A few months ago, I reflected on the meaning of Black history and the ten major events that I believe have most deeply shaped my life as a daughter of the African diaspora. In the foreword to When We Ruled, Robin Walker cites Maulana Karenga’s definition of Black history as “the struggle and record of humans in the process of humanizing the world, i.e., shaping it in their image and interests.” Walker further writes that Black history “is the collective record of people of African descent in Africanizing the world around them.”
I agree.
For me, Black history is the comprehensive study and documentation of the experiences, contributions, resistance, achievements, and cultural productions of people of African descent worldwide. However, Black history did not begin when Africans arrived in the Americas. It began in Africa, among African people, on the African continent, in 1441, with the Portuguese kidnapping of the first African man and woman. This distinction refuses to separate “Black” from “African,” as the diaspora is a geographical extension of African historical continuity. Thus, it recognizes Africa, its people, and its civilizations as the point of origin. It also acknowledges that, although African people experienced displacement and dispersal, they carried with them their cosmologies, spiritual systems, warfare traditions, governance structures, and cultural knowledge, humanizing and Africanizing the world around them.
The year 1441 marks the historical moment when European aggression began creating the conditions under which diverse African peoples—such as the Mandinka, Wolof, Fula, Yoruba, Igbo, Mende, Temne, Ashanti, Fante, Ewe, Ga, Fon, Hausa, Ibibio, Efik, Bubi, Kongo, Mbundu, Chokwe, Bamileke, Tikar, Mossi, Bambara, Kru, Balanta, Aja, Fang, and countless others—became “lost beyond the waters” and would eventually be racialized collectively as “Black.” Black history centers this newly racialized collective as active agents in shaping world history and cultures, and in influencing continental African history and cultural forms themselves. Marcus Garvey, a son of the diaspora—and a subject of this essay—had a profound impact on Africa, yet he never set foot there.
Black history became a worldwide phenomenon because of intentional activism and institutional organizing that began in the United States, led by historian Carter G. Woodson, who co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Woodson’s organization sought to address the erasure of black history from mainstream historical narratives. He established “Negro History Week” during the second week of February, in 1926. The week-long commemoration eventually became a month-long celebration and is now recognized internationally.
However, because of these origins, the African-American historical experience has become the epicenter of Black History studies. The large and well-funded U.S. university system has created a strong institutional infrastructure for researching Black History that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere in the Black Atlantic world. As a result, books such as Black History For Beginners center the narrative primarily on the African-American experience. While the book acknowledges that “there are people of African descent throughout the world, from Indonesia to the Soviet Union,” its emphasis shifts to “Black history is the American history that was omitted from your textbook.”
I must admit, I once found this perspective bewildering. It may be why I have read so widely. While I must acknowledge that my knowledge of Black history is due in large part to the tireless efforts of African-American educators, as a daughter of the diaspora born in the Caribbean, when I first encountered Black history as African-American history, I felt like I was experiencing marginalization and erasure all over again. Although more American historians are exploring the histories of the wider Black Atlantic, significant historical events like the Haitian Revolution, the long wars for freedom in Spanish America, and resistance movements in the Caribbean and Brazil continue to receive inadequate historical inquiry. Additionally, a United States-focused approach means English-language archives and debates dominate the literary landscape, while important Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone voices are underrepresented.
Approximately 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships during the transatlantic trafficking, and around 10.7 million survived to reach the Americas. When you look at the busiest ports, it’s striking how much Brazil and the Caribbean stand out as the beating heart of the African diaspora. Rio de Janeiro and Salvador da Bahia received close to 3.4 million Africans, Kingston nearly 900,000, Bridgetown about 500,000, and Cap‑Français more than 400,000. By comparison, Charleston—the biggest port in the US—received just 186,000.
However, one must acknowledge that by the eve of the Civil War, the United States had one of the largest Black populations in the Americas—about 4.44 million free and unfree people, according to the 1860 census. The size, resilience, and endurance of the African-American community partly explain why the U.S. is a focal point for Black scholarship and recognition, even though it was never the main destination during the transatlantic period.
