The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade

PART I

AFRICAN IDENTITIES

IN ATLANTIC SPACES

CHAPTER ONE

Identity among Liberated Africans

in Sierra Leone

David Northrup

In their influential collection of essays on Caribbean and Latin American port cities in 1991, Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss suggested that the presence of people of African origins, both slave and free, was an especially important topic in Atlantic history that deserved greater attention and study.¹ Since then there have been many important studies of the African presence in the Americas. As it happens, there has also been growing attention to African-European interactions in cities along Africa’s Atlantic coast. Three years before Knight and Liss’s book appeared, Joseph Miller’s celebrated Way of Death tied together the histories of Angola ports with the ports of Brazil. Subsequently, influential books by John Thornton and George Brooks have studied cultural hybridity in coastal Atlantic Africa. Robin Law’s study of the famous port of Ouidah is the most fully developed of the works focusing on West African ports as cultural and commercial meeting places of African and European worlds. By joining this body of scholarship on Africa with the existing literature on the Americas, the influence of European and African cultural influences in early modern Atlantic cities can be reconsidered, without the presumption of European dominance that was characteristic of earlier studies.²

Adding African coastal cities to the discussion requires changes in the conventional paradigm of Atlantic cities, but perhaps not so many as non- Africanist scholars might think, since there are many close parallels. In the first place, African Atlantic cities were growing at about the same moment as port cities were emerging in colonial Americas. As in the New World, Iberians pioneered the new African contacts (Northern Europeans following), and Africans were quick to build on these new contacts, although some coastal cities on the islands and in Angola were built on European foundations. Finally, in port cities on both sides of the Atlantic, Africans were more numerous than Europeans. In the late eighteenth century Ouidah and Luanda had only a few hundred resident Europeans, but as the chapters on Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Cartagena, Cap Français, and Kingston show, Africans were also in the majority in American ports, a substantial proportion of whom were born in Africa.³

The historiographies that developed in isolation on opposite sides of the Black Atlantic have now converged sufficiently for serious and more direct dialogue to take place. For example, working separately and with different evidence, Rosanne Adderley and I have reached nearly identical conclusions about changes among displaced Africans on the different sides of the Atlantic. We both underscore the complementary processes of Africanization and creolization. We both agree that as the time and distance from the place remembered as homeland grew, its boundaries expanded. Like the case of Africans liberated in Sierra Leone considered in this essay, the Bahamian Africans seeking to return home whom she considers were less focused on their natal communities than on a geographical region of origin; in their case one was newly created by the International Congo Association. If I have one bone to pick with Adderley, it would be with the sentence "diasporic Africans and their descendants simultaneously and over long periods of time could and did negotiate a dialectical experience of simultaneously remaining African and becoming African-American."⁴ As her larger analysis makes clear, she argues vigorously against Africanness as static, but the tendency to use language that implies an opposition between being and becoming has bedeviled diaspora studies. To be sure an individual was very likely to imagine the process in just such terms: remaining Christian while becoming Yoruba, remaining Yoruba while becoming Christian. But viewed from without, dynamic change is evident on both elements of such pairings. Immigrants were becoming African and becoming part of larger Creole communities at the same time and in ways that were complementary.

This chapter examines how African identities in Sierra Leone evolved in tandem with the development of English-speaking, literate, Christian communities and considers two quite different yet connected subsequent developments. The first is the gradual integration of the liberated Africans into the small, preexisting Creole society of Freetown, Sierra Leone, rather than into the larger African communities in whose midst the colony resided. The second is the return of some liberated Africans, when circumstances permitted, to the Yoruba-speaking homeland in what later became southwestern Nigeria. While this return might be seen as the completion of the dream of return to the Congo that circumstances prevented the Bahamians from accomplishing, it produced a range of different outcomes. At one end were the Sierra Leoneans who partially reintegrated into ancestral communities, nearly always defined at the level of dialect groups. At the other was the small body of African missionaries whose efforts to convert their countrymen led not just to the kinds of culture change (in religion, literacy, and so on) associated with creolization most commonly found in the Americas and explored in particular by the chapters authored by João Reis for Bahia and Nicole von Germeten for Mexico City, but also to the actualization of a pan-Yoruba identity for the first time in that homeland. In between were many who struggled to find a middle ground.

