Family Formation in West Africa and West Central Africa

Before being captured and sold into slavery, West Africans and West Central Africans had their own conceptions of family. Prior to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans already practiced polygyny, a system in which men have more than one wife.

Some slave narratives offer us glimpses of family formation in African societies during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Let’s take again Equiano’s case, which we explored in earlier chapters of this book. When he moved from his Igboland hometown to the coast, he narrated his stay with a “chieftain, in a very pleasant country,” where people spoke the same language as he did. According to Equiano’s account, the head of the family that he identified as his first master was a smith, who “had two wives and some children, and they all used me extremely well, and did all they could to comfort me; particularly the first wife, who was something like my mother.”⁴ Very early as an enslaved boy, he established bonds of affection with a woman who temporarily fulfilled a maternal role for him. Many other African men, women, and children of various ages developed similar ties with fellow enslaved persons, freedpeople, and even in exceptional cases with their own owners during their harrowing journeys through the Atlantic Ocean and into slavery.

Religion also shaped family formation. In regions where Islam predominated, it was not uncommon for men to have more than one wife with whom they had children. To a certain extent, African societies were not different from other rural societies in Europe and the Americas, where until the late nineteenth century, having many children secured families many hands to cultivate the fields.

Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, who was a Muslim, also explained in his published narrative how marriage and family formation operated in his homeland of Djougou, in the present-day Republic of Benin. According to him, young men who wished to marry selected the bride by having his sister offer the woman kola nuts.⁶ Following this initial gesture, courtship started with the groom paying multiple visits to the bride until the day of the marriage. During the ceremony, the wedding guests gave some kind of currency to the couple, musicians, children, and other attendants. Baquaqua emphasizes not only that polygyny was “practiced to a great extent, and sanctioned by law” but that a man’s wealth was “sometimes estimated by the number of wives he has,” even though he admits that “occasionally a poor man has a number of wives, and then they have to support.”⁷

The unrest caused by the Atlantic slave trade also led family members to sell their children into slavery, as discussed in chapter 2. But most of the time, African men, women, and children were captured by outsiders and separated from their families. In 1821 Samuel Ajayi Crowther was captured in Osogun, today’s Nigeria, where he lived with his parents, brothers, and sisters, as discussed in chapter 3. His narrative depicted the drama of family separation when Fulani warriors entered his town: “Women, some with three, four, or six children clinging to their arms, with the infants on their backs... [were] running as fast as they could.... While they found it impossible to go along with their loads, they endeavoured only to save themselves and their children.” Whereas his father was left behind, Crowther was captured along “with his mother, two sisters (one an infant about ten months old), and a cousin.” During his journey to the coast, he was separated from his mother and sisters. He met several other captives who, exactly like him, left their relatives behind.⁸ Nearly two decades after he was released in Sierra Leone, Crowther was able to reunite with his mother. Unfortunately, most enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas never had the opportunity to experience these rare reunions.⁹