Summary report of the meeting of experts
on the African slave trade221slaves. The tension was made even more dangerous as the quest for larger-
scale production made the treatment they received more and more unbearable
for the slaves.
In Brazil and in Réunion there gradually emerged a society in which
apart from agriculture, most of the 'small trades' were carried on by the slaves.
There thus developed a whole series of producing trades which were not under
the control of the planters. These are at present being studied by Cuban
scholars.^6
Socio-cultural consequences in the receiving countries,
particularly the AmericasWhile Haiti considers itself born of the slave trade, the societies to which it
gave rise became creóle by force of circumstances in the course of time. In
these culturally and ethnically more or less composite societies, it is still diffi-
cult to identify the role of Africa and African cultures. The degree of survival
of African influences is quite clearly linked directly with social and political
developments in each case under consideration.
Wherever the Black Africans' reaction to protect themselves was not
rapid and radical, integration of the slaves into the culture of the European
master class took place, more or less quickly. This gave rise to a linguistic and
religious fragmentation. The greater the religious, linguistic and day-by-day
integration of the slaves into a European type of life, the more one-sided the
process of ' creolization ', the more difficult it is to find traces of African culture.
The meeting considered that these very processes of integration should in
themselves constitute a subject of research.^6
The Muslim societies were in a different category. The religion and the
language of the Arabs would appear to be irreversible factors making for
integration, at least in the case of Africans removed from the black areas of
the continent to the Middle Eastern Islamic countries.
The areas where research should eventually be carried out are enormous.
They should include Fernando Po, Sao Tomé, the Cape Verde Islands, the
Azores, the Canaries and Madeira, which were known and populated in certain
cases before their discovery by Europeans. It should also include the islands
in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, Brazil, the United States and Mexico.
Brazil offered many examples of African survivals. In addition to existing
inventories, there should no doubt be more thorough and scientific studies.
Bahia has a million black inhabitants; African Muslims set up a resis-
tance movement in the nineteenth century north of Bahia and organized
themselves into a theocratic republic linked to the African continent. Afro-
Brazilians returned in the nineteenth century to the countries round the Gulf
of Benin. An old man of 96, Baba Ijesa,^7 spoke in Yoruba with two of the