Sierra Leone began as the Province of Freedom, founded as a refuge for free blacks in the Atlantic diaspora. The first settlers in 1787, 411 free blacks from England, were joined in 1792 by some 1,100 Nova Scotians, that is, blacks who had sided with the British in the War of the American Revolution so as to get their freedom and who were brought to the colony after having been initially settled in Nova Scotia. In 1796 nearly 600 Maroons, free Afro-Jamaicans, joined the struggling colony. Financial distress and high mortality led to the settlement’s annexation as a British Crown Colony at the beginning of 1808, just when Britain was also taking steps to halt the Atlantic slave trade. Sierra Leone found greater success as the headquarters of a British squadron and as a place where persons from captured slave ships were liberated and resettled.⁵

The arrival of some 94,000 Africans whom British patrols had rescued from slave ships and liberated in the colony, mostly between 1815 and 1835, transformed Sierra Leonean society. Not counting the indigenous Africans outside the colony’s boundaries, liberated Africans became the new majority. By 1820 they already constituted 62 percent of the colony’s 12,500 residents, compared to 13 percent for the earlier black immigrants and a mere 120 Europeans.⁶ Over time the newly liberated Africans and their descendants swamped the older black immigrants, but in the process the later arrivals absorbed the founding Creoles’ social and cultural norms.

The experiences of the tens of thousands of men, women, and children from all over Africa who were rescued from slave ships by British naval patrols and resettled in Sierra Leone between 1815 and 1850 differed in ways both large and small. Sierra Leone was a place of liberation and thus quite different from the slave societies of the Americas to which other Africans had the misfortune to be transported, but, despite the liberated Africans’ greater freedom, the outcomes of their efforts to rebuild their cultural lives in Sierra Leone often resembled the outcomes in slave societies in the Americas. The similar outcomes are observable in the process of creolization, the adoption of new cultural traits from the first settlers and the Europeans in the colony, and in the process of Africanization, the construction of radically altered senses of their African identities. Though these two processes were intimately connected, it is analytically simpler to examine them separately.

Creolization

Africans who survived the experience of captivity, enslavement, transportation, recapture, and the voyage against the prevailing winds to Sierra Leone would have stepped on the shores as physically and mentally traumatized as did captives who reached the Americas. They faced similar cultural challenges in re-creating themselves, if under less traumatic circumstances than in the Americas. As in many parts of the Americas, Europeans were a distinct minority in Sierra Leone, but European speech, institutions, beliefs, and customs dominated. However, most of those involved in this were other Africans, whether from the earlier Atlantic African immigrants or from earlier generations of receptive settlers who helped resettle the newly arrived recaptives in villages, taught them English, and preached Christianity to them.

Because of the great diversity of the African languages that recaptives brought to Sierra Leone, it is not surprising that the language of the earliest settlers and the British authorities rapidly became the lingua franca for communication. A Sierra Leone African renamed George Crowley Nicol testified to a British parliamentary committee in 1849 that all recaptives freed in Sierra Leone picked up English soon after their arrival since the language was essential for communication with the authorities and among Africans there. Even at home, he reported, married couples such as his own recaptive parents spoke nothing but English when they had no African language in common.⁷ Youths learned fastest, but observers noted that older people also picked up the language.

Religion was another area of cultural change. It is hardly surprising to find such openness to spiritual consolation among people who had been torn from their families and communities and had experienced the traumas of the Middle Passage. Separated from the sacred sites and ancestral shrines of their homelands, they took up new religious practices as readily as they did the new language. In his history of Sierra Leone, Christopher Fyfe describes the process in vivid biblical imagery: Amid the Babel of tongues English became not only a lingua franca but a Pentecostal interpreter, speaking a message many were ready to hear. For abandoned by their own gods who had failed to protect them in their homeland, they came up from the hold of the slave ship like Jonah from the whale, cut off from their own life, ready to be re-born into a new.⁸ The agents promoting this process of religious rebirth were mostly other black people. In 1820 the colony had only 120 European residents, mostly officials and merchants. The number of black Christians was many times greater: 1,530 Nova Scotians and 597 Afro-Jamaican Maroons.⁹ Anglican, Methodist, or Baptist missionary societies funded from Europe provided food, housing, medical care, and schools, as well as religious instruction, but, given the paucity of European missionaries in the colony and the extremely high mortality they suffered, most day-to-day instruction and leadership were in the hands of these Creoles, who also organized religious instruction classes for the new arrivals in their own languages.

