Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The 4% only include slaves shipped directly to the USA. Using an estimate of 12.5 million slaves ARRIVING in the Americas just under 500,000 were shipped to the USA. But maybe as many as another 200,000 wer shipped from places like Jamaica and Barbados, after they were "seasoned". Given that these were African born and the ultimate destination was the USA they shou8lod be counted in numbers of slaves imported into the USA.
That is what I meant by saying that slaves sent to the USA are undercounted. Some use 7% tro include this.
Yes the patterns of slavery were different in the USA where there was more emphasis on breeding rather then importing slaves. Furthermore as slavery declined in the Mid Atlantic states many slaves were sent to the southern states. The explosion in the use of slaves due to the expansion of cotton happened after the slave trade was abolished, so these needs had to be met domestically.
This explains why there are 41 million blacks in the USA, compared to under 300,000 in Barbados, even though more slaves were shipped to the latter.
Puerto Rico brought in relatively few slaves as it was never a prosperous plantation colony. Cuba had 900,000 slaves and Brazil 5,000,000. The vast majority of the slaves imported into Cuba arrived after 1800 when Cuba's sugar industry expanded to offset the loss of Haiti as a supplier and the decline of sugar in the British West Indies, where there was an initial decline in production after Emancipation which occurred in 1834.
The other thing is the average life expectancy of slaves in the Caribbean and South America was 6 years or so. People were worked literally to death on the plantations. The Black population really grew from escaped slaves having children, or Blacks who were later freed having children.
The last big group of slaves coming into Cuba, Brazil, Puerto Rico, etc were from Benin/Togo/Nigeria (late 1700 and 1800s). Which is why the Yoruba based religion left its market in those areas.
Central America had some Blacks that were imported as slaves during the Spanish colonial period.
Afterwards, Blacks were brought to Central American nations from the United States and the Caribbean to work on the banana plantations, build the railroads and the Panama canal.
So blacks got scattered all over the Americas, and this process continued for quite sometime and still continues.
That's why I said my genetic profile could have occurred anywhere in the Americas. It it isn't an African American profile per say, and depending on circumstance I very would could have been born in Trinidad, Brazil, Jamaica, Panama, Honduras, Colombia, etc.
The 4% only include slaves shipped directly to the USA. Using an estimate of 12.5 million slaves ARRIVING in the Americas just under 500,000 were shipped to the USA. But maybe as many as another 200,000 wer shipped from places like Jamaica and Barbados, after they were "seasoned". Given that these were African born and the ultimate destination was the USA they shou8lod be counted in numbers of slaves imported into the USA.
That is what I meant by saying that slaves sent to the USA are undercounted. Some use 7% tro include this.
Yes the patterns of slavery were different in the USA where there was more emphasis on breeding rather then importing slaves. Furthermore as slavery declined in the Mid Atlantic states many slaves were sent to the southern states. The explosion in the use of slaves due to the expansion of cotton happened after the slave trade was abolished, so these needs had to be met domestically.
This explains why there are 41 million blacks in the USA, compared to under 300,000 in Barbados, even though more slaves were shipped to the latter.
Puerto Rico brought in relatively few slaves as it was never a prosperous plantation colony. Cuba had 900,000 slaves and Brazil 5,000,000. The vast majority of the slaves imported into Cuba arrived after 1800 when Cuba's sugar industry expanded to offset the loss of Haiti as a supplier and the decline of sugar in the British West Indies, where there was an initial decline in production after Emancipation which occurred in 1834.
Thats maybe...yes, a MAYBE.
Many, many slave ships coming to the US landed in the Caribbean before they came to the North America. Thats already a known fact. The number coming directly from Africa as opposed to transferring from the Caribbean we don't know. South Carolina for instance had slaves that were imported from Barbados upon its founding. That colony was made specifically for slavery. The slavery connection between Barbados and South Carolina is known among historians.
