my essay 2

Coreen Harris

Essay Two

HST 300

In Afro Latino Voices, Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo, build upon John Thornton’s work, expanding his analysis both the role of Africans who lived in Africa were it affected by the political relations between Africans and Europeans, as explained in the letters of Queen Njinga of the Ndogno, developed a creole culture in the New World.

          First any slave culture may be developed from a military conquest.  Before 1624, it was believed by many Eurocentric historians, Portuguese envoys were accessed communications between the Ndogno tribes- an effort to open trade for slave labor.  According to Thornton, “after 1624, they became embroiled in a long series of wars that might be called the Wars of the Ndogno Succession, in which Portuguese officials hoped to place a pliant king on Ndogno’s throne and met with resistance of Queen Njinga” (Thornton, pg. 100). In a complementary study, McKnight and Garofalo examine the first hand account of Queen Njinga, as she addressed the Portuguese military commander Bento Baanho Cardosa in 1626, which opened political communications of European diplomacy.  At a time when commerce, not industry was deemed as the superior form of economic activity, Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofalo maintains the Ndogno were a people that embraced a great ethic of self-improvement. Queen Njinga writes “[I] t caused me great grief that an Aires’ fortress there were Portuguese forces there that I have received with great kindness because they were vassals of the king of Spain, to whom I recognized obeisance as a Christian… that in Ambaca a large force had gathered waiting for Your Honor to move against me to free the Portuguese held in captivity. Nothing is accomplished by force and to so would bring both me and them harm because everything can be done peacefully and without force.”(McKnight and Garofalo, pg. 43).  Queen Njinga consciously embraces her Christian faith for herself and her people as part of their identity as members of a progressive Atlantic community. The ambivalence, with which she did so, is key to Thornton’s argument that the Ndogno wars were multivariant to the development of a creole culture in the New World.

Next, McKnight and Garofalo pay particular attention to explaining how Portuguese and Ndogno changed in relations, according to Queen Njinga’s letter to the general of Angola in 1655.  Her letter, motivated by a desire for economic advancements, Matamba (Ndogno) immigrants established precarious and sometimes unruly settlements that gradually became more cohesive. How is this possible?  Thornton argues, “whereas the conquest of land necessarily required administration of larger areas and expansion of military resources, the acquisition of slaves only required a short campaign that need not create any new administrative conditions”(Thornton, pg. 106). Please read the following excerpt of Queen Njinga’s letter in 1655 (McKnight and Garofalo, pg. 47):

The one I have the most grievance with in Governor Salvador Correia {de Sà} to whom I gave the slaves Your Lordship knows about and made two hundred banzoes for Commander Rui Pegado who arrived as an envoy of his majesty, may God protect him, and assured me that my sister would be brought back to me and that there would be complete peace. I decided I could not break my royal word (and accepted his assurances). Because of this and other treacheries, I roam the forest, far from my own lands, with no one to inform His Majesty, may God protect him, from unease, when to be at peace with the said commander and His Majesty’s Governors is what I most desire.  (Pg. 47)

This attainment of ideological stability and emergence of family networks in Africa and across the Atlantic was attainable because of stable ruling elites, like Queen Njinga.

Conclusively, McKnight and Garofalo’s analysis of primary sources that openly and cleverly argue Thornton’s argument that “slaves, although no longer surrounded by their familiar home environment relationships, village, and family, were nevertheless not in a culture wilderness when they arrived in Americas”(pg. 205). Motivated by a desire for economic advancement, Portuguese immigrants Africans established precarious and unruly settlements that became more cohesive with the attainment of ideological stability as seen in the emergence of family networks. .

essay three

Coreen Harris

HST 300

Essay Three

“And we are scatterings of Africa

On a journey to the stars

Far below we leave forever

Dreams of what we were

 ~ Johnny Clegg

Bolster’s book is riveting. Structured around the War of 1812 that encompasses the age of sail.;  it tells the tale, as Bolster argues,  of the utterly unpredictable road of the life of an African American sailor. Like every good story teller, Bolster kept his stories tightly wound.   The story of Dartmoor Prison No.4 pleas a case of African American seamen or sailors to be Americans first and creoles second.  Jeffery Bolster has a remarkable capacity to breathe life into complicated rhetoric. His surprising talent for revealing hidden traces of an international culture of those at sea and revelation of “Americanism” in the times of the African American age of sail at the Dartmoor Prison.

First,  the contextualizing and critiquing in these developments  of culture into Americanism  was read in John Thornton’s text, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400-1650  (1992).  In Thornton’s view Bolster, together with other colleagues such as Kathryn McKnight and Leo Garofola, have dramatically enhanced African socio-cultural studies as a separate field. Their premise of the field, however, has remained conservative, in Thornton’s eyes, despite the political liberalism of some of its components. “Black sailor’s patriotism in 1814 asserted attachment to the United States  and their right to belong”(Bolster, pg. 116). It is not enough that Jeffery Bolster  asked why African American men- why they refused  to take up into the roll call of the Royal Navy upon their impressment into the Royal Navy or why Shakespearean theatre critics  had failed to  produce theatrical literary criticism in the quality of slave productions of Richard III (pg. 123). But the very nature of prison life at Dartmoor Prison No. 4   meant that there was an international community or society.   As Bolster notes, ”black sailors built a nation-within-a-nation in Dartmoor Prison”, which created a shared power between white and black prisoners.   Thornton argues the case of the creation of fraternities amongst slaves of the Kongo, which analyzed how Africans could be participants  in the broad patterns  and trends of western social and cultural developments yet create, live in, and be shaped by what many Americans see as a distinctive regime.

Second,  African Americans believed in a higher purpose  of what it was to be an American.  To express Americanism would be a society that defined itself in economic  and cultural components, and Bolster defines Americanism, which began in the age of sail for many African American sailors that had become prisoners of war. Scholars, such as Thornton, McKnight and Garofalo agree with a Marxist  perspective of slaves and escaped ones were capitalistic profit seekers as those that may have stolen other slaves to be sold or were marketplace workers in the urban cities of Latin America. In comparison, Bolster defines the issue of impressment into the Royal Navy for most prisoners of war. Yet he distinctly expressed  that many African American refused the enrollment of the muster,  but it the refusal of profit from the “[T]o assume that men like Backus, Godfrey and Potter were situating themselves as Americans simply to gain official American assistance, or to stick with white shipmates,  is to ignore their conscious decision-making”(Bolster, pg. 117).   But what is more convincing is Bolster’s argument for William Godfrey’s testimonial correspondence to the Congress of the United States of America, of the conditions of impressed seamen after 1815, which disagrees with the presumption of  Africans and creolized escaped slaves of Africa and Latin America- to be a subsequent creole culture were capitalistic profit seeking people.  “Neither have I , knowing myself to be an American as well for what reason, I do not wish to serve them.” (pg. 117).

In conclusion,  African American Americanism was defined by the cultural and economic developments that challenged those who were of the distinctive slave regime into a sailor. Through Bolster’s storytelling of the age of sail throughout the War of 1812, his book sufficiently described the African American’s reistance to slavery and impressment.  He challenges the prsumptions of Americanism as inherited ideas of slavery to shape both a world view  and response to  the intellectual and ideological assaults on slavery and its survived creole culture into a strengthened African American culture.