"African Founders"

It took me nearly a year to read David Hackett Fischer's 749-page (plus 131 pages of endnotes) African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (Simon & Schuster 2022). (I must be getting old because it took me only five months to read Fischer's earlier masterwork, Albion's Seed.) 

While African Founders could have used some tighter editing, it is an excellent work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in a detailed account of who came from Africa, by whom and where they were enslaved, and what and how they ultimately contributed to the culture of America.

Fischer provides a detailed account of the locations, ethnicities, languages, and cultures of the places of origin of those who were enslaved. All Africans were not alike. In this respect African Founders parallels Albion's Seed that recounted in detail the places of origin and folkways of the four British people groups who settled America in its colonial days. But unlike the Britishers who voluntarily settled in America, many Africans were "imported" because of their specific qualities. Thus, the ancestors of the Gullah/Geechee settlements in coastal South Carolina and north Georgia were purchased from the eastern side of Africa because they knew how to grow rice. The Dutch of New Amsterdam sought their slaves from among the "wheeler-dealer" Africans of what today is Zaire and Angola. Some of these people in turn were able to cut deals with their Dutch owners and achieve a unique level of "half-free." This practice continued until the English turned New Netherland into New York.

African Founders doesn't shy away from the brutalities experienced by slaves. Fischer describes them in detail. One account that struck me was the observation that Paul Revere on his famous ride passed under the desiccated remains of a slave who had been hung as an accomplice to murder twenty years earlier and "whose body was ordered to be displayed in an iron cage" as a reminder to all of the heightened retribution wrought on Black criminals, whether slave or free (p. 75). I was also surprised to learn that many Africans were Christians before their enslavement. Portuguese and Spanish missionaries had been at work in Africa since the late 15th century. 

But African Founders is not about the degradations of life as a slave. As Fischer described his work: "this is a history that flowed from the acts and choices of individual people in the midst of others. ... In every American region, Africans both slave and free played a vital role in these processes." (p. 26) And here his work shines as an implicit rebuke to many contemporary social theorists who, in their fixation on the singular dialectic of oppressor/oppressed, ignore realities that can be discovered through careful historical examination. Since this is not a review of African Founders, I won't take the time to describe the hundreds of examples that that Fischer documents and develops. The careful work of Fischer and the multiple empirical research projects on which he draws repeatedly disclose the agency of the enslaved. To be sure, that agency was often suppressed but it was nonetheless real and had and still has tangible and lasting effects on American society. 

The tradition of liberty that the English emigrants described in Albion's Seed brought to the American continent could not help but be caught by the slaves who were imported. For slaves too, America became a land of hope. We see this in Fischer's conclusion drawing from W.E.B. Du Bois extended to the present:

In the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois noted this "double-consciousness" in the thinking of African Americans: "One ever feels his twoness--an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn apart." ... At the same time Du Bois also observed that "few men worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries."

Through the full span of American history, that deep faith in American freedom was strong in the thought and experience of African slaves and their posterity. In the face of tyranny and oppression, the growing strength of that abiding faith in living free has been one of the greatest African contributions to America and the world.

Take up and read.