African Retention

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African Retention

• The Africans in North American retained many
  African traits

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The Debate

• African or Not
• Retention or Assimilation

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The Question

•  
• Why was not the experiences of the Africans the
  same everywhere?

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Two answers

•  
• 1.  African retentions in the US were negligible
  because the African was totally stripped of his
  culture by the process of enslavement.
• E. Franklin Frazier advocated this position.

http//www.howard.edu/library/Social_Work_Library/
images/frazerport.jpg
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• 2.      The slave system did not destroy the
  slaves African culture and a considerable number
  of Africanisms continue to define Afro-American
  culture in the US.
• Melville J. Herskovits advocated this position.

http//www.pbs.org/wnet/freetodance/behind/images/
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The idea

• The myth that Herskovitz wanted to dismiss was
  the idea that the African had no past other than
  primative savagery which was demolished once
  the African came in contact with Europeans.

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What do you think?

• The truth lay somewhere in the middle?

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Retentions

• Worship
• Spirit Possession
• Music
• Spirituals
• Supernatural Beliefs
• Hags, Haunts and Plat Eyes
• Conjuration

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Worship

• Worship
• Spirit Possession - getting happy shouting
  getting the spirit
• Filled with music - like many things African
• Sermon - high point, rhythmically delivered
• Call and response - signifies the relationship
  between the speaker and the congregation

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Music

• Spirituals
• Work songs
• Stories
• Weddings
• Funerals

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Supernatural Beliefs

• Plat Eyes
• evil spirits that changed shapes to lure their
  victims into dangers and make them go crazy
• Hags
• disembodied spirits of witches or conjure men
• Haunts
• spirits of the dead (zombis)

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Conjuration

• Voodoo or hoodoo
• Magic Shamanism
• use of supernatural to harm or avoid harm to
  others
• sickness was thought to the work of someone who
  was wanted to hurt another

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Food for thought

• Do you agree with the following quote?
• Most of the slaves culture was neither retained
  from African nor adopted from the white
  slaveholders. Rather, it was created by the
  slaves form a convergence of various African
  cultural patterns, white cultural influence, and
  the necessities demanded by the new environment.