My wife and I recently visited the Whitney Plantation. It is about 40 minutes west of the New Orleans. While we have visited Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, as well as the African Burial Ground in New York, this was our first visit to a plantation.
We learned that the Whitney Plantation was founded by a German immigrant who later became assimilated into the surrounding French Creole culture. In the 18th Century, his and his family’s fortunes were made off of indigo. Once this crop ceased to be viable, they transitioned to sugar. Both crops were profoundly dangerous to the enslaved Africans whose forced labor they exploited. As in other parts of the Americas, those who worked in the cane fields had short, miserable lives of about 7 to 8 years.
When touring the plantation you can learn how the plantation functioned as an economic engine. It was highly regimented with ringing bells to signal shift changes and a 24-hour labor force. While I am familiar with the labor dynamics of cotton plantations, sugar plantations were quite different in terms of the nature, structure, and hazards of the work which our ancestors were compelled to do.
Even after the end of legalized slavery, the brutal exploitation of African labor continued as a type of neo-slavery, a practice that was given legal sanction via laws which both restricted the movement of newly freed Africans/Blacks, mandated their employment on the local plantations where they were previously enslaved, and assigned convict labor to the cane fields.
Today, the Whitney functions as a museum and a research site. Several of the structures from the 18th and 19th Century have been preserved there. There are also structures from surrounding areas that have been transported to the site for preservation. You can even see the large iron vats that were used to process sugar. Various memorials and monuments have been erected to tell the story of the 500 Africans who were enslaved there. These monuments were very moving.
One monument details the Africans who were sold when two brothers, who owned the site parted company over 200 years ago. Each of the Africans who were sold in this “transaction” are listed. Another set of monuments lists the names of each African who has been identified as having been enslaved on the Whitney Plantation. You can see various names that indicate their place of origin (i.e., the Senegambia or Congo) or their ethnicity (i.e. Bambara, Congo, Igbo, and so on). Some African names are also visible. I noted a number of popular West African names like Mamadou and Boubacar, as well as various Akan and Ewe, as Kofi, Kwaku, and Aba. They also shared accounts of the savage violence that our ancestors were subject to.
There was a memorial to the Africans who took part in the 1811 German Coast Revolt who were later executed, and another to the many children who died on the plantation. We were so moved by the latter two, that Safia suggested that we do a libation in their honor, which we did—one near each memorial.
It was a moving experience, one which reminds me of the importance of study and reflection upon our past, and determination in our efforts to create, as Maulana Karenga says, “the world that we want and deserve to live in.”
