The Significance of Africanisms by Melville Herskovits is an in depth analysis of African Cultural survivals among the Negroes of the United States. The article involves far more than the traditional linking relationship of traits of Africa and the West Indies. The article examines the resistance and spiritual survival of African Culture among the black Diaspora in the United States. While at the same timeexpounding the scope and the significance of African culture by providing a fertile concept of Africanism that reflects the unique manner in which each black individual of the Diaspora envisions African Cultural retention. Herskovits in his writing posits that the retention of the African cultural has been long lost in the American Culture; however this observation is not the same in the Caribbean/West Indian context. The West Indian retention of the African Culture is evident in many of the religious practices that are still being done in the Caribbean, some of which are Revivalism, Pucho, Voodoo (Vodun), Keele, Santeria, Shouter Baptist and Komfa (Cumfa). These are some of the ways in which West Indians have retained many of the cultural practices of their African ancestors. In his writing Herskovits argued that “for the negro to appreciate his past he has to endow confidence in his own position in his country and by extension the world. He must have scientific facts concerning the ancestral cultures of Africa and the survivals of Africanisms in the New World.
In the article Herskovits argued that the survival of African Cultural forms was not present in the American culture as it is in the West Indian culture. He is of the belief that the slaves that arrived in the United States of America came with an already broken picture of their cultural heritage. This he argues because of the “watery values that slaves would have to learn from other slaves cause the