African Survivals in American Culture
Author(s): Romeo B. Garrett
Source: The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Oct., 1966), pp. 239-245
Published by: Association for the Study of African American Life and History
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THE JOURNAL
OF
NEGRO HISTORY
VOL. LI-OCTOBER, 1966-No. 4
AFRICAN SURVIVALS IN AMERICAN CULTURE
African survivals in American culture have diminished
markedly over the past one hundred years, but some are still
existent and are.interwoven into the cultural pattern of Amer-
ican and the Western Hemisphere itself. These are reflected in
the words we speak, the songs we sing, the dances we perform,
the instruments we play, the stories we relate, and the foods
we consume.
The most recent work on Negro speech in the United
States is that of Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, professor of
English at Roosevelt University, Chicago. His search uncov-
ered astonishing survivals of African culture and more than
4,000 African words, names and numbers still spoken among
Negroes on the Georgia-South Carolina offshore islands,
known to anthropologists as the Gullah region. Many of these
words are employed by Negroes and whites throughout the
United States.1
They lay bare the probable explanation of some of the
oldest and newest Americanisms, from “tote” to “juke box.”
They reveal the identity, civilization and relative influence of
the people from which most of America’s 20,000,000 Negroes
descend.
The word tote, meaning carry, has been found in print
within seventy years after the first settlement at Jamestown,
Virginia. It has no known English origin.
A frequently used word among southern Negroes is pinder
for peanut (called guba and pinda in Gullah from identical
words used by tribes in Angola). Also, the word tater for
potato has been found in several West African languages.
1 Lorenzo D. Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (the University of
Chicago Press, 1949).
239
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240 JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY
The list covers many animals like cooter for tortoise (kuta
in Gullah from two French West African tongues); biddy for
chick (it means a bird in Congolese); and jigger (bug known
as jiga in six African tongues.)
The name yam as applied to the sweet potato may be a
corruption of the African word nyiam that was brought to this
country by the Negroes. Nyam was the word the Negroes used
for true yam or other large edible roots or tubers found in
Africa. Later, it was incorrectly applied to large American
sweet potatoes.
Our latest juke boxes come from the word “juke,” a
Senegalese term implying a wild time.
African names, too, have survived among Negroes. Two
common ones are Bobo and Anyike. Professor Turner has
connected 2,000 names in the United States with African
languages.
Other scholars of African languages, including Serjeant-
son, corroborate the findings of Professor Turner. Voodoo,
first found in 1880, is probably from Dahomey “vodu.” Gum-
bo (Angolan ki-nyombo) appears first in America (1859).
The word gorilla is alleged to be an African word. This was
adopted as the specific name of the ape (“Trogladytes goril-
la”) by Savage in 1847 (Journal of the Boston Natural
History Society); it is found as an English word first in 1853.
Banana comes to us through Spanish from the native name in
Guinea in 1597; okra 1707, through the West Indies; it ap-
pears first in Slaone’s Jamica; chimpanzee 1738: “A most
surprising creature is brought over in the Speaker, just ar-
rived from Carolina, that was taken in a wood at Guinea. She
is the female creature which the Angolans call Chimpanzee;’
cola, kola, the seed, used for chewing, etc., from a West
African tree; zebra 1600 from the Congo dialect.”2
Other African words interwoven in the American English
linguistic fabric are: buckra, pickaninny, jazz, elephant,
ebony, turnip, parsnip, oasis, canopic, and sorcery.3
Negro spirituals are traceable to Africa. II. E. Krehbiel,
the nineteenth-century pioneer authority on the Afro-
2 Mary S. Serjeantson, A History of Foreign Words in English (New York,
1962), pp. 246-49.
3 Mary S. Serjeantson, A History of Foreign Words in English (New York,
1962), pp. 246-49.
