Hi, I’ve recently been looking into the history my ethnic history and realised I’ve only ever heard the history of my West African slaves from when they arrived in the Carribean to now, something I feel I need to look into, don’t believe it’s fair on their legacies to focus solely on only that part of African-Carribean history.
I get the feeling this question may be broad and without a specific answer, but the internet seems to only say that pre-capture, the ancestors of enslaved Africans were from conquered tribes who were then sold to colonisers and taken elsewhere, is this the full picture or is there more to it?
Were the ancestors of the enslaved mainly tribal? Were some part of larger West African society, in cities and such? What would often occur for these groups of Africans to end up captured and sold? Why would they have been conquered if they were tribal? Who would they have been really.
I’d love to know anything about this part of history I feel isn’t really talked about much, or at least isn’t seen as important enough in comparison to what happened to their enslaved descendants, thanks to anyone who could help me understand 👍🏼
It is extremely difficult to tell, as this history as been erased purposely, so unless your family kept this history on its own, or you do specialized genetic testing, you probably will never know exactly what African ethnic group a person descended from slaves comes froms.
But if you look at African diasporic religions in the Americas and Carribean(Santeria, voodoo, voodun) you can find traces of Fon religious traditions and traditional Igbo religious aspects, and Yoruba traditions. The majority of people descended from slaves in the Americans are descended from West Africans from these groups or ones similar in geography.
These groups also still exist in Africa right now, so if your interested in this, you can simply look up aspects the different ethnic groups in West Africa, as people descended from slaves in America are distantly culturally related to these living peoples. ( African descended Creole languages and AAVE tend to have grammer structures that actually mirror African languages as opposed to European ones)
But the truth is, there's possibly dozens of different answers to all your questions, because there are so many different ethnic groups that were taken as slaves that one could possibly be descended from describing how all of them lived would require an expertise I do not have.