I know. I have been quiet over the
last few weeks.
Hope you missed
me.
The
thing is, I got caught up in the spring migration back to Canada from West
Africa. Now, back in the condo jungle that is Toronto, spring has been rather
slow in coming. Not altogether ideal conditions for working, contrary to what some might
think. Ordinarily, at this time of the year, one would expect the weather to be
such that it gets the creative juices flowing, in tandem with sap rising. But
enough of weather-related excuses. Spring has now fully sprung with temperatures
in the mid-twenties, albeit under a blanket of cloud.
A
more germane reason for not getting down to actually writing is “research”, an
activity that covers a range of sins from sitting in the park observing people
go by, to watching lots of TV or surfing the net or sticking your nose in a
book, activities that require more or less undivided attention, depending on
the seriousness with which the task is undertaken or on how interesting the subject
is. This time, I have been much captivated (pun not intended) by the problem of
how to trace the origins of Africans that were forcibly taken to the
Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade.
It
had always been a challenge to determine who the people were that had been dragged from their homeland and taken across the Atlantic to live in slavery. And, as
to where they came from, there was no dependable information either, although
it was clear that the field of this execrable harvest was along the entire west
coast of Africa bounded by the northern and southern tropical latitudes. And by the time the trade ended, recorded
information of the 20 million slave identities was scarce, if available at all and, for the majority of these individuals
memory, handed down the generations was also vanishingly scanty. Nor was there
any remembrance of where exactly on the continent they had been taken from.
When African
slaves were landed on American soil there was no reception committee inquiring about
who they were and where they had come from. They were just sold. Like so much
chattel. In due course, individual identities became submerged under the weight
of slavery’s institutions, losing their own names for that of their “owners”. Two hundred
years after the end of slavery, the search for these individuals’ names, faces and personalities remains much as that for the holy grail. Now, as
researchers sift through the detritus of history they are beginning to discover
sources that might indicate not only geographic origins but, as well, suggestions of slaves’
original names and identities. I came upon some of these when I was,
myself, researching my own antecedents as a descendent of “Liberated Africans”. Liberated
Africans, or “recaptives”, were individuals freed from captivity aboard slave
ships by the Royal Navy after Britain passed a law in 1808 declaring the
Atlantic Slave Trade unlawful.
From then, on to about mid-19th
century, the navy intercepted and captured hundreds of slave-carrying ships, freeing
over 90,000 Africans and landing them at Freetown, Sierra Leone. The power of
these sources is that the identity of each liberated slave is written down in a
ledger kept by clerks of Britain’s colonial administration in Freetown, giving
details of name, age, sex, physical characteristics and, importantly, the port
on the African coast from which they had been taken. The records were in
duplicate, one set remaining in Sierra Leone and the other sent to Britain. These
records can be seen in the National Archives of Sierra Leone or at the Britain's National
Archives. Besides, the records have been digitised and are available at http://slavevoyages.org/tast/resources/slaves.faces
The main
limitations of the records is that the names were, presumably, phonetically recorded
(the clash of accents among clerks from different regions of Britain is best not imagined) and
are not easily referenced to currently recognizable African names although,
with a bit of imagination, useful guesses can be made.
Besides being
useful for identifying where Liberated Africans came from in the post-abolition
era, the records are a potential proxy for where others might have come from
during the active phase of the Slave Trade itself. But I won’t go there for the
moment. It is enough to say that whenever men do evil they leave a trail that
ultimately leads to their indictment. A warning to those thugs who violate the continent today.
Tell Fren Tru
