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There's actually significant ancestry trace back to the Benin/Togo region. Actually drumming wasn't banned completely in different regions if I'm not mistaken.
there is an analysis which states that the DNA tests overstate ancestries from that source.
A better source to determine the ancestries of various black groups in the Americas is www.slavevoyages.org. Its best to focus on the last 50 years of major trade, especially among societies other than that of the USA, because the life expectancy of enslaved peoples were low and the earlier arri8vals probably didn't produce enough children to have their ancestries survive significantly into to present day populations.
Based on this AAs have a high % of Congo/Angola and Senegambia/Guinea ancestries with Bight of Biafra being high in the Delmarva area and SL/Liberia along the Gullah coast.
Can you cite your sources? Otherwise people are just making up stuff and believing what they want.
A high % of enslaved peoples into the USA might have been Muslim, given the high % originating in Senegambia/Guinea. This source was actually quite low for most parts of the Americas though.
Whether this Muslim influence survived through into AA culture in its contemporary form can be debated, given that this movement of people into the USA occurred maybe as long as 250-300 years and many were blended with enslaved peoples from other parts of Africa along with Scots/Irish indentures.
I wish that people will look at the Africans who one encounters in NYC in 2019. Who will they identify more with. Dominicans or Haitians/Jamaicans? The only Latin groups that they will feel close to will be the black identified people from Cuba and Brazil. The rest bring too much "anti blackness" with them, given that Africans themselves have been heavily stigmatized by much of the world. They aren't interested in being defined by music/dancing or by religions that most no longer practice. Their emphasis is education and business ownership.
there is an analysis which states that the DNA tests overstate ancestries from that source.
A better source to determine the ancestries of various black groups in the Americas is www.slavevoyages.org. Its best to focus on the last 50 years of major trade, especially among societies other than that of the USA, because the life expectancy of enslaved peoples were low and the earlier arri8vals probably didn't produce enough children to have their ancestries survive significantly into to present day populations.
Based on this AAs have a high % of Congo/Angola and Senegambia/Guinea ancestries with Bight of Biafra being high in the Delmarva area and SL/Liberia along the Gullah coast.
1. I mentioned it as a reference guide to my African ancestry which so far haven't been to inaccurate.
2. Also based on the link you provided and few other sites that focus on the transatlantic slave trade. It's best to gather the entirety since some ( depending on geography) actually lived a long life despite the conditions.
I´ve never called anything a fabrication. I never said there were no Muslims among slaves taken from Africa in the US or in other nations in the Americas.
I did say, and I stand by this with the sources I´ve posted the majority of slaves brought to the United States were not Muslim.
Even your description above you FALSELY claim AA culture is based on Muslims from the Sahel. That is just not true.
One can be stoned to death for adultery in the Sahel. Single mothers are completely not allowed.
I don´t think there is any one source that makes the claim that the majority of African slaves who arrived to the US were Muslim. Links posted here have ranged from 10 percent to 30 percent. Even if it´s 30 percent, it´s not the majority though certainly a statistically significant number. Even 10 percent is a statistically significant number.
Do you even acknowledge that people from the coastal areas of Africa were taken to the United States in large numbers and obviously most AAs have this ancestry? Not that if 15 percent of African slaves were Muslim, the majority of AAs could theoretically have a Muslim ancestor, even with most African slaves brought here not being Muslim. Most AAs have a variety of ancestries on the African side alone, and often European and other non Black elements.
The bolded alone shows you clearly do not know what cultural influence is. You believe I am arguing that AAs are genetically majority African Muslim when I am saying the culture that influenced AAs the most is Sahelian West African whether it was Muslim or not. This post is just you not paying attention to what I am saying and just going along with whatever you want to believe. Once again again...
