AP African American Studies - Unit 1 Notes

What is African American Studies?

African American studies is an interdisciplinary field that rigorously examines the history, culture, and contributions of people of African descent in the U.S. and throughout the African Diaspora.
It emerged from Black artistic, intellectual, and political movements and has grown into a formalized academic discipline.
The course examines the historical development of ideas about Africa and its ongoing relationship with communities of the African diaspora.
Perceptions of Africa have evolved from misleading notions of a primitive continent to recognizing it as the homeland of powerful societies and leaders.

Incorporation of African American Studies in Colleges

During the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Black college students began attending predominantly white institutions in larger numbers.
The Black Campus Movement (1965–1972) involved protests at over 1,000 colleges nationwide, advocating for the study of Black history and experiences, as well as support for Black students, faculty, and administrators.

Reframing Misconceptions about Early Africa

Africa is the birthplace of humanity and the ancestral home of African Americans.
Early African societies made significant advancements in fields such as arts, architecture, technology, politics, religion, and music.
Interdisciplinary analysis in African American studies dispels the idea of Africa as a continent without a documented history and affirms its diverse and complex societies that were globally connected before the Atlantic slave trade.

The African Continent: A Varied Landscape

Africa, the second-largest continent, has diverse geographic features and five primary climate zones: desert, semiarid, savanna grasslands, tropical rainforests, and the Mediterranean zone.
It is bordered by the Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, and Indian Ocean and has five major rivers: the Niger River, Congo River, Zambezi River, Orange River, and Nile River.
The proximity of the Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, and Indian Ocean to Africa fostered early global connections and the emergence of early societies.
Population centers emerged in the Sahel and savanna grasslands due to major water routes, fertile land, and connections between trade communities.
Variations in climate led to diverse trade opportunities: herders in deserts traded salt, people in the Sahel traded livestock, people in the savannas cultivated grain crops, and people in tropical rainforests grew kola trees and yams and traded gold.

Population Growth and Ethnolinguistic Diversity

Technological and agricultural innovations contributed to the population growth of West and Central African peoples.
This population growth led to the Bantu Expansion, a series of migrations from 1500 BCE to 500 CE.
Bantu-speaking peoples' linguistic influences spread throughout the continent, resulting in the Bantu linguistic family of hundreds of languages.
Africa is the ancestral home of thousands of ethnic groups and languages, and a large portion of the genetic ancestry of African Americans comes from Western and Central African Bantu speakers.

Africa’s Ancient Societies

Several of the world’s earliest complex, large-scale societies emerged in Africa, including Egypt, Nubia, Aksum, and the Nok society.
Egypt and Nubia emerged along the Nile River around 3000 BCE. Nubia supplied Egypt with gold and luxury items, leading to conflict, and Nubia eventually defeated Egypt, establishing the 25th dynasty of the Black Pharaohs around 750 BCE.
The Aksumite Empire (present-day Eritrea and Ethiopia) emerged around 100 BCE and was connected to major maritime trade networks via the Red Sea. Aksum developed its own currency and script (Ge’ez).
The Nok society (present-day Nigeria) emerged around 500 BCE and was one of the earliest iron-working societies in West Africa, known for terracotta sculptures, pottery, and stone instruments.
Aksum was the first African society to adopt Christianity under King Ezana and Ge’ez is still used as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
These ancient African societies are culturally and historically significant to Black communities and African American studies because they counter racist stereotypes that deny African history and culture.
African American writers emphasized the significance of ancient African societies from the late 18th century onward to counter racist stereotypes.
Mid-20th century scholarship on African societies supported Africans’ claims for self-rule and independence from European colonialism.

