The Connaught Hospital complex, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, is built, in part, on the site of the King's Yard, a walled compound built in 1817. In his new book, Abolition in Sierra Leone, Richard Anderson reckons that the space, about 15,000 square feet in area, held as many as 900 people at a time (87). For the more than 90,000 enslaved people landed between 1808 and 1863 from slave ships captured by the Royal Navy, the King's Yard was a vestibule between life as a captive and life as a ‘Liberated African’ in Sierra Leone, Britain's small, officially antislavery colony on the coast of West Africa. One side of the Yard faced the Atlantic; the other opened into the colony, through a gated arch inscribed ‘Freed from Slavery by British Valour and Philanthropy’ (87).
This excellent book is a meticulously researched and carefully argued account of both the history of colonial antislavery in Sierra Leone and of the formation of new ethnic and religious identities among the Liberated Africans. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, Sierra Leone became the most common destination for repatriated former captives. Before the arrival of the Liberated Africans, the colony was settled by over 1,100 ‘Nova Scotians’ – African Americans who had emancipated themselves during the American Revolution and had been resettled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick – and by over 500 Maroons, exiled from Jamaica after a guerilla war with the colonial government. Anderson points out that many historians interested in Sierra Leone have exaggerated the influence of these ‘old settlers’ on the identity of Liberated Africans. These narratives assume that the far more numerous Liberated African settlers integrated into the existing settler community. ‘This common narrative’, Anderson writes, ‘of Liberated African incorporation and socialization into a pre-existing settler society is untenable’ (17).
In the first three chapters, Anderson makes one of the most detailed and careful assessments yet published of the origins of the Liberated Africans, the experiences of ‘recaptives’ liberated from the slave trade, and the often shambolic operation of the Liberated African Department, the colonial institution responsible for the ‘disposal’ of people who were variously conscripted as soldiers, labourers, and potential converts to Christianity. In the next two chapters, Anderson explores the process of identity-formation among the Liberated Africans. Rejecting both the narrative of integration into the old settler community and a competing narrative of ready-made imported ‘nationhood’ among the Liberated Africans, Anderson shows how the experience of resettlement reorganised social relations, preserving kinship and creating new idioms for monarchies and chieftaincies. In the final two chapters, Anderson traces the Yoruba diaspora – perhaps the largest single linguistic and cultural group among the Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone – and retells the history of the Cobolo War of 1832, which he marks as the first organised resistance to colonialism led by recaptives. Throughout, Anderson emphasises the influence of both missionary Christian and West African Islam on Liberated Africans as they carved new – and enduring – identities.
Abolition in Sierra Leone is an essential book not only for scholars of Sierra Leonean history, but for any historian of nineteenth-century West Africa. It will also reward readers interested in the dynamics of the African diaspora in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Colonial Sierra Leone was among the most notable and audacious experiments in antislavery in the British empire; this book will also benefit every historian with an interest in the relationship between antislavery and colonialism.
