“Forgotten ancestors” could well be the title for this book about Central Africans in the American diaspora. They are indeed the hitherto forgotten ancestors in the genealogy of the cultures in the diaspora of the New World, because the magnitude and ubiquity of their contribution have thus far been so overlooked or neglected as to become nearly invisible. Hence, this book opens new vistas and will be an eye opener to many of its readers, as they begin to realize the implications of the demographic size, the geographic ubiquity, and the common cultural background that many of those Central Africans already shared before they even arrived in the Americas. These implications force such a revision of received views concerning the formation and evolution of creolization that this book will leave its stamp on the whole field. It begins to provide answers as to how it all began and how it developed while giving rise to even more questions.

Almost half of all Africans who crossed the Atlantic came from Central Africa. They went everywhere in the Americas, from Buenos Aires to Columbia and Peru, to the wider Caribbean, including Suriname and the Guianas, to the coasts of the United States, from New Orleans to New York; eventually some even reached Nova Scotia. This contrasts to some degree with West Africans, who tended to be settled in discrete clusters, such as those of Bahia and Haiti by people from the Lower Guinea Coast or Jamaica for people from what is now Ghana. But even in such places, large numbers of Central Africans also settled. Kongo is still much remembered in Jamaica, Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, New Orleans, and the Carolina Lowlands.