Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora

by Kevin Dawson

Chosen as a finalist for the Lapidus Center's 2019 Harriet Tubman Prize Long before the rise of New World slavery, West Africans were adept swimmers, divers, canoe makers, and canoeists. They lived along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways, they became proficient in diverse maritime skills, while incorporating water and aquatics into spiritual understandings of the world. Transported to the Americas, slaves carried with them these West African skills and cultural values. Indeed, according to Kevin Dawson's examination of water culture in the African diaspora, the aquatic abilities of people of African descent often surpassed those of Europeans and their descendants from the age of discovery until well into the nineteenth century. As Dawson argues, histories of slavery have largely chronicled the fields of the New World, whether tobacco, sugar, indigo, rice, or cotton. However, most plantations were located near waterways to facilitate the transportation of goods to market, and large numbers of agricultural slaves had ready access to water in which to sustain their abilities and interests. Swimming and canoeing provided respite from the monotony of agricultural bond and brief moments of bodily privacy. In some instances, enslaved laborers exchanged their aquatic expertise for unique privileges, including wages, opportunities to work free of direct white supervision, and even in rare circumstances, freedom. Dawson builds his analysis around a discussion of African traditions and the ways in which similar traditions—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—emerged within African diasporic communities. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Africa

360 pages, Hardcover

First published February 9, 2018

Reviews

[Shé M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and necessary. I'm not a historian or anthropologist, just a Black person in America seeking to challenge and reclaim our narrative. This is essential in this category. Written in a way that is for the most part accessible and not overly academic.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the more significant developments in historical analysis in the last 25 or so years, at least for those of us who explore colonialism and diaspora, has been the rise of what we might think of as ‘ocean history’. At its heart has been an increasing awareness of the existence and actuality of human engagements with their environments and across territorial and geographic boundaries. It was this latter tendency that saw a shift in Pacific history that rejected the colonial approach that consigned island communities to small parcels of land, ignoring their rich engagements with the sea, and justifying their denigration as small world, ‘primitive’ peoples. Pasifika scholars in return began to argue that the sea was not a barrier but a vital component of a ‘seamless culturescape’ (Dawson’s words) that is, in the widely invoked words of Tongan historian Epeli Hau’ofa ‘a sea of islands’.

Kevin Dawson’s exceptional exploration of aquatic cultures in the African diaspora in the Americas and in parts of the continent where those diasporic peoples originated, the West and Central Western areas, draws on this approach and locates a strong aquatic and maritime culture across the Atlantic. Just as the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas argues that Oceania is a Pacific people’s world, Dawson makes a compelling case for understanding riverine and maritime Americas as a Black as well as its more commonly seen Indigenous space.

Dawson builds his case through two strands. The first focuses on swimming, making the point forcefully that the water was a space of fear and danger for Europeans, very few of whom could swim, unlike many if not most of the people along Africa’s west coast and its inland rivers. Furthermore, the absence of good harbours along that long coastline meant that in most cases visiting Europeans, including slavers, were dependent on local watercraft to get to and from the shore. Ships row boats were not suited to the shore breakers, and non-swimming Europeans were dependent on African swimmers to save them in the event of capsize. Not that this skill undermined racist hierarchies – being land-bound was considered a marker of being ‘civilised’.

The second strand explores canoe building and use, demonstrating clearly the falseness of the widely repeated claim that diaspora Africans learned canoe building from Native American populations. This debunking builds on two bases; first that the parts of Africa that were home to many of those enslaved had rich canoe building cultures, and second the canoes diasporic Africans built in the Americas resembled those west African canoes, not those of the Indigenous Americans. Dawson further supports his analysis by noting that at least in the British Americas many of the Indigenous peoples had been driven out or killed by the time substantial African-descent populations built up.

This diffusionist, trans-Atlantic analysis is a key aspect of the argument Dawson makes for the significance of aquatic cultures, in that he demonstrates that diasporic including enslaved African water cultures were brought with them, not inherited or developed in the diaspora. He further develops his analysis to highlight the place and significance of those aquatic worlds in diasporic African settings. He makes a powerful case for the importance of swimming skills as economically valuable as diving. In the very early stages of Spanish colonisation pearls provided a large part of the Caribbean coast’s economic value where Indigenous divers were replaced by Africans. More valuable diving skills however were associated with salvage and recovery work. Here Dawson argues that divers came to occupy a position of comparative privilege in their captivity, showing also in some cases evidence that those divers used that position in the interest of bettering the conditions of others in their wider communities.

The presence of canoes in the African diasporic world also became, in his telling, a place of comparative opportunity or release. They provided mobility, opportunity for trade and access to markets, in being water bound they also provide spaces relatively separate from the dominant white world. The opportunity is however not only in the diasporic communities, but the skills required for canoe building Dawson suggests were shared between ‘home’ communities leading to cross cultural skill recognition, community building, and the emergence of common identities ‘in country’. That is to say, those skills provided the enslaved with bases for common identification and development across language and other cultural barriers. Furthermore those skills were valuable in the white economy where canoe transport allowed cheaper and speedier access to markets than anything on land. Dawson then reinforces this case for an African sourced maritime and riverine canoe culture by looking at songs across the southern USA, Caribbean, and into northern South America, arguing that although canoe songs became increasingly sung in colonial languages they retained a form distinct from field songs, with characteristics of rowing songs seen in source regions in Africa.