Olaudah Equiano was an enslaved African brought to the Caribbean and eventually bought to Barbados, and then eventually Virginia. (although some suggest he was born in South Carolina).
The breeding and domesticating point I made earlier. You are correct.
Puerto Rico was never an important Spanish colony, and yes, nor was it very lucrative for Spain's colonists.
That probably explains why it had fewer slaves than Cuba. But keep in mind many of Puerto Rico's slaves also came from other neighboring islands.
But slavery in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Cuba still lasted longer after slaves here were free.
Its just that not many slaves were brought to the United States directly from Africa, compared to Latin America and the Caribbean. It is indeed a shock for many people.
It because the media has diluted Black men to thinking that Latinas are just an extension of Black women. Much of the media aimed a black men (especially young urban men) is saturated with latinas. They ate held out as some type of Ideal. It's brainwashing simple and plan. Here is a perfect example:
I am the son of a Latina mom and a Black American dad. Both of my parents were very conscious of their shared African heritage and raised me to be proud of both sides. My mom says Black Americans and Afro-Latinos are the same people. The boat just dropped off some of us first (in the Caribbean).
That's why I said my genetic profile could have occurred anywhere in the Americas. It it isn't an African American profile per say, and depending on circumstance I very would could have been born in Trinidad, Brazil, Jamaica, Panama, Honduras, Colombia, etc.
Different regions in the Americas have very different areas of origin, depending on when the slaves were imported, and also the source of slaves that the local planters preferred. Also different colonial powers had access to slaves from different regions
So North America and the Spanish Americas (aside from Cuba) have a very large Senegambia/Guinea origin, because that was an important source for the earliest waves.
Brazil has an overwhelming predominance of Angola/Congo (over 70%) with most of the rest coming from the Bight of Benin (presumably Yoruba). Indeed the reason why Congo/Angola provided most of the slaves (40%) is because Brazil is the only part of the Americas where there was a voracious appetite for slaves the entire period that the transatlantic slave trade existed (1510s to 1860s).
North America imported relatively few slaves direct from Africa after the 1780s, as did the Spanish colonies (other than Cuba). Yorubas are the third largest group into Cuba because Yorubas weren't sold into slavery in large numbers until the 19th century when the Yoruba empire imploded and various Yoruba clans battled with each other and sold off their Yoruba captors. Further the very aggressive Dahomey kingdom was able to take advantage of this. Prior to this the Yorubas were way too strong, and in fact sold off minor groups in the SW Nigeria/Benin regions.
So one cannot say that distribution is random. There is a reason why I should be more Gold Coast than you will be (from either your North American or your ANCIENT Cuban side). 70% of the Gold Coast slaves were shipped to the British Caribbean colonies, with most of the rest going to the French and Dutch Caribbean colonies, though some might have seeped in with that export of slaves from those territories to North America.
You will be less Yoruba than Lucario's mother (I think that he is part Cuban) because you would come from an earlier wave of Cuban slavery than he would (over 80% of the slaves entering Cuba arrived after FL was part of the USA).
The common factor in all of us will be the Congo, because that region (together with Angola) shipped more slaves to more places over a longer period of time than any other region in Africa.
Then we have the European side. The probability of some one who is not North American having as diverse a range of NORTHERN European ancestries is remote. Note that one random ancestor from Norway or Russia wouldnt show up in your DNA, unless relatively recent. This might indicate that your European ancestry isn't that old.
My European ancestry is concentrated in the British Isles because there was a very limited probability that (in some one who is 83% West African) that some random ancestor from some other part of Europe (aside from maybe France) would have made a sufficient contribution to the DNA to allow it to survive many generations.
So I would argue that your ancestry is particular to some one who has long term roots in the southern USA (though I remain curious about the Russia/Norway bit).
I am the son of a Latina mom and a Black American dad. Both of my parents were very conscious of their shared African heritage and raised me to be proud of both sides. My mom says Black Americans and Afro-Latinos are the same people. The boat just dropped off some of us first (in the Caribbean).
