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The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

G. Ugo Nwokeji  and
David Eltis
G. Ugo Nwokeji
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut, ugonwokeji@hotmail.com
David Eltis
Affiliation:
Queen's University
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Extract

Europe and the Americas have long dominated studies of transatlantic exchanges and much more is known about European participation in the Atlantic world than of its African counterpart. Current knowledge of how those parts of Africa located a few miles away from the African littoral contributed to the early modern Atlantic World is particularly sparse. This is despite the fact that the slave trade was the largest branch of transatlantic migration between Columbian contact and 1870, and that it is becoming apparent that Africans and indigenous Americans helped shape the new political and economic power structures, as well as the post-Columbian worlds of culture and labor.

Assessments of the impact of any group on the global stage must begin with the nature of the group itself, and thus efforts to raise the African profile in Atlantic scholarship and to focus on the agency of Africans must quickly face the contentious issue of ethnicity. From the broadest perspective, it is odd that the way the ancestors of the Atlantic World defined themselves should have become so much more contentious among Africanists and Afro-Americanists than among those scholars who study Europe and Europeans overseas. At the outset of the repeopling of the Americas, the European state existed in nascent form in only Spain, Britain, and France. The predominance of the nation-state in the way the world is organized in the twenty-first century—rather than its status in 1492—has perhaps led scholars to stress the contrasts between Africa and Europe on issues of early modern nationhood, and, more generally, human identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 29 , 2002 , pp. 365 - 379
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2002

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Footnotes

*

We thank the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the University of Connecticut, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, and the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition and Resistance at Yale University for the financial support that made possible the research on which this paper is based.

References

1 For the most recent contributions to the debate on ethnicity see Gomez, Michael A., Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998)Google Scholar; Thornton, John, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1780 (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar; Northrup, David, “Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World, 1600-1850,” Slavery and Abolition (2000), 1–20Google Scholar; Law, Robin, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: “Lucumi” and “Nago” as Ethonyms in West Africa,” HA 24(1997), 205–19.Google Scholar

2 See Nwokeji, G. Ugo, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Population Density: A Historical Demography of the Biafran Hinterland,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 34(2000), 629–31.Google Scholar

3 Full references to the Public Record Office sources of the Sierra Leone data, all in the FO84 series, may be found in Eltis, David, “Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas, 1819-1839.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12(1982), 453–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed The Havana data are in FO 313/56-62. David Northrup is the only historian to have exploited the ethnic potential of the Sierra Leone registers. Northrup, , Trade Without Rulers: Precolonial Economic Development in Southeastern Nigeria (Oxford, 1978), appendix AGoogle Scholar, though his analysis was confined to the 1,200 records of Bight of Biafran recaptives for whom the registers supplied a country of origin designation. Roseanne Adderley has used the Havana records in her study of the communities established by the recaptives in the Bahamas and Trinidad, but her primary interest was not the reconstruction of the African origins of the nineteenth-century slave trade. See her “‘New Negroes from Africa’: Culture and Community among Liberated Africans in the Bahamas and Trinidad 1810 to 1900” (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1996).Google Scholar The Sierra Leone records have also formed the basis of several studies of nutritional status and age and sex patterns in the slave trade.

4 The registers distinguish between “scores,” “cuts,” “marks,” and “tattoos” on the one hand, which we take to be evidence of voluntary cicatrization procedures, and “scars,” on the other. Scars are more likely to be the results of involuntary activity. Most of the latter would have little cultural significance.

5 Assessments of how representative are the Sierra Leone data in this and the next paragraph are based on comparisons of these data with the patterns of the overall trade described in Eltis, David, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment,” in William and Mary Quarterly (2001), 33–35, especially table 2.Google Scholar

6 One reason for the creation of these detailed records was to monitor the possible re-entry of liberated Africans settled in villages in the interior of Sierra Leone. It is certain that in a very few cases individuals were captured by slave traders from these villages and re-entered the slave trade, though we have not so far come across anyone who appears in the registers twice.

7 We do not assume that the few European-sounding names are, in fact, European, as some African and European names may sound similar. Where we cannot identify the African equivalent we must allow that such names may derive from yet-to-be-determined ethnolinguistic areas. In some instances, however, clerks enclosed the European name in inverted commas, (i.e., “Jack” and “Jim”) or entered it as a second name, or an alias, in which cases we assume they intended the name to be read as European. Aliases are more commonly African than European, however.

8 In the Havana records, the name of the interpreter and the vessel on which he arrived is provided in a separate column of the registers (FO313/56-62).

9 The standard reference is Hair, Paul, “Ethnolinguistic Continuity on the Guinea Coast,” JAH 8(1967), 247–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 In the past twenty months we have pronounced and discussed between themselves 16,000 individual names, in addition to preparing and distributing tapes, and pursuing separate discussions with the consultants listed below.

11 Madubuike, Ihechukwu, A Handbook of African Names, (2d rev. ed.: Colorado Springs, 1994)Google Scholar; idem, Structure and Meaning in Igbo Names (Buffalo, 1974). Ubahkwe, Ebo, Igbo Names: Their Structure and Meaning (London, 1994)Google Scholar; Essien, Okon E.Ibibio Names and Their Meaning (Ibadan, 1986)Google Scholar; Ikpe, Maxwell S., Dictionary of Ekpeye Proper Names (Port Harcourt, 1971)Google Scholar are some examples. From the American side there is Black Names in America: Origins and Usage, collected by Puckett, Newbell Niles, and edited by Helper, Murray (Boston, 1975), 347–469.Google Scholar Basic reference works include Crozier, D.H. and Blench, Roger M., An Index of Nigerian Languages (2d ed.: Horsleys Green, 1979)Google Scholar, and Hair, Paul, The Early Study of Nigerian Languages (Cambridge, 1994).Google Scholar

12 The term “voyageid” and all information on individual voyages derive from the unique identification number used in Eltis, David, Behrendt, Stephen D., Richardson, David and Klein, Herbert S., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).Google Scholar The term “slaveid” refers to the unique identification number assigned to each of the individuals registered by the Sierra Leone clerks and entered directly into the new database. The Havana recaptives are assigned ids that follow on from the Sierra Leone numbers. Thus the last number in the Sierra Leone registers is 57,567, and the first id number from the Havana is 58001.

13 We thank Onwuka Njoku for this information.

14 Thus, the vast majority of the identified names have the same gender as their 160 year-old counterparts. Thus, for example, “Chukwu,” “Chukwuma,” and “Okeke” are invariably registered against males rather than females. “Egbeichi” and “Lolo” are consistently female.

15 Nwokeji, G. Ugo, “The Biafran Frontier: Trade, Slaves and Aro Society, c. 1750-1905” (PhD., University of Toronto, 1999), 183–84.Google Scholar

16 It is already becoming clear that, while the slave trade from the Cameroons River was very small compared to Bonny and even Old Calabar, many upland Cameroons groups entered the Atlantic slave trade through Old Calabar rather than Cameroons embarkation points. For precolonial trade links between what is now Nigeria and Cameroon see Chilver, E.M., “Nineteenth Century Trade in the Baminda Grassfields,” Afrika und Ubersee 45(1961), 233–57.Google Scholar