ABSTRACT
The French North American colony of Louisiana, parts of which were first settled in 1698, is an interesting and unique example of early eighteenthcentury life in a non-English North American colony, especially as it was lived by the several thousand African slaves imported in the 1720s. Comprising fewer than a dozen isolated settlements along the Gulf Coast and on the banks of the Mississippi River, Louisiana experienced a sharp increase in immigration of West Africans which only lasted thirteen years from 1718 yet had a profound affect on the social and economic development of the colony.2 By the end of the African slave trade to the colony in the early 1730s, Africans made up over half of the total population of the colony's largest settlement and capital, New Orleans.3 Between 1719 and 1731, the Louisiana colony was the final destination for just over 5,000 Africans. Captives arrived from various points along the West Africa coast including Cabinda, Whydah, Cape Lahou, Cape Apollonia, Bissau, Albréda, Gorée and Saint Louis.4 Many were sold to plantations along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Natchez. Thorough and detailed examinations of contemporary events at and near these ports may eventually make it possible to offer more specific conclusions about the geographic origins and cultural backgrounds of Louisiana's African slaves than has been possible in other New World slave societies. As a result, Louisiana may provide for historians a rare opportunity to explore the complexities of African political and social structures in the New World as well as the African contribution to the social and economic development of a part of North America that is often neglected. As an example of an approach which stresses the value of wedding local histories in Africa and in the New World, this essay will focus upon Senegambia since that region accounted for roughly one-half of all the African captives brought to French Louisiana between 1719 and 1731.5
The Atlantic slave trade brought together Africans of distinct and varied religious, social and linguistic backgrounds in the hostile and oppressive environment of New World slavery. Louisiana was no exception and the colony had an ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse African population. Numerous ethnic groups lived in areas that fed the transatlantic slave trade, and individuals from many of these ethnic groups were brought to Louisiana. Approximately 2,000 were shipped from ports along the West Africa coast from Portentic in northern Senegal to Cape Appolonia several hundred kilometres to the south. An additional 2,000 came via the port of Whydah on the Slave Coast, and approximately 300 more departed from Cabinda. We have only a small number of observations relating to the ethnicity of slaves in Louisiana in 1720-50. Despite the geographic diversity of Africans arriving in the colony, a disproportionate number of those to whom an ethnic label is attached were described as Bambara or belonging to the Bambara nation.6
