Maintaining Our Roots

Africans were stripped of their individual cultures repeatedly for centuries while enslaved, but somehow the memories and knowledge of the Mother Country made it into the very texts we read and discuss in class. How did the Africans preserve and affirm their way of life despite surviving apparent linguicide, laws that attempted to undermine their education and trying to not be killed by the oppressor. By utilizing the concept of re-memory and restoring the “lost” memories many enslaved people had, a sense of strength and unity was felt yet again. By rebelling and organizing rebellions, establishing their own communities outside of enslavement and using verbal expression/storytelling, they preserved what was the most important of all: their identity.

Critical Review of Scholarship

In these past few weeks we have been introduced to the topic of how Africans preserved and affirmed their way of life (along with their identities to resist enslavement) through our assigned readings and class discussions/notes. Retaining the knowledge we analyzed and learned in the several texts, the framework of this second framing question starts to take shape. Almost all people know that Africans were taken from the Mother Country (Africa) and were forced into enslavement upon their arrival to the New World, along with various places in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. The question here is how did they combat the oppression that was holding them down after coming to the New World, and while doing so, how did that preserve and affirm their way of life and resist enslavement? Discussed in class was who were the African people to each other? Even though in the Modern World System, they were seen as slaves, laborers and criminals.

To assist in answering this framing question, the following texts will be utilized: Ayi Kwei Armah’s text, The Eloquence of the Scribes, Black Movements in America by scholar, Cedric J. Robinson, the Atlas of African-American History and...