The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective

Jacqueline Knörr, Christoph Kohl, Jacqueline Knörr, Christoph Kohl

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785330704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios regionales

For centuries, Africa's Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics and various other social phenomena. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.

Part I

Creole Connections

Chapter 1

Towards a Definition of Transnational as a Family Construct

A Historical and Micro Perspective

Bruce L. Mouser

Definitions

Current literature amply demonstrates that ‘transnational’ is an imprecise and overused term. For the purpose of this study of trader families on the West African coast and their charter generations, transnational is used in two ways. Transnational families contain a primary component on the African mainland. They have family branches living and working in different countries, and those branches interact with each other and are aware of each other’s existence. They identify themselves as transnational or are identified by others as transnational. Their more successful branches travel to distant places, study abroad, speak several languages, and are open to the pan-Atlantic market of products and ideas. Multi-sitedness across national borders and group cohesion are critical components in this definition of the term.

The second definition is more complicated because it involves a self- or other-imposed identity that may transcend or reject ethnic or national membership. In the African context, this may include any prominent cultural or physiological characteristic that separates a group from the majority population, stigmatizes its members for being different, or denies them ethnic membership or even a path to membership. Intermarriage among members within such a group increases the group’s self-identity of separateness as well as the impression among others that the group is exclusive, closed, separate and hostile.

A manifestation of these two definitions is the emergence of a creolized group with character and genetic traits that it borrows or modifies from many sources. Grey Gundaker (2000: 125) suggests that Europeans who arrived on the African coast as traders and who expected to remain and raise families there ‘made the most of similarities’ between their own systems and those of their hosts. They either accommodated to the cultural norms of the majority population or produced a self-identified hybrid or creolized and multiethnic culture that was denied ethnic membership. To explain how some Europeans and their métis families were able to fuse with or accommodate to the dominant population and over time obtain membership and privilege as power-sharing newcomers, Donald Levine (1979) developed a typology that identified stages through which strangers moved to acquire either newcomer status or marginality as a stigmatized and self-identified hybrid and separate group.

Historical Background

Between 1750 and 1850 (the approximate date for the ‘effective’ end of slave trading from the Rio Pongo), more than seventy American and European slave traders had settled at the Rio Pongo and remained there long enough to produce offspring that carried their surnames. They became a part of a fluid ‘African-European frontier’ or zone of interconnectedness emerging upon the coast (Coifman 1994; Hannerz 1997). Some of these traders died in their first years, succumbing to diseases, fevers and parasites of the coast, but many others survived and stayed to establish large families and create and join networks of trader families. A select number of these families or their most commercially successful branches became multi-sited, with units operating on the Nunez and Pongo Rivers and residences maintained in Liverpool, England; Charleston, South Carolina; Havana or Matanzas in Cuba; and in one case Boston, Massachusetts. In 1820, Commander Sir G. H. Collier of the Royal Navy described those in the Pongo as:

the surviving few of some hundreds of original [‘Company of Royal] Adventurers¹ [Trading to Africa’], of hardy constitutions, rude habits, and little education, [who] were well calculated for the task they had undertaken; they assimilated themselves to the manners and customs of the Country, and soon became powerful as Chiefs. By marriages with the native Women they had large families, a guarantee for their respect to the customs of the Country, and a pledge for their personal continuance in it; thus consolidating their interest, and uniting their fate with that of the Country…Their children are of course mulattoes.²

Jehudi Ashmun (Gurley 1933: 347) wrote in 1827 simply that these traders had ‘allied themselves, by something, which in Africa, passes as marriage, with the most powerful native families, and are the proprietors of slaves’. More than a century later, Monsignor Raymond-René Lerouge (Congrégation du Société Esprit)³ described such an arrangement in less flattering terms, neglecting to indicate that his interpretation contained all that was necessary to establish marital legitimacy in the Pongo context:

One day, we learn that the neighbouring chief sold him one of his daughters (girls) for several spans of Guinea cloth, a few bottles of rum, [and] a few pounds of gunpowder. This woman, with great fanfare, is introduced into the stranger’s bedchamber. After a few months, a child is born of this stranger’s house. This is the ‘mixed race’, the true métis of the first generation: father white, mother native. A [new] species is founded.

