on the common cultural traits supposedly shared by slaves from different parts of Africa.^1 He believed that
motor habits, aesthetic patterns, or value systems, lying below the level of consciousness were retained by
Africans in the New World and made significant contributions to Afro-American culture.^2 As we shall see,
these common cultural traits are difficult to establish for cultures that have long disappeared or changed
considerably over time. We should therefore not be surprised that there is still no overall consensus
regarding the unity or the heterogeneity of African civilization(s).
If there is disagreement over what constituted the slaves’ original cultures, and what they were able to
bring along with them on the Middle Passage, an even bigger controversy dividing scholars concerns the
process through which slaves became part of plantation societies in the Americas. How did slaves use the
materials at their disposal in a new environment? No doubt, slaves had to adapt their cultural practices to the
many constraints of slavery. Whilst nobody denies the necessity of adaptations for the sake of survival, it is
the very character of that process that still constitutes the bone of contention. Even Herskovits
acknowledged that ‘borrowing’ from African cultures was never achieved without significant change.
Because slaves were not only uprooted from their homelands but also separated from their families and kin,
Sidney Mintz and Richard Price in their classic study on the topic insisted that the deported Africans did not
compose structured groups, but that one should rather view them as heterogeneous crowds.^3 To form again
a community in the Americas, slaves had therefore to go through a process of intense cultural change. Mintz
and Price did not deny the importance of African input but insisted that ‘neither social context nor cultural
traditions alone can explain an African-American institutional form and that the development of institutions
must be viewed in their full historical setting’. They concluded that ‘formal continuities from Africa are
more the exception than the rule in any African-American culture’ and that ‘borrowing may not best express
the reality at all—“creating” or “remodelling” may be more precise’.^4
Critiques of Mintz and Price have pointed out that their analysis—commonly referred to as the
‘creolization model’—sees the problem too much from an American perspective, underplays the importance
of African continuities and therefore ‘has too many exceptions to carry much weight’.^5 Recent studies have
emphasized the continuity of African ethnicities well beyond the first generation in the Americas.^6 The role
of the first generation has also been re-assessed. Whilst Mintz and Price underlined the importance of the
‘charter’ generation, and thus their particular cultural background and experience, for the establishment of
an early creole culture that provided the matrix for later developments, new research has shown that there was
not always a linear evolution from ‘African’ into ‘creole’. Ira Berlin for instance demonstrated how first
generations of ‘Atlantic creoles’, familiarized with European culture, were swamped by later generations of
slaves from less acculturated African backgrounds.^7 In other words, the issue is how are we to characterize
slave culture: as an assimilation to and an adaptation of the master’s culture, as a ‘retention’ or even an
‘extension’ of their own African cultures or as a creative ‘re-invention’ using elements of both?
If new research has contributed significantly to a better understanding of the complexity of cultural
change in the Black Atlantic, it does not invalidate the basic argument that fusion did occur between
heterogeneous traditions, be it between different African cultures or between these and European and Native
American cultures.^8 Scholars have used a range of terms (acculturation, hybridization, transculturation,
creolization, syncretism, etc.) to describe this transformation. In my view creolization is still the best suited
category to analyse cultural change, since it does not—unlike hybridity—suggest a biological heritage or a
‘miscegenation’; it rather implies that change is acquired during a socialization process. It also is more
specific than acculturation and does not imply a passive adaptation. Creole is derived from the Portuguese
criar (‘to nurse’) and said to have originated among the Portuguese-dominated trade on the West
African coast.^9
32 THE CONTEXT OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC