Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: “Lucumi” and “Nago” as Ethnonyms in West Africa

Abstract

Ethnicity was evidently critical for the operation of the Atlantic slave trade, on both the African and the European sides of the trade. For Africans, given the general convention against enslaving fellow citizens, ethnic identities served to define a category of “others” who were legitimately enslavable. For African Muslims this function was performed by religion, though here too, it is noteworthy that the classic discussion of this issue, by the Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba in 1615, approaches it mainly in terms of ethnicity, through classification of West African peoples as Muslim or pagan. Europeans, for their part, regularly distinguished different ethnicities among the slaves they purchased, and American markets developed preferences for slaves of particular ethnic origins. This raises interesting (but as yet little researched) questions about the ways in which African and European definitions of African ethnicity may have interacted. Both Africans and Europeans, for example, commonly employed, as a means of distinguishing among African ethnicities, the facial and bodily scarifications (“tribal marks”) characteristic of different communities—a topic on which there is detailed information in European sources back at least into the seventeenth century, which might well form the basis for a historical study of ethnic identities.In this context as in others, of course, ethnicity should be seen, not as a constant, but as fluid and subject to constant redefinition. The lately fashionable debate on “the invention of tribes” in Africa concentrated on the impact of European colonialism in the twentieth century, rather than on that of the Atlantic slave trade earlier—no doubt because it was addressed primarily to Southern, Central and Eastern rather than Western Africa.

Cuban Performances of Blackness as the Timeless Past Still Among Us

“…Examples 4 and 5, like most of the Carabalí songs that I have heard, are voiced in the first person to give what can be described as a timeless historical account of cabildo members as “Africans” and specifically as “Carabalí” who are now in Cuba. As Palmié (1993) describes, the ethnic labels for slaves—prominently including Congo, Carabalí, and Lucumí in Cuba—were complex and fluid categories that were as much a product of slave‐trade imaginaries and New World ethnogenesis as a reflection of any African sense of identity at the time (see also Law 1997).…”

Yoruba Religions in Diaspora

“…The analytic orientations toward continuity or novelty have relevance to the religions of the Yoruba diaspora for we face the methodological issue of what is ‘Yoruba’ in the religions under investigation and what is a new construction in a new world. We have seen that the identities we know as ‘Yoruba’‘Lucumi’ and Nagô’ themselves were forged out of the pressures of colonialism and the slave trade (Law 1997). Is the presence of identifiable orishas in, say, Brazilian Umbanda, sufficient to classify Umbanda as a Yoruba‐derived religion?…”

Some Reflections on the Brazilian Legacy in Dahomey

“…The following brief discussion of this example is based on an article she presented in Toronto in 1997. 12 With Robin Law's recent article on 'Lucumi' and 'Yoruba' as ethnonyms in West Africa, 13 de Oliveira's paper provides insight into the social transformations induced by the return of the former slaves from Brazil.…”