Though exact totals will never be known, the transatlantic slave trade is believed to have forcibly displaced some 12.5 million Africans between the 17th and 19th centuries; some 10.6 million survived the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic.
Though descendants of these enslaved Africans now make up considerable segments of the population in the United States, Brazil and many Caribbean islands, written records of their ancestors’ origins are difficult—if not impossible—to find.
Through extensive research, however, scholars have been able to make educated guesses about where many of the slaves brought to the New World originated.
Slaves brought to the United States represented about 3.6 percent of the total number of Africans transported to the New World, or around 388,000 people—considerably less than the number transported to colonies in the Caribbean (including more than 1.2 million to Jamaica alone) or to Brazil (4.8 million).
According to Ghanaian Historian, Henry Kwadwo Amoako of the University of Cape Coast, the Africans who arrived in 1619 in Virginia on the White Lion (and, a few days later, the Treasurer) were from Angola, and have researched on how they came to be captured.
Deep research reveals that captain William Tucker took two of them into his household, Isabella and Antony, and allowed them to marry.
When their child William became the first recorded black birth in what would become the USA, he was baptized into the Anglican faith in 1624.
There was a “Negro woman” named Angelo in a 1624 census had arrived on the Treasurer in 1619.
Archaeologists have recently discovered graves that might include hers.
“This first group that came survived and created a solid and growing community of people of African descent, with some of them intermingling with English and the Native peoples,” says Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a professor of history at Norfolk State University and a member of various commemoration commissions.
Over a few decades, she said, the African presence grew with the arrival of more ships as well as with births.
This resulted in “the emergence of racialized politics, law and a bifurcated society.”
In 2019 Ghana marked 400 years since the first slave shipment left Ghana’s coast for the United States.
Of those Africans who arrived in the United States (1619 and beyond), nearly half came from two regions:
Senegambia, the area comprising the Senegal and Gambia Rivers and the land between them, or today’s Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Mali; and west-central Africa, including what is now Angola, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon.
The Gambia River, running from the Atlantic into Africa, was a key waterway for the slave trade; at its height, about one out of every six West African slaves came from this area.
In addition to the nearly 50 percent of the total number of enslaved Africans in the United States from these two regions, a considerable number of slaves had their origins on the so-called “Slave Coast,” which is now the West African nation of Ghana, as well as neighboring parts of the Windward Coast, now Ivory Coast.
Others originated in the Bight of Biafra (including parts of present-day eastern Nigeria and Cameroon), an inlet of the Atlantic on Africa’s western coast that was a hub of extensive slave-dealing operations.
Ghana has a dark history of being one of Africa’s main shipping points for slaves.
In 1619, a ship with “20 and odd” African captives made of some Angolans and Ghanaians landed at Point Comfort in Virginia, ushering in the era of American slavery.
This was part of the transatlantic slave trade, a triangular route from Europe to Africa, to the Americas and back to Europe.
The Africans were sold as slaves to work on tobacco, cotton and sugar plantations.
Those goods were then transported to Europe.
It is estimated that 12 million Africans were transported — and almost two million died — on the Middle Passage, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
While slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865, the generational impact still lives on Today.
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