Atlantic Creolization: Enslaved Africans Maintain Cultural Practices Under Colonial Surveillance

Through the first half of the eighteenth century, enslaved African people developed sophisticated strategies for maintaining African cultural traditions while adapting to colonial conditions. Forbidden from using drums in most colonies — which authorities correctly understood as communication tools — enslaved people developed substitutes: hand-clapping, foot-stomping, and body-percussion. Ring shout worship — a shuffling circular dance to chanting and handclapping preserving West African religious movement — was practiced in brush arbor gatherings away from white surveillance. Enslaved Muslims maintained prayer in secret. African naming traditions, foodways, medicinal plant knowledge, and craft techniques (basket-weaving from specific West African traditions survives to the present in South Carolina's Gullah-Geechee community) were transmitted across generations. Praise houses and informal gatherings became sites of community formation. Enslavers tried to disrupt African cultural continuity by mixing people from different ethnic groups, but cross-group bonds formed anyway.