You willfully ignored stuff like this posted:
Quote:
“Two American specificities can thus explain the emergence of the blues. Of all the countries in the Western hemisphere, the United States received the highest proportion of men and women from Senegal, Gambia, Mali, and Guinea; and it is also the only place where drumming was forbidden. So it is not by chance that the blues evolved only there. What makes this music so different from Caribbean and Afro-South American music is specifically the presence of Sahelian/Arabic/Islamic stylistic elements. They can be found in the instrument playing techniques, the melodies, and the singing style.”
Afro-Cuban and African American music is very similar yet very different. Why? Because “essential elements of these two musics came from different parts of Africa, entering the New World by different routes, at different times, into differently structured societies” (Sublette, 159). These essential elements in African American music do not appear in Cuban music: swing and the blues scale. Cuban music contains elements of the clave (a rhythmic key) and “those undulating, repeating, melodic-rhythmic loops of fixed pitches called guajeo, montuno, or tumbao” (159). The reason for these differences was that they reflected two different musical styles that of Sudanic Africa and forest Africa.
At this point I'm not sure what you're arguing anymore. It doesn't MATTER if Aframs are majority coastal West African in ancestry. Afro-Brazilians based on genetics are mostly Angolan/Congolese meanwhile the strongest African influence on them is Yoruba because it outlasted the Congolese influence. Same thing with Aframs and Sahelian West Africans.
The rest of your post I'm not even sure what you are getting at. You're literally comparing radical Muslims/modern social issues like single motherhood to cultures (NOT RELIGION!!!!!!!!!!!) of the Sahel/AAs. smdh.
Last edited by ADOSwarrior; 08-29-2019 at 07:54 PM..
The Benin/Togo "ancestry" I never heard of it being significant among AAs. Most DNAstudies show mostly Yoruba, Congolese and Senegambia. And yes drumming was mostly banned outside a select few Southern cities like New Orleans and even still it was restricted.
Which is why these non-drumming West African instruments survived.
Banjo
Quote:
The banjo is a four-, five- or six-stringed instrument with a piece of animal skin or plastic stretched over a circular frame. Simpler forms of the instrument were fashioned by Africans in Colonial America, adapted from several African instruments of similar design.
In the United States, the musical bow was apparently introduced by African slaves. Today, it is primarily found in the Appalachian Mountains, where it is called a mouthbow or mouth bow.
The diddley bow derives from instruments used in West Africa. There, they were often played by children, one beating the string with sticks and the other changing the pitch by moving a slide up and down. The instrument was then developed as a children's toy by slaves in the United States. They were first documented in the rural South by researchers in the 1930s
The Quills(pan pipes)
The Quills are a early American folk panpipe, first noted in the early part of the 19th century among Afro-American slaves in the south. They are aerophones, and fall into the panpipe family. They are assumed to be of African origin, since similar instruments are found in various parts of Africa, and they were first used by 1st and 2nd generation Africans in America. http://www.sohl.com/Quills/Quills.htm
Kazoo
Quote:
The kazoo is based on the African mirliton, and was a popular African-American folk instrument during the 1800's. The manufactured kazoo was invented by (an African American named)Alabama Vest.
An old unique blues style in the Northern Mississippi hill country called Northern Mississippi Fife and Drum blues, is an offshoot of Fulani Flute and drum music. In fact, the physical construction of the blues fife played in Northern MS is based on an old African model brought over by the transatlantic slave trade. The construction process mimics that of the of Fula flute. A musician typically cuts a piece of cane about a foot inlength, then a heated iron rod is used to bore out the cane, and finally the same rod isused to make the manipulation and embouchure holes of the fife. No formal measure of spacing either between the embouchure hole and the manipulation holes or between each of the manipulation holes is used. Instead, the musicians use their hands as guides forconstruction, resulting in instruments that have slightly individualized scales, none of which are based on a classical Western model.
Which played a role in the development of the Blues.
@caribny
Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban are obviously the most African influenced cultures in the Americas(yet they don't have three surviving creole languages like AAs) even more so than Haitian culture. However, AA culture especially in the rural areas is no more "less African influenced" than anglo-West Indians.
