Africans in Exile

Mobility, Law, and Identity

Benjamin N. Lawrance, Nathan Riley Carpenter, Nathan Riley Carpenter, Benjamin N. Lawrance

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253038104
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia africana

The enforced removal of individuals has long been a political tool used by African states to create generations of asylum seekers, refugees, and fugitives. Historians often present such political exile as a potentially transformative experience for resilient individuals, but this reading singles the exile out as having an exceptional experience. This collection seeks to broaden that understanding within the global political landscape by considering the complexity of the experience of exile and the lasting effects it has had on African peoples. The works collected in this volume seek to recover the diversity of exile experiences across the continent. This corpus of testimonials and documents is presented as an "archive" that provides evidence of a larger, shared experience of persecution and violence. This consideration reads exiles from African colonies and nations as active participants within, rather than simply as victims of, the larger global diaspora. In this way, exile is understood as a way of asserting political dissidence and anti-imperial strategies. Broken into three distinct parts, the volume considers legal issues, geography as a strategy of anticolonial resistance, and memory and performative understandings of exile. The experiences of political exile are presented as fundamental to an understanding of colonial and postcolonial oppression and the history of state power in Africa.

PART I

THE LEGAL WORLDS OF EXILE

1

“Wayward Humours” and “Perverse Disputings”

Exiled Blacks and the Foundation of Sierra Leone, 1787–1800

Ruma Chopra

BLACK EXILES, REFUGEES of war, became extraordinarily useful to an expanding British Empire during the late eighteenth century. An already uprooted people without means or patrons could be prepped for a second transplantation to British tropical settlements which whites found undesirable or fatal. Between 1787 and 1800, three groups of exiled blacks from England and Nova Scotia relocated to Sierra Leone to buttress British interests in the region. A geographically dispersed empire needed dependable settlers in new outposts amongst hostile African neighbors, subjects who had a stake in the British Empire. In an era of evangelical antislavery, a discourse of humanitarianism couched each subsidized migration. The strategic dispersal and concentration of exiles constituted empire.

The British government strategically promoted the settlement of black exiles in Sierra Leone. These exiles followed the trajectory established in the 1780s after the secession of the thirteen mainland American colonies. Following the War of American Independence, white and black loyalists fled to Nova Scotia to escape the enmity of the American patriots. They secured British interests by doubling Nova Scotia’s population and precluding an easy conquest of the colony by the new United States to the south. British Nova Scotia was also intended to demonstrate the order of constitutional governance in contrast to the disorder of American republicanism.¹ Sierra Leone’s nascent settlement spoke to another group of strategic aims: it established a British foothold in West Africa, and it showcased a formal antislavery establishment to the rest of the world. Freetown advertised the British as crusaders against the sin of slavery. Imperial and humanitarian goals went hand in hand.

Sierra Leone emerged as a solution for multiple social problems confronting metropolitan visionaries and politicians in the late eighteenth century. Men with commercial vision and philanthropic friends hoped that new colonies in West Africa would replace the “old thirteen” lost in 1783 by exporting raw materials and becoming a new market for British manufactured items. The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson celebrated the benefits of colonizing West Africa.² He listed the many items that could be procured: palm oil, ivory, gold, wood including mahogany, cocoa, and tulip, spices such as nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, black pepper, and cardamom, and staples such as rice, cotton, indigo, and sugar. Clarkson imagined “black persons and others going in a body into the interior country with camels or mules . . . loaded with merchandize” and returning with exportable goods.³

This chapter explores the resettlement of exiled former slaves to Sierra Leone, and their role in founding a colony that the British hoped would also serve as a beacon for uncivilized and unchristian Africans. By creating an example of a flourishing settlement based on the fruits of free labor in West Africa proper, this vision for Sierra Leone followed earlier schemes, including in the former colony of Georgia in 1732. Both were based on antislavery principles and imagined industrious, sober, and moral farming families who would set a model for a new kind of British settlement. Both establishments fortified imperial presence in strategic regions and received large infusions of British public spending to sustain them.⁴ Both involved the selection of immigrants who would best protect British geographical claims and promote the British antislavery vision. Protestant whites perceived as disciplined and deserving became the first settlers of Georgia while black exiles—many of whom had already shown loyalty to the empire—became selected as settlers of Sierra Leone.⁵

These blacks were both revolutionary exiles and slavery’s exiles.⁶ These displaced families became caught in the crosscurrents of the Atlantic world at a moment when the British were experimenting with antislavery and launching their claims to West Africa. Already uprooted blacks confronted a second migration from a perspective likely unavailable to other ex-slaves: the first exile burdened them with an awareness of imperial alternatives.

A British Vision for Sierra Leone

Zachary Macaulay, expansionist, evangelical antislavery crusader, and twenty-six-year-old governor of Sierra Leone, expressed British dreams for Africa. He idealized that the province would, with proper white supervision and an influx of black settlers, lead to new agricultural exports and, as importantly, create thousands of new consumers for British manufactured goods. Indeed, he imagined that Sierra Leone, with the most magnificent harbor in West Africa and free black workers, would soon outshine the slave colony of Jamaica. Macaulay’s vision of empire is echoed in “African Prince,” a moral fable about the slave trade written by abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson set Prince Zudor as a black Romeo and his wife Zera as a Juliet, who, with their infant son strapped to her back, drowned in grief in the Atlantic when Zudor was betrayed and sold into slavery. Shortly after, Zudor discovered her sacrifice and threw himself into the same ocean to reunite with her.⁷ Clarkson depicts the “sable and unlettered Kings of Africa” as awaiting humanitarian intervention to cease the destruction of their communities. British Sierra Leone would promise a happier ending for the prince and his bride. The mix of love, slavery, separation, and ultimately death appealed to sentimental reformers.

