**** Creolization and identity politics of pan-Africanism

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Creolization can be considered along three axes. The most commonly discussed is that of African acculturation into a "mainstream" European-American society as determined by slavery. The second involves the introduction of African culture into the realm of European society. A third process underlay the other two, however: slaves from diverse African ethnic backgrounds were negotiating a more unified African identity along with their American one.

In West and Central Africa, the tools were available to carry out this third process, the creation of a pan-African identity, but as an option rather than as the necessity it became under American slavery. Never before had so many diverse African nationalities been forced to communicate across so many ethnic and cultural boundaries as they were in the Americas. According to Sterling Stuckey, therein lay the roots of pan-African nationalism as it was to take shape in the United States many years later. In the Americas, the negotiation and re-invention of a shared culture became a matter of survival. In South Carolina and Georgia rice districts, Africans were able to perform this creolization to produce new cultures certainly informed by European society, but also distinct from it.

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{For the roots of pan-Africanism, see Sterling Stuckey Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America Oxford University Press, 1987, passim.}