flow of slaves but also affected how enslaved peoples were integrated into
the lands of their destinations. First consider race. Although there is a
greater variation of physical forms in Africa than in almost any other part of
the Old World—at the extremes are the Pygmies in southwestern Africa
and tall Nilotic peoples such as the Masai and Dinka in the northeastern
part—modern Americans are taught to consider all Africans as a single
black or Negro race. Slave traders knew better. They did not need a sophis-
ticated understanding of biology to identify different ethnic backgrounds:
the people for whom they bargained had distinctive facial scars that slave
traders called “country marks,” which were signs of coming-of-age cere-
monies. Since each ethnic group had its own patterns, at a glance the
traders could tell one group from another. Some were regarded as more
fierce and others as more docile; some as better workers and others as less
trainable. Slave traders and those Americans who ultimately purchased the
slaves became connoisseurs.
Linguistically, Africa was similarly divided. Its 2,000 to 3,000 dialects
are said to be grouped into roughly 150 distinct languages which belong to
four “families,” each comparable to our Indo-European family. On the
northern fringe of Atlantic Africa are Berber and Hausa speakers of a lan-
guage in the same family as Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and various ancient
Semitic languages of Egypt and the Levant. Linguists call that family
Afroasiatic. On the eastern fringe of the great central rain forest are speakers
of the Nilo-Saharan family. To the south are the Khoisan languages, also
known as “click languages,” used by the Bushmen and Hottentots. In the
center, Atlantic Africa, is the Niger-Congo (or Niger-Kordofanian) family,
which is composed of dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects. So
varied were these that people even in neighboring villages spoke sufficiently
differently to appear alien to one another.
Often, being unable to understand one another must have contributed
to a sense of hostility among the villages and small states in the interior.
People felt no compunction about raiding and raping their neighbors and
razing these neighbors’ villages. “The archaeological evidence,” Oliver and
Atmore wrote, “leaves no doubt that warfare between neighboring towns
must have been a regular occurrence, for defensive walling was already
widespread by the second half of the first millennium A.D.” In the one con-
88 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA