Rare has been the book on Africa that has acquired a history and become the subject of study in its own right. One such is the autobiography of Théophilus Conneau, a slave dealer of French and Italian background, who lived on the west coast of Africa during the 1830s and 1840s. Various accounts of Conneau's experiences in Guinea and Liberia have been translated into four languages, and were even incorporated into a successful novel in 1933, on which was based a motion picture. The latest version of Conneau's life story (and the occasion for this paper) was published as recently as 1976.

Conneau's story first came to press in 1854 through the editorial assistance and skill of Brantz Mayer, a lecturer, author, and journalist of the Baltimore area, known principally for his writings about Latin America. Having obtained experience and contacts with publishers by editing manuscripts and letters, Mayer was a valuable asset to a new author in 1853. Recently discovered letters from Conneau to Mayer and Mayer's own account of the relationship between them suggest an interesting beginning for this literary enterprise. Conneau found himself in 1853 in Baltimore where he met James Hall, whom he had known previously in Liberia. Hall had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Maryland settlement for freed Blacks at Cape Palmas and had served as that settlement's first governor from 1833 to 1836. Concluding that Conneau's story of a repentant slave trader would be of value to the cause of anti-slavery and black emigration from the United States to Africa, Hall suggested that Conneau write his memoirs and introduced him to Mayer.

Palavers, great meetings, grand conferences, “tribal” meetings— these are terms used to describe meetings among peoples in and near Sierra Leone, meetings in which political, diplomatic, and economic questions are discussed and sometimes resolved at the village, intervillage, and occasionally, national levels. These conferences vary in size and importance, depending on dimensions of conflicts or questions to be resolved. This paper focuses on one such conference that convened at Forékariah, the capital of Moria, in 1805 and on circumstances leading to it. It is based largely upon a lengthy first-hand report deposited at the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. This paper is presented in two parts: a description of the conference and its placement in Sierra Leone and Morian histories, and the text of the report produced by Sierra Leone observers.

From the earliest records of British officials at Sierra Leone, there are citations to specific “indigenous” meetings and allusions to others that supposedly occurred (indeed they would have had to occur for certain events to follow). One of the earliest large conferences described in detail in these records is one that convened at Forékariah from 24 March to 6 April 1805. The extant contemporary written record of this conference was produced by Alexander Smith, the Sierra Leone Company's and Governor William Day's principal representative at the conference. Other observers from Freetown included William Francis, Andrew Moore, Captain Smith, and Charles Shaw. Alexander Smith did not identify a specific interpreter nor describe what method he used to record the detailed arguments presented by participants. Certainly the filter of language and inter pretation must have influenced the record's content. If one places the conference within the framework of Company and Sierra Leone history, however, and accepts the premise that the Freetown observers were relatively unbiased since they were not principal parties to the palavers resolved, the report can be seen as one of a very few in which Sierra Leone's officials presented themselves in such uninvolved fashion.

Few slaving agreements contracted between African sellers and American purchasers appear to have survived. They were rarely committed to paper, were destroyed after commitments were fulfilled, or were removed from business records kept by slave traders. The contract discussed here is of considerable interest as a document which, although brief, records important information and offers intriguing insights concerning African-European and African-African relationships in Guinea-Conakry at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The slaving contract is dated 15 November 1804, and apparently was negotiated aboard the merchant ship Charlotte of Bristol, Rhode Island, Jonathan Sabens, master, anchored at the Iles de Los archipelago.

Nov. th[ursday] 15-1804

Shipe Charlotte

fortay days after date I Promas to pay Jno. Sabens or orde[r] nin[e] hundard and ni[ne]ty five Bars to be Pade in Rice and Slave Say fore tun of Rice at nity Bars par tun the Remandr in Slaves at one hundard and Twenty Bars par Slave.

[signed in Arabic] Fadmod [Fendan Modu Dumbuya]
[signed in Arabic] Muhammad Sa'ab shokr Mohammed Sakib Fana/Ta/ Mohammed Shabaan
(the month before Ramadan)

Respecting the American traders involved, the Charlotte was jointly owned by George D'Wolf and Jonathan Sabens of Bristol, Rhode Island. Captain Jonathan Sabens was an experienced mariner, involved in at least three previous slaving voyages, including one as master of the Charlotte. Members of the D'Wolf family were associated with numerous slaving voyages to west Africa and continued to invest in slaving ventures long after Rhode Island made the trade illegal in 1787.

Forty-five years ago (1965), when some of us were beginning our studies of the history of the Upper Guinea coast, there existed only a few published general histories of Guinea-Conakry or region-based models to guide us. André Arcin's substantial works (1907 and 1911) provided original but awkward structures from which we could commence our work, but his monographs tended to be based heavily upon a colonial presence, a necessity to make sense of a complex colony, and a reliance upon oral traditions or other uncitationed sources, many of which could not be tested a half century later. Christopher Fyfe's comprehensive history of Sierra Leone had just been published in 1962. Fyfe's foremost emphasis was to chronicle the development of the Sierra Leone settlement and chart that colony's progress, but his extensive documentation was extraordinary in that it demonstrated the clear link between the “Northern Rivers” and British enterprise from Freetown and opened Britain's archives as sources of information about the history of these rivers in new and profound ways.

