The African-British Long Eighteenth Century: An Analysis of African-British Treaties, Colonial Economics, and Anthropological Discourse

The African-British Long Eighteenth Century

The African-British Long Eighteenth Century An Analysis of African-British Treaties, Colonial Economics, and Anthropological Discourse

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Caulker, Tcho Mbaimba, 1977– The African-British long eighteenth century : an analysis of African-British treaties, colonial economics, and anthropological discourse / Tcho Mbaimba Caulker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2743-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-3487-0 (electronic) 1. Africa, West—Relations—Great Britain—History—18th century. 2. Great Britain—Relations—Africa, West—History—18th century. 3. Great Britain— Colonies—Africa—Administration—History—18th century. 4. Africa, West—In literature. I. Title. II. Title: African-British long 18th century. DT503.C38 2009 325'.3410966—dc22 2008047359 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The African-British Long Eighteenth Century

xi

1 2 3

4 5

Long Eighteenth-Century Fictive Literature and Filling the Vacuum of Africa

1

British-African Treaty Making and the Construction of a British Colonial State in Sierra Leone

37

Reading the British Sierra Leone Company: The Sierra Leone Company and its Ties to Emergent Colonial, Economic, and Moral Philosophy of the Long Eighteenth Century

57

Natural Science, Exploration, and the Colonial Project in West Africa

89

The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, and Bringing the Long Eighteenth-Century Archival Past into the Postcolonial Present

127

Epilogue: The African-British Long Eighteenth Century and Imagination

165

Appendix of Treaties

167

Bibliography

173

Index

181

About the Author

185 v

List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Figure 2.1 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8 Figure 4.9 Figure 4.10

Image Taken From “The Black Prince” (1799) (Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts) Sierra Leone Ethnic Map with Location of “Colony of Freedom” Map of West Africa from Essay on Colonization (1794) By: C.B. Wadstrom Map of West Africa from Essay on Colonization (1794) By: C.B. Wadstrom Map of West Africa from Essay on Colonization (1794) By: C.B. Wadstrom Map of West Africa from Essay on Colonization (1794) By: C.B. Wadstrom Map of West Africa from Essay on Colonization (1794) By: C.B. Wadstrom Map of West Africa from Essay on Colonization (1794) By: C.B. Wadstrom Map of West Africa from Essay on Colonization (1794) By: C.B. Wadstrom Image of Slave Ship from Essay on Colonization (1794) By: C.B. Wadstrom Blumenbach’s Five Varieties of Humankind (1790) By: Daniel Chodowiecki Blumenbach’s Five Varieties of Humankind (1790) By: Daniel Chodowiecki

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38 95 97 98 100 101 103 104 106 111 112

Acknowledgments

To my mother and my family in Freetown, Sierra Leone—your sacrifices will never be forgotten. Know that any success in life that I have is always your success as well. To my nieces and nephews in Sierra Leone, England, and the United States—Musu, Tittor, Macpenna, Jomo, Hassan, Judwi, Rasheed, and those yet to be borne—that you may always pridefully know yourselves and your place in this world as world-citizens of a global community. A heartfelt, genuine, and respectful thanks: To my dissertation directors Ken Harrow and Salah Hassan, and committee members Jyotsna Singh and Laurent Dubois, who embraced my vision of what this project could be, who understood its potential and my desire for a pluralistic approach, and who took the time to listen, nurture, and care, in lieu of the misunderstanding that sadly closes the door to so many minority students with potential. To Mr. Alfred Fornah, Mr. Cole, Mr. Moore, and the entire staff at the Sierra Leone National Archives, who have not only assisted me in my academic research, but have also always treated me as family without fail. To Dr. Strassa King, former president of Fourah Bay College—University of Sierra Leone, who welcomed a young and eager upstart of a twenty-four year old as a father would welcome a son home from abroad. To John Conteh Morgan—thank you for your encouragement and inspiration, and may your soul rest in peace. To Jamie Lynn Johnson—thank you for your friendly support. To my ice hockey coaches at Sacred Heart University—Shaun Hannah, Stephan Gauvin, Jim Drury—who reinforced the message, time and time again, that athletics and academics go hand in hand; that hard work will get you everywhere; and that talent and competence are what matter, never the color of one’s skin. To Keith Sandiford, Kathleen Wilson, and Lyndon Dominique, who took the time to personally introduce themselves at respective ASECS conferences in order to kindly welcome me into the profession. Many thanks to Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, ix

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Robert Markley, and all of the scholars who made me feel at home in my first professional scholarly seminar experience as a young twenty-one year old at the 2001 West Virginia University Summer Seminar: “Race,” Colonialism and Intercultural Contact in Early Modern English Theater. Many heartfelt thanks to Donald Smith, Brenda Williams, Richard Farrell, and Terry Recchia of the English Department at University of New Haven—as well as the entire University of New Haven community—for warmly and openly welcoming me into your midst. Thanks to Dr. Tony Brown, who also made me feel welcome as a young twenty-one year old at my first conference panel experience at the New York Conference on Language & Literature. To Judith Miller, Edward Papa, and President Anthony Cernera, and all of my mentors at Sacred Heart University in the English and Philosophy Departments, who always listened to my classroom questioning as that which came from an active precocious mind, instead of a student looking to upstage his mentors. To the welcoming group of scholars, whom I encountered at the University of South Florida, where I attended the DeBartolo Conference for EighteenthCentury Studies and presented a version of chapter 2. To my M.A. advisors, Lisa Tilton-Levine, Roger Apfelbaum, and Owen Schur—much thanks and appreciation for your support. To Monsignor Kelly and the faculty at Seton Hall Prep: The motto “Hazard Zet Forward” is forever emblazoned in my mind. To Alex Topacio, Amy Fishel, and Sarah Getter for listening to the idle ramblings that were eventually formulated into book form. To Emily Cullen, who also took the time to listen. Thanks, also, to the library staff at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library for providing a wonderful research environment in New Haven, CT. To my Aunty Tuzyline Allen (Caulker), whose book, Womanist and Feminist Aesthtics: A Comparative Review, provided me with a vision of what was possible for my own work. And finally, it is most certain that this list of acknowledgments is incomplete, and those not listed here in this limited space are not forgotten.

Introduction

THE AFRICAN-BRITISH LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The African-British Long Eighteenth Century is a literary exploration of the manner in which Africa and England—and indeed Europe—became increasingly intertwined from the late seventeenth century, through the eighteenth century, and into the early nineteenth century (later on within this introductory chapter, I also point to instances of Renaissance contact between Europeans and African indigenous). The subtitle of British Literature and Colonial Economics in West Africa/Colonial Treaties and Economics in Sierra Leone is written as such because each term refers to a critical element that I explore within this five chapter project. Both the regional distinction of West Africa and the specific distinction of Sierra Leone are also referenced in the subtitle because, by gaining a foothold in the strategically favorable location of Sierra Leone, the British hoped to utilize the colony as a staging location for further colonial expansion in Africa. In fact, manifested in the archival documents of this project are the first early elements of British colonial administration on the African continent. The main body of my project, beyond the Renaissance introduction, is an endeavor whose trajectory begins in the late seventeenth century, during which Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688) was published, which resembles A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinee (1670) in terms of the descriptions of the West African Guinea region of Behn’s fictional “Cromantine.” Behn’s Oroonoko also boasts a black prince as its central character, who bears many striking similarities to the protagonist of a late-eighteenth-century moral tract called The Black Prince (1799), published over 100 years later and based on the life of an actual African prince, Naimbanna, who traveled to London in the late eighteenth century. My exploration xi

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also spans from the late eighteenth-century into the early nineteenth century, which saw African-British land treaties being made between African indigenous sovereigns and English representatives, beginning in 1787 with the establishment of the British “Colony of Freedom” in Sierra Leone. Also included in the scope of this project is a literary exploration of archived reports of British companies and institutions like the Sierra Leone Company and the African Institution of London, both established to enact respective economic, explorational, and colonial ventures that they hoped would someday reap and exploit an economic, territorial, and informational harvest from the African continent. My exploration of the “African-British Long Eighteenth Century” culminates in the reading and analysis of The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1991)—a novel by Syl Cheney-Coker that looks back upon this seminal long eighteenth-century period of emerging British colonialism from the perspective of the 1960s decade of African independence, which saw many former British African colonies emerge as independent nations. This African-British long eighteenth century project, in many ways, draws inspiration and scholarly grounding from the works of several eighteenthcentury and postcolonial scholars. Among them is a text like Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, in which Srinivas Aravamudan makes a strong case for the pluralization of eighteenth-century literary studies. He asserts that: Faced with an accretion of texts around a chronological and geocultural monolith, a continental shelf known as the European eighteenth century, what I have proposed is not so much the complete dissolution of this landmass and library, but a pluralization and fragmentation of it into multiple textual archipelagoes. Faced with a resolutely metropolitan eighteenth century replete with discursive, disciplinary, and nationalist reifications, we can instead propose several eighteenth centuries animated by the agency of their differently worlded subjects.1

The inclusion of those parts of the globe (in this case West Africa) that experienced contact with the emerging British Empire and other European explorational and colonial endeavors is a significant part of this process of pluralization and creation of these eighteenth centuries “animated” by their “differently worlded subjects.” The “textual archipelagoes” that are created by pluralization allow us to delve into the colonial archive in order to explore an African-British long eighteenth century, as well as the many texts and documents encountered over the course of this project like Oroonoko, African-British treaties, Reports of the Sierra Leone Company, C.B. Wadstrom’s An Essay on Colonization Particularly Applied to the West Coast of Africa (1794), The Black Prince, and Reports of the African Institution of London, and so forth.

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In many ways, what I set out to accomplish in the African-British context is quite similar to Robert Markley’s task of analyzing the fundamentally Eurocentric focus of literary perceptions that inform the early modern literary study of Asia The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730. He writes that: Although there are obvious political differences between traditionalists, who celebrate the spreading of “civilization” to the non-European world, and their revisionist critics, who decry the violence and socioeconomic devastation of European imperialism, both camps share a fundamentally Eurocentric perspective of early modern history. Both rely on historical narratives and analytical models—colonialist or postcolonialist—that retell an old story.2

While one could certainly place my conception of the African-British long eighteenth century into the category of “postcolonialist,” my goal is to produce a “story” that is unique in its fashioning, particularly in regards to my analysis of African-British treaties that span from 1787 to 1819. I have not, and will not, explicitly set out to construct an entirely Afrocentrically focused project in order to counter the Eurocentrically focused metropolitan eighteenth-century. In place of these Afrocentric and Eurocentric poles, I set out to produce an eighteenth-century discourse that is animated by both the African and British subjects of historical and literary consciousness. I would also argue that edited compilations like Felicity Nussbaum’s The Global Eighteenth Century, and Kathleen Wilson’s A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, which both seek to expand the boundaries of geopolitical study of the manner that European contact with what is now called the “developing world” are manifested in literary and historical productions of the long eighteenth century. Nussbaum asserts that, “Early modern global studies seeks then to recognize the problems that asymmetric distribution of resources presents to worldwide analysis, and it attempts to revamp the disciplinary boundaries that impede alternative forms of historical knowledge.”3 One could certainly point to documents like the African-British treaties explored in chapter 2 of my project, or perhaps even the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company, as examples of “alternative forms of historical [and literary] knowledge” that have failed to penetrate the boundaries of “proper literature” into the locus of general literary knowledge. As a result, these documents have remained largely unanalyzed and untouched until now. Wilson’s call for “a new imperial history” that involves an increased sensitivity to global consciousness, and a pluralized perspective in terms of eighteenth-century European interactions with the formerly colonized world is also quite important for the scholarly groundings of my analysis of an

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African-British long eighteenth century. She astutely recognizes that, “For the kind of “new imperial history” at work here has at its heart the importance of difference—in historical settings and forms of consciousness as well as in historiographic and critical practice—that supports and extends the pluralities of historical interpretation.”4 The concept of “difference” is something that will play a large role in my analysis of the various texts and documents throughout this project, because more often than not, it is both the “recognition of difference” and the “amplification of difference” that is at work within fiction, semifictional, and nonfictional literary manifestations of European encounters with the non-European Other. It is also this concept of “difference” that is put into play when ascribing the boundaries between civilized and uncivilized—both synonymous with familiar and unfamiliar—in the long eighteenth century European encounters with the non-European world that are explored within my African-British project. Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation also poses an important concept that is relevant to my conceptualization of an African-British long eighteenth century, particularly in terms of her idea of Europe’s emerging “planetary consciousness” in the eighteenth century. She refers to this idea of consciousness as: A version marked by an orientation toward interior exploration and the construction of global-scale meaning through descriptive apparatuses of natural history. This new planetary consciousness, I will suggest, is a basic element constructing modern Eurocentrism, that hegemonic reflex that troubles westerners even as it continues to be second nature to them.5

This “planetary consciousness” marked by “an orientation toward interior exploration,” can take the form of both actual explorational endeavors—whose literary manifestations we observe in documents like Reports of the African Institution, Wadstrom’s An Essay on Colonization, or the anthropological treatises of Blumenbach that I explore in chapter 4 of this project; or the exploration can be of a fictional nature—like that which we encounter in Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), which seems to have derived some descriptions of Africa from an earlier piece of travel writing called A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinee (1670). One could even make the argument that the so-called “true relation of events” that we encounter in a moral tract like The Black Prince (1799), which I explore in chapter 1, also possesses fictional quality that is informed by an ideology that seeks to produce a moral and religious message by depicting the African continent as a sort of foil to England and English civility. Betty Joseph’s exploration of British East India Company documents in Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gen-

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der, is also an important watershed text for a project like mine that seeks to explore an African-British long eighteenth century. The most basic reason is because the British Sierra Leone Company, whose documents I explore in chapter 3 of my project, was based on the joint-stock model of the East India Company. However, another important reason, beyond the basic, is because of Joseph’s mode of analyzing official documents from the colonial archive, as well as the more commonly explored cultural texts themselves. On the subject of her analytical method, Joseph writes that: It may seem surprising that my analysis in much of the book privileges cultural texts (novels, guidebooks, portraits, autobiographical narratives) as sites of both emergence and consolidation, especially since the official documents seem to be closest to the deployments of colonial power. I do this for a reason. The authority of the official document is still understood today as uncontaminated by the subjectivity of the cultural and imaginative text. Part of the undoing of such a claim of authority and power lies in exploring the mutual contamination of the center and margins by examining the relationships between various kinds of texts and the rules and constraints that are put in place to separate them.6

A large part of Joseph’s method of analysis is based on an assumed relationship between colonial discourse and colonial material practice, and even the manner in which these relationships are manifested and consolidated in the literary cultural capital of the long eighteenth century. I do not explicitly intend to privilege either the cultural texts, or the official documents, over the course of my exploration of the African-British long eighteenth century, particularly since my project seeks to emphasize the value of both in their own respective rights. However, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840, offers us a concrete example of the manner in which official documents can be subject to rigorous literary analysis in the same manner as the more commonly analyzed cultural texts. Perhaps the idea of construction of the subject through language is the clearest way of expressing this idea of reading official documents, institutional reports, moral tracts, eighteenth-century novels and autobiographies (and even a contemporary African novel like The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar that offers a literary reading of this eighteenth-century historical period), and so forth. On this very subject of language and the colonial subject, Ania Loomba in Colonialism/Postcolonialism, asserts that: From a variety of different intersecting perspectives, language is seen to construct the subject. Perhaps the most radical result of these interconnecting but diverse ways of thinking about language was that no human utterance could be seen as innocent. Any set of words could be analyzed to reveal not just an individual but

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a historical consciousness at work. Words and images thus become fundamental for an analysis of historical processes such as colonialism.7

It is with a similar type of methodology, focused on both language and images, that I will proceed through this exploration of the African-British long eighteenth century. The “words and images” within the protocolonial and colonial documents and literary texts I explore over the course of this project hold within them the keys to examining the relationship between colonial literary discourse and colonial material practice, difference and familiarity, civilized and uncivilized, and so forth. All of the documents, be they highly official or commonly cultural, hold their own uniquely imprinted variation and manifestation of these protocolonial or colonial relationship dichotomies that are based on the individual ideological purposes for which they were meant. It is the scholar’s task to unlock the meaning by undertaking a rigorous interrogation of the documents in question, and then piecing together a, sometimes linear and sometimes nonlinear, literary-historical trajectory for scholarly interpretation. It is with this idea of undertaking a rigorous interrogation of “colonial library” that I look to the work of two other postcolonial scholars—The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge by V.Y. Mudimbe,8 and Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library by Gaurav Desai, alongside Loomba and the eighteenthcentury scholars that I have also made reference to in this introductory section. Desai builds upon Mudimbe’s conception of the “colonial library,” which he describes as “the set of representations and texts that have collectively ‘invented’ Africa as a locus of difference and alterity,” and that “Subject to Colonialism attempts to reimagine the colonial library as a space of contestation.”9 The concept of the colonial library as a space of contestation and rigorous interrogation is also coupled with the idea that the expanse of the colonial library and the documents one might chose to explore and interrogate is limitless. This is something that should become quite clear as I move beyond this introduction into the critical book in which Oroonoko, Reports of the African Institution, a contemporary African novel like The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, and an entire pastiche of other long eighteenth-century cultural literary and official documents are brought to the same proverbial table. “Any such widening of the scope of the colonial library must remind us that such pushing of the limits is endless, and any of our own readings of the colonial archives must remain at best partial and tentative.”10 Appropriately, and particularly, since the discussion of Desai and Mudimbe have led to an idea of the scope of the colonial library and the scope

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of my project, it is important to note that no study of an African-British long eighteenth century could be complete without reference to the issues of slavery and abolition. Indeed, several scholars and texts have influenced and informed me—among them Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism by Christopher Leslie Brown,11 Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (2005) by Deirdre Coleman,12 and Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (2000) by James Walvin.13 Brown astutely observes that during the mid- to late eighteenth-century in Britain, “there was a shifting of definitions of imperial purpose, of new ways to conceive relations among subjects of the crown, and between over seas colonies and the imperial state.”14 However, in reference to abolition, he also remarks that, “Antislavery values were not enough in the eighteenth century, or after. The decision to act involved more than thinking of slavery as abhorrent, although clearly this was crucial.”15 What I observe, over the course of my project, is that abolition would only come when a better, and more refined, economic system of colonialism, commerce, and economic opportunity arose to supplant slavery and the slave trade. Coleman, speaking on the nature of the African colonial projects of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century observes that, “Labour schemes are crucial to understanding the tensions between slavery and freedom inherent in all Romantic colonization plans, especially those of plantation-scale proportions.”16 In many ways, the system of British colonization basically supplants the system of slavery and the slave trade that feeds it. When one explores official documents of institutions likes those from the Sierra Leone Company or African Institution of London, and even a protocolonial moral tract like The Black Prince, it is important to bear in mind that these were literary productions of institutions, whose goal it was to establish a more viable economic model to replace a system of trade in African human cargo and slavery that was becoming obsolete. Having pointed to these eighteenth-century scholars and the issues of slavery and abolition, I should also emphasize that my goal with this examination of an African-British long eighteenth century is not to conduct an exploration or analysis of eighteenth-century slavery and abolition. Instead, my project seeks to look beyond slavery, and more towards abolition and a postabolition vision for Africa, which signifies a colonial impulse, and the idea that Africa could be put to better use for the benefit of Europe and England in particular. This long eighteenth-century European projected vision for an Africa beyond slavery involves elements of colonialism, exploration, commerce, so-called “civilization,” and so forth, which are manifested both implicitly and explicitly in the many cultural and official documents that I explore throughout this project.

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l As one can easily notice by the references to several eighteenth-century scholars and postcolonial scholars alike, I come to this project as a scholar who wears multiple hats that command my allegiance and complicate my own positioning in relation to this project that deals with the African-British long eighteenth century: I am a student of “traditional” British eighteenthcentury studies, yet I am also keenly aware that we can continually push the boundaries of a metropolitan eighteenth century in order to construct a globally conscious and pluralized eighteenth century. In addition, I am also a student of African literature and postcolonial studies, and it is most certain that having a foot within these three fields has broadly shaped my scholarly outlook to become one who operates with the premise that no field can exist within a vacuum. Further still, there is my personal positioning as one who comes from a Sierra Leonean (West African) background, and an indigenous Afro-British family, which has played a role in the political history of Sierra Leone.17 For instance, the name of my ancestor, George Caulker, can be seen on the Sierra Leone Treaty of 1807, and even today in 2008, a member of my family, Charles Caulker, sits in the Sierra Leone Parliament as an elected Paramount Chief of Sierra Leone’s Moyamba District. As Joe A.D. Alie writes in A New History of Sierra Leone, “At least four of the resulting Afro-British families—Caulkers, Tuckers, Clevelands, and Rogers—were to continue to play a significant role in their areas into the twentieth century.”18 It is also plausible that my positioning is further complicated by my own personal identity as a Diasporal subject, whose early years have taken him from Sierra Leone to the United States, and whose present life regularly carries him to and fro, across the Atlantic with personal commitments and obligations in two different global continental spaces in the so-called “developed” and “developing” worlds. It is because of all of these hats that bear my allegiance—academic, personal, familial, political, and perhaps even some that are latent—that I have developed as a scholar who is committed to the powerful idea of traversing boundaries and cutting across lines to read cultural literary texts alongside official documents, and long eighteenthcentury texts alongside a contemporary African novel in order to create a more enhanced and enriched socio-cultural literary project. It is said that the world is a small place, and becoming smaller every day with technological advances in transportation, communication, and evolving global economic systems. However, I would posit the irony that in this “small” world, which is becoming “smaller” with each technological advancement and each passing year, it becomes dangerously easier to become

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distanced from the pasts that contributed to the emerging “presents” and “futures” we are continually being thrust toward. We now live in a world where Diaspora is the norm, and in which Diaspora, as a term, no longer inherently implies leaving one’s place of origin, never to return. Instead, the nature of Diaspora, today, implies that one might leave one’s place of origin to live in another region of the world (say North America for instance), while still calling one’s place of family origin home (say Sierra Leone for instance). This concept of knowing ourselves and knowing our pasts, so that we can advance confidently as world-citizens, who may contribute our share to the greater global whole, is a major reason that I am committed to the archive as more than merely a physical repository for documents that tell us about the past. As Edouard Glissant points out: The duty of the writer is to explore, to show its relevance in a continuous fashion to the immediate present. This exploration is therefore related neither to a schematic chronology nor to a nostalgic lament. It leads to the identification of a painful notion of time and its full projection forward into the future . . . That is what I call a prophetic vision of the past.19

I use Glissant’s definition of the writer and scholar, as one who has the duty of exploring and showing relevance in continuous fashion to an immediate present, to build upon Desai’s idea of the “colonial library.” Since the task at hand is exploration, then I am compelled to define my conception of this exploration of an African-British long eighteenth century as one that is not limited to (or by) the texts that I explore here within my project. Instead, I view this exploration of an African-British long eighteenth century, not as an ending or finality, but as one that should be built upon and evolved by those who come after me. The colonial library, or colonial archive, is an entity that operates in service of the present and future, and allows us to construct solid presents and futures that speak to who we are and how we evolve as human beings in an ever-changing world. For instance, the Sierra Leone National Archive of my parents’ generation might consist of the same physical repository today, and indeed, many of the same documents. Still, inevitably, within an everevolving and ever-changing postcolonial world, this same archive and the very same documents signify and register at a different level based on generational experience and modes of perceiving the pasts—modes that are shaped by the current state of world affairs and world orders. The very same could be said of the other archives that I have utilized in constructing this project like the British National Archives in Kew Gardens, the British Library in London, or the Newberry Library in Chicago. It is with this manifesto of knowing ourselves and reconstructing our histories firmly in mind, that I proceed with

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my exploration, which at times, will seem like a literary-historical journey, while at other points, an archival journey, and even still, at other points, an examination of travel writing and cartography. It goes without saying that my goal is to bring various modes of discourse and analysis into dialogue with one another, with the hope that they will enhance one another.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW OF THE AFRICAN-BRITISH LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Chapter 1 of my exploration of an African-British long eighteenth century is entitled “Long Eighteenth-Century Fictive Literature and Filling Vacuum of Africa.” In this chapter, I examine in the fictive constructs of European imagination that are manifested within Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), and A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinee (1670), which contains similar descriptions of Africa that we see in Behn’s Oroonoko. I also explore a short moral tract called The Black Prince (1799)—based on the actual experiences of the Sierra Leonean Prince Naimbanna in England, originally published in Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts. The final text I examine is The Autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1789), which in many respects, is constructed and tailored to counter the prevalent eighteenth-century archetype of a savage and uncivilized Africa. One can argue, quite validly, that these representations of Africa could be characterized as imaginative inventions of Africa that are crafted by these respective European writers in order to fill a vacuum or void resulting from the lack of knowledge about the continent itself. Chapter 2 of this project is called “British-African Treaty Making and the Construction of a British Colonial State in Sierra Leone.” Within this chapter, I explore the treaties that the African indigenous of Sierra Leone made with those who would become their British colonizers over the period of 1787 to 1819. Through an analysis of these treaties, one can detect the emergence and solidification of modern British colonial administration that goes through a learning process of establishing territorial dominion and power. Through an analysis of these treaties, one can examine the manner in which Sierra Leone evolves from a supposedly benevolent “Colony of Freedom” in 1787, to a profit-driven joint stock Sierra Leone Company and colony in 1791, and finally, an official British Crown Colony in 1808. The Crown Colony form of modern colonial administration that was installed in 1808 is the form that Sierra Leone, and indeed all of the British African colonies, would assume well into the twentieth century until independence in 1961 during the 1960s African decade of independence.

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Chapter 3 of my project is entitled “Reading the British Sierra Leone Company: Colonial Economics and Moral Philosophy of the Long Eighteenth Century.” This chapter deals with the Sierra Leone Company (1791–1807), and the emerging economic and philosophical systems that combined to form a colonial philosophy, which linked European economic success with the socalled civilization of Africa, and moral education in Africa. The Sierra Leone Company, like the Colony of Freedom model, which was its predecessor, was closely aligned with the abolition movement and provided a viable economic alternative for a slave trade that was becoming obsolete. In attempting to establish a colony designed to promulgate Western civilization and British culture in Africa, and fashioned with the explicit premise of commerce and enterprise, the proprietors of the Sierra Leone Company were engaged in an endeavor that sought to engineer a commercial utopia from which an abundance of profit would flow. The company’s joint-stock venture in Sierra Leone, however, was confronted with a task of colonial engineering that proved too big for the company’s capabilities and financial resources. The eventual fall of the Sierra Leone Company in 1807 convinced the British government that the tasks of colony building and colonial administration were the job of a national government and an emerging empire that could readily absorb the impact of inevitable setbacks to a utopian colonial vision and provide adequate military defense. The end of the Sierra Leone Company’s joint-stock venture ushered in the era of modern colonial administration that began with the establishment of the Sierra Leone British Crown colony in 1808. Chapter 4 is entitled “Natural Science, Exploration, and the Colonial Project in West Africa.” In this chapter, I examine the manner in which the philosophy of the long eighteenth century both provides and draws foundational support to the emerging colonialism of the period. I conduct an archival study that explores the relationship between discourse and colonial material practice by examining protocolonial science of the long eighteenth century—that is, anthropology, geography, cartography, exploration and observation, and so forth. This chapter includes the works of individuals like the German Johann Blumenbach, who wrote his famous On the Natural Varieties of Mankind in 1775; the Swede C. B. Wadstrom, who wrote An Essay on Colonization Particularly Applied to the Coast of West Africa in 1794; and the Reports of the African Institution of London, which was essentially a league of gentlemen dedicated to scientific exploration and discovery in Africa, with the intention of supporting the emerging colonial project. The 1807 date of the institution’s founding is extremely significant because it is the year that the Sierra Leone Company was disbanded and taken over by the British government.

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Chapter 5, entitled “The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, and Bringing the Long Eighteenth-Century Archival Past into the Postcolonial Present,” is the final chapter of my exploration of the African-British long eighteenth century. Within this chapter, I examine the contemporary postcolonial African novel The Last Harmattan on Alusine Dunbar by Sierra Leonean author Syl Cheney-Coker. It is included as a novel of great significance for the long eighteenth century because it recounts the history that I examine within the first four chapters of this project in the form of a novel of historical fiction that deals with the emergence of colonialism in West Africa. The Last Harmattan demonstrates that the study of an archive, which comes to us from the long eighteenth century, has relevant connections to—and has just as much to do with—the present postcolonial era we live in, as it does with those centuries that have passed. Edouard Glissant’s thoughts on the nature of a historical consciousness, characterized by ruptures and fissures, also offers a useful mode in which Cheney-Coker utilizes historical events, myth, legend, and characteristics of African oral tradition to construct The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar. He writes that, “the converging histories of our peoples relieves us of the linear, hierarchical vision of a single history that would run its unique course” and that “the depths are not only the abyss of neurosis but primarily the site of multiple converging paths.”20 Finally, within the epilogue of this project, I do not seek to offer a neatly wrapped and neatly tucked ending that provides closure, precisely because I see this project as a beginning of sorts, as opposed to an ending or finality. As I state within the epilogue, each of the five individual chapters of this project (as well as the introductory section entitled “Renaissance Beginnings”) relays a different and unique, yet also interconnected, aspect of the African-British long eighteenth century. I embark on this exploration with the hope that others will be inspired to make their own contributions to this intercultural and interdisciplinary journey.

EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE BEGINNINGS AND AN ARCHETYPAL IMAGE OF AFRICA While I do not intend to undertake a comprehensive or exhaustive analysis of contact that occurred between Africans and Europeans from the Renaissance into the eighteenth century, I do plan, within this introductory section, to isolate certain instances involving the Portuguese and the English (specifically Sir John Hawkins) and their protocolonial exploits in Africa during the period. The fixture of an African stereotype—the creation of the ideological construct of difference within the European imagination, that allows Africans

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to be taken as human cargo without regard for their humanity—from this point in history forward comes into play. However, there are also instances of diplomatic contact that establish a tradition, which allows Europeans to engage in these endeavors involving diplomatic contact on a “human level” for economic benefit, while paradoxically, at the same time, retaining the imaginary construct that disregards the humanity of Africans and Africa. There is, indeed, an element of ambivalence to the archetypal image of Africa from the Renaissance onward. The constancy of the stereotype of Africa as a site where humanity is lacking had not appeared with the dawn of the eighteenth century. It is prudent to view it in the manner that Derrida suggests when he states, “the very condition of a deconstruction may be at work, in the work, within the system to be deconstructed,” which allows us to decipher that this trope of African inhumanity was already there, already present before the eighteenth century.21 The concept of acquisition is one of the elemental factors that can be deconstructively deciphered and tagged as the motivation that lay behind the activities of virtually all the contact that occurred between Europeans and Africans—from the Portuguese in West Africa during the 1400s, all the way to colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were the European sea-faring power that took the lead with exploration of the African continent. In 1444, Nuno Tristao discovered the mouth of the Senegal River, which marks the end of the Sahara Desert and the beginning of the populous sub-Saharan region of Africa.22 In the year 1455, when the famous Portuguese navigator Prince Henry assumed control of sea-faring expeditions along the African coast, “The Venetian Cadamosto, who visited west Africa with Henry’s permission, reported that from the factory or trading post of Arguin, south of Cape Branco, between 700 and 800 slaves were exported every year to Portugal, and from every cargo Henry collected his fifth share.”23 In 1462, Pedro de Cinta, visiting the peninsula for the first time, called it Serra Lyoa, and the estuary soon became an important source of fresh water for ships traveling to and from India. In 1482 Portuguese traders began to build a fort on an island at the end of the bay . . . The traders eventually established themselves along the coast. European goods like swords, kitchen and other household utensils and attractively colored ready made clothes were exchanged at first for gold brought from inland and for fine ivory. The opening of European plantations in the New World (the Americas) in the 1550’s and beyond, however, made slaves a major commodity that the Portuguese, and later, other Europeans, sought in Sierra Leone.24

Perhaps one of the most telling acts of this period, which sums up European attitudes towards those locations of so-called incivility and the indigenous

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inhabitants of these areas, came in 1493 when Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull that sanctioned the division of the world’s undiscovered and uncivilized lands between Portugal and Spain.25 This official papal sanction mirrored prevalent attitudes toward the African continent (and beyond) that labeled it as a site of otherness that could, and in fact, should, be used for the benefit of Europe with little regard for the inhabitants themselves (although there were also instances of intermarriage between the Portuguese traders and African women, who set up African-Portuguese families). In The Hawkins’ Voyages During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I, published in 1847 by the Haklyut Society—a reprint of the 1622 edition—during the height of the colonial era, there is an account of Portuguese, and later, English, participation in the early slave trade: It was in 1517 that Charles V issued royal licenses for the importation of negroes into the West Indies, and in 1551 a license for importing 17,000 negroes was offered for sale. The measure was adopted from philanthropic motives, and was intended to preserve the Indians. It was looked upon as prudent and humane, even if it involved some suffering on the part of a far inferior race. The English were particularly eager to enter upon the slave trade, and by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 England at length obtained the asiento, giving her the exclusive right to carry on the slave trade between Africa and the Spanish Indies for thirty years. So strong was the party in favor of this trade in England, that the contest for its abolition was continued for forty-eight years, from 1759 to 1807.26

Of course, in chapter 1, we will see that 1 January 1808 is the date that the British government officially assumed control of Sierra Leone as a British Crown Colony (which rhymes with the 1807 date we see in the above passage by Markham). However, my emphasis in highlighting this account is to highlight the constancy of the ideological construct of African incivility and inhumanity that is ambivalently transitioned from 1551 when the early events of The Hawkins Voyages occur, to 1713 when England “obtained the asiento” for slave trading to the Spanish Indies, and all the way to 1847 when this edition of The Hawkins Voyages was reprinted by the Hakluyt Society. By the time the middle sixteenth century arrived, the English, along with the French, Dutch, and Danish began to exert their seafaring influence and broke the monopoly that the Portuguese had established in West Africa. I turn to the figure of Sir John Hawkins as an example of early English desire for a stake in the African continent because we can label him one of the first, if not the first, protocolonial English in West Africa. P. E. H. Hair writes that “There is a strong case for seeing the Hawkins voyages as innovatory [because] Hawkins took Englishmen to Guinea to act as soldiers for the first time, and used them on land against the Portuguese.”27 Hawkins took great

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pride in his seafaring expeditions to Africa, and although his slaving voyages were of trivial economic gain compared to the ventures that were to take place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were still a source of pride for Queen Elizabeth I and the English Crown. “Be that as it may, on the widest view, in terms of world history, the significance of the Hawkins slaving in the 1560’s is its singularity. Between the 1440s and the 1640s, the only intervention [of England] in the developing export slave trade from West Africa was in the 1560s.”28 I think that it would be worth our while to actually point to a specific account of Hawkins’s third voyage to Guinea where he engages in diplomacy with an indigenous African sovereign that results in a windfall of slaves in the form of captured prisoners. There came to us a Negroe, sent from a King, oppressed by other Kings. His neighbors desiring our aide, with promise that as many Negroes as by these wares might be obtained [ . . . ] I went myselfe, and with the helpe of the King of our side, assaulted the towne, and put the inhabitants to flight, where we tooke 250 persons, men, women, and children, and by our friend the King of our side, there was taken 600 prisoners, whereof we hoped to have had our choice; but the Negroe (in which nation is seldom found truth) meant nothing lesse.29

It is interesting to note that while there is an alliance in place, which will result in mutual gain for Hawkins and his indigenous allies, Hawkins reifies the trope of African incivility when he points to a widely held European belief that, in Africa, there “is seldom found truth.” Africa is framed as a site of immorality as well, which is a trope that we will also see reified in the moral and economic theses of Adam Smith, the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company, African Institution, and so forth. Again, the ambivalence of this trope is what allows the fixity of these imaginary constructs of Africa to exist intact throughout the centuries. The British, prior to the Treaties of 1787 and 1788, had a rather long history of attempts at establishing commercial companies for purposes of trade (this is a history that I will touch upon in chapter 3, where I write about colonial economics and the history of British companies in Africa). There was also a tradition of diplomacy and contact that was developed between the British traders and African indigenous peoples. For instance, Fyfe writes that: In 1684 Thomas Corker came out from London in the Company’s service, was employed in the Sherbro, and in 1692 promoted Chief Agent. He was transferred to the Gambia six years later, and in 1700 returned to England and died. His descendants by a member of a chiefly family became prominent people in the Sherbro. They established the maternal claim to rule as chiefs, but retained

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the paternal surname, which, by the end of the eighteenth century, they spelt Caulker.30

The European trader was forbidden to go into the interior to trade, and was required to pay rents and tribute, and also obtain permission to trade from the African indigenous rulers as well. In order to discourage the slaving practices and promote legitimate trade, coastal rulers developed a system and tradition of demanding hostages of a ship’s crew. The indigenous coastal ruler was essentially the European trader’s landlord, and was therefore responsible for the conduct of the traders themselves.31 I finally turn my attention to A Treatise Upon the Trade from Great-Britain to Africa, published in 1772, the same year in which the Mansfield Declaration was handed down during the height of the abolition movement. The treatise itself is penned anonymously, and the only name attached to it is “An African Merchant.” The treatise launches into an argument that favors the establishment of an economic market for European goods, and more specifically British goods, over the slave trade. This is an argument made on economic grounds that we will see in the various documents we encounter throughout this project—i.e., Adam Smith, Olaudah Equiano, Sierra Leone Company Reports, Reports of the African Institution, and so forth. For example: Consider the vast continent of Africa, the extent of coast within the limits of our trade by act of Parliament, (from Port Sallee in Barbary, to the Cape of Good Hope, both inclusive) an extent of nearly three thousand leagues, most advantageously situated for commerce, the inland parts rich in gold, and other very valuable commodities beyond description, watered with innumerable rivers for many leagues up the country, the soil amazingly fruitful, and the people numerous. From a concurrence of such circumstances what advantages may not be expected?32

The English African merchant highlights the economic gains that could be reaped by the English in Africa, if only Parliament acted to take advantage. In the eyes of the merchant, the extensive coastline, which is “advantageously situated for commerce,” as well as “the inland parts rich in gold, and other very valuable commodities,” are reason enough for the Parliament to act. A Treatise Upon the Trade then paints the perennial English rival—the French—in a favorable economic light for taking advantage of African trade that is supposedly there for the taking: The French were fully sensible of this, and in the year 1701 presented a memorial to their government wherein they allege, “their West India Islands cannot subsist, unless due encouragement is given to the African trade;” in consequence of which they had many privileges granted them then, and a few

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years ago, the bounties and exemptions allowed them for that trade were very little short of £45,000 annually. If France deemed this trade of such importance to her, it must be of much greater to us, who may be said to subsist only as a maritime power.33

The idea that “If France deemed this trade of such importance to her, it must be of much greater importance to us,” is premised on the English national image of self-importance as a dominant “maritime power.” It is especially during this period of the abolition movement and, more importantly, emerging industrialism and commerce, that more potentially lucrative alternatives to the African slave trade were being pondered. In fact, the driving forces behind these actions were more economic and profit driven, than they were humanitarian in nature. Acquisition and profit for the colonial mother country were the ultimate goals of these new protocolonial ventures, as they were during the era of the slave trade as well. These new modes of conceptualizing the African continent, that are bent of acquisition—beyond the acquisitive aims of the slave trade—are part of the long eighteenth century protocolonial impetus that drives much of the literature, archival documents (like African-British treaties, company reports, and institutional reports, etc). The impulse to establish European bastions of colonial civilizations in Africa is rooted in the concept of acquisition—be it acquisition of territory, of natural resources (i.e. gold, silver, etc), of the souls of the indigenous (the work of colonial missionaries), and so forth. Throughout the next four chapters, the manner in which the acquisitive impulse is carried out will be examined in terms of colonial literature, colonial diplomacy, colonial economics, and emerging colonial science. The final chapter of the book will deal with a novel of postcolonial and African literature—The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar—which looks back upon the historical period covered by the first four chapters with the intention of creating a story of relevant meaning and significance for a postcolonial era that, with each passing day, seems to be leaning more toward the direction of global inclusion and pluralization. As I conclude this introductory section of my exploration of an AfricanBritish long eighteenth century, I am reminded of the poignant thoughts of Kwame Anthony Appiah that have been my guide and mantra during my evolution as a scholar. Appiah seeks to engage multiple disciplines that, to varying degrees, are both Eurocentrically and Afrocentrically inclined: A collection of . . . this sort, which is both interdisciplinary and intercultural (discussing African and European ideas), is bound to spend some time telling each of its readers something that he or she already knows. Whatever your training and wherever you live, gentle reader, imagine your fellow readers and their

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areas of knowledge and ignorance before you ask why I have explained what does not need explaining to you. When you find me ignoring what you judge important, or getting wrong what you have gotten right, remember that no one in our day can cover all these areas with equal competence and that that does not make trying any less worthwhile.34

Appiah’s thoughts regarding the patience and plurality of vision required for work that reaches across discourses, disciplinary fields, and cultural lines, offer important, and even vital, philosophical tenets for those of us who endeavor to embark on courses of interdisciplinary scholarship. Indeed, beyond scholarship, this vision of patience and plurality is a formula for engaging human beings across diverse lines in an increasingly global age. It is with this vision of inclusion and dialogic engagement across cultural lines that I have conducted my exploration of this African-British long eighteenth century, and with which I hope to engage you, my reading audience.

NOTES 1. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 25. 2. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1. 3. Felicity Nussbaum, ed. The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 11. 4. Kathleen Wilson, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity In Britain and the Empire, 1660– 1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. 5. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 15. 6. Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 28. 7. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 37. 8. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and The Order of Knowledge (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988). 9. Gaurav Desai, Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), 4. 10. Desai, Subject to Colonialism, 5. 11. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations in British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 12. Dierdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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13. James Walvin, Making the Black Atlantic: Britain and the African Diaspora (London and New York: Cassell, 2000). 14. Brown, Moral Capital, 2. 15. Brown, Moral Capital, 3. 16. Coleman, Romantic Colonization, 5. 17. Christopher Fyfe, Sierra Leone Inheritance (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 62. Fyfe writes that, In 1684 Thomas Corker came out from London in the Company’s service, was employed in the Sherbro, and in 1692 promoted Chief Agent. He was transferred to the Gambia six years later, and in 1700 returned to England and died. His descendants by a member of a chiefly family became prominent people in the Sherbro. They established the maternal claim to rule as chiefs, but retained the paternal surname, which, by the end of the eighteenth century, they spelt Caulker.

18. Joe A. D. Alie, A New History of Sierra Leone (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1990), 35. 19. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 63–64. Glissant’s idea of the writer and scholar will again come into play during my discussion of Syl CheneyCoker’s novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which deals with the emergence of British colonialism in Africa during the long eighteenth century. 20. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 66. I will return to this very passage in which Glissant discusses this fragmented notion of history in chapter 5, with the hope of placing it firmly within the context of discussing The Last Harmattan. 21. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 73. 22. Eric Axelson, Cape to Congo: Early Portuguese Explorers, ed. George Woodcock (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 32. 23. Axelson, Cape to Congo, 33. Axelson also writes that, “Cadamosto took a particular interest in malaguetta pepper, which soon became known in Europe as “grains of paradise,” with the result that the region from which it was exported— roughly equivalent to eastern Sierra Leone and Liberia—became known as the grain coast.” 24. Alie, A New History. 25. Axelson, Cape to Congo, 36. 26. Clements R. Markham, ed. The Hawkins Voyages During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I (London: Hakluyt Society, 1878), v (Introduction). This text is a reprint of the original 1622 edition. 27. P. E. H. Hair, Hawkins in Guinea, 1567–68 (Leipzig: Institut für Afrikanistik, Universität Leipzig, 2000), 7. 28. Hair, Hawkins in Guinea, 8. 29. Markham, The Hawkins Voyages, 71. 30. Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 62. 31. Alie, A New History, 35.

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32. A Treatise Upon the Trade From Great-Britain to Africa Humbly Recommended to the Attention of Government. By An African Merchant (London: Printed for R. Baldwin, No. 47, Pater-noster Row, 1772), 6. 33. A Treatise Upon the Trade, 6. 34. Kwame Anthony Appiah. In My Father’s House: African in the Philosophy of Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), xi (Introduction).

Chapter One

Long Eighteenth-Century Fictive Literature and Filling the Vacuum of Africa

I have decided to begin this exploration of the African-British long eighteenth century with an examination of selected long eighteenth-century texts that offer British literary depictions of the African continent and African indigenous, which are largely representations of fictive constructions of European imagination. One can argue, quite validly, that these representations of Africa could be characterized as imaginative inventions of Africa that are crafted by these respective European writers in order to fill a vacuum or void resulting from the lack of knowledge about the continent itself. As I analyze the fictive constructs of European imagination within the respective long eighteenthcentury literary texts included in this chapter, it is useful to consider Srinivas Aravamudan’s insightful thought that, “As British literature and culture participated vigorously in colonialist justifications in the eighteenth century, the period becomes a prime target for postcolonial interpretation.”1 It is for this reason of the manner in which British literature both derived from, and contributed to, an archetypically fictive and imaginative construction of sub-Saharan Africa, that I have selectively turned to Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), and A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinee (1670), which contains similar descriptions of Africa that we see in Behn’s Oroonoko. Also included in this chapter is an analysis of a short moral tract called The Black Prince (1799)—based on the actual story of the Sierra Leonean Prince Naimbanna in England, originally published in Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts, as well as The Autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1789)—written by the eighteenth century former slave turned English freeman of letters, who was purportedly kidnapped from his Igbo people of West Africa and sold into slavery.2 In the literature I explore throughout this chapter, it is evident that the reifications of a fictional archetype of Africa and “African-ness” observable in the texts are rooted more so in long eighteenth1

2

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century European imaginings of Africa, than in realities on the ground. As Martin Dauton and Rich Halpern observe in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, “The Encounter with Europeans was most significant for the enlargement of scale that it entailed and the reconstitution of identities that ensued. One obvious change is that the British and other Europeans generally imposed unifying misnomers on the people they met. Beothuks and Powhatans became Indians; Igbos and Nupes became Africans; Taipi and Teii became Marquesans.”3 All of these long eighteenth-century literary texts have manifested within them various literary representations of the African continent, which speak of various European modes of perception of Africa. In each of their own respectively individual and respectively imaginative ways, both answer and contribute to the questions: “What is Africa?” “What potential does Africa hold for European interests beyond slavery?” “How should Africa be categorized?” and so forth. In this chapter on long eighteenth-century literary representations of Africa, I do not seek to create a summary analysis that results in one great monolithic answer. Instead, I have selectively provided these individual texts that offer examples of long eighteenth-century literary representations or imaginings of Africa, through which one might gain greater insight into the aforementioned questions that deal with long eighteenth-century literary perceptions about Africa in their own respective ways, and the issue of Africa beyond an era of slavery and toward an age of colonial formation. When English writers of the long eighteenth century created fictional narratives about Africa (and even quasifactual travel writing), they provided distinctive imagined representations of Africa. However, in doing so, these writers also framed the idea of an English identity that stood in opposition to the fictive construction of Africa. Nicholas Dirks, in Colonialism and Culture, speaks about the construction of oppositional identities in the colonial context. He writes that colonial rulers aligned themselves “with the inexorable and universal forces of science, progress, rationality, and modernity,” while the indigenous subject was imagined to exist at the other end of the developmental spectrum of progress.4 “Colonialism came to be seen as ascendant and necessary precisely through the construction of the colonial world, with its natural oppositions between us and them, science and barbarity, modern and traditional.”5 The oppositions between England and civility versus Africa and barbarity are naturalized and taken as a given in these texts, whether it be Behn’s Oroonoko, published in 1688, before the beginning of the eighteenth century proper, or The Black Prince, which was published at the end of the century in 1799. In the selected texts I explore in this chapter, the question of Africa in the long eighteenth century revolves around the elemental factor of geographical,

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3

cultural, and racial difference. The one pervading constant that is discernable throughout the texts that I explore in this chapter is the literary attempt to bring Africa into a locus of European understanding, for better or for worse, thought spectacular fiction or realistically framed travel writing. As Firdous Azim states in The Colonial Rise of the Novel, “The notion of the Other . . . is brought into and held in place, within an area of tension, oscillating between celebration and condemnation.”6 The literary attempts to bring Africa into a locus of European knowledge and understanding involves this “tension” or “oscillation” between “celebration and condemnation,” familiarity and difference, and the negative and positive depictions rooted in literary fantasy. Whether it is the discourse on Africa that we encounter in Behn’s Oroonoko or The Black Prince, it is important to understand that, “The terrain that the voice in the novel was concerned to unravel was seen, in fact, like the voice itself, to be formulated and held together as fantasy.”7 Africa, in many ways, becomes a sort of fetish landscape, whose appeal is largely due to its unfamiliarity, and within the long eighteenth-century literature I explore in this chapter, Africa becomes a geographical backdrop or stage on which European fears, desires, fantasies, and so forth are played out for an audience of readers. The African continent is also used as a sort of barometer of civilization against which the literary European characters may measure their own levels of civility. Kathleen Wilson, in The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, keenly observes that, “The ‘savages’ who provided the ground zero point for the analysis of progress and assessment of ‘civilization’ were nevertheless seen as more culturally than racially different from Europeans.”8 This concept of culture, which operates in concert with the concept of racial difference, implies that there is a performative aspect of European-ness that must be played out on the African geographical stage in order to make complete the spectacle of a literary European adventure in Africa. The emergence of a Europeanized black figure like Oroonoko out of the depths of Africa, and the supposed redemption of an African figure like Naimbanna in The Black Prince, speaks to the idea of literary spectacle that is designed to captivate a long eighteenthcentury European audience. Implicitly present (and sometimes explicitly present) in these literary texts is “a trope of white civilization, maintained through social and theatricalized practices and displays at all levels, that attempted to set off its performers from ‘indigenous’ savagery.”9 The spectacle and fantasy of the African stage is ever present as a marker of geographical, cultural, and racial difference that stands as a foil to Europeanness or Englishness. Homi Bhabha sums up this notion of difference quite well in Location of Culture, where he speaks about “the production of differentiations, individuations, identity effects through which discriminatory practices

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can map out subject populations,” and in many ways, it is these differentiations that contribute to the literary spectacle that we encounter throughout these texts that entail African adventures.10 The texts that I explore in this chapter effectively “map out” and frame an entire continent as the terrain of the different and non-European, which effectively marks Africa as uncivilized. The elements of imagination and sentimentality also come into play within the long eighteenth-century literature I explore in this chapter because of an imagined community or nation of eighteenth-century English readers to whom these respective writers communicate their imaginative visions of Africa and difference. “The extension of the imagined community of the nation into the unimagined community of the empire required that citizens find some way of conceiving of unity in the face of incontrovertible and intractable difference.”11 The Englishwoman Behn communicates her story of an African slave through an imaginative medium of spectacle and similarity, which allows her eighteenth-century English reader to perceive Oroonoko as an African anomaly that possesses familiar European characteristics. Even Equiano, in his Autobiography, frames his discourse in a manner that will allow him to enter into the locus of imagined familiarity with his English readership. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, offers insight into how the concept of this imagined community functions, particularly in relation to the literature itself. He remarks that, “The birth of the imagined community of the nation can best be seen if we consider the basic structure of the forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe: the novel and the newspaper. For these forms provided the technical means for re-presenting the kind of imagined community that is the nation.”12 As I will demonstrate through means of the long eighteenth-century literature I explore in this chapter, these forms also provided the technical means for imagining, constructing, and depicting the forms that the non-European took as well. These technical means are key concepts for texts like Oroonoko and The Black Prince, in which Behn and the anonymous author attempt to endear their respective black figures to an English audience. Imagination, construction, and depiction also come into play for Equiano as he struggles to define himself against the archetypal image of the uncivilized African and frame his discourse in a manner that will allow him to enter into the imagined locus of English familiarity. OROONOKO’S SPECTACULAR EMERGENCE OUT OF “SAVAGERY” AND SPECTACULAR REGRESSION I have chosen to begin with Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, first published in 1688, because it is framed as a tale of spectacle that is designed to garner senti-

Fictive Literature and Filling the Vacuum of Africa

5

ment from its reader. The spectacular story of Oroonoko revolves around a fictional African prince, who is elevated from the supposed depths of African “savagery” and “incivility,” to the supposed heights of European grace and refinement. Oroonoko retains these attributes of grace and refinement, which are framed as characteristically European attributes that are uncommon and atypical for African indigenous, in spite of the many instances of maltreatment that he endures over the course of the text at the hands of his Uncle, the African king, who takes his love Imoinda; the European ship captain, who deceives Oroonoko and sells him into slavery; the lies of the plantation owners, who promise him eventual freedom that will never come; and so forth. In fact, it is only toward the end of Behn’s novella that the fantastic mimicry and spectacle of an African imbued with European graces, gives way to the more familiar spectacle of African savagery that existed within the eighteenthcentury European imagination of African fantasy. One could argue that, by the end of the novella, Oroonoko abandons his pattern of mimicry and reverts to his supposedly inherent state of “savagery.” Joanna Lipking astutely points out that, “Seventeenth-century Europeans did not know the West African interior beyond the string of fortified coastal stations where they traded. For Behn, that was an opportunity, a convenient blank space on the contemporary map into which she could inject her romance tale of honour and love.”13 It seems that Behn attempts to create a familiar European setting there in Africa, which makes this tale of the Other both familiar enough to be palpable, yet distant enough to be exotically “Otherworldly” for the reader. The scene in Coramantien, Behn’s fictionalized African kingdom, is “set amid vaguely ‘oriental’ ceremonies and dancing, a vaguely classical military camp, intrigue and gossip that might belong to a European court, and careful provisions for the security of older women.”14 This idea of Africa as blank space, or a sort of stage on which any sort of scene might be crafted for display, is the reason I look upon Behn’s Oroonoko as a protocolonial story that points to European colonial civilizational possibility in Africa. Behn effectively engages in a sort of fictional colonization of the African landscape and its people in order to create the fantasy model for Oroonoko. I propose that Behn’s Oroonoko is a novel that offers the reader a spectacular vision, or protocolonial spectacle, of the supposedly civilized potential that a supposedly uncivilized Africa holds for European interests in a postabolition and postslavery era. Behn’s Oroonoko presents a protocolonial vision of African potential or possibility, in the form of the African figure Oroonoko, that is well ahead of actual Europeanized Africans of letters of the late-eighteenth century like Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cuguano, or an actual African prince like John Henry Naimbanna15 of the Temne-Sherbro people of Sierra Leone.

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The issue of Oroonoko’s narrative perspective—more specifically, the perspective of Behn’s narrator—is an important one that must also be addressed. Moira Ferguson writes that, “the youthful narrator (who discusses prominent contemporaries and whom Behn in the preface claims to be herself) admires Oroonoko’s heroic stand against slavery and deplores his punishment when captured. At this level the text functions as a eulogy.”16 It is this striking concept of Oroonoko as eulogy, and a posthumous narrative perspective, that is crucial to understanding the text as a protocolonial novel. The story of Oroonoko is relayed long after his gruesome rampage and equally gruesome death—long after Oroonoko’s reversion back to a supposedly inherent state of savagery. This means that, in many ways, Behn’s Oroonoko is a full-circle tale about an African figure’s spectacular emergence from a supposedly savage state and an equally spectacular reversion to this supposedly natural state of savagery. The idea of Oroonoko as a sentimental figure is another concept that is also worth exploring, particularly because of the manner in which “Sentimentality draws an object home in order to incite feeling,” as Lynn Festa describes it.17 However, the key to the preservation of sentimentality is the maintenance of distance from the object itself. “This capacity permits the sentimental to produce sociable (communal, as opposed to personal) feeling. It is the fact that objects are not fully absorbed into the community that makes the sentimental such a useful mode in eighteenth-century discussions of empire.”18 I would also argue that the key to Oroonoko’s sentimentality is his familiarity, which renders him an anomalous African spectacle (as I will demonstrate later in the chapter). However, I will also argue that Oroonoko’s reversion back to the supposedly uncivilized state of African savagery means that sentiment is ultimately lost in the end. To read the description of Oroonoko’s appearance offered by Behn’s narrator, and of how Oroonoko came to be the Europeanized figure that we see in the text, is to read a lesson in the art of differentiation for effect, and differentiation for the sake of both “celebration and condemnation.”19 Oroonoko “was adorn’d with a native Beauty so transcending all those of his gloomy Race, that he strook an Awe and Reverence, even in those that knew not his Quality; as he did in me, who behld him with Surprise and Wonder, when afterwards he arriv’d in our World.”20 The term “our World,” which is utilized by Behn’s narrator is of great importance since it refers to the enclave of European civilization that was created in Surinam where Oroonoko is eventually enslaved and where the novella ends. Oroonoko is framed as a black human spectacle, whose graceful European mimicry strikes those “who beheld him with Surprise and Wonder.”21 This allows him to transcend his supposedly

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uncivilized African nature, and is one of the primary reasons that the narrator and those Europeans in the New World welcome him “when afterwards he arriv’d in our World” as a figure, who is clearly too great to be wholly black, but too black to be fully European. The narrator takes great care to emphasize that, although Oroonoko’s “Beauty” is of a “native” variety, the nature of this “Beauty” is atypical to such a striking degree that it sets him apart from the supposedly common African natives. This enables Oroonoko to transcend “all those of his gloomy race,” as the narrator puts it; thereby gaining the sentiment of his European reader by entering into a locus of familiarity and spectacle by the sheer fact that he is able to transcend Africa itself. Oroonoko’s unique variety of African blackness that we come to see through the eyes of Behn’s narrator might be described as a superior variety of blackness, which is so very unique, that it places him close to European whiteness, and allows for a sort of mimicry that allows him to transcend his “uncivilized” African origins. Behn’s narrator frames Oroonoko’s aesthetic packaging in a manner that effectively separates him from his African origins: He was pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be fansy’d: The most famous Statuary cou’d not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turn’d from Head to Foot. His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that Nation are, but a perfect Ebony, or polish’d Jett. His Eyes were the most awful that cou’d be seen, and very piercing; the White of ‘em being like Snow, as were his Teeth. His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His Mouth, the finest shap’d that cou’d be seen; far from those great turn’d Lips, which are so natural to the rest of the Negroes. The whole Proportion and Air of his Face was so noble, and exactly form’d, that’ baiting his Colour, there cou’d be nothing in Nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome. There was no one Grace wanting, that bears the Standard of true Beauty.22

The aesthetic differentiation of Oroonoko results in both “celebration” of the strikingly Europeanized qualities with which he has been fashioned, and a condemnation of the characteristically enthnographic features that would have made him African (had he been fashioned with any of them). His face is not merely or commonly black, but instead “a perfect Ebony, or polish’d Jett,” and “His nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat” effectively sets him apart from anything that might be remotely African.23 Oroonoko meets what Behn’s narrator calls “the Standard of true Beauty,” and it is this supposedly remarkable fact that renders Oroonoko such a spectacular sight to behold.24 Behn’s creation of Oroonoko is imbued with a certain work ethic and desire to rise above his supposedly inferior African state. A sort of meticulous

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care is ascribed to both his superior mental faculties, and some elements of his European aesthetics as well: His Hair came down to his Shoulders, by the Aids of Art; which was, by pulling it out with a Quill, and keeping it comb’d; of which he took particular Care. Nor did the Perfections of his Mind come short of those of his Person; for his Discourse was admirable upon almost any Subject; and who ever had heard him speak, wou’d have been convinc’d of their Errors, that all fine Wit is confin’d to the White Men, especially those of Christendom; and wou’d have confess’d that Oroonoko was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely, had as great a Soul, as politick Maxims, and was as sensible of Power as any Prince civiliz’d in the most refin’d Schools of Humanity and Learning, or the most illustrious Courts.”25

The fact that Oroonoko’s “Hair came down to his Shoulders, by the Aids of Art” points to a work ethic that is invested in mimicry of European manners and customs, and rejection of that which is characteristically African.26 This rigorous work ethic also applies to his mental faculties, which match his physical appearance, since Behn’s narrator states, “Nor did the Perfections of his Mind come short of those of his Person” and that “His Discourse was admirable upon almost any Subject.”27 The narrator also asserts that, “He had nothing of Barbarity in his Nature, but in all Points address’s himself, as if his Education had been is some European Court.”28 Oroonoko’s aesthetically pleasing appearance is linked with the civility of his behavior, which effectively creates the black African human spectacle that strikes those who behold him with “Awe and Reverence.”29 His uncommon ability to charm and captivate those Europeans whose acquaintance he makes is also significantly spectacular, as Behn’s narrator remarks that, “ He came into the room, and address’d himself to me, and some other Women, with the best Grace in the World.”30 Indeed, the origins of Oroonoko’s civility speak of colonial civilizational fashioning, and the potential for the re-creation or Europeanization of a supposedly uncivilized African environment. For the narrator, who is clearly in awe of Oroonoko, the discovery that such humanity could come from the depths of Africa is spectacular indeed: ‘Twas amazing to imagine where it was he learn’d so much Humanity; or, to give his Accomplishments a juster Name, where ‘twas he got that real Greatness of Soul, those refin’d Notions of true Honour, that absolute Generosity, and that Softness that was capable of the highest Passions of Love and Galantry, whose Objects were almost continually fighting men, or those mangl’d, or dead; who heard no Sounds, but those of War and Groans: Some part of it we may attribute to the Care of a French-Man of Wit and Learning: who finding it turn to very

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good Account to be a sort of Royal Tutor to this young Black, & perceiving him very ready, apt, and quick of Apprehension, took a great pleasure to teach him Morals, Language and Science.31

It becomes clear that Oroonoko’s atypical physical appearance was formed long before his gentle character, and that much work and training were required to complete the package of aesthetic beauty and gentle behavior. The “Humanity,” “Greatness of Soul,” and “refin’d Notions of true Honour” are partially attributable to the “Care of a French-Man of Wit and Learning,” who saw something very special and unique in Oroonoko “perceiving him very ready” to be raised from his supposed state of incivility and inhumanity.32 What makes Oroonoko such a spectacular and sentimentally endearing tale, though, is the fact that he is an African character, who is imbued with European attributes and characteristics, and who essentially rejects his African environment. Yet he can never escape the blackness and African origin, in spite of all the European mimicry, social graces, and displays of humanity. Azim writes that, “Oroonoko is wonderful precisely because he is not a typical Negro. However, while he is not a typical Negro, it is very difficult to see him as a white person, and the text, despite all its efforts to incorporate him into the social framework, fails to do so.”33 I would also contend the very fact that “it is difficult to see him as a white person” is one of the major elements that makes the tale or Oroonoko so very spectacular in nature.

l If there did not exist the lingering possibility of reversion back to a savage state, Oroonoko would perhaps be another obscure text that would not have made it into the present locus of eighteenth-century literary common knowledge (perhaps even relegated to the archives). The lingering element of savage danger, or savage possibility, that lurks beneath the aesthetically pleasing exterior and behind the gentle mimicry is what makes Oroonoko such a spectacle. As I mentioned earlier, Oroonoko’s story is one that is relayed posthumously, which means that the full-circle emergence from savagery, and reversion back to savagery, has already transpired. The opening words of the narrator make it very clear that the entire “History of the Royal Slave” has already transpired: I do not pretend, in giving you the History of this Royal Slave, to entertain my Reader with the Adventures of a feign’d Hero, whose Life and Fortunes may manage at the Poets Pleasure; not in relating the Truth, design to adorn it with any Accidents, but such as arriv’d in earnest to him: And it shall come simply

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into the World, recommended by its own proper Merits, and natural Intrigues; there being enough of Reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the Addition of Intervention. I was my self an Eye-Witness to a great part, of what you will find here set down; and what I cou’d not be Witness of, I receiv’d from the Mouth of the Chief Actor in this History, the Hero himself, who gave us the whole Transactions of his Youth.34

What makes the figure of Oroonoko such a spectacle is the fact that he triumphs over his inherently African state of savagery, and that he is able to continue the pattern of mimicry that endears him to the narrator and the Europeans that surround him. Srinivas Aravamudan conceptualizes Oroonoko as a sort of pet, and one might easily make the argument that the notion of spectacle and pethood work hand in hand (perhaps the notion of “spectacular pethood” is also viable), particularly given that one could also make the argument that Oroonoko is an African figure, who has been tamed and groomed for a sort of gentle and domestic role. In fact, “Africans seized for the slave trade were also transported to England and sold as pets and domestic servants. Several historians of slavery have documented cases of Africans as exotic possessions in addition to their more general use as a captive workforce for plantations.”35 Therefore, it is conceivable to look upon the admiring gaze that the narrator and his surrounding European company cast upon Oroonoko as that of a master looking upon a valuable and favored pet. Aravamudan writes that, “Charles II had bought a black boy for £50 in 1682, and, according to some accounts, this slave was presented by him to Louise Renee de Penancoet de Keroualle, the Duchess of Portsmouth.”36 Still though, one must also consider the case of Oroonoko’s African origins, and the fact that he was imbued with his European attributes of gentility and grace there in Africa, with the assistance of the French man of wit and learning. One could certainly make the argument for Oroonoko’s pethood once he is abducted from Africa and sent to the New World. On the subject of “Oroonoko as spectacle,” Emily Hodgson Anderson remarks that, “The new and strange remain unbelievable until they are witnessed, and verbal descriptions must be supported by physical evidence.”37 However, we could also argue that the narrative descriptions of Behn’s narrator constitute a dual link and manifestation of verbal description coupled with physical evidence, particularly in terms of referencing the physical appearance and life events of Oroonoko. I believe that the spectacle of Oroonoko comes full-circle when he learns that his female partner Imoinda is pregnant, and that his child is destined to be born into a world of slavery. The narrator writes that, “Now Imoinda began to shew she was with Child, and did nothing but Sigh and Weep for the Captivity of her Lord, her Self, and the Infant yet

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unborn, and believ’d, if it were so hard to gain the Liberty of the Two, ‘twou’d be more difficult to get that for Three. Her Griefs were so many Darts in the Great Heart of Caesar.”38 It is at this point of the novella that Oroonoko’s mimicry of civility (and complicit pethood) comes to an end. Oroonoko, now shifts from a spectacular black wonder of African civilizational gentility to an equally spectacular black wonder of raw African savagery. The reversion back to Oroonoko’s supposedly inherent state of natural savagery is evident in the speech intended to rally his fellow slaves into rebellion in an attempt to gain freedom. The gentle mannerisms and mimicry are no longer observable. Instead, in its place, are the vengeful words of a fictional African warrior created by Behn, who speaks of how they “Suffer’d the infamous Whip” and the manner in which: Blood trickled from all Parts of their Body; Blood, whose every drop ought to be Reveng’d with a Life of some of those Tyrants, that impose it: And why, said he, my dear Friends and Fellow-sufferers, shou’d we be Slaves to an unknown People? Have they Vanquish’d us Nobly in Fight? Have they Won us in Honorable Battel? And are we, by the chance of War, become their Slaves? This wou’d not anger a Noble Heart, this wou’d not animate a Souldiers Sould; no, but we are Bought and Sold like Apes, or Monkeys, Rogues, Runagades, that have abandon’d their own Countries, for Rapin, Murders, Thefts and Villanies.39

The Europeanized African, Oroonoko, who once had “nothing of Barbarity in his nature” is now filled with a vengeful spirit, and is now depicted as one who thirsts for the “Life of some of those Tyrants” in return for the African blood that has been spilled in captivity.40 Oroonoko, now renamed Caesar, who once held European values in high esteem, now rejects them as worthless and valueless. He is promised freedom, and is told that, “If you will be pleas’d . . . to render your self, all imaginable Respect shall be paid you; and your Self, your Wife, and Child, if it be born, shall depart free out of our land.”41 However, Oroonoko rejects Byam’s offer of freedom for his surrender, and in the same way that he rejected his fictional African setting, he now rejects his European setting: Caesar told him, there was no Faith in the White Man or the Gods they Ador’d; who instructed ’em in Principles so false, that honest Men cou’d not live amongst’em; though no people profess’d so much, none perform’d so little . . . [ . . . and that] with them a Man ought to be eternally on his Guard, and never to Eat or Drink with Christians without his Weapon of Defence in his Hand; and, for his own Security, never credit one word they spoke.42

While one can certainly sense the explicit tone of justified indignation in Oroonoko’s rebuking and rejection of European values, one must also read

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the passage as a rejection of European values and European Christianity with it. With this rejection of European Christianity, Oroonoko’s reversion back to his fictional primitive state of savagery is now complete. Once the performative words of rejection are uttered, all that is needed to complete the full-circle transition from savagery to civility, and back to savagery, are Oroonoko’s gruesome acts of savagery and barbarity that mark the end of Behn’s novella. Perhaps the most gruesome scene of Oroonoko, apart from his execution, is marked by his own act of self-mutilation that occurs prior to his capture. Prior to this capture, after Oroonoko’s and Imoinda’s first escape from the European authorities, many were of the impression that they had seen them for the final time. “Some were of Opinion he was escap’d never to return; other thought some Accident had hap’ned to him: But however, we fail’d not to send out a hundred People several ways to search for him.”43 At this point, Oroonoko is no longer the noble figure, who was once capable of mimicry that endeared him to the Europeans that surrounded him. He is a frightful savage threat that posses great harm to the European enclave at large. Oroonoko’s personal triumph over a fictionally inherent state of savagery, that once made him an amazing African spectacle, has now been erased. Ironically though, the trope of African savagery, that made Oroonoko’s rise to civility such a spectacle to behold, has now become the main spectacular event to behold. When the search party of Europeans finally catches up to Oroonoko, only to witness the sight of a pregnant Imoinda, who has been slaughtered by his hand, there is no chance for any sort of redemption. The narrator tells us that, “They put off the Flowers that cover’s her with their Sticks, and found she was kill’d and cry’d out Oh Monster! That hast murther’d thy Wife.”44 Indeed, the full-circle course of events has been completed, and Oroonoko has now become a “Monster” in the eyes of those who once viewed him as an African spectacle of humanity or pethood. Oroonoko’s acts of monstrosity and savagery continue as he taunts the search party of Europeans with acts of self-mutilation: Tis not life I seek, nor am I afraid of Dying; and, at that Word, cut a piece of flesh from his own Throat, and threw it at ‘em, yet still I wou’d Live if I cou’d, till I had perfected my Revenge. But oh! It cannot be; I feel Life gliding from my Eyes and Heart; and, if I make not haster, I shall yet fall a Victim to the Shameful Whip. At that, he rip’d up his own Belly; and took his Bowels and pull’s ‘em out, with what Strength he cou’d.45

