Never Forget Slavery

HERMAN L. BENNETT — COLONIAL BLACKNESS, A HISTORY OF AFRO-MEXICO — 2009

ONCE A CHRISTIAN SLAVE IN MEXICO, NOT FOR VERY LONG!

This book is important if you want to try to understand how slavery worked for Black Africans in Mexico. One thing is sure. It did not work the same as in North America under the English and then British authority. It did not work the same as in other South or Mesoamerican countries, including the West Indies. But in Mexico, like in so many other countries in the Americas, there are no serious archives about slavery: number of captured Africans in Africa, number of Africans actually and forcefully embarked in Africa, how many ships departed from Africa, how many ships arriving in the Americas, number of embarked Africans and delivered Africans, the destinations of these Africans, their names, ethnicity, origins, languages, religions, or any data about them apart from sex and estimated age. And the most important word here is “estimated.” They were granted names, and that was the first difference between the British Protestant procedure on the one hand and the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Catholic procedure(s) on the other hand. On the Catholic side, Christening was a rule. The slaves had to be baptized, and thus given some Christian names sanctified by the christening ritual…