The book seems to unsettle conventional views of the African diaspora in two significant ways. First, it shows convincingly that there is a powerful African sourced set of cultural practices that make up a rich set of aquatic cultures in the diaspora and amongst the enslaved. In this it is a potent reminder that the Middle Passage did not annihilate the cultural forms, insights, understandings, and ways of being of those forcibly shipped. Second, he also makes clear that diasporic Africans in the Americas were not land-bound but that many actively lived in water cultures and practices. In the final few pages he brings his focus back to the USA, reminding us that the water world was principally an African cultural space until late in the 19th or into the early 20th century, and that it is only with the rise of Euro-American leisure cultures that aquatic spaces are claimed as principally white zones – be they beaches, pools, or other water worlds.

The book resonates on many levels. It is valuable for and vital reading in African American studies, it enriches insights for those of us working in Ocean histories, it extends notions of the Black Atlantic well beyond its initial associations with modernity and modernism, and it is essential for those us in sport and leisure history to remind us of the socially invented character of those practices and their inclusions and exclusions. Finally, it is a methodologically rich reminder of the need to and value of reading the traces, the silences, and against the prejudices of the archive creators.

Quite simply, this is a superb book that deserves attention well beyond what might be seen as a narrow audience of direct relevance.

[Boyd Cothran · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful, in-depth study of Atlantic African swimming, diving, and boating culture. Incredibly readable. And full of eye-popping revelations like surfing in West Africa and African boat making techniques in the Americas.

[Josh Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptionally well researched. I also appreciated the way Dawson drew from his personal experiences as a diver, surfer, and swimmer to flesh out the aquatic lives of Africans and African Americans on both sides of the Atlantic.

[John Brentlinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book serves as a comprehensive lens into the aquatic histories of West Africans and their descendants. Dawson sheds light on how swimming, diving, surfing, and canoeing served as fundamental skills in Western Africa, and how those skills were used by enslaved Africans in the Americas as a way to obtain a level of comparative privilege to their peers) insofar as they could) and connect to their culture. I had two significant takeaways from this book. First, I realized how swept-under-the-rug the aquatic history of Africa is (compared to those of Polynesia, for example). Due to the combined effects of forced assimilation and segregation, especially of swimming pools, Dawson touches on the fact that many have become distanced from this history, and being fully transparent, I didn’t even realize how deep that history was. Secondly, snd more generally, I noticed that our perceptions of western history often see water as a challenge to be overcome (man conquers nature), as opposed to a tool and force acting with humanity (man works with nature). Water is almost seen as an in-between two settings, rather as the setting itself. I would highly recommend adding this to your list if you have interests in water-people and/or the history of the African diaspora.

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

Convincing and valuable research on the continuity of West African swimming and canoeing practices in the Americas during the colonial period. This worthwhile contribution to Black Atlantic scholarship is unfortunately limited by ungainly attempts at poetic description and a cumbersome and poorly supported argument about West African-derived aquatic practices constituting a form of cultural "resistance" against slavery. The evidence presented by the author himself overwhelmingly suggests that West African swimming and canoeing techniques supported and ultimately expanded the American colonial project, much like the ingenious agricultural contributions of slaves to New World colonies detailed by other scholars in recent decades. That Dawson in contrast likens swimming and canoeing to acts of sabotage comes across as forced and detached from the bulk of his source material.

[Nicole]

Used in HST 301 in Fall 2019, at the end of the semester and paired with Ellen Arnold's Speculum article about rivers and Gregory of Tours. The combination worked well, as the two authors are both using fragmentary sources that have been read differently by others in order to illuminate something entirely different. On the whole, the students liked the Dawson book, though some took issue with the water-oriented figurative language, as well as the focus on (apparently) Britain and a Paris-oriented France when talking about a lack of European swimmers.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the general critique of history as terrestrially preoccupied and the way this work opened up alternate ways of thinking about people and how they lived. I also loved the way this explanation of aquatic history and culture provided such well-rounded background to two of the books I've read recently (ish): She Would Be King and Island Under the Sea. This is a pretty straightforward academic text diving deeper into some angles of history I'd never considered—but I'm not so much of a history girl, so it didn't thrill me.

[Mike Emett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading for Atlantic World Ph.D. reading seminar.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked reading many of the chapters; found some a bit repetitive. Learned a lot! Appreciated the epilogue.

[Lious Moco · Rating 5 out of 5]

While in my opinion it has a lot of unnecessary inclusions, overall it is an intriguing book with a lot of valuable information. While it has a western hemisphere focus, to certain degrees, it does justice to ignored West African maritime cultures. I would always recommend