Bound to Africa:
The Mandinka Legacy in The New World
Matt Schaffer
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.
II
In many ways William Pollitzer's The Gullah People and Their African
Heritage is a vital source on the whole question of identifying the
Mandinka contribution to Gullah culture and language, especially
because he did the hard work of combing through colonial British and
plantation records, and numerous mentions of slaves in colonial
newspaper accounts, including ads for runaway slaves. However,
Pollitzer's analysis of the Gullah suffers some by not fully
appreciating the connectedness of Mande culture and language back in
west Africa. Another rare defect in this important book is that his
analysis of Lorenzo Turner's seminal Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect
seems too literal in its reliance on Turner's African-language speakers
of the 1940s who singled out the ethnic origins of the thousands of
Gullah words collected.
Pollitzer in Table 16 thus notes that an astonishing 100% of the 92
words collected by Turner in Gullah stories, songs, and prayers are
from Mende (69%), Vai (29%), Bambara (1.1%) and Mandinka (1.1%).5 These
are all Mande ethnic groups (and most if not all were collected by
Turner in Glynn and McIntosh counties, the two counties on the Georgia
coast where I grew up). This concentration suggests the enormous power
[End Page 323] of Mande music, prayer, and storytelling within Gullah
culture, but surely other African ethnic groups made contributions as
well.
Perhaps the greatest defect is that Pollitzer does not take into
account the absence of a Gambian or Pakao Mandinka informant in
Turner's listed group of African informants (more on this below), even
though Pollitzer's historical data suggest that Mandinka slaves were
often a first or second priority for slave buyers in Charleston and
Georgia. A Mandinka would surely have found more Mandinka words in
Turner's Africanisms, as I show below. Turner was also hampered by the
absence of recent Mandinka dictionaries; David Gamble did not start
publishing his Gambian Mandinka word lists until after Turner's work
appeared. Pollitzer's Table 16, based on Turner's analysis, thus shows
that Yoruba and Kongo have the highest percentage (15.9% and 14.5%) of
3595 Gullah words as personal names, while the following Mande groups
as individual ethnicities seem to have far less importance: Mandinka
and Mandingo are 4.2% and 1.6%; the Mende are 8.9%; Bambara are 6.6%;
Vai are 4.5%; Malinke are 0.2%; and Susu are 0.1%.
However, the combined Mande total would be 26.1%, much higher than
that for Kongo or Yoruba. For the 251 words Pollitzer notes in Table 16
that are used in Gullah conversation (as recorded by Turner), the 24.8%
Kongo total seems higher than the following Mande groups: Mende 7.8%,
Bambara 5.2%, Vai 7.2%, Mandinka 0.5%, Mandingo 2%, and Malinke 0.2%.
However, the Mande together are 23.2% (while, curiously, Yoruba are
only 3.2%). A modern analysis by Africans of all Turner's Gullah words
might change these totals somewhat, as it clearly would for Mandinka.
In a similar way, Pollitzer's Table 18 takes a much-needed look at the
1940 WPA masterpiece Drums and Shadows, but almost certainly
understates Mandinka and Mande influence by attempting to quantify the
various magic practices of the Gullah in terms of an ethnic group and
region of west Africa.6 As noted below, in the eyes of an
anthropologist with considerable experience studying the Mandinka, the
culture of this ethnic group seems to resonate virtually throughout
Drums and Shadows, from both Muslim and non-Muslim Mandinka traditions.
Also, this work, published in 1940, relied not on recent
anthropological accounts of the Mandinka, but mostly on early
explorers' accounts, such as Francis Moore's 1738 Travels (up the
Gambia River), as main sources for comparative examples of Mandinka
culture. Another problem that must be confronted and understood in
appreciating Mandinka legacy in the New World, is that both Muslim and
non-Muslim Mandinka slaves came to [End Page 324] this hemisphere in
great numbers, adding to Mandinka cultural variety during the slave
era.
Nevertheless, William Pollitzer's wonderful historical research both
supports and broadens the preferences noted by Curtin, concluding that
in South Carolina the order of preference for slaves was "Gold Coast,
Gambia, Windward Coast, and Angola; Ibo from Calabar or Bonny in the
Bight of Biafra were considered worst."7 Pollitzer cites a 1755 letter
from Henry Laurens, a founding father and leader of colonial South
Carolina, saying that slaves from "Gold Coast or Gambia are best."
Another letter from 1756 states that "[t]he Slaves from the River
Gambia are preferred to all others with us save from the Gold Coast."
Compared with the latter, "Gambians were similarly tall, strong and
very dark. Senegalese were considered most intelligent and esteemed for
domestic service. Mandingoes were gentle in demeanor but sinking under
fatigue."8
In what years or decades did these Mandinka slaves enter the Americas?
In order to demonstrate the influence of any African ethnic group, we
need to know the numbers of slaves arriving, and when. Pollitzer gives
us the best sense of this for Charleston, indicating that 1636
Senegambian slaves were sold there during 1716 to 1744 ("early
period"), representing 7.4% of the total and 11.2% of slaves
identifiable by geography. This number swells to 15,951 slaves from
1749 to 1787 ("middle period"), representing 25.2% of the total and
31.8% of identifiable slaves (the largest percentage from any
geographical area). In 1804 to 1807 ("final period") the number of
Senegambian slaves diminishes to 506 slaves, representing 1.7% and
1.9%. (In contrast, slaves from Angola represent 51%/77% for the early
period in Charleston, 14.6%/18.4% in the middle period, and 52%/56.6%
in the final period).9 If we add to Senegambians the slaves brought
from Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, (the three areas comprising
the Mande region), the totals rise, to 48.5%/ 61.2% in the crucial
middle period, when more than half of all legal importation into
Charleston occurred (68,701 slaves out of 121,464). [End Page 325]
As noted, Mande slaves came not just from Senegambia but from Sierra
Leone (especially the Mende in the final period) and the Windward
Coast; other ethnic groups in this large area likely had at least a few
Mande-language speakers, and the culture of non-Mande groups such as
the Jola and Bainouk, among many others, may have been influenced by
Mande. Pollitzer hypothesizes that a "homogenous group" arriving in
South Carolina and Georgia "first and in large numbers had an
opportunity to establish their common speech and culture" while later
groups had to adjust.10 While Pollitzer uses such an analysis to imply
that Angolans from this "Gola" region of Africa came through Charleston
in greatest numbers in the early period (1716-44), and thus influenced
the "Gullah" name more than the Gola of Liberia, this concept of a
homogenous group coming relatively early, could just as easily apply to
the Mandinka and the Mande more broadly in the middle period (1749-87).
11
On the Georgia coast, from 1755 until 1798, the presence of Gambia
slaves was just as significant as those coming through Charleston, if
not more so, within a group of 6539 estimated by Donlan. Of these, 2038
slaves came from the Caribbean; out of 3680 from a known area of
Africa, 43% came from Gambia and 44% from Sierra Leone or the Windward
coast.12
The several rice and cotton plantations in South Carolina owned by the
influential Ball family provide a rare case study where the probable
ethnicity of the slaves was documented in the eighteenth century; by
far the largest number of these slaves came from Gambia, implying a
Mandinka preference by the Ball family and suggesting that a knowledge
of rice cultivation was important for selecting their slaves.13 An ad
in the South Carolina Gazette for 1785 noted 152 slaves from Gambia for
sale and proclaimed, "[t]he Negroes from this part of the coast of
Africa are well acquainted with the cultivation of rice."14 There are
today large concentrations of rice-cultivating Mande ethnic groups
living in the area of Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the Windward Coast,
the areas that provided 61% of all slaves imported into Charleston from
the middle period (1749 to 1787). Indeed, the broad area encompassing
Liberia was sometimes known in the colonial era as the "Grain Coast or
Rice Coast."15
Eighteenth-century ads in Charlestown newpapers for runaways tell us
that slaves from the Senegambia (and Guinea) were the tallest and
(along [End Page 326] with the Ibo) lighter-skinned. Many runaways
spoke foreign languages, implying mobility in Africa, and played
musical instruments, including the violin. Senegambians appeared
perhaps less often in ads as runaways because they seem to have been
used more as house servants with less chance of running away than a
field hand. Slightly more than half the African names in the South
Carolina Gazette from 1732 to 1775 seem to have been Tshiluba names,
implying a Bantu heritage, but names from Angola and Gambia were
significant. However, figuring out the ethnic heritage of African names
requires linguistic sophistication. When Pollitzer points out that the
name Keta is a common name in Yoruba, Hausa, and Bambara, and written
by a Southern owner as Cato, I would speculate this is very likely a
reference to Keita, the name well-known to Mande Africans of the highly-
influential ruling clan of ancient Mali. As if referring to a veritable
incubator and laboratory for jazz, in 1886 George Washington Cable
fancifully described the Place Congo in New Orleans as the scene of
exuberant music, dance, and singing by a variety of a dozen
identifiable ethnic groups, including tall, well-built Senegalese and
Gambia River Mandingo, who were slightly less well-built but cunning
and lighter-skinned.16
A key component of the Mandification of Southern English is that back
in Africa, Mande traders, warriors, and emigrants were already
spreading their influence throughout much of west Africa. Judith Carney
points out that "seven hundred years of Mande empire formation,
however, would leave a pronounced legacy on the linguistic and cultural
map of West Africa." This resulted in "the widespread diffusion of
Mande languages as well as selected cultural practices throughout West
Africa, a cultural process that Paul Richards has referred to
'Mandingization'." Carney suggests the process of Mandingization in
west Africa began at the dawn of empire-building, at least by 700 CE
with two types of knowledge, cultivating glaberrima rice and smelting
iron. Accorded the powers of magic, the caste of smiths migrated into
forest areas in search of charcoal, and the arrival of iron implements
spread rice cultivation.17 The advent of Islam in the Mande heartland
area by about 1000 CE, the conversion to Islam by rulers of the Mali
empire prior to 1400, and the spread of Islam, aided by jihad, into
even the first years of the twentieth century no doubt amplified the
process. Mande warriors, urged on by their clerics, proselytized among
and battled non-Muslim ethnic groups, including the large number of non-
Muslim Mandinka who had not yet converted even in the nineteenth
century. [End Page 327]
Because of Mandingization, the Mande and neighboring ethnic slaves
sold into the Americas came here already equipped with a kind of
linguistic and cultural homogeneity or anchor. Mande culture in its
broadest sense could help them both in communicating with fellow slaves
and in creating new societies, within the cultural hodge-podge in the
South and elsewhere. In such a free-for-all, Mande commonality achieved
at least a modest cultural and linguistic dominance, capable of
influencing other slaves, their owners, and other white people. At
least one major Southern slave owner, Thomas Spalding of Sapelo Island,
Georgia, purchased African slaves from Mande-preferring Charleston,
based on these slaves' ability to communicate with each other and the
Africans already running his plantation, to make it easier to train
them in the work of the plantation.18
III
Before proceeding further, I must admit to a Mandinka bias, having
done nearly two years of field work with them in 1972 and 1974-75, and
returning briefly in 1980. At same time, my expertise with Mandinka
culture and language hopefully makes it easier to identify possible
areas of their influence in this hemisphere. But any comparisons
between Mandinka usage today and slave Creoles in America must also
bear in mind that change is a constant, wherever people live. The
French words used by the Mandinka during my field work, such as
Commandante (leader) and Anglais (the Gambia), appearing in the legends
of Djinns, Stars and Warriors, are but one example of an ongoing
linguistic change. The same process of Creolization no doubt happened
in the U.S. South, as slaves poured in directly from Africa or via the
Caribbean. Among numerous other geographic and ethnographic
classificatory difficulties, did contemporary observers from the
sixteenth though the nineteenth century even know if a "Mandingo" was
really a "Mandingo," as distinguished from a Wolof or Fulani, not to
mention hundreds of ethnic groups farther south in Africa?
Yet, as Pollitzer, Curtin, and others make abundantly clear, many
slave traders and plantation owners in South Carolina and Georgia had a
fascination for ethnicity which cannot be easily dismissed. At least
some eighteenth and nineteenth century observers, such as Henry Laurens
above and the Jamaica slave-ownesr Bryan Edwards or Thomas Spalding
mentioned below, seem to have been keenly aware of various west African
ethnic groups. At some point in the future, computer linguistic [End
Page 328] modeling and genetic tracing methods, of the kind that show
the origins of British islanders, might confirm or disprove the
patterns below that emerge from historical and linguistic analysis.
Perhaps Mandinka/Mande cultural and linguistic influence in the
Americas will then seem even more significant and discernible,
alongside the influence of other ethnic groups from Africa. The
identification of Mande influence in the South, the Caribbean, and
Brazil, must also be conditioned with a huge reality?ethnic diversity.
Slaves from hundreds of ethnic groups from all over western Africa came
into the South and the rest of the Americas along with the
Mandinka/Mande. At least some of these groups, especially larger ones
such as Yoruba, Kongo, and Angolans were also fairly widely diffused
back in Africa, and their influence has been discerned among the Gullah
in the South.19
IV
Even the name "Mandingo" has a certain, if varied, cachet in different
parts of the Americas. An economist from Argentina told me that in his
country the term Mandinga traditionally was a "black devil" or a person
of African origin with mysteriously threatening or magical qualities.
