A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone, Containing an account of the trade and productions of the country and of the civil and religious customs and manners of the people . . . with an Additional Letter on the African Slave Trade (London, B. White and Son, 1788)

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-225
Author(s):  
John Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Slave ◽  
The People

The Story of Rufino

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
João José Reis ◽  
Flávio dos Santos Gomes ◽  
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Porto Alegre ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
Slave Ship ◽  
Slave Revolt

The book tells the story of Rufino, or Abuncare, a Yoruba Muslim from the kingdom of Oyo, who came to Brazil as a slave in c. 1823 and lived in the Atlantic cities of Salvador, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Recife (all in Brazil), and Freetown in Sierra Leone. In Salvador, he lived his first eight years as a slave; then he was taken to Porto Alegre by his young master and sold there. He bought his freedom in 1835 with money he made as a hire-out slave and then moved to Rio de Janeiro. Here Rufino started to work as a cook on a slave ship bound to Luanda. In late 1841, after a few slave trading voyages between Africa and Recife, his ship was captured by the British and sent to Freetown, where he took Qur’ānic and Arabic classes in the local Yoruba community. Still an employee of the slave trade, he would later return to Sierra Leone complete his studies. Back to Recife, he made a living as a diviner, serving all sorts of clients, whites and blacks, free and slaves. He also became a leader in the local Afro-Muslim community. In 1853, Rufino was arrested in Recife due to rumors of an imminent African slave revolt. Rufino left several traces of his personal experience as a slave and a freeman in Africa, Brazil, and aboard a slave ship. The book revolves around his life, which is used as a lead to discuss the slave trade, slavery, and the resilience of ethnic and religious identities as seen through the experience of an individual.

Shipping Patterns and Mortality in the African Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro, 1825-1830.

1975 ◽  
Vol 15 (59) ◽  
pp. 381-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert S. Klein ◽  
Stanley L. Engerman
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Slave

Four Sierra Leone Recaptives

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Slave Ships ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

Parliament passed in 1807 the act to illegalize (called prematurely to abolish) the slave-trade. A Vice-Admiralty Court where the Navy could bring captured slave-ships for condemnation was constituted in Freetown, the capital of the Colony of Sierra Leone. From 1819 international anti-slave-trade courts, the Courts of Mixed Commission, were constituted there too. Until 1864, when the last ship destined for the Atlantic slave-trade was condemned, slave-ships were regularly brought in and the slaves freed.

Mooring Aslima

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-180
Author(s):  
Zainab Cheema
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Sex Worker

Abstract In Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille, the entanglement of Spain and Morocco emerges through the diasporic figure of Aslima, the Moroccan sex worker. This essay examines McKay’s Maurophilia, which he circuitously refers to as “Afro-Orientalism” in his various writings. Maurophilia not only foregrounds Aslima’s associations with Spain and Morocco but also highlights McKay’s engagement with transhistorical Mediterranean diasporas, including the intra-African slave trade and Iberian Moriscos and conversos settling in North Africa following the Reconquista. This essay argues that while Aslima’s associations with Moorish-Iberian performance styles influence McKay’s modernist poetics and radical aspirations for a global pandiasporic Black alliance, Romance in Marseille ultimately forecloses the prospect of a pan-Mediterranean, Black Atlantic globalism because of contradictions of gender and religion.

Fetishism and the Moral Marketplace: How Abolitionist Sugar Boycotts in the 1790s Defined British Consumers and the West Indian "Other"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Laurel Carmichael
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
The West ◽  
The People

<p>In the early 1790s more than 300,000 Britons boycotted West Indian sugar in one of the most impressive displays of public mobilisation against the slave trade. Many of those who abstained were inspired by William Fox’s 1791 pamphlet An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum. The abstention movement gained momentum amidst the failures of the petition campaign to achieve a legislative end to the slave-trade, and placed the responsibility of ending slavery with all British consumers. This thesis draws from cross-disciplinary scholarship to argue that the campaign against slave sugar appealed to an idealised image of the humanitarian consumer and maligned slave. Writers such as Fox based their appeal on a sense of religious duty, class-consciousness and gendered values. Both the domestic sphere and the consumer body were transformed into sites of political activism, as abolitionists attempted to establish a direct link between the ingestion of sugar and the violence of colonial slavery. Attempts to encourage consumers’ sympathetic identification with the plight of distant slaves occurred alongside attempts to invoke horror and repulsion at slave suffering. The image of the West Indian slave presented to consumers was one shaped by fetishized European imaginings. The decision to abstain from slave sugar, therefore, was not only motivated by genuine philanthropic concerns, but the desire to protect the civilised and refined modern consumer, from the contaminating products of colonial barbarity.</p>

The Vice-Admiralty Court

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Prize Money ◽  
Ship Building ◽  
The People ◽  
Slave Ships

This chapter examines the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, the first court in the British empire with an explicit mandate to release enslaved people from slavery. In practice, the Court and its officers paid little attention to the people the Court called ‘captured Negroes.’ Instead, the Court became the hub of a brisk trade in seized slave ships, which were renovated and resold at auction for the coastal trade. British officers, sailors and soldiers received ‘prize money,’ shares of the auction value of property they captured. Many settlers and European merchants were engaged in trades related to the Court, from victualling and rum-selling to surveying and ship-building. The antislavery businessman Zachary Macaulay had a controlling stake in many colonial businesses. This chapter also examines the role of the Royal African Corps, a regiment of white convicts and former slaves, and their place in the colony.

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