The Sudanic Empires: Ghana, Mali, Songhai

The Sudanic empires (Ghana, Mali, and Songhai) flourished from the 7th to the 16th century, each expanding from the decline of the previous one.
Ancient Ghana, Mali, and Songhai were known for their gold mines and strategic location at the nexus of trade routes connecting the Sahara to sub-Saharan Africa.
Trans-Saharan commerce brought North African traders, scholars, and administrators who introduced Islam and facilitated its spread throughout West Africa.
Songhai was the last and largest of the Sudanic empires, but its wealth diminished as trade routes shifted from trans-Saharan to Atlantic trade following Portuguese exploration.
In the 14th century, the Mali Empire, under Mansa Musa, became a center for trade, learning, and cultural exchange.
Mali’s wealth enabled its leaders to acquire powerful North African horses and steel weapons, expanding its power.
Mansa Musa’s hajj in 1324 drew the interest of merchants and cartographers across the eastern Mediterranean to southern Europe, promoting trade plans.
A map of Catalan Atlas in 1375 details the wealth and influence of Mansa Musa and Mali Empire.
The Sudanic empires stretched from Senegambia to the Ivory Coast and included regions of Nigeria, and the majority of enslaved Africans transported to North America came from these regions.

West African Learning Traditions

West African empires housed centers of learning in their trading cities, such as Timbuktu in Mali, which had a book trade, university, and learning community.
Knowledge from Islamic civilization was shared through Arabic, the written language of the Qu’ran.
Griots were historians, storytellers, and musicians who maintained and shared a community's history, traditions, and cultural practices.
Griots included both African women and men who preserved knowledge of a community’s births, deaths, and marriages in their stories.

Indigenous Cosmologies and Religious Syncretism

Some African leaders adopted Islam or Christianity, leading their subjects to blend aspects of these introduced faiths with indigenous spiritual beliefs and cosmologies.
Africans brought their syncretic religious and cultural practices to the Americas, blending indigenous spiritual practices with Christianity and Islam.
About one-quarter of African Americans descend from Christian societies in Africa and one-quarter from Muslim societies.
Spiritual practices traced to West Africa include veneration of ancestors, divination, healing practices, and collective singing and dancing.
These practices survived in African diasporic religions and were blended with Islam and Christianity in Africa before being blended again with Christianity in the Americas, impacting mainstream Christianity in American colonies.
Examples of West African spiritual practices in African diasporic religions include Voodoo, Vodun, Regla de Ocha-Ifa (Santería), and Candomblé.

Culture and Trade in Southern and Eastern Africa

The Kingdom of Zimbabwe flourished in Southern Africa from the 12th to 15th century, linked to trade on the Swahili Coast, and its inhabitants, the Shona people, grew wealthy from gold, ivory, and cattle resources.
Great Zimbabwe is known for its large stone architecture that served as military defense and a hub for long-distance trade; the Great Enclosure was a site for religious and administrative activities, and the conical tower likely served as a granary.
The stone ruins symbolize the prominence, autonomy, and agricultural advancements of the Shona kings and early African societies.
The Swahili Coast stretches from Somalia to Mozambique, and its coastal city-states linked Africa’s interior to Arab, Persian, Indian, and Chinese trading communities.
Between the 11th and 15th centuries, the Swahili Coast city-states were united by their shared language (Swahili) and religion (Islam).
The Portuguese invaded major city-states and established settlements in the 16th century to control Indian Ocean trade.

Portuguese Arrival on West African Coasts

The Portuguese, using Arab and Chinese technology, were the first great sea voyagers from Western Europe, seeking West African riches following Mansa Musa’s famous Hajj in 1324.
The Portuguese initially assumed that sub-Saharan African people lived in primitive, unorganized societies but soon realized this was false when their early invasions failed.
The Portuguese then sought diplomacy and trade partnerships with African kingdoms, who saw an opportunity to bypass trans-Saharan trade routes.
The Wolof Empire in modern Senegal was the first kingdom to sustain a complex relationship with Portugal, exchanging goods such as spice and textiles for Portuguese brass/copper and textiles.
By 1480, the Wolof shifted their capital to the Atlantic coast, marking a major economic and political shift in West African history as coastal trade with European ships replaced the power and wealth of the old Sudanic Empires.
The Wolof began trading enemies captured in battle, leading to the first auctions of enslaved people in Lisbon in 1444.
Portugal's success was amplified upon meeting the Akan people of modern Ghana (El Mina), a source of gold for Mansa Musa’s empire, where they built a fort in 1482 to trade European textiles and brass for gold.
The Portuguese then discovered the Kingdom of Benin, which traded captives from their wars, whom the Portuguese bought and traded to the Akan people at Elmina for gold.
By the 1640s, Elmina Fort became a center for the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, and Portugal was taking 25,000 ounces of gold from Elmina every year, funding their sea voyages.
Benin never showed an interest in Christianity, and in 1514, they decided to shut down Portuguese access to the slave trade, leading the Portuguese to shift their focus and change world history.

