Mistaken identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the methodological challenges of studying the African diaspora

American Historical Review

Volumn 114, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 279-306

  Sweet, James H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67649264646     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.114.2.279     Document Type: Article

References (132)

1. See, for example, Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998); Douglas B. Chambers, " 'My Own Nation': Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora," Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 72-97
2. David Northrup, "Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World," Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 3 (2000): 1-20
3. Douglas B. Chambers, "The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave Trade: A Rejoinder to Northrup's 'Myth Igbo,' " Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 1 (2002): 101-120
4. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005)
5. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, Ga., 2005), xiv-xv.
6. Although the controversy did not fully erupt until after the publication of Carretta's book, he had actually made similar claims in an earlier article. See Carretta, "Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity," Slavery and Abolition 20, no. 3 (1999): 96-105.
7. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York, 2002), 8.
8. On Carretta's findings and his challengers, see Paul E. Lovejoy, "Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, Alias Olaudah Equiano, the African," Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 3 (2006): 317-347
9. Vincent Carretta, Paul E. Lovejoy, Trevor Burnard, and Jon Sensbach, "Olaudah Equiano, the South Carolinian? A Forum," Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society 7, no. 3 (2006): 2-16;
10. Vincent Carretta, "Response to Paul Lovejoy's 'Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, Alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,' " Slavery and Abolition 28, no. 1 (2007): 115-119
11. Paul E. Lovejoy, "Issues of Motivation: Vassa/Equiano and Carretta's Critique of the Evidence," Slavery and Abolition 28, no. 1 (2007): 121-125.
12. The debates surrounding Equiano's identity also received widespread coverage in the academic and mainstream news media. See, for instance, Jennifer Howard, "Unraveling the Narrative," The Chronicle of Higher Education 52, no. 3 (September 9, 2005): A11
13. Gary Younge, "Author Casts Shadow over Slave Hero," The Guardian, September 14, 2005, http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/ articles/0,1569407,00.html (accessed February 4, 2009).
14. On the ways in which "categorization" operates as an assertion of power and domination, see Richard Jenkins, "Rethinking Ethnicity: Identity, Categorization and Power," Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 2 (1994): 197-223. Jenkins is careful to note that those who have these categories imposed upon them can eventually embrace them as their own.
15. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston, Mass., 1992), 18; emphasis in the original.
16. See, for example, Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture; Richard Price, "The Miracle of Creolization: A Retrospective," New West Indian Guide 75, nos. 1-2 (2001): 35-64
17. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Culture on the Edges: Creolization in the Plantation Context," Plantation Society in the Americas 5, no. 1 (1998): 8-28
18. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998).
19. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1998), 320.
20. See, for example, Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World;
21. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks
22. Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas
23. Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (London, 2000)
24. Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (New York, 2003)
25. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Bloomington, Ind., 2004).
26. Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Boston, Mass., 1951) suggests that European immigrants were alienated from their pasts, forced to assimilate into a new America. Since the 1950s, scholars have challenged this formulation, arguing for continuities in ethnic traditions. This work is perhaps best exemplified in John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, Ind., 1985).
27. See David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert Klein, eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 2000), and its open-source revision that promises frequent updates of the data, David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, and Manolo Florentino, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.com.
28. The idea of "revisionist" interpretations of slavery studies comes from Paul E. Lovejoy, "The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture, and Religion under Slavery," Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation 2 (1997), http://www.yorku.ca/nhp/publications/Lovejoy- Studies%20in%20the%20World%20History%20of%20Slavery.pdf (accessed February 4, 2009).
29. Nowhere is this clearer than in the scholarship on "Atlantic Creoles," where the Americanization process is now sometimes cast as having begun in Africa itself. See, for example, Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America," William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1996): 251-288
30. more recently Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge, 2007), who argue that Atlantic Creoles' "knowledge of European material culture, religion, language, and aesthetics made it easy for them to integrate into the [American] colonial environment"
31. According to this recent scholarship, the flow of knowledge from Europeans to Africans rendered Atlantic Creoles peculiarly suited as American colonial subjects. One troubling implication of this argument is that slavery was somehow made more tolerable for those who were familiar with European lifeways. For critiques, see Peter A. Coclanis, "The Captivity of a Generation," William and Mary Quar-terly 61, no. 3 (2004): 544-556;
32. and my review of Heywood and Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, forthcoming in New West Indian Guide 83 (2009).
