Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, in Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660, analyze the role of West Central Africans played in the foundation of African American culture. According to the authors, West Central Africa’s long contact with Portuguese culture and religion created an “Atlantic Creole” culture, an African culture infused with Christian and European ideals. Due to dynastic squabbles, wars, and commerce in this region of Africa, Atlantic Creoles comprised the majority of African slaves shipped to the New World in the early seventeenth century, especially those sent to the English and Dutch colonies. This “Charter Generation” stamped their imprint on the slave culture and, it seemed, had easier access to freedom because of their familiarity with Europeans and Christianity.

Heywood and Thornton buttress their theses through a better understanding of the African home and final destinations of the African Creoles.
Both Heywood and Thornton have stressed the African contribution to the Atlantic world and how they shaped the nature of transatlantic slavery. Thornton’s important 1992 work, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, affirmed that Africans, elites particularly, were agents in the slave trade and African slavery shaped African American culture. These themes are elaborated on in Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas. The authors utilize a wide array of primary sources, such as government archives, travel literature, and ship manifests, throughout the book to support their theses and address historical secondary literature on slavery in chapter six. Heywood and Thornton focus on the Central West African region, particularly Kongo, Ndongo, and Angola, which had significant contacts with Portuguese culture. The time period studied, 1585 to 1660, was an era when a significant majority of Angolans were among the Africans shipped to the New World, not only to the Iberian colonies but to the British and Dutch colonies as well.

Heywood and Thornton begin by discussing the nature of the slave trade and how the English and Dutch began building their slave colonies through privateering. This pillaging of ships from the Portuguese outposts in Angola ensured that the first slaves in their colonies were West Central African in origin. The authors then move to Africa, discussing what they term the “Atlantic Creole” culture that developed in the encounter with the Portuguese and other Europeans. The authors make the case that the Portuguese took more slaves from this area in times of political and military strife than in times of peace. He even notes that (p. 119) military activity by the Portuguese was often geared towards acquiring the maximum number of slaves. Their numerous “alliances” with Imbangala mercenary bands attests to this as well. This meant that a healthy majority of slaves transported to the New World, including those captured and sent to Dutch and English America too, were either Christians or familiar with Christianity.

Religion is a prime marker for calling an African an “Atlantic Creole” according to Heywood and Thornton. Many Africans in Ndongo and Kongo were Catholic and proudly so, resisting Dutch Calvinist efforts to proselytize them. The Kingdom of Kongo even sent ambassadors and letters to the Vatican seeking recognition and rights on par with European Catholic nations. The authors note many more examples of the Atlantic Creole culture, citing Europeanized naming practices, burial, music, and clothing styles. These Atlantic Creoles comprised Ira Berlin’s “Charter Generation,” and were treated differently than slaves in the British and Dutch worlds were after the arrival of the “Plantation Generation,” composed primarily of culturally heterogenic West Africans who tended cash crops on large estates. Heywood and Thornton note that these Charter Generation slaves were rarely described in travel literature, perhaps because they were in many ways similar to their Euro-American masters. They often lived in the same homes as their masters, were baptized in the same churches, and so forth. The cultural similarities between Europeans and Atlantic Creoles perhaps explains why slavery for the English and Dutch was not like Portuguese slavery or the post-1660 slavery associated with the Plantation Generation. Slavery meant total dependence upon a master, but in many cases was neither a perpetual nor heritable condition (see, for instance, p. 312).

Heywood and Thornton argue convincingly that West Central Africa was a part of the greater Atlantic World and had long contact with Ibero-Christian civilization. Unfortunately, though they lay out their ground in the introduction, they do not provide a conclusion to cogently and concisely sum up their theses. Instead the book ends rather abruptly with chapter six and the surmise that Euro-American reaction to the large contingent of West Africans who made up the Plantation Generation, an uncreolized group generally unfamiliar with European ways and Christianity, caused a hardening of the definition of slavery in the Anglo-Dutch world. Still, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas offers a possible explanation for the competing and amorphous notions the early English and Dutch held concerning African servants. ( )