognates).

Thornton and Heywood end their study by staking out a refreshing position on the old question about why race-based, hereditary slavery developed in the British and Dutch America. Rejecting a “race-based” approach outlined most famously by Winthrop Jordan, they argue that English and Dutch travel writers had an ambiguous, rather than exclusively negative, attitude toward Africans and that their descriptions tended to be more positive when they encountered the Kongolese. Unlike Indians, Africans were not seen as a completely foreign “other.” Still, Africans in the Americas were always regarded as slaves, though the English and Dutch “had not yet defined slavery as lifelong, inheritable servitude but only as indefinite service.” Atlantic Creoles could use their Christianity and familiarity with Europeans to capitalize on this flexibility, leading to “expanded rights, including freedom, social acceptance, and mobility” (299). These rights diminished with the influx of the Plantation Generation and the increasing rigidity of English and Dutch law which, which the 1660s, “explicitly excluded African Christians from using their religion to obtain manumission and also closed the avenue for freedom by excluding converts from using Christianity as a means to gain freedom” (331).
Thornton and Heywood cover an impressive amount of material in Central Africans, and their West Central African history expertise will be helpful for scholars interested in slave culture and religion in the Americas. Still, their broad scope leaves readers with a number of questions. To name just a few: how widespread was Christianity in West Central Africa and what factors (aside from European or African missionaries) were facilitating its movement? How can studies of slave religion in the Americas incorporate Thornton and Heywood’s findings on Kongolese Christianity? What kinds of effects, if any, did West Central African Christianity have on missionary efforts? While Thornton and Heywood cannot be expected to answer all the questions their research is bound to produce, their work will hopefully be used as a springboard for more specialized work. In that case, Central Africans may become not only an impressive study in itself, but one that inspires a flurry of new and exciting work.