To be sure, the founders of transnational families in the Pongo lacked sophistication and decorum, for they were engaged in the lowest of commerces – slave trading. Moreover, according to Meneses (1987: 231–33), they were operating in an environment of ‘a good deal of real hostility’. They represented a threat of potential enslavement and were ‘at best disliked and at worst hated’ by the majority population. As a minority, they were ‘freed from the usual obligation of generosity and kindness’. Some came to establish factories and become businessmen on the coast; some arrived seeking only employment in factories established by others. Nearly all arrived at the Pongo without relatives or a spouse, and they sought – as did their hosts – to remedy that deficiency as quickly as possible. Whatever their motives for remaining in the Pongo, they had to follow local custom if they intended to obtain a wife or partner. One method was to purchase a slave outright and use her as a mistress (Flezar 2009: 67; Brooks 2010: 95). But although that was permitted, it removed the river’s ‘land kings’ (who regulated the use of land) and ‘political kings’ (involved in social and political interactions) from the ‘wifegiving’ process. It also created a problem for stigmatized offspring, who in addition to being descendants ‘of the Saxon race’ were also descendants of slave mothers and therefore did not have locally recognized succession and inheritance rights (Conneau 1976: 107; Thayer 1978). Partnering with a slave woman also produced difficulties in the global or pan-Atlantic context, where a person classified as a slave was ineligible to inherit property (Kennedy-Haflett 1996; Flezar 2009: 67–68).

Map 1.1. Rio Pongo

The preferred pattern involved a marriage linked to a comprehensive understanding between parties in landlord/stranger or uncle/nephew relationships (Sarró 2009: 51–55; Diallo 1970; Mouser 1975). Marriage was advantageous to both parties: it permitted the host to tap into his stranger’s market while opening his own to the guest (Ballard 2001: 6–8). As host of a European or American, a landholder, especially if he also had political authority, expected any guest to accept a contractual arrangement that stipulated, among many things economic, how a stranger might interact with the host’s other subjects. These included women, who were bargaining chips to be used within patron/client relationships, whether those involved Europeans from the Atlantic or Africans from the interior.

A stranger sealed his trading contract with money or a marriage, and likely both (Conneau 1976: 107–11; Mouser 1975). Upon entering the river’s commerce, protocol required the stranger to approach the local headman and ask permission to visit his town and territory (Harrell-Bond and Rijnsdorp 1976: 26; Almada 1984 [1594]). Small gifts were exchanged. After an appropriate interval, the topic of trading would be raised; now the discussion assumed a more formal character because land use was involved. Land and political headmen and even elders in secret societies would need to be consulted and compensated for the stranger’s privilege to operate within a regional context (Conneau 1976: 109). Eventually an agreement was reached between hosts and guest, with obligations clearly stipulated for all parties. The money part of the arrangement included the semblance of a purchase or lease of land upon which the stranger built his trading factory. Only the buildings and improvements belonged to the trader. The contract set rents for land use and fees for wharf usage, water rights, burial duties and import and export taxes. Other provisions defined a range of allowed activities and mobility, as well as requirements (gunpowder and warriors) the guest/stranger provided his host/landlord in case the latter was attacked by an enemy or a rival family (CMS CAI/E3/99; CMS CAI/E4/127; Mouser 1996: 88–89; Mouser and Mouser 2003: 56).

These arrangements affirmed that land could not be alienated through sale, that strangers and their descendants could never become newcomers, and that the only ruling authority belonged to landlords/hosts or those holding land rights, as permitted by secret societies (Sarró 2009: 54–59). As long as the arriving stranger recognized those principles and accepted a subalternated position within the indigenous society, he could expect that his person, property and family would be protected, that he would be governed by his own rules within his household, and that his host or hosts would not interfere in his business, unless his contract permitted it.

A disadvantage of this arrangement for the stranger was the lack of choice. The landlord, as ‘wifegiver’, presented his guest with a daughter or ‘girl’ that the stranger was obliged to accept, for to refuse would challenge the wifegiver’s status and authority and identify the stranger as an intruder or outsider who had little interest in sharing his fortune with his host or hosts (Conneau 1976: 68, 107; Chauveau and Richards 2008: 519). By gifting a classificatory sister or daughter, the wifegiver also positioned a spy in the house of his stranger and produced a set of obligations something like those of an uncle/nephew relationship. The only decision falling to the ‘wifetaker’ was the scale of ceremony attached to the marriage. The higher the station of the wife, the more expensive would be the marriage ritual (Conneau 1976: 108; Graf 1998: 16, 35).