Oroonoko has lost the noble spirit he once had, and is now filled with the spirit of revenge that is characteristic of the fictional trope of African savagery. One, of course, learns that Oroonoko survives this gruesome act of self-mutilation,

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and that his final fate comes at the hands of his European captors, whom he assures “they need not tye him, for he wou’d stand fixt, like a Rock; and indure Death so as Shou’d encourage them to die.”46 Soon after that, in a warrior like manner—unwilling to yield, Oroonoko “gave up the Ghost without a Groan.”47

l Aphra Behn, in creating the literary landscape of Africa for Oroonoko, essentially had a blank slate on which to construct the fictional setting of Oroonoko’s Coromantien. In Catherine Gallagher’s edited Bedford edition of Oroonoko, she points to A New Account of Guinea, and the Slave Trade (1734) by Captain William Snelgrave. Gallagher writes that, “Snelgrave was involved in the slave trade for some 30 years, undertaking his first voyage to Africa in 1704 [some 16 years after the publication of Oroonoko], and traveling to Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast on later journeys.”48 Later on, within an actual passage excerpted from Snelgrave’s account, we learn of the “Cormantine Negroes [who] despised [or did not fear] Punishment, and even Death it self: It having happened at Barbadoes and other Islands, that on their being any ways hardly dealt with, to break them of their stubbornness in refusing to work, twenty or more having hang’d themselves at a time in a Plantation.”49 Knowledge of the “Coromantine Negroes’” imperviousness to pain, of which we could argue that Behn might have had knowledge from known accounts in 1688, validates the matter of Oroonoko’s reversion back to a state of what might have been perceived as natural African savagery in the final scenes of Behn’s novella. Indeed, the act of “giving up the ghost without a groan” or any signs of pain or distress speaks of imperviousness to human pain and suffering. However, in lieu of the Snelgrave account, published in 1734, I would like to turn attention to A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinea (1670), which was published some eighteen years prior to the publication of Oroonoko. It contains an account of a voyage to the Guinea coast made by explorers called Villault and de Belleford over the years 1666 and 1667. The text was originally published in French, and then translated into English, in 1670, for the publisher John Starkey at the Mitre in Fleet Street, and within the text, we learn of the African indigenous villages of both Comendo—known to favor the French, and Cormentin—home to a Dutch fort, which eventually falls into British hands. Within the section entitled Voyage to Guinea, it is written that: On Sunday the 28th we weigh’d anchor, and in two hours appear’d in the road de Comendo, whose Inhabitants are great lovers of the French, then any other

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Europeans: The Town (that may consist of about a hundred houses) is built on the Sea-side, and watered by a rivulet, which falling into the Sea likewise on the South formes a pretty channel and Horbour for Canoes, and Shallops: The East-side lyes low, but the West rises into a hill, which being flat a top, is very convenient to build upon. The house appertaining formerly to the French, stands upon the North end of the Town.50

The French influence in the Comendo village region is very plain to see in this account, and the fact that it states, “Inhabitants are great lovers of the French,” makes it very plausible that this knowledge of the Guinea region of West Africa in which Comendo and Cormentin are situated was available to a woman of letters like Aphra Behn. It seems that Behn drew upon material such as this to weave together the fictional character of Oroonoko since she emphasizes, about Oroonoko’s “Greatness,” “Honour,” and “Generosity” that, “Some part of it we may attribute to the Care of a French-Man of Wit and Learning.”51 The account also speaks of the manner in which the European fort at Cormentin, once in possession of the Dutch, came to be in English hands. The details of the conflict surrounding the change of allegiance reads that: All the rest of that month, and the four first days of April, we spent in traffique, and on the fifth we discern’d a Petach passing towards the Mine, with a great shallop full of Souldiers which the Dutch General sent to Cormentin, a Fort which belongs to them: we were utterly ignorant of the design, but were told afterwards by the Mores, that the Governour of that Fort being gone to Anembou with several of his Souldiers to drink and be merry (there being Palm-wine in Africk) had been seized upon, and all his company with him, by the King of that Countrey, in whose dominions Cormentin stood, and that two of them endeavoring to defend themselves, were kill’d: the ground of this Insurrection was this; The King of Fantin having ingag’d himself to the English at Cape Corse, to put them again into possession of that Fort, had given them his Son in hostage, and desiring to have him restor’d, and the English refusing till his Articles were perform’d, he had seized upon the Governour, and four other Hollanders, with design to exchange them for his Son. Thursday the seventh of April, we had news that the Controuler general of Holland was kill’d at Axime, and the Mores of those parts had unanimously declar’d for the English.52

This account points to the manner in which some European-Indigenous allegiances are structured, and the manner in which pacts are carried out. In fact, when we look back upon Oroonoko to the scene in which we are introduced to the English Captain, who captures Oroonoko and sells him into slavery, Behn is careful to note that Oroonoko and the Captain have dealt with one another before. She writes that, “This Person had often before been

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in these Countries, and was very well known to Oroonoko, with whom he had traffick’d for Slaves, and had us’d to do the same with his Predecessors.”53 Behn clearly draws upon knowledge of European-Indigenous allegiances like those involving “The King of Fantin having ingag’d himself to the English at Cape Corse,” which eventually resulted in Cormentin changing hands from the Dutch to the English. The Voyage to Guinea is also very detailed in terms of the enthnographic and early anthropological information that we receive in the travel writing account of the natives. Some of the information we learn about the indigenous Africans of this region that encompasses Comendo and Cormentin states that: The inhabitants of the Golden Coast are handsome, and well proportioned, they have nothing disagreeable in their Countenance, but the blackness of their Complection; some of them have flattish noses, and all of them little ears; their eyes are quick and sparkling, but above all, their teeth as white as Ivory.54

And when we compare these ethnographic descriptions of the Gold Coast indigenous with the description of Oroonoko crafted by Behn, it is clear that, “His Eyes were the most awful that cou’d be seen, and very piercing; the White of ’em being like Snow, as were his Teeth . . . [and that] His Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat.”55 Behn clearly picked and chose the attributes of the Gold Coast descriptions that she found favorable and endearing to a European audience, like “sparkling eyes” and “white teeth,” while discarding the “disagreeable blackness” and “flat African nose,” replacing them with the atypical “jett blackness” and a “black Roman nose.” In the same manner that Behn attempts to repair Oroonoko’s “gloomy blackness” with an atypical sort of blackness, we see below that the description of Goold Coast indigenous blackness is marked by “smooth and delicate” skin. The account reads that: Their Skin is black indeed, but smooth and delicate, without any hair, but as they grow old, their blackness lessens, and their hair which is short, black and frizell’d, grows grizzled by degrees . . . They are not at all asham’d of their nudity, but they have so great an abhorrency and detestation of belching, or any such thing, that they will sooner die than do it; and if it happens at any time they be in the company of any Europeans that are guilty of it, they run out of the room immediately, making the horriblest faces imaginable.56 They order their hair in several wayes; but rich, and poor, & all, are very curious in adjusting it handsomely, & inventing new modes & gallantries to adorn it, it being the only business almost which gives their women employment.57

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The “Aids of Art” that Behn makes reference to, which Oroonoko utilizes to meticulously care for his hair, which “came down to his shoulders,”58 is comparable to the industrious manner in which the account of the Gold Coast indigenous “order their hair in several wayes.” In addition, the “abhorency and detestation of belching,” which the account makes reference to, represents a degree of polite manners in the midst of African incivility. However, what the account frames as the lack of Christianity and heathen worship of false gods essentially counteracts any inklings of civility that are reported in the account of the Gold Coast indigenous. The highest Mountains, and such are the most subject to Thunder and Lightning, they imagine the Residences of their Gods, and therefore they pay great honour and respect to them: at the bottom of them they will lay Rice, Millet, Mays, Bread, Wine, Oyl, and other things, that they may eat and drink if they be hungry or dry.59

The stark reality is that this image of immoral heathenism, coupled with the “disagreeableness” and blackness that is supposedly African, is precisely what Behn attempts to counteract in the creation of the figure Oroonoko. It is this triumph of indigenous savagery that makes Behn’s creation of Oroonoko such an iconic figure and spectacle, and it is the enactment of his reversion back to this primitive state of savagery that makes Behn’s novella equally as spectacular. THE AFRICAN PRINCE AND THE TROPE OF A REDEEMABLE AFRICA For a text like The Black Prince, which is lesser-known than a text like Behn’s Oroonoko, I believe that it is equally important to introduce large pieces from the text as it is to engage in analyzing and explicating the text itself. The obscurity of The Black Prince is the primary reason that I have decided to offer such an abundance of textual evidence from the primary text itself. Behn’s Oroonoko, which relates the fictional story of a redeemable Africa, manifested through the figure of an African Prince redeemed from savagery, is remarkably similar to The Black Prince—a tract written about Prince John Henry Naimbanna, son of the Temne-Sherbro King Naimbanna of Sierra Leone, who ratified the Treaty of 1788 that we saw in the previous chapter. However, The Black Prince, published in 1799 as part of the compilation of moral tracts called Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts, came some 111 years—over a full century—after Behn’s Oroonoko original publication year of 1688. The full title and inscription of the tract is The Black Prince,

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A True Story; Being An Account of the Life and Death of Naimbanna, and African King’s Son, Who arrived in England in the Year 1791, and Set Sail on his Return in June 1793. Enacted in this tract, and very similar to Behn’s Oroonoko, is the trope or archetype of the African savage, who opts for the path of redemption, civility, and Christianity after recognizing his supposedly inherent state of savagery. The London publishers of the Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts are boastful of the wide circulation of the text published in two volumes. The introduction reads that, “The sale of the Cheap Repository Tracts has been exceedingly great, near two millions (bearing the price of about a halfpenny and penny each) having been sold within the first year, besides great numbers in Ireland.”60 The commercial dimension of the publication is also coupled with an explicit moral dimension, which is premised on the notion that the tracts are designed to exert good influences upon the reader. In fact, the unnamed writer of The Black Prince, at its conclusion, confronts the reader with evidence of the black prince’s transformation in an attempt to stir the moral consciousness. The writer notes that prior to Naimbanna’s untimely death in 1793, “He imbibes the spirit of the Gospel. His prejudices were overcome, his temper is regulated, his passions curbed, his very manners improve by it,” after which, he chides the reader by asking, “Tell me, Reader, hast thou ever experienced in thyself this change which Naimbanna underwent?”61 The publishers proudly boast of the commercial and moral successes of Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts, and speaks of the great zeal with which its proponents attempt to spread its moral message throughout English society: The success of the plan has been much extended, both by the zeal of individuals, and also by the active co-operation of some very respectable Societies, which have been formed in various towns for this purpose. Many persons have exerted their influence, not only by circulating the Tracts in their own families, in schools, and among their dependents, but also by encouraging booksellers to supply themselves with them [ . . . ] The Tracts have also been liberally distributed among Soldiers and Sailors, through the influence of their commanders.62

Among the fifty-seven short tracts, including The Black Prince, contained in the Cheap Repository, intended to instruct in Christian morals are titles like: The Good Mother’s Legacy, Black Giles the Poacher: containing some Account of a Family who would rather live by their Wits than their Work, and The History of Diligent Dick. However, like Oroonoko, one of the elements that the unnamed writer of The Black Prince draws heavily upon is the spectacle of an African, who overcomes a supposedly inherent state of savagery. On this subject of moralizing in the long eighteenth century, Daulton and

Figure 1.1. The cover page from the anonymously written eighteenth-century moral tract “The Black Prince,” which comes from Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts (London, 1799). A copy of the Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts is held in the British Library of London, England.

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Halpern observe that, “There was an emphasis on the need to moralize the manners of a ‘dissipated’ elite and the ‘heathen’ of the slums within Britain, as well as on the need to convert indigenous peoples in the empire,” and that over ninety years before The Black Prince and the Diasporal experiences of Naimbanna in England, the “formation of the Society for the Propogation of Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701 was part of an attempt to spread Christianity within the empire.”63 By the end of the eighteenth century, the economic colonial mission and the religious colonial mission are seen working in concert with one another, and this case of John Henry Naimbanna is a result of this collusion of economics and religion. The Black Prince opens by emphasizing that Naimbanna, the black prince, made a conscious decision to supposedly elevate himself from his African roots by supplanting them with European customs and manners: In Africa, the country where the negroes live, and from which slaves are taken, there was a king who was not a Christian, but who was a better man (to their shame be it spoken) than many who call themselves Christians. Though he could neither read nor write, he had good sense enough to grieve for the misery and ignorance of his poor countrymen, and he was desirous of doing them good if he knew but how.64

Elements of “condemnation” and “celebration” are utilized by the writer of the tract in order to condemn the fact that the “king who was not a Christian,” and his son by extension, are both heathens. However, the condemnation is coupled with a celebratory element intended to dramatically highlight the notion that the African king “had good sense enough to grieve for the misery and ignorance of his poor countrymen.” The act of recognizing the error of his heathen African ways leads to a desire for Christian redemption, and moves the elder Naimbanna to send his son to England for education. The work of the British Sierra Leone Company is framed as purely abolitionist and religious in nature, without any hint of the economic dimensions of the company that I will discuss more fully in the next chapter. Instead, the mission of the company is characterized as one that is full of a benevolent desire to elevate Africans from their supposedly inherent state of savagery: At length a number of English gentlemen, who had at heart the same thing, formed themselves into a company for the purpose of putting a stop to the trade in slaves, and spreading in Africa the blessings of the gospel. Their plan was to form a settlement in the river Sierra Leone, where the above mentioned king lived, and accordingly sent over an agent to talk with the king, and procure his consent.65

Fittingly, there is no mention that the plan for “a settlement in the river Sierra Leone” is, both geographically and economically speaking, an extremely

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favorable location for the establishment and expansion of an African colonial settlement—a fact highlighted in the following chapter on British diplomacy and expansion in Africa. The economic and protocolonial ambitions of the Sierra Leone Company are masked by a Christian overtone that is characteristic of the moral tracts within the Cheap Repository. The tract reads that: Being informed that what made the people in England good was the Christian Religion, he resolved to send thither his son, about 23 years of age, who was put under the care of the Sierra Leone Company’s agent, and by him brought to England, the Company readily undertaking the charge of his education.66

The highlight emphasized in The Black Prince is that the education of Naimbanna was undertaken in the utmost interest of his moral and religious foundations, as opposed to the interests of the company’s colonial establishment.

l It is quite clear, when looking at the 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company Board of Directors, that the subjects of religion and morals receive significant attention, as does both King Naimbanna and the education of his son.67 The report is careful to note that, “The present King is of a peaceful disposition, and is generally respected and obeyed,” and no doubt, this observation is placed there to allay the fears of potential investors.68 However, the goal is to assure the company investors that the indigenous government, although supposedly primitive and uncivilized, is at the very least stable and reliable. In this respect, the company report also takes care to note that “When he dies, the title is considered as elective; but his eldest son, now in England, would be likely to succeed; as the chiefs who chuse the king generally pay regards to hereditary succession.”69 This ensures any potential investor that there will be continuity in terms of succession, thereby ensuring continuity of goodwill towards the Sierra Leone Company. Dirks offers a window into this concept of colonial investment that operates on multiple levels and writes that, “Colonial power sought not only natural resources and strategic positions, but also native souls,” which would effectively result in a secured colonial foothold.70 In terms of the moral compass of the Sierra Lone indigenous, the report does the utmost to paint a picture of an uncivilized African that can only be redeemed with the aid of European instruction. It reads that: In point of religion and morals, the natives appear to be totally uninstructed. Perpetual feuds and hostilities seem to prevail between families and the descen-

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dants of families that have once injured one another; and to carry each other off for slaves is a common retaliation. They are generally Pagans; have no priests, no publick or private worship, nor stated religious ceremonies.71

However, out of this picture of moral depravity, the company report presents us with a glimmer of hope in the form of the African sovereign and his son. It is written that “Both the King’s son, and the king himself, appear to have the strongest desire to rescue their country from its present state of ignorance and wretchedness; and also to put an end to the slave trade.”72 The idea is that as long as the company holds the favor of the indigenous sovereign, then the company itself has a firm foothold in the indigenous territory. Once the foothold is established, the goal then becomes to spread the colonial settlement and civilization outward across Africa from its initial roots in Sierra Leone. The company officials intended to make John Henry Naimbanna an important company project—a human project of sorts—that would ensure the company had a firm foothold in Sierra Leone. The report reads: The General Court will no doubt approve of a resolution come by the Directors, that in consideration of the friendship subsisting between King Naimbanna and the Sierra Leone Company, the Company will take upon themselves the charge of his son’s education so long as he may remain in England.73

By taking the extreme measure of transporting John Henry Naimbanna to England, the company has in essence cemented a union or affectual bond between the sovereign and company. The report continues onward to explicitly speak about the hopes that they have for John Henry Naimbanna: The Directors feel great satisfaction in reflecting, that if it should please God to prolong his life, he appears likely both from his abilities and disposition, to lend the most important aid in introducing the light of knowledge, and comforts of civilization into Africa, and in cementing and perpetuating the most confidential union between the European colony and the natives of that country.74

In spite of the benevolent tone of the language, we must not forget that this is essentially an action undertaken with a strong underlying economic premise in mind. It is taken in order to ensure the economic stability of the Sierra Leone Company. A similar sort of negative archetypal characteristics attributed to Africa and Africans in the long eighteenth century (similar to what we’ve seen in Behn’s Oroonoko and A Relation of . . . Guinee) are placed on full display in the description of Naimbanna that we see in The Black Prince. Again

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here, the pairing of celebration and condemnation is done for dramatic emphasis: His person was not handsome, but his manners were extremely pleasing, and his dispositions kind and affectionate:—at the same time. His feelings were quick and jealous, and he was very violent in his temper, as well as proud and disdainful.75

Unlike Oroonoko, Naimbanna was not aesthetically pleasing, and is bluntly described as “not handsome”; however, the fact that his “manners were extremely pleasing, and his dispositions kind and affectionate” seem to offset the condemnation. Perhaps the most problematic elements of Naimbanna’s savagery, though, are his character flaws of “quick and jealous” feelings, which speak of irrationality, a “violent temper,” and “disdainful pride,” all of which characterize him as an unchristian heathen. These were in fact similar to the characteristic flaws that Behn noted in Oroonoko’s countenance before his supposed redemption. In the case of Naimbanna, it supposedly takes a journey to England in order to complete his redemption at the hands of civility and Christianity. This cultivation of the African prince by European hands resembles Oroonoko’s cultivation by the “French man of Wit” largely responsible for the transformation of Behn’s fictional African. In The Black Prince, we read that: He had not been long in England before a thirst of knowledge was found to be a leading feature in his character. His teachers have said that he would often urge them to prolong the time employed in reading, and that he was always thankful to any one who would assist him in learning anything that was useful. He was never led into company where the time was wasted in idle talk without being sorry, and when left to himself, he would employ not less than eight or ten hours of the day in reading.76

The narrative of the tract is constructed so that the heathen prince Naimbanna, now transported an ocean away from Africa, is able to find his redemption in Christian England. Note that it is in England where it is found that “a thirst of knowledge was found to be a leading feature of his character,” and that when Naimbanna leaves Africa, the supposedly natural indolence associated with Africa is left behind as well. In The Invention of Africa, V.Y. Mudimbe makes the astute observation that there is “the discrepancy between ‘civilization’ and ‘Christianity’ on the one hand, ‘primitiveness’ and ‘paganism’ on the other, and the means of ‘evolution’ or ‘conversion’ from the first stage to the second.”77 This transition from “the first [primitive] stage to the second” [civilizational] stage that

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is fully aligned with Christianity is precisely the same sort of formula that is enacted in The Black Prince: As it was the main object of the gentlemen to whose care he had been entrusted, to give him right views of Christianity, pains were taken to convince him that the Bible was the word of God, and he received it as such with great reverence and simplicity: “When I found,” said he, “all good men minding the Bible, and calling it the word of God, and all bad men disregarding it, I was then sure that the Bible must be what good men called it, the word of God” [ . . . ] He would sometimes complain of being fatigued with other studies, but even when he was most fatigued, if asked to read a little in the Scriptures, he always expressed his readiness by some emotion of joy.78

Naimbanna’s transition from the “first stage to the second,” which entails imbibing “the right views of Christianity,” is framed as the primary concern in this passage. “Pains were taken” to accomplish this task, because conversion literally means the difference between heathenism and Christianity; redemption and condemnation; and the civility of England versus supposedly inherent savagery of Africa. In the end, conversion and redemption are achieved, and the conversion is so successful that “even when he was most fatigued,” Naimbanna endured the pain of fatigue in order to read the Bible. The unnamed writer of The Black Prince offers a carefully crafted portrait of Naimbanna after he has been transformed by the period of education in England. The savagery that was formerly a significant part of his flawed African character has been subdued by the civility of religion and education in England. According to the tract: Humility was a quality which he found it hard to attain; but before his departure from England, not only his pride, but also his revengeful spirit had become hateful to him. The progress he had made in subduing his passions, during his short stay in this country, considering the natural violence of his temper was considerable.79

The “pride,” “revengeful spirit,” and “natural violence” that had once characterized Naimbanna as African have now become “hateful to him,” and are no longer part of his redeemed English character. While his black skin and lack of “handsomeness” remain, the supposedly negative African characteristics stand in stark contrast to Naimbanna’s newly imbibed European characteristics, and render him a black spectacle in Oroonoko-like fashion. Perhaps the most dramatic sign that Naimbanna has truly rejected his former state of “natural African savagery” comes with the rejection of polygamy. The tract reads that, “Among the difficulties which his new view of things laid upon

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him, one respected his wives. He had two while in Africa, but he clearly saw the New Testament allowed only one; his difficulty was, to know which of them was right for him to keep.”80 Acceptance of Christianity and civility means rejection of multiple wives, and in order to highlight the painfulness of the transition from primitiveness to civility, the matter is framed as one of the “difficulties which his new view of things laid upon him.” Naimbanna’s redemption from the depths of heathenism is framed as a spectacular undertaking for the Sierra Leone Company, as much as it is for Naimbanna himself. Unlike Behn’s Oroonoko, the story of The Black Prince and Naimbanna’s transition from savagery to civility is characterized as a permanent and irrevocable transition. Literally and figuratively speaking, there can be no going back to Africa for Naimbanna. The pending homecoming of Naimbanna that must take place, when he is summoned back to Africa upon the death of his father, is not framed as a joyous event for the black prince: While he thus went on improving, the news of his father’s death reached England, and called him suddenly to Sierra Leone. He felt much anxiety when he was on the eve of returning, from the variety of new duties, which the deplorable state of his country seemed to lay upon him. He was very desirous that his future conduct might not discredit his new religion; and it appeared to those with whom he conversed, that there was no personal sacrifice which he was not ready to make for the sake of Christianity.81

The young Naimbanna knows that, upon his return to Africa, he is charged with the task of elevating his fellow Africans from a supposedly inherent state of savagery to a state of civility and Christianity, as he has done himself. He is charged with a significant colonial undertaking in Africa, and “while there was no personal sacrifice which he was not ready to make,” the unnamed writer of the tract attributes the subsequent death of the black prince to his anxieties regarding “the deplorable state of his country.” The unnamed writer plants the seeds of implication that lead the reader to perceive that Naimbanna’s educational transformation in England has redeemed him to the point that he is no longer African, but in fact has become acclimated to England and English ways. Africa is no longer seen as home, but instead as a sort of insurmountable obstacle that must be overcome: During the passage, his mind was almost constantly employed in pondering over those difficulties which he thought he should have to combat on his return to Africa, and in devising the means of overcoming them. Numberless were the plans which he formed for the purpose of spreading the light of the gospel among his rude countrymen; though he seemed at the same time to suffer much uneasiness, from a fear of disappointment, which became stronger as he approached his

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native shores. He had left England in perfect health, but on reaching a warmer climate, he was much affected by the heat, and caught a violent cold, which began with pains in his throat and head, and ended in a fever, which the continual working of his mind probably contributed to produce.82

Having left England in newly refined manners and temperament, in addition to perfect health, the reader is left with the implication that it is Africa, itself, that sickens and eventually kills the young Naimbanna. “He dies about twelve hours after coming on shore. Thus ended the days of this amiable and enlightened African, from whose labours extensive good might have been expected.”83 A moral tract like The Black Prince speaks “neither about Africa nor Africans, but rather to justify the process of inventing and conquering a continent and naming its ‘primitiveness’ or ‘disorder,’ as well as the subsequent means of its exploitation and methods for its ‘regeneration.’”84 Unlike Oroonoko, there is no reversion to a state of inherent and natural African savagery for Naimbanna in The Black Prince. However, I will argue that, in its own unique manner, the death of Naimbanna is equally as spectacular as the death of Oroonoko, because while there is no savage regression and execution entailed in The Black Prince, there is still a spectacular rejection of Africa—both psychologically and physically—that literally results in the death of Naimbanna. As a result, Naimbanna, the one “primitive” black prince, is characterized as a sort of black eighteenth-century martyr, who rejected the heathenism and savagery of Africa; who had the utmost desire to redeem his fellow Africans as he had been redeemed himself; and who ultimately died in service of Christianity. OLAUDAH EQUIANO AND HIS ECONOMIC AND CIVILIZATIONAL VISION FOR AFRICA I have conceived of the final section of this chapter as a sort of prelude to the exploration of African-British treaties spanning from 1787–1819 that I undertake in chapter 2 of this project. Here I turn to Olaudah Equiano, the former slave and British freeman, who gained much notoriety and novelty as an eighteenth-century black man of letters and abolitionist, in order to survey the events in England leading up to the establishment of the first “Colony of Freedom” in Sierra Leone to which British Black Poor would be repatriated. He was a staunch advocate of the movement spearheaded by British abolitionist Granville Sharp to establish a “colony of freedom” in Sierra Leone, West Africa to atone for the wrongs committed as a result of slavery. Sharp and his Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave

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Trade saw the colony as a way of addressing the plight of the Black Poor of England who suffered greatly as freemen and freewomen on the streets of England. While my examination of imaginative spectacle and sentiment in relation to the African continent will end with this chapter, I believe that Equiano’s Autobiography provides an optic of both spectacle and sentimentality that offers a unique insight into the drive to settle the Sierra Leone “Colony of Freedom,” which resulted in the line of treaties that I will explore in the next chapter. In a long eighteenth-century period that saw Europeans questioning and debating the humanity and intellectual capacity of non-Europeans, and particularly those of African descent, Equiano stood as a sort of human spectacle, who managed to garner the sentiments of his European audience. Equiano was an anomaly, surpassing even his contemporary the young Naimbanna—he was a black African and former slave, who had risen to a level that rendered him capable of penning his own autobiographical story for a European audience. Equiano scholar Vincent Carretta points to the sentimental feeling that Equiano, as “African spectacle,” was able to elicit from his reading public by citing the response of the prominent figure Mary Wollstonecraft. Carretta writes: In the first known published review of The Interesting Narrative, Mary Wollstonecraft noted the significance of the author’s nationality. Her comments in the May 1789 issue of the Analytical Review opened with the observation that “The Life of an African, Written by Himself is certainly a curiousity, as it has been a favourite philosophic whim to degrade the numerous nations, on whom the sun-beams more directly dart, below the common level of humanity, and hastily to conclude that nature, by making them inferior to the rest of the human race, designed to stamp them with a mark of slavery.”85

It is the very concept of Equiano as “a curiousity” and Equiano’s writing as “a curiousity” that renders him such an eighteenth-century spectacle of humanity where no humanity was expected to exist. Festa’s thoughts on the nature of sentiment as it relates to the slave autobiography also offer insight into the idea of Equiano as spectacle when she writes that, “There is a perverse sense in which slave autobiographies are themselves tales told by (former) things, given the legal status of slave as chattel or res. The talking object in the slave autobiography is not only the speaking book, the animated clock, the watchful portrait; it is also the slave himself or herself.”86 The Sommerset Case was sponsored by Granville Sharp on behalf of the slave James Sommerset, who attempted to gain his own voice in English society by protesting for his freedom on grounds that his master planned to

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sell him outside of England. While it would have made logical sense that the Mansfield Declaration handed down in 1772 to conclude the Sommerset Case would have been the ruling that brought an end to slavery in England, this was not to be. “Sommerset was set free. But the Chief Justice did not declare a complete prohibition of slavery, nor did he say that any slave who came to England became a free man. Thus, the status of the slaves in England was unaffected by this decision.”87 In fact, the majority of the freemen and freewomen, who made up the Black Poor in eighteenth-century England, came there as a result of the defeat in the American Revolution because they fought on the side of the English. The destitution that the Black Poor of London experienced was heightened simply because “The Poor Law offices in London, who normally cared for paupers, bore no responsibility for the blacks because the laws stipulated that paupers were to be supported by their parish of origin. And the place of origin for these blacks was Africa.”88 The elements of race and national origin played a major role. On the subject of identity in the eighteenth century, Kathleen Wilson states that, “The practices of empire and nation-state building and their various constituencies also made possible the invention and representation of categories of collective identity that would shape group and individual consciousness for a century or more to come.”89 However, the greatest irony is that the African “place of origin” to which these Black Poor were to be repatriated was not an actual location of origination. This is highlighted by the fact that a treaty had to be signed in order for the settlement to be established (as we will see in chapter 2). They were strangers and settlers when they arrived in 1787 at the territory that was chosen for the “colony of freedom.”90 The reality is that this was a Sierra Leonean location that had been deemed best suited for purposes of European trade for over 400 years since the time of the Portuguese exploration in West Africa. Furthermore, the repatriation effort was seen as an opportunity to remove an unwanted black population from England. Olaudah Equiano puts the circumstances of the pending repatriation project in a different and perhaps performatively joyous light since we must recall that he is a black freeman writing for a white eighteenth-century English reading public from whom he is trying to gain favor and sentiment: On my return to London in August, I was very agreeably surprised to find that the benevolence of government had adopted the plan of some philanthropic individuals to send the Africans from hence to their native quarter; and that some vessels were then engaged to carry them to Sierra Leone; an act which redounded to the honour of all concerned in its promotion, and filled me with prayers and much rejoicing.91

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Sharp and his colleagues requested financial support from the British government to undertake the repatriation project, and the government, anxious to get rid of them, agreed to provide support. Equiano, in his biography, then goes on to write about the poor state in which he finds the preparations for the expedition. Perhaps the greatest irony is that the lack of care with which the African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic to the New World, is the similar lack of care that we see being manifested here, except that we might label it tolerated governmental corruption. Equiano is quite detailed in his description of his grievances: During my continuance in the employment of government, I was struck with the flagrant abuses committed by the agent, and endeavored to remedy them, but without effect. One instance, among many which I could produce, may serve as a specimen. Government had ordered to be provided all necessaries (slops, as they are called, included) for 750 persons; however, not being able to muster more than 426, I was ordered to send the superfluous slops, &c to the king’s stores at Portsmouth; but when I demanded them for that purpose from the agent, it appeared they had never been bought, though paid for by government. But that was not all, government were not the only objects of peculation; these poor people suffered infinitely more; their accommodations were most wretched; many of them wanted beds, and many more cloathing and other necessaries [ . . . ] I could not silently suffer government to be this cheated, and my countrymen plundered and oppressed, and even left destitute of the necessaries for almost their existence. I therefore informed the Commissioners of the Navy of the agent’s proceeding; but my dismission was soon after procured. For the truth of this, and much more, I do not seek credit from my own assertion. I appeal to the testimony of Capt. Thompson, of the Nautilus, who conveyed us, to whom I applied for a remedy, when I remonstrated to the agent in vain.92

Indeed, Equiano’s writing here is performative in order to gain favor with his audience, and takes care to specify that he “could not silently suffer government to be this cheated” before he makes any mention of his black “countrymen [who were being] plundered and oppressed” as a result of this corruption. His reward for attempting to counteract or eliminate the corruption he saw taking place, was to be removed (or what he calls “my dismission”) from the group of Black Poor that was set to sail in 1787 for repatriation in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone historian Christopher Fyfe offers another detailed historical account of the events that took place before the repatriation expedition to Sierra Leone set sail in 1787. He writes: At Plymouth the passengers wandered ashore, alarming the authorities who feared they might stay behind. Vassa began accusing Irwin (the agent) to Thompson and the Navy Board of cheating in ordering stores, and ill-treating settlers. He wrote

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Cugoano, who stayed in London, a letter which appeared in the newspapers calling Irwin, [Patrick] Frazer (a Scottish Prebyterian who persuaded the archbishop of Canterbury to let him travel as chaplain), and the senior surgeon villains. He, in turn, was accused of stirring up mutiny against the Europeans. These people began refusing to attend Frazer’s services. Thompson wrote in alarm to the Admiralty about the growing turbulence, which he had no authority to check. He believed Vassa was deliberately fomenting it, but also reported Irwin unfit for his post, neglectful of his duties. Middleton was inclined to support Vassa. Irwin hurried to London to see Samuel Hoare, a Quaker banker [who was] . . . Chairman of the Committee; at his representations the Treasury agreed Vassa be dismissed and the purser to the Nautilus be give charge to the stores. Vassa and twenty-three associates were put ashore. Eventually, the treasury gave him £50 compensation.93

What all of these combined histories seem to convey is a sense of confusion and upheaval surrounding the planning of the “colony of freedom” mission to Sierra Leone in 1787.

l My final reference to Equiano will be his vision for the future of Africa as an economic market place after the slave trade has been abolished by European nations. I believe that we must look at Equiano’s vision for Africa as the pleaful words of a free black man in the eighteenth century, who is desperate to see the day when the institution of slavery is brought to an end. While Equiano writes in a manner that enables him to gain endearing sentiment, which propels him into a locus of familiarity with his eighteenth-century audience, it is also very clear that he is writing from the margins of an English society that does not imagine him as a part of the greater English whole. As Anderson’s concept of the imagined community reminds us that, “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself conterminous with mankind.”94 While Equiano resides within the physical boundaries of England, he cannot transcend the “imagined finite boundaries” of the English nation, no matter how “elastic” and “permeable” they might seem. However, the irony of Equiano as spectacle lies in the fact that he has reached the very status of spectacle because he is an African subject that “defies imagination.” Equiano utilizes his social status as a living spectacle and sentimental figure to petition his reading audience to recognize the great economic and civilizational potential that Africa holds beyond an age of slavery. He writes: As the inhuman traffic of slavery is to be taken into the consideration of the British legislature, I doubt not, if a system of commerce was established in

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Africa, the demand for manufactures would most rapidly augment, as the native inhabitants will insensibly adopt the British fashions, manners, customs, &c. In proportion to the civilization, so will be the consumption of British manufactures [ . . . ] It is trading upon safe grounds. A commercial intercourse with Africa opens up an inexhaustible source of wealth to the manufacturing interests of Great Britain, and to all which the slave trade is an objection [ . . . ] Population, the bowels and surface of Africa, abound in valuable and useful returns; the hidden treasures of centuries will be brought to light and into circulation. Industry, enterprise, and mining, will have their full scope, proportionably as they civilize.95