Portuguese Colony of São Tomé

In 1485, Portugal made the uninhabited African island of São Tomé an official colony and developed a new system for sugar production, which would change the history of the world.
Sugar, previously a rare and expensive commodity, was produced on a massive scale in São Tomé for the first time, based on the human-trafficking of West Africans in massive plantations.
São Tomé became a violent labor camp based on racially-charged slavery for producing agricultural cash crops for export.
This model spread to the New World after its “discovery,” leading to European colonization for the purpose of modeling the São Tomé sugar experiment, resulting in Europe becoming the wealthiest region on earth based on the trafficking of 12.5 million West Africans.

West Central Africa: The Kingdom of Kongo

The Kingdom of Kongo, which had no contact with the Sudanic Empires, was shocked by the arrival of Portuguese ships in 1482, which negotiated treaties for ivory, salt, copper, textiles, and human captives.
In 1491, King Nzinga a Nkuwu (João I) and his son Nzinga Mbemba (Afonso I) voluntarily converted the Kingdom of Kongo to Roman Catholicism, strengthening its trade relationship with Portugal and increasing its wealth.
This conversion happened before Columbus discovered the Americas, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade system did not yet exist.
A distinct form of African Catholicism emerged, incorporating elements of Christianity and local aesthetic and cultural traditions.
The king of Portugal demanded access to the trade of enslaved people in exchange for military assistance, but soon, the volume of human trafficking grew out of control as the sugar trade exploded.
Kongo’s nobles participated in the slave trade but were unable to limit the number of captives sold to European powers.
Kongo, along with the greater region of West Central Africa, became the largest source of enslaved people in the history of the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas.
About a quarter of enslaved Africans transported to what became the United States hailed from West Central Africa; many were Christians before arriving in the Americas.
In Kongo, naming children after saints or according to the day of the week was common, and Christian names among early African Americans exemplify enduring ideas and practices across the Atlantic.

Kinship and Political Leadership

Many early West and Central African societies were comprised of family groups held together by extended kinship ties, which often formed the basis for political alliances.
Women played many roles in West and Central African societies, including spiritual leaders, political advisors, market traders, educators, and agriculturalists.
In the late 15th century, Queen Mother Idia became the first iyoba (queen mother) in the Kingdom of Benin, serving as a political advisor to her son, the king.
In the early 17th century, Queen Njinga became queen of Ndongo-Matamba, leading armies into battle and engaging in 30 years of guerilla warfare against the Portuguese to maintain sovereignty.
Queen Njinga participated in the slave trade to amass wealth and political influence and also expanded Matamba’s military by offering sanctuary for those who escaped Portuguese enslavement.
Queen Idia became an iconic symbol of Black women’s leadership throughout the diaspora in 1977 when an ivory mask of her face was adopted as the symbol for FESTAC.
Queen Njinga’s reign solidified her legacy as a skilled political and military leader throughout the African diaspora, leading to nearly 100 more years of women rulers in Matamba.

Global Africans

In the late 15th century, trade between West African kingdoms and Portugal for gold, goods, and enslaved people grew steadily, bypassing trans-Saharan trade routes.
African kingdoms increased their wealth and power through slave trading, which was a common feature of hierarchical West African societies.
Portuguese and West African trade increased the presence of Europeans in West Africa and the population of sub-Saharan Africans in Iberian port cities like Lisbon and Seville.
African elites, including ambassadors and the children of rulers, traveled to Mediterranean port cities for diplomatic, educational, and religious reasons.
Free and enslaved Africans served in roles ranging from domestic labor to boatmen, guards, entertainers, and vendors in these cities.
In the mid-15th century, the Portuguese colonized the Atlantic islands of Cabo Verde and São Tomé, where they established cotton, indigo, and sugar plantations using the labor of enslaved Africans.
By 1500, about 50,000 enslaved Africans had been removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe.
These plantations became a model for slave-based economies in the Americas.