Planters’ integration practices inadvertently preserved African communities and cultures.

Evidence

Within each of these groups there was cultural and linguistic diversity, but African languages and customs were undoubtedly kept alive. Some planters placed new arrivals under the tutelage of a slave on the plantation who came from the same homeland to facilitate their integration into plantation life. In the process they also facilitated the maintenance of African communities in their midst. The enslaved recalled, and sometimes called upon, their homelands. In one Vodou song recorded in the 1950s, probably a relic from the days of slavery, a singer calls on the King of the Kongo to “look at what they are doing to me.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 153

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Plantation tutorship systems inadvertently sustained African cultural communities (similarity 0.91)
• African religions blended with Catholicism into new syncretic practices on plantations (similarity 0.81)
• Planters found it more profitable to work slaves to death than to sustain them. (similarity 0.81)
• Plantations mixed slaves from a bewildering array of African nations. (similarity 0.80)
• Slave religions forged plantation-wide communities that crossed individual estate boundaries. (similarity 0.80)
• Ex-slave landlords replaced whites as the new plantation owners in Saint-Domingue (similarity 0.79)
• Louverture spared planters partly because the colony needed their expertise (similarity 0.78)