The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, James Sidbury, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, James Sidbury

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812208139
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, vibrant port cities became home to thousands of Africans in transit. Free and enslaved blacks alike crafted the necessary materials to support transoceanic commerce and labored as stevedores, carters, sex workers, and boarding-house keepers. Even though Africans continued to be exchanged as chattel, urban frontiers allowed a number of enslaved blacks to negotiate the right to hire out their own time, often greatly enhancing their autonomy within the Atlantic commercial system.In The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, eleven original essays by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America chronicle the black experience in Atlantic ports, providing a rich and diverse portrait of the ways in which Africans experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery. Describing life in Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Africa, this volume illuminates the historical identity, agency, and autonomy of the African experience as well as the crucial role Atlantic cities played in the formation of diasporic cultures. By shifting focus away from plantations, this volume poses new questions about the nature of slavery in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, illustrating early modern urban spaces as multiethnic sites of social connectivity, cultural incubation, and political negotiation. Contributors: Trevor Burnard, Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Matt D. Childs, Kevin Dawson, Roquinaldo Ferreira, David Geggus, Jane Landers, Robin Law, David Northrup, João José Reis, James H. Sweet, Nicole von Germeten.

PART I

AFRICAN IDENTITIES
IN ATLANTIC SPACES

CHAPTER ONE

Identity among Liberated Africans
in Sierra Leone

David Northrup

In their influential collection of essays on Caribbean and Latin American port cities in 1991, Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss suggested that the presence of people of African origins, both slave and free, was an “especially important” topic in Atlantic history that deserved greater attention and study.¹ Since then there have been many important studies of the African presence in the Americas. As it happens, there has also been growing attention to African-European interactions in cities along Africa’s Atlantic coast. Three years before Knight and Liss’s book appeared, Joseph Miller’s celebrated Way of Death tied together the histories of Angola ports with the ports of Brazil. Subsequently, influential books by John Thornton and George Brooks have studied cultural hybridity in coastal Atlantic Africa. Robin Law’s study of the famous port of Ouidah is the most fully developed of the works focusing on West African ports as cultural and commercial meeting places of African and European worlds. By joining this body of scholarship on Africa with the existing literature on the Americas, the influence of European and African cultural influences in early modern Atlantic cities can be reconsidered, without the presumption of European dominance that was characteristic of earlier studies.²

Adding African coastal cities to the discussion requires changes in the conventional paradigm of Atlantic cities, but perhaps not so many as non- Africanist scholars might think, since there are many close parallels. In the first place, African Atlantic cities were growing at about the same moment as port cities were emerging in colonial Americas. As in the New World, Iberians pioneered the new African contacts (Northern Europeans following), and Africans were quick to build on these new contacts, although some coastal cities on the islands and in Angola were built on European foundations. Finally, in port cities on both sides of the Atlantic, Africans were more numerous than Europeans. In the late eighteenth century Ouidah and Luanda had only a few hundred resident Europeans, but as the chapters on Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Cartagena, Cap Français, and Kingston show, Africans were also in the majority in American ports, a substantial proportion of whom were born in Africa.³

The historiographies that developed in isolation on opposite sides of the Black Atlantic have now converged sufficiently for serious and more direct dialogue to take place. For example, working separately and with different evidence, Rosanne Adderley and I have reached nearly identical conclusions about changes among displaced Africans on the different sides of the Atlantic. We both underscore the complementary processes of Africanization and creolization. We both agree that as the time and distance from the place remembered as homeland grew, its boundaries expanded. Like the case of Africans liberated in Sierra Leone considered in this essay, the Bahamian Africans seeking to return home whom she considers were less focused on their natal communities than on a geographical region of origin; in their case one was newly created by the International Congo Association. If I have one bone to pick with Adderley, it would be with the sentence “diasporic Africans and their descendants simultaneously and over long periods of time could and did negotiate a dialectical experience of simultaneously remaining African and becoming African-American.”⁴ As her larger analysis makes clear, she argues vigorously against Africanness as static, but the tendency to use language that implies an opposition between being and becoming has bedeviled diaspora studies. To be sure an individual was very likely to imagine the process in just such terms: remaining Christian while becoming Yoruba, remaining Yoruba while becoming Christian. But viewed from without, dynamic change is evident on both elements of such pairings. Immigrants were becoming African and becoming part of larger Creole communities at the same time and in ways that were complementary.

