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Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links. By Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. 225. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $34.95.)
Reviewed by Mechal Sobel
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's latest book, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas, is an unusual work. As the subtitle Restoring the Links indicates, Hall's key aim is to establish the existence and significance of links between particular ethnic groups in Africa and groups of the enslaved in the Americas, but the work first presents her credo in regard to enslavement and American history.
Hall has been a social activist since she was a young woman. Made aware of the injustice suffered by blacks in the Jim Crow era by the work of her father-whom she has described as "the only lawyer in the state [of Louisiana] who would accept police brutality complaints by black folks"-she early became involved in social action through the Communist Party, the only outside group helping poor blacks to organize for self-protection and political and economic rights in those dangerous times.1
When Hall later became an academic, she clearly continued on a committed path. Her use of the words "Truth and Reconciliation" (xiii) as the title for her preface makes it clear that she regards her work as a historian as critical to future social change. Hall has taken on the challenge to establish that, contrary to what is still widely accepted, "specific African regions and ethnicities . . . made major contributions to the formation of the new cultures developing throughout the Americas" (xv). She holds that these ethnic groups had a profound impact upon the "economy, culture, esthetics, language, and survival skills" of the societies in America, but that "Africans and their descendants have received very little recognition for their contributions and sacrifices and very few of the benefits" (xvi). Her work is intended to play a role in changing this.
Published in 1992, Hall's groundbreaking study of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana was based on extensive records she uncovered indicating that the majority of African slaves brought to Louisiana between 1719 and 1731 were from Senegambia. It was their culture that Hall found dominant in the general cultural development of the society.2 When she published...