Flying Africans

Common card · No. 398234

Flying Africans are figures of African diaspora legend who escape enslavement by a magical passage back over the ocean. Most noted in Gullah culture, they also occur in wider African-American folklore, and in that of some Afro-Caribbean peoples. Though it is generally agreed that the legend reflects a longing for a reversal of the Atlantic slave trade, scholars differ on the extent to which this should be seen as supernatural belief or as allegory: of freedom, death, the afterlife, and even metamorphosis or reincarnation. A common Gullah etiology given for this belief is the 1803 mass suicide at Igbo Landing as a form of resistance among newly enslaved people, although versions of the legend also occur across the African diaspora.

Read on Wikipedia · Image Triangular_trade.png: Sémhur World_map_-_low_resolution.svg: Al MacDonald [1]/ twitter account @F1LT3R derivative work: Jon C (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0