Research Paper about African-American Ethnic Origins

Ethnic Origins of African-Americans: an Historical Analysis

Ray Vanek-Johnson         US History periods I & G

Introduction

For roughly 250 years, an unprecedentedly brutal institution existed in the United States.  That institution was slavery.  Slavery was fueled by both the Transatlantic Slave Trade directly from Africa, and the internal slave trade of Africans already in the Americas.  Some effects of this institution – such as brutality, injustice, and ongoing racism - are well known.  The Transatlantic slave trade could, in fact be called a genocide.  But, if it was a genocide, who were the victims?  Where did they come from?  What part of Africa could be said to be the original home of the majority of modern day African Americans?  Also, more specifically, what tribe in Africa, or group of slaves in the slave trade can they identify with?  Part of the reason why it can be so excruciatingly hard to know this information is because of one highly destructive practice of the slave trade.  This practice is the practice of brutally erasing the slaves’ knowledge of their own cultural identity from their minds during the movement between Africa and the Americas, which was employed by slave owners and traders during the period ranging all the way from Pre-Bellum to Antebellum Times in the United States.  In recent years however, more new and effective ways of tracing ancestry have emerged for African Americans.  This new and effective way is based on DNA testing.

To start off with, when you test anyone’s ethnicity by DNA, you have three modes of doing so.  These three modes are: mitochondrial DNA testing, Y chromosome testing, and autosome testing.  Perhaps the most obvious of these modes is Y chromosome testing; it is based on studying the Y chromosome of a given person in order to determine their most direct paternal lineage given that the Y chromosomes are exclusive to males.  The next method is autosomal testing which requires looking at all the chromosomes in a human that are not sex related.  This gives a more broad-sweeping picture of someone’s genetic ancestry.  The third and perhaps most accurate way to know someone’s heritage in a direct maternal line is mitochondrial DNA Testing where the DNA of the highly unique organelle in someone’s cells, called the mitochondria, is examined.  This has been a very common way of studying genetics in many populations around the world in recent times.  In studying the origins of African Americans, I have looked at genetic studies using all three modes of genetic testing.  Another point that bears mentioning is that the most valuable genetic information comes from the part of the genome that is non-recombinant.  This part of the gene tells a story about what happened long ago in someone’s ancestry, because it has been unchanged for perhaps thousands of years.  

My Process

When I first started this research project, my knowledge of human genealogy beyond the basics was much more limited.  For instance, while I had heard that all humans are 99.99+% the same, and that the “½, ¼, 1/8…” rule is not fully true, I had no clue whatsoever about just how many angles there were to looking at a person’s genetics.  This includes things like which haplotype has the most variability, or what lone standing change in the bases of the DNA is connected to a certain group of people in a certain region.  However, in the end, all human beings are 99.99% or more the same genetically as one another.  Thus, solving the puzzle of human genetics relies on being able to observe highly minuscule differences in the genes of people of varied ethnicities at all angles, in order to paint a holistic picture of the origins of each population.  

When I first read about a genetic study of African-American origins that functioned on these principles, I had no clue about all of these dimensions to DNA testing, nor the skill to be able to piece together so much confusing information all at once.  Over time though, I went on to read many more reports about genetic studies that had been conducted around this same subject.  In doing so, I learned how to generally piece together information better, as well as work with a lot of confusing and/or unknown information in order to figure out the main idea.  The confusing information ranged from statistical equations, to genetic concepts that I had quite simply never heard of before.  Now however, even if I still don’t understand a lot of the total information, I do however understand a lot of the overarching concepts.  This is in large part because I gained the ability to sift out extraneous information from the given source, and take away only the key concepts through reading many in depth reports of human DNA studies.  These information processing skills, as well as the ability to pay attention to the scientific method will help me both as a scientist, and as a historian.

Another skill that I also learned is how to cite records of historical events, including text and illustrations, in order to make conclusions about my given research question.  This skill, a more purely social studies skill, is a one that I struggled with earlier in the US history course.  As a result of my project this has changed and I am now much more proficient in this area of social studies.  Furthermore, I believe it is good that I have mastered some important skills as a scholar of social studies rather than just memorizing historical facts about the US.  