Srivinas Aravamudan argues that “Equiano recommends the practical solution of global commerce and African consumption of British goods . . . in the manner of many mercantilist writers of the eighteenth century, from Defoe to Smith [both of whom we will explore in chapter 2], who saw global betterment through free commerce and the demand for European goods.”96 However, I believe that we must complicate this issue by qualifying the matter of Equiano’s racial otherness. Defoe and Smith are two individuals who occupy positions of power because of their race and gender, unlike Equiano to whom we might warrant his acclaim to the novelty of being a black man of letters. Equiano’s position is one of desperation, and while he may have a vested interest in the economic ends of abolition, we should take it as a given that the end of suffering for those he calls his African countrymen is his primary concern. In the days leading up to April 8, 1787, when the “Colony of Freedom” venture finally set sail, the mission stood with 290 black men, 41 black women, 11 black children, 70 white prostitutes who were forced on board, 6 white children, and 38 officials (the final figure of those who sailed is 411, and close to 50 died on the voyage). Equiano, himself, concludes his talk about his involvement with the repatriation effort by highlighting the deplorable conditions under which the Black Poor traveled to Sierra Leone, in addition to the harsh conditions they met upon arrival. He finishes: Thus provided, they proceeded on their voyage; and at last, worn out by treatment, perhaps not the most mild, and wasted by sickness, brought on by want of medicine, cloathes, bedding, &c they reached Sierra Leone just at the commencement of rains. At this season of the year it is impossible to cultivate the lands; their provisions therefore were exhausted before they could derive any benefit from agriculture.97

It seems this “colony of freedom” was doomed from the very beginning. Four months after arrival, eight-six of the settlers died of malaria and dysentery, and the colony itself would not last beyond 1790. Alie writes, “Some of the set-

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tlers and a few of the whites sent to develop the Colony abandoned the settlement completely and took to trading in slaves.”98 The final curtain fell on the “Colony of Freedom” when the new King Jimmy, who followed King Tom, retaliated for the burning of one of the indigenous settlements under his jurisdiction by burning and destroying the colony. Perhaps this event, more than any other, signifies that the repatriation effort, far from being a homecoming of sorts, was fraught with the complexities of a return from the forced removal that characterized the exile of slavery. Repatriation was not a journey back to a place that was home, but to an African site that had to be made a home. We can, however, still utilize Equiano’s language to highlight the fact that although this was a repatriation movement designed to bring Black Poor of African descent back to the continent, this was very much a colonial project in every sense of the term. Akintola Wyse refers to the 1787 endeavor as “an experiment in social and cultural engineering,” and that “the founders hoped that by creating the right conditions, an opportunity would be given to emancipated Africans settled in the [Sierra Leone] peninsula to evolve a free and self-governing black community patterned on Western civilization.”99 The idea was that these settlers, or “Black Englishmen” as Wyse calls them, would eventually be the agents of European civilization (a historical issue that I deal with in chapter 4 through The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar). However, when we consider the concept of the colonial promotion of Western civilization in Africa, we must not forget the supposition of inequality that is inherent in African-European interactions. It is the supposition of inequality that is the underlying tenet, which guides all European colonial undertakings on the African continent.

l I believe that Festa’s thoughts on the appealing nature of the “object narrative” is a fitting note on which to briefly end this chapter on the three African figures of spectacle and sentiment contained in Behn’s Oroonoko, The Black Prince, and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. I say this precisely because of the intense objectifications of these factual and fictional black figures also represent the manner in which Africa itself was intensely objectified as a fetish object. “If the object narratives are monstrous or catachrestic because they give heads to coins, backs to banknotes, eyes to needles, and so on, slave autobiographies are grotesque because they labor to claim human traits that the slave already possesses.”100 Similarly, the respective accounts of Africa that I have explored in this chapter are equally as grotesque (and therefore spectacular and sentimental) because they are predicated on the eighteenth-century notion that Africa is a site of savagery and in-

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humanity, that lies in wait for civilization by European hands. The questions that I began this chapter with—“What is Africa?” “What potential does Africa hold for European interests beyond slavery?” “How should Africa be categorized?” and so forth—are partially answered by this first chapter, as well as the remaining four chapters of this book. The answer takes many forms— fictional, autobiographical, anthropological, economic, geographical, and so forth. However, the greatest irony of the long eighteenth-century attempts to answer the question of Africa is the inherent and willful ignorance of that which already exists on the continent, and the perception of the African continent as a form to be molded and shaped for “proper” usage. NOTES 1. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 13. 2. Vincent Carretta, “Questioning the Identity of Olaudah Equiano,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 226–38. I utilize the term “purportedly” here in reference to Equiano because of the ongoing debate, based on research by Vincent Carretta as to whether Equiano had actually ever been on the African continent, or whether he was actually born in the New World. For the purposes of this project, I do not partake in this debate, but instead, concentrate on Equiano’s text. This argument can also be found in Carretta, Vincent, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 3. Philip D. Morgan, “Encounters Between British and ‘Indigenous’ Peoples, c. 1500–c. 1800,” in Empire and Other: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, eds. Martin Daunton and Richard Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 47. 4. Nicholas B. Dirks, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 8. 5. Dirks, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” 9. 6. Firdous Azim, The Rise of the Colonial Novel (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), 37. 7. Azim, The Rise of the Colonial Novel, 42. 8. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 11. 9. Wilson, The Island Race, 17. 10. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 111. 11. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 51. Festa builds upon the concept of the “imagined community” that Benedict Anderson proposes in

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his book, which is also called Imagined Communities. On the definition of the concept, Anderson writes that, “In an anthropological spirit . . . I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” 12. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 30. 13. Joanna Lipking, “‘Others,’ Slaves, and Colonialists in Oroonoko,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn, ed. Derek Hughes and Janet Todd (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 170. 14. Lipking, “‘Others,’ Slaves,” 170. 15. John Henry Naimbanna was the son of King Naimbanna—the African sovereign, who ratified the African-British Treaty of 1788 that I will examine in chapter 2. The treaty permitted the first colonial settlement or “Colony of Freedom” in Sierra Leone. He was sent to England to garner an English education at the expense of the Sierra Leone Company in 1790. He took the European name John Henry in order to honor the chairman of the Sierra Leone Company. 16. Moira Ferguson, “Oroonoko: Birth of a Paradigm.” New Literary History 23, no. 2 (Spring 1992), 339. 17. Festa, Sentimental Figures, 54. 18. Festa, Sentimental Figures. 19. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 111. This refers back to the Bhabha quote drawn from Location of Culture that I utilized earlier in the introductory section of this chapter. 20. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; Or, The Royal Slave, edited by Catherine Gallagher (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 42. 21. Behn, Oroonoko, 42. 22. Behn, Oroonoko, 43–44. 23. Behn, Oroonoko, 43. 24. Behn, Oroonoko, 44. 25. Behn, Oroonoko, 44. 26. Behn, Oroonoko, 44. 27. Behn, Oroonoko, 44. 28. Behn, Oroonoko, 43. 29. Behn, Oroonoko, 42 30. Behn, Oroonoko, 43. 31. Behn, Oroonoko, 42–43. 32. Behn, Oroonoko, 42–43. 33. Behn, Oroonoko, 44. 34. Behn, Oroonoko, 37–38. 35. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 34. 36. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans. 37. Emily Hodgson Anderson, “Novelty in Novels: A Look at What’s New in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko.” Studies in the Novel 39, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 5. 38. Behn, Oroonoko, 85. 39. Behn, Oroonoko, 86.

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40. Behn, Oroonoko, 42, 86. 41. Behn, Oroonoko, 90. 42. Behn, Oroonoko, 90. 43. Behn, Oroonoko, 96. 44. Behn, Oroonoko, 97. 45. Behn, Oroonoko, 97. 46. Behn, Oroonoko, 99. 47. Behn, Oroonoko, 99. 48. Catherine Gallagher, “Introduction to A New Account of Guinea, and the Slave Trade” (excerpted). Pp. 253–54 in Oroonoko written by Aphra Behn, ed. Catherine Gallagher (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 253. 49. William Snelgrave, A New Account of Guinea, and the Slave Trade (excerpted). Pp. 253–59 in Oroonoko written by Aphra Behn, ed. Catherine Gallagher (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 256. 50. Nicolas Villault, and Sieur de Bellefond, A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinea (London: Printed for John Starkey, 1670), 124–25. 51. Behn, Oroonoko, 43. 52. Villault and Bellefond, A Relation, 132–33. 53. Behn, Oroonoko, 62. 54. Villault and Bellefond, A Relation, 139–40. 55. Behn, Oroonoko, 43. 56. Villault and Bellefond, A Relation, 140–41. 57. Villault and Bellefond, A Relation, 145. 58. (Behn 44) Reference to “Aids of Art” Oroonoko uses to meticulously care for his hair. 59. Villault and Bellefond, A Relation, 183. 60. Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts. (London: F. and C. Rivington, J. Evans, and S. Hazard, 1799), iv. 61. “The Black Prince” (Author Unnamed), in Cheap Repository Shorter Tracts. (London: F. and C. Rivington, J. Evans, and S. Hazard, 1799), 362. 62. Cheap Repository, iv. 63. Martin Daunton, and Richard Halpern, “Introduction: British Identities, Indigenous Peoples, and the Empire,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, ed. Martin Daunton and Richard Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 4. 64. “The Black Prince,” 348. 65. “The Black Prince.” 66. “The Black Prince,” 348–49. 67. C. B. Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa (1794). New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968. C. B. Wadstrom, whose Essay on Colonization we will read in chapter 4, tells us that Naimbanna’s son took the name John Henry in honor of the director of the Sierra Leone Company. 68. 1791 Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, 6. 69. 1791 Report of the Court, 6.

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70. Nicholas B. Dirks, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 16. Dirks offers great insight into strategies of colonial power formation in this section. 71. 1791 Report of the Court, 7. 72. 1791 Report of the Court, 7-8. 73. 1791 Report of the Court, 9. 74. 1791 Report of the Court, 9. 75. “The Black Prince,” 349. 76. “The Black Prince,” 349–50. 77. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and The Order of Knowledge (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 20. 78. “The Black Prince,” 350. 79. “The Black Prince.” 80. “The Black Prince,” 356. 81. “The Black Prince,” 357. 82. “The Black Prince,” 357–58. 83. “The Black Prince,” 359. 84. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, 20. 85. Carretta, “Questioning the Identity,” 227. This is drawn from Vincent Carretta’s article “Questioning the Identity of Olaudah Equiano: Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa, the African,” which is included in Felicity Nussbaum’s edited anthology The Global Eighteenth Century. 86. Festa, Sentimental Figures, 132. 87. Joe A. D. Alie, A New History of Sierra Leone (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1990), 48. 88. Alie, A New History, 49. 89. Kathleen Wilson, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity In Britain and the Empire, 1660– 1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7. 90. This issue of the settling of the “Colony of Freedom” in Sierra Leone is something that I will explore in detail in chapter 4 through Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar. 91. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), 242. 92. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 244. 93. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 18–19. 94. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 16. 95. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 250–51. 96. Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans, 248. 97. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 245. 98. Alie, A New History, 54. 99. Akintola Wyse, The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1991), 1. 100. Festa, Sentimental Figures, 132.

Chapter Two

British-African Treaty Making and the Construction of a British Colonial State in Sierra Leone

Over the course of this chapter, I will explore the treaties that the African indigenous of Sierra Leone made with those who would become their British colonizers over the period of 1787 to 1819 (these can be found at the conclusion of this chapter in the treaty appendix).1 Through an analysis of these treaties, we see manifested the emergence and solidification of a modern British colonial administration that goes through a learning process, which sees Sierra Leone evolve from a supposedly benevolent “Colony of Freedom” in 1787, to a profit-driven joint stock Sierra Leone Company and colony in 1791, to an official British Crown Colony in 1808. “Colonial change was both limited and delayed by colonial understandings that, as much as they involved the fundamental reordering of epistemic constructions of social reality, also led to the paradoxical but largely successful attempt to freeze the wolf in sheep’s clothing.”2 This “fundamental reordering” of African-British power relations is a phenomenon that can be observed over the span of 1787, when the first treaty is signed, to 1819, which sees British colonial administrative authority fully installed. In fact, the Crown Colony form of modern colonial administration that was installed in 1808 is the form that Sierra Leone, and indeed, all of the British African colonies would assume well into the twentieth century until the 1960s decade of African independence.3 The evolution of colonial administration in Sierra Leone would come to serve as the blueprint for nineteenth-century British colonial administration throughout the whole of Africa. The treaties that I will explore are literary diplomatic manifestations of how this blueprint of colonial administration evolves from one of repatriation, benevolence, and freedom, to one of commerce, economic profit, and territorial acquisition. In the colonial context, and particularly in the context of the African-British treaties examined in this chapter, “Law was an arena in which discourse could be 37

Figure 2.1. “Ethnic Map of Sierra Leone” by S.J.A. Nelson taken from The Krio of Sierra Leone by Akintola Wyse (Courtesy of C. Hurst & Co. Publishers Ltd. Thanks to Michael J. Dwyer).

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seen immediately to have powerful effects; there were enormously important consequences to success or failure.”4 The success or failure of the colonial mission in Sierra Leone, and also throughout Africa, not only depended upon territorial acquisition, but the security and stability of territorial boundaries that these treaties provided. While an exploration of African-British treaties signed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a new approach to an analysis of emergent British colonialism in Africa, the underlying impetus that inspires this sort of archival study is not new. Within the introduction of this book, I have already made reference to Aravamudan’s conceptualization of a framework for pluralized bodies of long eighteenth-century studies that are “animated by the agency of their differently worlded subjects.”5 I also pointed to Wilson’s conceptualization of a New Imperial History that could be fashioned in a manner that is “energized by the political and imaginative wakes of postcolonial and cross-disciplinary scholarship.”6 Scholars, in this present era of long eighteenth-century studies that is open to pluralization, are now inspired to embark on historical analyses geared towards the recognition of “alternative modes and sources for understanding the past, to probe limits of historical knowledge, and to make the ‘subaltern’—from indigenes to women, and all others rendered silent or invisible by the historical archive—‘speak.’”7 The fact that I am able to produce scholarship, in this present day and age, based on an African-British long eighteenth century and African-British treaties that were signed over 200 years ago, is a fine example of this age of geopolitically pluralized study that is now upon us. Over the course of my analysis of these treaties, we will notice that the language of territorial acquisition, colonial administration, and domination of the British becomes stronger and more detailed with each successive agreement. In fact, by the time that we arrive at the Treaty of 1819, we will notice that the active voice of the indigenous Temne/Sherbro King Naimbanna that can be read in the Treaty of 1788 is no longer present. Lauren Benton, in Law and Colonial Cultures, frames this strengthening of colonial administration and law in terms of “weak pluralism” and “strong pluralism,” and asserts that “colonial settings offer both strong and weak legal pluralisms, as well as cases that fall between the types.”8 The concept of strong legal pluralism “denotes legal orders in which politically prominent attempts have been made to fix rules about relations of various legal authorities and forums,” while weak legal pluralism “occurs where there is an implicit recognition of ‘other’ law, but no formal model for the structure of legal order.”9 It will become clear that the trajectory of British legal authority and agency, from 1787 to 1819, moves from a starting point of relative weakness to a point of strength and military dominance.10

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By the treaty year 1819, the art of African-British treaty making has become a matter of a dictation of terms by the British colonial administration. Over the course of this thirty-two year period of treaty making between the African indigenous of Sierra Leone and British colonizers, we can see the evolution of a British colonial apparatus in West Africa that, at first, only sought to gain a foothold or launching point in Sierra Leone, and became a colonial governmental power that came to dominate the territorial landscape in 1819.

l The “Colony of Freedom” was the label given to the first settlement of Black Poor repatriated in 1787 from England to what is now Freetown, Sierra Leone. The venture was spearheaded by the English Quaker Granville Sharp and his Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, under the premise of atoning for the evils of slavery by establishing an African colony to which former slaves might be repatriated. Christopher Fyfe writes that “Sharp intended the settlement to be more than a receptacle for unwanted vagrants . . . He looked to provide a country and a constitution. His version of current constitutional theories antedated the American: the settlers had already spent a week in Sierra Leone when the constituent convention met in Philadelphia.”11 Therefore, the rule of law—a constitutional rule of sorts—would be at the heart of this mission of colonization, repatriation, and atonement.12 Sharp was also quite puritanical at heart, and intended that the colony would be founded on strict Christian principles, even going to the point of renouncing a monetary economy in favor of a system of exchange based on labor. However, it also follows that although the African settlement was to have its own constitution, there was the implicit understanding that these Africans, both repatriated and indigenous, unlike the white forefathers who met in Philadelphia, had to be taught how to govern by white colonial overseers in order for the venture to succeed. On April 8, 1787, the ship Nautilus and its Captain T. Boulden Thompson set out for the “Colony of Freedom” with 411 passengers. Fyfe writes that “Thompson’s instructions were to take the settlers to Sierra Leone, acquire a settlement from the chiefs, land the stores, and stay in the river (Sierra Leone River) to help them as long as provisions and crew’s health allowed.” In addition, “If the chiefs refused, he was to go down the coast till he found some more accommodating.”13 Thompson and the settlers did, in fact, meet a chief—the Sherbro/Temne Tom who was a subordinate chief to Naimbanna, who also came to see the Nautilus. After meeting with Thompson and the Nautilus crew, Naimbanna traveled back up the Sierra Leone River to his

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compound at Robana. Thompson and the settlers then proceeded to sign the original Treaty of 1787 on June 11 with King Tom and his subordinates Pa Bongee and Queen Yamacouba as witnesses.14 In 1788, Naimbanna, who never agreed to the original Treaty of 1787 in the first place declared that the settlement should be halted, which could have dealt a great setback to the efforts to establish a “colony of freedom.” However, a Captain John Taylor of the ship Mayo, who happened to be on an independent mission in the region on behalf of Granville Sharp, took it upon himself to sign a new treaty on August 22, 1788, which repudiated the former Treaty of 1787. It is with this Treaty of 1788, that we have the official beginning of the “Colony of Freedom,” which was called Granville Town (and would eventually come to be called Freetown in 1791). Captain Taylor, like King Tom, was not authorized to make treaties, nor was Taylor in service of the British government. Unlike King Tom, though, Captain Taylor’s agreement was accepted by his sovereign government. The rules of diplomatic discourse of the colonial treaties allow the British colonizers to place themselves in a position of flexibility, while placing the African indigenous in a position of increasing inflexibility. What he described in the Treaty of 1788 as his Britannic Majesty’s brig was in fact his own. Taylor also used the treaty signing as an opportunity to get rid of a consignment of pistols, cheeses, satin coats and waistcoats, bottles of port, barrels of pork, and a mock diamond ring, which he handed over on the settlers’ behalf as the price of the new grant.15 It should not come as a surprise that the establishment of the “Colony of Freedom” was permitted by the local indigenous authorities in the Sierra Leone region, and in West Africa as a whole. This is particularly because of the history of contact between Africans and Europeans since the 1500s (some of which I made reference to in the introduction), as well as a history of contact with Muslim traders. Benton reminds us that African states operated in an established system of international relations, and that “It was the existence of this system that allowed the Portuguese and, later, other European powers to set up trading relations and factories along the African coast.”16 Hospitality and accommodation of foreign strangers was not uncommon in precolonial West African cultures, and “This recognized existence of multiple legal authorities was common even outside areas of Muslim influence. African cities and towns were structured to admit the settlement of outsiders.”17 The determination to find a viable solution or alternative to slavery by those who spearheaded the venture to establish a colony in Africa is evident in the mission’s original orders to proceed undaunted in its attempts to find a suitable location to settle. However, it also follows that although the settlement was to be a “Colony of Freedom” rooted in benevolence, there always

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existed an underlying economic premise as well. In Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolition, Christopher Leslie Brown speaks about the conditions upon which the “Colony of Freedom” was founded: In key respects, the roots of the Sierra Leone settlement lay deep in the history of British enterprise in Africa. It evolved from the hopes of a persistent few who in the eighteenth-century wished to establish a more permanent British presence along the African coast, who wanted to found colonies of settlement that promoted commercial agriculture, not merely a trade in human bodies, who aimed to enhance the state’s role in the management of African enterprise.18

In the end, the desire to find an alternative to the slave trade was tied to the establishment of a viable economic alternative to slavery, and this new conception was to take the form of African colonialism. THE TREATY OF 1788: BEGINNINGS OF COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION AND USURPATION IN SIERRA LEONE The discursive language in the first line of the Treaty of 1788 is a paradox unto itself that leads us to question who is dictating the terms of the exchange. It is written in first person and reads “Know all men by these present that I King Naimbanna chief of Sierra Leone on the Grain Coast of Africa by and with the consent of the other Kings, Princes, Chiefs, and Potentates subscribing hereto.”19 It is evident that King Naimbanna himself is the African sovereign with the authority who is granting the claim of land to Captain Taylor and the settlers, and ultimately, the king of England. However, it is also quite curious that king Naimbanna is referred to as “chief on the Grain Coast.” That he can be both a king and chief points to the ambiguity and ambivalence of discursive colonial discourse—an intended and constructed ambiguity designed to lessen the authority of the indigenous sovereign in contrast to “His Britannic Majesty” George III.20 As the British colonial apparatus continues to evolve into the nineteenth century, we will see that this implicit usurpation of indigenous authority becomes more explicit. Alie writes that, “The power base was undercut because their sovereignty was lost to the colonial administration. They were no longer referred to as ‘kings’ or ‘queens’ but as ‘Paramount Chiefs’ because only one queen (Victoria) ruled the Protectorate.”21 Here in 1788, with the signing of this treaty and the utilization of discursive diplomatic language, we see the blueprint for colonial administration that will continue to strengthen and evolve.

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Yet another important element of the Treaty of 1788 that was to become an extremely contentious point is the fact that the land on which the “Colony of Freedom” was settled was supposedly granted to the British Crown forever. The treaty reads, “And by these present [I Naimbanna] do grant and forever quit claim to a certain district of land for the settling of the said free community to be their’s, their heirs and successors forever.”22 However, what was problematic about the terms of the agreement is that such a lifetime agreement was not possible according to Sherbro/Temne law in this western region of Sierra Leone. “According to Temne law the land had only been leased, not sold, for land was not saleable.”23 It seems that the treaty had significantly different meanings for the two parties involved, and Naimbanna’s affectionate relationship with the company would not be shared by his successors. This difference in interpretation of meaning would later lead to conflict between the Sierra Leone Company, which succeeded the “Colony of Freedom” and Naimbanna’s successor Bei Farma with whom the company refused to renegotiate the treaty (a conflict that would not end until the Treaty of 1807 made under the watch of the British Crown Colonial authority that would officially come to power in 1808 to solidify a colonial hold on Sierra Leone). John Thornton, in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Black Atlantic, 1400–1800, highlights the differences in British and African conceptions of land ownership that affected the respective outcomes of interpretation of these African-British treaties. He writes that Europeans, and in this case, the British, “Came from an area where the concept of landownership and income based on its lease to tenants was the fundamental starting point of law,” and that “although some recognized the absence of landed private property, many made Africans into landholders in spite of themselves.”24 The function of the colonial apparatus, in this case, is to gain a territorial foothold through legal wrangling and assumptions of European right to African territory in the name of assumed European superiority. In this analysis of the Treaty of 1788, 25 which was ratified by the Temne/ Sherbro sovereign Naimbanna,26 as well as the other treaties that we will later explore, I think Foucault’s notion that a discursive formation defies unity and coherence is extremely important to consider. We are presented with a text that is designed to both affirm African authority in order to gain a legal foothold on the Sierra Leone peninsula, but there is also the desire to usurp indigenous African authority because of the intended designs on English expansion of so-called “civilization” and economic markets. An important method for analyzing the discourse we see in the treaty is the concept that the keys to the unraveling of the discourse of the treaty may already be present within the treaty itself.27 Whether the key lies in the center of discourse, or perhaps

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even an eccentric center, the inherent idea is that the keys to the unraveling of a document like the Treaty of 1788, is that the discourse contradicts and turns in upon itself. The Treaty of 1788 also reminds us that, “never was it the case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there was always some form of active resistance,” and in eighteenth-century Sierra Leone, this potential for active resistance had to, at first, be dealt with diplomatically.28 The British, initially, had no choice but to recognize the sovereignty of the indigenous political system, before they could be turned into colonial subjects. We should recognize that it is the incoherent nature of the discursive discourse within the Treaty of 1788 that allows the British colonizers to create schemes that “give way to irreconcilable interests” and make it possible to “play different games” under the auspices of the treaty.29 After all, consider that through this seminal treaty signed in 1788, the British have managed to convince King Naimbanna and his head men to “grant and forever quit claim to a certain district of land for the settling of the said free community to be their’s, their heirs and successors forever.”30 This very land, which is supposedly meant for the free settlers (comprised largely of the British Black Poor), will change hands and be given to the Sierra Leone Company in 1791, after which, it will finally be ceded to the British Empire herself as an official Crown Colony. In addition, the land that once only included the original “Colony of Freedom,” would come to expand well beyond its borders in the nineteenth century to include all of present day Sierra Leone. Foucault speaks about the nature of discursive discourse, and the fact that there can never exist a permanent theme within such a mode of discourse, and suggests that an analysis of discursive discourse “would not try to isolate small islands of coherence in order to describe their internal structure; it would not try to suspect and to reveal latent conflicts; it would study forms and divisions.”31 He asserts that, “What one finds are rather various strategic possibilities that permit the activation of incompatible themes, or, again the establishment of the same theme in different groups of statement. Hence the idea of describing these dispersions themselves.”32 For example, the discourse within the Treaty of 1788 makes reference to the illegitimate Treaty of 1787, which it is intended to repeal and replace. It reads: We whose names are hereunto subscribed maketh oath that the purchase of the land, &c, made by Captain Thompson was not (to our certain knowledge) valid; it having been purchased from people who had no authority to sell the same.33

The British colonizers, in this case, have no choice but to adhere to the terms set by King Naimbanna if they wish to have any hope of retaining the land on the Sierra Leone Peninsula. However, only four years later, in 1791, after

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the initial “Colony of Freedom” model has been abandoned in favor of the joint stock company model, the Sierra Leone Company will attempt to gain a stronger foothold in order to dictate terms and conditions that warp and bend the bounds of the Treaty of 1788. It then becomes no coincidence that Naimbanna, in the treaty, is made to pledge his allegiance to the British Crown as a sort of pronouncement to the world. The treaty reads, “And forth be it known unto all men that I King Naimbanna do faithfully promise and swear for my Chief Gentlemen, and People likewise, Heirs and Successors, that I will bear true allegiance to His most Gracious Majesty George the third, King of Great Britain, France, Ireland, &c &c &c.”34 This reads as a pledge of allegiance made by a king turned chief, who merely rules the African Grain Coast, in contrast to a Britannic Majesty, who not only rules over Great Britain, but supposedly over “France, Ireland, &c &c &c.”35 Marcia Langton and Lisa Palmer highlight the fact that European powers were initially forced to make agreements with indigenous peoples out of necessity, as well as the fact that “the ambivalent treaty making of colonialists” was formed with designs to “entrench power over Indigenous peoples of those lands.”36 The African-British pact signed in 1787, in effect, lays the foundation for British colonial administration in Sierra Leone on behalf of the “Colony of Freedom,” the Sierra Leone Company, which supplanted the original colony in 1791, and finally, the British Crown Colony, which was established in 1808. The rise of these institutions signaled a dynamic power shift that came at the expense of African indigenous sovereignty.

l In 1791, when the British Sierra Leone Company took control of the territory that was once named the “Colony of Freedom,” the treaty agreement that was put in place during the year 1788 worked to the company’s advantage.37 Since the discursive language of the treaty maintains that the territory on the Sierra Leone Peninsula was ceded to the British Crown “forever,” this meant that the British were within legal international right to supplant the “Colony of Freedom” with a joint-stock company like the Sierra Leone Company.38 Dirks points to the fact that “The deployment of colonial discourse within the specific institutional framework of colonial law” was an elemental factor of British colonialism.39 It is also interesting to note that the 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company takes great liberties with embellishing the terms under which the land on the coast of West Africa was acquired. It reports that: [In 1787] a grant of land to his Majesty from King Tom, the then neighboring chief, was obtained for their use by Captain Thompson of his Majesty’s navy,

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who conducted them; and then afterwards a similar grant from King Naimbanner, the King of the Country.40

The Report neatly glosses over the history surrounding the facts and complex realities surrounding the Treaty of 1787/1788. In fact, Kup writes that Naimbanna “told Falconbridge in 1791 he had been hastily drawn into disposing of the land, which he had no right to sell, and he must get consent of all his headmen before allowing strangers even to live amongst them.”41 However, the Report states that the land had been obtained legitimately, which essentially amounts to expropriation of this land belonging to Naimbanna and the Temne and Sherbro that inhabited the region. The Report also reads that, “This land being about 20 miles square, is the same which his Majesty was enabled by the late act of parliament to grant to the Company.”42 As the British authorities see it, the power and consent over land is effectively under the control of the Parliament and the British Crown, and had been since 1788. The stark reality is that, whether intended or not, the colonial foundations and first firm territorial foothold had been established with Naimbanna’s ratification of the Treaty of 1788. THE TREATY OF 1807: A SHIFT FROM JOINT-STOCK COMPANY TO CROWN COLONY The Treaty of 1807 comes a year before the joint-stock company concept was abandoned in the region, in favor of official British Crown Colony status in 1808.43 The treaty is significant because it marks the end of the independent colonial venture like the “Colony of Freedom” and the joint-stock venture of the Sierra Leone Company that were both supported by the British government. In the face of the instability that the Sierra Leone Company was forced to confront as a result of its conflict with the Sherbro/Temne indigenous, which threatened the colony and its profitability, it was ultimately decided that the tasks of colony building and administration in Africa were not jobs suited for private joint-stock companies like the Sierra Leone Company. These tasks of colony building and administration were now deemed to be the job of the British Crown and British Government, and ultimately, the emerging British Empire. The Treaty of 1807 was signed at a point in time (July 1807) when the British Government was largely in control of the Sierra Leone Company, and had resolved to take full control on January 1, 1808. Benton reminds us that, “Behind mutual tolerance always lay the possibility of conquest, the threat of rebellion, and the danger of mass conversion. Where they did occur, these forces cast the redistribution of power.”44 This action of establishing Sierra Leone as an official Crown Colony, taken by the

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British government after a successful colonial military operation against the Sherbor/Temne, represents the solidification of the modern colonial blueprint or model of governance and administration that would be applied, not only in Sierra Leone, but throughout the whole of British Africa. The treaty amounts to a peace agreement of sorts with the Sherbro/Temne of the region, and was designed to end all hostilities against the colony and settlement, even though no war had officially been declared. Fyfe, in Sierra Leone Inheritance, states that “The Temne, alienated from the Company’s government, alarmed by the arrival of a garrison of soldiers, and stirred up . . . attacked from the west (where King Tom lived) on 18 November 1801.”45 After this incident in 1801, such strife between the Sierra Leone Colony and the indigenous arose from time to time, and it took a toll on the company itself, the burden of which caused the move from company to Crown Colony. Problems such as these arose without a strong diplomatic indigenous sovereign like Naimbanna, who favored the British, to keep the peace and settle disputes between the indigenous and Sierra Leone Company. In A New History of Sierra Leone, we are told that “When Company officials refused to sign a new treaty with Naimbanna’s successor, Bei Farma, [to replace the Treaty of 1788 well after Naimbanna’s death], he became angry. He and his sub-chief [also called King Tom], in alliance with Nova Scotian rebel Wansey, then proceeded to attack the company’s new fort of Thorton Hill on November 18, 1801.”46 This point of conflict involving the disputed terms of the Treaty of 1788 some twelve years later in 1800 draws us back to the ambivalent nature of discursive language and the fact that such disjointed discourse results in various material possibilities. By 1800, we see that the two parties who agreed to the Treaty of 1788 have developed radically different interpretations of the terms of the treaty, which renders the treaty acceptable to the British and unacceptable to the African indigenous (we could also safely say that both parties had different interpretations of the Treaty of 1788 when it was first made). However, in 1800, the different set of political circumstances and British military capabilities result in a very different outcome from the singular diplomatic possibility that was originally available to the British colonizers in 1787. We are also told, by Fyfe, that within the decade that followed the turn of the century, “In July 1807, a final settlement was negotiated with them at Robis (between present Wellington and Hastings).”47 We are given different accounts of the circumstances surrounding the signing of the Treaty of 1807 by Fyfe in his History of Sierra Leone, and Alie in his A New History of Sierra Leone. Fyfe writes that “King Tom and the Koya Temne remained peaceful; in July 1807 a final settlement was negotiated with them at Robis.48 The treaty confirmed the colony’s conquest of the land west

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of Freetown. The Temne also gave up their enclaves in the east.”49 However, Alie, in his new account of events published in 1991, tells us that: After a fierce struggle the company’s forces gained the upper hand and went on the offensive. Many Temne settlements were destroyed and King Tom fled. He took refuge with Mandingo and Soso chiefs on the Scarcies where he planned another invasion, but was easily defeated. He was then persuaded by Dala Modu (a Soso chief then living just north of the Sierra Leone Colony) to give up fighting.50

Alie finishes the episode by stating that “In 1807, the Koya Temne signed a dictated peace treaty with the British, by which they renounced all claims to the Colony land.”51 What is clear is with the Treaty of 1807, “the Colony’s original right to the peninsula, cession, was superseded by conquest,” which means that the British Crown would now rule Sierra Leone with a firm and unchallenged grip.52 Although the British Crown would not officially take control of the Sierra Leone colony until January 1, 1808, the British government and its military might are the force behind the Treaty of 1807, not the Sierra Leone Company, which would cease to exist on December 31, 1807. This is a case of mastery through military force. It is also interesting to note the treaty seems to have manifested within it the sentiment that proximity—or rather distance from the indigenous—results in a greater level of protection, and in turn a greater chance of continuity as well. Stipulation number four of the treaty reads that: No native town shall be built nearer to the Colony than Robiss, except Robiss, Salt Town, and Ro-Cupra; the land between Robiss and Ro-Cupra shall be left to the people of those places for their luggars.53

This essentially means that all lands to the west of the colony were to be abandoned by King Firama and King Tom. Interestingly enough, the language of the treaty hints at a sort of colonial mastery, as it specifically reads that they “hereby surrender to his Majesty the King of Great Britain, for the use and benefit of the Sierra Leone Company, all the right, power, and possession of every sort and kind in the peninsula of Sierra Leone.” Here, we see that the language of territorial acquisition for the sake of mastery and dominance of the Sierra Leonean indigenous is unmistakably stronger. Such powerful language, in this case, might also suggest a sense of urgency to capitalize on the victory over the Temne by immediately and irrevocably securing access to those natural assets important to the life of the colony. This was, in fact, the final pact that was signed before the British Crown officially took control, on January 1, 1808, of the company which was already virtually supported by government funds.54 The British colonial government of Sierra Leone, in 1807, found itself in the position of the party that dictates the terms of the peace settlement, as well

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as the party that determines the economic value of the lands and waterways that they have access to. Stipulation number seven of the treaty reads: And to prevent disputes it is hereby acknowledged that the duties payable for water are fifteen bars (each being of the full value of three shillings and four pence sterling, if paid in goods of specie) for every trading vessel that takes water, whether it takes little or much except crafts belonging to traders residing on the Coast of Africa.55

