The ways in which slavery and the slave trade have been remembered owe a lot to the personal narratives of enslaved Africans and their Creole descendants. In a real sense, these narratives are "survivals" of slavery and, hence, suggest that we revisit the approach of Melville Herskovits, who traced these cultural features of African background but did not concentrate on the recorded memories of individuals as one of those "survivals". Similarly, narratives reveal patterns of resistance to slavery among those who had been enslaved in Africa, providing evidence of cultural transference associated with their migration across the Atlantic. Whether individuals were able to identify with a reconstituted community mattered as much as the community that the Creole population was born into. Individuals coming from Africa were not always able to find comrades of similar background and had to form new associations, but arguments that suggest that the response of the enslaved population was relatively similar fail to appreciate the complex ways in which individuals had to respond and the ways in which they chose to resist as a strategy for survival. A study of individuals raises questions about the different ways in which Africans lived through slavery in the Atlantic world while attempting to retain or recreate their cultural and/or social backgrounds. Life histories illustrate the complexity of notions such as the 'Middle Passage' and 'diaspora' and what it meant to have been born in Africa. So the narratives of those born in Africa are accounts of Africa and slavery, and how African history was transferred to the Americas.  
Of course, individuals had diverse experiences, which reveal the variety of conditions that existed under slavery. Not one of the men considered here was 'typical' or fits the stereotype of the slave. These were individuals, and they experienced the slave trade and their enslavement in virtual isolation. They had their own 'cultures' and 'origins', but they could not connect these