Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World

Lawrence Aje, Nicolas Gachon, Lawrence Aje, Nicolas Gachon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000074987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Traces and Memories deals with the foundation, mechanisms and scope of slavery-related memorial processes, interrogating how descendants of enslaved populations reconstruct the history of their ancestors when transatlantic slavery is one of the variables of the memorial process. While memory studies mark a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, the book seeks to bridge the memorial representations of historical events with the production and knowledge of those events. The book offers a methodological and epistemological reflection on the challenges that are raised by archival limitations in relation to slavery and how they can be overcome. It covers topics such as the historical and memorial legacy/ies of slavery, the memorialization of slavery, the canonization and patrimonialization of the memory of slavery, the places and conditions of the production of knowledge on slavery and its circulation, the heritage of slavery and the (re)construction of (collective) identity. By offering fresh perspectives on how slavery-related sites of memory have been retrospectively (re)framed or (re)shaped, the book probes the constraints which determine the inscription of this contentious memory in the public sphere. The volume will serve as a valuable resource in the area of slavery, memory, and Atlantic studies.

Part I
(Re)-Constructing the Memory and History of Slavery and of the Slave Trade

1 Senegambia and the Atlantic World

African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade Through the Archive

Hilary Jones

When he lifted his wet face again he murmured, ‘Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody dere say, Yeah, I know Kossula. I want you everywhere you go to tell everybody whut Cudjo say, and how come I in Americky soil since de 1859 and never see my people no mo.’ ¹

In the introduction to her posthumously published field notes, anthropologist Zora Neal Hurston reminds us that while the Atlantic slave trade was “the most dramatic chapter in the story of human existence,” the books and papers written about this episode in modern history are based on the written record of slavers, masters, or sellers but never from the voice of the enslaved. “All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold,” Hurston wrote.² Over three months from December 1927 to February 1928, Hurston met with Kossola “Cudjo” Lewis, the last surviving individual of the slave ship Clotilda that sailed surreptitiously into Mobile Bay (Alabama) as the last known slave ship to enter North America.³ In her meticulous recordings of their conversation, Hurston sought to correct the record by rendering Lewis’s firsthand account in a vernacular that approximated his own voice. In doing so, Hurston offered a window into an African perspective on capture, the middle passage, enslavement, and memories of a distant homeland. For Lewis, this meant his recollection of the mid-nineteenth-century Dahomey Kingdom.

Outside of Hurston’s interview with Kossola, few eyewitness accounts by Africans that recount the experience of capture and enslavement exist. The most well known come from eighteenth-century narratives that either reflect the genres of the captivity narrative or the conversion narrative or that emerged as part of the anti-slavery movement of the late eighteenth century.⁴ Other life histories of the enslaved were recorded by an interpreter or were crafted by a third person from courtroom documents or press interviews.⁵ While these narratives center on the life history of a slave or former slave, they are told through the lens of an outside observer. However, in her analysis of written and oral accounts by slaves from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ghana, Sandra Greene makes the case that even though these narratives may be recorded and structured by an amanuensis for their own purposes, it is also possible that the slave or ex-slave presented their account in such a way as to use the interpreter to achieve his or her own goals.⁶ In other words, the narrative or memoir of the enslaved was the product of a two-way interaction between subject and interviewer and thus cannot simply be dismissed as inherently biased because slavers, colonial officials, missionaries, or colonial courts recorded evidence about individual slaves for their own purposes.

This chapter argues for a reexamination of the Senegambian experience of slavery in the French Atlantic. Yet to do this we must confront the problem that slave narratives generally appeared in Anglophone North America, England, or the British Caribbean rather than in the French Atlantic or Indian Ocean colonies. The equivalent of the English-language slave narrative does not exist in French literature before France declared an end to slavery in 1848.⁷ While French writers fictionalized accounts of race and slavery, no firsthand accounts of enslaved Africans were recorded in the eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century Francophone world. As a result, scholars who seek to understand the African experience of the middle passage and enslavement in the French Atlantic must look to archival sources. Recent research on slavery and freedom in the French Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonies have mined notarial records for information on births, wills, marriage, and property transfers to piece together the lived experiences of slaves and free people of color.⁸ In cases such as the Tinchant family of Louisiana, this information has produced new biographies of free families of color that go back many generations, even beginning with an African ancestor. Unpublished documents such as family genealogies, family papers, or letters contained in mission or parish archives provide an alternative lens from the official record of information collected by or pertaining to the state.

While African voices may be absent from the historical record of slavery in the French Atlantic, reading official records of the colonial administration, police, or judiciary “against the grain” allows the researcher to bring the African perspective to the forefront of interpretations about slavery and freedom in the Atlantic.⁹ To bring a critical perspective to administrative records about Senegambia and the slave trade, it is necessary to identify inherent biases in the administrative record and to compare them with other narrative accounts that may offer useful perspectives on African understandings of the societies in which they lived and the ways that the negotiated slavery. For instance, the police files of the Naval Ministry contain documents on the expulsion of slaves from Martinique to Senegal that provide tables of names, age, gender, where they came from in the Antilles, and their “occupation” in Senegal.¹⁰While official sources present limitations for revealing the African experience, analyzing these sources with an understanding of the local environment shows the options (or lack thereof) available to the enslaved. Considering these documents along with other records that offer insight into the strategies that Senegambians employed to negotiate slavery and freedom in North America and the Caribbean provides a valuable lens into how Senegambians moved through the Atlantic World. This chapter considers the role of Senegambia in the transatlantic slave trade and then examines research on the biographies of individual Senegambians who experienced the slave trade. Finally, it weights quantitative data and slave narratives of Senegambians with documentary evidence from the French and Senegal archives that assist in constructing the life history of enslaved Senegambians in the Atlantic World.

