chapter 6
The African Roots
of American Blacks
O
n the West African coast, the causes of migration to the
New World were as multifarious as, and even more com-
pelling than, in western Europe, but we know far less about the societies
from which the people came. Indeed, our ancestors knew almost nothing
about Africa. As Jonathan Swift scoffed in the early eighteenth century,
So geographers, in Afric-maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps;
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.In fact, Swift (and everyone else in Europe) was as wrong as the geogra-
phers he mocked. In much of the area from which most of the migrants to
America came, what has been called Atlantic Africa, the population was
denser than in Europe and inhabited thousands of towns. But Swift was
right in saying that for Europeans the map of central Africa was a blank. To
fill in the void, they invented what they could not see: not just “savage-
pictures,” they created an empire. Louis XIV’s geographer, Guillaume
Delisle, produced a map of Africa in 1700 with a vast mythical realm
almost the size of western Europe that he called “Nigritie.”
Despite the slave trade, which necessarily taught those engaged in it
much about the Atlantic fringe of West Africa, ignorance of the interior
remained profound. For Europeans and Americans, Atlantic Africa was
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