In modern Brazilian Portuguese, a Mandinga is a fetish, a kind of
material Vodou object capable of causing either good or evil, or it is
a charm worn to protect the body (like the grigri charms worn by Muslim
slaves in the 1835 Salvador revolt or worn by Mandinka Muslims
historically through the present day.) A Mandingueiro/a in Brazilian
Portuguese is a kind of sorcerer (or Gullah "root doctor") who "makes
Mandinga" (fazer Mandinga in Brazilian Portuguese.) Mandingar is to
bewitch or to use sorcery. Mandingaria is witchcraft or the practice of
sorcery.
Curtin's and Pollitzer's data give at least some statistical basis for
the kind of old Southern rumor Kyle Onstott used in writing the novel
Mandingo, implying an ethnic group of African-American slaves
considering themselves superior to other slaves and considered superior
by some Southern slaveowners. The appearance of Alex Haley's Roots and
the Mandinka slave Kunta Kinte, did not necessarily detract from this
myth, but once the hype and storytelling are set aside, convey the idea
of certain Mandinka linguistic traditions being passed on through
several generations in one biological family. The takeover of the slave
ship Amistad by Mende slaves must also have enhanced the reputation for
leadership of this ethnic group in the ante-bellum United States. [End
Page 329]
What happens when a whole lot of similar traditions from African-born
slaves get passed on together in the South, on a scale that occurred
after the Norman conquest of England, when hundreds of French words
were introduced into English and indeed the whole way of speaking
English changed? It would seem logical that the introduction of at
least a couple hundred thousand African-born slaves into the South,
owned by the trend-setting Southern elite, would not just introduce new
vocabulary, but influence diction and even accent. My contention is not
only that this happened, but that we can begin to identify the Mandinka
influence in these changes.
Within the broad Mande group, the Mandinka in particular, along the
Gambia River and in the center of southern Senegal's Casamance region,
are from one of the earliest areas of west Africa to be extensively
slaved, beginning in the mid-fifteenth century. This region was the
first one reached as Portuguese and other explorers proceeded southward
along the west coast of Africa. Because of the westward bulge in west
Africa, this Mandinka region lies comparatively close to the Caribbean
and the U.S. Situated on the westernmost point of Africa, Goreé Island
became a major port of embarkation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A
great many Mande slaves, but certainly not all, came through this
important port, although there were several other slave ports in Guinea-
Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia through which Mandinka and
other Mande slaves were shipped.
Aided by prevailing wind patterns, slave traders plying the Gambia,
the Casamance and other nearby rivers within a few hundred miles south
could maintain that their ships reached the Caribbean and Charleston
relatively faster with, if one can even use the adjective, healthier
slaves. These rivers also lie relatively close to the Mande heartland
in the western Mali and the trans-Saharan trade routes terminating
there, so geography influenced not only slave trading patterns, but the
whole process of Islamization in west Africa. Geography?access both to
rivers closest to the Americas and to trans-Saharan trade?favored Mande
expansion in Africa and their influence in the Americas.
However, geographic arguments favoring Mandinka influence can be
pushed only so far. Politics certainly intervened. After 1807 when U.S.
law outlawed the importation of African slaves, the British navy
aggressively intercepted slave ships off the coasts of Senegal, Gambia,
Guinea-Bissaou Sierra Leone, and Liberia, tending to push the focus of
slave trade further south, toward regions such as the Congo and Angola.
The ever-rising demand for slaves in Brazil, closer to Nigeria, the
Congo, and Angola, also increased the importance of these regions in
the slave trade. [End Page 330] Betty Kuyk does a good job of
suggesting that a large illegal slave trade arose in a state like
Georgia after 1808 until 1858, where efforts to suppress the
trafficking were less intense, and this trade heavily favored the Kongo
people. As she says, "[i]n the Sea Islands, Kongo people came late and
stayed in large numbers."20 She suggests that the numerous west
Africans already established along coastal Georgia and South Carolina,
with their accent and speech patterns already set, were joined by a
large number of Kongo people smuggled in.21
At first glance, Curtin's numbers suggest that only about 5% of all
slaves coming into the Americas were Senegambian Mande, and slightly
more than this if Mande from Sierra Leone and Liberia are included.
However, limited evidence suggests that Mande and Senegambian slaves
were more significant in the earliest years of the slave trade and at a
few other times and places, including, for example, middle eighteenth-
century Georgia and South Carolina. While Pollitzer's work above shows
that Angolans rather than Senegambians dominated the early period (1716-
44) of slave importation into Charleston, this is perhaps not true for
two early colonies in theAmericas?Mexico and Peru. Curtin's list of 207
African-born slaves in Peru compiled from 1548 to 1560, while perhaps
not statistically significant, shows 74% of the total were from
Senegambia and present-day Guinea-Bissau, an area where early
Portuguese slavers concentrated, and that 7.2% were Mandinka (15
slaves). A list of 83 African-born slaves (from 123 born in Africa),
compiled from the Mexican estate of Hernán Cortés, shows 10.8% Mandinka
(9 slaves) and 88% from Senegambia and Guinea-Bissau.22
The ethnomusicologist Michael T. Coolen focuses on another area,
Georgia between 1765 and 1775, where a relatively high percentage of
slaves, 53%, were from Senegambia, with significant percentages from
other years of the late nineteenth century.23 Paralleling Curtin and
Pollitzer, his research concludes that the planters of both Georgia and
South Carolina had a clear preference for Senegambian slaves,
especially those along the Gambia River, where there were large
concentrations of Mandinka (and to a much lesser extent Fula and a
scattering of ethnic groups, including the Wolof). Coolen observes that
planters liked the fact these slaves were often expert horsemen and
traders, and that traders could boast of relatively short sailing
times. [End Page 331]
To focus on one fairly distant colony for which early numbers are
available, Peru, Stephen Bühnen concludes that Mandinka contributed 9%
of the slaves in Peru between 1548 to 1650, larger than most groups,
but paling by comparison with the Bran (27.4%) and Biafra (17.3%),
whose higher percentages are explained by their proximity to Portuguese
towns on the coast of Guinea-Bissau. The Banol (Bainouk) average of
10.7% also exceeds the Mandinka. Interestingly, the Bainouk percentage
rises sharply from single digits to 17.9% in 1595, and remains mostly
higher than their 10.7% average until 1625 (21.3%), raising the
possibility that a major war might have doubled the number of their
people entering slavery.24
In fact, oral traditions of the Mandinka in Pakao, in Senegal's
central Casamance region, recount that their forbears defeated the
Banol in roughly this time frame, resulting in these people being
called the pejorative Mandinka appellation Bainouk?"those chased away"?
from the Mandinka bai, meaning "to chase out." Bühnen goes on to
suggest that the whole trans-Atlantic slave trade was relatively
confined to the coasts and that for the period 1560-91 more than half
of all African slaves (54.2%) and 67.2% of Upper Guinea slaves came to
the Americas from a miniscule area of some 20,000 square kilometers
reaching from the lower Casamance River to the Kogon River?basically
southern coastal Senegal and northern Guinea-Bissau. This relatively
small area, which includes the Bainouk and Cassanga regions of western
Pakao overrun by the Mandinka, was an early ground zero in the slave
trade. Bühnen implies a significant Mandinka influence on both the
neighboring Cassanga and the Banol (Bainouk) by noting how the later
two groups have a witch-detecting Mama Jombo mask, which in both name
and function seems roughly similar to the legendary Mandinka Mumbo
Jumbo. The Mumbo Jumbo, first reported by the English explorer Francis
Moore in 1738, is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mask roughly
synonymous, and concurrent, with the Mandinka kangkurao mask, in which
the wearer covers himself with the blood-red bark of the fara tree.25
Following the zenith of the ancient Mali empire from ca. 1250 to ca.
1350, Mandinka emigrant/traders, warriors, and their Islamic
proselytizing marabouts, spread westward along the Gambia River and
into the upper Casamance River, expanding Mandinka influence among
neighboring [End Page 332] ethnic groups, some of whose people they
helped to enslave. The Muslim Mandinka were especially oppressive
toward their geographical neighbors?non-Muslim Mandinka and the Banol
(Bainouk), Cassanga and Jola peoples along the coast from the Casamance
River up to the Gambia River.
V
Bühnen provides a stunning example of how an adjacent but non-Mandinka
ethnic group could have helped carry a Mandinka linguistic and cultural
concept through slaves into the Americas through the Mumbo Jumbo. He
also points out that massa is the Cassanga and Banol pronunciation of
the Mandinka word mansa, meaning king or boss.26 (The name of the
Casamance River is derived from Cassanga and mansa, meaning rulers of
the Cassas, and the rulers of both ancient Mali and subsequent Mandinka
kings along the Gambia River were all called mansa).
One can easily imagine a cultural convergence with the English word
master powering the Mandinka word mansa and the related Cassanga/Banol
massa into the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave vernacular in
North America. Massa is not a mispronunciation of master but the
correct pronunciation of a widely used West African word for king or
boss. If master, mansa and massa (and monsieur in Haitian or Cajun
Creole) all sound the same and mean something similar, the chances rise
for that word's vernacular to be used interchangeably.
In this demographic and linguistic sense, cultural convergence in the
development of American Creole language and culture is a variation or
corollary of Darwin's theory of natural selection, suggesting that
multiple sources increase the chance a word, expression, or cultural
feature gets adopted and survives. Lorenzo Turner implies this in
Africanisms of the Gullah Dialect by noting in his lengthy wordlist
that numerous African words have very roughly the same meanings among
sometimes widely disparate ethnic groups. Pollitzer picks up on this by
saying that "[t]hose linguistic features understood by the largest
number of slaves and shared with English were most likely to survive."
27 However, it is best to think of cultural convergence flexibly;
sometimes there is convergence with English, sometimes not. The key is
probably that roughly similar sounds and cultural features from
different African ethnic groups, and meaning roughly the same things,
have a better chance to be powered into an [End Page 333] American
Creole. Numerous examples of cultural convergence in music, language,
and culture are discussed below.
Coolen directs us to a musical parallel that could serve as another
stunning example of cultural convergence by noting that the adjacent
Fula, Mandinka, and Wolof all used musical instruments "strikingly
similar" to the fiddle and banjo, two of the most popular slave musical
instruments.28 The Mandinka today call their instrument of this sort
the halam, which is held sideways and played like a banjo. Coolen
communicated to me by e-mail that during an interview in Dakar with
Abdoulai Ndiaye, a gewel and instrument-maker of Tukulor heritage, a
discussion emerged about the U.S. banjo. Ndiaye then mentioned this U.
S. instrument was like the old plucked lute called the "banjar."
Mandification in the U.S. South would have ended this term with a
vowel, thus "banjo," if this term did not already exist in eighteenth-
century Mandinka.
The Swedish banjo historian Ulf Jagfors helps build a fascinating case
for this cultural convergence in music by focusing his search for
origin of the American minstrel banjo on the long-necked akonting banjo
of the Jola, with at least some influence, apparently, from the
neighboring Mandinka.29 The Jola are a non-Muslim people in the coastal
Casamance region of Senegal and northern Guinea-Bissau, who are
bordered on the north by Gambian Mandinka and on the east by Casamance
Mandinka. Jagfors shows how the constrruction of akonting, its up-
picking style of play, some of the songs played, and even the common
Jola names of Sambo and Juba (Jibba) all point to the akonting as the
nearest relative, among several related Senegambian instruments, to the
American banjo. Jagfor's Jola informant Daniel Jatta asserts that the
name banjo comes from the Mandinka word bangoe, for the local papyrus
used in making the long neck of the akonting banjo and that resembles
Asian bamboo in its qualities of hardness.
During my field work in the early 1970s, what the Mandinka in the
Pakao region of Senegal called bung or bungo, looked for all intents
and purposes like bamboo. This bamboo was also a critical building
material when split and woven to make raised platforms for sleeping and
conversation; walls around the washing areas of round, mud-brick
houses; rice-threshing baskets and conical hats, among other things.
Jagfors notes how the musical historian Samuel Charters visited the
Gambia about 1980 and recorded a song by the prominent Mandinka griot,
Alhaja Fabala Kanutheh, about how the Portuguese sailed to the Gambia
to buy slaves in the fifteenth century. One line notes that the
Portuguese found [End Page 334] people chopping down "sticks they
called 'bang' and the Europeans asked them, 'What are you cutting?' and
they said they were cutting the sticks called 'bangjola,' and the
Europeans wrote down the name."
As it happens, the name of Gambia's capital city is Banjul, a Mandinka
expression referring to the island where the papyrus or bamboo grows
and where the Portuguese encountered the locals.30 Jagfors believes the
Jola's habit of drumming at night after work while playing music and
getting drunk under a palm tree made them an easy catch for slavers,
who needed musicians to perform on slave ships, so the slaves could
dance for exercise to remain healthy. Jagfor's informant, Daniel Jatta,
was warned as a boy by his parents not to play the akonting in the
forest or the devil would take him away forever. Several Jola akonting
players told Jagfors of this and how, even today, Jola drummers insist
on playing only within the safety of a village.31
A late eighteenth-century watercolor, The Old Plantation, in the
Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, shows a primitive banjo
that looks remarkably like a Jola akonting, with its characteristic
long neck.32 The ethnomusicologist Michael Coolen tells me the dance in
this painting looks like the stick dance still performed by the Jola.
