Ernesto Mercer History/ Brazil's "We are all mixed up" African Malungus and American Melungeons

• We've ALWAYS known THIS. It's been written about forever. Except this story STILL doesn't get it right. Melungeons, from Malungu, Kimubundu (from Angola) ie those folks & others who arrived in 1619 at Point Comfort. & those that followed. That's why they spoke Portuguese & Kimbundu...same folks that made the Candomble Angola in Brazil. In Brazil the word is Melongo. It has many meanings. The most relevant is my "shipmate" as in Melongo in Brazil. Also "a spirit from the bottom of the Kalunga" ( the ocean, & the realm of death). Also a title in the old Mbunudu kingdoms that gave the bearer of the sacred malungu objects spiritual & temporal power that included the founding of lineages. Bantu men of the foundation generation were prize husbands. They created cattle culture in the US, they were great farmers. Many were indentured servants & became free after their indentures. & often married white indentures as Bantu men outnumbered Bantu women. They also married Virginia native women. They called themselves Malungu. During the time of the "Black Codes" hamlets could be fined for harboring Melungeons. They began to move across the Cumberland Gap. Into Tennessee. Obama, through his "white" mother is a descendant of a famous Bantu Malungu Soldier. Historians have been telling folks this forever. Lol, so have I. Not all descendents passed on into "Whiteness." A lot of us don't need the DNA either. We know who we were & are. That's one reason why I'm a Tata Nkisi. Why one nickname is Mista Malungu. & my motto is Malungu since 1619. I wrote a poem called "Nativity" about all of this. It's in my notes.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  DNA Study Solves Mystery Of Mysterious Mixed-Race People

  www.huffingtonpost.com
  

  NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies.

  
  

  
  

  • Ernesto Mercer http://www.eclectica.org/v5n3/hashaw.html

    
    

    
    

    MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons - Tim Hashaw - Eclectica Magazine v5n3

    www.eclectica.org
    

    Miscellaneous by Tim Hashaw , Eclectica Magazine v5n3

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer: Lol & a whole lot of us old timers still live around the watershed of the Chesapeake, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, & the Carolinas as Black folks! This is our "Old Country."

    
    
  • Adisa Novah Moswen-Harkless: so true.. Malungu is what I heard a lot say in Bahia..

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer: http://books.google.com/books?id=2zh5AAAAMAAJ...
    

    
    

    The Birth of Black America

    books.google.com
    

    The voyage that shaped early America was neither that of the Susan Constant in 1...See more

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer:  http://books.google.com/books?id=88XKOocy4vIC...
    

    
    

    Children of Perdition

    books.google.com
    

    Some oppressed groups fought with guns, some fought in court, some exercised civ...See more
  • Ernesto Mercer: 7 rivers south, finishing some writing about the Old Country. Been writing about Malungus & going to their places for the last 10 years.

    
    
  • Teníadé Toni Broughton: The side of my family from VA are of this genetic makeup and some scientists took samples of their DNA for some kind of Melungeon study.

    
    
  • Tara Bianca Candido: you know what this means about Elvis...

    Brazilian racial mythology "we are all mixed" US racial mythology esp white... "we aren't mixed"
    

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer: Elvis, Abraham Lincoln, lol...Going back to Carter G. Woodson & his Negro Presidents...

    
    
  • Xavier Auburn Ave Stanford Ernesto Mercer Wait you mean to tell me this dosent trace back to the holy grail, and knights templar? Sorry I had too lol

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer Xavier Auburn Ave Stanford: Believe it or not, it REALLY does involve the true inspiration of the "Flying Dutchman"... I'd comment on everything else above, but then I'd have to kill you...but the Dutchman thing: square biz.

    
    
  • Maven Huggins i either read or believed when i came to know of this clan that Abraham Lincoln might be...bizarre yes, but still believe it

    
    
  • Kenneth Carroll Joel Dias-Porter just gave me the whole Melungeon/Abraham Lincoln story.

    
    
  • Ernesto Mercer Malungus are more interesting.