This chapter examines how African identities in Sierra Leone evolved in tandem with the development of English-speaking, literate, Christian communities and considers two quite different yet connected subsequent developments. The first is the gradual integration of the liberated Africans into the small, preexisting Creole society of Freetown, Sierra Leone, rather than into the larger African communities in whose midst the colony resided. The second is the return of some liberated Africans, when circumstances permitted, to the Yoruba-speaking homeland in what later became southwestern Nigeria. While this return might be seen as the completion of the dream of return to the Congo that circumstances prevented the Bahamians from accomplishing, it produced a range of different outcomes. At one end were the Sierra Leoneans who partially reintegrated into ancestral communities, nearly always defined at the level of dialect groups. At the other was the small body of African missionaries whose efforts to convert their countrymen led not just to the kinds of culture change (in religion, literacy, and so on) associated with creolization most commonly found in the Americas and explored in particular by the chapters authored by João Reis for Bahia and Nicole von Germeten for Mexico City, but also to the actualization of a pan-Yoruba identity for the first time in that homeland. In between were many who struggled to find a middle ground.

Sierra Leone began as the Province of Freedom, founded as a refuge for free blacks in the Atlantic diaspora. The first settlers in 1787, 411 free blacks from England, were joined in 1792 by some 1,100 “Nova Scotians,” that is, blacks who had sided with the British in the War of the American Revolution so as to get their freedom and who were brought to the colony after having been initially settled in Nova Scotia. In 1796 nearly 600 “Maroons,” free Afro-Jamaicans, joined the struggling colony. Financial distress and high mortality led to the settlement’s annexation as a British Crown Colony at the beginning of 1808, just when Britain was also taking steps to halt the Atlantic slave trade. Sierra Leone found greater success as the headquarters of a British squadron and as a place where persons from captured slave ships were liberated and resettled.⁵

The arrival of some 94,000 Africans whom British patrols had rescued from slave ships and liberated in the colony, mostly between 1815 and 1835, transformed Sierra Leonean society. Not counting the indigenous Africans outside the colony’s boundaries, liberated Africans became the new majority. By 1820 they already constituted 62 percent of the colony’s 12,500 residents, compared to 13 percent for the earlier black immigrants and a mere 120 Europeans.⁶ Over time the newly liberated Africans and their descendants swamped the older black immigrants, but in the process the later arrivals absorbed the founding Creoles’ social and cultural norms.

The experiences of the tens of thousands of men, women, and children from all over Africa who were rescued from slave ships by British naval patrols and resettled in Sierra Leone between 1815 and 1850 differed in ways both large and small. Sierra Leone was a place of liberation and thus quite different from the slave societies of the Americas to which other Africans had the misfortune to be transported, but, despite the liberated Africans’ greater freedom, the outcomes of their efforts to rebuild their cultural lives in Sierra Leone often resembled the outcomes in slave societies in the Americas. The similar outcomes are observable in the process of creolization, the adoption of new cultural traits from the first settlers and the Europeans in the colony, and in the process of Africanization, the construction of radically altered senses of their African identities. Though these two processes were intimately connected, it is analytically simpler to examine them separately.

Creolization

Africans who survived the experience of captivity, enslavement, transportation, recapture, and the voyage against the prevailing winds to Sierra Leone would have stepped on the shores as physically and mentally traumatized as did captives who reached the Americas. They faced similar cultural challenges in re-creating themselves, if under less traumatic circumstances than in the Americas. As in many parts of the Americas, Europeans were a distinct minority in Sierra Leone, but European speech, institutions, beliefs, and customs dominated. However, most of those involved in this were other Africans, whether from the earlier Atlantic African immigrants or from earlier generations of receptive settlers who helped resettle the newly arrived recaptives in villages, taught them English, and preached Christianity to them.

Because of the great diversity of the African languages that recaptives brought to Sierra Leone, it is not surprising that the language of the earliest settlers and the British authorities rapidly became the lingua franca for communication. A Sierra Leone African renamed George Crowley Nicol testified to a British parliamentary committee in 1849 that all recaptives freed in Sierra Leone picked up English soon after their arrival since the language was essential for communication with the authorities and among Africans there. Even at home, he reported, married couples such as his own recaptive parents spoke nothing but English when they had no African language in common.⁷ Youths learned fastest, but observers noted that older people also picked up the language.

Religion was another area of cultural change. It is hardly surprising to find such openness to spiritual consolation among people who had been torn from their families and communities and had experienced the traumas of the Middle Passage. Separated from the sacred sites and ancestral shrines of their homelands, they took up new religious practices as readily as they did the new language. In his history of Sierra Leone, Christopher Fyfe describes the process in vivid biblical imagery: “Amid the Babel of tongues English became not only a lingua franca but a Pentecostal interpreter, speaking a message many were ready to hear. For abandoned by their own gods who had failed to protect them in their homeland, they came up from the hold of the slave ship like Jonah from the whale, cut off from their own life, ready to be re-born into a new.”⁸ The agents promoting this process of religious rebirth were mostly other black people. In 1820 the colony had only 120 European residents, mostly officials and merchants. The number of black Christians was many times greater: 1,530 Nova Scotians and 597 Afro-Jamaican Maroons.⁹ Anglican, Methodist, or Baptist missionary societies funded from Europe provided food, housing, medical care, and schools, as well as religious instruction, but, given the paucity of European missionaries in the colony and the extremely high mortality they suffered, most day-to-day instruction and leadership were in the hands of these “Creoles,” who also organized religious instruction classes for the new arrivals in their own languages.

