Middle Passage Experience

The Middle Passage was the oceanic crossing from Atlantic Africa to the Americas endured by enslaved captives. The experience involved extreme physical confinement, systematic violence, disease, starvation, and the death of shipmates — conditions that Stephanie Smallwood describes as a commodification of the body that shattered African cosmological frameworks for understanding life and death. Survivors were transformed by the crossing: stripped of names, languages, and social ties, but not of the capacity to form new bonds through shipmate kinship and shared spiritual practice.