How many black Americans really have African surnames that they think are European surnames?

I was sitting next to Adam Ouologuem and feeling darn lucky. Ouologuem is a woman, and women are my favorite gender. And Ouologuem is a beautiful woman. It’s not often a good-looking woman bothers to talk to a guy with a kisser like mine.
 
Her first name is pronounced a-DAHM, with the accent on the second syllable. She's is a journalist from Mali who lives in the United States. We both attended a symposium recently at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, N.C. During a break, Ouologuem took time to school me about my last name.
 
“It’s common in my country,” she said of the name Kane, which is pronounced KAHN in Mali. “There’s also the name Ly in Mali. It’s spelled L-e-e here.” Both Kane and Ly/Lee are, Ouloguem said, Fulani names.

It was the revelation about the name “Lee” I found fascinating. A dear friend of mine with that last name visited Senegal and Gambia several years ago. People in both countries said she looked Fulani.

This Fulani goddess’ ancestors may not only have been Fulani, but they may have had the Fulani name of Ly, which they passed down and may have become the Anglicized name Lee.

With what we now know about African history, American history and the history of Africans in the Americas, this may not have been an uncommon thing. William S. McFeely, the author of a biography of Frederick Douglass that was published in 1991, said the great orator and abolitionist might have also been Fulani.

Douglass was born Frederick Bailey around 1818 in Talbot County, Md. The name “Bailey,” McFeely wrote, “may have had an African source. In the 19th century, on Sapelo Island, Georgia (where Baileys still reside), there was a Fulfulde-speaking slave from Timbo, Futa Jallon, in the Guinea highlands, who could write Arabic and who was the father of twelve sons.
 
“His name was Belali Mohomet. ‘Belali,’ spelled in various ways, is a common Muslim name…Belali slides easily into the English ‘Bailey,’ a common African surname along the Atlantic coast. The records of Talbot County list no white Baileys from which the slave Baileys might have taken their name, and an African origin, on the order of ‘Belali,’ is conceivable.”
 
Belali/Bailey, Ly/Lee and Kane may not be the only African names that survived once black folks crossed the Bitter Passage and landed in America. Benjamin Banneker’s last name came from his grandfather, whose African name was Banneky, which was sometimes spelled Bannaky.
 
So, what does this teach us about some of what has passed for history within black America for the last 40 or 50 years? To be blunt: some of it may be downright wrong.
 
For decades, many of us have clung to the version of slavery and black history given to us by Malcolm X, our Shining Black Prince, in his autobiography. The nutshell version of that history is that blacks were kidnapped from Africa by a race of white devils, thrown in chains and packed together in the dark nether regions of slave ships and brought to America.
 
Once here, we were brutalized. Our women were raped. We had Christianity shoved down our throats, the better to brainwash us into being submissive and obedient slaves. We were stripped of culture, language, religion and name.
 
Much of that may be true. But not all of it.
 
Ira Berlin, in “Many Thousands Gone,” wrote that some Africans resisted attempts to convert them to Christianity (some slave owners resisted their being converted; it seems some masters felt becoming Christians might give slaves funny ideas about being free and equal.).
 
And we now know the part about all slaves being stripped of their names isn’t completely accurate. Some African names, in one form or another, did survive. Not all of us were stripped of our names.
 
The lesson here is that we should take any history lessons given to us by a guy who cobbled his unofficial history degree together from reading books in prison with a grain of salt. The other is that our slave ancestors struggled to hold on to vestiges of their African identity more than we’ve previously given them credit for.

Our history is far more complex and fascinating than the white devil/black victim nonsense we’ve been listening to for years.