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Aspects of the Prehistory of Freetown and Creoledom*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

P.E.H. Hair
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Extract

The immediate circumstances which led up to the founding of Freetown in the 1790s were highly contingent, even freakish. Christopher Fyfe has stressed the role of the scientist and dubious adventurer, Henry Smeathman, in publicizing the misguided view that the Sierra Leone district provided an ideal ecological environment for settlement. More recently, Stephen Braidwood has shown that the 1787 choice of Sierra Leone as a suitable locality for settlement by the Black Poor of London, the earliest settlers, came about as a result of acceptance of Smeathman's view, not by the white philanthropists and politicians who masterminded the exodus of the Black Poor, but by the London Blacks themselves—who knew nothing of Sierra Leone from personal experience but were convinced by Smeathman's rhetoric. That the Blacks were allowed to insist on their choice might itself be regarded as freakish.

Yet, seen in a wider historical context, the foundation of Freetown, and the subsequent development of the community eventually termed “Creole,” appear less accidental and extraordinary. Why, for instance, did Smeathman chose Sierra Leone for his butterfly-collecting on his only visit to Africa? Presumably it was because he was aware that he could obtain the support and protection of the trading settlements in the Banana Islands, on Sherbro Island, and along the coast between—settlements which had been established in earlier decades by the English-speaking families of the Caulkers, Parkers, and Tuckers, families whose very names (even if corrupted from African names) point back to the later seventeenth century and the activities on this coast of the Royal African Company. And perhaps Smeathman had read John Newton's published account of his early career as a resident trader on the same coast which, although full of complaints about his treatment by his African employers, at least showed that a white could survive there.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 25 , 1998 , pp. 111 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1998

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Footnotes

*

This paper is based on a contribution prepared for presentation in absentia to a 1988 conference at Freetown on the history of Freetown (but whose conference papers never appeared). Written with the intention of provoking discussion, it is only lightly referenced, although some references have been updated. It is here published as a slight contribution to the current analysis of the agony of Freetown and Sierra Leone in 1995-98, an analysis most percipiently attempted in Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone (London, 1996).

References

1 Fyfe, Christopher, A History of Sierra Leone (London, 1962, reprinted with a supplementary introduction, London, 1992), 14–16Google Scholar; Braidwood, Stephen J., “Initiatives and Organisation of the Black Poor 1786-1787,” Slavery and Abolition, 3 (1984), 211–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London's Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786-1791 (Liverpool, 1994), passim. On the Creole community see Porter, A.T., Creoledom (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Wyse, Akintola, The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History (London, 1989).Google Scholar

2 da Mota, Avelino Teixeira and Hair, P.E.H., eds., André Donelha, An Account of Sierra Leone and the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde (1625) (Lisbon, 1977), 77.Google Scholar

3 Hair, P.E.H., “Sierra Leone in the Earliest Global Strategy: a Spanish Pamphlet of c.1590” in Jones, Adam and Mitchell, Peter K., eds., Sierra Leone Studies at Birmingham 1985 (Birmingham, 1987), 44–50Google Scholar; also Hair, P.E.H., ed., To Defend Your Empire and the Faith: Advice offered c.1590 to Philip, King of Spain and Portugal by Manoel de Andrada Castel Blanco (Liverpool, 1990), 104.Google Scholar Although writing in Spanish, Castel Blanco was Portuguese.

4 Hancock, Ian F., “Gullah and Barbadian—Origins and Relationships,” American Speech, 55 (1980), 17–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a reply to Cassidy, Frederick G., “The Place of Gullah”, American Speech, 55 (1980), 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar I have considerably simplified the debate, one of the issues being whether the relexification was from Portuguese pidgin to English pidgin; and it is only fair to Hancock to note that his earlier claim for “the Sierra Leone area” later referred to a region centered on the Gambia.

5 Hair, P.E.H., “Beating Judas in Freetown,” Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion, 9 (1967), 16–20.Google Scholar

6 Hair, P.E.H., “Hamlet in an Afro-Portuguese Setting: New Perspectives on Sierra Leone in 1607,” HA, 5 (1978), 21–42.Google Scholar

7 A.T. von, Bradshaw, S., “Vestiges of Portuguese in the Languages of Sierra Leone,” Siena Leone Language Revieiv, 4 (1965), 5–37.Google Scholar As regards Temne, the issue has been further investigated by A. K. Turay.

8 I hope to write at greater length elsewhere on the delicate matter of Afro-European miscegenation, which calls for thoughtful study of European as well as African sexual mores.

9 Latterly the Afro-Portuguese ivories almost certainly produced in Sierra Leone have been excellently cataloged and discussed in Bassani, Ezio and Fagg, William B., Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, although the historical contributions are presentist and distant, and the name chosen for the Sierra Leone material, “Sapi-Portuguese,” is unfortunate.

10 Peterson, John, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone 1787–1870 (London, 1969).Google Scholar

11 Hair, P.E.H., “Freetown Christianity from 1792 as a Field for Research,” Proceedings of the Inaugural Seminar, Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1963), 127–40.Google Scholar

12 Hair, P.E.H., “Freetown Christianity and Africa,” Sierra Leone Bulletin of Religion, 6 (1964), 13–21Google Scholar; idem., “Christian Influences in Sierra Leone Before 1797,” Journal of Religion in Africa, 27 (1997), 3–14.