Migration and the African Diaspora
This massive population movement occurring from 1500 BCE to 500 CE spread agricultural technology and language across the African continent.
What is the Bantu Expansion?
This term describes the blending of different religious beliefs and practices, such as when enslaved Africans combined West African spirituality with Christianity.
What is Syncretism?
These professional oral historians, storytellers, and musicians serve as the "living libraries" of West African history and culture.
Who are Griots?
This 17th-century Queen of Ndongo and Matamba famously resisted Portuguese colonization for 30 years through both diplomacy and warfare.
Who is Queen Njinga?
This continent is the second-largest in the world and is recognized in the CED as the "cradle of humanity" where the earliest modern humans emerged.
Answer: What is Africa?
This 14th-century ruler of Mali made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca, showcasing West Africa's global connections and immense wealth to the Mediterranean world.
Who is Mansa Musa?
In many West African societies, such as those in the Ghana and Mali Empires, power and inheritance were often passed through this mother-centered lineage system.
What is a Matrilineal system?
This early West African culture (c. 1500 BCE–200 CE) in present-day Nigeria is famous for its naturalistic and distinctive terracotta sculptures.
What is the Nok Culture?
Led by an enslaved man named Jemmy, this 1739 South Carolina uprising was the largest slave revolt in the British mainland colonies.
What is the Stono Rebellion?
This 13th-century founder of the Mali Empire, known as the "Lion King," is the subject of one of Africa's most famous epics preserved by oral tradition.
Who is Sundiata Keita?
This term describes the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, famously depicted in a 1788 diagram of the ship Brookes.
What is the Middle Passage?
This 1662 Virginia legal doctrine stated that a child's status (free or enslaved) followed that of the mother, ensuring the growth of hereditary slavery.
What is Partus Sequitur Ventrem?
Also known as "Sorrow Songs," these musical pieces allowed enslaved people to express grief, hope, and coded messages for escape.
What are Spirituals?
These independent communities were formed by formerly enslaved people who escaped and created autonomous societies in remote areas like swamps or mountains.
What are Maroon communities?
This Moroccan scholar and traveler spent decades visiting Muslim-ruled lands; his 14th-century writings provide vital eyewitness accounts of the piety and law of the Mali Empire.
Who is Ibn Battuta?
Known as "Atlantic Creoles," these individuals of African descent arrived in the Americas with linguistic skills and cultural knowledge from both Africa and Europe.
Who are Ladinos?
This social and legal principle, also known as the "one-drop rule," classified anyone with any known African ancestry as Black to maintain racial hierarchies.
What is Hypodescent?
This Creole language, spoken in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, blends English with various West African languages.
What is Gullah?
This term refers to "quiet" methods of defiance used by enslaved people, such as breaking tools, feigning illness, or learning to read in secret.
What is Everyday (or Day-to-Day) Resistance?
Issued by the British Governor of Virginia in 1775, this proclamation offered freedom to any enslaved person who fled their rebel masters to fight for the British Crown.
What is Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation?
Often called the "Second Middle Passage," this term refers to the forced internal migration of over one million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South in the 19th century.
What is the Domestic Slave Trade?
This analytical framework examines how multiple social categories (like being both Black and female) overlap to create unique experiences of discrimination or privilege.
What is Intersectionality?
Created in 1375 by Abraham Cresques, this famous map visually depicts Mansa Musa holding a gold coin, symbolizing Africa's central role in global trade.
What is the Catalan Atlas?
Passed in response to the Stono Rebellion, this restrictive law prohibited enslaved people from gathering in groups, growing their own food, or learning to read.
What is the Negro Act of 1740 (or the South Carolina Slave Code of 1740)?
This massive stone complex in Southern Africa, which flourished between 1200 and 1450, was the center of a trade network reaching as far as China, debunking myths that sub-Saharan Africa was isolated.
What is Great Zimbabwe?