“They are forcibly brought here to the New World, and these men come here bearing names like Peter Portuguese and Anthony Congo. Obviously the Africans don’t have names like Anthony and Peter. The very first thing you want to do to an enslaved person is you want to strip them of their identity, and how do you do that? You take away their [given] African names and you replace them with new European names.” The captured Africans’ last names often indicated where they were stolen from or reflected a connection to the person who took them from their birthplace—this, Damaras said, helped the
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