Re-connecting Africa with herself: 1619 Angola and Congo to Virginia

Re-connecting Africa with her history and her people means re-connecting Europe (and the Middle East) with its own history, too. "About 350 slaves were bound for Veracruz [Mexico], when the ship was robbed of its human cargo off the coast of Mexico in 1619 by two unidentified pirate ships..." Sandra sent me the link to Lisa Rein's Sunday, 3 September Washington Post article, Mystery of Va.'s First Slaves is Unlocked 400 Years Later. This was no "mystery". The countries who held these records for the past four centuries did not care. In fact, they've been evasive, hostile and secretive about this chapter of their own history. The Africa-Europe-Virginia story of 30 Africans cast ashore at Jamestown in 1619 from a Dutch-flagged ship is part of the larger story of 350 Angolans and Congolese among the tens of millions of Africans deported on ship after ship to the Americas over 300 years. Since then we have been kept apart from Africa. Apartheid. Forced to live apart forever. These Africans lived apart in the Americas, separated to the present day from Africa and each other. They were kept apart even inside every society into which they were shipped like goods. "They passed through a slave fortress at the port city of Luanda, still Angola's capital." ... continued

... Many people still do not acknowledge the vast semantic difference in calling us "Africans" and (in the U.S.) "Black Americans," as who we were and are, rather than "slaves," which is deliberately pejorative. The word "slaves" is tossed about constantly verbally and in books, articles, and blogs. This in spite of the fact that it's the most de-humanising of terms. People were not and are not slaves. They were people enslaved by others. Today, Hurricane Katrina and mass 'gentrification' remind us how apart we're still seen and treated within the peoples of whom we are "a part", and in the communities and nations our enslaved and free ancestors created in the Americas. Lisa Rein's article illustrates again the "networking" inherent in Europe's shared human trafficking, i.e., its "trade" in Africans. Some of the names come up yet again. Holland, Britain, Portugal, Spain... "... Portuguese traders under the rule of the king of Spain had established the colony of Angola. The exporting of slaves to the Spanish New World was a profitable enterprise. ..." "... Virginia's first Africans spoke Bantu languages called Kimbundu and Kikongo. Their homelands were the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, regions of modern-day Angola and coastal regions of Congo. Both were conquered by the Portuguese in the 1500s. ..."