In time, newly converted liberated Africans became the major agents of acculturation. Beginning as helpers to European missionaries, many Africans went on to become teachers and catechists for the missionary societies. A few were ordained ministers, including Samuel Ajayi Crowther (later consecrated as an Anglican bishop); his shipmate, Joseph Bartholomew; an Igbo recaptive, Charles Knight; and another Yoruba speaker, Joseph Wright. After their ordinations in 1848, the Reverends Knight and Wright had precedence over more junior missionaries in the colony, to the chagrin of some of the newly arrived Europeans.¹⁰

Instruction in Christianity was more voluntary in Sierra Leone than was the case on slave plantations in some parts of the Americas. Africans were not compelled to attend and were free to choose and switch congregations. Many found the church-run schools an irresistible attraction. In an autobiographical essay the Reverend Joseph Wright described how learning and faith were intertwined: Although I did not embrace or believe from my heart when I first read the word of God, I had great love to it. I liked to hear reading, and I liked to hear the minister preach to me Jesus. In five or six years after I came to this country. I began to learn to pray morning and evening, although I did it not from the heart…. In the year 1834 … I began to attend the Methodist Chapel…. From the day I met in class, I began to seek the peace of God.¹¹ In addition, as Fyfe suggests, the traumas of enslavement and forced relocation made recaptives receptive to the message of salvation that missionaries and catechists preached. However, the process was not passive and one-sided, for Africans also infused European forms of Christianity with African religious sentiments, just as they had in the Americas, as analyzed in Chapters 3, 4, 7, and 12, which focus on African participation in Catholic sodalities, for example. Hymn singing was infused with distinctly African musical forms and accompanied by hand clapping and dancing. In Sierra Leone the path to conversion generally involved seeking and finding, encountering salvation through outward signs, such as visions and convulsions, rather than by passive acceptance of the preacher’s message. Like Joseph Wright and the Nova Scotian emigrants, many liberated Africans gravitated toward the Methodists because they were more open than the Anglicans to such appeals to the spirit. Nor did it take long for congregations to gain significant control over their churches. Some congregations built their own churches and hired (and fired) their own ministers.¹² Christianity became a powerful link among non-indigenous Sierra Leoneans. The Nova Scotians had successfully introduced Christianity to the young generation of Maroons, whose ancestors in Jamaica had resisted conversion. As many liberated Africans became Christians, the basis of broader identity emerged, though some obstacles remained.¹³

Especially for young Africans, schools were critical agents of acculturation. The schools had their beginnings among the colony’s original black settlers from England and Nova Scotia. Missionaries and colonial officials actively promoted education, but liberated Africans embraced formal education in Western subjects with great enthusiasm. To meet the demand for schooling among both children and adults, teachers were enlisted from every possible source and included individuals of African descent, locally resident European merchants, and an occasional stranded sailor. The missionary societies spent great sums to keep up with the demand. After the missions imposed modest fees in the 1830s to help defray costs, school enrollment continued to rise in the prospering colony. In Fyfe’s analysis, Lack of schooling became a moral stigma: Europeans found their servants too busy writing to do housework. Schools overflowed; children had to be turned away; new schools opened. By 1840 there were over eight thousand children in Sierra Leone’s schools (a fifth of the population). A secondary school opened in 1845, and shortly afterward the old seminary that Ajayi had attended in the late 1820s at Fourah Bay was revitalized and again became an important center for African education.¹⁴

While Sierra Leone’s freedom and schools have no counterparts in the slave systems of the New World, the process of creolization on both sides of the Atlantic has many suggestive parallels. Language acquisition was a necessity. Religious change might have been an option that appealed to many. New skills were acquired in formal and informal contexts. Such similar outcomes suggest that the element of coercion by slave owners and managers needs to be balanced by sufficient attention to how much enslaved Africans were themselves agents in the process of creolization, responding to new circumstances in ways that reflected their fundamental needs both material and spiritual. But as important as the adoption of elements of European culture was, it was only one side of the larger acculturation process that was taking place

Africanization

The creolizing tendencies evident in the spread of the English language and of Western Christian denominations were accompanied by equally profound transformations in displaced persons’ conception of their African identities. Even before they boarded a European slaver, the circumstances of captivity, encounters with unfamiliar African religions and languages, and contacts with other victims of the slave trade had led many captives to expand and alter their identities. This process of Africanization included a much greater awareness of themselves as part of a pan-African community and an expanded or entirely new sense of themselves as members of distinct national groups.