Research Findings

First and foremost, the findings of my research show that African slaves brought to the United States originated in at least three and possibly four regions.  These regions are West Africa, the Bight of Biafra, Central West Africa, and possibly Southeastern Africa.   Southeastern Africa, however, is a significantly less likely region of origin for slaves taken to the United States.  

Finally, an internal slave trade within the Americas also existed during the colonial times.  This trade was the trade of African peoples between colonies in the Americas.  The most common example of this was Afro-Caribbean peoples being taken to mainland North America, as well as to a lesser extent to mainland South America.  In fact, many slaves were taken from colonies in the Caribbean up to territory now part of the United States.  This significantly complicates the process of figuring out where in Africa many of the slaves forcibly taken to the United States originated.  A researcher, whether historian, human geneticist, or anthropologist, must figure out the origins of a population of slaves that has been settled, sometimes for well more than a generation, in  another colony, usually a Caribbean colony.  Finally, the other major factor that can complicate finding the ethnic origins in Africa of contemporary African-Americans is the intermingling between populations of slaves in the United States.  As a result, a significant number of African-Americans have ancestry that originates in more than one African region.  This is often combined with non-African ancestry.  However, geneticists have still made headway in tracing African-Americans and other African diaspora populations to the four regions of Africa listed above.  The first and perhaps most significant region in the overall slave trade from Africa to the Americas is Central West Africa.      

The Central West region of Africa is the region stretching from Southern Cameroon down to Southern Angola along the Atlantic Coast. It is primarily inhabited by people of Bantu ethnicity, which includes the Mbundu tribe among others.  This is clearly the region where the majority of slaves taken to the Americas as a whole originated.  However, this region is unlikely to be where the majority of African slaves taken to the United States originated for a few reasons.  

The first is that while this region of Africa was the primary source of slaves in the early to mid-1600s, this was not when the peak of the slave trade to the United States occurred. Central West Africa was almost certainly the origin of at least 15% of the slaves taken to the United States throughout the entire history of the slave trade.  In fact, the first slaves brought to the British North America colonies were from the Mbundu tribe in Northern Angola.  They were sold to people in the Virginia colony by Portuguese slave traders in 1619.  These are a few among the many examples that illustrate Central West Africa’s important role as a place of origins for people enslaved in the territory that is now the United States.  

Genetic studies have clearly proven a significant amount of Bantu ancestry to be present in a large number of African-Americans.  Also, one of these studies has even shown Mbuti DNA to be present in African populations in the Americas—especially Bantu diaspora populations in Brazil, but also Bantu diaspora populations in places like the United States.  The Mbuti are a tribe of people who have lived almost exclusively as hunter-gatherers in the Ituri Rainforest of the Congo traditionally.  They, as well as other groups of African people are incredibly short on average (the average heights of both men and women are between 4’ 0” and 4’ 6”) and therefore referred to as pygmies.  These results from a genetic test conducted in 2004 on the origins of African diaspora populations as a whole were incredibly surprising because the Mbuti populations are thought to have been relatively secluded from the slave trade through living in largely impenetrable forests.  Just how many Mbuti people were involved in the slave trade, if in fact any, remains a mystery.  These questions constitute an important debate in the social studies and Anthropology field.  And while these studies shed light on the quite influential Bantu presence in Colonial America, they do not however indicate that Bantu people were the ethnic majority in the slave populations of colonial America and the early United States.

These same studies have also shown Bantu ancestry to average only 8% in most African-Americans.  This is very compelling evidence that refutes the theory of Western Central Africa as being the source of the largest number of slaves brought to the US.  Further evidence may be found in a study that investigates the origins of Africans throughout the Americas as a whole.  This study found a strong polar coordination between the Americas and Africa in that it found the majority of slaves from further south in Africa to have gone to South America, while the majority of slaves from further north in Africa went to North America and the Caribbean.    

Another region, however, where the majority of African slaves in the United States likely came from is the Bight of Biafra.  This region stretches from Central Nigeria down to Southern Cameroon.  It is inhabited by tribes of Niger Kordofanian ethnicity including the Igbo, Yoruba, and other tribes.  

