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Food and Language: African Roots of American Southern Culture

Fehintola Mosadomi, Center for African and African American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
mosadom@mail.utexas.edu

The Atlantic Slave Trade was the dominant mechanism of labor migration from Africa to the New World in the 15th Century. It was a phenomenon predicated on violence and extensive human rights abuse. Six centuries later, some of the contradictions thrown up on both sides of the Great Passage by this phenomenon have propelled a different, yet familiar pattern of labor migration from Africa to North America. This is through State-administered immigration lotteries in the host countries for potential (willing) immigrants from Africa among other continents. But whereas the first pattern of labor migration was predicated on force and violence, the latter is tendentially voluntary; and whereas the one was expressly exploitative, the other is arguably mutually rewarding to the immigrant and her home country on the one hand, and to the host country on the other.This paper explores the dimensions of these two patterns of migrations. It argues that the same forces of economic exploitation that propelled (forced) labor migration in the Slave Trade era also underpin the supposedly voluntary wave of migration that debuted at the twilight of the 20th century. It avers that a common experience of a wounded psyche and the logic of survival in a strange, usually unfriendly land, have served to bind the different immigrant groups together in their host countries. The basic experience of frustration which propelled the slave revolts of the earlier age also largely account for the relatively high rate of crime among immigrant populations from Africa in North America today. In relation to diasporic linkages, the paper examines the degree to which the early immigrants still retain important cultural forms of their home countries after more than 500 years of physical separation. It also establishes the historical and contemporary patterns of interaction between the immigrants, their family members back home, their home countries, and the social consequences arising therefrom.