Before experiencing overseas exile, it is unlikely that many residents of sub-Saharan Africa had a conscious sense of belonging to a large regional or linguistic groups, still less of being residents of the African continent or of sharing physical traits that distinguished them from peoples elsewhere. Encounters with Europeans and with people from other parts of Africa forced Sierra Leone recaptives to become aware of their pan-African identity, just as it did for Africans in more distant lands. Sierra Leone was one of the earliest places in sub-Saharan Africa where people identified themselves as Africans, but only the most educated and traveled did this as a matter of course. One who did was the son of Igbo-speaking recaptives, James A. B. Horton, an Edinburgh-trained physician. The A was for Africanus, a name Horton adopted consciously following the usage of many North Africans in the Roman Empire; the name was also used by the small community of long-term residents from sub-Saharan Africa in eighteenth-century Britain, such as the writers Gustavus Vassa (Olaudah Equiano) and Ignatius Sancho, who had identified themselves as sons of Africa by the use of the African or Africanus.¹⁵

For the less elite the process of Africanization was played out on a smaller, subcontinental scale. Among the recaptives settled in Sierra Leone, a German missionary named Koelle was able to record 160 languages, plus several distinct dialects of the languages with large numbers of speakers in the colony. The biographies of his informants that he included with his vocabulary lists are very revealing. When asked to identify where they were from, his informants all named a community even smaller than a dialect group. Of the 128 languages for which Koelle provided information (see Table 1.1), fully 25 had only one (surviving) speaker in the colony, 73 others were represented by a dozen or fewer speakers at the time of their interview, and 21 languages had between 13 and 50 speakers in the colony. Only 9 had more than 50 speakers.¹⁶

Given this linguistic fragmentation, new identity groups had to be created. By 1848, the colony’s census was able to list Africans as members of just nineteen tribes or nations. Some of these nations were defined by a common language, but others had to build identity communities out of more exotic materials. Whether based on linguistic or other criteria, none of these nations then existed elsewhere in Africa. In Sierra Leone, as in parts of the Americas touched upon in chapters by Matt Childs for Havana and João Reis for Bahia, many of these ethnic nations were creations of the slave trade.

The largest of Sierra Leone’s new African nations were the Aku or Yoruba. In his account of enslavement and journey to the coast, Samual Ajayi Crowther makes clear that no pan-Yoruba identity or common name then existed among those in his home of Oyo and the intervening people among whom he lived on his slow journey to the port of Lagos. In Sierra Leone, other Africans called Ajayi and his country people the Akoo (Aku), a name derived from a greeting that they used. Koelle chose to refer to the dozen dialects of the language as Aku, noting, It is … not the historical name [of] these numerous tribes. He specifically objected to the use of Yoruba as a general name because it was unhistorical and used only by the Oyo, adding that if one called an Ijebu a Yoruba, that person would reject the term with as much vigor and justice as a Bavarian would object to being called a Prussian.¹⁷

The next most numerous group in Sierra Leone were the Eboo (Igbo). In their homeland along and east of the lower Niger, Igbo speakers inhabited a multitude of politically autonomous village groups dispersed over a substantial area. Their political autonomy and geographical range had fostered considerable linguistic and cultural diversity, which had precluded the development of a common identity. At midcentury, the Niger explorer William Baikie emphasized the great dialectical and cultural differences between different parts of this extensive country and pointed out that when at home each person hails, as a sailor would say, from the particular district where he was born. Only when removed from their particular ancestral kinship communities, as in Sierra Leone, Europe, or the Americas, was a common Igbo identity likely to surface. from the recaptives in Sierra Leone, koelle was able to collect vocabularies of five main igbo dialects and the names of ten other countries whose people were called igbo in Sierra Leone. He stressed that, like the yoruba, most igbo speakers in their homeland shared no national name and knew only the names of their respective districts or countries and had never heard the name igbo before coming to Sierra Leone.¹⁸

