Enslaved

It wasn't just people who were brought from Africa

during the transatlantic slave trade,

it was knowledge.

Knowledge that helped give birth to the world we live in

without most of us knowing anything about it.

We brought our ways with us.

It's not in the history books.

We're going to find it in the bottom of the ocean.

They have an opportunity

to rediscover their ties to the past,

and their connection to the enslaved Africans

who were here.

Woo!

You look at this, and it's beautiful,

but it's also a mathematical.

Exactly.

There were 2,500 enslaved Africans

that ran away to join the pirates.

Here was a world where they had an equal vote

and an equal say alongside their white counterparts.

Your life depends on your skills,

your equipment and your attitude.

Why are you the first Black person I ever seen

play a banjo?

It was known by everybody

as a Black instrument.

All those things have been considered for so many years

to be slave food,

right now, everyone wants to celebrate it.

The memories and talents of the enslaved Africans

who arrived here

helped to create the culture of the new world

in a way we have only just begun to understand.

This community was started by the Africans

who were on the last illegal slave ship

to arrive in America, "The Clotilde."

Five years after they were brought here,

the end of the Civil War set them free

and they started the only African-run town in America.

Grammy award-winning musician, Rhiannon Giddens and I

are here with Joe'l Billingsley

who brought us here to see the monument

honoring her great-great- grandfather, Kazoola,

one of the founders of Africatown.

Kazoola happens to be the one we know the most about.

Right.

Because he lived longer and he shared his story

in a way that a lot of us are learning about it now.

Wow.

My grandmother was born in 18 something.

So her mother was a slave.

So she could talk to me about what that was.

That forms us in interesting kinds of ways.

I mean, people always talk about slavery

like it's ancient history.

- Yeah. - And it's not.

- Mm-mm - And lasted a long time.

That. Yeah.

In Africatown, they grew their own food.

They established their own community

based on what they did in their homeland,

based on their traditions.

And so as you sort of move through the decades,

you'll see that, that community at one time,

when it was thriving, had everything you needed.

Didn't have to go anywhere, to go to the grocery store,

see a doctor to be educated

or even have some entertainment.

Everything you needed to live

was right here in the community.

And so when you talk to people, they have so much pride

in what it used to be.

One time it was 12,000 people, now it's 2000.

Now we're trying to revive Africatown.

We have a place called Kazoola,

named after my great-great- great-grandfather.

So why are you the first Black

person I ever seen play a banjo?

- That's the question. - That is the question.

Because it was like, I grew up seeing white people

play the banjo and kind of going,

oh, that's cool, but it's not part of my culture.

And then I found there are some recordings

of the Black players of this music.

And then as I started to dig

and, like, this used to be a huge tradition.

It was an enormous tradition all across,

not just the south, but all across the country.

So I know the banjo as this, metal strings,

metallic instrument often played bluegrass style.

And then I learned that the banjo

was an African American instrument.

So it looked more like this.

It was known by everybody as a Black instrument.

The emblem of being Black was the banjo.

Then you have a change in the 1820s, and 30s,

and that's when white folk started going.

"That's really cool. I would like to play that."

So you have white entertainers picking up the banjo.

The reason why we don't talk about this shift

is because the white folks playing this banjo

would have been doing it in blackface.

This entire industry becomes the blackface minstrel show,

is the most popular form of entertainment

for, like, over 60 years.

Are you saying that what we know as bluegrass today

actually began with African Americans?

100% - Wow.

That's exactly what we're saying.

Wow.

So are you saying the original do-si-do

was an African American thing?

So, way back when you have nothing but dances

as entertainment, and you have plantations,

the musicians for these balls are African American.

Almost always.

And so they are forced to learn European dances,

European music,

and then they are themselves mixing it.

The thing that sets apart American square dancing,

and country dances from Europe is the calling.

You don't have callers.

And that's the thing that you think.

That stuff.

These are the innovations that make this music

uniquely American are African American.

Do it again now, come on!

Yeah!

We're here in Costa Rica,

because of a local group of young divers

believes that Africans contributed

to their history and culture.

This time we're not diving to investigate the deaths

of those that never made it.

This time, we're investigating one group

that may have survived.

Before we do any diving, Alannah, Kinga and I

are traveling through Southern Costa Rica

on our way to a remote village,

several hours from the ocean

into the rainforest of the Highlands.

We're meeting members of an indigenous group

called the Bribri.

They're considered to be descendants of the Mayans,

but there might be another side to that story.

Their folklore tells of slave ships

that were wrecked on the Costa Rican shoreline,

and of Africans who came ashore

to make a new life for themselves in the forests.

But their African ancestry

has always been considered to be a mere tribal legend.

Maria Suarez Toro has invited us here to a Bribri feast

to see if we can help this community

reclaim its lost history.

I would like to thank everyone for inviting us here

to hear your story.

On some level I'm jealous

because my question is always where do you come from?

And the answer to that for me is always,

I don't know.

I don't have a connection to my home or my people

so to be able to assist

in answering those questions

is a connection for me.

I want to hear the local story.

What do locals say about what happened

or those shipwrecks?

I can't really imagine.

You've just wrecked up in the middle of nowhere.

You have no idea where you are.

You look to your left, and it's just ocean.