Who Am I

Journal Entry of a Subordinate Group Member

Although I am of royal descent, I was taken prisoner which marked a life altering journey. We were gathered from different ports such a Luanda (Angola), Whydah (Bight of Benin), Bonny (Bight of Biafra); and the adjacent "castles" at Koromantin and Winneba on the Gold Coast accounted for at least a third of the Africans transported to the Americas. Other major ports included Old Calabar (Bight of Biafra), Benguela (Southern Angola), Cabinda (north of the Congo River), and Lagos in the Bight of Benin (http://www.inmotionaame.org). They shackled, branded, sold and loaded us, like animals, onto slave ships. Bound for an unknown land and faced with an uncertain future, I can feel the knot of fear in the pit of my stomach that I will forever be estranged from my family and all that I am familiar with.

Of the estimated ten million men, women, and children who survived the Middle Passage, approximately 450,000 Africans disembarked on North America's shores. They thus represented only a fraction - 5 percent-- of those transported during the 350-year history of the international slave trade. Brazil and the Caribbean each received about nine times as many Africans. The labor of enslaved Africans proved crucial in the development of South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland and contributed indirectly through commerce to the fortunes of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Though the enforced destination of Africans was primarily to plantations and farms for work in cash crop agriculture, they were also used in mining and servicing the commercial economy. We were placed in towns and port cities as domestic servants; and many urban residents performed essential commercial duties working as porters, teamsters, and craftsmen (http://www.inmotionaame.org). As one being transplanted to this strange land, I am forced I to begin a life of subjugation and separation, which I fear will persist from this day...