Five other nations also shared a common language, but likewise seem to have acquired their common identities in Sierra Leone. The Hausa, who appeared in large numbers in nineteenth-century Bahia, as analyzed by João Reis in this volume, were the next most numerous after the yoruba and igbo in the colony and had lived in a number of autonomous city-states for many centuries until their forcible incorporation into the Sokoto Caliphate at the beginning of the century. Some sort of national identity may already have existed among the more mobile Hausa traders, but it is doubtful that it held meaning for the majority of Hausa, who were sedentary farmers. Both of koelle’s informants on the language self-identified with the traditional Hausa city-states of kano and katsina. Some fulbe in Hausaland had acted in concert in creating the Sokoto Caliphate, but centuries of pastoral migration had made them the most widely dispersed people in West Africa. Koelle recorded four Pula’ dialects—two in Hausaland and two hundreds of miles to the west. Some Wolof speakers may have came from the Jolof kingdom, but the group probably included others who had not had a sense of political identity in their homelands. The Kromantee nation (named after one of the trading forts on the Gold Coast) probably consisted of Akan speakers from the various states of the southern gold Coast, but is likely to have also included many people from farther inland who passed through Akan country on their way into the Atlantic trade. Finally, the Calabah nation (named for the major slave port of Old Calabar) appears to have represented the three major dialects of the language that koelle called Anang after one of them, but has subsequently come to be called Efik-Ibibio or Efik. The Calabah used language to distinguish themselves from other Africans in the colony, but their lack of a common name for themselves even today suggests how weak their sense of common identity must have been at home two centuries ago. Their nation, too, would have included nonnative speakers who learned their language while in Old Calabar.

Table 1.1. Linguistic Diversity and Ethnogenesis among Liberated Africans in Mid-nineteenth-century Sierra Leone

Note: The 1848 census did not include the entire colony and is therefore only a rough approximation of the relative size of the nonnative nations in Sierra Leone. The records of the slave cargoes captured and landed in Sierra Leone cannot be converted directly into ethnolinguistic groups, but there is a general correspondence of language distribution and probable coast of origin. The following are the percentages of those enumerated in the census grouped by probable coast of origin and, in parentheses, the percentage of recaptives from those coasts: Akoo and Paupah 66 percent (Bight of Benin 41 percent); Binnee, Eboo, Hausa, Calabah, Moko, and Kakanja 24 percent (Bight of Biafra 37 percent); Kromantee 1 percent (Gold Coast 2 percent); Congo 3 percent (West-Central Africa 6 percent); Mozambique more than 1 percent (Southeast Africa 1 percent). It will be apparent that even when all members of groups that might have gone to either the Bight of Benin or Bight of Biafra ports are assigned to the latter, that coast’s share is low, while the Akoo numbers are higher. Given the limitations of the census, it is impossible to say what significance should be attached to these anomalies.

Other African nations in Sierra Leone lacked both a common language and prior political unity in their homelands. The Paupah (or Popo) from the western Slave Coast, the third largest group in the 1848 census, spoke five different languages by Koelle’s count. Other such polyglot nations were the Mandingo (five Mande or Mandinka languages), the Bini (the Edo of the kingdom of Benin, plus speakers of six or seven neighboring languages), the Moko of Cameroon (sixteen different languages), the Kongo (eighteen distinct languages scattered over a vast area of West-Central Africa), and the Mozambique of southeastern Africa (six languages).

It should be clear, then, that the African nations in Sierra Leone were not survivals from ancestral homelands, but new, expanded identities arising out of the circumstances and experiences of captivity, transport, and resettlement. Three distinct forces helped create these new identities: the perceptions of other Africans, who often gave the new group its name; the perceptions of Africans inside the group, who accepted the new identity to some degree; and the policies of the British authorities who oversaw the resettlement of the tens of thousands of recaptives rescued from the Atlantic slave trade. It is difficult to calculate the relative roles of each, although official policies are the best documented. Newly arrived Africans were put under the care of residents who spoke their own language or something close to it, but to communicate with their neighbors they needed English or another common language.¹⁹

