Reassembling Africa: a leading anthropologist proposes an essential library for understanding the Black Diaspora in the Americas

Black Issues Book Review, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Sheila S. Walker

* Central Africans and Cultural Transformation in the African Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, January 2002), edited by historian Linda M. Heywood, presents articles about the African background and American presence of Bantu-speaking peoples, the Africans most ubiquitous in the Diaspora, and how they perpetuated their culture in Brazil and Guyana in South America, in Haiti in the Caribbean, and in Spanish Florida and the South Carolina Low Country in the United States.

The Centrality of Spirituality

The important place occupied by writings about religion of African origin in the Diaspora reflects the centrality of spirituality as a locus of the preservation of African culture in the Americas.

In his beautifully illustrated Voodoo: Search for the Spirit (Harry N. Abrams, April 1995), Laennec Hurbon traces Haiti's now officially recognized religion from its African origins to its current manifestations. And Leslie G. Desmangles in The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (University of North Carolina Press, January 1993) demonstrates the negotiation and syncretism that occurred between African religious forms and imposed European religion. Sociologist George Brandon's Santeria From Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories (Indiana University Press, March 1997) traces Yoruba religion from West Africa to its evolution in Cuba and spread to the United States. And cultural organizer and scholar Marta Morena Vega, in The Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santeria (One World/Ballantine, September 2000) shares her experience with religion of African origin from her grandmother's East Harlem apartment to her initiation into the religion of the Yoruba Orichas in Cuba. And the forthcoming book by dance anthropologist Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Cuban Yoruba, Haitian Vodou, and Bahian Candomble (University of Illinois Press), successfully undertakes the daunting task of portraying the three major African-derived sacred dance traditions of the Americas.

In fiction, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (originally published in 1983, reissued by Plume in October 1992) takes an unlikely middle-class African American New Yorker through a spiritual transformation in which she finds her roots in a nation dance on Carriacou. And Maryse Conde's monumental historical novel Segu (Penguin USA, September 1998) traces the odysseys of members of a Bambara royal family from Segou in Mali.

Lest we mistakenly believe that such diasporically focused awareness and writings are a recent phenomenon, we should know that two illustrious foremothers opened the way more than half a century ago with accounts of their fieldwork experiences in the Caribbean. Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, novelist and playwright, wrote about Jamaican and Haitian culture of African origin in her Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (Perennial, reissued January 1994) and about similar phenomena among U.S. African Americans in the southern United States in Mules and Men (Perennial, reissued January 1994).