homogenous picture but rather engaged in heated controversies inspired by and linked to the political
agendas discussed in the previous chapter.
Whilst much of the older literature emphasized the heterogeneity of African societies, which supposedly
prevented the preservation of African cultural traits,^14 another line of historiography, postulated, on the
contrary, that all slaves deported to the Americas, or at least those originating from one major region, did
share a single cultural heritage. Melville Herskovits prominently defended the idea of West Africa as one
‘culture area’. All societies in this macro-region supposedly shared a wide range of cultural traits such as
patrilocality or corporate ownership of land, an assumption that has to some extent been proven
inaccurate.^15 Later scholars have thus sought to refine that kind of approach. J.Thornton, for instance,
reconfigured Herskovits’ cultural zones in his work on the Africans in the Atlantic world. Adopting the
classic distinction between three macro-regions from where slaves were deported into the Americas—
Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea and the Angola coast—he combined linguistic, economic and political
criteria, and subdivided these main areas further into seven distinct sub-regions. According to Thornton,
within these sub-regions language, economics or politics created a minimum of homogeneity that allows
conceiving each of them as a distinct subculture.^16
Even though his scheme has been criticized for West Africa,^17 his point certainly remains valid for the
Angola coast, also referred to as the Kongo/Angola region or West Central Africa. Almost all native
peoples in that macro-region spoke—with few exceptions—Western Bantu languages. Furthermore, many
of the inhabitants on the Angolan coast communicated in either Kikongo or Kimbundu. Since those two
main languages were, in the sixteenth century, ‘as linguistically similar as Spanish and Portuguese’,
Kikongo and Kimbundu speakers were able to establish communication without resorting to a colonial
language.^18 In contrast to Upper and Lower Guinea, Kongo/Angola was thus characterized by greater
linguistic homogeneity.
Communications between slaves of different ethnic backgrounds were further facilitated by the fact that
many inhabitants of West and Central Africa, especially in crossroads regions, spoke several languages.
Trade and the expansion of kingdoms fostered the transformation of some languages into lingua francas,
such as the Mandinga in Upper Guinea. Similarly, Yoruba was sometimes referred to as the ‘general
language’ of Mina. Moreover, creole languages developed not only in the Americas, but also on the African
coast, creating further possibilities of communication among captives. The existence of multilingualism,
lingua francas and the similarity between related languages therefore questions the view of slaves from
different ethnic groups unable to talk to each other. These features, on the contrary, allowed slaves coming
from the same sub-region or even from one of the three main areas to communicate with each other. Long
periods of time spent in ports or on the slave ships further increased the possibilities of language
apprenticeship and interaction. The slave trade itself thus contributed to the redrawing of ethnic boundaries
among captives well before they had even touched American soil.
Without trying to make inadequate generalizations about African political systems, one can, nevertheless,
for the sole purpose of discussing slave origins and their ‘nations’ in the Americas, acknowledge that two
levels of statehood frequently combined in both West Africa and on the Angolan coast. Around the Bight of
Benin, for instance, hundreds of territories—usually a town with its hinterland or a group of villages—were
ruled by an oba, a sacred king who enjoyed relative or even total autonomy.^19 Most of those mini-states
however became tributaries of larger units, such as the kingdoms of Ketu, Ijesha, Oyó, Ijebu or Benin. In
similar ways, many of the local rulers (sobas) on the Angolan coast were subdued to larger states, the most
prominent of them being the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo (and later Portuguese Angola).^20 As a result,
the captives embarked on the middle passage could identify either with their smaller, local territory or with
the more encompassing regional political structure to which they had also been subjected.
34 THE CONTEXT OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC