Out of the House of Bondage

Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World

Gad Heuman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134727650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Slave rebellions have been studied in considerable detail, but this volume examines other patterns of slave resistance, concentrating on runaway slaves and the communities some of them formed. These essays show us who the runaways were, suggest when and where they went, and who harboured them.

PART ONE RESISTANCE IN AFRICA

Some Thoughts on Resistance to Enslavement in West Africa

Richard Rathbone

DOI: 10.4324/9780203770733-2

Despite the obvious importance of integrating scholarship on pre-nineteenth-century African societies with research on black societies in the New World, the Atlantic appears to have remained a formidable barrier to such exchange. Few Africanists can read the Caribbean and American material without wincing when it adverts to the ‘African background’. For the most part such allusions are generalised, often based on rather ancient scholarship and shy of both the complexity and the dynamism of the history of Africa. This remark points no finger of blame but rather seeks to emphasise that historical studies of Africa are now so numerous, detailed and sophisticated that a researcher whose commitment is to understanding the diaspora scarcely has time to master both bodies of data. Students of African history are no more successful in their understanding of the American material. Certainly North American and Caribbean scholarship has had a profound impact upon methodology,¹ but the rich material on black life on the other side of the Atlantic has never been seriously combed for what it might tell us about the continent from which its subjects had been so recently and rudely forced. An ultimate and obviously desirable synthesis seems remote and it is a matter of regret that a more thorough understanding of the African elements in the world the slaves made is still denied us.

This paper does very little to redress this situation. Its proposition is fundamentally very simple indeed. In the analysis of slave resistance in the Americas there is frequent reference to the significance of the activists’ African past. For some authors, the propensity to revolt is in part conditioned by whether slaves were African born or ‘creole’. Others have tangentially suggested that leaders and followers may well have been people traditionally attuned to ‘jungle warfare’, a position betraying a profound ignorance of West African geography but no less attractive for that. Similarly, ‘African’ patterns of social and political organisation from chieftaincy, through secret societies, to religious structures have been invoked to explain how rebellion could be mounted in the most disadvantageous circumstances.² All such thinking might be true, partly true or even wrong; what is missing is perhaps a more thorough understanding of a culture of resistance that is discernible through the records and which is rooted very firmly on African soil. By culture of resistance is meant no generalised notion of opposition of the spirit but actual evidence of physical attempts to prevent the forcible removal of people from their home environment. By the time of the high-tide of the Atlantic slave those acts of forcible removal appear to have been more commonly initiated by abduction, kidnapping and social and economic methods than by outright war and its repercussions. Thus it is not a question of ‘national’ mass resistance, which doubtless was part of the story, but of individual acts and especially the actions of those enslaved but awaiting shipment to the Americas. The evidence for resistance at the point of enslavement is thin; a partial explanation of this is undoubtedly that flight was the preferred method of avoiding the raiders’ intentions. The abandonment of villages and fields for the bush whilst slaving parties were in the vicinity was undoubtedly a frequently repeated episode in many peoples’ lives but its lack of drama has tended to play it down so far as the record is concerned.

Nonetheless there is clear evidence of the use of main force to prevent capture from the early period when, of course, it was more common for European crews to come into direct contact with their putative victims. The record of Hawkins’ third voyage recalls that at Cape Verde ‘our Generall landed certaine of our men, to the number of 160 … to take some Negroes. And they going up into the Countrey for the space of sixe miles, were encountered with a great number of Negroes: who with their invenomed arrowes did hurt a great number of our men …’.³ By the end of the period such resistance appears to have been as strong. The Commissioner for Sierra Leone reporting to Canning on 15th May 1824 said that

In the course of the last year some boats from Bissao … sacked some of the villages there and carried off … to be sold … as many of their inhabitants as they could take. Besides the barbarity of this practise, its consequence is that the natives within the reach of such kidnapping expeditions are rendered savage and intractable, so much so that they are always disposed to deal harshly with such Europeans as may fall into their hands.

He went on to relate the story of some islanders’ seizure of a Portuguese boat's crew who were ultimately released with great difficulty after the payment of a ransom by the Governor of Bissau.⁴

Once captured there is no doubt that attempts at escape were frequent. On the long march to the coastal assembly points, captives were frequently manacled as well as harnessed to one another by neck irons. Pinioning was resorted to in some cases as slaves might ‘strike or stab’ their captors.⁵-Wadstrom's report goes further in relaying his informant's insight that manacling also prevented captives from suicide attempts. Escape at any point along the extended trails from point of capture to eventual embarkation was clearly perceived as a major risk by the purveyors, and the harsh circumstances of such journeys attest to the vigour and frequency of such attempts.

Despite the forbidding architecture of the coastal forts of West Africa it is clear that captives once ensconced on the coast were no more secure than they had been on the march. The long periods spent awaiting transhipment, periods on occasion in excess of a calendar year, provided the factors with the equally costly alternatives of the risk of escape or more systematic supervision and confinement. If the labour of the awaiting captives was to be used then risks had to be taken. But those risks could result in flight. The strong documentation for the 1680s for the Royal African Company allows us to get some idea of its scale. Conduitt, the chief factor for the Company in Accra, reported in June 1681 that flight from the barracoons was common; he complained that he received insufficient assistance from local African political authorities, and in an attempt to force their hands threatened to close down the trade. This threat apparently elicited a guarantee of recompense by the local rulers.⁶ Although escape and failure to recapture was clearly being used here as a bargaining counter in local politics, there is less equivocal evidence for escape later in the same year from Accra. The new chief factor, Hassell, complained of the lack of leg-irons in October and other requests from him and his successors for restraining devices are notable aspects of the exchanges between the RAC and its local agents.⁷Visitors to the castles and trade forts today from Goree southwards are struck not merely by the menacing gloom of the dungeons which let out on to the Atlantic surf, but also by the proliferation of ring-bolts in their walls. It is clear that at no point in the long misery of the march out of Africa were captives safe in the eyes of their captors.

