Liberated Africans As Human Legacy of Abolition:
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Abstracts: While the Atlantic island of Saint Helena only ever served as a temporary settlement for Africans taken from illegally operating slave ships in the mid nineteenth century, the so-called Liberated African Establishment at this location nevertheless became an important site of both cultural encounter and short-term community formation for the Africans themselves and their self-described British rescuers. In particular, the management of the Liberated African Establishment produced an intense dialogue around the specific subject of African health care and feeding, with a view to safely delivering these people to their new lives as immigrant laborers in various British Caribbean territories. Each group of Africans dispatched to the West Indies was supposed to be certified to be "in good bodily health and not incapacitated from labor by any lasting bodily infirmity." Like so many British officials and civil servants in the age of emancipation, the men charged with this task devoted considerable writing to explaining their efforts to their superiors at the Colonial Office. Consistent with the professed spirit of British abolitionist policy, these officials boasted of their solicitous concern for liberated African well being. Medical care and feeding at Saint Helena however proved enormously challenging and "a great mortality" prevailed among the refugees. This paper will examine the extensive reports generated by Medical Officers and others seeking to address this mortality. Like so much documentation related to liberated African experience these records provide rich terrain for exploring British ideas about Africans (and sometimes Africans ideas about themselves)--in this case focused on questions of supposedly innate physical and mental characteristics; and culturally contingent ideas about food and health. Rosanne Marion Adderley Liberated Africans in Eastern Africa and the Western Indian Ocean: Retrospect and Prospect This paper is an historiographical consideration of some imperatives in the study of "liberated" Africans in the Indian Ocean region. I start with an overview of what has been done, identify what we do not know, and I argue for a research agenda for this part of the world. I draw from primary, archival sources, but for the most part I will be discussing the secondary literature. The scope of the paper will examine the various sites where liberated Africans were deposited (Bombay, Muscat, Mombasa/Freretown, Zanzibar, Durban, the Seychelles and Mauritius). Although just thinking about the topic raises larger issues of emancipated Africans in Somalia, Mozambique, the Comoros, Madagascar and La Reunion, I will stick narrowly to the British abolition efforts that yielded such "liberated" Africans. Edward Alpers The "Last Slaves" of Mauritius: Retracing the history of the forgotten Liberated Africans This paper provides an overview of the "liberated" Africans brought to Mauritius in the second half of the 19th century, after having been captured by British ships patrolling the Western Indian Ocean. They were either allocated directly as apprentices or indentured labourers to local planters and other employers, for up to 14 years, or referred, if children, for an initial period, to the Powder Mills Orphan Asylum. For the most part, since their regions of origin could not easily be determined, the 'liberated' Africans remained in the colony for life, ultimately blending into the wider Creole community, and, in most cases, losing all traces of their African ancestry. It is ironic that these 'last slaves' have vanished from the popular consciousness when, paradoxically, their arrival in the mid 19th century, when a Department of Immigration had already been set up, and a bureaucracy supervising the arrival and registration of new labourers installed, made them probably the most well documented segment of any of the slave immigrants to Mauritius, enabling us to retrace their working and family lives. The flaws in British policy-making which were revealed in the treatment of the 'liberated' Africans have been extensively documented. The real drama, in Mauritius, lay in the fact that colonial officials extended the duration of their servitude on the grounds that they were not sufficiently 'integrated' and at the same time, refused to let most of those who wished to return to Africa, do so, on the grounds that they believed the recaptives risked re-enslavement. Thus the 'liberated' Africans supported a double burden which was undoubtedly more onerous than that of the indentured labourers who arrived in Mauritius at the same time: they were kept in servitude until they were deemed sufficiently well-trained to adapt to freedom, and, unlike Indian immigrants, were deprived of the right to return to their birthplace at the expiration of their lengthy indentures. Marina Carter & Mark Hall En las Antillas espa–olas, lo mismo que en el Brasil, la aplicaci—n de los Tratados para la abolici—n del tr‡fico de esclavos, firmados con Gran Breta–a despuŽs del Congreso de Viena, supuso la aparici—n de un peque–o grupo de negros jur’dicamente libres: los emancipados. Con documentaci—n procedente de diversos archivos espa–oles, en este ensayo se estudian los or’genes del grupo y del tŽrmino empleado para nombrar a los negros de nueva condici—n. A continuaci—n, teniendo en cuenta el peso de factores de naturaleza diversa tales como los de car‡cter demogr‡fico, la transformaci—n de la estructura de la sociedad esclavista cubana, la marcha de las relaciones diplom‡ticas entre Espa–a y Gran Breta–a o la evoluci—n del mercado laboral, se reconstruye la trayectoria del peque–o grupo humano desde el momento de su aparici—n en 1817 hasta 1870, cuando la Ley preparatoria para la abolici—n de la esclavitud aprobada en las Cortes espa–olas franque—, por fin, el acceso de los emancipados a su condici—n de libres. Las autoridades coloniales vieron a los emancipados como un elemento perturbador del orden social existente y sumieron a aquellos autŽnticos "esclavos del gobierno" en una horrenda condici—n, si cabe peor que la de los siervos. Todo ello muestra, una vez m‡s, que las v’as de ascenso de los negros esclavos a la libertad eran dif’cilmente transitadas en la sociedad esclavista cubana y evidencia el poco disimulado incumplimiento de los compromisos internacionales. InŽs Roldan de Montaud Liberated Africans in Time and Space The paper provides an analysis of the Africans that were removed from slave vessels in the abolitionist era of the slave trade. After 1807 almost 200,000 individuals were diverted from their intended destination in the slave Americas by the intervention of naval cruisers of various countries. The paper assesses the size, origin, ultimate destinations and eventual fates of this large pool of coerced migrants. It also considers some of the larger consequences of this diversion for the black Atlantic. David Eltis By the time Crowther died in 1892, he had lived for most of the nineteenth century, and transited from freedom to slavery, and then back to freedom, and ultimately ending in a position of power. Consequently, we have a biography that allows us to frame a variety of notions around slavery, using the trajectories of a multiple career to talk about changing identities of not just slavery, but of the meaning of Africa and the emerging ideas of progress formulated in the context of abolition and the survival of domestic slavery. The past of his time, one could argue, became more important than the present of his generation to create an imagined future of a people, a nation, and a "race." Toyin Falola Liberated Africans and the Creation of a Modern African "Tribe" A number of recent works have shown how various African ethnicities were "invented" as a result of the collision of cultures, the experience of racism by educated Africans, the influence of Christianity, and the rise of nationalism during the colonial period. This paper focuses on the creation, by the descendants of the thousands of Liberated Africans who were resettled in Sierra Leone by the British in the nineteenth century, of a brand new African ethnicity or "tribe" in the mid to late nineteenth century. It argues that the forging of Sierra Leone Creole ethnicity differs fundamentally from almost all others in that where groups like the Yoruba of Nigeria already had a common language and cosmology to draw upon Ð they only needed energizing influences like the written form and the consciousness brought about by Christianity and European racism Ð the Creoles of Sierra Leone began as a disparate collection of uprooted people, from many different traditions and communities, and speaking dozens of different languages, to forge a brand new language, Krio, and a brand new ethnicity. This ethno-nationalism took concrete form partly because the culture of the descendants of the Liberated Africans were much derided by the Europeans as 'mimicry' and 'aping', while at the same time perceiving itself to be under threat from the neighbouring 'heathen' aborigines who began flocking into the tiny colony in the 1870s. Lansana Gberie Ambiguous Freedom: Paradoxes of Liberation and Antislavery in the Western Indian Ocean An estimated 800,000 Africans were transported from East Africa to Asia in the nineteenth century as part of the Indian Ocean slave trade, with the majority sent to destinations in Arabia. The British antislavery campaign in the Western Indian Ocean, designed ostensibly to free enslaved Africans who were being shipped from East Africa and to end what was popularly called the Arab slave trade, produced several paradoxes. From its beginnings in the 1850s to its conclusion in the 1880s, the Royal Navy's antislavery campaign in the Indian Ocean was fraught with difficulties. Techniques of patrol and capture that had been employed in the Atlantic Ocean were ill suited for the Indian Ocean. Ill-equipped or corrupt translators caused many free Africans to be mistaken for slaves, and corrupt officers and seamen who sought larger shares of Admiralty bounties and illegally-seized booty frequently captured and condemned legitimate trading vessels as slave ships. Yet the most striking failures of the antislavery campaign were the consequences for the Africans who were "liberated" at sea. Most Africans removed from suspected slave ships in the 1850s and 1860s were taken to the British ports of Aden and Bombay, where men were employed in manual labor in harbors or on railways, and women and children were placed with missions or in domestic service. More than a third of the approximately 5,500 Africans captured by the Navy and brought to these ports between 1865 and 1869 died within five years of their arrival. Those who were brought to missions on Indian Ocean islands like Mauritius and the