Short Essay One

Short Essay One

            When considering Thornton’s ideas about African culture and how it helped to shape the Atlantic world, it is important to keep in mind that Thornton’s most salient assertion is that African society was highly developed (Thornton, 7). This stands in contrast to traditional notions of Africa as an undeveloped and easily exploited source of raw materials ripe for European commercial plundering. Although Thornton is not the originator of this viewpoint, he does make a compelling case that although Africa had thriving trade economies, a manufacturing base, complex social and political structures, and a rich and varied cultural landscape, all of these things existed in something of a closed sphere that, for the most part, did not extend beyond the continent (Thornton, 21) due to difficulties in oceanic navigation.

            Within this closed (but rather large) economic, political, and cultural sphere there seems to have been a great deal of diversity. The sheer number of cultures and traditions that existed within the African sphere shatters the notion of a monolithic African culture. As one view the maps from the period (Thornton, x-xiv) it becomes clear that there were several hundred states, sub-states, and cultural groups operating along the West African and Central African coasts. The political maneuvering among these entities surely was on par with that of the famous “Great Game” of geopolitics several centuries later.

            Thornton argues that at the outset of European-African trade, the influence of the Europeans was negligible (Thornton, 47). It is only with the advent of two related events that European trade began to have an impact on Africa. With the development of oceanic routes that were bidirectionaly navigable between both Europe and Africa and Europe and America, as well as the subsequent colonization of the New World there came a shift in the nature of European interaction with Africa. This directly led to a trade circuit that resulted in the mass exportation of African slaves to the plantations of the New World.

            The practice of slavery had always been a part of African culture, and slaves were the main repository of wealth for many Africans ( Thornton, 90). In Thornton’s view, this existing slave economy, which can be considered a kind of existing economic infrastructure, was what made slavery lucrative for European traders. Indeed, Thornton actually states that “the Atlantic slave trade was the outgrowth of this internal [African] slavery” (74). The fundamental difference in the experience of New World slaves and their African counterparts seems to be the large scale exposure to differing cultures. Whereas, in their home countries an African slave might be immersed in a culture that he or she is only a small part of, when that same slave is exported to the New World then he or she suddenly becomes the sole repository of the home culture. When many such individuals are placed in close contact with one another, in a setting that is fundamentally alien and oppressive, then cultural hybridization is inevitable. Because of this, Thornton has developed a view that “slaves were not militant cultural nationalists who sought to preserve everything African but rather showed great flexibility in adapting and changing their culture” (206).

            This concept can be most clearly illustrated in the realm of slave language. The average plantation in the New World would house a diverse mix of slaves from many different regions. Obviously, most of them would not have shared the same language. Thus, the development of a common language would have been a necessity. Here, Thornton argues that the development of “Pidgins” or “Pidgin Languages” would have been widespread (Thornton, 213). He goes further to assert that , over time, “a community develops that uses this language as a native speech, [and] then it evolves into a creole, which does have full capacity [of linguistic expression]” (213).

This hybridization of language can be seen as a template for the larger process of cultural hybridization. By blending many different cultural traditions in the Altantic world, the slave trade effectively mixed diverse African cultures as well as European influences to create an amalgam that was simultaneously distinct and “more homogonous than the cultures that compose it” (Thornton 206). It is this new culture that forms the basis of Afro-American and Carribean cultures that we have today.