Interactive Experience
Drag tradition cards from the deck below into the eight category trays — or tap a card and choose a tray. As you build, the museum reveals the documented links between what you've placed.
Drop a foods tradition here
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United States · Louisiana
A Creole one-pot stew whose name comes from the Bantu word for okra (ki ngombo). The okra thickener traces directly to West and Central African cookery.
Origin · West African okra stews + French roux + Choctaw filé
West Africa
Pounded or sliced okra simmered with palm oil, fish or meat. The mother of every okra-thickened stew in the Atlantic world.
Origin · Igbo, Yoruba, and broader West African home cookery
Caribbean
A green stew of dasheen/amaranth leaves with okra, coconut milk, and salted meat — a direct creolisation of West African leaf-and-okra soups.
Origin · African leafy-greens cookery adapted to amaranth and taro leaf
Brazil · Bahia
A Bahian seafood stew defined by red palm oil and coconut milk — staples carried across the Atlantic by enslaved West Africans.
Origin · Indigenous fish stew + West African dendê (palm oil) & coconut
Jamaica · Caribbean
Coconut-cooked rice with red beans. Part of a wider African rice-and-bean family that includes Lowcountry red rice and Brazilian baião-de-dois.
Origin · Senegambian rice cookery (thieboudienne lineage)
Gullah Geechee · USA
Tomato-stained rice cooked with smoked meat — a direct descendant of West African jollof, preserved by Gullah Geechee rice growers.
Origin · Senegambian jollof traditions on the Carolina coast
Sea Islands · USA
Spoken from the Carolinas to northern Florida. Sister creole to Jamaican Patwa and Sierra Leone Krio — all share Atlantic African substrate.
Origin · English-based creole with heavy Kongo, Mende, Mandinka, Wolof grammar & vocabulary
Jamaica
A full creole with West African syntax and lexicon (e.g. nyam = eat, from Fulfulde/Wolof). Mutually intelligible with Krio and Gullah at the substrate level.
Origin · English lexifier · Akan, Igbo, Yoruba substrate
Sierra Leone
Spoken by descendants of freed people resettled in Freetown — a true Atlantic crossroads language with Yoruba, English, Portuguese, Akan layers.
Origin · Recaptive Africans + returning Nova Scotians & Jamaican Maroons
Haiti
Born on the plantations of Saint-Domingue. Shares deep Fon vocabulary and grammar with Louisiana Creole and the language of Haitian Vodou.
Origin · French lexifier · Fon & Kongo substrate
Honduras · Belize · Guatemala
Spoken by descendants of Africans and Island Caribs exiled to Central America in 1797. UNESCO Masterpiece of Intangible Heritage.
Origin · Arawakan core · West African & Carib loans
East African coast
The lingua franca of the Swahili coast — a thousand-year creolisation of African and Indian Ocean worlds.
Origin · Bantu core · Arabic, Persian, Portuguese loans from Indian Ocean trade
Mississippi · USA
Twelve-bar form built on call-and-response and bent-pitch vocal lines inherited from Sahelian griot music.
Origin · West African field hollers, griot song, banjo (akonting) tradition
Louisiana · USA
Born in a city where enslaved Africans were uniquely allowed to drum publicly. The 'Spanish tinge' Jelly Roll Morton named is Afro-Caribbean clave.
Origin · Congo Square drum circles + brass band + blues + Caribbean syncopation
Jamaica
Built on the one-drop pulse of Rastafarian Nyabinghi hand drums — themselves rooted in Kumina (Kongo) ceremonial drumming.
Origin · Mento + ska + rocksteady + Nyabinghi drumming
Bahia · Brazil
The Bahian ancestor of all samba. UNESCO Intangible Heritage. Shares circle-dance form with Cuban rumba and Gullah ring shout.
Origin · Kongo–Angolan circle dance & song
Cuba
A clave-driven family of secular drum-song forms born in Havana and Matanzas dockyards — a wellspring for jazz, salsa and Afrobeat.
Origin · Kongo (yuka) and Yoruba drumming in the cabildos
Paris · London
From Sidney Bechet in 1920s Paris to today's London scene, a continuously Black European jazz lineage layered with West African and Caribbean players.
Origin · Black American expatriates + African & Caribbean migrants
Garifuna · Central America
The signature Garifuna drum rhythm — also a fertility dance. The basis for modern punta rock across the Honduras–Belize coast.
