Enslaved Africans sometimes kept their original African or regional names

Evidence

Mustapha, historians tell us: John C. Inscoe, “Carolina Slave Names: An Index to Acculturation,” Journal of Southern History 49, no. 4 (November 1983), 533. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 68. According to John Inscoe, “Quite a few slaves [brought from abroad and not born here] were allowed to keep either their original African names or names given them elsewhere, as indicated by the frequent use of Spanish and Portuguese names retained by slaves brought from the Caribbean Islands or South America” (Inscoe, p. 529). — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 1134

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone researching African name retention or the Middle Passage — contradicts the assumption that enslaved people were always renamed.