Seychelles were put to work on plantations or were trained in domestic service or manual labor for Europeans. In Zanzibar, freed slaves at the missions were known as Watumwa wa Wangereza (slaves of the English). The lives of manumitted Africans in many ways paralleled the lives of enslaved Africans in ArabiaÑfrom the labor they performed to their re-naming and re-clothing, manumitted and enslaved Africans experienced many similar conditions. Using new research from archives in London, Scotland, Zanzibar and the Arabian Gulf, including the recorded testimonies of enslaved Africans in the Gulf, this paper examines the paradoxes of freedom and the ambiguities of manumission in the Western Indian Ocean in the second half of the nineteenth century. Matthew S. Hopper Liberated African Women and Children in the 1831 Census of Freetown, Sierra Leone In 1831, nearly a quarter of a century after the British had begun their campaign against the slave trade, 25% of the residents of Freetown were Liberated African women and children. If the children of Liberated African women are added to the total, they constituted nearly one-third of the population. This paper argues that analyzing the households in which those women and children were living, and their occupations, reveals several important trends. The analysis is based on a quantitative study of the 1831 house by house census of Freetown in combination with official documents, missionary records, and travelers' accounts. First, most women had entered partner relationships with men and had formed single family households. Second, some couples lived in households with other couples. Because such household often had few or no children, this suggests that such communal living was a temporary arrangement. Third, a small number of women lived in households with other women but without men. Such women tended to concentrate in occupations that provided services, most notably, washerwomen. While the general trend was toward monogamy, this should not necessarily be attributed to missionary injunctions, for strong economic and structural factors were at play. Liberated African children were distributed in households across the Freetown population, but it would appear that they were disproportionately situated in the households of better off Repatriated Africans, those who had arrived from the Americas or their descendants, and of Liberated African adults who had entered Sierra Leone earlier in the anti-slave trade campaign. By this time, Liberated African children were fairing poorly in comparison with the children of Liberated Africans. Those children who were born in Sierra Leone had a socio-economic advantage over those newly freed. This trend is confirmed by reports on the labor done by Liberated African children and their relative lack of education. This reflected not only parental preference for their own children, but missionary and colony policy and economic forces. These and other trends identifiable in the census and complementary sources indicate that a class hierarchy was emerging among Liberated Africans. A class order already was underway as determined by the occupation of adults and the size and diversity of their households. But it was also in the process of being defined by the educational attainments of the children of Liberated Africans. Perhaps the most important determinants of peoples' place in the hierarchy were the time period when they were freed off of the slave ships and the kinds of social and economic networks they were able to form. The people liberated in the beginning years of the campaign may not have had a particular advantage because a system for facilitating their adjustment was not in place, although some individuals formed valuable connections. Those, however who arrived in the mid- to late -teens and early 1820s -- when the British were providing subsidies of food, jobs, and training and also were committing substantial resources to public works in Freetown --seem to have received a foundation on which many could build. This interpretation runs against the personal uplift model that runs through some of the published biographies of individual Liberated Africans. Allen Howard This study explores the formation of Malagasy villages and the use of the Malagasy language (in both oral and written forms) among freedmen and women in Mauritius, a British sugar colony, in the years after the final emancipation of apprentices in 1839. The work lies at the intersection of two key dimensions of the "African" diaspora in the Indian Ocean: Malagasy speakers likely constituted the single largest intercommunicating group of slaves entering that Ocean (about 20% of the total since 1500) and in many regions (particularly in British Colonies) creole slaves were proportionally few by comparison with Atlantic societies. In the Mascarenes, Malagasy speakers were about 40% of all slaves entering the islands, and mutually intelligible dialects of Malagasy came to define the largest self-identifying cultural group of slaves there. Creole slaves probably never reached a majority of the servile population in either island before emancipation. In Mauritius, on which the study focuses, many of the approximately 10,000 Malagasy departing the sugar estates en mass in mid-1839 sought to purchase land together and form villagesÑsometimes based on old homeland ethnicityÑin the peri-urban area of Port-Louis. They were dramatically successful; by 1845 a dozen or more Malagasy settlements ringed Port-Louis, and many of them sought Malagasy Christian evangelists and teachers to teach them to read both in their native tongue and in French. While Malagasy identities became important organizing principles in the age of emancipation, Malagasy and their children routinely spoke the Malagasy tongue among themselves in their new communities, when all linguistic studies of the Mascarenes would suggest that native languages had been early abandoned for the French creole. The purpose of this study is to employ the case of Mauritius to introduce some of the salient dimensions of ethnicity, identity, and language that shaped emancipation in the Mascarenes, and to demonstrate that studies of creolization, so popular nowadays in those islands, are deeply flawed for assuming, erroneously, that creoles formed significant majorities of the servile populations and that slaves' and apprentices' home identities and languages were quickly effaced after arrival. Pier Larson "Gabino: A Liberated African Story" This paper is about Gabino, a Ganga Congoba, whose real name was Dobo. He was one of the unfortunate 61 souls on board the Spanish slaver "Fingal," which had taken its slave cargo near the mouth of the Gallinas River in West Africa, and then captured near Cuban waters by a British cruiser in 1826. Dobo was only 10 years old when the British disembarked him in Havana, where he was registered as a liberated African, given a new name, and consigned for a five-year term of apprenticeship under Luisa A. de la Paz. Instead, Gabino was used as a semi-slave labourer, and his servitude extended for two additional terms after the initial term. Gabibo petitioned the British consul in Havana in 1840, who demanded from the Spanish government "immediate and unconditional" freedom for Gabino, sparking a diplomatic crisis between Spain and Great Britain. A severe Spanish reaction saw the British Consul expelled and Gabino convicted for sedition and sent to prison in Ceuta in North Africa. Oscar Grand’o Mor‡guez The Homelands of Liberated Africans Exported from Upper Guinea in the 19th Century Despite the rich tradition of scholarship on Africans liberated from slave ships in the 19th century, little is known about the regions of the interior where they lived prior to their enslavement in Africa. Based on the ethnolinguistic identification of recaptive names recorded in the Registers for Liberated Africans, my essay explores the hinterland origins of liberated Africans exported mostly from Rio Pongo and the Gallinas Ð the major points of embarkation for slaves from Upper Guinea in the first half of the 19th century. The data on which this essay is based comes from commissioners in the Havana court of mixed commission which, between 1824 and 1841, recorded personal details of more than 1,600 liberated Africans from nine intercepted slaving vessels. An identification of the origins of these recaptives makes possible an assessment of the impact of British antislavery initiatives on the slaving hinterland of Upper Guinea over a period of almost twenty years. Data on recaptives from Upper Guinea is particularly strong, given the close proximity of active slaving ports in this region to Freetown, where abolitionist activity in Africa was centered. Officers on British antislavery cruisers knew this part of the coast well and British records document slave-trading activity from this region extensively. The Select Committee on the Slave Trade conducted interviews with a number of liberated Africans from Upper Guinea, who talked in length about a number of issues relating to the slave trade. Such rich data provides a unique opportunity to explore the way Africans experienced enslavement prior to their liberation. Further, the representation of Africans from two major ports makes possible a comparative assessment of these issues for recaptives from Gallinas and Rio Pongo. Philip Misevich Track test this part of the experience of integration and emancipation of the Africans who were free of Gunpowder Factory work in the Star, between the years of 1840, 1870. Destacaremos, especially aspects of their family backgrounds and the treatment given to the children of African born free in the manufacturing unit, little objects operated by Brazilian historiography on the group. From the analysis of the treatment of the children, we have important data about their social conditions in Brazil, which suggested new evidence for the study of the status of their parents, but also contribute to the discussions that culminated in the adoption of the law of 1871 - freed slaves that the children born from that date. According to documents and reports suggest consulted, the experience with the children of African free may have served as the basis for the discussions of the project emancipacionista gradual and how to proceed with the slaves freed after that law. Another issue that colours the discussions on the protection of children is the citizenship of the offspring that, in principle, did not have any legal impediment to pursuing it, as it were born free, and Brazil. The Factory of the Gunpowder Star was chosen because of his administration Tuesday adopted various arrangements of work, slaves, workers free and free Africans living in the same space, which allows us to collate the different experiences of these workers and the specific circumstances in which they lived the Africans