33. To be sure, the contributions of African Americans in "building" America is an important topic; however, the tendency to emphasize American institutional outcomes draws attention to broader critiques of extant Atlantic histories-that many are not really Atlantic at all, and instead focus narrowly on European and American histories that are "old wine in new bottles, or in this case the old colonial history repackaged as Atlantic history." See Alison Games, "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities," American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 741-757, quote from 745.
34. See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's critique that the Atlantic paradigm "sanctions Eurocentric cultural geographies for North America"; Cañizares-Esguerra, "Some Caveats about the 'Atlantic' Paradigm," History Compass 1, no. 1 (2003): 1.
35. More recent attempts to define the Atlantic world in terms of "entangled" empires are no less satisfying in integrating African histories (let alone African "empires") into the Atlantic narrative. See, for instance, Eliga H. Gould, "Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery," American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 764-786.
36. For a critical response in the same AHR Forum, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?" ibid., 794, where he says: "If the category of the Atlantic is to mean anything, it ought to include Africa, but there seems to be no room for this often overlooked fourth continent in most new versions of the Atlantic."
37. Here I echo calls made by other scholars to break free from the "straitjacket" of creolization versus survivals. See, for instance, David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas," American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (December 2007): 1329-1358, esp. 1332
38. Vincent Brown, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 7-8
39. J.Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomble ́ (Princeton, N.J., 2005)
40. Luis Nicolau Parés, A formação do candomblé: História e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia (Campinas, Brazil, 2007).
41. Studies of individual enslaved Africans in the North Atlantic are exceedingly rare. Where they exist, they tend to adhere to the "Atlantic Creole" perspective. See, for instance, Terry Alford, Prince among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the American South (New York, 1977);
42. Daniel L. Schafer, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner (Gainesville, Fla., 2003)
43. Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 2004)
44. Historians of the South Atlantic have produced greater numbers of biographical studies; these have been more sensitive to shifting, overlapping cultural circuits in the broader Atlantic world. For an early example, see Luiz Mott, Rosa Egipcíaca: Uma santa africana no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1993).
45. For more recent work, see João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, and Marcus J. M. Carvalho, "Á frica e Brasil entre margens: Aventuras e desaventuras do africano Rufino José Maria, c. 1822-1853," Estudos Afro-Asíaticos 26, no. 2 (2004): 257-302
46. Mariza de Carvalho Soares, "A biografia de Ignacio Monte, o escravo que virou rei," in Ronaldo Vainfas, Georgina Silva dos Santos, and Guilherme Pereira das Neves, eds., Retratos do Império: Trajetórias individuais no mundo português nos séculos XVI a XIX (Niterói, 2006), 47-68
47. João José Reis, Domingos Sodré: Um sacerdote africano (São Paulo, 2008). For the rare case of a biography that links the North and South Atlantic, see Paul E. Lovejoy and Robin Law, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, N.J., 2001).
48. The representativeness of these cosmopolitan, culturally fluid Africans in the Atlantic world is difficult to quantify. Most probably worked on board ships or as personal body servants, accompanying their masters back and forth between the Americas and European metropoles. Although they were a distinct minority, their numbers were not insignificant. In the 1720s, an African-born slave in the Portuguese city of Porto revealed a network of twenty-five slaves in the city who manufactured and distributed "Mandinga" charms. Of these twenty-five men, eighteen had once lived in Brazil, two were the slaves of Englishmen, and two more worked on merchant ships. Arquivo Nacional de Torre do Tombo, Inquisição de Coimbra, Processos, no. 1630 (Luís de Lima).
49. For a further discussion, see James H. Sweet, "Slaves, Convicts, and Exiles: African Travelers in the Portuguese-Atlantic World, 1720-1750," in Caroline A. Williams, ed., Bridging Early Modern Atlantic Worlds: People, Products, and Practices on the Move (London, for thcoming).
