ABSTRACT
The Africans who, beginning in 1619, were sold into slavery and shipped to the mainland of colonial North America were stripped to the skin and shackled in chains for the long, traumatic voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, the so-called Middle Passage. White colonists watched the dancing of the Africans and listened to their singing with a mixture of admiration, disparagement, and outright disapproval. Nevertheless, some of the whites included accounts of the African-style festivities in their travelogues, journals, local histories, diaries and other personal writings, and fiction. At the same time as white American colonists were beginning to take note of the African festivals in their midst, European explorers and traders in West Africa were keeping records of their adventures among the Yoruba, Hausa, Ashanti, Ibo, Fon, and other, primarily West African, nations, with a view to publishing their notes or diaries in book format after returning to their homes.