Seated next to the banjo player, the drummer has his head covered in a
turban (like a Mandinka) and plays a drum held between his legs like a
Mandinka jembe, beating it with two drumsticks, more like a Mandinka
tama or tantango would be played.33
Amplifying the theme of cultural convergence among adjacent west
African people, Coolen points out that the Wolof word for slave is jam
and that the Mandinka word for slave is jon.34 Is there a Wolof
derivation for "jam session" and the verb "to jam," perhaps reinforced
by the Mandinka? Jams as a verb or the plural of the noun could easily
have been pronounced "jazz" in African-American slave dialect. Is it
plausible to see these west African words for slave embedded somehow in
the origin of the word jazz? The concept of cultural convergence allows
other potential derivations of jazz, like the French chasse, or other
African "j" words, to join in powering this important word into use.
One of these, Coolen tells me, is "jas," another Wolof word, meaning
"to mix up," offering reinforcement as yet another possible source for
jazz. Pollitzer [End Page 335] notes that jazz may come from the Hausa
word jaiza, which describes the sound of drumbeats.35
VI
Cultural convergence is not necessarily required for an African word
to become popularized in African-American slang. The Wolof, for
example, a coastal people often at war with the adjacent Mandinka in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, offer a number of other
potential sources for terms not necessarily reinforced by Mandinka.
Michael Coolen tells me that these Wolof words include the terms "hip,
hep, hipkat and hepkat." Hep is "someone who comes to know something."
Kat is an agentive suffix, making a verb into a noun. Wolof, by
implication, is behind such important slang expressions as "hip" and
"cool cat." The linguist David Dalby told me that "Digana Wolof?" or
"Degana Wolof?" was the source of "dig" in U.S. slang, as in "Can you
dig it," meaning "Do you understand?" In fact the Wolof repeat the word
"Dinga" or "Denga" to ask someone with emphasis, "Do you understand
me?"
Pollitzer and Turner give numerous examples of how non-Mandinka words
could have influenced English. Vodou in Haiti and hoodoo in Gullah come
from vodou, a god or demon in Fon and a good or bad spirit in Fon
(although I must point out the Mandinka of Pakao labeled as bunyu furo
a fetish made of chicken feathers and a shard of cracked pot). Arabic
tabix for cement and the Wolof tabi for earth or a similar hard
material, perhaps gave rise to tabby, the Southern English word for a
cement made of limestone and oyster shell (although I must point out
again that in Mandinka tabi means "to cook," as in stirring a broth in
an iron pot, perhaps evoking the process of making tabby). Shindu,
noise made by feet in Gullah and Kongo, may have engendered the word
shindig, perhaps mixing in the Wolof dig.36
Even the modern rap-singing of black musicians might find some origins
in a curious Mandinka tradition, the fino, or rapping/chanting griot.
The entire Pakao village of Sumbundu is composed of such griots, who
rhythmically chant their praise without accompanying musical
instruments. While griots who sing, drum, or play the kora, a 21-string
calabash instrument, are well-known among Mande peoples, the fino or
rapping griot is far less known in the West. Sumbundu elders talk about
their [End Page 336] origins directly from Manding, the ancient Mali
empire, with an original founder, of the clan name Kamara, who brought
in the fino tradition with him. As Pakao evolved, the fino tradition
became popular because it was less overtly musical, performed without
instruments, and thus more acceptable to the conservatism of Islam. Did
this formal Mandinka chanting by their fino griots find its way into
African American slave traditions? Guy Johnson in Drums and Shadows
reports Gullah shouting in Church, accompanied by drumming.37 Mandinka
fino rapping and Gullah shout-singing may have influenced rap music
through another precursor such as African-American prison "toasts" and
hustler poetry from the 1950s and earlier, which resemble both rap and
gangsta rap.38
VII
Mande musical traditions including the griot caste musicians with
their kora, balafong (wooden xylophone), and halam (small guitar or
banjo), and the various Mandinka drums?the tabala and tama and jembe?
all could have helped Mandinka slaves have great impact in the slave
culture of the United States and elsewhere in Americas. The Maninka
concept of ngara, the master oral historian?or storyteller, singer, and
musician?pervades Mande/Maninka culture.39 This seems to have left a
deep imprint on slave society when we recall that all of the stories,
prayers, and songs in Turner's Africanisms were from Mande ethnic
groups. Such influence seems especially likely when considered in the
broader Senegambian context where there were similar musical
instruments and traditions among the Jola, Wolof, and Fulani. Rich
Mandinka oral traditions by their jeli or caste musicians (griots)
about descent from the kings of ancient Mali might have given slaves
from this ethnic group an inherent confidence that so impressed one
notable slave owner in Jamaica, Bryan Edwards. Edwards found that his
Mandinka slaves considered themselves superior to the other slaves and
attributed this in part to the ability of some of them to write Arabic,
impressing other slaves and even their sometimes illiterate owners:
Most, if not all, the nations that inhabit that part of West Africa
which lies to the northward and eastward of Sierra Leone, are
Mahometans, and following the means of conversion prescribed by their
prophet, are, as we are told, perpetually at war with such of the
surrounding nations as refuse to adopt their religious tenets. The
prisoners taken in these wars furnish, I [End Page 337] doubt not, a
great part of the slaves which are exported from the factories on the
Windward coast, and it is probable that death would be the fate of most
of the captives, if purchase were not to be met with.
But the Mandingoes have frequent wars with each other [Muslims versus
non-Muslims], as well as such nations as they consider enemies of their
faith? [Edwards had another Mandingo slave] who could write with great
beauty and exactness the Arabic alphabet, and some passages from the
Alcoran.
The advantage possessed by a few of these people, of being able to
read and write, is a circumstance on which the Mandingo Negroes in the
West Indes pride themselves greatly among the rest of the slaves; over
whom they consider that they possess a marked superiority; and in truth
they display such gentleness of disposition and demeanor, as would seem
the result of early education and discipline.40
The education Edwards refers to would have come not just from Qur'anic
schools around campfires for the boys, but the traditional (non-Muslim)
education and discipline infused by circumcision and minimum of two
weeks seclusion of both boths and girls, not to mention age-grades and
other Mandinka secret societies. One can sense from Edwards' remarkable
observations that the Mandinka slaves he knew were admired by other
slaves, yet feared by owners (Mandinka were "more prone to theft than
any of the African tribes").41 The Mandinka reputation among fellow
slaves would also surely have been enhanced by the legends of great
Mande kings sung by griots, by Mande prowess in war and trading, and by
the devotion of an important group of Mandinka to Islam. The sense of
superiority, and indeed manifest destiny, pushing the Mandinka from
their Mali heartland roots out toward the northern coast of west
Africa, might have helped them assume leadership roles in the slaves
societies of the Americas.
VIII
West African Islam had an enduring and proselytizing quality that was
transported by west African slaves to the Americas. Several notable
Arabic script documents written by west African slaves have shown up
all over the Americas.42 In Brazil we even find numerous medicinal
charms [End Page 338] comprised of Arabic script messages encased in
leather, as worn among Mandinka in Pakao and all over west Africa. In
1835 these charms were carried into a Muslim revolt or jihad by mostly
Nigerian Yoruba (or Nago slaves) erroneously called Malês (meaning
literally "from Mali"), a term Reis believes is from the Yoruba imale,
meaning Muslim. Reis conjectures that the term was brought by Mande
marabouts emigrating southward from Mali.43
We can infer from Allen Austin's work that perhaps as many as 10% of
the slaves coming into the Americas were Muslim, coming mainly from the
Mande, Fula, Hausa, and a few other, mostly west African ethnic groups.
Austin includes biographies of several of these west African-born
Muslim slaves.44 One of them, Bilali, left to posterity a 13-page
manuscript in Arabic that was translated for me by a Mandinka Jakhanke
descendant of Pakao's 1843 jihad leader Syllaba.45 Bilali was said to
have been a Fula from a Fulani capital Timbo in the kingdom Futa Jalon,
where Mandinka live in close proximity, but nothing in the style of
writing in the manuscript suggests that Bilali himself was Fula.
Bilali's writing seems more in the Mande style, resembling the writing
among the Pakao Mandinka, and perhaps is Susu, according to a
preliminary report e-mailed to me by Nikolai Dobronravine, of St.
Petersburg University. Bilali, who prayed to Allah daily, read from his
Qur'an, and practiced his Muslim faith openly, was at the very least a
chief slave-driver or acting foreman for the Sapelo Island planter
Thomas Spalding. Bilali attracted considerable fame among his fellow
slaves, and even the white general public, for, among other things,
saving the island population from the great hurricane of 1824 and
drilling a local slave militia, armed by Spalding with rifles, to
prevent a British incursion on the island during the War of 1812.
As in Timbo, Mandinka Muslims and Fulani Muslims lived side-by-side in
the Pakao area of present-day southern Senegal. The Mandinka and the
Fulani made alliances to wage jihads against non-Muslims, as happened
in Syllaba's Pakao jihad. But the Mandinka and Fulani were also enemies
who sometimes enslaved each other's people. This complex [End Page 339]
relationship led the contemporary observer Bryan Edwards to consider
the Mandinka as a broad ethnic group?incorrectly?actually including the
Fula. He says "Mandingoes . . . consist . . . of very distant tribes,
some of which are remarkably tall and black and one tribe (called
'Phulies' or Fula) a link between Moors and Negroes properly so-called."
46 Edwards seems to use the tribal name "Mandingo" generically to
denote any west African Muslim, just like Malê (meaning "from Mali")
was used in the first half of the nineteenth century in Brazil to refer
to any west African Muslim, including some, like the Nago Yoruba who
were of course not Mandinka.
IX
Linguistic evidence also supports the notion that Mandinka slaves were
significant among west African Muslim slaves brought to the Americas.
In Africanisms Turner found more than a dozen Mandinka Muslim names and
Mandinka Arabic religious words, along with numerous other Mandinka
words among thousands of African words he identified among the Gullah
of coastal Georgia and South Carolina.47
The Muslim personal names Turner found include Ibrahima, Mariama,
Siaka, and Mamadu, among numerous examples, all identified with at
least one Mande ethnic group, and which are, incidentally, widely used
among the Pakao Mandinka in southern Senegal, and presumably among the
Gambian Mandinka. Turner's tendency to associate Muslim personal names
with the Mande, rather than with Fulani, Wolof, or other groups at
least partially Islamized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
might be correct. But it also perhaps reflects a mistaken bias of both
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers and Southern slave owners
to associate any Muslim slave, especially one writing a little Arabic,
to be a "Mandingo" (i.e., a Mande, if not Mandinka).
Turner found several other Islamic words among the Gullah, whom he
identifies as coming from one of the panoply of ethnic groups
considered by Western observers to be among the Mande. These include
Kitimu, an important Muslim festival, karamo (Muslim teacher), laila
(oh God), moriba (Muslim saint, also great marabout), days of the week
such as arjuma (Friday), and Muslim prayer times of the day such as
alansaro (3 P.M. prayer) and fitero (6 P.M. prayer). Other Mandinka
words that Turner finds include several terms for animals that are also
clan totems: bamboo (crocodile, a totem of the Mamburi), bida (the
black or spitting [End Page 340] cobra, a totem of a "noble clan," in
fact the Drame), and jati (lion, the totem of another "noble clan,"
probably the Keita).
Turner lists several Mandinka clan names (using his spelling): Gojan,
Sougko, Touri, Sane (noble clans), Dabo (a clan of "petty traders," a
noble clan in Pakao), and "Keyita" (not identified by Turner, but they
are the royal clan of medieval Mali). Among the lower castes?including
artisan-praise-singers, griots, and slaves?Turner includes Dafi (a clan
of caste leatherworkers), Tungkara, and Kijera (clans of caste
goldsmiths and blacksmiths), Suso (a clan of caste drummers and
jesters), and Danso (a slave clan of weavers).
Already we see a pattern of religious words, Muslim given names, clan
names cutting across all castes, and important animals that happen to
be totems?exactly what one might expect, words handed down representing
something fundamental and precious from Mandinka slaves' lives back in
Africa. Turner goes on to identify additional words that play central
roles in Mandinka culture: fa (father), lula (5), konondo (9), and
other words for numbers, jambo (leaf), jiyo (water), juso (liver, a
"good liver" commonly means good-natured today in Pakao), kidola (gun),
kemu (man), kodo (silver, incidentally also money in Pakao), musolu
(woman), musonding (girl), sajano (harvest season), safero (to write),
sali (to pray), sama (rainy season), sani (gold, to purchase), solo
(leopard), somanda (morning), yiro (tree), tiyo (master), warata
(large), tilo (sun), tilibo (eastern land, in Pakao ancient/medieval
Mali, and an indirect reference to Mecca), tana (totem), tamu (own, in
Pakao to walk on), tambo (spear), taba (edible fruit, also pronounced
tabo, the most revered tree in Pakao), koima (white), suto (night),
kongko (hunger), kuntingo (hair), mala (shame, from Pakao this appears
to be an important pre-Islamic concept), minto (where are you), mirango
(gourd), and sining (tomorrow; in Pakao siningding means day after
tomorrow).
