Finding Ourselves

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-19^th 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