What is perhaps most ironic and remarkable is that a full twenty years earlier, in 1787, the British colonial settlement to establish a “Colony of Freedom” was in the position of begging and soliciting the favors of an African sovereign for the privilege of remaining on African soil. However, the circumstances in 1807 have seen the power relationship between British and African indigenous come full circle, and the British colonizers now view what was once a privilege to settle the land as an inalienable right. In the end, regardless of the ill-fated Sierra Leone Company’s demise, the discursive language contained within the Treaty of 1788, in turn, allowed for a wide range of free-play that enabled the British colonizers to reanimate potential material possibilities on the ground. This, in turn, enabled a shift from a “Colony of Freedom” to a joint-stock colony of commerce, profitability, and territorial acquisition, which would last until the British Crown Colony came to power with the final decisive military solution and treaty of capitulation in 1807. THE TREATY OF 1819: AN ERA OF COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION AND COLONY BUILDING (MAR PORTO AND RO BOMPEH RESPECTIVELY BECOME WATERLOO AND HASTINGS) The Treaty of 1819 comes eleven years after the implementation of British Crown Colony administration. Having arrived at a point in time when the blueprint or foundations of the modern colonial enterprise in Africa have been established, we are presented with an example of a colonial desire for not only territorial mastery and dominance, but nominal mastery of the land as well. The treaty itself only speaks of “the transfer of land” that “His said Excellency the Captain General and Governor [MacCarthy] in Chief for himself and Successors as the Governor of Sierra Leone for the time being, on the part and on behalf of His Britannic Majesty engages.” However, after the signing of the Treaty of 1819, the purchase of the strategically important locations of “Mar Poto and Ro Bompeh situated on the banks of the Bunch

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River” were to become Waterloo and Hastings respectively.56 We might consider this an act of, or attempt at mastering the difference of a supposedly uncivilized and therefore supposedly blank African space by establishing a sense of nominal European familiarity. In the same way we encountered the ritual of naming or renaming Naimbanna’s offspring—John Henry—earlier in this section, we see the renaming of African territory to christen it into a locus of European knowledge and familiarity. Mills writes that “This blankness signifies not merely that Europeans have not arrived but that these spaces have not arrived, a blankness of the inhabitants themselves. Africa is thus the ‘Dark Continent’ because of the paucity of (remembered) European contact with it.”57 In order to remedy this territorial ailment of blankness, “They are domesticated, transformed, made familiar, made part of our space, brought into the world of European (which is human) cognition, so they can be knowable and known.”58 In the case of the Treaty of 1819, the African presence is recognized, however, it is recognized as an uncivilized presence that must be civilized by nominal erasure and a cultural renaming. This, in many respects, is what Governor Charles MacCarthy saw as his major task in the colonial building of Sierra Leone. MacCarthy came to power as interim governor in 1814 after being appointed Governor of Senegal and Goree Island, and was officially appointed to the position of Governor of Sierra Leone in 1816.59 When MacCarthy came to power in 1814, Freetown and the Sierra Leone colony was not marked by the thriving administration that he instilled during his tenure. “There were scarcely half a dozen stone buildings, public or private, no Governor’s house, no church, no gaol, no proper public offices.”60 It was under the watch of Governor MacCarthy that Freetown and Sierra Leone went from a mere settlement to a colony with a colonial administration to match. Alie writes, “MacCarthy’s governorship witnessed an increase in the quantity and quality of public buildings in Freetown. The jail was completed in 1816, the foundation stone of St. George’s Church (later Cathedral) was laid in January 1817, a town hall was built . . . and officers’ mess . . . a commissariat store at the wharf, and so on.”61 Within the treaty itself, we see that MacCarthy, hoping to increase the power of the colonial administration, wishes “to strengthen and renew the former Treaties made by his Predecessors with the King and Chieftains (in this case Ka Conko), to prevent all misunderstanding which might arise from misconception as to the proper limits and boundaries of the Colony, the rights and titles of British subjects.” The concept of “limits” and “boundaries” once again come into play, as they did with the previous Treaty of 1807. If we consider the concept of “presupposition of inequality” once again, then the term “proper” in regards to the established limits and boundaries of the terri-

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tory stands out. This is because there is the presupposition that the European, or British colonizer in this case, who supposedly exists on the positive and “proper” side of the spectrum of inequality, possesses the cultural right to determine what is civilized in a supposedly uncivilized African space. In the same styling of the terms of capitulation surrounding the Treaty of 1807, we see a similar declarative style within the Treaty of 1819 as well. However, it is also evident that there does not exist the same sense of urgency that came with pressing to solidify a grip on power at the conclusion of conflict. The apparatus of colonial administration has been comfortably installed, and the age of nineteenth-century colonial administration has begun. Gone is the first person dictatorial style of the African sovereign that we saw in the Treaty of 1788 where Naimbanna pronounced “Know all men by these present that I King Naimbanna chief of Sierra Leone on the Grain Coast of Africa.”62 Instead, the colonial authority is the power that is explicitly dictating the terms and conditions of the treaty agreement and the financial compensation that will be doled out by the colonial administration now that there is a firm grip on power. The treaty reads that: In consideration of which transfer of Land, His said Excellency the Captain General and Governor in Chief for himself and Successors as the Governor of Sierra Leone for the time being, on the part and on the behalf of His Britannic Majesty engages, promises and agrees to pay yearly and every year to the said Pa Loudon commonly called Ka Conko, or to such person as may succeed him or be appointed or authorized to receive the same, the Sum of Fifty Bars in lieu of all other claims or demands of whatever nature or description.63

As a result of the treaty of capitulation that brought a so-called peace in 1807, the same year that also saw the British government assume full colonial authority, and the strengthening of colonial power that saw MacCarthy take gubernatorial leadership, there are no reservations as to who should dictate the terms of the agreement. In many respects, the discursive language that once existed with the intent to cajole and allow room for colonial growth and territorial domination have now become less discursive and more explicit.

l As I conclude this chapter in which I have trajectory of a dynamic power shift from 1787 to 1819, which is marked by the rise of British colonial administration in West Africa, and particularly in Sierra Leone, it is evident that the discourse of power (colonial power in this case) can be found in “the dispersion of the points of choice that the discourse leaves free.”64 I am also prompted to

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recall the “different possibilities that it opens of reanimating already existing themes, of arousing opposed strategies, of giving way to irreconcilable interests.”65 Both of these conceptualizations about the ambivalence of discourses of power are emphasized, particularly earlier in this chapter, because these are elements of ambivalence that are an integral part of these long eighteenth-century African-British treaties. The literary history of diplomatic interaction and treaty-making between the Sierra Leone indigenous and British colonizers is a literary history that takes one on a pathway through the evolution of the power relationship depicting the decline of indigenous sovereignty and the rise of colonial subjectivity. On this pathway, one is also able to detect the manner in which discourse can be manipulated and reanimated in order to build and maintain a firm hegemonic grip on power (in this case, for the purposes of usurpation). The AfricanBritish treaties offer the British a wide range of “dispersion” and numerous “points of choice” that can be activated for the purposes of territorial acquisition and colonial administration. The diplomatic discourse of the treaties allow the British colonizers to place themselves in a position of flexibility, while placing the African indigenous in a position of increasing inflexibility. The “irreconcilable interests” of affirming African sovereignty, while usurping African sovereignty is made possible through the ambivalent diplomatic discourse of the treaty, and it is the link between discourse and material practice that will make it possible to render African sovereignty into African colonial subjectivity. NOTES 1. Over the course of this article, I utilize Fyfe’s A History of Sierra Leone, and Sierra Leone Inheritance, and Alie’s A New History of Sierra Leone—a more condensed history of Sierra Leone created for the University of Sierra Leone system through Macmillan Publishers in 1990. Fyfe and Alie neither speak about, nor offer an analysis of the several treaties I explore in this article, nonetheless, both scholars offer an important overview of the historical climate during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century periods in which these treaties were signed. 2. Nicholas B. Dirks, “From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 176–77. 3. Sierra Leone itself officially gained its independence from Britain on April 27, 1961. 4. Nicholas B. Dirks, “From King to Landlord,” 177. 5. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 25.

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6. Kathleen Wilson, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity In Britain and the Empire, 1660– 1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. 7. Wilson, A New Imperial History, 2. 8. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. 9. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 11. 10. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 2. Benton also argues that, “Colonialism shaped a framework for the politics of legal pluralism though particular patterns and outcomes varied. Wherever a group imposed law on newly acquired territories and subordinate peoples, strategic decisions were made about the extent and nature of legal control.” 11. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 16 12. Granville Sharp’s Short Sketch of Temporary Regulations (until better shall be proposed), written in 1786, offers a detailed vision of his plans for settlement. 13. Fyfe, A History, 19. 14. Pa Bongee’s name can be seen on the subsequent Treaty of 1788, however, Queen Yamacouba’s is not. 15. Fyfe, A History, 22. 16. Benton, Law and Colonial, 54. 17. Benton, Law and Colonial, 55. 18. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations in British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 263. 19. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 20. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 21. Joe A. D. Alie, A New History of Sierra Leone (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1990), 138. Alie contends that, “These rulers no longer met the Governor on equal terms; instead they had to go through the District Commissioners (some of whom were young and inexperienced). 22. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 23. Alie, A New History, 63. 24. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800. 2d ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 77. 25. Throughout this piece, I will refer to Naimbanna as a Sherbro/Temne sovereign because it is the Sherbro people who first inhabited the region in which the “Colony of Freedom” Freetown was established prior to Temne and Mende encroachment into the area. As a result, Naimbanna is often referred to as a Temne sovereign only. 26. I make the distinct reference to the Treaty of 1787/1788 because the original Treaty of 1787 was declared null and void, as it was signed by King Tom, who was a subordinate to the Sherbro/Temne sovereign Naimbanna and, therefore, had no legitimate authority to do so. 27. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 73.

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I must emphasize that I do not intend to deconstruct these several treaties. However, I am creating a play on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive ideal that states, “Deconstruction may be at work, in the work, within the system to be deconstructed.” He states that the cornerstones of deconstruction may “already be at work, not at the center of but in an eccentric center, in a corner whose eccentricity assures the solid construction of what it at the same time threatens to deconstruct.” The idea that the key to unraveling a text may already be at work within the text is quite useful for the unraveling of the discursive language we find in these African-British treaties. 28. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1978), xii. 29. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 37. 30. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 31. Foucault, Archaeology, 37. 32. Foucault, Archaeology. 33. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 34. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 35. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 36. Marcia Langton and Lisa Palmer, “Treaties, Agreement Making and the Recognition of Indigenous Customary Polities,” in Honour Among Nations?: Treaties and Agreements with Indigenous People, ed. Marcia Langton, Maureen Teehan, et al. (Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 35. 37. The British Sierra Leone Company will be the subject of chapter 3 of this project. However, here in this section on African-British treaties, I discuss the affairs of the company as they relate to these treaties. 38. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 39. Dirks, “From King to Landlord,” 177. 40. 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company Board of Directors, 2. 41. A. P. Kup, Sierra Leone: A Concise History (London: David & Charles Ltd, 1975), 163–64. The Englishman Alexander Falconbridge was an official representative of the Sierra Leone Company during the reign of King Naimbanna. 42. 1791 Report, 2. 43. See Appendix (Treaty of 1807). 44. Benton, Law and Colonial, 26. 45. Christopher Fyfe, Sierra Leone Inheritance (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 126. 46. Alie, A New History, 62. 47. Fyfe, A History, 96. “The Sherbro Chiefs were drawn into war. European slave traders supplied arms, and reaped a rich harvest of slaves captured from devastated villages all over the country,” so this was indeed a period of turmoil and great unrest among competing indigenous peoples as well. 48. Robis is located between present day Wellington and Hastings in the western region of Sierra Leone. 49. Fyfe, A History, 96. 50. Alie, A New History, 62.

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51. Alie, A New History. 52. Fyfe, A History, 96. 53. See Appendix (Treaty of 1807). 54. Fyfe, A History, 97. “By 1806 the Company had received £67,000 from the Treasury. The fortifications cost about £20,000, the Volunteer Corps about £3,000 a year. The government grant was swallowed up at once repaying uncontrolled expenditure.” 55. See Appendix (Treaty of 1807). 56. These towns mark the boundaries of the sprawling present day capital of Freetown, Sierra Leone. 57. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 45. 58. Mills, The Racial Contract, 45. 59. Alie, A New History, 16. 60. Fyfe, A History, 134. 61. Alie, A New History, 71. 62. See Appendix (Treaty of 1788). 63. See Appendix (Treaty of 1819). 64. Foucault, Archaeology, 36–37. 65. Foucault, Archaeology.

Chapter Three

Reading the British Sierra Leone Company The Sierra Leone Company and its Ties to Emergent Colonial, Economic, and Moral Philosophy of the Long Eighteenth Century This chapter deals with the Sierra Leone Company (1791–1807), and the emerging economic and philosophical systems that were combined to form a colonial philosophy linking European economic success with the so-called civilization of Africa, and morality or moral education in Africa. The Sierra Leone Company project, like the “Colony of Freedom” model, which was its predecessor, was said to be closely aligned with the abolition movement and provided a viable economic alternative to the slave trade. However, Christopher Leslie Brown, in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism makes an important point about the connection between eighteenthcentury economics, abolition, and emerging imperialism. He remarks that “the [abolition] had its roots in a distinct and distinctive moment in British imperial history, a moment that presented both unfamiliar challenges and novel possibilities to those preoccupied with the character and consequences of overseas enterprise.”1 The “emergence in Britain of shifting definitions of imperial purpose” and “of new ways to conceive relations among subjects of the crown, and between overseas colonies and the imperial state” were also at stake during this period of early emergent colonialism in West Africa.2 While abolition was a significant part of the Sierra Leone Company’s stated mission, it is clear that economics and territorial acquisition are significant overarching impetuses for the Company’s establishment and existence. The first section of this chapter will deal with readings of the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company Court of Directors that span from 1791 to 1801. Examination of these archival documents will reveal the Company’s colonial model modis operandi on the ground, with which it sought to create an effective disciplinary apparatus through education in religion and morality. The idea was that such a disciplinary and educational apparatus would provide the civilizational tools to tame the “savage inhabitants,” and in turn, 57

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provide territorial stability, as well as a stable colonial economic foundation. The middle section of this chapter will deal with long eighteenth-century economic and moral theory, and the manner in which this economic and moral discourse combined to form a material colonial formula. I will turn to the famed eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations3 (1776) and Theory of Moral Sentiments4 (1759) in order to demonstrate the perceived nexus between colonial ideologies of moralizing and colonial economic stability and success in what Smith calls the uncivilized torrid zone. Finally, in the third and last section of this chapter, I will point to Smith’s prophetic forecast for the ultimate demise of the prospectus of the colonial company model like those that existed in Sierra Leone and East India. It seems that Smith favored the official crown colony established by a metropole, as opposed to the individualized and independent joint-stock company venture, because he felt that the former was more effective and efficient for territorial expansion and profit than the latter. As I examine the various reports of the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company, in addition to the economic and moral philosophy of Adam Smith, I detect the manner in which new definitions of imperial purpose begin to take shape, as well as strategies to achieve colonial dominion. I also detect a strong link that is manifested between discourse and material practice. There are points at which we can easily recognize the philosophies of Smith in a more simplistic and applied form within the literature of the Sierra Leone Company documents. The Company reports are broken down into subtitles or section headings that delineate the important factors for the success of the Sierra Leone Company enterprise—among them are: Trade, Civilization, Cultivation, Morality, Education, and Health. It could be said that these six elements were perceived as the key to maintaining the success and stability of the Sierra Leone Company colonial model, because once this supposedly unruly and savage continent was tamed, and both stable economic markets and stable trade could be established, European capital profits would increase all the more. Smith’s thoughts on the economics of Africa that we see in Wealth of Nations make the connection between economics and morality quite clear. He writes, “All the inland parts of Africa, and all that part of Asia which lies any considerable ways north of the Euxine and Caspian seas . . . seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we find them today.”5 Considering that such a statement about savages, both in Africa and Asia, have been taken from an economic treatise like Wealth of Nations, it becomes prudent to link Smith’s theory of economic success and proficiency with the idea of so-called “civilization” (or Western civilization) and civilizational stability. We even find that Africa’s geographic landscape is

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painted in a sort of unmanageable light, given that, “There are in Africa none of those great inlets, such as the Baltic and Adriatic seas in Europe . . . and the great rivers of Africa are too great a distance from one another to give occasion to any considerable inland navigation.”6 Alongside the African indigenous or so-called “savage” that would supposedly contribute to increased economic risk, the land itself is also framed as a sort of geographic economic risk. Some fifteen years after the publication of Wealth of Nations, the Sierra Leone Company was formed with the premise of developing an effective strategy for managing and even mitigating the risk posed by the “untamed” African continent. In the company documents, the risk of the venture is justified by the idea that the favorable geographic location of Sierra Leone on the African coast has great profit potential. The 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company reads: Besides trading to Sierra Leone for the immediate productions of that country, it appears also, that a coast and river trade, and, through the rivers, an important inland trade, may easily be established by means of small vessels calculated for that purpose: These might deposit at Sierra Leone productions of Africa, brought from other parts. The coast of Africa, neighboring to Sierra Leone, is more intersected with rivers navigable for small craft, than any other portion of it whatsoever: by which circumstance an extensive commerce might be greatly facilitated.7

The company report points to the potential for trade and commercial profit from not only the Sierra Leone region of West Africa, but throughout the entire continent, and emphasizes that vessels sent throughout the continent “might deposit at Sierra Leone productions of Africa, brought from other parts.” Given the supposedly inherent negative factors or risks of the African continent’s unmanageability, we gain a greater understanding of why a centralized colonial settlement on the coast of West Africa in Sierra Leone was such a very attractive prospect. Abolition and repatriation to Sierra Leone were seen as means of achieving civilizational progress that might, in turn, lead to economic progress and profit. “The campaign for the abolition of the slave trade demonstrated and proved that civilized peoples, like the British, could achieve moral progress. British primacy in the war against barbarism reaffirmed the nation’s place at the apex of refinement and virtue.”8 However, if Britain’s war against the barbarism of the European slave trade placed it at the apex of refinement and virtue, then the fact that the British government granted a charter to the Sierra Leone Company to colonize and civilize what was seen as the uncivilized disorder of Africa, strengthened its position. “To be governed people must be counted, taxed, educated, and of course, ruled in regulated

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places” and the creation of such a regulated colonial environment was the task of the Sierra Leone Company.9 The various excerpts from the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company that we will read and analyze throughout this chapter are concrete examples of discourse representing the will and desire to strategically engineer a regulated colonial space. However, we should not be mistaken to suppose that the creation of this regulated colonial space was done solely to gain a national moral high ground for Britain (if anything, such a moral high ground would be a collateral gain). It is clear that colonies, like the one constructed by the Sierra Leone Company in 1791, were designed to create and foster new economic markets that would result in economic and territorial profit for the British nation. The explicit premise of the company is that “extensive commerce might be greatly facilitated.”10 The regulation and sustained stability of the colony would be one of the major keys to the success of the Sierra Leone Company, and again, this is why the factors of Trade, Civilization, Cultivation, Morality, Education, and Health are of such vital importance in the company reports. One of the distinguishing features of the Sierra Leone Company Reports, which sets them far apart from the more scientifically oriented documents that I will analyze in chapter 4 (like Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization, Blumenbach’s scientific treatises, and Reports of the African Institution) is the fact that the company reports read like late eighteenth and nineteenth century public relations documents, which are designed to lure and appease investors of the company by presenting a solid strategic vision of the company’s designs. The preface of the Sierra Leone Company Report of 1791 reads: The most advantageous season for settling at Sierra Leone now nearly approaching, and the intelligence that was expected having been received from Mr. [Alexander] Falconbridge, Agent to the Company, who is lately arrived from thence, the Directors have thought proper to call the present court, for the purpose of laying some general information before the Proprietors, and of submitting also to their determination the proposition for raising capital.11

This preface passage connotes a sense of urgency that suggests time is of the essence, particularly since “the most advantageous season for setting” is looming upon the horizon. The emphasis placed upon the forthcoming “intelligence” from agent Falconbridge is of extreme importance because a large task in the job of gaining supporters and raising capital was to distinguish the Sierra Leone Company’s colonizational model from Granville Sharp’s failed “colony of freedom” that was characterized as unorganized, unprepared, and ill-conceived.

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The Sierra Leone Company was founded on a formulaic premise that the abolition of an era of African slavery could be supplanted by an era of colonial and economic servitude of Africa. Mavis Campbell, in Back to Africa: From Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, writes that, “The British in a controlling position would find this colony of immense economic and strategic importance, especially when it is noted that the founding of this territory coincided with new thinking on Africa.”12 The four groups of Africans who would be repatriated to the Sierra Leone colony—the Black Poor from Britain, the Afro-Americans [from Nova Scotia], the Maroons [from Jamaica], and the recaptives or liberated Africans [rescued from slave ships]—were also of strategic import.13 The prevalent idea among the company directors was that in order for the colonial economic project to not only succeed, but thrive and expand, nothing could be left to chance, and that every facet of the colonial company operation had to be guided by a planned strategic vision. Betty Joseph, in her analysis of British East India Company documents, asserts that colonial archival documents, like the company reports that I explore in this chapter, are part of a systematic form of governmental administration and colonial control. “Governance was carried out through a practice of archiving, a systematic circulation, preservation, and recall of written texts that allowed rule by remote control from London.”14 These archival company documents should be examined as more than mere records of a colonial economic venture of a past era, as Joseph suggests. A wealth of knowledge is to be gained by examining and interrogating these company documents as living records of a strategic plan for systematic control and colonial territorial expansion in Africa. In his study of colonial government in imperial New Delhi, Stephen Legg writes that, “The basis of a post-colonial critique can . . . be an interrogation of the practices, modalities, and projects through which the lives of the colonized were altered.”15 Manifested in these company reports are blueprints of colonial administration for a pending age of British and European expansion in Africa, and a close interrogation of these documents will reveal the strategies, both implicit and explicit, through which the colonial company government sought to establish authority and maintain control.

THE SIERRA LEONE COMPANY: COLONIZATION AND MORALITY, CIVILIZATION, & ECONOMICS The 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company Board of Directors points out that Sierra Leone has “great and uncommon natural advantages,” however, because of “its present forlorn and miserable situation” after the failed

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“Colony of Freedom,” special provisions would have to be made in order to ensure the company’s success.16 It also reads: The Directors . . . are led to observe, that it is evidently not merely a commercial factory that they have to establish, but that in order to introduce a safe trade, or any considerable degree of civilization or cultivation, it must be an especial object of the Company to provide effectully for the protection of property, and for the personal security of the settlers on their district . . . together with their first adventure, a sufficient strength shall be sent out for security against external violence, and maintaining domestic tranquility.17

There are several strategic elements that can be detected within this loaded passage. First, once again, there is an explicit attempt to distinguish the Sierra Leone Company model from any attempts that came before it, as an explicit plan of protection is laid out. Secondly, with this distinguishing mark or promise of providing “sufficient strength” with the “first adventure,” comes the implied concept of linking successful economic trade with the stability and security of a colony. “External violence” from the supposedly uncivilized African indigenous on the outside, must be prevented from disturbing the tranquility that would exist on the inside of the company settlement. The company’s board sets out to design an “internalized” colonial civilization that is complete with its own colonial model for control and discipline expressly for the purposes of creating the foundations for civilizational stability and colonial economic success. Further separation from the past failed ventures is made when it is written that “It seems obvious both from general reasoning on the subject, and past experience, that a small and feeble attempt to set up a colony, or to begin a new trade at Sierra Leone, under all the circumstances of that place, is in no respect likely to prosper.”18 The approach that is deemed more favorable by the Company’s board is “an attempt made upon a large scale, carrying out a stronger body of persons from hence.”19 The idea set forth here is that bigger not only means better, but that bigger also means increased profitability as well. The 1791 Report also reads: Besides the advantages of general security to the settlement, and personal convenience to the settlers, from the formation of a respectable establishment at once, the Directors are of opinion also, that a much more profitable trade is eventually to be expected by conducting it on a large scale, that by confining it to a narrow mercantile speculation.20

“General security” is framed as an important element for the stability of the colonial establishment, and company directors take the measure of making an explicit connection between security and profitable trade. The archetypal

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eighteenth-century idea of Africa as “savage landscape” prevalent in the European imagination, contributes to the notion that this venture, which set out to create an entire colonial system designed to support an economic system, was seen as one that was fraught with an extremely high level of risk. However, given the favorable forecast of profit potential should the company succeed beyond its proprietors wildest dreams—a profit that came with opening an entire continent to trade—the risk was deemed well worth it. A key reason that company directors saw the Sierra Leone model as one that would work economically, and yet another factor that would distinguish it from past attempts, is because Sierra Leone was seen as a central point from which trade and commerce could be transacted. This, in turn, would create a centralized British economic marketplace on the African continent. The previous models and previous manner of operating were deemed highly inefficient and extremely wasteful. However, this new model of English trade in Africa would lend itself to increased profit potential: The expense of protection to a factory, and of demurrage to the ships waiting or trading about for the scattered produce of Africa, has hitherto been so great, that the usual advantage in the barter, which is extremely great, has perhaps been no more than what was necessary to indemnify the trader for his high charges, and leave over and above these the ordinary profit of trade [ . . . ] The advantage therefore of introducing a great degree of cultivation on one spot, of collecting a great body of consumers of British articles on the side of one river, of storing a large quantity of goods in their factory rather than a small one; the advantage also of thus providing the means of a more prompt sale, and quicker returns in the African trade than have yet been effected, must be very obvious.21

The geographical location of Sierra Leone was a great advantage to any trading company that could successfully establish a colonial company model there.22 A central point of trade, on a giant African continent of “scattered” European trade and exploration, was seen as a very feasible method of driving down the cost of commerce and increasing profit. However, the key to the success of this Sierra Leone Company model was “introducing a great degree of cultivation (which also implies civilization)” to this one spot—this was essential to maintaining the stability of the commercial colonial settlement. I believe that the contributions of several scholars, who have produced work on strategic disciplinary apparatuses both within the colonial context and without, would be quite useful for my examination of the Sierra Leone Company model (among those I will reference are Foucault, Mitchell, Dirks, Burton, etc.). The discourse on the nature of the structure of colonial power is a well-worn path in the scholarly conversation about colonial governmentality. However, the uniqueness of the Sierra Leone Company model that I examine

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here lies in the fact that within the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company, we see manifested before out very eyes, the rise and evolution of British colonial administration in West Africa. The trials and errors of the Sierra Leone Company through the period of 1791 (when it was established), to its termination in 1807, are significant because the Company played a significant role in the establishment of the first official British Crown Colony in Africa.23 The disciplinary apparatus of Ledoux’s Arc-et-Senans, which is offered as a model in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, is a very useful tool for my examination of the Sierra Leone Company colonial model because the Ledoux model is a system of order that is strategically manufactured to create an efficiently functional and enclosed social system. Foucault writes that: The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the course of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned. This is what Ledoux had imagined when he built Arc-etSenans; all the buildings were to be arranged in a circle, opening on the inside, at the centre of which a high construction was to house the administrative functions of control and checking, the religious functions of encouraging obedience and work: from here all the orders would come, all activities would be recorded, all offenses perceived and judged.24

While the colonial settlement that would eventually come to extend from the original West African coastal colony into the Sierra Leone interior was far from a perfect circular formation, nor was it possible for a single gaze to see or a single light to illuminate everything, the matter of a functional system of penal control—or regulated colonial control in this case—is still quite useful for my examination of the company model. The matter of a centralized colonial authority responsible for maintaining order, and both delivering justice and due punishment, is very applicable to the regulated colonial model established by the Sierra Leone Company. Other important elements of the centralized colonial company authority are the educational and religious apparatus, which worked hand in hand to encourage obedience, industriousness, and submission to colonial authority. The company reports carefully detail the structure of the colony administration and government within its records, and presents a utopian picture of colonial order in Africa; For example, the 1798 Report of the Sierra Leone Company offers a detailed illustration of governmental structure as developed by Company officials: Government and Administration of Justice. Free Town and Granville Town, as observed in a former Report, are divided into tythings, or districts of ten

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families; and the heads of each, choose annually a tythingman; and for each ten tythingmen, a hundredor. The persons so chosen, are sworn to assist in keeping the peace: The tythingmen act as constables. All regulations, adopted by the Governor and Council, are laid before the hundredors and tythingmen; and, on their acquiescence, are declared to have the force of law. Several servants of the Company act as justices; and a court of session is held every 3 months, at which, offences and suits for debts are tried by a jury, before two or more justices.25

The judicial structure of law and order, as laid out by the company authority, places colonial company subjects in minor positions of authority as “tythingmen” and “hundredors,” and there is also the right to a court trial by jury. However, the company officials, and the colonial governor in particular, are the overarching and overriding forces of power in the colony. In the end, “The formal extension of legal jurisdiction in and of itself created a clear cultural boundary between colonizers and the colonized by casting only one as the possessor of law and civility.”26 The subjects of the company colony were perceived as Africans, who had to be educated in the ways of civilized English law, whether they were Africans that had been repatriated from lives of slavery, or indigenous that had existed in a supposedly natural state of barbarity all the while. Timothy Mitchell expounds on the concepts of “disciplinary mechanisms” and “strategies of control,” as well as the “colonizing nature of disciplinary power” in his explorations of how European powers came to dominate Egypt as colonial masters.27 He notes that the “panopticon, the model institution whose geometric order and generalized surveillance serve as a motif for this kind of [disciplinary] power, was a colonial invention,” and that models of the panopticon were largely built in places of colonial dominion like India (not northern Europe).28 It is not a geometric panoptic shape or structure that is important for my analysis of the Sierra Leone Company colonial model and reading of company documents, but motif or trope of colonial control and power, and the manner in which elements of justice are administered in order to maintain control. Among elements rooted in the disciplinary strategies that played a central role in establishing and maintaining colonial power and authority were judicial law and order, monitoring and regulation of subjects, education, religion, and so forth. The “panoptical possibilities of the official [colonial] archive” and the difficulty of imagining the “official [colonial] archive as something other than a panoptical institution” are also quite important considerations in my examination of these Sierra Leone Company documents.29 These are two key concepts that Antoinette Burton highlights in the epilogue of Dwelling in the Archive, where she also asserts that, “archives themselves were born out of a determination to survey, an outgrowth of states convinced of their all-seeing

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and all-knowing capabilities.”30 Nicholas Dirks also points to these “panoptical possibilities” of the colonial archive in his analysis of colonial anthropology and the archive in India, where he writes that, “The [colonial] archive is a discursive formation in the totalizing sense that it reflects the categories and operations of the state itself, in this case of the colonial state.”31 Within these archival documents, the reader or surveyor of documents is given glimpses of precisely what the proprietors of the colonial state intend the reader surveyor to see. It is the task of the scholar to read between the lines and interrogate these colonial documents in order to gain a vision of these colonial documents beyond what is intended by the colonial authority. Upon close interrogation of company documents, when one reads between the lines, it becomes clear that the fear of punishment by the colonial state or company apparatus was also utilized as a tool for maintaining order. The company reports make explicit references to individual cases in which the colonial justice and penal system are used to remedy acts of criminal conduct in order to both punish the offender and serve as an example to the colonial community at large. The 1798 Report of the Sierra Leone Company depicts a colonial justice and penal system that also has the capacity to deal with not only “internal” settler criminal offenses, but those committed by the indigenous as well. One account reads that, “In Sep. 1797, a native man, convicted of stealing two goats, and a few other things, was sentenced to be whipped, and kept to work hard for 12 months.”32 Another example of colonial justice included in the 1798 Report highlights the case of a colonial subject named Joseph Tybee, who is tried and convicted for inciting an insurrection in 1794.33 The information about the event reads that: At the Quarter Sessions, in April 1796, Joseph Tybee was convicted of being actively concerned in the insurrection in June 1794, and sentenced to be whipped and banished. The lashes were not given him; but, at his own request, reserved to be inflicted in case of his return from banishment.34

The colonial justice and penal system is depicted in a light, which offers the reader a sense that there is sufficient means to maintain control of the colony, even in the face of an insurrection and uprising. The fact that only part of the guilty prisoner’s sentence was carried out, and that the “lashes were not given him,” also presents the picture of a merciful justice system that has the power and security to offer mercy where none is seemingly warranted.

l To design the proper colonial environment, which would promulgate morality, industriousness, civilization, and other key terms that connote colonial

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authority and control, the moral construct or character of company officials selected for travel to the African colony is said to have been placed under great scrutiny. Morality and discipline of company officials is a key issue that is highlighted within the first 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company because white British company officials are expected to be influential examples, who will not be impacted by the potentially “harmful” African environment. The report reads “Before the establishment could be formed and proper subordination be secured . . . examining, with due care the characters of the various persons, who offered to go as settlers, have all been the motives which conspired to make the directors discourage the going out of English settlers for the present.”35 A common white settler, who was not of the strictest moral code and strength of character, would supposedly succumb to the uncultivated African environment, and would, therefore, be a weak link within the company’s disciplinary model of strategic control. The report also points to the natural indolence of the English Black Poor as the primary reason for failure of the initial 1787 “Colony of Freedom,” and creates a strategy to remedy this problem that led to the failure of the company’s predecessor. The Report states that the company has “also declined, for the most part, to give a passage to any black persons from hence, in consequence of their having observed that the habits of those, who have been living in London, were in general far from regular and industrious.”36 Any element that could possibly jeopardize what would already be a colony of questionable morals, and therefore, a colony on the fringe, was to be excluded, be they European or non-European. The report also states, “The Directors have considered that one of the chief dangers to the whole undertaking, might be the hasty intrusion into the colony of Europeans of loose morals, idle or expensive habits, with minds of impatient subordination.”37 The goal is to create a functional utopian model that will transform the character of the black inhabitants of the Sierra Leone colony. Only after a strong initial foundation has been laid by the initial wave of company officials and settlers of supposedly high moral stature, will the next wave of settlers from England be allowed to come to Sierra Leone. “Persons indeed of some property and of exemplary character who wish to settle at Sierra Leone, and working people who are used to any art or trade likely to be wanted there, will probably, after the first rainy season is over, be considered as a valuable acquisition to the colony.”38 In lieu of settlers from England, the directors of the company managed to procure former American slaves who fought for England during the American War of Independence. At the conclusion of the war, after England had lost its rights to the American colonies that became the United States, these slaves fled to Nova Scotia where promises of freedom and tracts of land went unfulfilled.