It was not accidental that a botanist, Henry Smeathman, suggested the peninsula of Sierra Leone for British explorations in West Africa.⁸ The eighteenth-century age of botanical exploration overlapped with the era of imperial expansion; both shared in the zeal for improvement and reform. The prevalence of botanical language with its focus on the right environment (soil and climate) for transplanted seeds would become convenient shorthand for discussions of transplanted people.⁹ Smeathman raved about the benefits of Sierra Leone for the average settler: “A man possessed of a change of cloathing, a wood axe, a hoe, and a pocket knife, may soon place himself in an easy and comfortable situation.”¹⁰ He imagined white settlement and minimized high white fatalities in the region. He blamed the deaths on “unwholesome” and “rancid” provisions, “intemperate lives,” and “ardent spirits.”¹¹ Despite Smeathman’s assurances, it was widely known that many whites did not survive the diseases in the tropical region. The government ruled against sending white convicts to Sierra Leone even though it was sufficiently remote to preclude easy return to England. White convicts, some of whom had only committed misdemeanors or minor infractions, could not be sent wholesale to die.

Black exiles sent to Sierra Leone in 1787 set a precedent. Uprooted blacks would extend the empire’s claims in regions deemed undesirable by white settlers, and settle regions where British interests exceeded British occupation. In comparison with West African communities, black settlers, many from the Americas, appeared marginally British. The blacks’ complexion mattered less than their availability, their familiarity with British customs and laws, and their readiness to advance within and not outside the British Empire.

During the mid-1780s, when the evangelical lawyer Granville Sharp, who earlier became deeply invested in abolitionism through the Somerset Case, seized the opportunity to establish a free community in Sierra Leone, black emigration became irrevocably linked to British humanitarianism. It is not surprising then that the first candidates for the Sierra Leone settlement came from amongst the thousands of free black poor in London, numbered to be over fourteen thousand. In addition to domestic slaves, the influx of black refugees in England after the War of American Independence had further expanded the indigent black population. As their numbers fed class anxieties about unemployment and crime, Sharp, along with other Christian reformers, saw a chance to reduce England’s burden and to launch the antislavery experiment in West Africa. Domestic order depended on expelling burdensome blacks.

Sharp’s recruitment campaign invited blacks who suffered “the greatest distress” to make a home in Sierra Leone. In May 1786, widely circulated notices used Smeathman’s language to emphasize the benefits of the new settlement for any hardworking emigrant: “It is found that no place is so fit and proper as the Grain Coast of Africa; where the necessaries of life may be supplied by the force of industry and moderate labour.”¹² The British government would supply transportation and clothing and provisions for three months, along with tools for the cultivation of the new settlement.

The first group of migrants who left from London for Sierra Leone faced terrible difficulties and doomed Sharp’s efforts in Sierra Leone. Accompanied by a captain of the Royal Navy, the group of 439 English settlers arrived in Sierra Leone in May 1787.¹³ The group included the black poor and some white men, along with seventy white women. They landed in Sierra Leone during the wrong season. They faced torrential rains, inadequate housing, insufficient provisions, and the suspicion of nearby natives. Only two-thirds of those originally embarked lived beyond seven months. Some, both blacks and whites, joined the slave factories nearby; a few found employment on board slave ships.¹⁴ In desperation, Sharp sent more settlers in April 1788 along with “live swine” to keep the colony viable.¹⁵ But of the thirty-nine sent, only twenty-six survived. Little financial support was available for the abandoned settlers. In April 1790, when Sharp received news that the town was destroyed and the blacks had scattered, he lamented the fate of his “poor little, ill-thriven, swarthy daughter, the unfortunate colony of Sierra Leone.”¹⁶ Paternalism went hand in hand with imperialism. Fortunately for Sharp, a larger group of black exiles would become available for a second transplantation.

A Rival “New” Jamaica?

The high mortality rate in Sierra Leone could not be ignored, especially by abolitionists who had drawn sustained attention to the lack of natural increase of slaves in the West Indies. As early as 1788, Granville Sharp created a rationale for why settlers had been reduced to just 276 people within the first year. At least thirty-four people, he wrote, died in crowded ships before they reached the African coast “so the climate of Sierra Leone is not to be blamed.”¹⁷ Others died within the first four months because they “continued intemperate,” lacked fresh provisions, and did not have time to build huts before the rainy season.¹⁸ Some remained missing not due to sickness or death but to emigration; they had fled the British settlement to live in nearby African communities. By whatever means he could identify, Sharp emphasized that the deaths were due to improper precautions, and were not inevitable in a tropical climate for whites and blacks who had not acquired immunities.

After the failure of Sharp’s first venture, the Sierra Leone Company, founded by merchants as much as philanthropists, attempted to revive the settlement based on a more secure foundation. Its justification was simple: “Whereas the interior kingdoms and countries of the said continent have not hitherto been explored by Europeans, nor hath any regular trade ever been carried on therewith from these kingdoms nor can such undertakings be conveniently carried on or supported unless a considerable capital joint stock is raised for that purpose.”¹⁹ The Company raised money to cultivate tropical crops and to identify useful commodities from the less-explored interior regions of West Africa. It received a monopoly to launch the settlement. In 1791, it raised £110,000 from five hundred subscribers.²⁰

The potential threat represented by the Sierra Leone Company was not lost on the planters in the West Indies who confronted a sustained attack against the slave trade. The abolition of the slave trade risked shattering the edifice of their sugar economy. Tropical crops produced in West Africa, they feared would compete for metropolitan consumers. Sugar would conceivably be cheaper in Africa than that manufactured in the West Indies because it would use free labor, one-third the cost of slave labor.²¹ In addition, as West Africa was only twenty days by sea from England, such produce could likely be t...