The first and foremost evidence that supports the Bight of Biafra being the origins of the majority or plurality of the slaves in the United States is the fact that from what many genetic studies suggest, the overall highest percentage of Ancestry of all African-Americans is Yoruba.  As is mentioned above, the Yoruba are a tribe of people native to Eastern Nigeria in the Bight of Biafra.  Furthermore, multiple genetic tests have found the highest amount of genetic overlap, especially in the form of genetic variability between the Yoruba people, the Igbo people, the Mandenka people, as well as other groups of people native to the Bight of Biafra region and African-Americans.  As this evidence suggests, Igbo, Yoruba, Mandenka, and other people originating in the Bight of Biafra may be contemporary African-Americans’ most common ancestors.  These people mentioned above are part of the Niger Kordofanian pan-ethnic group, the group of people native to the region stretching from Cameroon to Senegal east to west, and the edge of the Sahel desert north to south.  

Genetic evidence is not the only evidence to suggest a strong presence of slaves originating in the Bight of Biafra—most notably Yoruba slaves in the United States.  Other evidence lies in studies that have been conducted using a purely historian oriented approach, namely by studying slave ship records and possibly other historical artifacts.  The vast majority of these studies have concluded: the overall majority of slaves brought to the United States both during the peak eras of the slave trade, and throughout the entire slave trade were of Yoruba, Igbo, or other ethnicity originating in the Bight of Biafra.  This evidence, when combined with the high prevalence of genetic matches between African-Americans and contemporary people in the Bight of Biafra in multiple genetic studies, presents a very compelling argument for the Bight of Biafra, and particularly the Yoruba tribe being the primary source of slaves in the United States.

The only other region where the majority of slaves brought to the United States could have conceivably originated from is West Africa.  For a long time, West Africa was thought to have been region of origins for the majority of slaves brought to the United States.  As such, this same story of the slave trade to the United States was taught in most US History classes for a long time.  West Africa is considered to be the region that stretches from Senegal in the westernmost point, all the way down to Western Nigeria in the easternmost point.  The most compelling evidence in favor of this theory is the findings of one genetic study that showed high levels of haplotypes from the present day country of Benin in West Africa, to be present both in many African-Americans as well as Afro-Caribbeans in Jamaica.  The majority of further evidence for this theory lies in a more limited amount of studies based on slave ship records that have found regions such as the Windward Coast, the Ivory Coast, or occasionally even Senegambia to be the likely region of origins for the majority of African-Americans.  One study cited slave ship records as the leading source of evidence to indicate African slave origins in the Windward Coast region near Sierra Leone.  There is even a limited amount of further genetic evidence that has suggested some of these regions as the source of the majority of African slaves in the United States.  An example of a study that supports this hypothesis is a study that found a high level of DNA originating in Senegambia (the region of the modern day countries of Senegal and Gambia combined) in a population of African-Americans.  This sample population was predominantly from the Southeastern United States, but also to a lesser extent from the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States.  Combined with this with the fact that many slaves were taken from Senegambia to Colonial America (especially the Carolina colonies) for their skills in rice cultivation, this study adds up to compelling evidence that Senegambia, other regions of West Africa, or West Africa as a whole was/were probably the second most common region of origin for Africans kidnapped to the United States.  Also, some of these same Senegambian slaves formed what would become the Gullah Communities of South Carolina.  The African-Americans living in these communities on islands along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina have preserved most of their African heritage right up to the present; they even speak a language that is very heavily influenced by their original African language.  However, the current evidence supporting the Bight of Biafra as being the most common region of origins for the majority of slaves forcibly taken to the United States greatly is overwhelmingly greater than that indicating the same of West Africa.     

Finally, another region that has been theorized to potentially have been a source of slaves brought to the United States is Southeastern Africa.  This region includes the countries of Mozambique and Madagascar.  These regions clearly played a role in at least one element of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.  In the 1800s, a spike in the slave trade to Brazil occured , and most of the slaves brought to Brazil in this period came from either Mozambique or Madagascar.  However, there is little evidence of a slave trade between the United States and Southeastern Africa.  For instance, while a match was found uniquely between the Americas and Mozambique, it only proves the obvious: that Mozambicans were involved in parts of the Atlantic Slave trade.  It does not specifically prove that the United States was one of their destinations.  Furthermore, all non-genetic evidence to support this theory ultimately amounts to hearsay, or even myths and rumors.  However, there is not enough evidence to absolutely rule out the influence of Southeastern African slaves in the United States.  Therefore, whether this region of Africa played a role in the slave trade to the United States remains a mystery.  If it played any role at all, it would have been extremely small.  

