Of course, some of the similarities in West Central Africans overlapped with West Africans, particularly along converging religious ideas (spirit possession, for instance) or social formation. Nevertheless, the broad similarities shared by West Central Africans could likely have played a strong unifying role among them and thus produced a stronger or more conspicuous impact among later generations of creolized, Afro-Americans. This can be seen in the documented Kongolese and other Central African influences in Brazilian, Latin American, and Caribbean Creole languages, music, religions (Macumba, Umbanda, Vodou, Santeria), and genetic analysis. I shall briefly lay out the following in relation to understanding cultural formation among the enslaved diaspora through the following evidence: genetic, cultural retentions, and imposed ethnonyms from white writers.
A source of inspiration for this post was a study on the African genetic contributions to the contemporary population of Haiti. The authors found Haiti to be generally intermediate between the US and the Dominican Republic on one hand, and Brazil on the other. Apparently, the United States and Dominican Republic are characterized by lower frequencies associated with Central Africa, reflecting the slave demographics of the each African-descended population. From this, one can likely conclude that the majority of enslaved Africans who lived long to reproduce were West African. Furthermore, the history of both the US and the Dominican Republic reveal that the main periods of the slave trade were in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the latter location, Santo Domingo, the main period of slave trading occurred likely in the 16th and 17th centuries, with West Africans, particularly Senegambians, prominent in the early colonial period. Since Santo Domingo became a neglected peripheral colony quickly, the economy stagnated and few enslaved Africans were imported in the years of its status as a backwater. Hardly alone in this, colonial Cuba and Puerto Rico were also colonial backwaters, ignored once the Spanish found more wealth through exploitation and exhausting the gold and silver mines of mainland Spanish America. Unlike the Dominican Republic, however, the aforementioned Caribbean colonies experienced a resurgence in sugar plantation slavery in the late 18th and 19th centuries, developing increasingly blacker populations.
The United States always had a thriving economy throughout the antebellum years based on racial slavery. However, an estimated 400,000-600,000 enslaved Africans, mostly coming before the Congressional abolition of the international slave trade in the early 1800s, meant that the majority of the black population descends from a smaller pool of enslaved Africans that experienced exponential domestic population growth. From a small total of perhaps 500,000 enslaved Africans coming primarily before the legal end of the international slave trade in 1808, the population growth of enslaved African-descended peoples reached 4,000,000 by 1850. Moreover, the domestic slave trade of the US during the 19th century vastly exceeded the country's slave imports from Africa or the Caribbean. Millions of African-Americans were forcibly relocated during the massive internal domestic trade, especially after the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory and the need for slave labor in the Deep South. Anyway, the fact that African-Americans, according to some studies, have lower rates of Central African ancestry from DNA studies on average does not negate the existence of Central African influences in African-American culture.
The DNA studies only prove that a majority derived from West Africa and were likely more able to successfully pass on their genes, perhaps because more were part of the initial enslaved African bottleneck population for the much larger 19th century domestic trade. Likewise, Dominican culture and music likely draws on various Central African forms of music, language, or identity, but slaves from West Central Africa could have composed a smaller proportion of the initial waves of imported laborers or faced additional constraints to having offspring. Moreover, mortality rates among slaves, especially infants, were often quite high and always higher than that of whites, particularly in the Caribbean, and more recent slaves, bozales or bossales, in particular, were among the most likely to die in the first 6 or 7 years of life in the Americas. Ignorant white racists often assert that slaves were better off in the Americas than Africa, conveniently ignoring the "seasoning" period of slavery's astronomical mortality rates. For several Caribbean slave society's, natural population growth was unfathomable until after emancipation! Therefore, the lower Central African genetic contribution to the US and Dominican Republic does not necessarily correlate strongly with records of African ports of origin for slave ships entering the aforementioned states.