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Upon hearing the offer of repatriation to the Sierra Leone Colony, which entailed an offer of land as well, a great many consented to go. These black loyalist freemen were seen as the new hope of the colony, because their work habits learned as slaves under the British colonial system of the Americas disabused them of some of the supposedly indolent ways attributed to those with black skin. On this mater, the company report reads, “The impossibility indeed, of finding Europeans who can work in Africa in the sun, without the utmost prejudice to their health, has made the Directors conceive it their duty to discourage labourers from hence . . . and they trust therefore to the native labourers, or the free Americans, who . . . are expected immediately to arrive.”39 Morality and civilization were certainly issues that the company considered important, but as we may recall from the headings under which the reports are organized, Health and survival of workers in the torrid zone was an important concern as well. In his analysis of colonial models of discipline and control, Mitchell has also pointed to the “monitorial method of schooling, also discussed by Foucault, whose method of improving and disciplining a population . . . came to be considered a model for political progress,” and in this case, colonial civilizational progress.40 As I demonstrated in the reading of The Black Prince and the case of John Henry Naimbanna in chapter 1 of this project, education, religion, and morality were all synonymous with one another in the West African colonial contexts, particularly in regard to the Sierra Leone Company and its efforts to construct a stable colonial economic foundation. Evidence of this focus on education, religion, and morality can be detected throughout the various yearly company reports. In the 1791 Report, for example, the company directors emphasize the importance of creating habitual patterns of religious conduct for the good of the company colony: and the attention of the Council is particularly directed to the promotion of religion, and good morals, by the regular support of publick worship, the due observance of the Christian Sabbath, and also the general instruction of the people, and education of children.41

At this point in time in 1791, when the company had first established its Sierra Leone colony on the heels of the failed “Colony of Freedom,” the establishment of a firm and predictable pattern of social conduct and discipline within the fledgling colony was extremely important. Otherwise, it was feared that the company might meet the same dire fate as its predecessor. Five years later, in the 1796 Report, the course of company action taken in the education of both the repatriated Africans and indigenous Africans is again highlighted. In this passage, we gain a greater sense of the manner in

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which the education of the natives is commanded by the company directions at home in England: The Directors have lately taken some important measures in England, with a view to the improvement of the Sierra Leone schools, and to the extension of Christian knowledge in Africa. Two missionaries from the society of Baptists in England, who wished to settle under some African Chief, have had passage to Sierra Leone granted to them, in one of the Company’s ships. The Directors have also taken the best means in their power of providing regular performance of the services of the church, and for the instruction of both sexes, by sending out several additional persons proper for these purposes.42

“The extension of Christian knowledge” in Africa is emphasized as one of the primary concerns of the company directors in the metropole. An increase in the number of Africans willing to accept and supposedly be “tamed” by Christianity, means an increase in civilization in Africa. This, in turn, leads to a greater chance of territorial expansion and increased profit potential as well. The settling of missionaries under African chiefs also implies that there is a potential opportunity to gain influence beyond the coast within the interior of the continent as well. There is little coincidence that the next passage that follows speaks of “the encouragement to settle in the interior of Africa, which was thought to be given, as stated in a former Report . . . wherein the favourable reception of the Company’s servants in the capital of the Foolah kingdom was described.”43 The 1796 Report then describes the strategic plan for engagement of the Foolah indigenous, who reside within the interior of Africa away from the coast: A few English families acquainted with agriculture and with European arts, and zealous for the propogation of Christianity, have set sail in the Company’s last ship. Their purpose is to proceed, if the season should permit, directly to the capital of the kingdom of the Foolahs, which is about 300 miles inland. Their expenses are borne, as the Directors understand, by a number of persons in this country, who have subscribed for the purpose.44

It is emphasized that the individuals from England who have gained passage on the company vessel are both industrious—“acquainted with agriculture and European arts,” and wholly religious—“zealous for the propogation of Christianity.” They are depicted as individuals who fit “lock and step” with the company’s vision for establishing a firm economic foundation in Africa. In addition, if the mission proves to be successful, then the company will have also succeeded in establishing firm foundational contacts “300 miles inland.”

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Within the 1798 Report, a different, yet equally important tenet of the company’s strategy is displayed. This time, the emphasis on education, religion, and morality is directed toward the education of the repatriated and indigenous youth of the African colony. The report reads that, “The improvement of their (the Nova Scotian settlers) children is too visible to admit of doubt; nor does it consist merely in reading and writing; for their understanding and memories are enlarged, their errors and bad habits corrected, and their tempers and manners much meliorated.”45 On the matter of improvement within indigenous children, “The young natives at school in the Colony, improve in so many important respects, as to justify the hope of their becoming the instruments of extensive benefit to Africa. The manners and tempers of the neighboring natives in general, are strikingly improved, and their views are enlarged.”46 In the same way that the company directors hoped to influence John Henry Naimbanna (examined in chapter 1) so that it might gain favor with future generations, the company hopes to influence the youth both within and without of the colonial settlement. The “extensive benefit of Africa” as it is labeled in the report is synonymous with the extensive economic benefit of the company and England. All of these strategic measures of discipline and panoptic strategic control designed to ensure company officials could “survey all,” leaving nothing to chance, were enacted with an economic premise in mind to create an efficient company business model that would succeed where the previous attempts at establishing profitable companies in African failed. The company picked up the pieces of the failed “colony of freedom” that was begun in 1787, and while the settling of a colony to which freed slaves could return seemed like an idea full of benevolence, we must not forget that the economics of the project were the driving force that moved both individuals and English government to action. Company officials believed that there was much greater profit that could be made in Africa with the abolition of slavery than what had been made through the slave trade. The implied premise was that the Sierra Leone Company would thrive and flourish, where the “Colony of Freedom” failed, because of a company vision that permitted it to see far beyond what other models could not see. EMERGING COLONIALISM AND THE CONNECTION TO EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ECONOMIC AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY “By mid-eighteenth century, what mattered to the British was that theirs could and was seen to be an empire of trade rather than an empire of domin-

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ion.”47 Therefore, looking at the Sierra Leone Company Reports in the light of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century economic philosophy, particularly when that philosophy is reflected in the works of Adam Smith, is extremely useful for this chapter that looks at the evolution of the British imperial purpose after the slave trade in West Africa. After all, Smith had much to say on the history of European trading and economic endeavors on the African continent, in addition to the subject of slavery. However, it is also important to consider the moral philosophy of the age when dealing with the economic ideas of Europeans regarding the African continent. Foucault, in Discourse on Language, speaks of a “will to knowledge,” which is “reliant upon institutional support and distribution, [and] tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse.”48 The concept of “will to knowledge” coupled with the applied pressure of “institutional support and distribution” is an example of the link between material practices and discourse. This is an important socio-economic link to consider when we think about the way that economic philosophy and moral philosophy work in conjunction with the evolving sense of imperial purpose for an emerging British empire. It is for this reason of a nexus between economic philosophy and moral philosophy (and philosophy of moral sentiments) that I turn to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Lynn Festa, whose Sentimental Figures of Empire I have referenced in the previous chapters of this project, offers a useful way of linking Smith’s theories of economic philosophy with his theories of moral philosophy. She speaks of the reasoned causality of commerce to bring distant objects within the grasp of imagination, thereby, “enabling individuals to perceive connections between themselves and people far away, between actions in one place and consequences within another.”49 Festa then uses a geopolitical example drawn from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and states that: In much the same way, Adam Smith invites us in The Theory of Moral Sentiments to contemplate the possibility that “The Great Empire of China, with all its myriad of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake.” A man of humanity in Europe would, Smith argues, express every necessary and correct sentiment upon hearing the news: “he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man [ . . . ] He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe.”50

The key link that Festa demonstrates here, through Smith’s example of global geopolitical connections and economics, is the close link between moral

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sentiment and economic vision. In many ways, this link between economic vision and moral sentiment that we see manifested in the philosophy of Smith is very similar to the visionary link that the Sierra Leone Company makes between (1) The moral sentiment that calls for the abolition of slavery and (or linked to) the economic windfall of profit from new economic markets in an Africa that is free from the slave trade, and (2) The educational moralizing of African indigenous and repatriated settlers alike and (or linked to) the expansion of colonial territory in Africa and greater economic profit. The panoptic gaze that surveys all, in this case, forecasts a great profit potential that is rooted in the abolition of slavery and the civilization of Africa. Smith, before producing his Wealth of Nations in 1776, crafted his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments seventeen years earlier in 1759, which is commonly read differently and held apart from Wealth of Nations because of the different subject matter—economics versus morality—that each text focuses upon. The reality, though, is that in order to understand Smith’s economic theory in relation to Africa, and by extension, the Sierra Leone Company’s underlying premise of linking economic profit with Trade, Civilization, Cultivation, Education, Morality, and Health,51 it is important to understand his theories on morality as well because they go hand in hand. More often than not, the African continent, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was viewed as a place where morality and humanity did not exist, and could not exist without colonial cultivation by the efforts of Europeans. This, in turn, creates a theoretical dynamic in which the establishment of moral and religious foundations through colonial civilization and a disciplinary system of regulation (similar to what is enacted in the Sierra Leone Company model), works hand in hand with any potentially fruitful economic model. The premise is that slavery does not amount to good economics, however, colonialism and civilization did. Smith’s visionary link between morality and economics also extends to his thoughts about the institution of slavery and the slave trade. He had a fair amount to say on the issue of slavery and economics. It seems that Smith’s conceptions of economics and the immorality of transporting human cargo went hand in hand. This inclination to single out slaveholders for censure reflected a long-standing tendency among some in Britain to cast the enslavement of Africans as a colonial innovation wholly unrelated to the needs and values of the more civilized metropolis, as a consequence, instead, of choices made by degenerate Britons. Smith, for example, famously tarred colonial slaveholders in 1759 as “the refuse of the jails of Europe” who through their deeds and manners had forfeited a place in polite society. These “wretches,” wrote Smith, “possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor those which they go to.52 Fortune never exerted more cruelly her

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empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes,” the peoples of Africa, “to the levity, brutality, and baseness” of British Americans.53 Along with his view of slavery as morally reprehensible, he also found it economically reprehensible as well. At one point, in Wealth of Nations, he makes an explicit connection between moral depravity and economics when he writes, “The wear and tear of a slave it has been said, is at the expense of his master; but that of a free servant is at his own expense.”54 Smith posits this as a hypothetical example that points to the economic inefficiency of forced servitude. He builds upon this initial point, and asserts, “It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves. It is found to do so even at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where the wages of common labour are so very high.”55 In fact, Smith, similar to the proprietors of the Sierra Leone Company, favored a colonial model that would foster civilization and trade in Africa, as opposed to what he perceived as the economically inefficient and morally bankrupt institution of slavery. What is more telling about the economic model that Smith envisioned in relation to torrid zones, and Africa in particular, is the manner in which he envisioned trade would elevate the level of those natives who inhabited the regulated colonial space. Smith asserts that: Commerce and manufactures gradually introduce order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual state of war with their neighbors, and of servile dependency upon their superiors. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the most important of all their effects. Mr. Hume is the only writer who, so far as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.56

Demonstrated in this example in which Smith posits that trade will “gradually introduce order and good government,” we see the link between economic philosophy and moral philosophy. Smith’s model is designed to gradually introduce order and good colonial government, similar to the model presented in the Sierra Leone Company documents. It is also important to note that Smith makes reference to his colleague Hume.57 There is an interplay of ideas that takes place between philosophers like Smith and Hume; between theories of economics, anthropology, and so forth; and between the institutions like the Sierra Leone Company that put them into practice. This interplay exemplifies the relationship between discourse and material practice. Donald Winch, in Adam Smith: Scottish Moral Philosopher as Political Economist, writes about the rift that occurred between moral philosophy and

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economic philosophy in the latter portion of the eighteenth century. Winch writes: Several influential schools of thought converge in the belief that the advancement of economics as a science—a science capable of delineating ‘economy’ as a self-regulation realm—required the separation of its subject matter from the extraneous considerations embodied in moral philosophy.58

However, if this separation between moral philosophy and economic philosophy did in fact occur, such a separation did not take place when Europeans applied the theories that arose from a combination of moral and economic philosophy to the emerging colonial project in Africa. In fact, we should even make the argument that in the case of Africa, such intertwining of morals and economics became stronger as we see in the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company. Winch astutely links Smith’s moral philosophy to his economic philosophy, and more importantly, the concept of how high philosophy was translated into simple applicable form. “If we wish to understand the strategy of science and persuasion employed by Smith when addressing legislators, and the rationale for the anti-utopian approach to policy that he adopted, we have to turn to his work as a moral philosopher.”59 Having made that point, we should turn to a passage from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which on many levels, literally operates along the polar tropes of “civilized nations” and “barbarous nations” (both terms that Smith utilizes). Through such an example, it will become clear why it becomes impossible to conveniently separate Smith’s economic philosophies and theories from his moral philosophy. Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, expounds on the nature of socalled “civilized” nations and “barbarous” nations, and carefully notes their respective social characteristics. While, in this particular passage, he does not explicitly call for a civilizing of the barbarous, the dichotomies of “civilized” versus “barbarous,” and “European” versus “non-European,” which eventually leads to “colonizer” versus “colonized” in the emerging eighteenthcentury colonial economic is present. Smith writes: Among civilized nations, the virtues which are founded upon humanity, are more cultivated than those which are founded upon self-denial and the command of the passions. Among rude and barbarous nations, it is quite otherwise, the virtues of self-denial are more cultivated than those of humanity.60 Every savage undergoes a sort of Spartan discipline, and by the necessity of his situation is inured to every sort of hardship. He is in continual danger [ . . . ] A savage, therefore, whatever be the nature of his distress, expects no sympathy

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from those about him, and disdains, upon that account, to expose himself, by allowing the least weakness to escape him.61

According to Smith, the savage nation—by which he means the natives of Africa, North America, and other non-European regions of the world—is not one that is based on “virtues which are founded upon humanity.”62 The savage nation is marked by its supposed inhumanity. Smith continues that “The heroic and unconquerable firmness, which the custom and education of his country demand of every savage, is not required of those brought up to live in civilized societies.”63 This self denial that Smith speaks of is a denial of humanity and human passion that is characteristic of the civilized European. The implication is that beings, who have grown accustomed to continual danger, and who have grown accustomed to expecting no sympathy from others, cannot be morally trustworthy. This, in turn, means that Africa poses a great economic risk to those investors and entrepreneurs, like those who funded the Sierra Leone Company, who seek to open up this new and potentially fruitful economic market. Hence, the need for the establishment of a heavily regulated colonial space in Africa, that is designed and engineered to affect change within the uncivilized inhabitant and uncivilized space. THE JOINT STOCK COMPANY, RISK MANAGEMENT IN THE TORRID ZONE, AND THE PROFITABILITY OF CIVILIZATION The final significant portion of Smith’s Wealth of Nations that I will point to speaks of the status of European possessions in both Africa and the East Indies. While highlighting that natives in Africa and the East Indies were difficult to displace territorially because they were shepherds, as opposed to the hunters of North America, he compares these company ventures within the torrid zone to the successful colonial model employed in the Americas. Smith emphasizes the great disparity in terms of success that favors the colonial model. His analysis points out that: Though the Europeans possess many considerable settlements both upon the coast of Africa and in the East Indies, they have not yet established in either of those countries such numerous and thriving colonies as those in the islands and continent of America.64

Smith then writes that, “The genius of exclusive companies . . . is unfavorable, it has already been observed, to the growth of new colonies, and has probably been the cause of the little progress which they have made.”65 He

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emphasizes that, “The Portugueze carried on the trade both to Africa and the East Indies without any exclusive companies . . . [and] bear some faint resemblance to the colonies of America, and are partly inhabited by Portugueze who have established there for generations.”66 Smith clearly believes in colonialism, however, he frowns upon the company model. The American model is held as the pinnacle model specifically because it is a colonial model that is rooted in establishing a civilization built around economics, instead of a mere company model. Smith parallels the Portuguese example with the American example to show that American style colonialism could work in Africa as well, and that in terms of economics, this model would be the most efficient and profitable model for the English. Ironically, years later after the publication of Wealth of Nations, the Sierra Leone Company would establish a colonial civilizational model in Africa that was premised upon concepts similar to Smith’s ideas. Although the Sierra Leone Company’s vision of establishing a company in Africa was not unique unto itself, what should become clear about the company is that it sought to create a civilizational model around the company itself (instead of a factory), which was extremely unique. This sort of civilizational company model, that created a regulated colonial space, would supposedly provide the stable foundation necessary for economic success, that would, in turn, supposedly transform the savagery and indolence that Europeans attributed to Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Brown writes that: In key respects, the roots of the Sierra Leone settlement lay deep in the history of British enterprise in Africa. It evolved from the hopes of a persistent few who in the eighteenth-century wished to establish a more permanent British presence along the African coast, who wanted to found colonies of settlement that promoted commercial agriculture, not merely a trade in human bodies, who aimed to enhance the states role in the management of African enterprise.67

In fact, it is interesting to note that this vision for a British company on the West Coast of Africa was something that proponents of British commerce advocated for well over a century before the Sierra Leone Company came to pass. One of the more famous proponents of this idea was Daniel Defoe, himself, who called for a governmentally sanctioned company in West Africa some eighty years before the founding of the Sierra Leone Company. Defoe’s piece, published in 1711, was entitled An Essay Upon the Trade to Africa, In order to set the Merits of that Cause in a True Light and Bring the Disputes Between the African Company and the Separate Traders into a Narrower Compass. Defoe produced this piece because in his words, “the trade [to Af-

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rica] itself appearing then in its infancy, to be a most profitable, useful, and absolutely necessary branch of our commerce in order,” and “that so great an advantage should not be lost to the nation.”68 The problem at hand was that independent traders to Africa were flooding the market and undercutting the profits of the British African Company, which had an official charter from the English government. While Defoe saw competition as a necessary factor of commerce, the problem with such competition in terms of the trade to Africa was that if such competition drove the officially sanctioned African Company under, then a consistent and reliable trade to Africa would be lost to the English nation. Reliability of trade for the supply and production of manufactured goods was not the only reason Defoe was concerned about the stability of the African Company. The supply of African human cargo was also of great concern to Defoe because they contributed to the emerging commercial strength of England. Defoe spells out these concerns quite clearly when he writes: As there is no obligation to any man to trade longer than advantage prompts him to it; so the Separate Traders never yet offer’d, nor can they bring in a number of men that would be personally bound [ . . . ] This leaves the trade in such an uncertainty, that no dependence can be proposed, either for the encouragement of our manufactures, or the supply of negroes to our colonies.69

Defoe also shows great concern about the economics of slavery and the slave trade as they both relate to the emerging economic success of England. He argues that: There can be no security obtain’d from these free traders . . . as to the number of negroes they shall yearly supply our plantations . . . as by their means the price of negroes has been brought from 20 to 40, and £45 per head, to the great oppression and discouragement of the plantations.70

This investment in the slave trade is another key distinction that separates the African Company of the early eighteenth century from the Sierra Leone Company of the later eighteenth century. It is also a key tenet that distinguishes Defoe’s beliefs on economics and commerce from those of Smith. What is most important to Defoe is the stability of English trade to, and particularly from, Africa, and Defoe believes it is the company model that will “give real and sufficient security to the nation to preserve the trade by obliging themselves in the forfeiture of their charter, or such penalties as the government shall think reasonable.”71 Because they are accountable to no one, the independent traders, in the case of the trade to Africa, would be a weak and unreliable link for the English.

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Smith, in Wealth of Nations, lays out a thorough idea of how a joint-stock company operates. He points to the dramatic differences between the nature of what he calls the regulated company and the more preferable joint-stock company. He remarks that “Regulated companies . . . though they had frequently supported public ministers, had never maintained any forts or garrisons in the countries where they traded; whereas joint stock companies frequently had.”72 This fact alone makes the joint-stock company more apt to be a model that lends itself to economic stability and regularity of trade. Protection of trade is of the utmost importance in the torrid zone, and the management of risk in this respect must not be taken for granted. Smith goes on to clarify his stance, which in many ways, mirrors Defoe’s assertions as to why the company trader is more favorable than the independent trader in terms of reliability and vested interest. He points out that “the directors of a regulated company have no particular interest in the prosperity of the general trade of the company, for the sake of which forts or garrisons are maintained,” and that “The decay of that general trade may even frequently contribute to the advantage of their own private trade.”73 However, in contrast, “The directors of a joint stock company . . . having only their share in the profits which are made upon the common stock committed to their management, have no private trade of their own.”74 In the end, because the interest of the joint-stock company shareholder lies primarily in the economic success of the company itself, there can be no conflict of interest. Furthermore, because the nature of the joint-stock company, in terms of risk management, is such that the risk is spread among the shareholders themselves, this means that the risk is shared and managed among a joint group of holders. Smith also points out that “The directors of a joint stock company have always the management of a large capital,” which is another great advantage.75 Smith goes on to speak of the history of English companies in Africa. At the time that Wealth of Nations was written and published, the African Company was the sanctioned English company that handled the trade. However, Smith goes on, at length, to speak of the Royal African Company—the very same company for which Defoe made a very strong case in An Essay Upon the Trade to Africa that I referenced earlier. He writes: The Royal African Company, the predecessors of the present African Company, had an exclusive privilege by charter, but as the charter had not been confirmed by act of parliament, the trade, in consequence of the declaration of rights, was soon after the [Glorious] revolution, laid open to all his majesty’s subjects.76

It seems that Smith points to the same flaw that Defoe also saw as a shortcoming—the lack of official governmental sanction, in turn, allowing a company to have exclusive rights to a certain territorial trade.

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Smith goes on to point out that the African Company’s “stock and credit gradually declined,” and that “In 1712 [the year after Defoe’s piece was written], their debts had become so great, that a particular act of parliament was thought necessary.”77 The nightmarish economic scenario unfolds as Smith writes that “In 1730, their affairs were in so great disorder, that they were altogether incapable of maintaining their forts and garrisons, the sole purpose and pretext of their institution,” with Parliament having to provide the necessary allotment of ten-thousand pounds per year for maintenance.78 This scenario of being unable to financially provide for the upkeep and maintenance of defense fortifications in the supposedly hostile torrid zone proved to be one of the last death blows to the stability of the African Company. In 1732, the African Company went bankrupt, and was dissolved by an Act of Parliament, and the forts and factories on the continent were handed over to the Royal African Company, which was a regulated company. This was the final company predecessor and proponent of slavery before the Sierra Leone Company colonial civilizational model premised on abolition. The Sierra Leone Company was to be the fifth British company to operate on the African continent. Smith writes that, “Before the erection of the Royal African Company, there had been three other joint stock companies successively established, one after another, for the African trade. They were all equally unsuccessful.”79 The Royal African Company would turn out to be a failure, much like the other three attempts before it. However, the Sierra Leone Company would prove to be more of a successful model, specifically because it was not merely a company, but also a civilizational project that sought to engineer a controlled colonial environment. Indeed, the Sierra Leone Company provided the blueprint for the nineteenth-century British colonial model. The colonial apparatus was what bolstered the company’s success—through means of education and diplomacy, the company was able to create an African environment in which many indigenous would come to identify with its economic and civilizational purpose. In the end, though, the reality is that colonies could only be adequately maintained by a mother country or state, and maintenance of the Sierra Leone Company colonial apparatus proved too much to financially bear. As a result, the company would come to be absorbed by the British state as an official British Crown Colony on January 1, 1808.

l By the time of the Sierra Leone Company Report of 1796, there is a detectable shift in company policy and company language because of an attack on the colony in 1794 by the French, who all but destroyed the colonial progress

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made there.80 However, the report takes care to frame the events within the context of civilizational progress: The disadvantages under which the Sierra Leone Colony has laboured, have been, in many respects, peculiarly great; and the expenses attending its institution have been proportionately considerable; nevertheless, every year’s experience seems to have added to the probability of its establishment and future prosperity, and to have afforded fresh proof of the practicality of cultivating and civilizing the Continent of Africa.81

The major setback of the French invasion and destruction of the colony is framed as an event that can be overcome with perseverance and wise fiscal management. The company’s accomplishments are also presented as great steps on the path to a brighter economic future in Africa, which will translate into increased profit. In order to further allay the fears of investors, the company officials take measures “to reduce within narrow limits the whole amount of the risk which the Company was about to incur in Africa; and consequently to contract, in some measure, their speculation in trade, as well as the expenses of their establishment.”82 Speaking on the nature of colonial discourse, Dirks makes the important observation that things or events may not always be as they seem, and that one must look beyond the mode of presentation in order to engage in a critical interrogation of colonial discourse. He writes that, “Serious attention to context (reading contexts as texts) demonstrates how colonial texts did not always mean what they seemed, that colonial discourse was most powerful and most effective, contingent, heterogeneous, circuitous, incomplete, and often contradictory character of colonial forces.”83 It is important to recognize that, “colonial discourse was so powerful because texts and contexts were indistinguishable.”84 This is why it is the task of the surveyor or the analyst of colonial documents to interrogate colonial discourse so as to distinguish between the convoluted mixture of texts and contexts. Deidre Coleman, in Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery, writes of the background events surrounding the French invasion of the Sierra Leone Company colonial settlement. She states that, “On the second of July in 1792, John Clarkson85 drafted a letter to Monsieur Lafayette in Paris, reminding him of the colony’s independence and political neutrality. The grand aim of the settlement was, he argued, the civilization of Africa, a humanitarian aim which transcended all rivalries.”86 In the end, the letter had no effect, and the national rivalry between England and France, who were both at war, resulted in a leveling of the company colony. Coleman also notes that after the attack, tensions were further heightened when the new colonial governor, William McCaulay, accused the repatriated settlers of looting

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company goods during the French attack, and insisting that reparations be made by the settlers. However, the 1796 Report is contextualized as an informational update that expounds on the subject of civilization of the blacks of the colony. It also highlights the supposedly good progress towards civilization of the Nova Scotian repatriates, who were former slaves turned British Loyalists in the American war for independence. The report reads that: The enthusiasm that had prevailed among the Nova Scotians is thought also to have abated, their minds are said to have become more enlightened, and their morals to have improved . . . [and that] Many Nova Scotians have been employed as apprentices under English masters and artificers, and have advanced in the knowledge of more common European arts.87

The goal is to present evidence that the regulated colonial environment, which the company has engineered, is affecting the black inhabitants for the better. We are presented with elements—advancement in “European arts” and moral improvement—that will bolster the chances for the economic success of the colony. The end goal of the directors is to present a picture of a colony that has restabilized itself after the French attack. The discourse is framed in a manner that disguises the real contextual situation on the ground within the company colony. Recall that in the previous chapter that maps the trajectory of African-British treaties from 1787 to 1819, that while there is a decline of indigenous sovereignty and an increase of colonial administrative authority, the conflicts that occurred along the way would ultimately result in establishment of the official Crown Colony by the British government, at the expense of the Sierra Leone Company’s territorial claim. The company’s colonial and civilizational venture was an endeavor that proved to be unsustainable by an individual joint-stock company. The 1796 Report also speaks of the fear and terror that the repatriated Nova Scotians experienced at the hands of the French attack on the colony. This is used as yet another public relations moment for the company to convolute “texts and contexts” in order to dramatically alter an otherwise negative storyline. The report speaks of movement inland by the repatriated settlers, which in turn, is constructed to signify an expansion of the colonial settlement. It reads: Many Nova Scotians had been induced, through terror inspired into those who lived nearest the coast, by the French depredations, to retire further into the country, and to enter upon the cultivation of many distant farm-lots . . . [and that] The produce already growing on some of the farms has been represented, by persons who have come over to England, as extremely valuable.88

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The report also lays out a plan to encourage further settlement inland, again offering the image of a move further inland into the African interior, and that “a few premiums of forty dollars each” have been offered to the prospective settlers in order to undertake such a move inland. Offering up a picture of a budding colonial settlement to investors is the prime goal of these company reports, and anything that offers an image of an economic windfall of profit is worthy as news. By the time of the Sierra Leone Company Report of 1801, the text presents another cause for alarm, for which another diplomatic attempt at public relations is needed in order on quell the fears of potential investors. In addition, with the imminent arrival of 600 Maroons, due to be repatriated from Jamaica, it was important to provide an official update that assured the colonial venture was not a powder keg waiting to explode. The report opens with the following: It appears from these accounts that the unruly spirit of the settlers, which for some time before had been gradually encroaching on the limits of the Company’s authority, had at length broken forth into open revolt. But as this event is in itself an interesting one, and as it may also be productive of very important effects on the future prosperity of the Company’s establishment, the Directors propose to take a retrospect of the circumstances which have led to it.89

The report then goes on to speak of the past hardships the company has endured, including an account of the French attack on the colony. Again, this is a public relations move designed to bolster faith, and offer the image of a company that is resilient and resourceful in dealing with the tests rendered by the African continent and its futile resistance against civilization. The report also speaks about the gripes of the black African settlers against the company, and trivializes the matter as a petty grievance in which the company authorities know best. It reads that “One great complaint has been the high price of European goods: little consideration being had to the difference necessarily occasioned by a state of war, the circumstances of goods being dearer at Sierra Leone than they used to be at Halifax.”90 It points to the fact that the settlers complained of the rents they were forced to pay in Sierra Leone, and petitioned heavily for what the report calls “quit-rents.” The company presents the settlers’ request as irrational and states, “This by their acceptance of the original terms held out to all settlers they had bound themselves to pay.”91 In the company’s eyes, the civilizing and moralizing that the colonial inhabitants received was a privilege, and the economic premise of the colonial mission mandates that nothing should come without a fair price (to be determined by the company authorities).

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After presenting a portrait of ungrateful black colonial settlers that posed a threat to company profits and company stability, as well as a portrait of a benevolent company, willing to take upon itself the moral and civil education of these blacks, the company points to the new Sierra Leone Company Charter of 1800, which was approved by parliament and the king. The report explicitly states: Influenced by these considerations, the Directors made an application to His Majesty in July 1799, for a Charter of Government, which should convey to them, a clear, formal, well-grounded authority, to maintain peace of the settlement, and execute the laws within the Company’s territory.92

In addition to emphasizing that there will be “a small military force” for protection of company assets, the report also takes great care to mention that the new charter has been patterned along the same lines as that of the more economically successful East India Company, which had seen a much greater amount of success than its counterpart in Sierra Leone. Upon interrogating this report account that highlights a new “small” military, as well as a new charter that is based on the model of a more successful company economic venture, it should be clear that this signals a warning sign of trouble ahead for the company. This is particularly evident after having surveyed the course of events of the previous chapter that highlights the Treaty of 1807, which is essentially a treaty of capitulation signed by the Sherbro/Temne warring faction after a lengthy string of conflicts dating back to 1800. When one reads between the lines, and distinguishes between “context and text,” is becomes clear that the company has taken on a task of colony-building that is far beyond its economic and military means. C. A. Bayly comments on the economics of British colonialism, and the great cost of establishing and maintaining empire. He writes, “Military fiscalism on the periphery became a peretuum mobile which far outran, and even endangered, the interests of the very trading concerns it was designed to protect.”93 In the end, the venture of managing an entire colonial settlement in Africa was a task that would prove too burdensome for an individual joint-stock operation like the Sierra Leone Company. The task of establishing and maintaining a regulated colonial space was a task that would be passed onto the British imperial state and the British military in 1808, with the dissolving of the Sierra Leone Company, which would become the African Institution of London. Still, the underlying colonial premise of the Sierra Leone Company remained, and the modern colonial blueprint had been fashioned for nineteenth-century imperialism: creating an economic model that was based on the idea of creating a civilization to support and bolster this economic model was still the

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goal. In addition, what would also remain is the relationship between emerging colonial economic discourse and colonial material practice, that we see exemplified in the company documents, as well as the economic and moral philosophy of figures like Adam Smith.

NOTES 1. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations in British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 2. 2. Brown, Moral Capital, 2. 3. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Bantam Books, 2003). 4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 5. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 31. 6. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 32. It will become evident, through the Reports of the Sierra Leone Companys, that one of the reasons Sierra Leone is valued as a strategic position is precisely because of the inlets that led to the African interior. 7. 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company Court of Directors, 12–13 8. Brown, Moral Capital, 3. 9. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1993), 327. 10. 1791 Report, 13 11. 1791 Report, Front cover preface (unnumbered). 12. Mavis C. Campbell, Back to Africa: George Ross & The Maroons, From Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993), Introduction, vii. Campbell also writes that, “a colony with a group of grateful blacks, carefully nurtured along Western lines, holding themselves aloof from the autochthons and living in symbiotic relationship with them is a model of colonial divide et imperium.” 13. Campbell, Back to Africa, Introduction, vi. Campbell writes, “This is in contrast to the suggestion of [Thomas] Jefferson . . . when in 1802 he made his minister in London approach the Sierra Leone Company to negotiate—unsuccessfully—the transportation of American blacks to the newly founded British Colony.” As part of its strategy of settlement and expansion, the company left nothing to chance. 14. Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company: Colonial Currencies of Gender (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5. Joseph also states that, “As imperial governance came to depend on a massive archival culture, literary, political, economic, and historical texts, the distance between the subjects and objects of knowledge was more than a geographical issue. On the one hand, the rulers, in making alien territory and its people into objects of knowledge, initiated a process that gradually denied the colonized any role in this knowledge production.” 15. Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentality (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 20.

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16. 1791 Report, 18. 17. 1791 Report. 18. 1791 Report, 19. 19. 1791 Report, 19. 20. 1791 Report, 19. 21. 1791 Report, 19. 22. The strategic geographical advantage of the colony is something that is illustrated on Wadstrom’s map of Africa that I utilize throughout chapter 4. 23. Many of the Sierra Leone Company board members, subscribers, and supporters were founders of the African Institution of London, which was committed to pan-African scientific discovery and exploration. The African Institution will be discussed in detail in chapter 4. 24. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 173–74. 25. 1798 Report of the Sierra Leone Company Court of Directors, 17–18. 26. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12. 27. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 35. 28. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 35. Mitchell also writes that, “The same can be said for the monitorial method of schooling, also discussed by Foucault, whose model of improving and disciplining a population . . . came to be considered the model political process.” 29. Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 140. 30. Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 140. 31. Nicholas B. Dirks, “The Crimes of Colonialism: Anthropology and the Textualization of India,” in Colonial Subjects: Essays in the Practical History of Anthropology, eds. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 175. Dirks also states that, “The state produces, adjudicates, organizes, and maintains the discourses that become available as the ‘primary’ texts of history.” 32. 1798 Report, 19. 33. In reference to this insurrection that occurred in 1794, the 1801 Report of the Sierra Leone Company reads, “The proprietors will perceive that the Nova Scotia settlers had begun, at a very early period of their residence at Sierra Leone, to manifest a very ungovernable and refractory disposition, as well as a degree of jealousy and suspicion in their intercourse with the Company’s European servants, which was utterly unreasonable. These tempers, which a very trivial occurrence would occasionally enflame, had continued from the first to give considerable uneasiness of the Governor and Council; and in June 1794, they issued an insurrection which had nearly produced an overthrow of the Colony, but which had happily terminated in the complete discomfiture of the insurgents, and the banishment of their ringleaders”(2). 34. 1798 Report, 19. 35. 1791 Report, 21.

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36. 1791 Report. 37. 1791 Report. 38. 1791 Report. 39. 1791 Report. 40. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 35. 41. 1791 Report, 23 42. 1796 Report of the Sierra Leone Company, 13. 43. 1796 Report, 13–14. 44. 1796 Report, 14. 45. 1798 Report, 19. 46. 1798 Report, 19–20. 47. Brown, Moral Capital, 155. 48. Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 219 49. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 213. 50. Festa, Sentimental Figures, 213. 51. Recall that many of the Sierra Leone Company Reports are framed with individual sectional headings that read Trade, Civilization, Cultivation, Education, Morality, and Health. 52. Brown, Moral Capital, 115. 53. Brown, Moral Capital. 54. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 113. 55. Smith, Wealth of Nations. 56. Smith, Wealth of Nations. 57. I label this reference to David Hume important because we must realize that these ideas were not conceived in philosophical vacuums, nor did they remain in isolated vacuums after their philosophical conception. In the next chapter—chapter 4—it will become evident that the idea exchange is quite global in nature, particularly when it comes to emerging natural science. 58. Donald Winch, “Adam Smith: Scottish Moral Philosopher as Political Economist,” in The Historical Journal. 35.1 (March 1992), 92. 59. Winch, “Adam Smith: Scottish,” 94. 60. Smith, Theory of Moral, 239. 61. Smith, Theory of Moral, 240. 62. See passage above. 63. Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments, 242 64. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 805. 65. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 805–6. 66. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 806. 67. Brown, Moral Capital, 263. 68. Daniel Defoe, An essay upon the trade to Africa, in order to set the merits of that cause in a true light and bring the disputes between the African Company (London, 1711), 5 69. Defoe, An essay upon, 42.