What phillystress doesn't know is that not only those Cubans who do self identify as black display pride in their blackness, but Cuban blacks have had contact with African Americans for a long time. Starting with the Negro base ball league, where quite a few players were Cuban. Then there was the exchange of music forms that went both ways, from the early to the mid 20th century. And Cuban blacks were always interested in the various struggles and strategies that AAs adopted to battle against racism and bigotry. Du Bois and others made frequent visits to Cuba where he met with much of the AfroCuban leadership.
What many AAs get confused is that the one drop rule doesn't apply. So they meet a Latin or Caribbean person who self identifies as mixed, but to her eyes is black. Then she has a heart attack that the person is rejecting their blackness. To be honest they may well be, but then they are applying the rules of their society. I feel confident that many light skinned AAs would behave the same if the race rules of the USA allowed them to "escape blackness" by claiming a mixed identity, and indeed before Jim Crow this did happen. Because we do know that the "lighter is better mantra" was (and in some places still is) an ideology shared by those who have some degree of African ancestry.
Puerto Rico was never an important Spanish colony, and yes, nor was it very lucrative for Spain's colonists.
That probably explains why it had fewer slaves than Cuba. But keep in mind many of Puerto Rico's slaves also came from other neighboring islands.
But slavery in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Cuba still lasted longer after slaves here were free.
Its just that not many slaves were brought to the United States directly from Africa, compared to Latin America and the Caribbean. It is indeed a shock for many people.
yes its all a maybe. For instance most of the slaves brought in by the Dutch that were offloaded in Curacao and subsequently smuggled to Spanish colonies, because those who sold slaves to these colonies (under contract from the Spanish government) couldn't ship enough, so slaves were smuggled in. So we can argue that more slaves were shipped to Spanish America than is recorded.
It is a known fact that about 1/3 of the slaves imported into New York came from the British West Indies. You are correct about South Carolina. Indeed when we hear "Geechee" being described as "African" most West Indians chuckle because that is straight Bajan, and the Bajan dialect is regarded as being the LEAST African. The deepest dialect with roots in the English language being Sranan Tongo (Takitaki..which means talk talk) from Suriname. Because they lost touch with the English language in the mid 17th century that dialect retains more African features and has developed away from English, though surprisingly not towards Dutch.
So what we do know is where slaves who were shipped from Africa (and who survived the journey, as maybe 1/3 died enroute) were sent. We do know that some were immediately transferred elsewhere. We also know that some were "broken" in Jamaica and Barbados, where some plantations specialized in breaking the spirit of African born slaves, for subsequent shipment to the USA It takes another level of research to quantify those numbers.
Different regions in the Americas have very different areas of origin, depending on when the slaves were imported, and also the source of slaves that the local planters preferred. Also different colonial powers had access to slaves from different regions
So North America and the Spanish Americas (aside from Cuba) have a very large Senegambia/Guinea origin, because that was an important source for the earliest waves.
Brazil has an overwhelming predominance of Angola/Congo (over 70%) with most of the rest coming from the Bight of Benin (presumably Yoruba). Indeed the reason why Congo/Angola provided most of the slaves (40%) is because Brazil is the only part of the Americas where there was a voracious appetite for slaves the entire period that the transatlantic slave trade existed (1510s to 1860s).
North America imported relatively few slaves direct from Africa after the 1780s, as did the Spanish colonies (other than Cuba). Yorubas are the third largest group into Cuba because Yorubas weren't sold into slavery in large numbers until the 19th century when the Yoruba empire imploded and various Yoruba clans battled with each other and sold off their Yoruba captors. Further the very aggressive Dahomey kingdom was able to take advantage of this. Prior to this the Yorubas were way too strong, and in fact sold off minor groups in the SW Nigeria/Benin regions.