As I write this, I’m deeply grateful for the generations of African-American scholars and activists who demanded the world pay attention to Black History. Still, my aim here is to bring more balance to that istwa (history). What follows are my top ten defining moments in Black History—chosen to honor the nearly 12.5 million taken from Africa, and the countless others who died before they could be taken. One, or possibly two, of my choices may be deemed controversial!
But first I must write about the beginning.
Out of the salt waters came first the Portuguese, seekers of gold, carrying within themselves a brutal and blood-soaked history that they would use to darken our land. Clyde W. Ford notes that the Kongo people called the Portuguese “Mputuleezo,” meaning “agitated water.” This name alludes both to the Atlantic surf from which Europeans arrived and into which so many Africans disappeared, never to be seen again. The Kongo called the Portuguese land “Mputu,” meaning “the land of the dead.” However, this does not only refer to a place of physical death, but to an underground realm of invisible powers and unconscious forces. Mputu also became the realm to which Africans, taken aboard ships to the Americas, were cast to confront darkness and the unknown.
The Mputuleezo “first” landed on African shores in 1434, but initially found no one to capture. Afonso Gonçalves Baldaia journeyed further south in 1435–36, returning to Portugal with seal skins. It was not until Antão Gonçalves’s voyage to the Río de Ouro coast in 1441 that the first recorded capture of an African man and woman took place. According to Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, Henry the Navigator sent Gonçalves to the African coast to obtain seal skins. However, after completing this task, Gonçalves wanted to do something he thought would bring him honor and reward: bring back people as tangible proof of his travels to Africa. He selected nine men to go ashore to find people to capture. They eventually encountered an African man “following a camel and with two assegais in his hands.” Although he found himself up against a gang of ten Mputuleezo, he defended himself as best as he could, showing “a bolder front than his strength warranted.” He was wounded by a javelin and captured. On the return journey to their ship, the gang saw a woman walking alone. They seized her too. Three years later, in 1444, Africa’s sons and daughters were being publicly sold in Lagos, in the Algarve.
Yet the istwa (story) of that first capture of an African man is deeply revealing.
Alone, he stood his ground against ten Mputuleezo raiders.
It was only after he was wounded with a javelin that they were able to overpower and capture him.
We do not know his name.
We do know that he was captured in 1441 in the Rio do Ouro area, south of Cape Bojador—on the coast of what is now Western Sahara—along with an African woman whom Zurara described as a moura negra. He later refers to the man simply as a “Moor.” Yet this terminology, elsewhere in the chronicle, shows that this does not let us determine with certainty how we would classify the man’s complexion today. Here, I remember him simply as an African man: one of the earliest documented Africans to confront the developing Mputuleezo assault on Africa, and as a figure standing at the threshold of what would become the Maafa.
This is our istwa (story).
Since 1441, Black people have faced European oppression and aggression, physically, socio-economically, psychologically, spiritually, culturally, and intellectually. Yet we have defended ourselves—individually and collectively—time and time again. Our fight is ongoing and will never cease, because “we [have to] rebuild,” and since we have to rebuild:
we will choose our most knowing
most eloquent old women
to spit in the mouths
of the newborn babies
so that they will remember
and be eloquent also
and learn well
the lessons of the past
to tell their grandchildren
so that if you come again
in another time
with your trinkets and arms
with porcelain bowls
and scriptures
they will say
we know you.
From When You Have Emptied Our Calabashes by Iyamide Hazeley
Thank you for reading,
Meserette Kentake
PS. Tomorrow, I’ll publish Part 2, starting with the first four istwa I’ve chosen as defining moments in Black history.
Zurara kept the javelin, the camel, even the count of the ten it took to overpower one man, and did not keep his name. Starting the record at 1441 with him standing his ground is remembering done truthfully.
I am looking forward to your next post