Precolonial Africa
The three medieval West African empires, in order
What are Ghana, Mali, and Songhai?
Prof. Simmons dates Indian Ocean chattel slavery from this year to the present
What is 652 CE?
The year the Portuguese began capturing Africans and taking them to Portugal and Spain
What is 1441?
The year Jamestown was founded
What is 1607?
The year the Moorish army crossed into Spain
What is 711?
This Mali ruler (r. 1307–1337) established Islam in Mali and made Timbuktu a center of learning
Who is Mansa Musa?
The main route into slavery in the Indian Ocean World, often by pledging wives and children for loans
What is debt bondage?
The second of three journeys: after the march to the coast, before seasoning
What is the Middle Passage?
Virginia’s legislature, which in 1662 decreed that a child’s status follows the mother’s
What is the House of Burgesses?
Both videos say the Moors came to Spain from this present-day North African country
What is Morocco?
Official oral historians who recite the histories of Mali and Songhai, often playing the kora or ngoni
Who are griots?
Persian “black play,” a blackface theater tradition that moved into Iranian film
What is siyah bazi?
Up to two years of discipline meant to turn captives into “effective laborers”
What is seasoning?
The Latin name for the principle “offspring follows the womb”
What is partus sequitur ventrem?
The fortress palace in Granada that was never conquered by force
What is the Alhambra?
A family system where men control rank and property but pass them down the female line, as among the Bakongo
What is matrilineal?
This spirit healing ritual is “considered a relic of Indian Ocean slavery”
What is zar?
Slave-trade profits and slave-grown crops financed this transformation of English production
What is the Industrial Revolution?
The 1676 uprising after which the planter elite relied on enslaved Black labor instead of arming poor whites
What is Bacon’s Rebellion?
In this year, Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella
What is 1492?
Lumen says the region was “united under the ___ of the ancient Kingdom of Kongo”
What is suzerainty?
Vaziri: complaints about missing records reaffirm the archive as a “site of recovery and ___”
What is legitimacy?
Enslaved people born in the Americas, worth three times as much as “New Africans”
Who are Creoles?
The September 1739 revolt near Charleston, led by about 20 recently arrived Africans
What is the Stono Rebellion?
Scobie credits the Moors with spreading this science, which let Portugal and Spain cross vast seas
What is navigation?