'He Gwine Sing He Country': Africans, Afro-Virginians, and the development of slave culture in Virginia, 1690-1810

Slaves in colonial and early national Virginia drew on their particular ethnic African cultures, especially Igbo from present-day south-eastern Nigeria, to adapt to the conditions of slavery in the Chesapeake region. Igbo peoples were the bringers of an ancestral tradition that served as the basic source for the common tradition which Afro-Virginian slaves forged over the course of the long eighteenth century (1680s-1810s). There were Africans of other ethnicities in the colony, of course, most notably peoples from Senegambia and "Angola," but Igbo were numerically dominant and, especially in the black-belt, were the 'first-comers'.;I posit a process of "historical creolization," predicated on the assertion that imported Africans constituted loosely defined "groups" rather than "crowds" of cultural strangers. The dissertation identifies and describes the material, social and ideological resources on which numerically dominant Eboan peoples and their immediate descendants drew in order to adapt to the conditions in which they found themselves as slaves in Virginia. This heavily Igbo-influenced community-culture of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Afro-Virginian slaves was one of the principal sources of archaic African-American culture. That which was 'Eboe' in early Virginia was neither a "survival" nor an accident; just because the people did not leave written texts does not mean they were not there.