The flying Africans legend reflects a longing for a reversal of the Middle Passage in the Atlantic slave trade.
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.[1]
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.[2][3][4][5]
^Walters (1997). ""One of Dese Mornings, Bright and Fair,/Take My Wings and Cleave De Air": The Legend of the Flying Africans and Diasporic Consciousness". MELUS. 22 (3): 3–29. doi:10.2307/467652. JSTOR 467652. Retrieved 4 June 2022.
^Wilentz, Gay (1989). "If You Surrender to the Air: Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance in African American Literature". MELUS. 16 (1): 21–32. doi:10.2307/467579. ISSN 0163-755X. JSTOR 467579.
^McDaniel, Lorna (1990-01-01). "The flying Africans: extent and strength of the myth in the Americas". New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids. 64 (1–2): 28–40. doi:10.1163/13822373-90002024. ISSN 1382-2373.
^Young, Jason R. (2017-01-15). "All God's Children Had Wings: The Flying African in History, Literature, and Lore". Journal of Africana Religions. 5 (1): 50–70. doi:10.5325/jafrireli.5.1.0050. ISSN 2165-5405. S2CID 151519181.
^Dewulf, Jeroen (2021). "Flying Back to Africa or Flying to Heaven? Competing Visions of Afterlife in the Lowcountry and Caribbean Slave Societies". Religion and American Culture. 31 (2): 222–261. doi:10.1017/rac.2021.12. ISSN 1052-1151. S2CID 237392638.
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