The Baptist faith was brought to Trinidad by the Merikins, former American slaves who were recruited by the British to fight, as the Corps of Colonial Marines, against the Americans during the War of 1812. After the end of the war, these ex-slaves were settled in Trinidad, to the east of the Mission of Savannah Grande (now known as Princes Town) in six villages, since then called the Company Villages.[1][2]
These American settlers brought with them the Baptist faith of the Second Great Awakening combined with, in the case of those from Georgia, the Gullah culture. With the coming of missionaries of the Baptist Missionary Society from Great Britain, the Baptist faith in the Company Villages was much affected, but despite the ensuing schism between the so-called London Baptists and the rest, the Baptist congregations of the Company Villages, even including those with Gullah origins, retained so little visible African influence in their practice that John Hackshaw was able to give a different view of the Baptists in the north of the country:
"While those that settled in the 'Company Villages' were exposed to the Baptist Missionary Society's influence, those that settled in the North practiced their beliefs as brought from America with the inclusion of African religious practice and beliefs joined by those they met here which blossomed into the group now known as 'Spiritual Baptists'."[2]
The faith expanded to Barbados in 1957 as the Sons of God Apostolic Spiritual Baptists movement.[3] It now ranks as one of two indigenous religions in the country, the other being the Rastafari religion.[4] Archbishop Granville Williams, who was born in Barbados, lived for 16 years in Trinidad and Tobago, where he witnessed the local Spiritual Baptists. Becoming enthusiastic about the Trinidadian movement, he asserted that he had seen a vision and heard the voice of God. Upon returning to Barbados he held the first open-air meeting in Oistins, Christ Church. Due to a well received response in Barbados, he quickly established the Jerusalem Apostolic Spiritual Baptist Church in Ealing Grove. This church was quickly followed by Zion at Richmond Gap. As of 1999 the following in Barbados had reached around 1,900 and the Jerusalem church had been rebuilt to seat 3,000.
^^Not only that but it seems spiritual Baptism expanded into the Caribbean from America via Afram slaves.
Not only that what about field holler?
Quote:
The field holler has origins in the music of West Africa, where the majority of enslaved African in America originated from. The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik also identify Islamic music as an influence.[8] Diouf notes a striking resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, an Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in musical scales, and nasal intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Arabic-Islamic world of the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries."[8]
More importantly American slaves growth being via natural birth doesn't explain away certain African elements. How do you explain the development of the Blues or even Jazz? Those genres didn't just pop out of nowhere in a vacuum. How do you explain the diddy bow? The Banjo? The Kazoo which is based off the African mirliton? Or the Griot influence which we even still see today?
Quote:
2. The blues tradition and much of other black musical forms which revolves around a solo performer accompanied by a plucked-string instrument does not have a parallel in the cultures of the West African rain forest and the Congo, but it does in the Sahel crescent. Griots and other traveling musicians of the Sahel performed like the blues men “in the midst of an active and noisy crowd that constantly comments on and dances to their music.”[47] “Musicologists generally agree that Africa’s black bluesmen have, in essence, reinstituted the high art of the African griot.” (?)
Or even similarities in melismatic singing? Which has been noted by scholars. Yes, ADOS culture is unique in that it is NOT Coastal West African influenced like the rest of the diaspora but Upper West African Sahelian. Comparing AAs to Black Brazilians/Cubans is a mismatch. Heck comparing AAs to Haitians is a mismatch. A better comparison would be Jamaicans, Bahamians, Trinidadians, and other English West Indies. And this post is not just directed at you Caribny. Again, while AA culture is not the most African influenced in the Americas there are still many African elements especially in the deep rural south. Heck I only addressed music, language/accents and spirituality when there is much more. You're not going to find this Upper West African influence in places like NYC, LA or Chicago but Mississippi, rural Alabama, rural eastern Texas, coastal South Carolina/Georgia, and even parts of Tennessee.
