Senegalese Americans

Senegalese Americans (French: Américains sénégalais) are an ethnic group of Americans of Senegalese descent. In the surveys of 2019, 18,091 people claimed to be of Senegalese origin or descent in the United States. However, many West Africans trafficked by enslavers to the United States were also of Senegalese origin (arriving together with Africans of other origins who came by way of Senegalese ports). Thus many African Americans may also have some ancestors of this country.

History

Slavery

The first people whom Europeans trafficked and enslaved from present-day Senegal arrived in the modern United States from several ports of Senegal. The Senegambia area (moderns Senegal, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau) was a critical human-trafficking hub during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both for the United States and Latin America, exporting many West and Central Africans to the Americas. Europeans trafficked most of the West Africans they would soon enslave in the USA through the Saint-Louis port, as well as from Goree Island (while, also are registered some West and Central Africans from Galam port in South Carolina). So, Goree Island, located a few miles off the coast of Senegal in the Atlantic Ocean, was the place from which the Europeans and Americans trafficked West and Central Africans to the former British colonies of North America, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even after of the official abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, displacing maybe 50,000 West and Central Africans from there (although according to the Slave House curator, 20 million West and Central Africans were exported from the Gorée island to the modern United States).

However, not all enslaved people collected from present-day Senegal were actually from there: many of them hailed from other African regions, having been trafficked through Senegal ports by the kings and aristocracies of other parts of Africa, as a consequence of war. Through these ports, Europeans trafficked them to the Americas.