The answer to the question of “From just where in Africa, and to what tribe can most contemporary African-Americans trace their roots?” is not irrefutably set in stone. However, evidence from studies that I have read, including studies done on slave ship records and historical artifacts, as well as genetic matches, particularly in overlapping genetic variability levels, indicate that the Bight of Biafra is where the majority of African-American slaves came from originally.  And, most of all, the overall most common ancestry in all African-Americans is most likely Yoruba.  

 

     

Consideration of an Historical Novel that Looks at the Slave Trade:

“Slave Dancer” byPaula Fox  

“Slave Dancer” by Paula Fox is a novel that I read roughly four years ago for my English class at my old school.  It is a novel about the experiences of a young American boy, Jesse, living in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 1830’s.  He plays his fife for money on the streets of New Orleans.  He plays his fife on the docks of the Port of New Orleans.  He does this to support his widowed mother and ailing sister.  Once, while he is unexpectedly away from home late at night, he is kidnapped by slave traders.  The slave traders take him captive onto their ship to work as a slave.  In the course of the novel he travels across the Atlantic to Africa and back, as well as around the Caribbean. While on board the slave ship Jesse experiences the horrors of the slave trade first hand.  For instance, he witnesses the brutal punishment of other people on the ship whenever they are blamed for something.  For instance, he watches the whipping of his friend Purvis who is wrongly blamed – in fact framed - for something he didn’t do.  Jesse also witnesses the atrocities that are committed against the slaves who are taken on board the ship to be sold both in the American South and in the Caribbean.  Once a day, he must play his fife in order to give the slaves music to dance to.  This is the one time of day that the slaves come out from the lower storage space on the ship where they are packed together like sardines.  These slaves came from the Bight of Benin in West Africa.

At the end of the story the ship capsizes and sinks off the coast of Mississippi in the spring of 1840.  Jesse is the sole survivor of this accident, as everyone else who is not drowned is eaten by sharks.  This sadly includes Purvis Clay, Jesse’s Irish friend.  After Jesse manages to escape from the sinking ship, he goes ashore to Mississippi.  Here, he meets a freeman named Daniel.  Daniel has escaped slavery, and now lives off the land in the woods near the Mississippi coastline.  Daniel helps to nourish Jesse back to health for a few days where he lives.  Once Jessie is well however, Daniel sends him on his way.  Jesse walks all the way back to his home in New Orleans within a day or two and finds his family again.  

This novel depicts the Trans-Atlantic slave trade highly accurately in many ways.  The first way is that it is unflinching in how exposes the atrocities committed against the slaves involved.  Also, it demonstrates the behavior of  all those involved in the slave trade from people who played music or in some way entertained slaves on board the ships, all the way to government officials who were complicit in the trade.  These include government officials in the American South, the Caribbean and other countries like, as well as multiple monarchs of African countries.  Finally, and perhaps most of all, the slave ship that Jesse is taken away on goes to the Bight of Benin.  This part of the story relates most to the focus of this paper in that according to DNA evidence, as well as historical artifact evidence, the Bight of Benin was quite possibly one of the top three most common regions of origins for slaves taken to the United States.  Though many of the questions posed in this paper cannot be known for certain yet, hopefully scientists and historians alike can continue to shed light on the answers in the decades to come.  Finally, by doing so, we can hope to create a more just society where atrocities on this level never occur again, and where many of the social justice challenges seen in American society today may cease.  

Maps of Slave Trade

Source
"New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade," Special Issue, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 58 (2001), between pp. 16 and 17.

Comments
Shows major areas of slaving activities and embarkation ports; see caption on map for original source. Map placed on website with permission of the William and Mary Quarterly.

Source
"New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade," Special Issue, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 58 (2001), between pp. 16 and 17; see caption for original source.

Comments
Shows major areas involved in importing enslaved Africans. Map placed on website with permission of the William and Mary Quarterly.

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Mbuti”— Page 14 by Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, 1995