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70. Defoe, An essay upon, 43. 71. Defoe, An essay upon, 45. 72. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 935. 73. Smith, Wealth of Nations. 74. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 935–36. 75. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 936. 76. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 942. 77. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 942. 78. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 942. 79. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 943. 80. The 1801 Report of the Sierra Leone Company states that the “pleasing course of things was, however, interrupted by the capture of Freetown by a French Squadron, in October, 1794, an event calculated in itself to produce much disorder, and the effect of which was aggravated at Sierra Leone by the peculiar circumstances of the Colony,” 2. 81. 1796 Report, 14-15. 82. 1796 Report, 5. 83. Nicholas B. Dirks, “From Little King to Landlord: Colonial Discourse and Colonial Rule,” in Colonialiam and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 175. 84. Dirks, “From Little King.” 85. Governor of the Sierra Leone Company Colony, who was dismissed in 1793 prior to the French attack in 1794. 86. Dierdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 127. 87. 1796 Report, 12. The “enthusiasm” to which the 1796 Report refers is related to the Joseph Tybee case. Recall that earlier in this chapter, I pointed to the case of Joseph Tybee, the Nova Scotian, who was banished from the Company colony for inciting insurrection in 1794 (noted in the 1798 Report). 88. 1796 Report, 9–10 89. 1801 Report of the Sierra Leone Company, 1. 90. 1801 Report, 7. 91. 1801 Report. 92. 1801 Report. 93. C. A. Bayly, “The British and Indigenous Peoples, 1760–1860: Power, Perception, and Identity,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, ed. Martin Daunton and Richard Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 23. Bayly also states that, “British territorial expansion throughout the empire beyond the West Indies between 1760 and 1830 was driven centrally by the need to finance and provision imperial armies from local resources. It was redoubled by the resistance of indigenous peoples to that very expansion.”

Chapter Four

Natural Science, Exploration, and the Colonial Project in West Africa

This chapter consists of an exploration of the emergent natural science of the long eighteenth century (i.e. anthropology, geography, cartography, etc.) and its place in the emerging colonial project of the period as it related to the African continent. Where the previous chapter examined how evolving economic theory contributed to the emerging British colonial project of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; here in chapter 4, I intend to look at the ways that an emerging anthropological science, and emerging scientific methodology were bolstered by individuals like the German Johann Blumenbach, who wrote his famous On the Natural Varieties of Mankind in 1775, and the Swede C.B. Wadstrom, who wrote An Essay on Colonization Particularly Applied to the Coast of West Africa in 1794. The long eighteenth century also gave rise to what I will dub “the age of the scientific proto-colonial institution”1 like the African Institution of London, which was established in 1807 upon the demise of the Sierra Leone Company.2 Dirks, to whom I make reference earlier in this book, makes an important epistemological observation about the collusion of the colonial project and a long-eighteenth-century era of science and scientific discovery. He remarks that, “Science flourished in the eighteenth century not merely because of intense curiosity of individuals working in Europe, but because colonial expansion both necessitated and facilitated the active exercise of the scientific imagination.”3 More importantly, the methodologies that continued to expand and evolve during the period played an important role in the emerging European colonial project within Africa. This is a fact that will become very clear as I progress though my examination of the travel writing and cartography of Sweden’s Wadstrom, the scientific anthropology of Germany’s Blumenbach, and the institutional work of England’s African Institution, which sought to promote these scientific ventures in Africa. “It was through discovery—the 89

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sitting, surveying, mapping, naming, and ultimately possessing of new regions that science itself could open new territories of conquest: cartography, botany, geography, anthropology were all colonial enterprises.”4 It is also quite important to emphasize that the economic aspect that I examined in chapter 3 still remains quite important and connected to the scientific subject matter here in chapter 4. In fact, I have purposely succeeded the previous chapter on colonial economics with this chapter on protocolonial science because of the natural link that exists between the two. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt speaks about this link between the mutual engagement between natural history and European economic and political expansionism. She states that “Natural history asserted an urban, lettered, male authority over the whole planet; it elaborated a rationalizing, extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional, experiential relations among people, plants, and animals. In this respect, it figures a certain kind of global hegemony.”5 The documents I explore in the three sections of this chapter—Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization, Blumenbach’s scientific anthropological treatises, and Reports of the African Institution of London—demonstrate that when economics and science are brought together in an emerging colonial project, as they are during this age, they are combined with the intention and belief that both fields will enhance one another. In fact, more often than not, the great hope is that scientific discovery will lead to enhanced economic profit or profit potential as the result of a greater amount of knowledge about the African continent itself. The desire for scientific knowledge of the African continent—be it anthropological, geographical, and so forth—seemed to be highly valued regardless of the national origin from whence it came. In the European contexts, certainly this was a period of strengthening nationalism and competition between emerging national characters, however, when it came to scientific or pseudo-scientific information that might potentially help a European continent tame and reap the fruits of the African continent, national competitors became scientific allies in a quest to increase an everexpanding web of European knowledge about Africa. Pratt makes the observation that, “The eighteenth-century systematizing of nature was a European knowledge-building project that created a new kind of Eurocentered planetary consciousness.”6 This translates into a science of bias that leans in favor of familiarity and “European-ness,” and against the nonfamiliar and non-European. Perhaps Said puts it best when he remarks that “No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of society.”7 When one explores and interrogates the

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works of Wadstrom, Blumenbach, or the Reports of the African Institution of London, as I do in this chapter, it is vitally important to remember the eighteenth and nineteenth century epistemological contexts to which they belong. I approach the texts in this chapter, much like I have approached the literature in chapter 1, or the African-British treaties of chapter 2, or the economic discourse of chapter 3—with the awareness that these scholars and institutions are a product of the period in which they existed. What is evident, as we read the works of Wadstrom, Blumenbach, and the Reports of the African Institution, is a thirst for knowledge of the nonEuropean Other, and in this case Africa. This demand for knowledge takes the form of a protocolonial science that proudly takes on the mission of investigating the “unknown” regions of the world inhabited by non-Europeans. However, while a thirst or demand for knowledge about the non-European world is one of the driving forces behind these protocolonial scientific investigations, it is not the only impetus. This drive for knowledge also carries with it an overwhelming desire for an ordering of the non-European world (in this case Africa), so that it might fit comfortably into the European schematic of world order. It is evident that the works of Wadstrom, Blumenbach, and the Reports of the African Institution, are charged with the task of ordering Africa into a convenient taxonomic table or orderly schematic that is fit for consumption by European audiences. I would label this impetus for gaining knowledge about the non-European world, and in this case, the ordering of the African world, as a desire to render comfortable and familiar that which is deemed unfamiliar, and therefore, anxiety-provoking and savage. The unfamiliar and savage world was often referred to as the “natural world,” and the protocolonial science of the long eighteenth century sought to determine the “natural order” of this world.8 Foucault also speaks about the European penchant and desire for creating an “order of things” to render the unfamiliar natural (or non-European) world familiar. He asserts that, “The center of knowledge, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is the table” and that “the Classical episteme can be defined in its most general arrangement in terms of the articulated system of mathesis, a taxinomia, and a genetic analysis.”9 The long eighteenth-century protocolonial science represents a quest to construct a progressive spectrum of natural world order that places the European at the pinnacle of this order. If the European side of the spectrum represents “progress,” then the African side of the table represents the antithesis of this notion of “progress.” This vision of a science that is systematically created and formulated in order to form a coherent table or coherent worldview is a long eighteenth-century reality that we explore in this chapter.

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Whether we are dealing with Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization, which attempts to paint a picture of a colonial alternative that will replace the slave trade, while undertaking a geographical and anthropological survey of Africa; or Blumenbach’s On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, which paints an ordered world-system of creation; or the Reports of the African Institution, which serves as a receptacle for gathering protocolonial scientific information about the African continent from as many sources as available, these scientists and explorers are engaged in the act of constructing limited and systematically structured worldviews.10

C. B. WADSTROM AND THE SCIENCE OF CARTOGRAPHY, EXPLORATION, AND COLONIZATION Upon first inspection, this section on Wadstrom’s cartography, exploration, and colonization, might seem better suited for the previous chapter, especially because Wadstrom was a strong advocate of colonial expansion, as well as the British Sierra Leone Company that I examined in chapter 3.11 However, Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization, which points to the economic profit potential of West Africa (and the African continent as a whole), is borne out of an anthropological and geographical exploration of West Africa that ended in the year 1788. One of Wadstrom’s key traveling partners was “Dr. A. Sparrman, known to the public by his voyages to the Cape of Good Hope, and round the world with the celebrated [Captain] Cook.”12 Shortly after his expedition, and a debriefing by the British Parliamentary Privy Council, Wadstrom published a very small tract called Observations on the Slave Trade in a Voyage to the Coast of Guinea (1789), which established his credentials as a staunch abolitionist and advocate of African colonialism. However, it is his massive two-part Essay on Colonization, occupying over 600 pages, in which we see Wadstrom’s vision for a world void of slavery, and what he believes can be a great boon for the civilization of Africa and European commerce. A substantial knowledge gain and sharp learning curve about the African continent is an important key to the potential civilizational and economic success Wadstrom envisions, which is why science and exploration figure very prominently. In Wadstrom’s Essay, it is evident that he utilizes an anthropological gaze to study Africa and Africans along the way. Indeed, behavior analysis and modification of Africa and Africans seems to be a large part of his colonialist scientific agenda, because it is these modifications that will lead to the so-called advancement of Africa and the expansion of European commerce and profits (as I also demonstrated through the Sierra Leone

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Company model). This is the primary reason that his Essay also reads like an anthropological study. The visual picture that Wadstrom constructs is precisely what a scholar like Foucault (or Pratt) means when he asserts that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “sciences always carry within themselves the project . . . of an exhaustive ordering of the world” and that “they are always directed . . . towards the discovery of simple elements and their progressive combination.”13 The title Essay on Colonization itself suggests that there is a linear sequence of natural civilizational “progress” that exists, and that while Europe lies at one end—the positive end—of the linear sequence, Africa exists at the other negative end of the linear sequence. By this line of reasoning, it follows that European colonization, itself, is the most efficient means through which Africa could possibly reach the height of European progress. The anthropological study that Wadstrom embarks upon in his Essay on Colonization might be characterized as an attempt to create an exhaustive study of West Africa, and the Sierra Leone region in particular, because it is only through gaining firm knowledge of the continent that Europeans might come to successfully colonize Africa and supposedly enable the continent to enter into an era of civilization and industriousness.

l The map of Africa that Wadstrom crafts for his Essay on Colonization speaks volumes about his vision for Africa, and creates the same visual image of a potentially fruitful African landscape that Wadstrom expounds upon in his Essay. The implied idea is that the African continent requires European ingenuity to render it economically and civilizationally productive. As we can see in the upper right hand corner of Wadstrom’s map, the full heading reads Nautical Map Intended for the use of Colonial Undertakings on the W. Coast of Africa from Lat 5.30 to Lat 14.N but More Particularly those of Sierra Leona and the Island of Bulama (see Figure 4.1). Wadstrom also takes special care to write that the map is “Respectfully Dedicated to the Humane and Disinterested Promoters of Those & Similar Establishments.” The claim of “humaneness” and “disinterest” is in keeping with the tone of benevolence that Wadstrom hopes to convey throughout the Essay. Wadstrom also takes much care to emphasize this tone of benevolence in a special advertisement included at the conclusion of Part I of his Essay. He states: It would give the author great pain, if in delivering his free, but conscientious, opinions on subjects so very interesting to humanity, his language should

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unfortunately be misunderstood, especially so misunderstood, as to suggest the repetition of Colonial attempts, on principles, merely pecuniary, mercantile, or in short, mercenary. His meaning is to reprobate such principles [ . . . ] The period indeed seems fast approaching, if it has not yet arrived . . . when persons of property, discarding all commercial maxims, and adopting those of benevolence, which is but another word for true policy, will successfully labour to reconcile self interest with the interests of mankind.14

While understanding, like Adam Smith, what economic benefits can be reaped from the African continent, Wadstrom moves beyond purely economic terms in hopes of supposedly aligning “self-interest with the interests of mankind.” It is here that the scientifically anthropological mode of thinking takes hold. In theory, by coming to understand a continent and its inhabitants, as one would understand scientific subject matter, a colonial project could learn to manage, if not control, the environmental variables of Africa that would lead to economic success. In addition to the Advertisement, the fact that Wadstrom also inscribes on his map, a dedication to the “promoters of those and similar establishments,” points to the global nature of Wadstrom’s colonial vision that we will speak of later on. It is important to note here in 1794, some 91 years before the infamous Berlin Conference of 1885, 15 where European nations met to literally and figuratively carve up the African continent, we see a significant collaboration (albeit in the case of 1794, a quest for knowledge of Africa) of a similar nature between European nations that cuts beyond national boundaries. It is interesting to note the map, itself, is created for promoters of “similar establishments,” and that in the specific promoters we see multiple nationalities represented on Wadstrom’s map: Sweden (Wadstrom himself), England (the 1794 path of explorers Watt and Winterbottom is pointed out), France (both Madagascar and the African map of Pierre D’Anville are represented), and the Netherlands (Biorn, Esq. Governor of the Danish settlements is mentioned on the map). Another image that is representative of Wadstrom’s vision for Africa can be located at the upper right hand corner of the map (see Figure 4.1). There are two distinct landmasses that are separated by a channel of water that stands in the middle. It is easily discernable that the landmass on the left-hand side, complete with a black male figure clothed in only a loincloth, represents Africa. The white female figure, who is standing fully clothed on the opposite landmass, represents Europe. The hand that the European female figure (almost resembling a “lady liberty” or “lady civilization” of sorts) is extending, across the channel, toward the black male figure represents the gift of European civilization that Wadstrom envisions being bestowed upon Africa. The

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Figure 4.1. This image from C.B. Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization Particularly Applied to the West Coast of Africa (London, 1794). The image is emblematic and represents eighteenth-century colonial perceptions of dialogic interaction between Africa and Europe.

benevolent figure of Cupid is also seen hovering above lady of civilization and the European landmass, and moving in the direction of Africa across the channel. It is also no coincidence that instruments of land cultivation, like a shovel, lay at the feet of our “lady of civilization.” In stark contrast, however, the black figure across the channel stands with his feet chained, and looks across eagerly awaiting the gifts of European civilization. The landmass on which he stands is represented as one that is teeming with vegetation or unkempt bush, as well as an exotic palm tree in the distant background. I think it quite important to point to the female figure that stands on the shore, extending her hand to the male African figure. We should take note that there are no distinguishing characteristics that mark the female figure as English, or French, or Swedish. She simply stands as a European figure, upon the European shoreline, extending the supposedly exclusive gift of European civilization. Wadstrom’s map presents an image of a European cooperative union—white skin color and the civilizational traits that are

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supposedly exclusive to this pigmentation, is the unifying factor. In fact, the caption below the map speaks to this pan-Europeanism, particularly since there are several contributors from European states mentioned: This chart has been drawn from the most authentic charts, maps, and descriptions of the coast, viz: those of D’anville, Bellin, Adanson, Denmanet, Desmarches, Norris, Matthews, & Sr. Geo. Young, and from conversations with respectable persons who have resided on the coast, particularly—Biorn Esq. Governor of the Danish Settlements, H.H. Dalrymple Esq., Dr. A. Afzelius, an eminent Botanist, employ’d by the S. Leona Co . . . as also from many observations & draughts of the Editor [Wadstrom] & information acquired by him, during a voyage performed in years 1787 & 1788 by order and at the expense of their late Majesties the Kings of Sweden & France (see Figure 4.2).

It is evident that throughout the materials I explore in this chapter, when it comes to scientific information—whether geographical, anthropological, and so forth—the boundaries of competitive national zeal collapse because this is a continental effort to cultivate the African continent for the benefit of Europe itself. Another distinguishing feature of Wadstrom’s map is the detailed information about the landscape, particularly in terms of the navigability of the rivers going inland, as well as the coastal tides. For instance, if we look to the center of the map, a large detailed drawing of the River Grande can be seen (see Figure 4.3). When we look at the western part of the river towards the mouth, we will notice the caption enclosed by the dotted semicircle that lies south of the mouth. It states that “according to Mr. Beaver’s account, there is no chart of the part within this line to be depended on,” meaning that there exists a significant knowledge gap that could be potentially threatening to any inland trade that utilizes the River Grande. In addition, if we follow the track of the river from west to east, we notice the caption that reads, “Riv Grand is not laid down in Capt Norris’ chart farther that 13 (degrees), 15’ W. Long: He says it is navigable for 150 leagues, which seems to have taken from Abbe Denament, but Mr. Beaver who sailed up in 1793 to Ghinala thinks that it cannot be navigated so high. It is laid down here from Bellin” (see Figure 4.3). Indeed, the River Grand, because of its favorable size, and with it, the ability to accommodate merchant vessels for purposes of trade, made it geographically favorable. That the island of Bulama, which lies at the mouth of the river, is also another favorable geographical factor since it can be used as a colonial staging area in the same way that Goree Island was once used as a staging area for the slave trade. Another important piece of navigational information is located at the left edge of the map where, toward the center, we see the heading “Sailing

Figure 4.2. This image is taken from C.B. Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization (London, 1794). The map and captions are part of a larger map that was created for, and paired with, Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization in 1794.

Figure 4.3. This image of the “River Grande” is part of a larger map of West Africa that was created for C.B. Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization (London, 1794).

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remarks communicated to the editor by the officers of Senegal C at Harve De Grace. 1787” (see Figure 4.4). Most importantly, it reads: Westward of Cape Blanco it (the current) sets SE & ESE & with so much violence that if the coast should be discovered the navigator will be obliged to run WSW by the compass in order to avoid the shelves to the latitude of 18 (degrees), 30 N after which he may rather more safely approach nearer to the coast all the way down. These remarks should be seriously attended to for all the NW part of the coast of Africa is generally so very low that the land cannot be seen till the ship urged by the current especially during a calm is too near to recede from it. In cases of shipwreck on this inhospitable shore the crews are generally murdered or made slaves by the Moors. (see Figure 4.4)

Wadstrom’s contribution to the growing collective European pool of information about Africa indicates the trope of fear of the unknown that the continent holds for the European imagination. The geography is to be feared because it both literally and figuratively creeps upon unsuspecting navigators. The hope is that strengthening knowledge of the seascape of the region will abate the dangers of African geography. Even still, the Moors that inhabit that particular region of coastal Northwest Africa are not presented as subtly as the geography we see on the map. The “shore” is characterized as inhospitable, and the trope of the murderous African Moor is evoked. At the bottom right hand corner of the map in the southwest corner, we come upon Cape Mezurado, which has a river by the same name that flows inland toward a small mountain range. It is interesting to note that the caption at the river’s end, attributed to the Cheval Des Marchais, reads “All this part abounds with gold.” At the mouth of the River Mezurado, it is written, “At this place it was proposed by the Chev Des Marches to the French Government to establish a colony which might have proved of great importance, the place being particularly healthy, productive of many valuable articles and inhabited by a peaceable and good kind of people” (see Figure 4.5). The interesting thing about this caption is that the geographical and anthropological language used here, which speaks of “healthy land” and “peaceable people,” is similar to that which is said of Sierra Leone itself. Indeed, the fact that gold is present in the region also provided great impetus for Chev De Marches’ proposition. The final portion of Wadstrom’s grand map that I will point to is actually a map of the African continent produced by the Frenchman Pierre D’anville. Wadstrom takes care to note that the shaded portion of D’anville’s map in the northwestern portion of Africa covers the extent of his (Wadstrom’s) own map. The most significant portion of D’anville’s map that I will point to, for

Figure 4.4. This map of West African coastline and the navigational remarks are part of a larger map of West Africa created for C.B. Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization (London, 1794).

Figure 4.5. This map of Cape Mezurado and the river tributaries is part of C.B. Wadstrom’s larger map of West Africa created for Essay on Colonization (London, 1794).

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my own purposes here, is located in the southeast corner of the map just below Madagascar (see Figure 4.6 and Figure 4.7). There we see a heading that reads Hints for Colonizing Madagascar, and underneath it reads: The editor (Wadstrom) has been consulted about some plan for providing the unfortunate French emigrants who, if an asylum be not soon prepared for them, are likely to become more burdensome that the loyalists were to Great Britain, after the American Revolution. There are indeed several obvious and urgent reasons for relieving the neighboring countries, especially England from the expence of maintaining this numerous body of men, at a period when many industrious tradesmen, manufacturers, and labourers are so much distressed. As the editor’s opinion has been asked he will venture to suggest that they might be encouraged to form themselves into a colony. It appears to him that the Isle of Madagascar would be found more congenial to the character and constitution of Frenchmen than any other part of the world that is not already claimed or occupied by Europeans; and it appears the native princes would readily sell to a pacifick people lands sufficient for such an undertaking. (see Figure 4.7)

Wadstrom, with the help of Frenchman Pierre D’anville’s map, proposes a solution to the French, for their own Black Poor or “African problem,” which mirrors the Sierra Leone Company venture.16 It also becomes quite clear, through this caption on Wadstrom’s map, that what lies at the core of these African colonial ventures bent on repatriation is not genuine benevolence, but instead, an overwhelming desire to relieve the mother country of a black or African burden of sorts. In doing so, the mother country is also intent on creating a colonized civilization in the form of a black colony that is, in many ways, linked and dependent on the metropole for trade, while also creating profit for the metropole. In the end, it becomes clear that the geographical and anthropological focus within the archival documents explored in this chapter utilize, not only take stock and categorize an African continent, but also create a protocolonial portrait or blueprint, and by utilizing the sciences of geography and anthropology focus, to determine what shape the non-European world should take. Natural history, or the anthropology that we see in Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization did not become possible because men looked harder and more closely, it became possible because men like Wadstrom, Blumenbach, or the men of the African Institution chose to impose the conditions of possibility for nonEuropean space (in this case Africa).17 These men and institutions of Europe took it upon themselves to define the conditions of possibility. I think that Akintola Wyse puts it best when he writes, “It (Sierra Leone) was meant as an experiment in social and cultural engineering: the founders hoped that by creating the right conditions, an opportunity would be given to emancipated

Figure 4.6. This map of Africa by Frenchman Pierre D’anville is included as part of C.B. Wadstrom’s larger map of Africa that was created for Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization (London, 1794).

Figure 4.7. This map of Africa by Frenchman Pierre D’anville is included as part of C.B. Wadstrom’s larger map of Africa that was created for Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization (London, 1794).

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Africans settled in the Peninsula to evolve a free and self governing black community patterned on Western civilization.”18

l Wadstrom, in many ways, takes abolitionist rhetoric to a new level in his Essay on Colonization, because he not only calls for abolition, but he advocates a colonial solution in West Africa. He includes, with the Essay, the plate of a slave ship (see Figure 4.8), that diagrams in detail the inhumane and cattlelike manner in which slaves are stowed on a ship for transport to the New World.19 However, it is quite clear that abolition serves as a launching point for his vision of the benefits the colonization of Africa could hold for Europe. Wadstrom takes great care to establish his premise at the outset of his introduction to the Essay. He writes: The reader has no doubt, by this time, discovered that this person who now addresses him is a zealous friend to the Africans. But it is presumed that his zeal is not inconsistent with sober truth; and that friendship with the Africans is not incompatible with friendship to the Europeans, and all mankind. The author has ever thought that the most likely way to promote the civilization of mankind, would be to lead their activity into the cultivation of their country[ . . . ] Thus cultivation and commerce established upon right principles, rendering the mind active, would early dispose it for the reception of pure moral instruction.20

Wadstrrom labels himself a “zealous friend of the Africans” and makes it a point to stress that African and European “friendship” is not “incompatible” since both comprise that which he calls “mankind.” While he acknowledges the humanity of the African, and chooses to integrate Africans into his vision of “mankind,” he chooses to do so by placing African and Africans at the lower rung of a linear progressive order. What we will come to see is that Wadstrom, through his pseudoanthropological and pseudoscientific discourse creates a sort of scientific method or mode of analysis that he uses to create a visual picture of the Africa that he sees, and the Africa that he envisions if his colonial vision is enacted. Wadstrom utilizes this scientific method in an attempt to refute the idea that Africans are incapable of being raised to levels of cultivation and civilization from the supposedly low depths of humanity that they occupy. He remarks that: The opposers of the colonization of Africa would have it believed, that the natives are incurably stupid and indolent: but I have in my possession the means of proving the contrary; for on a question put to me in a committee of the British House of Commons, I offered to produce specimens of their manufactures

Figure 4.8. This plate of a slave ship is included as part of C.B. Wadstrom’s Essay on Colonization (London, 1794). Within the Essay, Wadstrom explains that the plate was presented to him by the Committee of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1794).

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in iron, gold, fillagree work, leather, cotton, matting, and basket-work, some of which equal any articles of the kind fabricated in Europe, and that with proper encouragement, they would make excellent workmen.21

In the face of claims against African humanity, Wadstrom gives what he believes to be concrete and unmistakable proof of African industriousness. Foucault makes reference to the four variables that the natural historian seeks out in order to create a portrait with regard to the construction of an object of study. He labels them: “the form of the elements, the quantity of those elements, the manner in which they are distributed in space in relation to each other, and the relative magnitude of each element,” all of which are utilized to create the portrait that fits the desired ends.22 Wadstrom both concentrates on the manner in which detractors of Africa manipulate these elements for their own purposes, while he also utilizes these elements for his own desired ends of building a case for colonization of Africa. He writes: Climate, diet, occupation, and a variety of other less considerable causes contribute their share to the general effect [of the character of nations]. It is not, however, by abstract reasonings alone, on the separate or combined influence of those causes that the character of a nation can be ascertained; but actual observations on their genius and conduct must be attended to. Such observations cannot be too numerous; nor can general conclusions be too cautiously drawn from them.23

Wadstrom then offers a critique of what he sees as biased accounts that have been offered by detractors of the African continent. One might even say that he criticizes them on the heavy presence of bias and lack of a pseudoscientific analysis that Wadstrom himself seems to employ. He asserts, “The accounts of African governors and other slave merchants, have been but too implicitly followed by authors of no small note, who were never in Africa, and who did not suspect the writers they quoted were interested in misleading them.”24 Wadstrom continues to offer a defense of Africa and Africans based on the linear model of progress, and speaks about education and civilizing in pseudoanthropological terms as they apply to European and African relations. He writes that: Societies may be divided into the civilized and the uncivilized; and the duties of the former to the latter are similar to those of parents to children; for uncivilized nations, like children, are governed by their affections, their understanding being uncultivated. If we feel within ourselves a principle which teaches us to seek our own happiness in that of our offspring; ascending from particulars to generals, we shall find, that civilized nations ought, for their own advantage, sincerely to promote the happiness of the uncivilized [ . . . ] As the tutelage of children is

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a state of subjection; so it would seem that civilized nations have perhaps some right to exercise a similar dominion over the uncivilized, provided that this dominion be considered and exercised as a mild paternal yoke.25

That Wadstrom is advocating abolition is not in doubt, however, the irony is that the very same linear vision of progress and civilization that some use to justify the enslavement of Africans, is the same linear vision of progress that Wadstrom utilizes to justify colonization of Africa. The key difference is that the harsh and violent yoke of slavery is to be replaced with a milder paternal colonial yoke. The model of East-West relations that Edward Said offers in Orientalism might be a fitting one here, as he remarks that “The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior.”26 Europe is placed in the seat of human progress and humanity as a whole, while Africa is presented as the passive subject that must be analyzed and inevitably reconstructed and refashioned through the colonial system. This notion of a model of linear progress is especially important to remember as we turn to the anthropological science of the German Johann Blumenbach in the next section. There is the shift from the unscientific and extremely reflexive humanist philosophy, to the supposedly scientific anthropological philosophizing of Blumenbach, who actually makes it a point to recognize the humanity of the African (albeit at the supposedly most underdeveloped rung of human existence in a progressive order). THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF BLUMENBACH AND THE EXAMINATION OF AFRICA Daniel Chodowiecki’s artistic rendering the “African or Ethiopian variety” of human beings from Johan Blumenbach’s “Five Varieties of Mankind,” done in 1790, speaks volumes about the image of Africa through European eyes during this period. Blumenbach’s Division of Mankind into Five Principal Races comes to us from section XII of his Contributions to Natural History. He builds upon the original system of four varieties of man laid out by Carrolus Linnaeus, but proceeds to add a fifth race—The Malay. The taxonomic endeavors that Blumenbach and his contemporaries engaged in can be labeled a science of order and progress. “Taxinomia . . . treats the identities and differences; it is the science of articulations and classifications; it is the knowledge of beings.”27 The taxonomic approach operates under the inherent premise that there is a genesis from which a progressive order can be constructed, and this in turn means that a constructed and concocted order of human progression can be deduced as well.

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Blumenbach specifically states that “no other definite boundaries can be drawn between these varieties, especially if, as is but fair, respect is had not only to one or the other, but also to the peculiarities of a natural system, dependent upon all bodily indications alike.”28 The indication is that all varieties of human beings, in spite of their differences in pigmentation, are similar to one another in the physical sense. Blumenbach lays out these five categories and definitions: 1. The Caucasian Race. The Europeans, with the exception of the Lapps, and the rest of the true Finns, and the western Asiatics this side of the Obi, the Caspian Sea, and the Ganges along with the people of North Africa. In one word, the inhabitants of nearly all the world known to the ancient Greeks and Romans. They are more or less white in colour, with red cheeks, and, according to the European conception of beauty in the countenance and shape of the skull, the most handsome of men. 2. The Mongolian. The remaining Asiatics, except the Malays, with the Lapps in Europe, and the Esquimaux in the north of America, from the Behring’s Straits to Labradour and Greenland. They are for the most part of a wheaten yellow, with scantly, straight, black hair, and have flat faces with laterally projecting cheek-bones, and narrowly slit eyelids. 3. The Ethiopian. The rest of the Africans, more or less black, generally with curly hair, jaw-bones projecting forwards, puffy lips, and snub noses. 4. The American. The rest of the Americans; generally tan-coloured, or like molten copper, with long straight hair, and broad, but not withal flat face, but with strongly distinctive marks. 5. The Malay. The South-sea islanders, or the inhabitants of the fifth part of the world, back again to the East Indies, including the Malays, properly so called. They are generally of brownish colour (from clear mahogany to the very deepest chestnut), with thick black ringleted hair, broad nose, and large mouth.29 Virtually all of the categorical definitions and descriptions of the five varieties are ethnographic, and deal primarily with physical appearance only. In fact, the only point at which Blumenbach slips in terms of his objectively scientific analysis comes when he self-reflexively remarks that the Caucasian variety is “the most handsome of men.” Said speaks about this type of scientific gaze of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that operates on a linear progressive model, which places non-European human beings at the lower rung of the human species. He writes that: A more knowledgeable attitude towards the alien and erotic was abetted not only by travelers and explorers but also by historians for whom European experience

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could profitably be compared with other, as well as older, civilizations. That powerful current in eighteenth-century historical anthropology, described by scholars as the confrontation of the gods, meant that Gibbon could read the lessons of Rome’s decline in the rise of Islam, just as Vico could understand modern civilization in terms of the barbaric, poetic splendor of their earliest beginnings.30

The scientific anthropological gaze of Blumenbach, which enabled him to place human beings into varying taxonomic rungs of progressive levels, meant that he and his contemporaries like Wadstrom, institutions like The African Institution and Sierra Leone Company, could scientifically justify the use of colonialism to raise the level of humanity of Africa and African. It also offers a sort of scientific grounding for usurpation of land and creation of colonial territory. “Throughout the eighteenth century, simple comparativism was the early phase of the comparative disciplines (philology, anatomy, jurisprudence, religion)” and to add to the parenthetical list that Said constructs here, I would also add the emerging colonial system that would lead to colonial enterprise of the nineteenth century.31 The reproduction of Chodowiecki’s plate depicts the figure of an African male dressed only in what amounts to a holding sack for his genitals (less forgiving than Wadstrom’s depiction we saw earlier), while holding an oar. Lying in front of this male figure is a female figure, who is reclining upon the bare ground, utilizing a clump of earth as a makeshift pillow to elevate herself (see Figure 4.9 and 4.10). She is also clothed in a loincloth and remains bare-breasted and suckling a baby, while a younger male figure is knelt and toiling away beside her. In the background, there are various figures in dugout canoes who are engaged in fishing activities. However, I think that the most interesting feature upon which to concentrate in this plate is the African landscape itself, because its depiction says much about prevalent European thoughts about Africa and Africans. The landscape is presented as a sort of untamed and unkempt bush with a small hut lying in the background. Indeed, the clump of earth that the female figure uses as a sort of furniture piece speaks volumes as well. The landscape presents the image of an unindustrious people who have not learned how to tame the earth, but have instead supposedly become subjugated by the African landscape itself. If the African figures are compared with the two other plate depictions that are represented—the Caucasian or white variety, and the Mongolian or Yellow variety—the dramatic differences in terms of landscape alone are immediately noticeable. The male and female Caucasian figures are depicted indoors, reclining in a beautifully carpeted Ottoman-type furniture piece, while the Yellow or Mongolian variety of human beings are situated in a garden or sanctuary-like setting. The landscape is presented as well-kempt, and the male and female figures are presented as genteel (see Figure 4.9 and Figure

Figure 4.9. These renderings of Johann Blumenbach’s “Five Varieties of Humankind” were created by the artist Daniel Chodowiecki, and included in Blumenbach’s Beytrage zur Naturgeschichte, 1807 edition. (Thanks to the New York Public Library—Humanities Rare Books Division.)

Figure 4.10. These renderings of Johann Blumenbach’s “Five Varieties of Humankind” were created by the artist Daniel Chodowiecki, and included in Blumenbach’s Beytrage zur Naturgeschichte, 1807 edition. (Thanks to the New York Public Library—Humanities Rare Books Division.)

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4.10). David Bindman remarks, “In the end, Europeans and Caucasians are for Blumenbach simply the most beautiful peoples, and in their whiteness preserve a potential for moral purity.”32 However, as we will see later in this chapter, his scientific anthropological study also caused him to believe in the humanity of the African, where philosophers like Kant, Hume, and Rousseau could not. Blumenbach believed that, in spite of the black skin of the African, which supposedly rendered them inferior, the human status of the African could still be raised. In fact, from his Contributions to Natural History, Blumenbach, in the section entitled “Of the Negro in Particular” writes: “God’s image he too,” as Fuller says, “although made out of ebony.” This has been doubted sometimes, and, on the contrary, it has been asserted that the negroes are specifically different in their bodily structure from other men, and must also be placed considerably in the rear, from the condition of their obtuse mental capacities [ . . . ] I am acquainted with no single distinctive bodily character which is at once peculiar to the negro, and which cannot be found to exist in many other and distant nations; none which is in like way common to the negro, and which cannot be found to exist in many other and distant nations.33

Blumenbach’s analysis of the African was based, not on a reflexive philosophical premise, but instead, on a scientific method, which caused him to understand that all men were created equal in the physical sense. It then follows that the aspects of civilization and mental conditioning became the more important factors for a scientist like Blumenbach. In his analysis of the Negro from his Contributions to Natural History, Blumenbach also goes on to list examples of black men and women who have supposedly risen out of their state of incivility. In addition to his own scientific analysis, he points to actual examples, and unlike the philosopher Hume who equated the achievement of the negro to the achievements of a parrot, Blumenbach seems to be much more generous in his treatment. He writes: I possess some annals of a Philadelphian calendar, which a negro there, Benj. Bannaker, had calculated, who had acquired his astronomical knowledge without oral instruction, entirely through private study of Fergusson’s works . . . Negroes have also been known to make very excellent surgeons. And the beautiful negress of Yverdum, whom I mentioned, is known far and wide in French Switzerland as an excellent midwife, of sound skill, and of a delicate and well-experienced hand. I omit the Wesleyan Methodist preacher, Madox, and also the two negroes who lately died in London, Ignatius Sancho and Gustavus Vassa, of whom the former, a great favorite both of Garrick and Sterne, was know to me by correspondence.34

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It is also interesting to note the wide national array of the examples that the German Blumenbach draws from. The scientific quest for knowledge pushes him beyond his own German boundaries so that he may draw upon American, British, and French cases of Negroes who have supposedly achieved a sort of enlightenment. Blumenbach finishes his commentary on the Negro by asserting that “There is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by examples of perfectability and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro.”35 It is this pseudoscientific concept of the perfectability of the Negro, which speaks of a sort of scientific human conditioning, that will drive the emerging colonial mentality that we see in the later portion of the long eighteenth century.

