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I offer here a theory of "cultural convergence," as a corollary to Darwin's natural selection, regarding how slave Creoles and culture were formed among the Gullah and, by extension, supported by other examples, in the Americas. When numerous speakers from different, and sometimes related, ethnic groups have words with similar sounds and evoke related meanings, this commonality powers the word into Creole use, especially if there is commonality with Southern English or the host language. This theory applies to cultural features as well, including music. Perhaps the most haunting example of my theory is that of "massa," the alleged mispronunciation by Southern slaves of "master."1 Massa is in fact the correct Bainouk and Cassanga ethnic group pronunciation of mansa, the famous word used so widely among the adjacent and dominant Mande peoples in northern and coastal west Africa to denote king or boss. In this new framework, the changes wrought by Mandinka, the Mande more broadly, and African culture generally on the South, are every bit as significant as the linguistic infusions of the Norman Conquest into what became English.

Long before studying the Mandinka as an anthropologist in west Africa, I was exposed to their legacy in the United States through my contact with the Gullah of Saint Simons Island, Georgia, my home town. The correlation between a white minority and the Mandification of the [End Page 321] English language during the slave era might be obvious to some and terrifying to others. My recently completed work on Mandinka oral traditions lays some of the groundwork for this hypothesis by providing texts that, on close examination, do seem to have some resemblance to select slave vocabulary and diction in America. I propose that the Southern accent, depsite all its varieties, is essentially an African-American slave accent, and possibly a Mandinka accent, with other African accents, along with the colonial British accent layered in.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of an observation made about the practice of slavery in North America and to ask whether this view might be extended to the rest of the Americas. The observation is Philip Curtin's conclusion, after sifting through the immense number of sources available to him, that "South Carolina planters . . . had strong ethnic preferences in the Charleston slave market. They preferred above all to have slaves from the Senegambia, which meant principally Bambara and Malinke from the interior [both are Mande] . . . and they generally have a preference against short people" especially from the Bight of Biafra.2 In the present paper, Curtin's observation becomes the first in a chain of facts and informed speculation that reveal a pattern of Mandification of Southern English.

While the notorious Charleston market was not the only slave port in the U.S., it was a major port and was involved in North American slave trafficking early on, with a fairly wide regional influence into the rest of South Carolina and Georgia. Curtin notes that slave-buying proclivities in the Charleston slave market, emphasizing Mande and including the Mandinka of Senegal and Gambia, might have caused other states such as Virginia to have a slight preference for Senegambian slaves as well. When Curtin's Table 45 speculates that 13.3% of all slaves imported to North America were from Senegambia, 5.5% from Sierra Leone, and 11.4% were from the Windward Coast or Liberia, he emphasizes the regions of west Africa where large numbers of Mande still live today, including Mandingo, Mende, Malinke, Maninke, Mandinka, Susu, Bambara, Vai, and Dyula among others, distributed among non-Mande groups.3 How many Mande or Mandinka were really in these percentages? The linguistic map showing which ethnic groups in west Africa speak Mande-related languages is immense, with many groups on the coasts or relatively near slave ports.4

Of course the vast area of eastern Mali—the heartland—contains Mande-speakers. But from here the influence spread out all along the [End Page 322] Gambia River, the Pakao region of southern Senegal, northern Guinea-Bissau, major regions of Guinea and Sierra Leone, significant territory in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and even a border area of northwestern Nigeria. The seeming fragmentation of the Mande among so many regions and into slave era classifications that included geographic references to three, or sometimes four, seemingly disconnected areas—Senegambia, "Sierra Leone," "Guinea," and the "Windward Coast" (Liberia and Ivory Coast)—have worked to understate among scholars the Mande influence on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave societies of the U.S., as if these geographic areas could not have a broad ethnic and linguistic group such as the Mande bound by a common language and history.

Further amplifying this seeming ethnic fragmentation is that one key slaving area—along the Gambia River—of vital importance to the slave markets of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the Caribbean and throughout the New World in certain decades, became by far the smallest country in west Africa, The Gambia. Since the early seventeenth century the Mandinka have predominated in villages along both sides of this river, settling there after Manding (the ancient Mali empire) expanded and began to disintegrate toward the end of the fifteenth century.

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Posts: 1219 | From: North Carolina, USA | Registered: Jul 2004  |  IP: Logged |