African Patterns in the Afro-American Family

Recent and contemporary scholarship on Afro-American history by Woodson (1936), Herskovits (1941), Blassingame (1979), Genovese (1974), and Gutman (1976) has revealed that the earliest forms of African family organization recreated in America by enslaved blacks represented both a syncretization and an adaptation of certain universal features to the realities and demands of slave life. Among the African patterns that were transplanted and transformed by Afro-American slaves were consanguineal kin groupings (kin networks), husbandwife relations, sibling bonds, socialization practices, patterns of exogamy, marriage rules and rituals, naming practices, relationships between alternate generations (i.e., grandparents and grandchildren), patterns of respect and deference, and the extension of kinship terminology to elders throughout the community (Sudarkasa, 1980: 52). Despite the evident survival of such Africanisms among American slaves there has been a stubborn resistance on the part of many scholars to make such an admission. Most often the argument follows the view expressed by Elkins (1976: 90, 98-102) that there was so much cultural diversity among the African tribes involved in the slave trade that it is impossible