African Contributions to America
- Mya Brown
- Feb 4, 2024
- 2 min read
February 3, 2024
This week we read a portion of Joseph E. Hollaway's reading What Africa Has Given America and watched a video titled The Future is Africa.
I was shocked by just how many everyday things we use and encounter that we only have thanks to African traditions.
My group was tasked with focusing on the vaccines and medicine. Some slaves were even freed for saving the colonial planters (a term I also hadn’t heard) using herbal medicines and techniques. According to the text, "Colonial planters generally had more respect for their enslaved Africans knowledge of herbs, medicines, and poison than did the so-called doctors of the era."
Key Examples:
Panpan - was a Virginia manumitted slave freed for his secret concotion of roots and herbs because it was a cure for yaws and for syphilis. He was freed for sixty pounds.
Caesar - cured Middleton from intolerable pain in the "stomack and bowels". He also cured a person bitten by a rattlesnake and a man afflicted with Yaws (the body was covered with scabs from head to toe)
Sampson - freed for discovering an even more affective cure for rattlesnakes than Caesars.
Vaccination was a method used in the Gold Coast for centuries.
I also learned about various foods that to this day we still enjoy. I had learned previously that soul food came from the slaves being given scraps, but I didn’t know what specifically (ex. Lots of pig parts including chitlins). Some essential crops and dishes included the following...
Black eyed peas
Okra (women used this to help while giving birth & in West Africa it is used to produce abortions)
Peanuts
Sesame
Rice
Fried Chicken
turn meal + flour to produce something like Fufu
Hoecake & corn bread
Grits out of Indian corn - like African dish Eba
Essentially, this reading basically showed me how crazy it is that America has historically acted like the country is better and more advanced than Africa. Yet so much of what our culture is today derived from things and traditions from Africa.
Hi Mya,
I like how you detailed out the medicines mentioned in the article and added an additional reference proving the African influence in medicines. I was also surprised that the settlers believed more in the slave medicines than they did their own doctors at the time. I knew that historically many older Black people, especially in the South, made home remedies out of roots and herbs to cure or maintain diseases. My grandmother used a homemade salve and dipped a cloth and it and wrapped it around your face to cure the mumps. I was very young so I barely remember it, but I do remember it was warm and had a certain smell and it cured me. At…