Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T11:19:17.276Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2013

Richard Anderson ,
Alex Borucki ,
Daniel Domingues da Silva ,
David Eltis ,
Paul Lachance ,
Philip Misevich  and
Olatunji Ojo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Between 1808 and 1862, officers primarily from the British navy liberated approximately 175,000 enslaved Africans from transatlantic slavers. Information on more than half of this group has survived in bound ledger books. Based on the assessment of extant data for more than 92,000 Liberated Africans whose information was copied in at times duplicate and triplicate form in both London- and Freetown-based registers, this essay explores the pitfalls and possibilities associated with using the Registers for Liberated Africans as sources for historical analysis of the slave trade. The article explains the relationship of multiple copies of the registers to each other, demonstrates the link between the African names they contain and ethnolinguistic identities, argues for crowd-sourcing – drawing on the knowledge of the diasporic public and not just scholars – and, finally, shows the importance of such an approach for pre-colonial African history.

Résumé

Entre 1808 et 1862, les officiers de la Marine Britannique libérèrent environ 175,000 esclaves africains des négriers transatlantiques. Ils furent amenés par la suite à Freetown, à la Havane, et à d’autres ports où leurs noms et des informations personnelles furent inscrits dans les régistres relies. En se servant des données sur plus de 92,000 de ces Africains libérés, cet article s’interroge sur la possibilité d’utiliser les Registers for Liberated Africans comme sources d’analyse historique de la traite des esclaves. La relation entre les régistres différents mentionnant les mêmes individus est examinée, ainsi que les liens possibles entre noms africains et identités ethnolinguistiques. En proposant comme méthode d’analyse le “crowd-sourcing,” à savoir, l’appel aux connaissances des publiques diasporiques au lieu de se limiter au savoir des experts, l’étude montre le besoin d’une telle approche dans l’étude de l’histoire de l’Afrique précoloniale.

Type
Reports on Slavery Research
Information
History in Africa , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , October 2013 , pp. 165 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Behrendt, Stephen, Latham, A.J.H. and Northrup, David, Diary of Antera Duke, An Eighteenth Century African Slave Trader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Bethell, Leslie, “The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 7 (1966), 79–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowdich, Thomas E., Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London: John Murray, 1819).Google Scholar
Bruce-Lockhart, James, and Lovejoy, Paul E. (eds.), Hugh Clapperton into the Interior of Africa: Records of the Second Expedition, 1825-1827 (Leiden: Brill, 2005).Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip D., Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).Google Scholar
Domingues da Silva, Daniel, Eltis, David, Misevich, Philip and Ojo, Olatunji, “The Diaspora of Africans Liberated from Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century,” (paper presented to African Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 18–21 November 2010).Google Scholar
Eltis, David, and Richardson, David (eds.), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Eltis, David, and Richardson, David, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
Fyfe, Christopher, History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar
Gallotti Mamigonian, Beatriz, “To be a Liberated African in Brazil: Labour and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century,” PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, Ontario ( 2002).Google Scholar
Hair, Paul E.H., The Early Study of Nigerian Languages: Essays and Bibliographies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).Google Scholar
Hair, Paul E.H., “The Enslavement of Koelle’s Informants,” Journal of African History 6 (1965), 193–203.Google Scholar
Hamilton, William, “Sierra Leone and the Liberated Africans,” Colonial Magazine and Commercial-Maritime Journal 6 (1841), 327–334, 463–469.Google Scholar
Higman, Barry, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Jeffs, Ben, MacQuarrie, Helen, Pearson, Andrew and Witkin, Annsofie, Infernal Traffic: Excavation of a Liberated African Graveyard in Rupert’s Valley, St. Helena (London: Council for British Archeology, 2012).Google Scholar
John, A. Meredith, Plantation Slaves of Trinidad, 1783–1816: A Mathematical and Demographic Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Koelle, Sigismund W., Polyglotta Africana or A Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly Three Hundred Words and Phrases in More Than One Hundred African Languages (London: Church Missionary House, 1854).Google Scholar
Kopytoff, Jean, A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The ‘Sierra Leonians’ in Yoruba, 1830-1890 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965).Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Henry, “Old Oyo Influences on the Transformation of Lucumí Identity in Colonial Cuba,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles (2012).Google Scholar
Meyer-Heiselberg, Richard, Notes from the Liberated African Department in the Archives at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1967).Google Scholar
Misevich, Philip, “On the Frontier of ‘Freedom:’ Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860s,” PhD dissertation, Emory University, Atlanta GA (2009).Google Scholar
Misevich, Philip., “The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the Nineteenth Century,” in: Eltis, David and Richardson, David (eds.), Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 155–175.Google Scholar
Nwokeji, Ugo, and Eltis, David, “The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana,” History in Africa 29 (2002), 365–379.Google Scholar
Nwokeji, Ugo, and Eltis, David, “Characteristics of Captives Leaving the Cameroons for the Americas, 1822-1837,” Journal of African History 43 (2002), 191–210.Google Scholar
Ojo, Olatunji, “John Baptiste Dasalu or Nicolas Lucumi and the Nineteenth Century Cuban-Lagos Connection,” paper presented at the Kitchener-Waterloo Black History Month Workshop, 4 February 2008.Google Scholar
Peel, John D.Y., Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Roldán de Montaud, Inés, “En los borrosos confines de la libertad: el caso de los negros emancipados en Cuba, 1817-1870,” Revista de Indias 71 (2011), 159–192.Google Scholar
Schön, J. Frederick, and Crowther, Samuel, Journals of Rev. James Frederick Schön and Mr. Samuel Crowther who accompanied the Expedition up the Niger in 1841 (London: Cass, 1970 [1842]).Google Scholar
Smith, Thomas, Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (Albany: E. and E. Hosford, 1823).Google Scholar
Stephen, Daniel Augustine Vonque, “A History of Liberated Africans in the Colony of Sierra Leone during the first half of the 19th Century,” MA thesis, University of Durham (1963).Google Scholar
White, Francis, “Creole Women Traders in the Nineteenth Century, ” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 14 (1981), 626–642.Google Scholar
Yai, Olabiyi, “Texts of Enslavement: Fon and Yoruba Vocabularies from Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Brazil,” in: Lovejoy, Paul E. (ed.), Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 109–112.Google Scholar