# Precursors to creolization in early modern Upper Guinea Coast  
The latest evidence to date on the transatlantic slave trade into the Carolina, Georgia and Florida region gives historians new insight into the Western African cultural heritage of the people who are today called the 'Gullah Geechee'. On 824 slaving voyages between 1710 and 1860, an estimated 150,130 African captives were captured, purchased, imprisoned and transported against their will from ports in West and western Central Africa disembarking slaving vessels in South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia ports. Of the total number of captives directly imported into this portion of the American colonies, roughly 43 per cent originated in the Upper Guinea Coast and roughly 42 per cent originated in western Central Africa, a statistical 'dead-heat'. The slave vessel records reveal the percentage of captives which originated in the Upper Guinea Coast and western Central Africa. However, they cannot tell historians how the culture of these two Western African regions or Western African ports would influence the enslaved communities in the South-Eastern Atlantic Coast whose descendants became the Gullah Geechee.  
![img-10.jpeg](img_ref_11)  
FIGURE 2. Areas of origins of enslaved Africans from the 'Lowcountry'  
In identifying for historians two broad embarkation regions, western Central Africa and the Upper Guinea Coast, the slave ship data also pinpoints the genesis of Lowcountry Creoles (Figure 2). Linda Heywood and John Thornton have argued that the culturally and linguistically homogeneous western Central African kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo were the source of 'Atlantic Creole' culture in colonial Virginia (Heywood and Thornton, 2007, pp. 236-39, 49, 51, 60-61, 62-67, $70,72,82,98-109,69-70,86-94,95-97,99,206,08-11,22-26$; Sweet, 2003; Sweet, 2006). Among the Upper Guinea Coast's relatively heterogeneous Atlantic and Mande language groups, ${ }^{5}$ Toby Green argued that the transatlantic slave trade and  
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