Katherine Collins, Maci New, Adam Funck, Grace Kinner

Humans of Miami

“Knowing who I am is very important to me. I think a lot of people find their strength in understanding where they came from and how they came to be where they are. Their lineage and their family story, you know. From what I can gather my story begins in western African tribes, with the birth of my many-great grandparents. I have been able to trace some of my ancestry back to Western and Central Africa, maybe near the Congo, but obviously it is pretty hard to be sure. One thing I am sure of however, is of their enslavement and ultimately their relocation through the Transatlantic slave trade. They were taken and shipped to Brazil, for twenty cowrie apiece, less than the price of meals for the week. They were put up on the auction block to be sold for backbreaking labor working on sugar plantations. They were “desarranjar” --that’s the Portuguese word for uprooted-- from their homes and forced to make a new life in South America. And even then life was controlled by their masters, so it wasn’t really their own. A hundred years or so later, when I was a young girl, my mamãe and papai and I immigrated to the United States. That’s how we got here, to Florida. Lately I’ve been reading about why so many of our people were taken from their homes, ripped from their families and stripped of their identities, and I’m beginning to understand more of the history behind it. It is said that Africans were specifically chosen for enslavement for multiple reasons: because of the lack of central government across the continent that allowed for easy exploitation of poorer nations and peoples. My ancestors were also chosen because our people had been farming for millennia and the European elites uprooting them had no knowledge of the necessary skills to farm the crops of the New World and also because they were surprisingly resistant to the European diseases that killed most of the Native Americans. In the eyes of the Europeans weak slaves were bad slaves. It makes my blood boil to think about the hardships these people endured, and how people continue to deny the obvious echoes of that same oppression in society today. I keep their struggles in the back of my mind always as a reminder that, despite some advances, slavery and oppression still permeate every facet of modern society. Every time I encounter those echoes in my life, instances of prejudice, injustice, or outright hate, I look back and think about all that my ancestors had to go through to get me to where I am today. It is there that I draw my strength, hope, and perseverance to go on.”

Sources:

Understanding Slavery. “Trade and Commerce.” Understanding Slavery Initiative. 2011. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.

Johnston, Mark. "The Sugar Trade in the West Indies and Brazil Between 1492 and 1700." The Sugar Trade in the West Indies and Brazil Between 1492 and 1700. University of Minnesota Libraries, n.d. Web. 14 Feb. 2017.

Pruitt, Sarah. "What Part of Africa Did Most Slaves Come From?" History.com. A&E Television Networks, 03 May 2016. Web. 16 Feb. 2017.

Reader, John. Africa: A Biography of the Continent. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998. Print.