The sad fact is that many of the first Africans to see America were victims of the transatlantic slave trade. At the end of their journey, through the middle passage, packed into the hulls of ships that sailed from the coast of West Africa to southern US ports, the eyes of these men and women gazed upon a foreign land where they would live out the rest of their lives in slavery. The transatlantic slave trade was a system of exchange that took place from the 16th to 19th centuries, in which European merchants took West African slaves from their homelands and sold them in slave markets in the Americas. This fate befell millions of Africans who, upon landing in the Americas, were met with disease, alienation from loved ones, and frequently, cruelty at the hands of slave masters. The transatlantic slave trade is an important chapter, the foundation in fact, in the ongoing story of how Africans experienced and understood America. Unfortunately, we have little firsthand information about how enslaved Africans viewed America. There are precious few written firsthand accounts of slaves. There are, however, some accounts that were collected after slavery was abolished that allow some perspectives of how African slaves viewed their lives. You have already read through a selection of first-person accounts of slavery that was created by the National Council of the Humanities. The narratives contained in this document were collected during two periods. First, there's selections from the 18th and 19th Centuries, which describe first hand accounts of capture and enslavement. Second, there are narratives that were collected in the 1930s as part of research carried out by the Works Progress Administration. Because these were collected decades after slaves had been emancipated, these narratives are often told by the grandchildren and great grandchildren of people who had been enslaved. As we examine these documents, it is important to keep these period distinctions in mind. The narratives of capture and transport are harrowing, and they often describe the physical pain and emotional strain of this experience. One account by an individual named Boyrereau Brinch describes his emotional state and physical discomfort in this way. "I, after a siege of the most agonizing pains describable, fell into a kind of torpid state of insensibility, which continued for some hours. Towards evening I awoke only to horrid consternation, deep wrought misery and woe, which defies language to depict. I was pressed almost to death by the weight of bodies that lay upon me; night approached and for the first time in my life, I was accompanied with gloom and horror." Brinch describes his voyage and his mistreatment as traumatic, in his first experience of true suffering. His description of his emotional state speaks to a widely held perspective of captured Africans. They understood their enslavement as a tragedy that changed their lives for the worst. The testimony of a woman identified as Adeline from Tennessee describes how enslaved Africans attempted to understand their position within America and to retain a sense of pride in their origins. She said, I'd always been told from the time I was a small child that I was a Negro of African stock. That it was no disgrace to be a Negro. And had it not been for the white folks who brought us over here from Africa as slaves, we'd of never been here and would have been much better off. While the truth of this statement seems obvious to us today, at the time, many slave masters and slave traders justified their oppression of Africans through the belief that they were better off in America, or that Africans were too primitive and savage to truly suffer at the hands of their mistreatment. With such perspectives, white slavers questioned the very humanity of enslaved Africans. When understood in this light, the enslaved author's assertion of their suffering and recognition that it was no disgrace to be African as a way of conveying their humanity in the face of dehumanization by their oppressors. Another difference in perception, evident in these capture narratives, concerns the moral judgment assigned to the practice of capturing slaves. For instance, many of the capture narratives refer to the slave trade, not as exchange, but as theft. This is done through the use of language that implies the slavers stole Africans from their homeland. Such is the account of Sylvia King which reads, “I know that I was born in Morocco, in Africa, and was married and had three children before I was stolen from my husband. I don't know who it was that stole me.” Other capture narratives illustrate their critique of the slavers callousness through stories. For instance, Luke Dixon, a slave from Arkansas, offered a harrowing account of a mother being separated from her child by a slave master in spite of her pleas to be allowed to stay together. Dixon uses this story to illustrate his captor's cruelty. The perspectives of captured Africans are thus a stark contrast to the narratives offered by white slavers and slave masters. Slave traders and owners felt morally justified in their participation in the slave trade and understood their actions as part of a legitimate business transaction. In contrast, capture narratives demonstrate that enslaved Africans experienced the trade as a traumatic and morally bankrupt injustice. In the West African slave trade, although there were a select number of ports where slaves were transported to the Americas, they were taken from a very wide area. Stretching down the coast from at least modern-day Senegal to Angola. Because of this, enslaved Africans represented an extremely diverse set of peoples and cultures, and thus experienced the Middle Passage with people who spoke different languages from disparate regions. The first-hand capture narratives, taken in the 18th and 19th centuries, are more likely to refer to specific geographic locations or cultures from where slaves were taken than the narratives from the 1930s. Not surprisingly, the 1930's narratives recalling stories of their ancestors are less precise about the details of enslavement. This change in language between the 1930's accounts and the earlier ones suggest that the distinctions people recognized between themselves and other slaves at enslavement was often not maintained. The facts of being enslaved in the Americas meant that slaves had to create new communities, and that these communities necessarily incorporated a great diversity of cultures. In the face of slavery and the great confusion and dislocation of the Middle Passage, enslaved Africans were able to endure through creating new communities based on their shared oppression. The capture narratives of Africans displaced by the transatlantic slave trade bear witness to a momentous period of suffering. These documents show how enslaved West Africans perceived and experienced America, and offer a counter-narrative to that offered by slave traders and owners. Over time, the perceptions and language used by slaves to describe the first experiences of contact changed, as circumstances such as cultural exchange between enslaved Africans resulted in the creation of new and distinct African American cultures. This transition begs the question of what qualifies as an outsider perspective. What qualities define the word foreign in this course's title, America Through Foreign Eyes? In other chapters, we will examine again the experiences of African Americans. Such as their relationship to African independence movements in the 1960s and the challenges of returning to Africa as tourists in more recent years.