Earlier works by Lucien Marie Francois Famechon, Jules Machat, Fernand Rouget, Laurent Jean B. Bérenger-Férand, Ch. Bour, and others, centering upon the peoples, economies, and terrain of coastal rivers, continued to be instructive, but these authors were writing at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and they tended to treat the histories of indigenous peoples as interesting and exotic and at the same time relatively unimportant to the colony's regional development.

By the end of the eighteenth century the Baga, or peoples of the seaside (the bae raka), were already long-term residents of mangrove islands located between Guinea-Bissau and Iles de Los—the northern half of Guinea-Conakry's current coast. That fact is well known and accepted by everyone interested in the ethnohistory of this part of Guinea. What is less clearly documented or understood is how far they extended inland, the context of that residence which allowed them to operate economically and socially with guests upon their lands, and perhaps how outsiders influenced their characteristics, within a historically definable period. Drawing on observations from first-hand accounts written between 1793 and 1821, this study attempts to answer these questions and to suggest assumptions about the Baga experience and conclusions for particular Baga groups by 1821.

This paper flows from a longer and broader study of peoples and commercial activities in the Rio Nunez to Iles de Los section of coastal Guinea-Conakry for the 1750 to 1865 period, that period just prior to establishment of French suzerainty. It also emerges from a historian's desire to assign ethnic groups or at least ethnic types to identifiable regions and to understand relationship traits that may have operated during a specific period. The Baga were likely minor players in political and commercial transformations that accompanied the rise of slave trading or establishment of new markets for commodities' traffic occurring with its decline in the late 1830s. As producers of rice, salt, and livestock, and collectors of cola, however, and as ‘first-comers’ with claim to land through which commerce with the interior inevitably flowed, the Baga favorably served trades that found their basis in both trades and that attached interior markets to those of the coast.

Late in 1818 Major William Gray (Royal African Corps) and Staff Surgeon (Captain) Duncan Dochard (RAC) launched a mission of discovery along the Gambia River, intending to determine the source of the Niger River and follow its course to the point that it flowed into an inland sea or emptied into an ocean. That expedition consisted of no fewer than 62 military personnel, 31 formally appointed civilians, and likely an equal number of unofficial Africans who had taken advantage from a large and well-armed entourage for security along the path. That expedition, which lasted for more than two years, was moderately successful, but it failed in its larger objectives. It returned to the coast eventually without even reaching Timbuktu. Its leaders produced a monograph, published in 1825, that confirmed many observations made earlier by Mungo Park.

The Gray/Dochard expedition, while admirable in its efforts and intent, was not the first, however, to make this particular attempt. Indeed, planning for this expeditionary cycle began in London during the summer of 1815, and was part of a larger government-sponsored plan to trace the course of the Niger, clarify the circumstances of the death of Mungo Park, and perhaps return his remains and personal property to the coast. The expedition's planners also hoped to resolve suggestions that the Niger might drain into an inland lake, might evaporate in the desert, or might join with the Nile, Congo, or another river before reaching Africa's coast. No less important was a concern in 1815 that the end of warfare on the European continent would bring a resurgence of French commercial and imperial interests.

The path to the publication of our collaborative research concerning an aspect of earliest Church Missionary Society history has been an irregular, and often despairing, one. For a time it seemed unlikely that we would ever finish our research, and that was simply the research part of it. The prospect of collaboration by husband and wife, persons trained in disciplines—history and sociology—guided by approaches seemingly opposed to each other, was not a promising one from the start. Simply put, could we cooperate, work through the processes of writing, thinking, and rewriting/rethinking within a single household, and endure the stress associated with meeting demands placed upon us by a publisher and full-time jobs as instructors? Had we been aware that this project would last for nearly thirty years for Bruce and twenty for Nancy, and consume entirely too much of our lives, we are pretty certain—in retrospect—that we would never have embarked on it.

Bruce was the first to encounter the archive of the Church Missionary Society, during his dissertation research in London in 1966. At that time his principal objective was to scan records found in that archive for bits and pieces of data relating to political development and economic transformation of a part of coastal Guinea/Conakry from 1800 to 1850. That was a region where the Church Missionary Society had operated schools and mission stations between 1808 and 1816/17. Among the Society's earliest missionaries sent to West Africa was one named Peter Hartwig—a person who, according to other missionaries and early historians, had deserted the sacred cause to become a slave trader, and yet had returned to the Society's service at the eleventh hour, only to die in 1815 in a yellow fever epidemic then sweeping the African coast. Still, something seemed to be amiss in that narrative, for correspondence found in the archive suggested that it was a very complex affair. It was apparent that a careful review of Hartwig's experiences would be a worthwhile research project, but for a later time.

The movement from ship to shore and to merchant stores occurred prior to 1790 in the Rio Pongo, where an indigenous trading system between the coastal Baga and the Fula of the interior had long existed. Between 1790 and 1808 contact with the interior improved. A vibrant European and Eurafrican trading community developed at the mouth of the river and coalesced to oppose an attempt by the Sierra Leone Company to capture control of the river's commerce. More significant than the threat of monopolistic control was the company's opposition to slave trading. This study of trade, coasters, and conflict in the Rio Pongo outlines the importance of the landlord-stranger relationship, the interaction of slaving and legitimate commerce, the influence of long-distance African traders upon littoral trade and politics, and the manner in which traders and chiefs cooperated to forestall company success.