Documenting the Diaspora

Historian couple investigate Central Africa's place in world history, rooting Black studies in an international context

By Ronald Roach

Traveling to the Vatican to study documents once belonging to a 17th-century central African diplomat may seem an unlikely project for professors in an African American studies program. But for Drs. John Thornton and Linda Heywood, husband and wife historians, the trek they made earlier this year to Rome represents just one facet of the broad scope of Black studies scholarship for which they are known.
At a time when Black studies programs at American colleges and universities are placing increasing emphasis on the impact of Black migrations and movements throughout the world, scholars such as Thornton and Heywood are gaining prominence in the discipline due to the shifting focus. Scholars like this couple, who are now reshaping Black studies along international dimensions, often bring to their specialties fluency in two or more languages; backgrounds in European, Latin American, African or Asian studies; and an interest in examining the wide diversity of the Black experience both in and outside Africa.
As professors in the African American studies program at Boston University, Thornton and Heywood are gaining attention for at least two projects whose implications illustrate how African Diaspora research may serve to reorient Black studies. The one initiative that had the couple conducting research at Vatican City this year involves their investigation of letters and documents that were carried by Antonio Manuel, a diplomat from the Kingdom of Kongo, as he traveled from central Africa to the Vatican from 1604 to 1608. After a long delayed journey, Manuel died just three days after arriving in Rome. 
The research is expected to shed considerable light on one of Africa's first independent nations, the Kingdom of Kongo, which existed in what is now Angola. "(Kongo) was operating at a level of sophistication that most people don't associate with Africa" during that period of time, Thornton says. "They had a large strata of literate people. The surviving letters indicate this."
The second project, which encompasses the research that has revealed Kongo to have been a highly sophisticated and developed nation for its time, is expected to re-establish the origins of the African slaves brought to the New World during establishment of the first English, Dutch, Swedish and French colonies. Heywood and Thornton are contending in a forthcoming book that the first generations of African slaves brought to the colonies, such as in Virginia and New York, during the 1600s were not of West African origin, but originated directly from central Africa.
"(They've) got good evidence for making that argument. I have high regard for them," says Dr. Ronald Hoffman, a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.