Origin · Garifuna primero & segunda drums + call-and-response song
Zanzibar · Swahili Coast
A coastal chamber music that braids African, Arab, Persian and Indian instruments — heard at weddings from Mombasa to Mombassa.
Origin · Swahili poetry + Arab oud/qanun + Indian harmonium
Gullah Geechee · USA
A foot-and-clap circle worship — the oldest surviving African performance tradition in North America. Direct ancestor of gospel and shout-style preaching.
Origin · Kongo counter-clockwise circle worship
Bahia · Brazil
An Angolan martial art camouflaged as dance inside a roda (circle) of clapping, berimbau and song. Recognised UNESCO Intangible Heritage.
Origin · Angolan n'golo + Kongo combat games
Pan-diaspora
From Yoruba gele to Louisiana tignon to Jamaican dhuku — a continuous African textile language of status, marriage, and worship.
Origin · Yoruba gele · Wolof musor
Ghana · Asante
Strip-woven silk and cotton with proverbial patterns. Now a global symbol of Black graduation, leadership and pride across the diaspora.
Origin · Asante and Ewe royal weaving traditions
Swahili Coast
A printed cotton cloth carrying a proverb (jina). Worn from Mombasa to Muscat — clothing as conversation.
Origin · 19th-century Swahili coast
Gullah Geechee · USA
A coil-sewn rice-fanning basket whose technique was carried directly from Sierra Leone and Senegal to the Carolina Lowcountry.
Origin · Senegambian coil-weaving
Stone Town · Zanzibar
Carved teak doors studded with brass — signatures of Swahili merchant houses, blending African, Arab and Indian Ocean craft.
Origin · Swahili, Gujarati and Omani carving traditions
Honduras · Belize
The primero and segunda drums of the Garifuna are hand-carved hardwood with deerskin heads — drum-craft kept alive in coastal villages.
Origin · West African hand-drum lutherie
Haiti
A creolised religion of lwa (spirits) served through song, drum and dance. Sister tradition to Cuban Lucumí and Brazilian Candomblé.
Origin · Fon (Vodun), Kongo and Yoruba cosmologies
Bahia · Brazil
Yoruba orixás reconstituted in Bahian terreiros. Each nação preserves a distinct West or Central African liturgical lineage.
Origin · Yoruba (Ketu), Fon (Jeje), Bantu (Angola) nations
Cuba
An orisha tradition whose batá drum liturgy is one of the most precisely preserved African religious musics in the Americas.
Origin · Yoruba orisha worship via the cabildos of Havana & Matanzas
United States
A Christianity infused with African call-and-response, shout and improvisation — birthplace of gospel and the Civil Rights Movement's organising base.
Origin · Spirituals · ring shout · Methodist & Baptist revivals
Gujarat · India
The Sidis — descendants of East Africans in South Asia — sustain a goma drum-and-dance Sufi practice unique in the Indian Ocean world.
Origin · East African Sufi traditions of the Sidi people
Trinidad & Tobago
Pre-Lenten street masquerade rooted in 19th-century Canboulay (cannes brûlées) processions — model for Notting Hill, Caribana and Labor Day Brooklyn.
Origin · Canboulay processions of formerly enslaved Africans
Rio · Salvador · Recife
Samba schools (escolas) are themselves African mutual-aid societies in carnival form — civic memory parading as joy.
Origin · Portuguese entrudo + African drum-and-dance traditions
London · UK
Europe's largest street festival — a Trinidadian Carnival transplanted to London by Caribbean migrants as cultural defence.
Origin · Claudia Jones · Trinidadian carnival in response to the 1958 riots
Toronto · Canada
North America's largest Caribbean street festival — a direct sibling of Trinidad Carnival and Notting Hill.
Origin · Caribbean diaspora in Canada · founded 1967
Portobelo · Panama
Every October, pilgrims walk to Portobelo to honour El Nazareno — a Congo-rooted devotion stitched into Panama's coast.
Origin · Congo-rooted Afro-Panamanian devotion
Diaspora-wide
Annual observance of the end of legal slavery — marked from Bridgetown to Galveston to Halifax as a day of memory and resolve.
Origin · 1834 (British Empire) · 1865 (Texas · Juneteenth)
Documented Connections
