5 P.E.Lovejoy, ‘Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora’, in P.E.Lovejoy (ed.), Identity in the
Shadow of Slavery (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 24.
6 See, among others, M.A.Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in
the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); D.B.Chambers,
‘“My own nation”: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora’, Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1997), 72–97.
7 I.Berlin, ‘From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland
North-America’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. LIII, No. 2 (April 1996), pp. 251– 88.
8 See also the recent assessments by R.Price, ‘The Miracle of Creolization: A Retrospective’, New West Indian
Guide, Vol. 75, No. 1 (2001), pp. 35–64; and M.-R. Trouillot, ‘Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the
Plantation Context’, Plantation Society in the Americas, Vol. V, No. 1 (1998), pp. 8– 28.
9 More recently M.Warner-Lewis has suggested that creole derived from the Kikongo term kuulolo, ‘excluded’.
See Lovejoy, ‘Identifying’, pp. 13–14.
10 J.H.Kwabena Nketia, The Music of Africa (New York: W.W.Norton, 1974), p. 241.
11 J.N.Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1992).
12 E.C.Eze, Race and the Enlightenment. A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); M.Banton, Racial Theories (2nd edn,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
13 K.A.Appiah, In My Father’s House. Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (London: Methuen), Chapters 1 and 2;
S.Howe, Afrocentrism. Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso, 1998).
14 In Brazil this position has been prominently defended by Darcy Ribeiro, O povo brasileiro. A formação e o
sentido do Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995), p. 115.
15 Mintz and Price, The Birth, p. 9.
16 J.Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), pp. 186–91.
17 S.E.Greene for example showed that Yoruba did not serve as a lingua franca among the Ewe and therefore
cannot be used as an indicator of cultural homogeneity. See ‘Cultural Zones in the Era of the Slave Trade:
Exploring the Yoruba Connection with the Anlo-Ewe’, in P.E.Lovejoy, Identity in the Shadow of Slavery
(London: Continuum, 2000), p. 98.
18 Thornton, Africa, p. 191.
19 R.S.Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba (London: James Currey, 1988).
20 Beatrix Heintze, Studien zur Geschichte Angolas im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. EinLesebuch (Koln: Rüdiger
Köppe, 1996).
21 J.K.Thornton, ‘Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500–1700’, in L. M.Heywood
(ed.), Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p. 74.
22 Furthermore, the definition of what was the Guinea Coast varied over the centuries. If in early Portuguese
documents the term stands for the whole coastline south of Morocco, it became a more specific geographic
designation once other major areas of the slave trade such as the ‘Gold Coast’ or the ‘Slave Coast’ had been
carved out.
23 For that reason many scholars spell the historic kingdom with a k in order to avoid confusion.
24 Specialists point out that a ‘dialect continuum’ and a common myth of origin (the belief in Oduduwa, father of
all Yoruba-Kings) existed, but that the modernYoruba language is a relatively recent creation, linked to the
translation of the Bible during the nineteenth century. Smith, Kingdoms, pp. 7–10; P.F. de Moraes Farias,
‘Enquanto isso, do outro lado do mar...os Arokin e a Identidade Iorubá’, Afro- Ásia, 17 (1996), p. 140.
25 For an overview, see P.D.Morgan, ‘The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional
Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments’, Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1997),
pp. 122–45.
26 O.Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: a Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).220 NOTES