This presentation focuses on the connections between history, memory and culture during the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The first part of the presentation takes up the on-going debate of how and in what ways African cultures traveled across the Atlantic. The next part lays out some events in central Africa that involved the kings of Kongo, the Portuguese, the Dutch, Queen Njinga of Ndongo/Matamba and later rulers of Matamba referred to in the records as Njinga. It is argued that these events and the way that Africans remembered them in Africa would become the basis of the memories that enslaved Kongos and Angolans brought with them to Brazil. The last part of the presentation examines celebrations connected with the Afro-Brazilian Confradias and later Congadas and argues that these rituals and events connected with the celebrations of the Brotherhoods and Congadas referred to specific historical memories that enslaved central Africans brought with them to Brazil.