West African

The history of Acadiana is inseparable from West Africa. Much of its food, music, language, and spiritual traditions helped shape the distinct cultures of South Louisiana.

Settled in 1699, the French colony of Louisiana was originally conceived, by its French-Canadian founder Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, as a territory dependent on slave labor. Within a decade, enslaved Africans were being transported from the Caribbean. In 1719, the first pair of slave ships arrived on Louisiana’s shores, carrying 451 souls. An estimated 6 to 12,000 enslaved individuals from West Africa — primarily the Senegambia, Bight of Benin, and Congo regions — arrived during the French colonial period. The Spanish colonial administrators continued importing Africans throughout the late 19th century, as a plantation economy began to take hold.

West African culture fundamentally shaped the culture of South Louisiana. Area culinary staples, including rice, legumes such as black-eyed peas and kidney beans, yams, and okra, were likely first transported aboard transatlantic slave ships. In fact, the word gumbo derives from several West and Central African words for okra, such as ki ngombo in the Bantu language.

African cultural retention is also evident in our diverse music styles. Most evident is the heavy syncopated rhythm and propulsive percussive backbeat, via the frottoir or washboard, found in zydeco.

Lafayette, Acadiana’s hub city, is home to two historic Black communities. The first, the La Place neighborhood, commonly known as Fightingville, was established in 1856 and is located just north of downtown. A mostly residential community, La Place was home to the area’s first African-American Catholic Church, St. Paul’s, founded in 1911, and a hub of Black commercial and social life called The Block.

Located on the south side of downtown, the area known as Freetown-Port Rico was settled by free people of color in the years preceding the Civil War, established on the former grounds of Louisiana Governor Alexandre Mouton’s sugar plantation. The social center of Freetown was Good Hope Hall, a concert venue and assembly room used, most notably, by the True Friends Society, which worked to safeguard the city’s Black community from white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.

Today, the neighborhood is home to Maison Freetown, a museum, event space, and bed-and-breakfast dedicated to documenting and preserving the history and culture of Lafayette’s African-American community.

Several other Black history museums dot the Acadiana area. In St. Martinville, the African American Museum focuses on the lives of enslaved and free people of color who called the Attakapas District home, from the colonial era to the present day. In Opelousas, the Rural African American Museum traces the history of St. Landry Parish’s Black population from settlement to the rich Creole cowboy culture of today. Further east, in Ascension Parish, Donaldsonville’s River Road African American Museum details the history of Louisiana’s primary plantation region.

The Africa-to-Louisiana cultural pipeline can be experienced through the diverse food cultures of the area, as well as at any musical festival, most notably Festival International de Louisiane, which frequently features at least one artist from West Africa.