Turner's list of words is breathtaking, almost painful to contemplate,
when one considers the process by which these words got from west
Africa to Turner's notebook. The words, distilled through the unique
torture and deculturization of slavery, show what is important and
fundamental to the Mandinka in a most profound way, and also how their
culture maintained linguistic vitality despite the horrors of
enslavement.
Unfortunately, Turner used only Mande informants who were Bambara
(presumably originating from Mali), Mende from Sierra Leone and
Liberia, and Vai from Liberia. He does not report a Mandinka from the
Gambia River or Pakao region in his interesting list of named
informants.48 A Mandinka informant would surely have noticed quite a
[End Page 341] number of African words that Turner failed to associate
with the Mandinka and instead associates with other ethnic groups,
including doko (work or younger sibling), hadi (yes), jalo (griot or
praise-singer), kelo (war), bangko (land, country), ko (salt), kono
(stomach), bada (forever, from Arabic and thus almost religious, as
used in Pakao), mali (ancient Mali), mansa (king), misera (small
mosque, often the first one established in founding a village), nomo (a
slave caste name), namanole (male and female circumcision novices),
saba (three), safo (listed as the last Muslim prayer of the day, but
could also be amulet or written charm), singa (the circumcised or
purgatory, a pre-Islamic concept), and Keyita (the royal clan of
ancient Mali).
While boro is listed as a Mande word (both Vai and Bambara), Turner
fails to list this as the important Mandinka word for both medicine and
poison. Turner identifies Kiang as an "ancient African kingdom," but
fails to note this is a kingdom along the Gambia; he also lists Combo
and Wuli but fails to note they also are important Gambian Mandinka
kingdoms. Jarume is listed as a Fula word, but it is also an important
village in Pakao Mandinka village system. Turner lists the word samba
for elephant (sama or samo in Pakao Mandinka means elephant). However,
in Pakao samba is widely used for bring or brought, take, or sent as in
slaves brought (samba) to the land of the white men.
Turner does identify this last group of Gullah words with other, non-
Mande, ethnic groups from western Africa. Yet these words were commonly
used in Pakao. This too must be an example of a cultural convergence or
overlap of similar words/sounds, that is an important linguistic
concept for understanding how in the slave era in the Americas, a
momentum could have been created for certain words, phrases, or ideas
to be powered into broader English.
As noted, the lyrics for all of the several songs Turner identified
are also Mande.49 Despite the lack of a Mandinka informant and
contemporary dictionaries, Turner was able to write a special section
on Mandinka influence, singling it out alongside several other notable
African ethnic groups whose language heritage is seen in Gullah, but
nevertheless understating the Mandinka impact.50
Curiously, a number of positive, uplifting words appear in this
Mandinka list from Turner, as if the very need to survive included
hopeful words?all the religious words, yes, "liver" as in good natured,
purgatory (a hopeful and fundamental of pre-Islamic religion, giving
people a [End Page 342] second chance), and shame (the positive
Mandinka quality needed before penitence allows forgiveness).
Some words are double-edged. These include boro (the word for both
poison and medicine), spear and war (both defense/offense, but often a
precursor for enslavement), and the intriguing word samba, which in
Mandinka usage implies both voluntary ("to bring") and involuntary
("brought") as if to recognize that they both sent their own people
into slavery, and were also taken their against their own will. We can
only guess which words from Turner's list were non-Muslim Mandinka
names. There are at least several; since the Pakao Mandinka are fully
Islamized today, their pre-Islamic culture had to be inferred during my
fieldwork from their witchcraft beliefs, circumcision rituals and
songs, and ethnomedicine, among other things.
Turner tells us that many of these African words were used among the
Gullah as personal names or nicknames spoken semi-privately among
themselves as a language kept secret from the outside world. I can
vouch for this, remembering my 1955 visit as a child to Sapelo Island
with my father, a veterinarian called over to vaccinate horses, and not
being able to understand a single word of Gullah spoken in our
presence. Sapelo, where Bilali lived, remains a Geeche (Gullah)
heartland. Turner explains that the Gullah of the 1930s spoke more
understandable English to outsiders, but that the more he got to know
them over the years, the more they used African words, obviously doing
so among themselves.51
If the Mandinka Gullah words Turner lists have anything in common, one
can imagine it is their everyday importance back in west Africa, as if
they became in America haunting recollections too precious to lose?
village names, religious words, personal and given names, clan names,
and totemic animal names. Turner went way beyond proving that Gullah
was not primitive pidgin or baby-talk. He showed conclusively that
Gullah was a heavily west Africanized Creole, and also a new language.
He also allows us to infer how at least several English words commonly
used in America today might have had African origins. Among such words
with at least some Mande influence, are kunu meaning boat (Bambara),
tote meaning to carry or lift (Mandinka and other Mande/non-Mande
languages), yam or yambi meaning sweet potato (Mandinka and other non-
Mande languages; in Pakao, nyambo).52 and bubu meaning any insect [End
Page 343] whose wound is poisonous?thus a small wound (from Mandinka
and other Mande/non-Mande languages). Gullah words heard in English,
where Turner finds no Mande connection, include tabi meaning a building
material (tabby) (from Wolof and other non-Mande languages), gumbo
meaning gumbo (from Tshiluba in Congo and Umbundu in Angola), bidi bidi
meaning itty-bitty (Kongo, a non-Mande language), and gola or gula,
meaning Gullah (either a Liberian or an Angolan ethnic group and
language).53
Turner allows us to glimpse the process of Africanized thinking and
culture seeping into Southern English and from there into mainstream
American English. He forces us to go back and take a second look at
American English, and start asking deeper questions about its African
content. One west African linguist who has done this was David Dalby,
among the earliest to point out that the widespread traditional
Mandinka usage of "OK" mirrored its similar usage as one of the most
characteristically American words in existence. Therefore, Dalby
suggests, the very American expression "OK" must have seen usage first
among Mandinka slaves in the South, who passed the expression on to the
rest of us.54
In my fieldwork in Pakao, I found the Mandinka expressions OK, OK kuta
and OK kuta bake (OK, very OK and very, very OK) to be widely used.55
The Mandinka signature on this expression, accenting heavily the second
syllable, and often using the expression with the common Mandinka words
kuta and kuta bake, help convince me this is not some absorption from
twentieth-century America, but rather a descendant of the African
precursor to U.S. usage. Even if a telegraph operator helped put the
expression into common usage in America, then the expression could have
been reinforced by usage among Mandinka slaves and their descendants,
in the kind of cultural convergence already discussed above for mansa
and massa. Turner himself does not single out "OK" as one of the Gullah
expressions. It was so common he may not have thought to include it.
[End Page 344]
However, Turner's discussion of the west African syntax in Gullah
speech patterns provides a model for thinking about a west African
derivation for other expressions commonly associated with Southern
English. The widely used "y'all" may be another example of a cultural
convergence, in this case between the English "you all" and the
Mandinka "al," meaning "you all," or "y'all" and often followed by a
verb. Thus the Mandinka say al ta for "Y'all go" or "Y'all git." They
say al ku for "Y'all wash" and al jinan for "Y'all come down here." See
this latter expression in Kadri Drame's account of Deskaleri the
Mysterious.56 The Mandinka also use fo as their word for "for" in the
sense of "until," for example, "I went fo the house" as in Southern
diction. In his tale about "The Bwa or Cannibal-witch, Kadri Drame says
that djinns "can only harass someone until [fo] their time of death has
come."57 Fo also would be an example of a cultural convergence. Several
of the Mandinka legends in Djinns, Stars and Warriors also use
quotations one after another in rapid fire, preceded by "he said/says"
or "I said/say," which was also a feature of Southern storytelling that
I heard growing up.
X
The little known ante-bellum memoir of Ophelia Troup Dent of Hofwyl-
Broadfield Plantation in Glynn County near Brunswick, Georgia, tells us
that her slaves used "My little aunt" to address a wet-nurse of
presumably lesser importance and age, and "My big aunt" to address the
main female house servant.
Writing during her old age in 1902, Dent says she especially remembers
two of her grandmother's women slaves:
one, a small brown woman who nursed all the babies born in our house
for a month. She had the care of the old Broadfield House (not the
work), which was occupied by my father and uncles, our headquarters
being Darien [near Hofwyl-Broadfield.] She was called "My Little Aunt"
by our servants; but the big brown woman, who ruled our yard with a
rod, was called "My Big Aunt.'" We children, and everyone else I knew,
[including dozens of known slaves and slave descendants on this
plantation] except my father and mother, called her "Mom Betty." She
carried the keys when my mother was confined to her room, and in the
spring made us [End Page 345] sassafras beer as in Charleston. She was
the most scornful woman, black or white, I ever knew. She took care of
the Darien house in the summer. She lived to a great age and died at
Broadfield during the war.58
While a great many west African kinship concepts may have converged to
produce this vernacular system, I must at least point out that Mandinka
women in Pakao commonly used the word ba for mother to describe an
important village leader such as a circumcision queen. Chief Fode
Ibrahima Drame spoke about one such woman, Ture Nyako, in Pakao's Dar
Silame. "All the women of Dar Silame chose her as their common mother
[ba or baa]."59
In addition to "Mom Betty," the Dent slaves used expressions like "My
Big Aunt" and "My Little Aunt;" would they have also said, "my big
brother" or "my little brother" or "my big sister" or "my little
sister?" Such expressions are in wide use in Southern English. Both
Ophelia Troup Dent and her slaves seem to have used "big" and "little"
to distinguish kin on the basis of relative age and importance. This
was done among the Pakao Mandinka to distinguish between older and
younger brothers, sisters, and other relatives with the widely used
kinship terms koto or doko, (older or younger sibling). Pakao Mandinka
also usually preface their use of kinship words with "my" (n), as in
nba or nbama for "my mother" or nkoto for "my big sister, or "my big
brother" or ndoko for "my little sister" and "my little brother."
"Little" and "big" are west Africanized ways of translating "younger"
and "older."
The expression "Mom Betty" is especially fascinating. Among the
Mandinka, relatives through the mother, especially the mother's
brother, are more important. In the Mandinka kinship system, young men
try to marry their mother's brother's daughters, or matrilateral cross
cousins (i.e., to marry any woman with the same clan name of the
husband's mother). The Mandinka kinship vocabulary favors this
preference, because the Mandinka word for mother's brother, mbaring, is
also the word for father-in-law, so that the father of every bride in
effect also becomes the husband's mother's brother, even if the
preferred kinship did not exist before the marriage. This Mandinka
kinship system, favoring the "mother" idiom and preferred matrilateral
kinship in a man's marriage [End Page 346] partner, is quite old. Ibn
Batuta visited Mali in 1352 and reported a similar though more radical
matrilateral kinship system in which men claimed descent, not through
the father, but through their mother's brother. A man's heirs were his
sister's sons, not his own sons.60 In this sense we can see hints of an
ancient Mande kinship system pushing through slavery into a Southern
idiom, into the fabled "black Mammy," influencing the use of the
maternal "Mom Betty" by Ophelia Troup Dent and her family's slaves.
XI
When we consider Drums and Shadows, the classic WPA study of Gullah
religious beliefs in South Carolina and Georgia from the 1930s,
collected/edited by Guy Johnson, Mary Granger, and others, Mandinka
culture and Mande culture broadly reverberate on seemingly every page.
At the same time, what cultural features appear Mandinka or Mande, such
as drumming, might also be similar to cultural features of other ethnic
groups, including those adjacent to the Mandinka in Senegal and Gambia
such as Wolof and Fula, or distant groups including those from Ghana,
Nigeria, Angola, and elsewhere, mostly on the western side of Africa.
Drums and Shadows relates how the Gullah drummed in church and also to
communicate with each other.61 For example, they "beat the drum
signaling them to gather, then all sing and dance in a circle to the
accompaniment of the drum."62 Gullah women often used to dance in a
circle to drums while clapping, like Pakao Mandinka today.63 Mandinka
villagers still beat the tabala or large bass drum to summon people to
important funerals or meetings; the jembe and hourglass squeeze drums
called tama (tantango) are used for dancing, and when these are not
available, a large gourd bowl is turned upside down in a tub of water
and used as a drum. While drumming no longer occurs during mosque
because of Islam's conservatism, the men and boys of Pakao during my
fieldwork would sing [End Page 347] Muslim songs all night, accompanied
by drumming, once the harvest was gathered. In the legend "Ture Nyako
and Her Time," Fode Ibrahima Drame relates a traditional tale where an
imam Kang Siaka said "don't bring in jembes [tantango.] But the village
chief said: bring on the drums[tangtango]."64 In his tale, The Fall of
Kunkali, Drame similarly associates the demise of the village with too
much drumming (tangtango).65 Tam-tam or tantango, meaning drum or
drumming, are Mandinka words that may have helped give us "tam-tam"or
"tom-tom" in English.
Setting aside the question of similarities with the culture of other
African ethnic groups, numerous additional similarities with Mandinka
culture abound in Drums and Shadows. The handmade Gullah banjo, figure
IIIa, looks like a Mandinka halam, also evoking what Drums describes as
a gourd ("goad") guitar.66 These Gullah gourd guitars or banjos may
have been influenced by either the Mandinka halam, the 21-string
Mandinka gourd kora, the Jola akonting mentioned above, and various
other musical instruments from the region of Senegal and Gambia. When
referring to the "guitah" or banjo, Drums says that the local people
"makes em from goad," using the plural "em," implying multiple,
commonly-made instruments. The Gullah goatskin covered log drum, figure
IV d., evokes both the Mandinka tam-tam or jembe used more for music or
dancing and the larger, deeper-sounding tabala used to summon
villagers.