However important outside forces were in establishing these new identities, once they came into existence, those who belonged to them had the central role in shaping their development. Multiple identities were common. African settlers regularly took steps to strengthen solidarity by forming beneficial societies, often called companies, whose fellow members accorded each other the kinds of mutual aid customary in kinship-based villages elsewhere in Africa. Strikingly similar to the Catholic sodalities and mutual aid societies discussed in chapters by Sweet for Lisbon, Landers for Cartagena, Reis for Bahia, Childs for Havana, von Germeten for Mexico City, and Geggus for Cap Français, many of these companies had a common linguistic core (though this did not exclude some outsiders from joining), but other companies were based on different principles. One Sierra Leonean (himself descended from African Americans from Nova Scotia) reported that soon after a new shipload of people of different tribes or nations was settled in a village, they formed a club including the whole of their shipmates, without distinction of nation, for the purpose of mutual assistance. This club of all shipmates was called the Big Company, which he distinguished from the Little Company, a separate ethnically based club that, in addition to other activities, helped preserve the festivals, dances, music, and other customs of their homelands. However, it was impossible to preserve all the rich variations of these customs from different homeland communities in the microcosm of the Sierra Leone diaspora. Inevitably, what emerged were composites, simplified and imbued with new features and understandings based on life in Sierra Leone.²⁰

As might be expected, the numerous Yoruba speakers formed the largest ethnic companies in the villages and even had a king to whom Yoruba from villages all over Sierra Leone pledged allegiance. While this clearly reflects the re-creation of an institution from the homeland (where several kingdoms existed) that had been streamlined and adapted to altered circumstances, it is important to note that it was also a new creation that corresponded to no particular Yoruba kingdom and that it functioned quite differently from any homeland political system. In other words, the Yoruba nation was both old and new. Perhaps in imitation of the numerous and well-organized Yoruba, the Nupe, Igbo, Mandinka, Susu, and other national groups also chose kings and other officers, though none of them achieved the Aku’s degree of solidarity. It is instructive that their solidarity did not persist when Yoruba left Sierra Leone and returned to their homeland, where they fit themselves into the complex of older identities overlain by many new kingdoms that decades of civil warfare had produced.²¹

These new nations drew upon shared languages and customs, but they were formed in Sierra Leone under circumstances conceivable only outside their homelands. They not only made use of institutions, such as written constitutions (in English), that had no counterpart in their homelands, but could be found in the Americas in such institutions as the cabildos de nación, as discussed in the chapter by Matt Childs, but they also borrowed freely from the other nations around them. As in the Americas, an ethnic name might conceal a more diverse membership. Many liberated Africans in Sierra Leone were from linguistic groups too small to form nations. Some created nonethnic affinity groups, as was the case when a group of Bassa described themselves as of the Bassa Society, not nation. Yet another option was to affiliate with a larger nation, whose language one knew, even if it did not represent one’s actual origins. At one point, the reigning king of the Aku in Sierra Leone, a man named John Macaulay, appears to have been Hausa in origin.²²

As other chapters in this volume touch upon, these new nations were invented, but not out of nothing. In their struggle to rebuild their lives and communities, displaced Africans naturally drew upon everything they knew and loved from home, but they also adapted old ways to new circumstances, adopted new customs and beliefs, and enlarged the circle of their contacts and understandings. The most important point is the dynamic nature of what was happening, not the static survival of bits and pieces from home. To focus on the relics (the survivals) rather than on the dynamics by which African individuals and communities survived by reinventing themselves is to miss the point. To use a scriptural image many Sierra Leonean recaptives would have understood, they were pouring old wine into new wineskins as well as new wine into old skins. Sierra Leone shows a marvelous blend of creolization and Africanization, sometimes existing in harmony, sometimes existing in conflict, and sometimes running along parallel lines of development.

Other Identities

Sierra Leoneans also formed alliances that cut across national identities or that represented different religious perspectives within a single nation. In the village of Waterloo, for example, the leaders of the major ethnic groups organized a sort of United Nations of Africa to mediate disputes. Known as the Seventeen Nations, it represented the village’s seventeen largest ethnic groups, as they had evolved in the colony. The institution spread to other settlements, where it served as an effective local government and persisted for decades. The Seventeen Nations had been formed to settle interethnic disputes following a war involving three of the nations during Christmas week in 1843. The war was reportedly set off by the unauthorized bathing practice of a Calabar woman, which offended Aku sensibilities. However, during the conflict the vastly outnumbered Calabar had been joined by the Igbo people.²³ Such rivalries and interethnic alliances prefigure the ethnic politics of twentieth-century Nigeria, but in their precolonial homelands the Yoruba and Igbo were too isolated from each other to be rivals. Rather, such rivalries and identities were first born in the diaspora and may well have reflected Igbo resentment at the numerical predominance of the Yoruba speakers. In addition, the Calabar-Igbo alliance may have reflected friendships formed in Bight of Biafran ports and on slave ships, which, it was noted earlier, were the basis of enduring organizations in other villages.