In time, newly converted liberated Africans became the major agents of acculturation. Beginning as “helpers” to European missionaries, many Africans went on to become teachers and catechists for the missionary societies. A few were ordained ministers, including Samuel Ajayi Crowther (later consecrated as an Anglican bishop); his shipmate, Joseph Bartholomew; an Igbo recaptive, Charles Knight; and another Yoruba speaker, Joseph Wright. After their ordinations in 1848, the Reverends Knight and Wright had precedence over more junior missionaries in the colony, to the chagrin of some of the newly arrived Europeans.¹⁰

Instruction in Christianity was more voluntary in Sierra Leone than was the case on slave plantations in some parts of the Americas. Africans were not compelled to attend and were free to choose and switch congregations. Many found the church-run schools an irresistible attraction. In an autobiographical essay the Reverend Joseph Wright described how learning and faith were intertwined: “Although I did not embrace or believe from my heart when I first read the word of God, I had great love to it. I liked to hear reading, and I liked to hear the minister preach to me Jesus. In five or six years after I came to this country. I began to learn to pray morning and evening, although I did it not from the heart…. In the year 1834 … I began to attend the Methodist Chapel…. From the day I met in class, I began to seek the peace of God.”¹¹ In addition, as Fyfe suggests, the traumas of enslavement and forced relocation made recaptives receptive to the message of salvation that missionaries and catechists preached. However, the process was not passive and one-sided, for Africans also infused European forms of Christianity with African religious sentiments, just as they had in the Americas, as analyzed in Chapters 3, 4, 7, and 12, which focus on African participation in Catholic sodalities, for example. Hymn singing was infused with distinctly African musical forms and accompanied by hand clapping and dancing. In Sierra Leone the path to conversion generally involved “seeking and finding,” encountering salvation through outward signs, such as visions and convulsions, rather than by passive acceptance of the preacher’s message. Like Joseph Wright and the Nova Scotian emigrants, many liberated Africans gravitated toward the Methodists because they were more open than the Anglicans to such appeals to the spirit. Nor did it take long for congregations to gain significant control over their churches. Some congregations built their own churches and hired (and fired) their own ministers.¹² Christianity became a powerful link among non-indigenous Sierra Leoneans. The Nova Scotians had successfully introduced Christianity to the young generation of Maroons, whose ancestors in Jamaica had resisted conversion. As many liberated Africans became Christians, the basis of broader identity emerged, though some obstacles remained.¹³

Especially for young Africans, schools were critical agents of acculturation. The schools had their beginnings among the colony’s original black settlers from England and Nova Scotia. Missionaries and colonial officials actively promoted education, but liberated Africans embraced formal education in Western subjects with great enthusiasm. To meet the demand for schooling among both children and adults, teachers were enlisted from every possible source and included individuals of African descent, locally resident European merchants, and an occasional stranded sailor. The missionary societies spent great sums to keep up with the demand. After the missions imposed modest fees in the 1830s to help defray costs, school enrollment continued to rise in the prospering colony. In Fyfe’s analysis, “Lack of schooling became a moral stigma: Europeans found their servants too busy writing to do housework. Schools overflowed; children had to be turned away; new schools opened.” By 1840 there were over eight thousand children in Sierra Leone’s schools (a fifth of the population). A secondary school opened in 1845, and shortly afterward the old seminary that Ajayi had attended in the late 1820s at Fourah Bay was revitalized and again became an important center for African education.¹⁴

While Sierra Leone’s freedom and schools have no counterparts in the slave systems of the New World, the process of creolization on both sides of the Atlantic has many suggestive parallels. Language acquisition was a necessity. Religious change might have been an option that appealed to many. New skills were acquired in formal and informal contexts. Such similar outcomes suggest that the element of coercion by slave owners and managers needs to be balanced by sufficient attention to how much enslaved Africans w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. African Identities in Atlantic Spaces
• Part II. The Sources of Black Agency
• Part III. Urban Spaces and Black Autonomy
• Part IV. Black Identities in Non-Plantation Economies
• Notes
• Bibliographic Essay
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Acknowledgments