Elsewhere, Drums reports Gullah baptismal candidates being dressed in
white robes, and wading into the river to be immersed behind a preacher
with a long robe.67 Such Gullah/Geeche baptisms must have seemed
culturally logical to the Mandinka, who were used to the traditional
white circumcision costumes and and also to"riverwash" (batakuo), when
for the first time in a week after circumcision, the male and female
novices ritually bathed in a river away from the village. Drums reports
Sapelo Island Geeche oral traditions about the piety with which the
Muslim Bilali and at least one of his wives prayed, including a
repeated use of the Muslim word Ameen to punctuate prayers.68 Bilali's
piety obviously impressed other slaves on Sapelo and perhaps on the
mainland. [End Page 348] Does the tradition of an Amen corner in
Southern black Christian churches owe some of its piety to the Mandinka
Muslim tradition of punctuating prayer with Ameen, an Islamic and
Arabic-inspired Mandinka word?
When Johnson says Gullah traditions report several slaves who flew
back to Africa, is this not consistent with the widespread Mandinka
belief that people and various spirits can fly or that people can
change their shape into animals that can fly?69 One Gullah informant,
George Smith, also reported fox and rabbit stories recounted among his
people to their children.70 Similar traditions might have influenced
Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus tales. I recorded several "Hyena and
Hare" (Br'er Fox and Br'er Rabbit) stories in Pakao, where these
creatures were referred to with the alliterative words suluo and sula."
Since the Mandinka don't have a fox, their equivalent would be the
hyena, suluo.
Several Gullah informants report the affliction, common among the
Mandinka, of being "ridden by a hag," described as being short of
breath and feeling the sensation of being pinned to the bed by a
mysterious force. Drums associates this with a Mande ethnic group, the
Vai, but one of my Mandinka informants Kadri Drame also reported it
from Pakao in southern Senegal, a few hundred miles north of the Vai.71
Drums reports a fear of owls among the Gullah, as if these birds are
messengers of death and the very incarnation of evil; a similar fear
and belief is widespread among the Mandinka.72 Pakao Mandinka reported
an almost phobic fear of their bwa or cannibal-witch, and explain that
bwa is also their word for owl, just as it was in the 1730s when
Francis Moore so reported in his Gambian Mandinka word list. During my
fieldwork, if a Pakao Mandinka heard an owl screeching, he or she went
inside mortally fearing imminent death to themselves or a close
kinsmen.
Throughout Drums and Shadows are reports of "root doctuhs" putting
evil charm medicine or "conjuh" on people, causing death and disease
that can only be undone by the greater good medicine, also "conjuh," of
another "root doctuh."73 This pattern is similar among Pakao Mandinka,
where marabouts or Islamic priests/witch-doctors make and unmake evil
spells with their written amulets (safo), which are also considered
[End Page 349] boro (the Mandinka equivalent of "conjuh"?either
medicine or poison.)74 I also found during my fieldwork with the
Mandinka an abundance of healing plant medicine and evil fetishes, such
as bunyu furo made of cracked pottery and chicken feathers tied onto a
millet stalk, evoking both Gullah remedies and the lethal spells of
their marabout-like "root doctuhs." The parallel between Gullah
religion, with root doctuhs and charms from various objects, and
Mandinka marabouts and their written Islamic charms, causes me to
wonder if Gullah religion of the 1930s is a glimpse back in time to an
eighteenth-century pre-Islamic Mandinka religion, when importing
African slaves into the US was widespread and legal. The danger posed
by "root doctuh" witches among the Gullah, is paralleled throughout the
discussion on witchcraft in Djinns, Stars and Warriors, where the Pakao
Mandinka inhabit a similarly dangerous world invaded by various djinns
(jinno) and cannibal-witches (bwa), but mediated and protected by all-
seeing wizards (kumfanute) and marabouts.75
Mandinka Muslims entering North American slavery in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries could easily have believed in, and contributed to
the Gullah witchcraft system Drums recorded. Telling us why, the
marabout Fodali Cisse discussed the flexibility of Mandinka Islam in
accommodating witchcraft and other non-Islamic beliefs: "The Koran says
these . . . are illicit beliefs but we humans don't reject these
beliefs because they are our custom." In his account of the origin of
the bwa or cannibal-witch, Cisse says: "Let us not reject the word of
the Koran, but let us not follow it too closely."76
XII
Turner's Africanisms reminds us that while the Mandinka may have been
a significant influence, numerous other ethnic groups from western
Africa also left some linguistic imprint. At least one scholar who
recently evaluated Turner's material, Frederic Cassidy, "found Congo-
Angola elements strongest in the word-lists and Nigerian elements
stongest in the texts."77 However, as noted above, Turner relied solely
on mostly older Mandinka dictionaries, and not on a Mandinka informant
from the Gambia River area or Pakao. [End Page 350]
Betty Kuyk notes that between 1733 to 1807, two-fifths of slaves
imported to South Carolina were from Kongo groups.78 She proceeds to
analyze Gullah culture of the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina
in terms of Kongo influence, and finds a impressive array of examples.
These include secret societies, "big" as eldest, multiple and often
secretive names, white symbolizing purity, traditional baptism, smaller
prayer houses on many plantations before and after the Civil War, white
gowns and headcloths, hags, intiation novices and a palm lodge,
processions to cemeteries, masked figures, and owls as cultural symbols.
79
However, such cultural features are also notable among the Mandinka:
the smaller, founding mosques or misero in villages as a prayer-house
model on a plantation; the kangkurao masked figure; circumcision lodges
made of millet stalks; novice costumes and headcloths of white,
riverwash as a phase of initiation; hags; a fear of owls; etc. This is
in no way intended to undermine Kuyk's analysis, but more to suggest
how cultural convergence may be at work here, with cultural survivals
perhaps occurring more readily where there is overlap in the cultural
features of ethnic groups in slave societies. Yet tones favoring
Mandinka or Kongo influence can be identified. While I see as
distinctively Mande the Gullah fear of owls as "messengers of death,"
Kuyk would see owls in Kongo society as messengers and symbols or "old-
time folks," something perhaps equally appropriate in viewing the
Gullah.80 Even if Kongo slaves were smuggled into the South
disproportionately after 1808, the Mande preference noted by Curtin and
Pollitzer, established mostly before the termination of legal
importation from Africa, raises interesting questions not just about
vocabulary, but also the very accent of Southern speech.
XIII
My first insight into the possibility of significant Mandinka content
in the Southern accent occurred in one memorable conversation in
Ziguinchor during 1972 with Buli Drame, the Mandinka from Suna
Karantaba who guided me to the four villages I emphasized in studying
Pakao. We proceeded to converse in French and he asked where I was
from. After I told him, he slowly repeated after me, "St. Simons
Island," pronouncing the words with such a strong Southern drawl that a
chill ran up my spine. After years at college and graduate school away
from the South, my own Southern accent had mostly disappeared. Yet Buli
pronounced these and [End Page 351] other English words with a strong,
seemingly perfect Southern accent, certainly an accent of the Georgia
coast where Africanisms of The Gullah Dialect and Drums and Shadows
both suggest a strong Mande influx and influence. One can debate how
much a coastal Georgia accent resembles variable accents elsewhere in
the South, but the accents of Charleston and coastal South Carolina and
Georgia, spoken by both slaves and elite whites, were established
before much of the inner deep South was settled.
This is not to say that a British accent or accents from African
groups other than the Mande are not also present in certain Southern
accents. Several informants from the 1930s in Drums and Shadows, from
different ethnic groups as far south as Congo, a long way down the
coast from Mande groups, note a strange system in which red flags were
used, often hoisted onto slave ships anchored close to shore, as a
method for attracting and capturing themselves or other unsuspecting
children.81 Because these informants would have come from the very end
of U.S. slave importation from Africa, Drums and Shadows perhaps
implies this wildly random tactic was employed in the latter stages of
the trafficking, as demand continued, but African importation into the
U.S. had become illicit and, as Kyuk notes, many Congo were imported
into Georgia. Buyers during the illegal era clamored for slaves, and
slavers were so desperate they would resort to any measure, including
red flags, to get captives on board regardless of ethnicity. After 1808
the old system of ethnic preferences in the slave trade began breaking
down.
In any event, after that conversation with Buli I began to visualize
and hear a heavy Mandinka content in the Gullah accent and thus in the
"Southern accent" with all its variety. Pollitzer's slave importation
demographics above favoring the Mande regions of Senegambia, Sierra
Leone and the Windward Coast during the middle period (1749-87), and
his literal analysis of Turner's Africanisms, showing the collective
importance of Mande groups in Gullah speech, tends to support the idea
of a predominant Mandinka and Mande content in the Southern accent,
with the various other accents layered in (even without Mandinka
informants identifying additional words, or the concept that the Mande
influenced nearby ethnic groups in West Africa). Accent follows the
vocabulary and demographics consistent with a Mande preference in
Charleston and Georgia.
In various locales in South Carolina and Georgia, slaves so
outnumbered white people, it is inconceivable for white English not to
have been influenced by a West African accent. Turner noted some
sections of South [End Page 352] Carolina where black families
outnumbered white families twenty to one.82 Thomas Spalding's grandson,
the ex-Confederate Captain Charles Spalding Wylly, wrote that the ratio
on Sapelo Island was one hundred slaves to one white person, and
asserts that these slaves had close, family-like relationships with
their owners, implying close, verbal exchanges. "I have so often
referred to the slave that I think it may gratify curiosity to tell in
what manner these men and women fresh from Africa would with any safety
be taken into the life of the family where in all probability there
were not three white men to three hundred of their own race."83 Parrish
notes there were 4,000 blacks and only 700 whites in Glynn County in
1845.84 A visitor to South Carolina in 1737 found the area more
resembled "a negro country" than one settled by "white people," while
the first federal census of 1790 established that 43% of South Carolina
population were black slaves, compared to the national average of 18%.
While the slave population in America declined to 13% (4,000,000) in
1860, South Carolina's slave population the same year had risen to 57%
with even higher concentrations in the influential low country.85
Slave purchasers in the low country slightly preferred Mande not just
for their rice farming knowledge and other factors, but once Mande came
in sufficient numbers, they could communicate with the Mande slaves
already working on plantations. Implying this possibility, Captain
Wylly wrote a fascinating memoir detailing a training system for
African slaves that is chilling for its racism and deculturization,
suggesting a highly non-random process concerning the ethnic groups of
slaves, at least for his grandfather, Bilali's owner. Wylly thought he
provided a veritable linguistic blueprint for how the African-born
slaves were gradually taught English. However, in so doing he
inadvertently explains how a Mande accent might very well have entered
Southern English, especially through the slave drivers, who were often
African born leaders among the slaves, in charge of training the newly
imported slaves.
After the African slaves were bought in the Charleston market, "the
newly purchased were transferred at once to the plantation. Here always
would be found a number of men and women acquired in former years who
belonged to the same race, frequently of the same tribe and speaking
the same dialect, or at least capable of making themselves understood."
The African-born slaves were then assigned in groups of ten to a
"driver" or leader "chosen for his ability to command and his fluency
in speech."86 [End Page 353]
In this transitional, learning, period the men, women, and children
were separated from each other and assigned leaders of their own gender
and relative age. Gradually, they were taught English and the work of
the plantation and rewarded for good progress with extra food. The
African driver lived with them, talked and walked with them. No work
was yet expected. The same method prevailed in the taming of the women,
boys and girls. Meat was given out at the request of the trainers, or
coaches, as I should this day call them. Fish, crabs and such stuff
they caught for themselves under the eye and teaching of their constant
guide and watchful guard. After a tutelage of perhaps three to five
months they were assigned to work not requiring skill but only manual
strength, such as the gathering shell for the burning of lime, the
mixing of sand, lime and shell into concrete in the mortar beds [tabi
or tabby from the Wolof word, according to Turner]?still under the eyes
of their teacher?and transferring in hand-barrows of the concrete to
the moulds which were slowing growing into the walls of house, stable,
or barn. In twelve months they were generally, as it were termed,
'tamed,' and had acquired enough of the English language to be
understood and to understand when spoken to. Then, and not until then,
did their master begin to notice their personal qualities and abilities
and assign them to duties which they seemed best fitted for.
The second year of the 'new' Negroe's development usually found him
with a gang of thirty assigned to the regular labor in the fields. One
third of this gang would be men and women of his own race [ethnic
group?] who had graduated years before from the same school that he was
now entering. Here commenced the imitation, and long before the
expiration of a year he had learned many things, for his teacher,
called locally his driver, was always near to direct, instruct and
command. He had been taught to rise when the conch blew in the morning,
to use his hoe as he saw others use it, to come and to go when told to
do so, to stand still when a white man spoke to him, and in most cases
by the end of the second year the "Jack, new negro" that had marked his
place and value on the plantation books had been altered into "Jack?