A more complex cultural transformation came in religion, where the traditional beliefs and Islamic beliefs brought from homelands confronted the growing Christian influence.²⁴ In 1847 the acting governor of Sierra Leone estimated that there were some two thousand Muslims and at least twelve thousand Pagans in the colony, along with some twenty-one thousand African Christians.²⁵ Muslims would have predominated among the Hausa and Fulbe and were common among the numerous Yoruba recaptives. While Islam was the predominant religion of the indigenous peoples in the vicinity of Sierra Leone, within the colony the religion met with the stern disapproval of both officials and missionaries. Many Muslims persevered in the practice of their faith despite such hostility, while others modified their beliefs. The parents of Thomas Maxwell of Sierra Leone, for example, had both been raised Muslim in Bornu, but in Sierra Leone, while his father remained devoted to Islam, his mother became a Christian.²⁶ It is likely that Muslim identity would have been affected by the reformist Islamic movements in the vicinity of the colony, but few details are known.

One has somewhat better information with regard to the so-called Pagans, whom the report accorded the courtesy of a capital letter. Some individuals, especially older men, continued religious practices and beliefs they remembered from their homelands, but the continuation of such religious traditions proved difficult because African religions were based on particular communal identities in the homelands and were often closely tied to ancestral shrines and local nature spirits. In addition, the creation of broader identity groups meant that a more encompassing religious identity was also necessary. As the 1847 report shows, most Africans fulfilled this need by becoming Christians. However, others successfully adapted traditional beliefs to these new circumstances.

The most notable example of this occurred among the Yoruba speakers. Not only were Yoruba speakers very numerous, but the elaborate pantheon of Yoruba deities and myths proved as transportable to Sierra Leone as it did to Brazil and Cuba. The acting governor identified this neo-Yoruba religion with the worship of Shango, the god of thunder. Others associated it with the worship of the creator, Oludumare, or his son Oduduwa, the founder of the Yoruba. The emergence of this unity in exile stands in striking contrast to the strong sense of religious alienation Ayaji had experienced among the alien ancestral and nature shrines of the Egba and to the political disunity and civil war that had ravaged their homeland and fostered this massive forced exodus into the Atlantic. In exile, Yoruba recaptives reinvented their ancestral religion with a stronger emphasis on those elements that could bind them together, while deemphasizing the particular ceremonies and shrines that had such variety in the homeland. The process was also reversible. When Yoruba recaptives who had embraced this neo-Yoruba religion in Sierra Leone returned to their homeland after the end of the civil wars, they tended to take up the local particular religious practices while deemphasizing the overarching cosmological aspects of the religion. As Fyfe puts it, [O]nly in Sierra Leone were all the children of Odudua, the Yoruba ancestor-god, united.²⁷

By 1850 the Yoruba in Sierra Leone came to have substantial numbers of Christians, traditionalists, and Muslims, just as would be the case later in their homeland. Other ethnic groups were similarly divided into two or more camps. In some cases these divisions were sources of conflict, especially as some Sierra Leonean Christians worked hard to eradicate pagan practices among their members. However, many new Christians continued traditional beliefs and ceremonies, particularly those associated with birth, death, marriage, and other major parts of the life cycle. This phenomenon explains the seemingly contradictory descriptions one gets from the European Christian ministers. The optimists among them were full of praise for the remarkable progress being made in the direction of Christianity. The purists tended to have a more pessimistic take, denouncing the shallowness of faith and the survival of heathen practices. Occasionally, one strikes a happy medium that has the ring of truth, as in this observation by a missionary on the recaptives of Bathurst: Heathenish customs are certainly on the decline … [people] are anxious that their children should be baptized, and instructed in the truths of the Christian religion, but yet themselves prefer the superstitions of their own Country; for no better reason that it was the religion of their forefathers. The acting governor also believed that many inhabitants professing Christianity believed as well in the powers of traditional magic and witchcraft of their homelands. While conceding that decades of efforts had failed to convert many recaptives, he preferred to emphasize how much had been done.²⁸

