ABSTRACT
Among the various exploits and voluntary or involuntary contributions of African people to the development of the new world and France, following are some selected examples. As Sidney W. Mintz (1958) emphasized in the introduction to the 1990 edition of The Myth of the Negro Past by Melville Herskovits, the millions of Africans who came here did not arrive as empty vessels that European civilisation had to fi ll up. These Africans survived despite everything that was done to them; their children survived and with them Africa also survived. However, African contributions to the New World and France, for example, cannot simply be evaluated through the physical labor of enslaved Africans and their production of goods but the cultural assets of the African legacy must also be taken into account, including linguistic infl uences, architectural styles as well as African cultural survivals in economic and pastoral practices.