African born."?an immense change in his life resulting: i.e. a task
each day, which when completed gave to him all the remaining hours to
do with as he pleased; a house and garden lot, when he had chosen a
wife, and on Sapeloe freedom to fish, hunt, oyster and crab, always
with a reasonable restriction. No one now living can imagine with what
freedom and lack of danger was the African of 1787 to 1806 trained into
the most efficient but easiest managed laborer in the world.87 [End
Page 354]
Spalding had about 400 slaves at any one time, and during his lifetime
gave over 1000 slaves, and the lands they worked on, to his two
surviving sons and four married daughters, disseminating the linguistic
influence and west-Africanized accent of his system into the Georgia
coast and the South, presumably alongside a number of similar examples
from other plantations.88
Despite slavery's hodge-podge mixing of ethnic groups from Africa,
evidence of a Mande preference among the Gullah finds additional
support in the memoir of Sapelo Island's Gullah, or more correctly,
Geeche writer Cornelia Bailey, who uses styles of basket-making, "Mende
ring shout dancing," linguistic and other evidence to conclude that the
Mende from Sierra Leone were a strong ethnic component of the heritage
of African-Americans living on Sapelo Island. What Cornelia's people
called "fanners"? shallow, flat baskets used for threshing rice?the
Mende call fantas.89
XIV
More than a few of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century slave
owners on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia had business and
personal associations with the Caribbean. Bilali's owner Thomas
Spalding visited the Caribbean, had family ties there through his
father-in-law, and is thought to have purchased slaves there. One of
Bilali's daughters, Magret, was said to have been a slave in the
Bahamas before she was brought to Sapelo. Magret passed down some
untranslatable words through her daughter Cotto to Cotto's daughter
Katie Brown.90 Katie reported Magret's words as "mosojo" or "sojo" for
pot, "deloe" for water, "diffy" for fire, and "saraka" for the flat
rice cakes made on the same special day each year, suggesting that
Magret was Muslim like her parents Bilali and Phoebe, who both "prayed
on the bead" and said "ameen" as a way to punctuate and agree to each
other's prayers. "Deloe" and "diffy" appear to be French de l'eau and
du feu, suggesting that Magret was from the French Caribbean, and that
she spoke a French Creole, perhaps a Haitian Creole.
When I raised the French Creole possibility with the Mandinka scholar
David Gamble, he replied that the Wolof use the word sujer or soojer
for iron pots, most likely imported from Europe. When Gamble checked an
old French dictionary, he found the word chaudière for large pot or
cauldron, [End Page 355] and thinks this may have been in use in the
eighteenth century and was the source of Magret's word for pot.91
Gamble also points out that Magret's saraka is the Bambara word for
rice cake, sada and sadaji (singular and plural) are the Gambian Firdu
Fula words and are from Mandinka, sadaga is Futa Jalon Fula, sadarha is
Khassonke, sarax is Wolof, and sadaa is Gambian Mandinka (as it is in
Pakao). Was Magret of Bambara (Mande) descent? If not, she was at least
speaking a Bambara-influenced word for rice cake. The different
vocabulary from sada suggest Mandingization of a religious word that
comes from the Arabic word sadaqa, for alms (most Mandinka religious
words are from Arabic).
Interestingly, Magret's daughter is named Cotto; Koto, meaning older
sister, is a widely-used Mandinka woman's name. If Bilali was an
African-born Fula from Timbo, he might have been able to speak some
Mandinka, since many Mande live around Timbo, and gave the Mandinka
name Koto to his grand-daughter. Bilali gave the name Bentoo,
suggestive of the popular Mandinka name Binta, to another daughter, and
two Muslim names, Fatima and Medina, also possibly Mandinka names, to
two other daughters.
The explorer Mungo Park provides a haunting portrait of a significant
Mandinka presence in Caribbean slavery, and how a slave ship from the
Gambia River funneled slaves into the Americas?slaves who might have
ended up on the plantation Bryan Edwards wrote about or on Thomas
Spalding's Sapelo Island. Trying to get back to England after having
discovered the Niger River, Park waited around for weeks in 1796,
hoping for a ship to return him directly. Finding none, he finally was
obliged to book passage on the most likely ship to take him out of
Banjul?a slave ship bound not for England but Charleston, and named for
this city, at a time when significant trans-Atlantic slave shipments
from the Gambia region took place. As the voyage turned out, the ship
leaked so badly it almost sank following prevailing wind patterns into
the Caribbean, and had to unload its human cargo in Antigua long before
it reached Charleston.
Park had learned to speak Mandinka during his travels upstream along
the Gambia toward the Niger River, and conversed with the slaves during
the crossing, compelled by their suffering to serve as their doctor. He
estimated about 25 Muslim slaves in a cargo of 130 that included a
great many Mandinko and at least a few from a failed jihad against a
Wolof ruler. Coming up the Atlantic coast from the Gambia River, this
ship docked at Gorée to take on supplies, and then headed across the
Atlantic. 22 of the slaves died before reaching Antigua, several before
even reaching [End Page 356] Gorée. Impressed by the great numbers of
Mandinka slaves arriving in the Americas, Park chose to include a
Mandinka wordlist in his famous book as a guide for people needing to
converse with the great number of African-born slaves found at that
time in the Caribbean. "The following questions and answers may be
useful in the West Indies," he entitled his word list, as if it were
common knowledge that large numbers of Mandinka slaves were shipped
there. The vocabulary list is composed entirely of Mandinka words and
phrases, several pertaining to medical issues.92
A growing body of field work and anthropological studies suggest, as
Park implied, that a major influx of Mandinka or "Mandingo" slaves
poured into the Caribbean during the slave era, and, aided sometimes by
their Muslim beliefs, could attain positions of leadership in slave
society, making them forces to be reckoned with by white settlers.
Nishida reports that in Trinidad an "urban Mandingo community, whose
members were Muslims, used part of its considerable economic assets to
function as an emancipation society. As in the case of nineteenth-
century Salvador in Brazil, some Mandingoes in Trinidad became slave
owners. (Carl Campbell's implicit assumption is that the Mandingoes,
who showed strong ethnic identity, owned non-Mandingo slaves and some
of them traded in non-Mandingoes for their freedom)."93 The Free
Mandingo Society on Trinidad helped convert a whole regiment of West
Indian blacks to Islam.94 Nishida elsewhere reports that the jailing of
an important, African-born Muslim slave leader named Pacifico, or
Bilali by his Muslim name, helped precipitate the slave revolt in
Salvador in 1835 by a largely Yoruba group of Muslim slaves who had
already tried unsuccessfully twice to rescue him.95 Pacifico's ethnic
identity is not given, but "Bilali" (from Bilal, Muhammad's slave
advisor and first muezzin) appears to have been a highly esteemed slave
Muslim honorific name among the Mandinka. One slave Bilali mentioned in
the oral traditions of Pakao during my fieldwork was identified with
the additional honorific samanung, "hard-working" (literally elephant
head: samanung Bilali).96
XV
Strong African ethnic identities in Cuba, wrote George Brandon,
rightly or wrongly became the basis for stereotypes used by slave-
owners in selecting [End Page 357] and purchasing their slaves. The
Mandinka were "excellent workers." The Carobali were "proud," the
Gangars "thieves and runaways," the Fanti "also runaways" and
"revengeful," Ebos "less black . . . and lighter wool," Congos "short,"
and Lucumi "[i]ndustrious workmen." Slaves also used such
classifications to guide relationships between subgroups on the same
plantation or simply to help identify themselves. Montejo, a Cuban
slave born in 1860, used such concepts to describe relationships among
various ethnic stereotypes among his fellow slaves, who, depending on
their ethnic group, could be hard-working, cowardly, or prone to run
away. Lucumi (Yoruba descendants) and Congolese did not get along, for
example. "The Mandingoes were reddish-skinned, tall and very strong. I
swear by my mother, they were a bunch of crooks, too."97 Brown reports
that neighborhood (cabilo) processions occurred in Cuban slave society,
where the various ethnic groups could be distinguished by their
appearance, movements, and sounds. The Mandinka and other groups such
as Congo and Lucumi could immediately be singled out by their clothing
and markings. "The Mandinka stood out for their sartorial luxury; wide
silk pants, short jackets and turbans, all bordered with marabout
(feather boa)."98
The Santeria priest Nicolas Angarica wrote in Cuba at some length that
Ozain, the Santeria orisha or god of herbs and medicines, "comes from
the Mandingas." George Brandon speculates that perhaps a Mandinka "with
particularly impressive knowledge of Ozain's lore arrived in Cuba and
was able to plant anew Ozain's worship . . . Ozain priests in Nigeria
are simply not good herbalists."99 I found several herbalists among the
Pakao Mandinka, often hunters but sometimes marabouts, who could each
name scores of plant remedies, and that a few remedies, such as one for
snakebite, were common knowledge and the subject of their own oral
traditions.100
In another example where informants knew the ethnic identify of a
cultural tradition, Scott Mahler, an editor with Smithsonian Press,
told me he had heard directly in Cuba that the Mambo is from the Mumbo
Jumbo secret mask society of the Mandinka. The Mambo was said to be a
special section in Cuban music where in a transcendental moment mumbo
jumbo is spoken. Mumbo Jumbo, a secret mask society closely related to
the kangurao, and probably the word jumbo as well, were also [End Page
358] introduced into English by Francis Moore's 1738 work about the
Mandinka, but the terms may already have been in use among African
slaves in the Americas before then; it certainly appears so in Cuba.
101
Masked figures or dancers show up in a number of disparate places in
the New World as part of the broad slave legacy, and in some cases are
traceable to the Mandinka. Judith Carney told me how a few years ago on
New Year's eve, she witnessed the kangkurao mask and dance in Triunfo
(or Trujillo), Honduras, and was astonished that local people did not
know its origins.
XVI
Mandinka masked figures like the Mumbo Jumbo or its close cousin the
kangkurao also possibly show up in Haitian Vodou. Sidney Mintz cautions
me not to push this too far, but it does seem more than a mere
coincidence that an important Vodou divinity, Gran Bwa, when
represented as a masked dancing figure covered in leaves, looks very
much like some representations of the Mandinka kangkurao along the
Gambia River, where dancers in the latter secret society also cover
themselves with a combination of bark and leaves. In Vodou Gran Bwa is
associated with medicinal healing, the forest, and initiation.102 Also,
like the Haitian Gran Bwa, the Mandinka kangkurao is associated with
initiation and the forest, although only tangentially to medicinal
healing.
In yet another potential cultural convergence, the Haitian word for
this divinity, Gran Bwa, might derive either from the French bois for
wood or forest or from the Mandinka bwa or bua, reported since the
1730s as the commonly-used word for both witch and owl. I translate
Mandinka bwa as cannibal-witch, a widely-believed fundamental of local
witchcraft belief in Pakao, and include several mentions or a
description of it in Djinns, Stars and Warriors.103 Bwa, often human
witches transforming [End Page 359] into animal shapes, is such a
common Mandinka word and widespread belief that it is hard not to see
some linguistic hint of it within the Haitian Gran Bwa. This Vodou
divinity might thus be seen as an amalgam of the Mandinka name for
cannibal-witch, bwa; the French word bois; the leafy appearance of a
Gambian type of kangkurao, and the protectiveness toward initiates of
either a kangkurao or fangbondi variant.104
There is another striking parallel in the pervasive Mandinka belief in
jinno, djinns or spirit doubles, and the Haitian Vodou term ginen,
described as a place identified with "spirits," as well as a sort of
idealized Africa or Guinea.105 Ginen in Haitian Vodou is also a place
beneath the sea, a kind of spirit-world watched over by the sea-god
Agwe.106
Along with Mandinka cultural influence come additional hints of their
political leadership. David Geggus notes that there are both Mandinka
and Kongo-Petro interpretations (cultural convergence?) of the
legendary Bois Caiman ceremony that paved the way for the Haitian
revolution, when dissident slaves gathered in a secret forest ritual,
sacrificed a pig, and drank its blood. The Mandinka interpretation (by
Diouf) asserts that the leader Boukman and the high priestess Cecile
Fatiman were Mandinka Muslims. To Geggus this assertion might be
contradicted by the Muslim proscription against hogs.107 However,
through much of the last millennium of their history, Mandinka non-
Muslims lived side by side with Mandinka Muslims, sometimes in
neighboring hamlets or villages, and the Muslims incorporated certain
non-Muslim beliefs such as purgatory. The Mandinka hunter Baba Sagnan
demonstrated for me his prowess as a hunter in 1974 by shooting a boar
pig simply because it was a worthless beast, and then showed me how he
could track it by following tiny?to me nearly invisible?flecks of blood
on the leaf bed of the forest floor. Finally, if Cecile Fatiman were
Mandinka, she would have experienced, and perhaps studied, the
commanding and essentially non-Islamic powers of her village
circumcision queen in West Africa. [End Page 360]
XVII
There are also tantalizing hints of an older Mandinka influence in
Brazil?a country whose southern latitude linked it more closely with
large ethnic groups from Nigeria, the Congo region, and Angola.