Identity Dynamics after 1850

At midcentury the black populations of Sierra Leone and its hinterland were far from being a single community. The deepest division was between indigenous peoples and the immigrants. An occasional outsider like Edward Wilmot Blyden from the Virgin Islands might express admiration for the indigenous Muslim societies in the region, but this was not a view widely shared among the settlers. Furthermore, the settlers themselves were split between older immigrants and liberated Africans. Deeply committed to an identity as black Englishmen, Nova Scotians initially held liberated Africans in deep contempt for their lesser acculturation to that norm, and some referred to them in derogatory terms, such as Willyfoss [Wilberforce] niggers.²⁹ For their part, the liberated Africans’ dual Creole/African identities made them quite distinct from the monocultural African Americans. The liberated African community was far from homogeneous but divided by neo-ethnic, religious, and geographical differences.

However, as the founding generations of the settler communities passed on, crosscutting ties among their descendants fostered greater rapprochement. By midcentury, the descendants of the London, Nova Scotian, and Jamaican settlers were beginning to coalesce into a single community. This small community grudgingly admitted a few of the best educated and most prosperous liberated Africans, who adopted its cultural values and manners. Such social integration and intermarriage were encouraged by the growing number of indigenous Africans in the colony, whom both groups looked down upon. By the late 1870s, Leo Spitzer argues, the lines separating Nova Scotians, Maroons, and Recaptives had virtually disappeared. Instead there was a single Creole community distinguished by distinctive mores, European dress, language (Krio), and social boundaries. In time a few indigenous people who were deemed suitable also gained admission to Creole society. Creole society remained stratified along class lines, with education and wealth the great signifiers and the principal means of social advancement.³⁰

Religious affiliation was also a discriminator among Creoles. Christian denominations had their own places in the social hierarchy, but the sharpest distinction was between Christians and Muslims. The largest community of Muslim Creoles were Yoruba. As John Peterson argues, the sharp division between (Christian) Creoles and Muslims can be exaggerated: In everything but religion, the Freetown Muslim Creole developed similarly to the Freetown Christian Creole. Still, their separate identity has a long history. In the 1820s and 1830s the independence of Yoruba Muslims was already a matter of British concern, military action, and judicial proceedings—all of which produced no substantial change. In Sierra Leone the label Muslim Creole remained common into the twentieth century. In the 1950s the seventy-five hundred Yoruba Muslims had a distinct identity and customs in Freetown and nearby towns in Sierra Leone and maintained ties to others who had emigrated to Senegal and the Gambia. The Yoruba may not have been the only Muslims who resisted assimilation, but I am unaware of evidence that other groups had sufficient numbers to maintain a separate identity.³¹

As the Muslim circumstances suggest, besides being a place of multiple acculturation processes, Sierra Leone was also a point of dispersal. During the last two decades of the Atlantic slave trade over fifteen thousand Africans, most newly liberated, sailed from there under contracts of indenture to British Caribbean colonies, where their acculturation was gentler than what earlier generations of enslaved Africans had experienced.³² Another stream of emigrants from Sierra Leone, though fewer in numbers, is of greater interest here since it illustrates the ways in which identities continued to evolve as people returned to their homeland areas.

Individuals of other groups may have sought to return to their homelands, but only the numerous Yoruba speakers did so in significant numbers once it became safe to do so. Three new circumstances at midcentury facilitated this return migration. The first was the decline in the decades of civil war among the Yoruba that made the region safer. The second was British success in ending the slave trade from coastal ports, notably the port of Lagos, through which so many thousands of enslaved Yoruba speakers had passed. After diplomacy failed to stop Lagos’s external slave trade, the British first occupied the port and then annexed it. Finally, a burgeoning legitimate trade in palm oil provided along the West African coast promoted regular shipping along the coast, which furnished ancillary passenger service to Sierra Leoneans at a reasonable price. Those returning from Sierra Leone (and smaller numbers of Yoruba speakers from Brazil) arrived with a grasp of the spoken language (or one of its dialects) and childhood memories that could reconnect them, but, like many return migrants to Europe and Asia in the nineteenth century, they found their exiles had changed them. Most returning Saros (Sierra Leoneans) and the Amaros (Americans, i.e., Brazilians) were sincere Christians and admirers of other aspects of Western culture. The concentration of homeland Yoruba in dense settlements, often referred to as cities, tended to accentuate the impact of the returnees on their more numerous