50. For a treatment of seafaring Africans in North America, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
51. I am aware of critiques that reject the term "identity" as a meaningful category of analysis. Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker, for instance, have called for scholars to disaggregate the many meanings of identity, among them "identification," "categorization," and "self-understanding." Where possible, I use these terms as alternatives to a homogenized "identity." However, as I show, archival documents often do the work of reifying "identity" in precisely the ways that Cooper and Brubaker critique. By faithfully adhering to documentary identities as "real" or "true" evidence, scholars actually reinforce these static, essentialized "identities" that ignore the vicissitudes of power and subjectivity.
52. Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker, "Beyond Identity," Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1-47.
53. Throughout this article, all references to Domingos Á lvares come from his Inquisition case: Arquivo Nacional de Torre do Tombo, Inquisição deÉ vora, Processos, no. 7759, discussed in greater detail below.
54. On the crucial importance of group affiliations in determining individual autonomy and power in Africa and the diaspora, see Joseph C. Miller, "Retention, Reinvention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities through Enslavement in Africa and under Slavery in Brazil," in José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery (Amherst, N.Y., 2004), 81-121.
55. His birth date is based on his statement in March 1743 that he was "thirty four years old more or less." Four years later, in October 1747, he claimed that he was "forty years old."
56. The vodun belief system asserts a mutual interdependence between the temporal world and the world of the spirits. Vodun spirits are most often associated with natural forces-lightning, thunder, wind, earth, iron, and so on. Vodun priests (vodunon) are ritual experts who mediate between the living and the voduns, embodying the spirits through possession, prescribing offerings of food and drink to the spirits, etc. The ultimate goal of the religion is reciprocity, balance, calm, patience, and composure. On the etymology of "vodun," see Suzanne Preston Blier, African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (Chicago, 1995), 37-47. For a description of the belief system more generally, see Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, 2 vols. (1938; repr., Evanston, Ill., 1967).
57. The date of his enslavement is based on the timing of warfare in his homeland (1728-1732), as well as the timing of the bankruptcy of the plantation on which he served in Goiana (1733).
58. Arquivo Nacional de Torre do Tombo, Inquisição de É vora, Processos, no. 7759.
59. I have seen descriptions of thousands of Africans in state and church records for Rio de Janeiro up until 1770, and with the exception of this one case, I have never encountered the term "Nagô," or anything approximating it. The earliest Brazilian references that I am aware of come from Minas Gerais, where, in a sample of 1,239 Africans taken from tax rolls in 1723, two were identified as Nago, one as Nagoa, one as Nagom, and one as Anago. Moacir Rodrigo de Castro Maia, "Quem tem padrinho não morre pagão: As relações de compadrio e apadrinhamento de escravos numa vila colonial (Mariana, 1715-1750)" (Ph.D. diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2006), 44. Similarly, in a sample of 354 Africans taken from estate inventories between 1725 and 1759, Kathleen J. Higgins found three identified as Nago. Higgins, "Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas
60. Renand des Marchais, Voyage du chevalier des Marchais en Guinée, isles voisines, et à Cayenne, fait en 1725, 1726, &1727 (Paris, 1730), 125.
61. Robin Law, "Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: 'Lucumi' and 'Nago' as Ethnonyms in West Africa," History in Africa 24 (1997): 205-219.
62. For the argument that Yoruba was formed in the diaspora, see J. Lorand Matory, "The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation," Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999): 72-103
63. Matory, Black Atlantic Religion. Biodun Adediran has challenged the notion that Yoruba identity emerged only in the nineteenth century, instead arguing that the Yoruba subgroups of the pre-colonial period consciously shared linguistic, religious, and historical similarities. Adediran, "Yoruba Ethnic Groups or a Yoruba Ethnic Group? A Review of the Problem of Ethnic Identification,"Á frica: Revista do Centro de Estudos Africanos da USP 7 (1984): 57-70; Adediran, The Frontier States of Western Yorubaland, 1600-1889 (Ibadan, 1994).
64. Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
65. Antonio da Costa Peixoto, Obra nova da lingua geral de Mina (1741; repr., Lisbon, 1945). See also Olabiyi Yai, "Texts of Enslavement: Fon and Yoruba Vocabularies from Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Brazil," in Lovejoy, Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, 102-112.
66. This lingua geral also became prominent in West Africa itself. In his travels in the Bight of Benin in the late eighteenth century, the English trader Archibald Dalzel noted that "the language is that which the Portuguese call lingua geral, or general tongue, and is spoken not only in Dahomy-proper, but in Whydah, and the other dependent states; and likewise in Mahee, and several neighbouring provinces." Dalzel, The History of Dahomy, an Inland Kingdom of Africa, second printing with intro by J. D. Fage (1793; repr., London, 1967), v.
67. On the ethnic makeup of the Catholic brotherhoods, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Devotos da cor: Identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro, 2000), 200-201.
68. Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. See also Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Conselho Ultramarino, Pernambuco, Caixa 42, Doc. 3786 (January 16, 1732).
69. Viceroy of Brazil to Lisbon, April 29, 1730, quoted in Pierre Verger, Trade Relations between the Bight of Benin and Bahia, 17th-19th Century (Ibadan, 1976), 125-126.
70. For the best historical account of Dahomey' s rise to power, see Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550-1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford, 1991).
71. Cobûs were less than 1 percent of the African population in the samples taken by Laird Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888 (Cambridge, 1999)
72. James H. Sweet, "Manumission in Rio de Janeiro, 1749-1754: An African Perspective," Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 1 (2003): 56.
73. In a sample of 1,239 Africans in Minas Gerais in 1723, Maia found 23 Cobûs-21 men and 2 women. Maia, "Quem tem padrinho não morre pagão," 44. Finally, Higgins found that Cobûs represented roughly 4 percent of Africans in Sabará between 1725 and 1759, decreasing to only 2 percent between 1760 and 1808. Higgins, "Licentious Liberty," 74.
74. Eduardo França Paiva, Escravidão e universo cultural na colônia: Minas Gerais, 1716-1789 (Belo Horizonte, 2001), 71.
75. see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Devotos da cor:
76. Mariza de Carvalho Soares, "A 'nação' que se tem e a 'terra' de onde se vem: Categorias de inserção social de africanos no Império português, século XVIII," Estudos Afro-Asiáticos 26, no. 2 (2004): 323 n. 19
77. Indícios para o traçado das rotas terrestres de escravos na baía do Benim, século XVIII," in Soares, ed., Rotas atlânticas da diáspora africana: Da Baía do Benim ao Rio de Janeiro (Niterói, 2007), 75, 85, 94 n. 32.
78. Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
79. According to Yeda Pessoa de Castro, "Cobû" is a Portuguese corruption of "Cové-nu," meaning "born in Cové" in the Fon language. Pessoa de Castro, A lingua mina-jeje no Brasil: Um falar africano em Ouro Preto do século XVIII (Belo Horizonte, 2002), 131-135.
80. I. A. Akinjogbin, Dahomey and Its Neighbors, 1708-1818 (Cambridge, 1967), 83-99; Adediran, The Frontier States of Western Yorubaland, 102-110; Adediran, "Ídáìsà: The Making of a Frontier Yorùbá State," Cahiers d' études africaines 24, no. 1 (1984): 71-85.
81. On the distinctions between "metaethnicity" and "ethnicity," see Parés, A formação do candomblé, 24-29.
82. It is important to note that externally ascribed "categories" of identity were not solely an assertion of European power; they could also be African. One finds similar political distinctions in the names applied to slaves in the Spanish-speaking Atlantic. Aguirre Beltran notes that "Ardas" (those from Allada) were distinguished from "Araras" (those in the interior north of Abomey). Araras arrived in places such as Cuba with double names-"Arara agicon," "Arara magino," and "Arara savalu." "Arara" represented a broad metaethnic region (similar to "Mina"), while the second word represented the particular nation or people. Among those arriving in Cuba were Arara cuevano, almost certainly the equivalent of the Brazilian Cobû. On the distinctions between Arda and Arara, see Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, "San Thome," Journal of Negro History 31, no. 3 (1946): 321-322.