free. Alinnie S. Moreira Unlike the slave communities established by fugitive, rebel, and maroon slaves, American slave dealers established the Africa town in Alabama for slaves directly from Ghana in the 1860s. Beginning with 32 of 103 enslaved Africans from the village of Tarkbar in Ghana, Africa Town, in Mobile County, Alabama grew to what it is today. The African slaves had traveled aboard the Clotilde to the Mobile Bay, Alabama, after the legal transatlantic importation of slaves had been stopped. Having successfully evaded the federal authorities that were on the look out for Clotilde, its captain managed to transfer the slaves to a riverboat and burned and sunk the ship. And those who sponsored the expedition hurriedly distributed the slaves among themselves. They settled 32 of the slaves at Magazine Point, which eventually became known as Africa Town. Once established as Africa Town, it became a safe haven for many enslaved Africans in the United States, especially after the Civil War. I am seeking to find out the reasons behind the settlement of the original 32 slaves at Magazine Point, the general feature and the cultural characteristics of their community (Africa Town) up until World War II based on information from newspaper articles, court records, Radio Stations, oral tradition, and material culture. Johnston Njoku "His Country Marks": Liberated Africans transported to the Australian penal colonies I offer this paper to illustrate my view that the world is all of a piece and to argue that discussion of expropriated Africans should not be limited to the Atlantic, as ripples from the transatlantic slave trade could reach as far the southern ocean. Soldiers found guilty of serious offences at court martial in the West Indies were sentenced to transportation to the antipodean penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. Because of the large number of liberated Africans in the West India Regiments, we can be confident that impressed ex-slaves were well represented among the hundreds of men whose court martial resulted in a sentence of transportation to penal servitude in Australia, although they have English names and are not identifiable as Africans. However, after 1826 in the colony of Van Diemen's Land, the convict bodies were minutely described and among the descriptions of convicts arriving from the Caribbean colonies there are many described with African features. For some of these, additional physical details include scars that are clearly ritual scarification, which indicate that these men reached adolescence in West Africa and their various ages further indicate that were taken from Africa sometime between 1820 and 1837, many years after the abolition of the slave trade. They are almost certainly Africans men 'liberated' from slavery in order to serve the manpower needs of the British empire and an indicative sample of what must have been a much larger number of Liberated Africans who found themselves breaking rocks and carting timber in colonial outposts at the very end of the world. Cassandra Pybus Liberated Africans at the Cape of Good Hope: New Perspectives In this paper I draw upon my own material and as much of this new work as I can, to try to reinterpret the role and significance of Liberated Africans at the Cape. I now wish to emphasise, more than I did initially, their importance as a new source of labour after the end of the slave trade. Other new perspectives that the new material has opened up relate to what happened to them after their periods of indenture ended, and to the wider context in which Liberated Africans at the Cape should be seen. I now wish to begin to compare their lot with that of Liberated Africans in Mauritius, Brazil and elsewhere, and to show connections between those who were landed at the Cape in the early nineteenth century and other Africans forcibly taken there, such as the ex-slaves who were brought to the colony in the late nineteenth century from Ethiopia. Christopher Saunders Liberated Africans in Key West, Florida 1827 - 1860 Key West is a 3 1/2 x l mile island at the end of the archipelago of the Florida Keys south of Miami, settled in 1822 by Americans. It is only 90 miles from Havana, Cuba. In 1827 the Spanish slaver Guerrero wrecked at the Keys while being pursued by a British warship. Of the 561 Africans aboard 41 perished in the collision, 398 were hijacked to Cuba on American rescue ships, and 122, less one who died enroute, were brought to Key West, living in the village of 400 people for 75 days. Their 27-month ordeal, until reaching Liberia, is examined. In 1830 an American warship rescued 82 Africans on a Spanish slaver coming from Africa, after the slaver, the Fenix, was caught trying to rob an American vessel off Santo Domingo. Those Africans were brought to Key West and then to New Orleans, where they were freed in a court decision which was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by the Spanish "owners." In 1860 three American-owned slavers were intercepted by American warships, as they approached Cuba. Of the 1,432 Africans still alive when the warships reached Key West 295 perished and were buried on a Key West beach, now a County park. Their unmarked cemetery was brought to the attention of the public through my efforts and now has a State of Florida historical marker. The survivors reached Liberia the same year, after hundreds more died enroute. Gail Swanson Author back to top |