Haiti, mentioned earlier but never analyzed earlier, enjoys an intermediate position in terms of African genetic contributions from both Central and West Africa. Moreover, a gradient was found from north to south, with the Haitian population in the northern regions having a greater Central African component. This is consistent with the literature on the 18th century slave trade in colonial Saint Domingue, whose northern province featured the largest sugar plantations and was the center for the international slave trade. During the second half of the 18th century, when the majority of slaves coming through ports like Cap Francais were "Congos," these enslaved Africans could have likely shifted the genetic profile of northern Haiti by simply being the dominant population in the region according to longevity and ability to reproduce before and after the Haitian Revolution. Although the population of Saint Domingue declined by well over a hundred thousand or more during those 13 years of revolt and revolution, perhaps the "Congos" of northern Haiti persevered through the demographic catastrophes wrought by civil war and slave insurrection while earlier established African populations died in war, fled, or their offspring died too soon. Southern Haiti, on the other hand, has a smaller Central African component in its genetic profile, probably due to the south being seen as underdeveloped and featuring fewer grand estates like the mornes of the north. Slave trading obviously existed, but often in illicit forms with Dutch and English Caribbean colonies and likely drawing disproportionately from West Africa rather than Angola or the Congo.
Brazil, the extreme case in favor of Central African ancestry, should come as no surprise. An old saying states that without Angola, there would be no Brazil. Brazilian dependence on slave labor for just about everything for centuries led to further dependence on slaves disproportionately from West Central Africa. Benguela, Mondongue, Kongo, and various other Bantu-speaking Central African peoples (with some from Mozambique) provided the main slave labor force partly because West Central Africa is directly across the Atlantic. West African slave labor was important in the northeast, reflected by the Yoruba (rendered Nago in the colonial period and in Afro-Brazilian Candomble). The Central African influences are very strong throughout the country, however, with linguistic, religious, musical, and spirituality reflected in contemporary Brazil. Umbanda, for instance, or kilundu, reflect Central African Bantu-speakers' long-lasting contributions to Brazilian music and religious identity. Like enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, Africans in Brazil often organized themselves into ethnies based on the 'ethnonyms' constructed by white and European traders, although slave nations in the Americas could and did include heterogeneous Africans. A study of African nations in post-colonial Buenos Aires, for example, reflected mostly West Central African slave nations, but also emphasized that these groups, which functioned as mutual aid societies that often pooled resources for manumission of members, burial costs, and cultural functions/socializing. Similarly, Brazilian slave 'nations' based on some African "ethnic group" were constructed from an identity which may not have been representative of the members' actual background. Slave nation identities were also forged in the process of creolization, including European and indigenous influences, thereby complicating any idea of "pure" African "tribal" identities relevant to the enslaved population.
In summation, the process of tracing or ascertaining African "roots" and retentions among the African diaspora cannot ever likely directly trace every possible retained African cultural practice of influence. The genetics picture does not give complete data, but may be useful for general trends in the proportions of slaves coming from West and West Central Africa. Cultural evidence from language, religion, and music likewise is difficult to trace directly, although several dances and rituals do, from linguistic evidence and recorded descriptions of similar practices in particular regions of Africa, reveal the likely origins of certain chants, spirits, etc. As for specific 'nations' mentioned in the literature from centuries of the Atlantic Slave Trade, groups like "Coromanti" were often meaningless because various Akan-speaking peoples from what is now Ghana and Togo were likely subsumed under that category by slave traders on the Gold Coast and in the Caribbean. The term "Congo" in the French Caribbean, was also likely an amalgamation of multiple African populations that probably did not conceive of themselves as a single people but various culturally-related peoples in Angola and the Congo. Moreover, one must not neglect African, European, and later Asian influences that impacted creolization and new black identities across the hemisphere. Thus, we can never truly ascertain our specific 'roots' (despite DNA tests, which presents an entire new set of problems too complex for me to tackle) but we know primarily from which regions our ancestors were stolen and sold. And we know that that African diaspora has returned throughout the centuries of the slave trade, to Sierra Leone, Lagos, Cameroon, Liberia, and elsewhere, further shaping local cultures and music scenes. In this case, the ties do indeed bind.
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