As for "back to Africa" with the ADOS movement more African-Americans are moving past that. However and no offense it is not for an non-Afram to dictate what ideology should Aframs follow as there are some Aframs who live in Africa. I myself who has had relatives live in Africa and even visited Africa. And more importantly Africa is not monolithic so what is "African culture." According to that Dominican poster Muslim West Africans aren't "real" Africans. So yea while more Aframs are moving away from "Pan-Africanism" at the end of the day AAs are genetically African.
But anyways like I have shown repeatedly the Upper West African/Sahelian influence outlasted the coastal West African one when it comes to AAs.
Last edited by ADOSwarrior; 08-29-2019 at 07:51 PM..
I wish that people will look at the Africans who one encounters in NYC in 2019. Who will they identify more with. Dominicans or Haitians/Jamaicans? The only Latin groups that they will feel close to will be the black identified people from Cuba and Brazil. The rest bring too much "anti blackness" with them, given that Africans themselves have been heavily stigmatized by much of the world. They aren't interested in being defined by music/dancing or by religions that most no longer practice. Their emphasis is education and business ownership.
Blacks in general have been "stigmatized" by the world.
A high % of enslaved peoples into the USA might have been Muslim, given the high % originating in Senegambia/Guinea. This source was actually quite low for most parts of the Americas though.
Whether this Muslim influence survived through into AA culture in its contemporary form can be debated, given that this movement of people into the USA occurred maybe as long as 250-300 years and many were blended with enslaved peoples from other parts of Africa along with Scots/Irish indentures.
I wish that people will look at the Africans who one encounters in NYC in 2019. Who will they identify more with. Dominicans or Haitians/Jamaicans? The only Latin groups that they will feel close to will be the black identified people from Cuba and Brazil. The rest bring too much "anti blackness" with them, given that Africans themselves have been heavily stigmatized by much of the world. They aren't interested in being defined by music/dancing or by religions that most no longer practice. Their emphasis is education and business ownership.
Good points about the religions most no longer practice. You’re right, they come to NYC for work and education. There’s a high level of educational and professional achievement among Nigerians in NYC.
The Benin/Togo "ancestry" I never heard of it being significant among AAs. Most DNAstudies show mostly Yoruba, Congolese and Senegambia. And yes drumming was mostly banned outside a select few Southern cities like New Orleans and even still it was restricted.
Which is why these non-drumming West African instruments survived.
Regional wise you could extend the exceptions to Louisiana, Carolina sea islands, & maroon communities.
Check the attachment : The Bight of Benin portion on the Lower Mississippi ( New Orleans/Gulf Coast) map.
I notice from the handful or so DNA test of other Aframs that Benin/Togo region is constantly 2nd highest ancestry or in some cases the plurality. Hence why my results displays it at 36%.
Regional wise you could extend the exceptions to Louisiana, Carolina sea islands, & maroon communities.
Check the attachment : The Bight of Benin portion on the Lower Mississippi ( New Orleans/Gulf Coast) map.
I notice from the handful or so DNA test of other Aframs that Benin/Togo region is constantly 2nd highest ancestry or in some cases the plurality. Hence why my results displays it at 36%.
Not sure if we are reading the same image because the Bight of Benin is losing out in every region. And seems to be the lowest ancestry in most. Not sure what you mean with 2nd highest. The image actually helps my case more. As for the lower Mississippi the Bight of Benin ancestry seems to be the third largest while the Senegambian one is the 2nd which again helps my case.
More importantly I see Yoruba/Hausa are included in as "Bight of Benin" which could explain why those ancestry studies on AAs you reference show high "Benin." Haitians are the only Diasporans who have very high Benin/Togo ancestry. Heck Aframs don't even resemble Beninese/Togolese like Haitians do. And I'm talking the less admixed Aframs. That "Benin" component probably contains Yoruba or even Hausa ancestry.
It should also be noted today most Africans are Christians or Muslims and that includes Yorubas. Groups like like Hausas of Northern Nigeria and Niger have been entirely Islamicized. Yorubas are well aware of their ancestral religion, but many Yoruba are either Christian or Muslim. Arab imperialism and European colonialism have reshaped Africa.
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