GEOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

The vast majority of the Africans who came to populate the English colonies of North America and the Caribbean came from a region we can designate as Atlantic Africa. It stretched from the Senegal River in northern Africa to the Angolan port city of Benguela in the south. A few African Americans did come from outside this region – inventories and shipping records reveal some people from Madagascar, the areas around the Zambezi basin and perhaps from the east coast of modern-day South Africa – but they were not numerous and came relatively late in the trade.

This region was denned first and foremost by the Atlantic Ocean, because the ease of access to the African coast was dictated not only by the presence of water transport routes but also by the fact that once mastered, the wind and current regime of the south Atlantic made fairly easy linkage for sailing ships between African and American destinations. It was also defined on the north and south by desert regions. North of the Senegal, the Sahara desert and its barren coast made for little trade or navigation; to the south, the Namib desert formed a similar barrier. Even though the Portuguese had a colony in Angola since the late sixteenth century, they had barely explored the region south of Benguela by the 1780s.