83. Luis Gomes Ferreyra, Erario Mineral (Lisbon, 1735), 81.
84. For a brilliant discussion of the development and evolution of "Jeje" identity in West Africa and Brazil, see Parés, A formação do candomblé.
85. The word "vodun" represents both the belief system and the deities that encompass it; thus Sakpata is the earth god. "Afenage" is the name of one of the most powerful descendant qualities of Sakpata, while "Oconon" means "mother of the land" in the Fon language. To this end, both were ritual titles as well as names. Herskovits, Dahomey, 2: 142;
86. R. P. B. Segurola, Dictionnaire Fon-Français, 2 vols. (Cotonou, 1963), 2: 448, 1: 298, 2: 408.
87. The term preto buçal has pejorative connotations. Preto simply means "black." Boçal means "rude, loutish, unrefined," but was most often utilized to describe unacculturated African slaves.
88. Herskovits, Dahomey, 1: 289.
89. "Lecumies barbas" refers to the Bariba people of Borgu in present-day northern Benin. Alonso de Sandoval, De instauranda Aethiopum salute (Bogota, 1956), 95-96.
90. Dalzel, The History of Dahomy, xviii.
91. The word terreiro literally means "yard," or "outdoor space"; in Brazil, however, it has come to be associated with the ritual space for the practice of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. This early use of the word in Brazilian documents is therefore significant.
92. On the ritual importance of trees, see Parés, A formação do candomblé, 98-99. It is also worth noting that many years later, oranges became a favored offering of the Candomblé deity Osun.
93. William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade (1734; repr., London, 1971), 27-28.
94. Soares, Devotos da cor, 199-230
95. There are numerous reasons for this association. Portugal maintained strong historical ties to Angola going back to the late fifteenth century and asserted a colonial presence along the coast there from 1575. Until the early eighteenth century, roughly 90 percent of slaves arriving in Portuguese territories, especially Brazil, were coming from Angola. Thus, the ideological and human representation of Africa for Portugal' s most isolated metropolitan subjects was "Angola." Not surprisingly, colonial Brazil had a much more sophisticated understanding of Africa' s complex histories and peoples.
96. Rodney Gallop, Portugal: A Book of Folk-Ways (1936; repr., Cambridge, 1961), 77-80.
97. Although it might be a stretch to think that Domingos actually "talked" to snakes, it is worth noting that snakes were also feared and revered in Dahomey, where the snake god, Da, was believed to capriciously "give and take away." According to Dahomean myth, when the deity Mawu began creating the world, she was carried from place to place in the mouth of the serpent. Wherever they spent the night, the excrement from the snake became mountains. "That is why when a man digs into a mountain slope, he finds riches." Quoted from Herskovits, Dahomey, 2: 248-249.
98. For a broader description of the meaning of Da, see ibid., 245-255.
99. For eighteenth-century descriptions of snake "worship" in Dahomey, see Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade, 10-14.
100. In his travels across southern Portugal, Domingos encountered people who were already predisposed to forms of "folk medicine" and healing similar to the ones he performed. On popular forms of healing in Portugal, see Timothy D. Walker, Doctors, Folk Medicine, and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment (Leiden, 2005).
101. On the definition of bochio, see Blier, African Vodun, 2.
102. On the significance of piercing needles in vodun bochio, see ibid., 107, 249-251, 287-292.
103. Arquivo da Cúria Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro, Santíssimo Sacramento, Freguesia da Sé, Batismos de Escravos, September 11, 1711, and December 12, 1712. For the use of these baptisms to chart collective African trends, see James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 36-37.
104. Testimony of Don José Ruiz, August 29, 1839, as recorded in John Warner Barber, The History of the Amistad Captives (New Haven, Conn., 1840), 7.
105. Thomas R. Gedney &c. v. The Schooner Amistad, &c., U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut, Testimony of Antonio, January 9, 1840.
106. "Exhibition of the Amistad Blacks-Display of Mendi Learning, Eloquence, and Music," New York Herald, May 13, 1841.
