In this week’s reading of Michael Gomez’s Exchanging Our Country Marks, Societies and Stools (Chapter 5)<\/em> the people from Sierra Leone and Akan are put under the microscope as they were heavily pulled from their lands during the Atlantic slave trade. Given the term African slave, the knee-jerk reaction is to coin them all together as black and all alike. However, as this reading pointed out, that is clearly not the case. While Africans had \u201cdeveloped a shared identity\u201d (89), there were many distinct tribes and groups that operated differently from one another. These distinct groups often sparked inter-group hostilities within the ties of the Atlantic slave trade, which led to group rulers renting out land for European groups like the Royal African Company to establish headquarters. The commercialization of their own people was just the surface layer in regards to the people of Sierra Leone.<\/p>\n The biggest concept was the people of Sierra Leone’s vast and intricate number of societies that were created among the different ethnic groups. It was important to note that \u201cethnicity was clearly operative for many of the principal groups\u201d (89). The people formed their own strength as a society and had great political strength. The African people had a societal structure among tribes that far surpassed many European structures. These individual societies were very different, as women had roles of leadership and to them it was common. The community was often run by women as they were strong and exercised political power \u201con their own\u201d. (93) It is important to note the societies willingness to give power over to women, where in other countries that is a subject where the bullet has yet to be bitten. Gomez even goes into detail about how because the women were such good agricultural farmers that in North America it transferred over as they cultivated rice primarily. (93) The importance of female leadership is stated very well by Kyle Kelsay<\/a>, as he explains it to be the voice in both religion and community.<\/p>\n In the matters of religion that is where the Akans come in. They played a heavy role in death and the afterlife and their beliefs in where there ancestors would carry on. They carried on the belief in spiritual nature of human beings and the ancestral world. So although many would like to clump Africans slaves together as unintelligent and simply used as a labor force commodity. The people of Sierra Leone and Akan, clearly show that they were far more capable than what Europeans painted them out to be as they established many secret societies and strong roots of religion. Many of which did transfer across the Atlantic through the slave trade, although many were slightly altered due to the new conditions and freedoms allowed.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n