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AFRICAN SURVIVALS IN AMERICAN CULTURE 241
American folksongs, after analyzing 527 Negro spirituals,
found their identical prototypes in African music, concluding
that the essential “intervallic rhythmical and structural ele-
ments” of these songs came from the ancestral homelands.4
These vestiges of African music rose to a higher harmonic
development when there was blown through or fused into
them the spirit of Christianity as the Negro slaves knew
Christianity. At the psychic moment there was at hand the
precise religion for the adverse conditions in which they found
themselves thrust. This religion implied the hope that in the
next world there would be a reversal of conditions. All men-
slave and free, black and white, rich and poor, high and
low-would be equal. The result was a body of song voicing
all the cardinal virtues of Christianity-patience, forbear-
ance, love, faith, and hope-through a necessarily modified
form of primitive African music. The Negro took complete
refuge in Christianity and the spirituals were literally forged
of sorrow in the heat of religious fervor. They brought hope
and comfort to a burdened people.5
The contribution of the transplanted African to musical
expression in America was summed up by Walter Damrosch
in a speech at Hampton Institute in 1912: “Unique and
inimitable, Negro music is the only music of this country,
except that of the American Indians, which can claim to be
folk music.” It is the finest distinctive artistic contribution
America has offered the world.
Jazz, too, has its roots in Africa. Negro slaves from Africa
brought the roots of such and planted them in the soil of
slavery. The word “jazz” in an African dialect means “hurry
up.” That is just about the tempo of jazz. The culture pat-
terns that produced jazz are the result of the Afro-Ameri-
can’s accommodation to a sociocultural setting established
and controlled by Euro-Americans. Afro-American music is
characterized by tonal and rhythmic elements of African
origin transformed by disciplines of Euro-American music.6
4 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Making of America (New York, 1964),
p. 30.
5 Dorothy L. Conley, “Origin of the Negro Spirituals,” The Negro History
Bulletin (May, 1962), p. 179.
6 Harold McKinney, “Negro Music,” The Negro History Bulletin, XXVII,
No. 5, Feb. 1964.
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242 JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY
Leonard Feather, one of the most important jazz scholars
and critics, explaining Afro-American orientation of jazz
said:
“Jazz was the product of a specific social environment in
which a group of people, the American Negroes, largely shut
off from the white world, developed cultural patterns of their
own. 7
M. E. Hall, Music Department Chairman at Michigan
State University, presenting the case for academic jazz in
America wrote:
“Popular music at all levels, movie background music,
television background music, musical comedy, all are growths
of the jazz idiom. Europeans consider jazz to be our one
important contribution to the culture of the world.”8
The noted French music critic Andre Hodier wrote:
“What contemporary observer would have guessed that
the folk music of a small group would become the language of
an entire people fifteen or twenty years later and in a few
more years, a world-wide phenomenon, with jazz bands exist-
ing simultaneously in Melbourne, Tokyo, and Stockholm.”9
The African group said to have contributed most to the
basic nature of jazz was the Dahomeans of West Africa. Their
musical traditions merged with those of the French and be-
came the leading influence when the “roots” of jazz were still
forming in the West Indies. The Dahomeans later became a
powerful cultural force in New Orleans. The Creoles, a group
of French Negroes, settled in Louisiana and were wealthy and
as well educated as Europeans. They became an intellectual
force in jazz development. Stripped of their property and
rights as American citizens, they were forced into the Negro
community. Many well trained Creole musicians found it im-
possible to work as concert musicians and had to earn money
by either teaching or playing “race” music. The techniques
they developed as musicians were used to develop the music
now called jazz.?1
The livliest and most rhythmic dances of the New World
7 Ibid., p. 120.
8 Ibid., p. 120.
9Ibid., p. 120.
10 Ibid., p. 126.
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AFRICAN SURVIVALS IN AMERICAN CULTURE 243
are of African origin. African ritual dance patterns, when
brought to the New World, interacted with the secular dances
from Europe with notable results. In Latin America among
the combinations springing from this fusion of African and
European dance forms were the beguine, the rhumba, the
conga, and the habanera. The first of these originated in
Martinique; the last three are Afro-Spanish. The rhumba was
first performed among Cuban Negroes as a rural dance depict-
ing simple farm chores. The conga and the newer mambo
originated among the Congo Negroes of Cuba. The music of
the habanera, which takes its name from Cuba’s leading city,
has an African rhythmic foundation that soon came to domi-
nate the dance melodies of Latin America, as it does today;
from it came the tango (after an African word “rangana”)
of Areentina. The national dance of Brazil, the samba, is
derived directly from the wedding dance of Angola, the
quizomba. The significant role of Africanisms in the dance of
the Hispanic countries has been richly documented in the
monumental studies of the contemporary Cuban scholar, Fer-
nando Ortiz.l1
The research of Professor Turner also shows that such
United States dances as have the Charleston and Black Bot-
tom originated in Africa. So also did calypso singing and
musical instruments like the drums, zylophone, marimba, and
gourd.