107. For example, on refugees and the creation of new identities in Central Africa, see Beatrix Heintze, Asilo ameaçado: Oportunidades e consequências da fuga de escravos em Angola no século XVII (Luanda, 1995)
108. and Joseph Miller, "Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade, c. 1490s-1850s," in Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge, 2002), 46-47.
109. Alex Byrd argues that even as an adult, Equiano was " confounded" by the meaning of Eboe.
110. See Alexander X. Byrd, "Eboe, Country, Nation and Gustavus Vassa' s Interesting Narrative," William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 134.
111. Likewise, James Sidbury argues that Equiano' s sense of himself as "African" coincided with his "true" conversion to Christianity as an adult.
112. Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford, 2007), 39-65.
113. Carretta, Equiano, the African, 147-149, and Carretta, "Response to Paul Lovejoy's 'Autobiography and Memory,'" 118.
114. Altogether, three different musters were taken during the journey of the Racehorse. In the first two, no birthplace is listed for Equiano. Only in the third does the "So. Carolina" delineation appear. In all three musters, however, the purser inaccurately recorded Gustavus Vassa' s last name-once as "Feston" and twice as "Weston." At the very least, the purser was inconsistent in his recordkeeping. Carretta, Equiano, the African, 147-148.
115. For the most trenchant critique of Carretta' s treatment of Igbo, see Lovejoy, "Autobiography and Memory."
116. Carretta argues that "the possible Igbo words Equiano uses are so few (fewer than ten) that he could easily have learned them outside of Africa." Carretta, Equiano, the African, 9.
117. On the Igbo terms and their meanings, see Catherine Obianju Acholonu, The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano: An Anthropological Research (Owerri, 1989).
118. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavus Vassa, the African: Written by Himself, 8th ed. (Norwich, 1794), 89-90.
119. Ibid., 307. Lovejoy uses this passage to argue that Equiano chose Igbo speakers for the plantations; however, the reference to Libya calls this conclusion into question. Lovejoy, "Autobiography and Memory," 332.
120. Carretta, Equiano, the African, 184.
121. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 335.
122. James Sidbury convincingly argues that Equiano' s "African" identity was closely tied to his Christian awakening. For Equiano, "African" identity centered on a shared Christian past interrupted by the fragmentation and dispersal of diaspora. The reunification of "Africans" could be achieved only through Christian redemption. Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 39-65.
123. Carretta, Equiano, the African, 184.
124. Byrd, "Eboe, Country, Nation," 123-148.
125. In thinking about the fragmented histories of Atlantic Africans, I build on the provocative work of Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), esp. 202-207.
126. In addition to the experience of losing his sister, Equiano recounts other filiative losses in his journeys through the Atlantic world. For example, shortly after his original enslavement, he was purchased by an African woman whose family made him "forget" that he was a slave, treating him as though he were "to be adopted." Reflecting on the moment he was kidnapped and taken away from this family, Equiano captured the cruel promise of social redemption and the horror of instability: "Thus, at the very moment I dreamed of the greatest happiness, I found myself most miserable and it seemed as if fortune wished to give me this taste of joy only to render the reverse more poignant. The change I now experienced was as painful as it was sudden and unexpected. It was a change indeed, from a state of bliss to a scene which is inexpressible by me . . . and wherein such instances of hardship and cruelty continually occurred, as I can never reflect on but with horror."
127. See also Equiano' s description of his connection to a "benevolent boy" who treated Equiano as if he "had been his brother." The two boys were "very happy in frequently seeing each other" for several months in 1761, until Equiano was once again taken to sea. Ibid., 98-100.
128. On the desire of scholars to impose "moral meaning" on historical narrative, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Content and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 21.
129. For critiques of historical "reality" and the importance of recognizing the discontinuity between events and narrative representation, see White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978)
130. and Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983).
131. My suggestion that narrative creates social experience, expectation, and memory draws heavily from Margaret R. Somers, "The Narrative Constitutions of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach," Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 605-649, quote from 621.
132. This call for a data bank of biographies echoes Lovejoy' s. See Lovejoy, "The African Diaspora."