Ancestral Footsteps: Honoring Africans of the Middle Passage

This website joins global pursuits to preserve the truthful history and remembrance of the extraordinary multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural African souls who, during the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, survived physical, spiritual, and mental trauma due to:

• Their initial capture on African soil

• Their forced exodus and shipping across the Middle Passage on slave trade ships

• Their importation to the shores of South America, the Caribbean, and North America.

 

Designed to inform and uplift, the website is based on Kim-Marie Walker’s solo pilgrimage (2016 - 2018) to at least 48 documented historic U.S. transatlantic slave trade ports; it is also a companion to her WordPress blog. In 2016 she journeyed to 19 ports and is currently writing Part I of the travel memoir, Truth's Place.

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Although Walker’s focus is the 400,000 - 450,000 first Africans ‘imported’ to North America shores from 1601 – 1860s from Africa (majority), the Caribbean, or South America, she also bows down to the estimated 12 million African survivors shipped to South America and the Caribbean—and to the estimated 1 to 2 million who did not survive the crossing.

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For almost four centuries:

• All were captured on African soil and traded for goods by Africans and Europeans.

• All were exported, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, and imported as cargo less than human by governments, merchants, ship captains and crew, and investors from Britain, Portugal, Spain, Britain’s New England colonies in North America, European immigrants, and post-Revolutionary War Americans.

 

While some Africans rebelled and escaped enslavement, an overwhelming majority experienced generational oppression and enslavement, even as they continued to  resist, and survive.

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Forget these multiethnic and multicultural African ancestors? Never.