Theophilus Conneau, a French trader who worked at a factory in the upper Pongo in the 1830s, claimed that his Euro-African employer maintained a seraglio of more than thirty wives and mistresses, some of whom made themselves available to strangers visiting the river (Conneau 1976: 64). Nearly two and a half centuries earlier, André Álvares de Almada (1594) reported that a visiting stranger in the Pongo was asked to pick one female from his host’s harem and leave the rest of his host’s wives alone for the duration of his visit. In effect this was an attempt to minimize negative consequences and métis children that might result from contact with a person with less desirable racial traits (Goffman 1963; Kivel 2002: 122–23; Johnson 2005: 33). And children did result: others reported that there always were ‘masterless’ and free métis eager to attach themselves to a patron (Thayer 1981b: 15, 20; Mouser and Mouser 2003: 27, 82, 86). Still another variant involved companionship as a benefit a trader provided to those Europeans who took jobs in his factory. Conneau reported that he received wages of one slave per month, meals from the kitchens of his employer’s wives and ‘a private establishment with the accessories not necessary to mention’ (Conneau 1976: 66).

Whatever the form of marriage or union, children inevitably appeared. These were the métis of the charter generation. When a trader succeeded financially, other of his hosts noticed the advantages of proximity and gifted daughters of their own to seal arrangements with this successful stranger. Family size could quickly become large, depending on how many wives the guest received and particular rules governing child-rearing and breastfeeding. Benjamin Curtis Sr. at Kissing, for instance, was reported to have produced more than fifty children during the twenty-three years he lived in the Pongo (Foreign Office 1830: 8:848). This first generation of mixed European and African children – the Euro-Africans – was perhaps least problematic, except those fathered by strangers who died during the first rainy season. Their mothers were African, and some may have been ‘royals’ or the free daughters of headmen and landholders. If wives were Susu, who were patrilineal and patrilocal, they would look to their husband’s lineage to find their ‘refuge’ when catastrophe struck, but since in these cases there typically was no lineage belonging to such a husband, a wife could appeal only to her father, to a fictive lineage composed of non-Africans similar to her husband, or to the factory operator (Conneau 1976: 67–68; Harrell-Bond and Rijnsorp 1976: 7–9; Thayer 1981a: 41–42; Thayer 1983: 119; McLachlan 1999: 15).

As in most cultures, first-generation children grew up in houses kept by their mothers (Harrell-Bond and Rijnsorp 1976: 21–22). Their close kinship cousins were those belonging to their mother’s side, for in this instance their fathers’ relatives were absent. The identity of siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts and relations became complicated by definitions that were imprecise and set by proximity and local practice. They spoke the language(s) of their mother(s) on the playground and that of their father in the marketplace, especially when dealing with Europeans. Some from the more commercially successful branches of trader families attended European schools (at Freetown, London, Liverpool, Havana, Matanzas, Charleston or – when the Pongo began to slip into a French sphere of influence after 1850 – Gorée or Saint Louis in Senegal), and they obtained self-identified membership in those worlds or were stigmatized by others as belonging to those less desirable worlds. Their principal playmates were the sons and daughters of other traders, for it was with them that they shared the most time, proximity and characteristics. Those of the first generations were light-skinned and carried European features. They had stakes in three civilizations: that of their fathers, that of their mothers and the civilization of the métis. In 1821, for instance, Brian O’Beirne of Freetown described William Lawrence of Domingia, who was at least a third-generation Euro-African descendent, as ‘a person dressed in Nankeen Jacket and Trowsers and who, although nearly as dark as many around him, had the features of a good looking European’ (O’Beirne 1979: 224–25).

Many strangers died during the first rainy season. If children and a wife were left behind, the mother might take their offspring to her father’s compound, or she might seek an alliance or marital relationship with another trader. That happened with Phenda, who married John Fraser at the Îles de Los in 1799 (Schafer 1999). Another possibility was to continue her former husband’s enterprise, with the considerable help of friends or kin (Thayer 1983). Any widow might avail herself of this option, but there had to be a male protector (husband’s brother or son) to whom she was ultimately responsible, at least nominally. She might acquire ‘Big Man’ status and command respect and authority, but only so long as she was able to maintain discipline within her husband’s extended family, of which she might be the senior or most respected member (Thayer 1979: 63–64). That happened with the widow of John Ormond Sr., who remained a powerful voice within Ormond family interests in the upper Pongo for nearly two decades after her husband’s death until her son John Ormond Jr. returned from London to reclaim his father’s position in river commerce (Conneau 1976).

Some of these children found themselves further isolated by colour, physical features and European first names. Their hue stigmatized them as European by locals and as African by traders. The Rev. Peter Hartwig, who lived in Freetown and Sumbuya from 1804 to 1815, described the dilemma encountered by a widowed mother of métis children, suggesting that she ‘is often so circumstanced [and her children so stigmatized] that she is forced to leave them [offspring] at the factory’ (Mouser and Mouser 2003: 86). Inevitably, some of these children found attachment and employment with European traders or with others of mixed race...