Commodore Collier's second annual report on the settlements on the coast of Africa of 11 September 1820 recalls a recent visit to the disused barracoons of Bance Island:

During the period of the slave trade … the walls of the slave-yards still prove the whole to have been so contrived as to prevent the chance of escape to the most resolute and infatuated of the miserable victims they inclosed, yet with all these precautions, insurrections, as on board the slave ships, were not uncommon and on one occasion the white managers were threatened; in the very moment they had dedicated to revelry and licentiousness; for which the unhappy slaves were all held responsible and condemned to an atonement, by undergoing indiscriminate butchery or suffering dreadful scarification. … Armed only with the irons and chains of those who were so confined the slaves audaciously attacked the lock-up keeper, at the moment he made his entre to return them to their dungeons after a few hours of basking in the sun; but thus bringing upon themselves the close fire of musketry … which they probably neither saw nor contemplated … many obtained their only wish, a relief from their misery by the hand of death, for it can be scarcely be supposed that much value was attached to the life of these beings when a few rusty muskets or three or four bars of iron was the cost per head.⁸

Although we cannot trace the insurrectionary careers of such remarkable rebels, an earlier reference suggests that there was more continuity to resistance than is often supposed. Atkins, the Royal Navy surgeon, in his Voyage to Guine. … of 1735, recalls looking over the slave holdings of a dealer rather aptly called Cracker.

I could not help taking notice of one Fellow among the rest of a tall, strong make and bold stern aspect …. He seemed to disdain his fellow slaves for their readiness to be examined … scorned looking at us, refused to rise or stretch his limbs as his master commanded; which got him an unmerciful whipping …; this same fellow, called Captain Tomba, was a leader of some country villages that opposed them and their trade at the River Nunes; killing our friends there, and firing their cottages … by the help of my men [says Cracker] surprised and bound him in the night … and made my property.

Captain Tomba clearly remained intractable and his subsequent career leads one to suspect that he was not so isolated amongst his fellow captives as Atkins suggested, for he was to lead a mutiny on the Bristol ship Rober. under Captain Harding's command, a mutiny which Atkins tells us nearly succeeded. What happened to Tomba is unclear although imaginable.⁹

Unsurprisingly some of the most dramatic testimony arises out of the circumstances of the Middle Passage. Resistance seems to have taken a wide variety of forms. The Commissioner for Sierra Leone reporting to Canning in April 1825 speaks of something rather like modern industrial action: ‘A slave vessel entered this river (the Nunes) last November, the residents however refused to load her and she was eventually supplied by the Portuguese from Bissao’.¹⁰ Thomas Phillips’ account of the voyage of the Hanniba. at the end of the seventeenth century presents us with evidence of suicide which is slightly less equivocal than the log entry of the Jame. on 17th April 1675, which records that ‘a stout man slave leaped overboard and drowned himself.¹¹ Phillips writes:

the negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country that they have often leap'd out of the canoes, boat and ship into the sea and kept under water till they were drowned to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats. … We had about 12 negroes did wilfully drown themselves, and others starved themselves to death for ‘tis their belief that when they die they return home to their own countries and friends again. I have been inform'd that some commanders have cut off the legs and arms of the most wilful, to terrify the rest.¹²

Phillips’ information helps us to understand the circumstances in which insurrection took place, and perhaps to marvel at the clear evidence of the frequency of revolt. Phillips, by no means an inhumane monster,¹³ tells us that

When our slaves are aboard we shackle the men two and two, while we lie in port and in sight of their own country, for ‘tis then they attempt to make their escape and mutiny; to prevent which we always keep centinels [sic] upon the hatchway and have a chest of small arms ready loaden and prim'd constantly lying at hand upon the quarter deck together with some granada shells [grenades]; and two of our quarter deck guns pointing on the deck thence; and two more out of the steerage, the door of which is always kept shut and well barr'd; they are fed twice a day, at 10 in the morning, and 4 in the evening, which is the time they are aptest to mutiny, being all on deck; therefore all that time, what of our men are not employed in distributing their victuals … stand to their arms; and some with lighted matches at the great guns that yawn upon them, loaden with partridge [another word for langrage or case-shot].¹⁴

Phillips additionally tells us about how intelligence might prevent mutiny: ‘we have some 30 or 40 gold coast negroes make guardians and overseers of Whidaw [Whydah] negroes and sleep among them … in order … to give us notice, if they can discover any caballing or plotting among them, which trust they will discharge with great diligence’.^15...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Notes of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: RESISTANCE IN AFRICA
• PART II: RUNAWAYS AND RESISTANCE IN THE NEW WORLD
• PART III: MARRONAGE
• Bibliography
• Index