1. Senegambia and the Making of the Atlantic World

Historian Boubacar Barry defines Greater Senegambia as the vast territory that extends from the great river basins of the Senegal to the Gambia and the southern rivers that extend to the border with Sierra Leone.¹¹ For Barry, Greater Senegambia comprises a region bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, the Saharan desert, the savanna grasslands, and the equatorial rainforest of the modern-day nations of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea (Conakry), and Guinea-Bissau, as well as parts of Mauritania and Mali to the frontier with Sierra Leone. Captives who left Africa from Senegambia may have come from regions as far away as the Upper Niger River. The quantitative side of slavery studies has sought to determine an approximate volume of slave exports from “Greater Senegambia” to the Americas.¹² A precise accounting, however, remains elusive due to the uneven nature of sources and inadequate data.

Available data show that Senegambia factored into African exports to the Americas in the first two centuries of the slave trade when the Portuguese held a monopoly on the slave trade from the region. By the late sixteenth century, the French and English entered into the trade with outposts on the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Exports from Senegambia increased in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century with the heaviest volume between 1720 and 1740, which corresponded with the period of Islamic revolutions that generated civil war in Senegambia. In the eighteenth century, 337,000 enslaved Africans left the ports of Senegambia in the Atlantic slave trade. In the nineteenth century, the slave trade shifted markedly to the east and yet Senegambia accounted for 200,000 Africans sold into slavery for labor in the Americas during the illegal phase of the slave trade.¹³

For the French trade, the majority of slave voyages departed from Whydah in the Bight of Benin, followed by ports in West Central Africa.¹⁴ Senegambia only accounted for a very small portion of slave cargo bought and transported to the French Caribbean by French slavers. French slaving voyages, moreover, supplied the vast majority of slaves for plantation labor in the French islands in the Caribbean.¹⁵ Consequently, the dominant African cultural imprint in St. Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana came from the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa rather than Senegambia.

African Diaspora research seeks to locate African cultural survivals and ethnic identities in the Americas, but this approach tends to generalize cultural traits or recognizes categories that correspond with known identities on the receiving side but that are imprecise for identifying the origin of the enslaved.¹⁶ Despite these limitations, research on the ethnicity of the enslaved shows that slavers used specific indentifiers such as Wolof (Jalof), Fulbe, Nar (Moor), Mandingo (Mandega), and Sape (Bullom or Temne) to describe slave exports and that slave owners recognized that the enslaved regrouped into these “national” categories in American slave societies.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall argues that the role of Senegambia has been underestimated in the literature on the African origins of slaves in the Americas. Between 1751 and 1775, when Britain occupied the former French posts on the Senegal and the Gambia, close to half of the British slave trade voyages from Senegambia went to North America and five of six transported the enslaved to British West Florida ports.¹⁷ According to Hall, even though slave owners in North and South America became fearful of rebellious Senegambians by the mid-eighteenth century, they still sought slaves from the region because of their expertise in the cultivation of rice and indigo. This trend continued in North America in the age of piracy and smuggling of slaves into North America after the United States prohibited the importation of slaves in 1807. Louisiana parish records between 1723 and 1820 reveal that Senegambians constituted 30.3% of the slave population. By comparing data compiled in the Louisiana Slave Trade Database with her analysis of data of slave voyages from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, Hall found that Senegambians constituted 64.3% of French Atlantic slave trade voyages and 59.7% of all voyages from Africa to Louisiana and northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico between 1770 and 1803.¹⁸

While the overall numbers of Senegambians may be a fraction of those from other sending regions, such as the Bight of Benin or West Central Africa, it is clear that Portuguese slavers relied on exports from Senegambia in the early phase of the transatlantic slave trade. Additionally, French and English mercantile companies that operated depots on the Senegal and Gambia rivers profited from conflict in the region in order to acquire slaves in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Finally, Senegambia continued to supply some slaves in the nineteenth-century era of the illegal slave trade even as the focus of the trade moved east away towards the Bight of Biafra and central Africa. One additional factor offers a compelling rationale for investigating the links between Senegambia and the Atlantic World. Saint Louis and Gorée both served as key administrative nodes for France and Britain in their contest over control of coastal trade between the Senegal and Gambia rivers. As a result, names and details about the lives of African men and women, whether slaves or slave owners, occasionally appear in official sources.

2. Biographies of Senegambians in the Atlantic World

As useful as data on slave trade voyages are for unpacking the volume of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Table
• Introduction
• Part I (Re)-Constructing the Memory and History of Slavery and of the Slave Trade
• Part II Re-Membering Memory: Inscribing the Memory and History of Slavery in Public Space
• Part III Artistic Memories of Slavery
• List of Contributors
• Index