So one cannot say that distribution is random. There is a reason why I should be more Gold Coast than you will be (from either your North American or your ANCIENT Cuban side). 70% of the Gold Coast slaves were shipped to the British Caribbean colonies, with most of the rest going to the French and Dutch Caribbean colonies, though some might have seeped in with that export of slaves from those territories to North America.
You will be less Yoruba than Lucario's mother (I think that he is part Cuban) because you would come from an earlier wave of Cuban slavery than he would (over 80% of the slaves entering Cuba arrived after FL was part of the USA).
The common factor in all of us will be the Congo, because that region (together with Angola) shipped more slaves to more places over a longer period of time than any other region in Africa.
Then we have the European side. The probability of some one who is not North American having as diverse a range of NORTHERN European ancestries is remote. Note that one random ancestor from Norway or Russia wouldnt show up in your DNA, unless relatively recent. This might indicate that your European ancestry isn't that old.
My European ancestry is concentrated in the British Isles because there was a very limited probability that (in some one who is 83% West African) that some random ancestor from some other part of Europe (aside from maybe France) would have made a sufficient contribution to the DNA to allow it to survive many generations.
So I would argue that your ancestry is particular to some one who has long term roots in the southern USA (though I remain curious about the Russia/Norway bit).
You have people who are of Northern European descent in Latin American itself. More have come in the past 200 years, but in varying degrees they were always there. The Spanish nobility has always been at least partially of Northern European descent. The European royal families frequently intermarried amongst themselves. The Hasburgs, a Germany dynasty, technically rule Spain to this day. Queen Elizabeth of Britain has German and Russian ancestors.
Blacks in the Caribbean and Latin America also have moved around from country to country . You have situations in which a Caribbean Black (English) marries someone who is from a Spanish speaking country (many English Caribbean Blacks moved to Central and South America).
Back to England itself, you have varying waves of Germanic people who settled in Britain at various points, ditto the French.
You cannot look at my profile and say for sure I have any connections to the US South, and not even those giving the tests would make that claim because people in the Americas and worldwide have always been mobile. You were actually saying I had long term ties to the Northeast/Midwest until I corrected you there.
A number of Blacks with ties to the US South tested with small amounts of Native America.
Also, historical records are not to be taken literally. Who says they accurately kept records of where slaves were from? Even if you think they did, that doesn't necessarily mean that they were accurate. Lastly, since slaves were traded all over the place and since people post slavery were free to chose where they wanted to live, you cannot do a dna test on Blacks from the Americas and determine their nationality (Jamaican, Dominican, US, Brazilian etc).
Also, one things like the one percent Indian/Pakistani, I have no idea when or how that happened. Perhaps it somehow happened in Africa. Perhaps it happened in the Caribbean and some of my ancestors are Caribbean (there are gaps when you look up your family history via the census records). Even the African Southeastern Bantu. I don't know if they were brought directly to the US (the Carolina or Georgia) or if they were brought to Spanish Florida. I don't know the ethnic composition of my ancestors who were living in Florida at the time.
So a lot of this stuff is stuff you cannot make sense of, and trying to cross reference it history is futile as there never were absolutes or 100% in history.
"My DNA breaks down as follows: I’m 23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 7% Togo, 6% Benin, 5% Senegal and 4% Portuguese.
Now, I can’t wait to go to Ghana and Cameroon and Togo and Senegal — it’s a great opportunity to see why the customs resonate with you. I love to travel and I love to explore, and I have to admit that I was always jealous of people who knew their cultural background. Both my family and myself came out with light eyes, so obviously there is a recessive gene here. Not knowing what that was just made me very curious."
The above profile is Vanessa Williams profile. Again, just by looking at the test results you cannot know her nationality. She's a mix of various African and European groups that did not have to happen in the US.