Similarity to the kangkurao can be seen in one of the best-known gods
or Orixas from Brazil's popular, Africanized Candomble religion in a
figure called Omalu or Obalouaie. This Orixa is represented by a dancer
inside of a haystack being twirled on a pole. The kangkura, also very
frightening, is sometimes represented in a similar fashion?for example,
by the Senegalese national dance troupe. However, there are a number of
other African ethnic groups, at least as far south as Zaire, that have
a twirling haystack masked dancer, thus invoking the idea of a cultural
convergence to create Omalu. This most terrifying of Orixas is
sometimes called "grandfather" or "the old one," as if a reference is
being made to the god's origins from one of the larger and earlier west
African ethnic groups whose members were sold into Brazil.108
A book on Brazilian folklore called Brasil, Histórias, costumes e
lendos by Aleceu Araújo and José Lanzellotti shows other possibilities
for Mandinka influence, including a popular dance to drumming, called
Jongo or Jongo Africano, which started among African descendants in
Rio, clearly invoking the Mandinka word for slave jungo or jongo. The
book includes a picture of Omalu with the haystack headdress and
wearing cowry shells used among some Mande groups. This book also
includes several additional male and female Orixas portrayed as wearing
white (Iemanjá, Oxalufam, Oxumaré, Oxalufá, Oxodiã, Iaõ and Oxum), all
invoking the color white and style of Mandinka Muslim robes and other
Muslims from West Africa.109
Another hint of Mandinka influence is in the word samba, the name of
the well-known Brazilian dance so vividly on display at carnival. Wafer
[End Page 361] explains that traditionally samba dancing took place in
a circular style, the circle samba or samba-de-roda, and had an
important ritual role in Candomble, leaving little doubt of this dance
style's African origin.110 In this Candomble format, which seems
identical to the most popular dance style among the Mandinka of Pakao,
one or two people dance in a circle of jubilant peers, and then summon
one or two more dancers, who repeat the process. The Pakao Mandinka
also widely use the verb samba (meaning send, sent, bring or brought)
in conjunction with references to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. I
often heard them teasingly threaten a misbehaving child with a warning:
"M ba samba tubabodu" (I'm going to send you to the land of the white
man). One can easily imagine how this Mandinka verb could have been
used in Brazil's colonial slave era to refer to a dance brought by
African slaves. Reinforcing this usage, in another potential cultural
convergence, samba is also a first and last name among the Wolof and
Tukolor. Michael Coolen tells me that his halam teacher was Abdulai
Samba, and one of the most famous halam performers was Samba Jebere
Samba. Also, the article mentioned above on the Jola akonting, notes
that Samba is a common Jola family name. Finally, Pollitzer points out
that samba means "to jump about" in the Tshiluba language. In Bobangi
samba means "to dance the divination dance;" in other Bantu languages,
it's meaning is related to worship.111
African dances certainly showed up during the slave era in this
hemisphere, as noted in Johnson's Drums and Shadows. Lydia Parrish
writes about Gullah/Geeche shout dances, including "The Buzzard Lope,"
in her Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. Patience Pennington
writes that her young black women workers "with bare feet and skirts
well tied up danced and shuffled the rice about with their feet . . .
singing, joking, displaying their graceful activity." An accompanying
illustration shows one of the young women with her arms straight out,
as if moving them up and down, while pounding her left foot up and
down, in a classic Mandinka dance form.112
XVIII
I have probably only scratched the surface in identifying Mande and
Mandinka influences in the Americas. The presence of the Mandinka and
their cultural legacy has been documented in Surinam and Mexico.
Evoking [End Page 362] this legacy, a popular beach in the Mexican City
of Vera Cruz (a former colonial center built up after Cortés landed
there) is called Mandinka. Robinson A. Herrera told me how his sources
on Guatamala assert that this country's national instrument, the
marimba, came from the traditional balafong, the xylophone-type
instrument constructed by Mandinka slaves. Paul Lovejoy told me he is
working on an Arabic script document left by a Mandinka slave in
Jamaica. Svend Holsoe told me that his research on St. Croix into some
16,000 ethnic identities written down in the slave-era church records
for baptism notes the presence of a significant number of Mandinka
slaves. Haitian Revolutionary Studies notes the presence of groups of
Mandinka slaves among those loyalist blacks shipped out of Haiti by
their French sponsors to other locations in the Caribbean.
Mandinka cultural survivals help us see the rich history of this
particular ethnic group in a more ancient and geopolitical way, through
the trade linkages of Manding across the Sahara in medieval times to
the Islamization of west Africa, and through the horrors of slavery to
the Americas. We must see the Mandinka from west Africa in a greater
Atlantic Rim context, in which traces from their culture show up all
over the Americas, especially in the United States, from jazz and rap
to the diction of Southerners and the drawl of Southern presidents. The
breadth and reach of Mandinka influence perhaps raises more questions
than it answers. Will some Mandinka influence ever be found in tango,
the name of Argentina's famed dance that supposedly originated in part
from African slaves? The Mandinka word for the palm tree, under which
the Jola danced and played their banjo, is tengo. Tantango is the
Mandinka word for drum.
Clearly, "tango" was an important and widely used sound in the
Mandinka language during the time of my research in Pakao. Beyond that,
Argentine historical works on the tango, such as that by Benedetti,
suggest an origin from West Africa somewhere between "Cape Verde and
Dahomey."113 He points out that some early, nineteenth-century, singers
of tango lyrics had one name, suggesting they were of west African
slave origin, and calls for more linguistic research on the tango's
potential African origin. More research is needed, for example, on
whether cultural convergence ideas can apply to the tango. Does the
"tango" sound exist in other West African languages besides Mandinka?
What does the word mean, and how many slaves speaking those languages
were sold into Argentina during the nineteenth century and before? Is
the tango a purely [End Page 363] African invention. or more of a west
African name based on a form of exuberant African dancing melded into
forms of Spanish colonial dancing in Argentina?
In this paper I suggest the possibility of a Mandification not just of
Southern English, but of Southern culture, both of which offer a
compelling laboratory for linguistic and structural analysis. At least
seven principles may seem to emerge from this analysis. First, cultural
convergence increases the chances that words related in sound and
meaning, used by a critical mass of people, win out and become absorbed
in the cultural free-for-all environment of the South and the Americas
generally. Such words as master/massa/mansa, y'all/ al, for/fo,
jazz/jams/jong, and OK/OK, OK kuta and tom-tom/tantango help to open up
this possibility for consideration.
Second, Mandification was already happening in Africa during the trans-
Atlantic slave era, as the Mande began to gain the upper hand vis-à-vis
neighboring ethnic groups through trade and war, perhaps amplifying
their impact in the South and the Americas. The widespread use of Malê
in nineteenth-century Brazil to describe Muslims is an example of this
process, and so perhaps are the word combinations master/massa and
mansa and jazz/jams/jong. We are told Malê (from Mali, Muslim) is
derived from imale among the Yoruba, who received the word from the
Mande in Africa. Massa (meaning mansa or king) is used by the Cassanga
and Banol ethnic groups, who also have a word and mask closely related
to the Mandinka Mumbo Jumbo. Mande slaves came to the New World with
some ability to intercommunicate through some similarities in the
various languages within the overall Mande linguistic group.
Third, cultural convergence applies not just to language, but also to
cultural features, such as the Haitian Gran Bwa and similarities
between the baptizing of Gullah initiates in white robes in the river,
as compared to the white Mandinka circumcision costumes and the
"riverwash" purification ceremony in their circumcision seclusion.
Structural parallels between Christianity and Islam (e.g., heaven and
hell, mercy, penitence, charity, devotion, piety, regular and visible
practice, appropriateness of the color white) offered a coherent
structure for the rapid and unique Christianization of African-born
slaves or their descendants. The common values mentioned above for
Islam and Christianity of course may have figured in animist religions
too. As well, animist values seem to have already influenced Mandinka
Islam before slaves took it to the Americas, with the Pakao Mandinka
believing in everything having a spirit double, the sanctity of
historical trees, and the second chance of purgatory?all different from
mainstream Islam. The point here is that west African [End Page 364]
Islam, with its coherent values derived from one book, the Qur'an,
already had converted many (but not all) Mande people during the slave
era, as well as certain non-Mande people. This commonality between west
African Islam and Christianity perhaps amplified the impact of the
Mande slaves in the Americas. What an irony that "the Amen corner" in
the African-American church may descend from the "ameen" used to
punctuate and emotionally ratify a Mandinka or Mande Muslim blessing or
prayer.
Fourth, possible examples of Mandinka influence showing up outside the
United States in places like Brazil, Haiti and Cuba, despite the major
importation of slaves from other African ethnic groups, tend to give
weight to, or even confirm, the potential for a Mandification of
Southern English and culture. The pieces of the argument supporting
significant Mandinka influence tend to reinforce each other and the
whole.
Fifth, non-US examples of Mandification in the Americas also suggest
this process may have taken some unique forms, just as if did in the U.
S., and could prove a fruitful area for future analysis. For example,
Reis tells us that when the rebelling Malê Islamists poured into
downtown Salvador, in 1835, it was the first time Brazilians saw large
numbers of people dressed in white in the streets, allowing us to infer
at least one Islamic derivation for the whiteness of clothes worn by
Brazilians during carnival, alongside traditional African sources for
white clothes, including Mandinka circumcision costumes. In another
example, Brazilians widely use the adjective inho (masculine,
pronounced eenyo) or inha (feminine, pronounced eenya) at the end of
nouns to modify them into "little" or "opposite," in words such as
cafezinho ("little coffee" or espresso), pezinho (little foot),
Ronaldinho (a personal name), camisinha ("little shirt," slang for
condom), and so on. Is it coincidence or direct influence that the
Mandinka use dingo (child or little) and ringo (opposite) to modify
countless nouns, for example, baringdingo (mother's brother's daughter)
to mamaringo (grandson or daughter). The Brazilians amplify this idea
with a marvelous saying about pervasive African genealogy in their
society: "Todo Brasileiro tem um pezinho in Africa" meaning "All
Brazilians have a little foot in Africa."
While the sounds inho and inha existed in Portuguese, the use of these
sounds is far more extensive in Brazil. Brazilian anthropologist
Roberto da Matta suggested to me that an infusion of inho by early
Portuguese explorers gave rise to the Mandinka ingo sound. However, the
Mandinka word dingo is used so widely as an adjective for several words
ranging from child to fruit that dingo seems more like an indigenous
creation. If we accept a possible African and Mandinka influence for
the wide usage [End Page 365] of inho/inha in Brazil, perhaps we must
ask why ito/ita is widely used in Mexico, but curiously, not in the
mother country Spain. Does this Mexican idiom represent slave and
Mandinka influence?
Sixth, if analysis singles out Mandinka in the Americas, the same kind
of analysis ought to be possible for tracing other African ethnic
origins in this hemisphere. Betty Kuyk singled out Kongo influence
among the Gullah. Paul Lovejoy focused more broadly on Yoruba influence
in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, noting in particular the influence
of jihad directly through captives and indirectly through refugees of
jihads streaming toward the coast.114 The identification of particular
ethnic influence also gains support in Cosentino, during a series of
articles about Haitian Vodou. Sidney Mintz and Michel-Ralph Trouillot
dissent by cautioning that "Vodou was created by individuals from many
different cultures."115 But others, such as Robert Ferris Thompson for
the Fon, Eve, and Aja, and Suzanne Preston Blier for the Eve and Fon,
suggest that western African ethnic groups who influenced Vodou can be
identified.116
Finally, where does cultural convergence in its broadest sense come
from, as a commonality between European and African language, if not
from some basic and ancient source of language? While learning Mandinka
in the field, I was struck by this possibility. "Na si (Come sit),"
Sanjiba Drame used to say when asking me to come talk with her beneath
the low, smoky roof of her cooking house. "Na si ka cha (Come sit and
chat),"she would add; na sirango ("come sit down on the stool,") she
said, while pointing to a carved sirango (stool). The basic Mandinka
herabe or ibe herato("how are you?") followed by heradro ("I'm fine")
came to mind repeatedly as I rode a bicycle in 2003 on Cumberland
Island in Georgia, and every Southern tourist I met said, "How ya
doing? or "Hey, how are ya?" Is the structure of this Southern greeting
a coincidence with Mandinka or direct influence, or commonality with
some ancient proto-language? Already the field of Nostratics has arisen
as a theoretical super-family of languages in which Indo-European is
only one of six branches of a much larger language family. In the last
fifteen years, linguists postulate an even more ancient language, the
first language, Proto-Human, Proto-World, or Mother Tongue, probably
arising in Africa, the continent where the earliest hominid skeletons
have been found, and geneticists tell us that a precursor female
hominid, the mother "Eve" of all humans, once lived.117 The commonality
master/massa/mansa and or y'all/al may ultimately [End Page 366] prove
to be part of this pattern, suggesting that deep and ancient linguistic
sounds and structure may lie behind Creolization in the Americas and
the Mandification of Southern English.
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Footnotes
1. See Djinns, Stars and Warriors, Mandinka Legends from Pakao,
Senegal, published by Brill Press in 2003, containing oral traditions I
collected in 1972 and 1974 in the Pakao region of middle Casamance in
southern Senegal. This volume is a companion book to my basic
ethnography of the Mandinka first published in 1980 and kept in print
since 1987. Of the many people who helped me with this article, I want
to single out Michael Coolen and Judith Carney for special thanks. I'm
also grateful to National Geographic and the Rhodes Trust for funding
my fieldwork.
