Study of the slave trade led a historian to a curious tale of tangled cultures. Emma Christopher was deep into research for a book about two convicts transported to NSW for slave trading when she was waylaid. For about three years. She had been in Lofa county in Liberia, West Africa, trying to find out more about the convicts. She is a long-time historian of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its legacies and, on her laptop, had clips of African-style songs and dances performed exclusively by a small community known as Gangá Longobá, who are Cuban descendants of African slaves. The Gangá knew almost nothing about the origins of their precious rituals, nor about their African forebears, who had been stripped of their identities generations earlier.
Read the full article at the Sydney Morning Herald