    
    
  • Maven Huggins glad to know i was not making it up, but he has that/their face. and i always always all my life, felt he looked "odd" -- this is what/how i learned why

    
    
  • Arletha Okiki Ola Williams I read it was 1526 with the Spanish? Did you ever hear that 
  • \
  • 
    Ernesto Mercer : De Soto invaded the Southeast from La Florida. The Spaniards 
    plundered then marched back south & consolidated their Mexican Empire including the Southwest. From Georgia, north they could never gain purchase. The 1526 incident was just that. an incident. Shipwreck, disease & a mutiny of Africans who may or may not have been slaves, nor capitves. ( "Pirates of the Caribbean" got that right: lots of Africans sailed as crew on traders & freebooters (pirates). The 1526 castaways appear to have died out. Europeans & Africans. They are thought to be the source of plague which among other things helped to cause the fall of the Mississippian Great Chiefdoms of the Southeast. The Spaniards attempted to colonize the Chesapeake decades before the English.They kidnapped a young man of high standing, took him to Cuba where they thought that they had him under control. He led them back to his country called Ajakan. The Spaniards built a fort & mission. The ships sailed away. Whereupon said young man led his people to kill all the Spaniards. Native Americans of the Chesapeake region HATED the Spaniards. They drove them off every expedition. The Spanish gave up & gave the British, Dutch & Swedish the opening to settle the Chesapeake & Delaware Bays & the Hudson River. They got their footholds precisely because they WERE NOT Spanish speakers. & all enemies of Spain. All of the Africans, from those who came to Jamestown, to those who built the Wall on Wall Street in Manhattan, etc were Bantus. Many former soldiers captured in the Portuguese wars with Nzinga, or the years that the Dutch seized ports from the Portuguese & were allied with the Mani Kongos. The Malungus who arrived in 1619 & thereafter are "the Charter Generation" of the African Americans. The left their mark in the customs, language, spirituality & arts of the region. As other groups came in they built on the experience of the Malungus. & as Portuguese was a major language spoken in the Kongo & Mbundu kingdoms, that's where the Portuguese part of the Melungeons comes from. & is one reason why Af Am names contain so many variations of Antonio, the great Saint of the Kongo & center of Kimpa Vita, Dona Beatriz's Kongolese Christianity...but that's another story...& another one deeply bound up with Palo.
    
    

    • Kendra Hamilton I want to take your Af Am history course, cousin.

       Those people, 200 years later, were Gullahs (Ngolas or Angolans).
    • Arletha Okiki Ola Williams Omg! You wrote a dissertation your response! Historyman! it! Ok so what I've read talks about some early "Congo based" practices after the 1526 revolt when those Africans ran away to the great dismal swamp area in SC. So not "Palo" but Congo derived practices that later came in

       also those Africans were said to have gone to St. Augustine/Fort Mose as well. I've seen a lot that says they didn't die out, but flourished in SC and FL.
      
      
      

      • Ernesto Mercer : Stono, or Cato's Rebellion led by "Congo Jimi" was a completely West Central African military campaign. The black triangular flags, the strategies & the tactics: there area couple of great articles & books about this. It's start date September 9, 1739 was a major Konoglese Feast Day for the Virgin Mary in the Kongolese Church who had taken on the role of many of the female bakisi. It was a date all the rebels would know. The majority of the West Central African men shipped into the Trade were soldiers. Many of them from Ndongo, after it's fall. In particular they were Nzinga's soldiers, the ones who fell defending her retreat to Matamba. In the early years of US colonial settlement Kongos & Ngolas were also used as hunters & soldiers in the Virginia militias. Kongo-Ngola soldiers made up a great major element of Bacon's Rebellion. As a matter of fact, they were the very last to surrender, long after the whites had. Stono was a major reason for the end of the muster of African Soldiers. & was a reaction to the official beginning of the codification of slavery as an institution. It is said that some rebels made it to their goal: Fort Mose ( Fort Moses) which was set up by the Spanish to undermine the British slave colonies north of Florida. & also to begin the long interweaving of Blacks & Seminoles.

         

         & while it isn't Palo per se, at that time neither was Palo. Palo is a reorganization of the Bantu practices in Cuba, not only of the Cabildo traditions of Habana & Matanzas, but of the Palenque & family traditions of Eastern Cuba. A tradition that began in the 1600s. A reorganization done on purpose done in the late 1880's early 1900's. Kendra, yes, these Ngolas, become Gullahs. The closest thing to pre-Palo Nkisi Malongo is the Praise House tradition. To this day the similarities are striking & noted by Cuban scholars since the late 70's & early 80's, especially in East Cuba ( Joel James Figueroa, Jose Millet). I can't say much about it, but I can say that a person initiated into a Praise House through Seeking & Finding would recognize the initiation rites of many lines of Palo. The root of all Bantu spiritual systems in the Americas is Nkisi Malongo.

        
        
      •