Becoming African: Identity formation among liberated slaves in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone1

[1] A version of this paper was presented at the 2003 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago.

Abstract

In an effort to move the acrimonious debates on African identity formation in the Americas in a more fruitful direction this paper places these debated in a larger historiological context and presents a case study of ethnogenesis among Africans who were liberated from the Atlantic slave trade and resettled in the West African colony of Sierra Leone. For these culturally diverse Africans the dynamic processes of creolization and Africanization were generally complementary aspects of personal and communal struggles for survival. Developments among liberated Africans in Sierra Leone offer many richly documented and complex outcomes that might usefully be considered when trying to reconstruct the parallel processes taking place among enslaved Africans in the Americas.

Notes

[1] A version of this paper was presented at the 2003 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago.

[2] A limited analysis, Northrup, “Igbo and Myth Igbo,” 1–20, elicited an acerbic response from Chambers, “The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave-Trade,” 101–20.

[3] Heywood, “Introduction”, 13; Mintz and Price, The Birth of African-American Culture, viii. Chambers, “Significance of Igbo,” 101, characterizes Mintz and Price in language that is nearly identical to Heywood's.

[4] Mann, “Shifting Paradigms,” 6–7.

[5] Anderson, Imagined Communities; Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Vail, “Introduction”.

[6] Geary, The Myth of Nations, 157–70.

[7] Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison,” 147.

[8] Griffin, The People with No Name. I owe this reference to Stephen Howe, “Historiography,” 223.

[9] Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, 3, 6.

[10] Wilson, The Loyal Blacks.

[11] Ajayi's account was first published in 1837 and is more readily available Curtin, Africa Remembered, 289–316. The early part of the more celebrated account of Olaudah Equiano has been frequently cited as an example of an enslavement experience, but a careful examination of the surviving records of Equiano's later life raises serious doubts about it being a first-hand account. See Carretta, “Introduction”. In any event, the transformative experiences Equiano says he underwent closely resemble those of Ajayi.

[12] “The Narrative of Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” in Curtin, Africa Remembered, 307.

[13] Law, The Oyo Empire, 5, following Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa, 4. On the slender evidence of Hausa usage of the name Yoruba (Yarabawa) as early as the seventeenth century, Paul Lovejoy presses for a wider sense of the term (see “The Yoruba Factor,” 2).

[14] Butterworth, Three Years' Adventures, 96, records taking several Africans in 1786 who had learned English in Old Calabar; Law and Lovejoy, The Biography of Mahommad Gardo Baquaqua, 158.

[15] Parliamentary Papers 1850 ix (53), Report … on the African Slave Trade, 98–99.

[16] Koelle, Polyglotta Africana, 9, 17–18.

[17] Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 127–8.

[18] Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers 1825 (520) xxv, Sierra Leone, Accounts, Census 8 July 1820.

[19] Fyfe, History, 254.

[20] “The Narrative of Joseph Wright,” in Curtin, Africa Remembered, 332–3. The narrative was written in 1839, a decade before Wright's ordination.

[21] Fyfe, History, 201.

[22] Fyfe, History, 55, 69, 77, 172, 213 (quote), 236–37. Fourah Bay College later became the University of Sierra Leone.

[23] Fyfe, Africanus Horton. Of course, the original use of Africanus in names was by people from the Roman province of Africa, i.e., the Maghrib, such as the historian Sextus Julius Africanus (c.160-c.240 C.E.).

[24] The census data is in Curtin and Vansina, “Sources of the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave Trade,” 191–208.

[25] These were the Joloff (Wolof), Foulah (Fula), Mandingo, (Mandinka), Soosoo (Susu), Bulom, Temne and Sherbro. The Fula appear to have included a few Fulani recaptives originally from northern Nigeria. Sierra Leone censuses also enumerated Europeans and African Creoles from the Americas (Jamaican Maroons, Nova Scotians, Americo-Liberians and West Indians), and Kroomen (Kru; indigenous Liberians).

[26] There is a general correspondence of ethnolinguistic distribution in the census and probable coasts of origin that can be computed from the records of slave vessels captured and landed in Sierra Leone. The following are the percentages enumerated in the census grouped by probable coast of origin and, in parentheses, the percentage of recaptives from those coasts: Akoo and Paupah 66% (Bight of Benin 41%); Binnee, Eboo, Hausa, Calabah, Moko and Kakanja 24% (Bight of Biafra 37%), Kromantee 1% (Gold Coast 2%), Congo 3% (West-Central Africa 6%); Mozambique > 1% (Southeast Africa 1%); Eltis et al., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It will be apparent that even though all members of groups that might have gone either to the Bight of Benin or Bight of Biafra ports have been assigned to the latter, that coast's share remains low, while the Akoo numbers are higher. It is impossible to say whether any significance should be attached to these anomalies, since the 1848 census did not include the entire colony and is therefore only a rough approximation of the relative size of the non-native ‘nations’ in Sierra Leone.

[27] Koelle, Polyglotta, 5.

[28] Baikie, Narrative of an Exploring Voyage, 307–8; Koelle, Polyglotta, 8–9.

[29] Fyfe, History, 119–20, 127, 138.

[30] Jacob Boston Henzeley in Fyfe, Sierra Leone Inheritance, 143.

[31] Fyfe, History, 170–2, 233–5, 292–4.

[32] Fyfe, History, 233–4. Fyfe also points out that Hausa often exercised great influence over Yoruba-speakers in the Americas; see also Law and Lovejoy, “The Changing Dimensions of African History,” 191.

[33] Fyfe, History, 233–4.

[34] Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 219–21, argues that some Africans may have carried Christianity to the Americas from Angola and parts of West Africa where Christianity had been adopted as early as the 1480s, but no instance of this process has been detected in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone.

[35] Great Britain, Colonial Office, CO267/204, “Acting-Governor [Benjamin] Pine's Annual Report,” 151–3.

[36] Parliamentary Papers 1850 ix (53) Report … on the African Slave Trade, 102, testimony of Thomas Maxwell, 14 May 1849; for another Muslim convert to Christianity see “Autobiography of Omar ibn Seid,” 791–5.

[37] James Johnson, Quarterly Reports, C.M.S. Archives CAI/0123, in Fyfe, Sierra Leone Inheritance, 153–4.

[38] Blyden to Rev. Henry Venn (C.M.S.), Lynch. Selected Letters of Edward Wilmot Blyden, 91.

[39] Fyfe, History, 292.

[40] CMS/CA 1 M7, Report of the West Africa Mission, 1834, by the Rev. J, Raban, 155; Pine, Annual Report, 1847, 151–3.

[41] Peel, Religious Encounters.

[42] Peel, Religious Encounters, 248–9, 288, 293, 305.

[43] Hastings, The Church in Africa 1450–1950, 451.

[44] Berlin, Many Thousands, 61–2, 95–108, quotation, 105.

[45] Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 586, and Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade”; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 174. For related discussion see Caron, “‘Of a nation which the others do not understand.’”

[46] Berlin, Many Thousands, 105; Law, “Lucumi and Nago”; Northrup, “Igbo and Myth Igbo,” 8–10. Cf. Geggus, “Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity” and Stein, Vassouras, 76–7.