Another African survival is the folk story. Wherever the
Negro has gone, tales have gone too, and with only minor
alterations in plot. Negroes from the bulge of Africa brought
with them legends, myths, proverbs, and the remembered
outlines of animal stories that for centuries had been current
at their native hearths. The best known of the adaptations of
this folklore from the Dark Continent are the Uncle Remus
tales, the African ancestor of Br’er Rabbit being Shulo the
Hare. The very titles, such as Br’er Wolf and Sis’ Nanny
Goat, were carried across the Atlantic.12
Anthropologists attest that many of our most popular
plants have their roots in Africa. Black-eyed peas traveled
from Africa to North America in the holds of slave ships as
11 Quarles, op. cit., p. 31.
12 Ibid., p. 31.
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244 JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY
food for the pitiful cargo. Africa’s greatest contribution to
the joy of eating is watermelon. Cultivated thousands of years
ago in the Valley of the Nile, it is still found wild in the
interior of Africa where it originated. Sometimes in dry
periods it forms the only water supply.13
In the conquest of Mexico, Cortez was accompanied by a
Negro, who finding in his rations of rice some grains of wheat,
planted them as an experiment and thus made himself the
pioneer in wheat raising in the Western Hemisphere.l4
It is the consensus of geobotanists that coffee, America’s
most popular nonalcoholic beverage, has as its birthplace
Africa. Our word “coffee’ is derived from Kaffa, Ethiopia,
its place of origin. Originally coffee was eaten, not drunk.
Wandering Ethiopian tribesmen ate wild coffee berries from
the trees, or mixed them with fat. The practice continues in
many African villages. Ugandans make a savory drink from
coffee and bananas. Coffee is today one of Ethiopia’s chief
exports.15
Okra apparently originated in what the geobotanists call
the Abyssinian center or origin of cultivated plants, an area
that includes present-day Ethiopia, the mountainous or
plateau portion of Eritrea, and the eastern, higher part of
Sudan. Africans brought ther favorite okura (okra) to
Louisiana. Soon they were teaching the settlers how to make
African stew, kingombo (gumbo) thickened with okra. Gum-
bo is to this day a favorite of Americans throughout the
United States. When pecans were discovered growing wild in
Louisiana, the African cooks creatively turned them into
delicious pecan pies and pralines. Pralines were named for the
French Duc de Plessis-Praslin who invented a similar confec-
tion in France made of sugared almonds. The use of kola as a
drink originated with the Africans. Today, the extract of kola
nuts is the basic ingredient of popular carbonated “cola”
drinks throughout the United States and the world.’
13 Victor Boswell “Our Vegetable Travelers,” The National Geographic
Magazine, Vol. XCVI, No. 2 (August, 1949), pp. 193-211.
14 Carter G. Woodson, “The Negro a Factor in the History of the World,”
(Washington, 1940), p. 5.
15 The Ethiopian Herald (No. 48, Vol. 1, 1959), p. 1.
16 Ruth Fox, Food Wonders of the World (Battle Creek, 1964), p. 28.
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AFRICAN SURVIVALS IN AMERICAN CULTURE 245
The late Professor Carter G. Woodson, one of the world’s
most eminent authorities on Negro culture and history, stated
in a letter to the author (November 18, 1947): “All around
me I can see Africa in almost every Negro whom I meet, and I
do not refer to color. It is true that law and custom cause the
Negro to be assimilated gradually to the standard of the
Caucasian with whom he comes in contact. But the “Caucasi-
anization” of the Negro is not yet complete in the United
States and very far from being so in Cuba and Brazil. ”
ROMEO B. GARRETT
Bradley University
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