2. Curtin, 1969:156-57. His numerous sources include the work of
Elizabeth Donnan.
3. Ibid.
4. Vydrine/Bergman 2001.
5. Pollitzer 1999:116-17.
6. Ibid., 148.
7. Ibid., 41.
8. Ibid., 41-42.
9. Ibid., 44-45, table 6. Pollitzer states (ibid., 37) further that,
roughly speaking, Senegambia means Senegal and Gambia of today. "Sierra
Leone" in eighteen-century English sources refers not just to that
country of today, but Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, a small part of
northern Liberia, and the Casamance River region of southern Senegal.
Pakao Mandinka, though closely connected to Gambian Mandinka, may have
been considered more from "Sierra Leone" than Gambia, although the
frequency of travel between Pakao and Gambia suggest Mandinka slaves
from Pakao may certainly have been shipped from the Gambia as well. The
"Windward Coast" includes roughly Ghana and Ivory Coast, but the usage
varied.
10. Ibid., 47.
11. Ibid., 108.
12. Ibid., 47.
13. Ibid., 57, quoting various sources including Ball 1998.
14. Pollitzer 1999:88-89.
15. Ibid., 37.
16. Ibid., 58, 56, 61, 55, 65, 113; Cable 1886:517-32.
17. Carney 2003:1-21; Carney 2001:41, map.
18. See the quotes from his grandson's journal cited below.
19. Kuyk 2003. See her broad analysis of Kongo influence on the
Gullah. Pollitzer 1999 for Kongo, Angolan, and Yoruba influence, as
well as Mandinka.
20. Kuyk, 2003:2.
21. Ibid., (2003:xxii.
22. Curtin 1969:96-99.
23. Coolen 1991:1-18. A book devoted to west African Mande musical
style is Charry 2000. I'm grateful to Michael Coolen for his helpful
comments in reviewing this article, and to Eric Charry for introducing
us.
24. Bühnen 1993:90. Table 3b, 69, and 86, 91, 100, and map 102. I can
only speculate that the very low Fula percentage of .2% from 1548 to
1650 was because of their distance from the coast (away from Portuguese
traders) and military strength that included significant mounted
troops.
25. See Schaffer/Cooper 1987:101-04, Schaffer 2003:cover photo, 104-
07.
26. Bühnen 1993:90.
27. Pollitzer 1999:129; see ibid., 124-29 on creolization and how an
English-based Creole might have developed on the coast of West Africa
and spread to coastal South Carolina and Georgia, developing variants
from one plantation to the next.
28. Coolen 1991:1-18.
29. Jagfors 2003/04:26-33.
30. Ibid., 30.
31. Ibid., 30-31.
32. Painting shown in Pollitzer 1999:106.
33. Charry 2000:224 (for early twentieth-century Mande jembe players
wearing turbans); 216 (for jembe and tama drums, the latter typically
played with a single drumstick).
34. Coolen 1991. In Pakao, the word for slave was a very similar jong
or jongo/jungo.
35. Pollitzer 1999:255n196. Pollitzer (1999:125) also sees jam, from
the Wolof jaam for slave, jive from jev, to talk disparagingly; hip
from hipi, to open one's eyes; and juke from Gullah joog for
disorderly, ultimately from Bambara (Mande) dzugu, meaing wicked.
36. Ibid., 115; Turner 2002:194, for hudu, 202, for tabi.
37. Johnson 1986:149; first published in 1940.
38. See, for example, Wepman/Newman/Binderman 1976.
39. Charry 2000:54.
40. Edwards 1793: 2:56-57.
41. Ibid.
42. See for example, Austin 1984:265-307, "Bilali: African Patriarch
in Georgia," mentioning Bilali's 13-page manuscript in Arabic, or
Curtin 1967, photo section, for the letter written from a Virginia
plantation by a Fulani named Job Ben Solomon, who was captured and sold
into slavery by Mandinka along the Gambia River.
43. Reis 1973:93-97, 101 (for a photo of the grigri).
44. Austin 1984.
45. Local oral traditions widely point out how Pakao's Syllaba, during
a several-year stay, forged a key alliance with the Almamy of Futa
Jalon in Timbo to garner troops for his 1843 battle which destroyed the
infidel king of Manduari. A proverb developed in Pakao, where tardy
children were teased, "You take as long as Sylla stays in Futa."
46. Edwards 1983:65.
47. Turner 1973: words lists and 32-35.
48. Ibid., 292.
49. Ibid., 256-57.
50. Ibid., 32-35.
51. Ibid., 12.
52. Moreover, the word 'toting" is specifically used for carrying rice
on the head, as done by the Mandinka. (see illustrations in Pennington
1913:34-35). Pennington also noted (ibid., 78-79) that the long-handled
rice hoe is considered strictly a female tool, while the plow is a
man's implement?as the Mandinka do today. The men's farming experience
in Africa, and women's rice-farming in particular, might have been
among reasons for the preference by Charleston purchasers for Mandinka
or Mande slaves.
53. Turner 1973:19l, for bubu and bidi bidi; 194, for gumbo and
gola/gula; 197, for kunu; 203, for tote; and 204, for yam.
54. Dalby 1970. Joseph Hill, an anthropology graduate student at Yale,
told me an equally interesting, possible Wolof explanation for OK, and
I wonder if they passed it on to the Mandinka, or vice versa. Two
principal Wolof words for roughly "yes" are waaw and kay: waaw used at
the beginning of a sentence and kay, for a bit more emphasis, at the
end. Sometimes these two words are used together as waaw kay for "OK"
or "all right then," to communicate overtones of respect and
acceptance.
55. This Mandinka kuta is not to be confused with kuta as turtle,
absorbed into the South as cooter. Mandinka is a tonal language; e.g,.
jato can mean lion, oinion, or human body, depending on the tone.
56. Schaffer 2003:196-97. Patience Pennington (1914:447), a rice
planter on the South Carolina coast, says that "unna" is a Gullah word
for "you all," but "y'all" is close enough to English that she might
not have considered it influenced by Gullah.
57. Schaffer 2003:202-03.
58. Dent 1902:5, of a modern typescript. She was also a distant cousin
of Bilali's owner Thomas Spalding, and her own father, the physician
James Troup Dent, traveled at least once from Broadfield on the
mainland out to Sapelo Island to treat Spalding's family during the War
of 1812. Ophelia's grandfather William Brailsford came down from
Charleston with numerous slaves when he bought Broadfield on the
Georgia coast in 1806, and Brailsford's father Samuel was one of
Charleston's slave traders.
59. Schaffer 2003:116-17.
60. DuBois 1946, 1947:208. For matrilateral kinship in Pakao see
Schaffer/Cooper 1987:87-90.
61. Johnson 1986:46, 149. Drumming also occurs for funerals, which
Johnson, in the appendix, says Francis Moore reported in the 1730s, but
today's Muslim Pakao Mandinka have stopped doing this. Ibid., 64, also
relates a foot-wide drum covered with goatskin. Johnson himself
compares Gullah drums to Mandinka drums described by Francis Moore
(ibid., 215).
62. Ibid. 1986:67, 143; ibid., 181 describes a drum 18" wide and 15"
deep, like a tabala. Ibid., 181, says "drums" from hog (pre-Islamic
Mandinka) while "base drums" from cow, distinguishing the deeper
sounding, summoning tabala from the tam-tam or jembe used for music and
dancing.
63. Ibid., 118, 137.
64. Schaffer 2003:116-17.
65. Ibid., 56-59.
66. Johnson 1986:186-87, figures IIIa and IVd. For the sake of
clarity, Gullah words are in quotes, to differentiate them from
italicized Mandinka.
67. Ibid., 112-13, 143. For pictures of the white-robed Mandinka
circumcision novices and riverwash, see Schaffer/Cooper 1987: xviii,
xix, 97, 98.
68. Ibid., 161. Bilali's Muslim wife Phoebe, says "Ameen, Ameen."
Katie Brown, Bilali's great-grand-daughter, also reports that her Ibo
grandmother Hannah and Ibo uncle Calina were Muslim, probably converts
through Bilali, and say "Ameela;" Hannah also says "Haka bara [Allah
Akbar]" (ibid., 163-65).
69. Ibid., 80-82, 169, among several references to flying back to
Africa.
70. Ibid., 110, 170.
71. Ibid., 34, 59, 79. 246; see Schaffer 2003:216-19, for Kadri Drame
on "the fengkoto or hag."
72. Ibid., 101, 75, 99. Among the Gullah, "Duh owl is a true messenger
of death." See Moore 1738, Appendix, reporting bua as owl or witch.
73. Ibid., 18, 65, 67, 102, 109-10, 124, for anti-conjuh charms,
including hair, nails, and graveyard dirt, among numerous other
references to conjuh and anti-conjuh.
74. Schaffer 2003:220-21, for Kadri Drame's use of boro as "poison" in
"the Seer of Sunakarantaba."
75. Schaffer 2003:181-221.
76. Ibid., 2003:5, 188-89, 214-15.
77. Cassidy n.d., 5-81, cited in a new edition of Turner 2002:xxix.
78. Kuyk 2003:xxi.
79. Ibid. 2003:15, 42, 43, 57, 83, 88, 91, 115-18, 128, 141, 154.
80. Ibid. 2003:154-55.
81. Johnson 1986:70, 120, 145-46, 184.
82. Turner 1973:4.
83. Wylly 1915:39.
84. Parrish 1942:237.
85. Pollitzer 1999:51, 63.
86. Wylly 1915:39.
87. Ibid., 1915:40-41.
88. Ibid., 1915:42.
89. Bailey 2000:301-07.
90. Johnson 1986:162.
91. Personal communication, David Gamble, October, 1988.
92. Park 1971:360-63, first published in 1799.
93. Nishida 2003:83, quoting Campbell 1975:472.
94. Turner 1997:24, quoting Washington 1838:449-54.
95. Nishida 2003:96-98.
96. Schaffer 2003:34-35.
97. Brandon 1997:56-57; Montejo quoted in Rout 1976:32.
98. Brown 2003:49.
99. Brandon 1997:137, quoting Angarica 1955?
100. Arfanba Sagnan told how the Mandinka received snakebite medecine
Katirao; see Schaffer 2003:166-169.
101. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, England's Helen
Bannerman incorporated Mumbo Jumbo terminology in her children's story
Little Black Sambo, infamous for its racist stereotypes, further
popularizing Mandinka terminology in the English-speaking world.
Sambo's mother was called was called Black Mumbo, and his father was
called Black Jumbo. These African Mandinka names and characters were
grafted onto a largely Indian tale involving tigers. Sambo is a Jola
name.
102. Cosentino 1995:430, for a description of the Haitian Gran Bwa.
See the photographs of the leaf-covered Gambian kangkurao in Fletcher
1977:28-29, and compare this with a similar-looking, leaf-covered
Haitian Gran Bwa in Cosentino 1995:179. In Pakao the kangkurao is
entirely of bark.
103. Schaffer 2003:184-89, 202-03, including accounts both by Fodali
Cisse and Kadri Drame. Francis Moore 1738:Appendix, word list first
reported bwa, as mentioned, to mean witch and owl. In Moore (40, 116,
117, 133) the Mumbo Jumbo was a secret society of men centered on a
masked figure, and the society spoke a secret language to maintain a
certain mystery and power over women and girls, and uncircumcised
boys.
104. Schaffer 2003:202-05.
105. Cosentino 1995:58.
106. Ibid., 32-33, in "Imagine Heaven" by Cosentino.
107. Geggus 2002:254n66). He quotes Diouf 1998:152-53, 229. Geggus
2003:229nn., considers the Mandingoes of northern Haiti to be "the most
striking Muslim cultural survival in the Americas," and mentions they
are described in Alexis 1970:173-85, and Najman 1995:158-60.
108. Wafer 1991:126, 198, 201-02, about Omalu and Brazilian
Candomble.
109. Araújo and Lanzelloti n.d.:132, 134, 146-47, 149. Meirles
1983/2003:74, who observed and painted Candomble in Bahia from 1926 to
1934, wrote that Oxalá was "probably a distortion of Alah," the word of
course used by Muslim West Africans, including the Mandinka, for Allah.
Oxalá seems to be the origin of Oxalufam and Oxalufa, raising the
possibility that the white-robed deity Oxumare comes from Omar, the
second Caliph. Interestingly, Meirles also found that Candomble was a
form of Macumba or magic practice devoted to achieving "good," while
canjerê was devoted to achieving "evil;" the latter, ibid., 68, evokes
"conjuh," the negative or positive magic of Gullah root doctors of
coastal Georgia and South Carolina. Indeed, the lilting drawl from the
Bahia state in Brazil, where slave descendants form a large portion of
the population, evokes the Southern accent in the United States.
110. Wafer 1991:78-80.
111. Pollitzer 1999:115.
112. Pennington 1913:11-12. See the modern photo of a Mandinka woman
dancing in similar fashion, pounding her left foot, arms extended out,
in Charry 2000:202.
113. Benedetti 1997:8.
114. Lovejoy 2003:14.
115. Cosentino 1995:123.
116. Ibid., 78, 87.
117. Among several sources dealing with Proto-World or Mother-Tongue
are Shevoroshkin 1990.
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