A big problem with trying to classify African Americans is that people will randomly decide that because a big shipment of whatever ethnic group of Africans came to area X, that everyone in that area is automatically descended from that group. That isn't always the case . And when dealing with the European ancestries in people of color, people automatically decide if must be tied to the European colonial power. That isn't always the case as not all whites in Latin America were ever always Spanish or Portuguese, and not all whites in British America were always "English" And mind you the British always had a mixed of ethnic groups going on at home,
Slavery actually ended in PR in 1873, only 8 years after it ended in the US. It didn't end because of an Abolitionist movement. It ended because the planters in PR wanted it to end. Being impoverished they no longer wanted the responsibility of having to feed and house slaves. Indeed most of the blacks in PR were probably free by then as there wasn't that much need of slave labor.
You have people who are of Northern European descent in Latin American itself. More have come in the past 200 years, but in varying degrees they were always there. The Spanish nobility has always been at least partially of Northern European descent. The European royal families frequently intermarried amongst themselves. The Hasburgs, a Germany dynasty, technically rule Spain to this day. Queen Elizabeth of Britain has German and Russian ancestors.
Blacks in the Caribbean and Latin America also have moved around from country to country . You have situations in which a Caribbean Black (English) marries someone who is from a Spanish speaking country (many English Caribbean Blacks moved to Central and South America).
Back to England itself, you have varying waves of Germanic people who settled in Britain at various points, ditto the French.
You cannot look at my profile and say for sure I have any connections to the US South, and not even those giving the tests would make that claim because people in the Americas and worldwide have always been mobile. You were actually saying I had long term ties to the Northeast/Midwest until I corrected you there.
A number of Blacks with ties to the US South tested with small amounts of Native America.
Also, historical records are not to be taken literally. Who says they accurately kept records of where slaves were from? Even if you think they did, that doesn't necessarily mean that they were accurate. Lastly, since slaves were traded all over the place and since people post slavery were free to chose where they wanted to live, you cannot do a dna test on Blacks from the Americas and determine their nationality (Jamaican, Dominican, US, Brazilian etc).
Also, one things like the one percent Indian/Pakistani, I have no idea when or how that happened. Perhaps it somehow happened in Africa. Perhaps it happened in the Caribbean and some of my ancestors are Caribbean (there are gaps when you look up your family history via the census records). Even the African Southeastern Bantu. I don't know if they were brought directly to the US (the Carolina or Georgia) or if they were brought to Spanish Florida. I don't know the ethnic composition of my ancestors who were living in Florida at the time.
So a lot of this stuff is stuff you cannot make sense of, and trying to cross reference it history is futile as there never were absolutes or 100% in history.
We cannot rely on records to determine our specific ancestries, but we can have an idea. The records include where slaves were loaded, where off loaded and which flag did the ship sail under. So we have a general idea as to the regions of Africa which were the source of slaves to various regions in the Americas.
Well looking at your profile I was immediately able to sense that you had some sort of connection to Cuba, this because of your Indian Ocean connection. The majority of those were sent to Brazil Cuba and Argentina/Uruguay. You then surmised that it was because of a Florida connection, maybe ancient because it might have been when it was under Spanish control. Or maybe not with a Cuban person moving to Florida after it fell under US control.
So I guess we each make each other's point. Me because I said that an analysis of geographic ancestry is a clue as to where one might have a connection to in the Americas. And you because you have pointed out the fluidity of such flows that occurred since then.
Research that Russian/Norway part though. Where does your European ancestry come from?
The South Asian part can be explained maybe because of your Indian Ocean connection, or through your Mediterranean ancestors. There wasn't heavy migration of Russians/Norwegians to the South or to the Caribbean. Yes people pop up in places, but a random ancestor long ago most likely will not appear in your DNA. If the Russian/Norwegian is just a trace then it might be a co factor (error) in some other European ancestry. The DNA tests aren't 100% accurate as they are looking at genomes and a similar sequence might show up in unrelated groups, based maybe on some very distant point of origin.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