THE AFRICAN INSTITUTION OF LONDON AND AN AFRICAN MISSION OF NATURAL SCIENCE, EXPLORATION, AND DISCOVERY In the final portion of this chapter 4, I turn my attention to the African Institution of London because, as the heading above suggests, it was a London institution created by former members (and English gentlemen) of the Sierra Leone Company to gather knowledge about the African continent. By 1807, the company had essentially been taken over by the British government as an official Crown Colony, and colony building was now the territory of the emerging British Empire. This signaled a dramatic shift in the vision for Africa that the former company proprietors once held—theirs was to become an institution of explorational and scientific endeavor. As Richard Drayton observes in the eighteenth-century volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire, “An informal empire of gentlemanly amateurs emerged to span Britain’s eighteenth-century worlds. Observations, information, specimens, and argument, journeyed from physicians in Edinburgh to absentee planters in London,” and that “Private clubs linked such gentlemen with lesser amateurs who provided them with specimens and intelligence, and direct connections with mariners and colonists.”36 The distinction between the demised company and the new institution is that the official task of setting up a colony had now been assumed by the British government itself, leaving the institution to exploration and the gathering of information. Whereas, the initial incarnation of the Sierra Leone Company was based in West Africa, with a goal of branching out through the continent, the African Institution of London explicitly had the entire continent of Africa within its sights from the very beginning. The institution had full leave to

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divert its energy and resources to what it had developed as its new task at hand. In the first Report of the African Institution released on 15 July 1807, it is written that: As we neither propose to colonize, nor to trade on our own account, how, it may be asked, can we materially contribute to the civilization of Africa? We answer, by the same means, in part, which are found necessary or useful for the promotion of agriculture, and for the encouragement of useful arts, or other patriotic and benevolent improvements, even in this enlightened country [ . . . ] We hope also to find enterprising and intelligent men, who will explore the interior not merely to gratify curiosity, but to obtain and disseminate useful knowledge, and to open sources of future intercourse. But information must be also diffused, and the spirit of commercial enterprise excited, at home, in order that individuals may be prompted by self-interest to aid us in the most effectual manner.37

The goal of the African Institution was not only to send explorers to Africa in the name of science and information gathering, but like the Sierra Leone Company, establish an institution (to borrow the name) that would make a lasting impact upon Africa (the only difference being through exploration and science, instead of colony building). The task of colony building was to be left to the British government itself, and the institution would utilize the colony not only for its own ends of gathering information, but to also promote so-called civilization and enlightenment throughout Africa. This task of bringing so-called civilization and enlightenment to Africa is an issue that Christopher Leslie Brown explores in Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. The African Institution, like its predecessor the Sierra Leone Company, framed its mission in the form of antislavery rhetoric that promoted the colonization, exploration, and commercialization of Africa in place of the slave trade. These endeavors of colonization, exploration, and commercialization were framed in terms that emphasized they were latently being undertaken for European benefit, but most importantly being undertaken for the benefit of Africa and Africans. Brown writes that: The influential John Seeley acknowledged in his widely read Expansion of England of 1883 [that] Britain, unlike the others (European nations), acted nobly. “We published our own guilt, repented of it, and did at last renounce it.” That view, that insistence on the selfless quality of British actions, that record of redemption for past wrongs, took on special importance [ . . . ] In this environment, the history of antislavery provided a compelling origin story for modern empire as well as ideological defense. It displayed Britain as the purveyor of civilization, justice, and order. It established the British state as concerned historically with the welfare of the African peoples, even, it was noticed, at a cost to itself.38

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The supposed “repentance” for the wrongs of slavery that Seeley noted, was done in part through the actions of institutions like the Sierra Leone Company, the African Institution, and the Crown Colony that would be instituted in 1808. We should also keep in mind that Britain also had in its favor the fact that it was they who effectively “put an end to the Dutch legal slave trade” as Pieter C. Emmer suggests. He writes that “Their occupation of the Dutch West Indian possessions during the course of the Napoleonic wars made Surinam, Berbice, Essequibo, and Demerara, as well as the Antillian islands subject to that famous decision of the British Parliament in 1806, which prohibited the slave trade in newly conquered West Indian possessions.”39 The reality is that in the case of abolition, Britain was seemingly ahead of the European pack. In fact, it was not until 15 June 1814 “right after the formation of the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, [that] an order in council was issued that made illegal any slave trade organizing in Dutch ports.”40 In the case of France, Serge Daget writes that “After three years of delays the first French abolition law was promulgated without discussion on April 15, 1818,” and that “Nine weeks later the royal ordinance of June 24 instituted a French naval squadron to suppress the slave trade on the coast of Africa.”41 The fact that Britain was the first European nation to supposedly repent for the wrongs it committed in carrying on the slave trade served as a weapon of moral ideology, which gave Britain a sort of moral high ground, that it would use to defend its colonial purpose. The institutional backing of an African Institution, and eventually, an official Crown Colony only served to bolster this ideological stance. The awesome size of the task that lay ahead was not lost upon the proprietors of the African Institution at all. In fact, the 1807 Report of the African Institution presents the greatness of this task as a sort of challenge that must be met: A Plan which proposes to introduce the blessings of civilized society among a people sunk in ignorance and barbarianism, and occupying no less than a fourth of the habitable globe, holds forth an object, the contemplation of which, it will be allowed, is sufficient to warm the coldest, and fill the amplest mind [ . . . ] But it should be remembered, that the most striking changes have often been produced in the characters and fortunes of nations, by means apparently very inadequate. There have been critical opportunities, in which the combined efforts of a few private men, or even the energies of a single mind, have sufficed to effect great revolutions.42

That these men, who have founded the African Institution and laid out its plan of action, believe the task before them is great is evident; and that these men also believe in their own supposed greatness and superiority is also equally

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evident. The task at hand is to “introduce the blessings of civilized life,” and the African indigenous whom their institutional explorers will encounter along their journeys are “a race very distinct in bodily appearance from all others.” The picture of difference, which emphasizes the “inferiority of their intellectual powers,” as well as their “moral depravity,” are framed as a sort of challenge to the mission of the institution to supposedly save Africans from themselves. The institution has explicitly set out to “effect a revolution” upon the African continent. The Institution Report defends the right of the African continent to exist by utilizing both logic and scientific anthropology to state its position. However, it is clear that this rigorous defense of the “Negro” is not done only in the name of Africans and Africa, but also done in the name or defense of the institution and its mission. The retort against its criticizers reads: But before we admit the justice of a representation so degrading to the character of the negro race, it will be proper to inquire who are their accusers, and what is the evidence on which charges are founded [ . . . ] The portrait of the Negro has seldom been drawn but by the pencil of his oppressor, and has sat for it in the distorted attitude of slavery. That there have been found in him such vices as in all ages and countries have been the fruit of private bondage, need not be denied: but that these have been much exaggerated by prejudice and contempt, and still more by policy and party spirit, is no less certain.43

The Institution Report paints the denigrating picture of Africa and Africans as one that has been contrived and concocted by those who have something to gain by keeping Africans in bondage. “The portrait of the Negro has seldom been drawn but by the pencil of his oppressor,” and the institution has knighted itself with the task of undoing the damage that has been done by slavery, in favor of a colonial system that promotes so-called civilization. Perhaps the most interesting defense of the negro and the institution’s mission in Africa (particularly because of the connections to Blumenbach and Mungo Park), comes when the Institution Report utilizes Park’s travel account from his Travels in Africa in order to bolster its position. Quoting Park himself, it states that: Nothing is wanting to this end but example to enlighten the minds of the natives, and instruction to enable them to direct their industry to proper objects. It was not possible for me to behold the wonderful fertility of the soil; the vast herds of cattle, proper both for labour and food; and a variety of other circumstances and agriculture; and reflect, withal, on the means which presented themselves of a vast inland navigation; without lamenting that a country, so abundantly gifted and favoured by nature, should remain in its present savage and neglected state. Much more did I lament, that a people, of manners and dispositions so gentle

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and benevolent, should either be left, as they are now, immersed in the gross and uncomfortable blindness of pagan superstition.44

Park’s anthropological gaze, demonstrated here, is used to present a picture of Africa that is similar to the anthropological gaze of the scientific treatises of Blumenbach. He states that, “Nothing is wanting . . . but example to enlighten the minds of the natives and instruction.” He basically advocates a system of social conditioning that is characteristic of systems of colonial order and control that are advocated. The Negroes that Park makes reference to here are not presented as animals or animalistic, but instead as “a people of manners and dispositions so gentle and benevolent” who must be saved from an uncivilized and pagan state of existence. The interesting shift of the African Institution’s mission lies in the fact that, unlike the Sierra Leone Company, the business of religion is labeled expressly forbidden territory. This is an important public relations measure designed to gain as much support for the institution as possible by eliminating the threat of competition from the religious missionary realm. The idea is that these would-be competitors would, instead, become allies and proponents of the institution’s mission: To prevent misconception concerning the views and measures of the African Institution, it may be proper, in the very first instance, to declare, that it is the Society’s fixed determination not to undertake any religious missions, and not to engage in any commercial speculations. The Society is aware that there already exist several most respectable institutions formed for the diffusion of Christianity, and means not to encroach on their province.45

Indeed, the desire to “prevent misconceptions concerning the views and measures” of the institution is designed to avoid the engagement of competition, particularly since this is a point in time when the numbers of those who hope to make a stake in Africa is rising. This newly established dedication to science and exploration is also made in an attempt to distinguish the mission of the institution from the mission of the Sierra Leone Company, which had to be rescued by the British government, after it literally and figuratively collapsed under the monumental economic and missionary burden that it attempted to carry. In spite of the decision to eliminate both religion and commerce from its mission, and distinguish itself from the company, the 1807 Report of the African Institution still pays much attention and much homage to the Sierra Leone Company for what it attempted to accomplish in Africa. Far from labeling the company a failure, the Report praises its efforts. It states, “In no other part of the world, since the value of colonial commerce and the expense

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of colonial establishments have been known, have men associated to settle in an uncivilized country upon terms like these.”46 The uniqueness and boldness of the company’s project is not lost at all, and because of this, the company’s endeavors are also presented in a benevolent light as well. “In attempting to found a new colony, which, if successful, was to give this country great commercial advantages, the Company took upon itself the whole charge of the civil government, of the public works, and of the military defense of the settlement. At the same time, no part of the possible profits was secured exclusively to itself.”47 The Sierra Leone Company is presented as a great success—a private jointstock company that took upon itself the task of colony building and civilizational engineering that would benefit the British nation. It is also depicted as a private enterprise that bore the burden and literally and figuratively held firm to its obligations in Africa for as long as it could, until it could bear the financial weight no longer. As for the company’s achievements: In their Colony, now about to be taken over under the immediate care of the Government, there is a basis upon which we may proceed to at once build. In that centrical part of the great African Continent, schools may be maintained, useful arts may be taught, and an empourium of commerce be established, by those whom our patronage may animate, or our information enable, to engage in such undertakings. There native agents may be found, and the African languages acquired. From thence, travelers may diverge on their journeys of discovery; and there the scattered rays of information from the interior may be collected.48

The Company is depicted as a successful venture that laid the foundations for British colonization in “that centrical part” of Africa from which it might spread. The Report also emphasizes that with the company, it established a “basis upon which we [the institution] may proceed” on its mission in Africa. In the eyes to the institution’s proprietors, there is much to be gained such as “African languages,” “information from the interior,” and on the Crown colonial level, the emerging empire will “maintain schools” in order to civilize Africa, and establish “an empourium of commerce.” The reality is that while the company’s meager resources could only provide limited protection for the company’s ventures in Africa, the abundant resources of the British government and British military provided a degree of security the company could never achieve, as well as stability for the institution to conduct its business.

l Being in the position of a nation that promoted abolition and that established a “Colony of Freedom” enabled England and the African Institution to place

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itself on a sort of moral high-ground. One should not lose track of this global long-eighteenth century reality regarding various Reports of the African Institution that mention the subject of efforts taken to affect the cessation of the slave trade. For instance, in the Report of 1813, The Seventh Report of the African Institution, there is a letter included under the heading “Extract from Vice Admiral Stopford, to J. W. Croker, Esq. dated on board His Majesty’s Ship Lion, in Table Bay, 6th March 1812.” The Admiral writes: In my letter to you, I stated, that I had detained the Portuguese ship Restourador, from Mozambique to Rio Janiero, with a cargo of slaves consisting of four hundred and fifty, which ship had put into Table Bay for a supply of water: she has, by a decree of the Court of Vice Admiralty, been ajudged a Droit of Admiralty, and the Blacks made over to the captors. The opinion of the Judge on this occasion, was entirely determined by the inspection of the printed papers relative to the Portuguese Slave Trade, forwarded by Mr. Barrow on the 2d May, in which it appears that none but the Portuguese built vessels were allowed to carry on the Slave Trade, and the Restourador was proved to have been built in America.49

The English, as the emerging preeminent naval power on the high seas and colonial power, place themselves in the position of international judge and jury in the water off the coast of Africa. The account also notes that “none but the Portuguese vessels were allowed to carry on the Slave trade,” which places England on a moral pedestal compared to its European counterpart Portugal, which is still engaged in the transport of slaves to Brazil. In the 1824 Report, a show is also made of captured rogue French slave traders and their insistence on carrying on a trade in African slaves, even after France abolished the slave trade in 1818 and instituted its own squadron to suppress the slave trade in the same year of 1818.50 Seemingly more important, I believe, to the African Institution here is the denial or lack of respect for British authority on the high seas. The 1824 Report reads: France—It can be shewn that from the single port of Nantz no fewer than thirty slave-ships were fitted out, in the course of only a few months of the year 1823, openly, with scarcely an attempt at concealment, and with the full knowledge and participation of multitudes in that port? [. . .] Suffice it to say, that slave ships under the French flag still actually swarm upon the African Coast; that they carry on their trade with perfect impunity, being visited even by French cruisers without molestation; and that, in consequence of their immunity from British capture, they not only protect extensive interests properly French, but shelter the criminal adventurers of other nations from detection and punishment [ . . . ] These things have been brought under the attention of the French Government, in all their horrid and disgusting detail, and the French Slave-Trade still proceeds as actively as before.51

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The issue here is not only the slave trade, but more importantly—for an emerging British empire with an emerging sense of its global importance and dominance—British authority and power over its European competitors. In a show of national rivalry, the report paints a picture of incompetence and inadequacy of French authority, and the fact that, “no fewer than thirty slave-ships were fitted out” with “scarcely an attempt at concealment” under the noses of complicit French authorities. It is emphasized that, “they carry on their trade with perfect impunity, being visited even by French cruisers,” and that although the French government has been notified the “French Slave-Trade still proceeds.” Here in this account, there is evidence that abolition for the British, in many ways, acts as a sort of proxy for the international competition for power and dominance. The evidence of international competition displayed in the previous passage is all but erased in the instance of a Tartar (or Russian), who has anthropological and geographical information to relate after an extended period of wandering lost in the African interior. There is no international competition or bias when it comes to the matter of gaining unknown scientific data from the rescued Tartar. The Report of 1824 includes the narrative of the Tartar, discovered living amongst the natives of the Cape Coast, under the heading “Information Respecting the Interior of Africa.”52 The account reads: For several weeks previously to the 1st of June last, reports were prevalent among the natives of the Cape Coast, that some Europeans had arrived at Coomasie, the capital of Ashantee; little or no credit was attached to them; but on that day, to the surprise of every person connected with that place, messengers arrived from the King, escorting an elderly White man, clothed in an old uniform of the African Company. The circumstances could not fail to excite a considerable degree of curiosity; and this was materially increased when it was ascertained that he had traveled all over so great a portion of the African Continent, as from Tripoli to Cape Coast. Unfortunately, the excitement proved greater than the means of gratification . . . for the ignorance of the language spoken by the individual in question has precluded the possibility of obtaining satisfactory information, which a long residence in the country must have enabled him to afford; and which, it is to be hoped, will yet be gained . . . should no mishap occur to him previous to his reaching England [ . . . ] It has been with much labour and difficulty that even a few confused circumstances, in addition to the names of places on his route, have been elicited; the only communication with him being through the medium of a boy, who speaks the Marawah or Houssa language, of which the other obtained a smattering while in the interior . . . .The traveler’s name is Wagree. He is a Tartar.53

When the British officials in Africa learn that he is literally and figuratively a human vessel of privileged information about the African continent, the value

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of this foreign traveler “materially increased.” The fact that the Tartar had “traveled all over so great a portion of the African Continent, as from Tripoli to Cape Coast,” made him a valuable human specimen that could rival even the likes of Mungo Park. The case of a white man—a European—who had wandered the interior of the African continent is an extremely appealing specimen for a body dedicated to “science and discovery” like the African Institution. The Tartar’s worth is valued in relation to the information that he holds, and even before the human vessel of African knowledge is transported to England, every attempt is made to acquire as much information from him as possible. Perhaps the most useful information that this the account of the Tartar contains is the information he provides relating to Timbuktu and the River Niger—two extremely important African objects of European desire. The first, because it represents the pinnacle lost African city of riches, and the second because it represents a water path that possibly leads deep into the heart of Africa. Frank T. Kryza, in The Race for Timbuktu, writes that, “Timbuktu was a powerful idea as much as a place, its texture and weave to be shaped by each man who heard the tale,” and one might say that what El Dorado was for the Spanish in the New World, Timbuktu was for Europeans in Africa.54 It, therefore, makes much sense that an account of Timbuktu would be a valuable object of desire in this account. Nor is it any coincidence that the description of Timbuktu spans seven full pages of the report. The report itself states that these descriptions were the best they could muster from the Tartar, given the “defective method of communication,” and a segment of the anthropological description states that, “Timbuctoo he represents as a large town, much larger than Cape Coast, and much larger than Coomasie; the houses far better and more regular. It has one long street intersected by others, but not very regular. The houses are built of mud. The house in which he lodged, belonged to the Sultan Mohammed.”55 The information relayed in this account of what the Tartar saw in Timbuktu is, in many ways, similar to the anthropological gaze of Wadstrom and Blumenbach in terms of the level of details describing the traits of a given subject. The selection of information provided is also quite predictable in many ways, as details are provided on “how they live,” and “how they eat,” and “what they eat’ and “what they wear,” and even “how many wives the king has.” The information provided is designed to satiate readers of the African Institution Reports, who desire information of the unknown interior of Africa, and especially the city of object of Timbuktu, which was steeped in legend. In the account containing the debriefing of Wagree, the Tartar possesses information concerning the treasured Niger River. The hope, for eighteenth and nineteenth century European enthusiasts of Africa, was that the Niger River would flow far into and even beyond the heart of Africa. Included in

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a separate section that comes after the actual relation of the account is a section labeled “Notes on the Travels of a Tartar.” Wagree’s account is taken as pure fact, and used to refute an early traveler by the name of Adams, because Wagree’s account seems to match the account offered by Leo Africanus, in addition to the Moors of Ashantee.56

l The long eighteenth century is commonly characterized as a period of strengthening nationalism and competition between emerging nations and national characters. However, when the matter comes to scientific information that will enable Europeans to gain greater knowledge about the African continent and of what lay beyond the imagined borders of the European landmass, competitors in many cases become scientific allies. Each of the three main sections of this chapter is living archival proof of the willingness to temporarily breach imagined national boundaries for the sake of gaining knowledge that might potentially lead to dominion over an unknown and unexplored continent. Colonial expansion and a desire to render the unfamiliar and non-European familiar is one of the prominent driving forces behind an emerging protocolonial science within the long eighteenth century. Time and time again, protocolonial science would animate, reanimate, and reconfigure itself into entities and modalities that would both derive from, and contribute to, the emerging colonial project: Wadstrom had his extensive vision for civilizing Africa through means of a colonial project that would supplant the slave trade; Blumenbach creatively imagined and categorically defined and divided human beings into five varieties of mankind, and was self-imbued with the belief that science was capable of “discovering” the “order” of the world and revealing it to the world at large; an institution took upon itself the supposedly benevolent mission of saving an entire continent from itself by discovering and curing Africa’s pathology through means of science and exploration. All of these incarnations are examples of the role that science was to play in colonialist justifications well into the twentieth century.

NOTES 1. I use this term “scientific protocolonial” or “protocolonial science” because these institutions and methodologies supported the colonial project in Africa by providing argumentative foundations for justifications of colonial establishment and expansion.

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2. The 1807 date is extremely significant because it is the year that the Sierra Leone Company was disbanded and taken over by the British government, in addition to the year the African Institution was created. 3. Nicholas B. Dirks, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 6. 4. Dirks, Colonialism and Culture, 6. 5. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 38. 6. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 38. 7. Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1978), 10. 8. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 38. Pratt observes that, “‘Nature’ meant, above all, regions and ecosystems which were not dominated by ‘Europeans,’ while including many of the geographic entity known as Europe.” 9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London & New York: Routledge, 1970), 82. 10. Foucault, The Order, 146. A helpful way of looking at this concept of a “limited mode of seeing” can be found in Foucault’s The Order of Things. He states that, “Displayed in themselves, emptied of all resemblances, cleansed even of their colours, visual representations will now at last be able to provide natural history with what constitutes its proper object, with precisely what it will convey in the well-made language it intends to construct. This object is the extension of which all natural beings are constituted—an extension that may be affected by four variables only: the form of the elements, the quantity of those elements, the manner in which they are distributed in space in relation to each other, and the relative magnitude of each element.” 11. In Essay on Colonization, Wadstrom also copies heavily, word for word at some points, from the various Reports of the Sierra Leone Company that were released prior to the publication of his Essay in 1794. 12. C. B. Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968), i (Introduction). 13. Foucault, The Order, 82. 14. Wadstrom, Essay on, 197. 15. The Berlin Conference opened on November 15, 1884, and lasted until February 26, 1885. 16. Recall from the discussion in chapter 3, that the repatriated blacks transported by the newly formed Sierra Leone Company in 1791 were former slaves, who fought against the colonies in the American War of Independence, and at its conclusion, fled to Nova Scotia. 17. Foucault, The Order, 144. Foucault observes that “Natural history did not become possible because men looked harder and more closely. One might say, strictly speaking, that the Classical age used its ingenuity, if not to see as little as possible, at least to restrict deliberately the area of its experience. Observation, from the seventeenth century onward, is a perceptible knowledge furnished with a series of systematically negative conditions.”

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18. Wyse, Akintola. The Krio of Sierra Leone: An Interpretive History (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1991), 1 19. Wadstrom, Essay on, 197. Wadstrom explains that the plate of the slave ship was given to him by the Committee of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. 20. Wadstrom, Essay on, iii (Introduction). 21. Wadstrom, Essay on, 14. 22. Foucault, The Order, 146. 23. Wadstrom, Essay on, 9. 24. Wadstrom, Essay on. 25. Wadstrom, Essay on, 19. 26. Said, Orientalism, 108. 27. Foucault, The Order, 81. Foucault also suggests that “Taxonomy establishes the table of visible differences” and that when “confronted by genesis, taxonomy functions as a semiology confronted by history. It defines then, the general law of beings, and at the same time, the conditions under which it is possible to know them”(81–82). 28. Johann Fredrich Blumenbach, “Contributions to Natural History,” in The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865—Published for the British Anthropological Society), 303. 29. Blumenbach, “Contributions to Natural,” 303–4. 30. Said, Orientalism, 117. 31. Said, Orientalism. 32. David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 201. 33. Blumenbach, “Contributions to Natural,” 305. 34. Blumenbach, “Contributions to Natural,” 310. 35. Blumenbach, “Contributions to Natural,” 312. 36. Richard Drayton, “Knowledge and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 237, 239. 37. Report of the Committee of the African Institution (15th of July, 1807), 45–46. 38. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations in British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 8. 39. P. C. Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880: Trade, Slavery, and Emancipation (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 179. 40. Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic, 179. 41. Serge Daget, The Suppression of the Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century: Actions of French Cruisers on the Coasts of West Africa (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1997), 194. 42. 1807 Report of the African Institution, 11–12. 43. 1807 Report, 17–18. 44. 1807 Report, 33–34. 45. 1807 Report, 3.

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46. 1807 Report, 38. 47. 1807 Report, 38. 48. 1807 Report, 38. 49. 1813 Report of the Committee of the African Institution, 38. 50. Daget, The Suppression of the Slave Trade, 194. 51. 1824 Report of the Committee of the African Institution, 20–21. 52. The report states that the African Institution drew this account from the Sierra Leone Gazette (8 March 1823), which was established by the Sierra Leone Company in 1795 as a disseminator of colonial information and propaganda. 53. 1824 Report, 213. 54. Frank T. Kryza, The Race for Timbuktu (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), xvii (Introduction). Kryza writes, “Timbuktu was a powerful idea as much as a place, its texture and weave to be shaped by each man who heard the tale.” To popes and kings who needed money and reinforcements, it was the mythical kingdom of Prester John; to merchants it was a great center of commerce with streets paved with precious metal and gemstones embedded in every wall; to politicians, it was the capital of a great Central African Empire; and to scholars it was a place of learning whose priceless manuscripts would solve the mysteries of the age.” 55. 1824 Report, 214. Another portion of the 1824 Report reads that, “The Sultan is fat, stout, and good looking, having a few gray hairs in his beard; and is a peaceable good man; he is a Musselman, and dresses handsomely in the Mohammedan style [ . . . ] The king’s wives wear a lower cloth, fastened round them, and another thrown over their bodies; these are generally white, but the lower one sometimes blue. Indeed, he says, coloured clothes are rarely to be seen: white and blue are the prevailing colours, varying in their quality according to the station of the wearer”(215). 56. 1824 Report, 223–24. This section of the 1824 Report reads, “No. 1—From what Wagree relates, it would appear that Adam’s assertion, that there is a “considerable navigable river close to the city (Timbuctoo),” must be incorrect. Between Wagree’s Account and that of Leo (Africanus), there is a considerable degree of coincidence: Leo places Timbuctoo at the distance of twelve miles from the Niger; Wagree says, it is three hours’ walk from Timbuctoo to Kaberah (on the Mazzr, a branch of the Barneel or Niger, but not navigable), and three hours more from Kaberah to the junction of the Mazzr with the main stream of the Barneel. That Wagree’s information on this point is correct, there can be little doubt, for he illustrated it by a rude sketch [ . . . ] No. 4—It is a curious fact, that the hypothesis which favours the discharge of the waters of the Niger into the Nile of Egypt, should be in measure confirmed by Wagree without his being led to this point further than his being asked if he knew where they each disembogued.”

Chapter Five

The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, and Bringing the Long Eighteenth-Century Archival Past into the Postcolonial Present

It is of great significance that I should include a contemporary novel of historical fiction and African Literature, written in 1991, as part of a book-length project that conducts a literary analysis of the African-British long eighteenth century, and specifically, about the evolution of British colonialism in West Africa. My inclusion of Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar is intended to demonstrate that the literary study of the archival documents and texts that I have utilized in the previous four chapters has just as much to do with this present postcolonial and increasingly globalized era, as it does with those past centuries from whence they came. In his epic novel, Cheney-Coker takes on the role of a teacher, who constructs an interpretative history of Sierra Leone and the establishment of the British colonial system in West Africa. He also provides a unique literary-historical lens through which to read and reread the archival materials—that is, treaties, reports, essays, and so forth—that I have explored in the earlier four chapters of this book. Within Cheney-Coker’s epic novel, one can detect traces of the actual historical events that I have surveyed over the previous four chapters of analytical literary readings of archival documents and literary texts. However, for this final chapter to function on its own, as a serious piece of rhetorical reading and literary analysis, I attempt to explicate and analyze The Last Harmattan in a manner that frees the novel from being a mere reflective surface for the historical. Eustace Palmer, in “Re-lighting Sierra Leonean History: A Comparative Study of the Re-Interpretation of Aspects of Sierra Leonean History by Syl Cheney-Coker and Yema Lucilda Hunter,” writes that Cheney-Coker, “Handles history by blending it with myth and legend and gives an interesting interpretation of history.”1 It is evident that his melding of myth and legend utilized to create an African novel of historical fiction draws from traditions 127

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of orality or oral tradition common to many African cultures, particularly those encountered in West Africa. F. Abiola Irele asserts that, “Oral literature . . . stands as the fundamental reference of discourse and of the imaginative mode in Africa. Despite the undoubted impact of print culture on African experience and its role in the determination of new cultural modes, the tradition of orality remains predominant.”2 It could also be postulated that in addition to taking on the role of teacher, Cheney-Coker also occupies the role of the “griot” or traditional “storyteller” common to West Africa, who relates cultural histories passed on from generation to generation. Myth and legend, in this case, are used to convey culturally valued concepts of tradition and beliefs of a people. The roles of griot or storyteller, and teacher of history, myth, and legend would seem to translate quite well into the framework of historical fiction because these elements enable the writer to overcome the two major hurdles that one must confront when producing historical fiction. “They have to contend with the issue of historical accuracy and authenticity in a work that really belongs to the realm of fictive imagination, and they have to present great movements in history by showing how they affect the lives, feelings, and destinies of ordinary people.”3 Cheney-Coker enables his melding of historical fiction, myth, and legend by framing The Last Harmattan as an epic that tells the history of Sierra Leone from the emergence of colonialism to independence. The epic form, itself, suggests that “the whole work is going to be about tyranny and savagery and heroic struggle for freedom in both the past and present.”4 The epic form of The Last Harmattan has a trajectory, which proceeds from the seminal Treaty of 1787/1788 and settlement of the “Colony of Freedom,” that I examine in chapter 2, which might be regarded as the beginning of the colonial state in Sierra Leone, all the way to the decade of the 1960s in which Sierra Leone and several other African nations would emerge from colonial rule. The publishers of the novel have marketed it with the label, “a novel of magical vision,”5 precisely because Cheney-Coker constructs a history of Sierra Leone (which he has renamed Malagueta for the pepper that is common to the Sierra Leone region) through the melding of history, myth, and legend. The historical events of Malagueta have already been prophesized by the novel’s mystic character Sulaiman the Nubian (also known as Alusine Dunbar), whose “aging was of a kind that had escaped the rages of time and chronological oblivion,” and whose “eyes were clear and kind like the great marabout’s.”6 The scholar Edouard Glissant offers a mode of interpreting the fictional character of Sulaiman the Nubian, who prophesizes the history of Malagueta. He writes that “myth disguises while conferring meaning, obscures and brings

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to light, mystifies as well as clarifies and intensifies that which emerges” and that “Myth is the first state of a still-naïve historical consciousness, and the raw material for the project of literature.”7 Cheney-Coker paints Sulaiman the Nubian as a prophet, who possesses a panoptic vision of historical events of past, present, and future, which enables him to foreshadow the course of colonial events that awaits Malagueta and West Africa. This panoptic and prophetic vision is the reason that, in the early stages of the novel, Sulaiman is able to speak of Malagueta and remark that, “This place has the devil of a name”—a double entendre that refers to both the fire-like pepper itself and the historical events that will engulf the land.8 Sulaiman paints a panoptic and prophetic picture of Malaguetan history that, in many ways, mirrors the history of Sierra Leone, but is also melded with mythical fiction in order to encapsulate the wide-ranging historical events into a form that suits an epic framework. Cheney-Coker gives the name “Kasila” to the Sierra Leonean region of the indigenous Temne and Sherbro, where the 1787 British settlement laid its roots. The mystic Sulaiman forecasts for the people of Kasila that: “One day a great disaster will take place here, and many years after that, black people from across the sea, who will be speaking a barbarous language, will come here with their wayward manners.” He told them that although Almoravid diviners had come to Kasila before him and had blessed the place and driven out all the djinns, there was nothing to save it from the plague of those people. But the citizens of Kasila were not to worry, because although the foreigners would control the place for one hundred and seventy-five years, and would establish a most spurious society with laughable manners, and would for a while live under the impression of being in control of their destinies, they would in the end be pushed aside by the “tumultuous onslaught of the soapstone people.”9

The hope of an African colonial settlement for English Black Poor in Sierra Leone, which Olaudah Equiano speaks about,10 is contextualized as a “great disaster” by the mystic Sulaiman. The African homecoming that many of the black English settlers foresaw is viewed by Sulaiman as an invasion or encroachment of sorts, which adds to the complexity of Sierra Leonean history. Perhaps the most eerie part of the prophecy speaks of the approaching colonial period in which “they would live under the impression of being in control of their own destinies,” but in the end, would be “pushed aside by the tumultuous onslaught of the soapstone people.” The onslaught of the “soapstone people,” no doubt, refers to an impending age of British colonialism. The experiment in cultural engineering, to which Akintola Wyse makes reference, is also contextualized as an effort to “establish a most spurious society with laughable manners.” Cheney-Coker, from the very beginning of

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the novel, points to the rift that would come to exist between the repatriated African settlers and the Africa indigenous of Sierra Leone. This notion of a rift between repatriated African settlers and African indigenous of Sierra Leone enables a rethinking or reconceptualization of Naimbanna’s ratification of the Treaty of 1788,11 particularly given that the historical events surrounding the signing of the treaty are prophesized by Sulaiman the Nubian as the coming of “black people from across the sea” with “wayward manners.” In the mythical fiction and legend of Cheney-Coker’s novel, there is mention of neither the Treaty of 1787, which was nullified, nor the Treaty of 1788, which replaced it.12 The historical details involving the Sierra Leone Company, or King Naimbanna’s son John Henry Naimbanna, are also unmentioned. However, prominent historical reality highlighted by Cheney-Coker is the role that King Naimbanna plays as the sovereign one who granted permission for the repatriated black Africans to settle the Sierra Leone “Colony of Freedom” where they might construct a new chapter of history for themselves. This legendary image of the king of Kasila as a benevolent diplomat in The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, is born from the historical figure of King Naimbanna. His role of statesman is particularly made clear if one reconsiders the communiqué that Naimbanna sent to Granville Sharp13 through his interpreter: It has been told that these people (the free settlers from England) would in time drive me by force of arms, back in the country, and take my ports from me. I have received several accounts, from factories and captains of ships, against the settlement, which I took no notice of, as I conceived it was, in my opinion, spite or envy that they had against their living in the country; but have served them in any little request they asked of me, and have endeavored to keep peace between them and my people, and also among themselves, by settling a great many disquiets between them. It was a pleasure to do it, as I thought they would become useful to us all in this country, by teaching us things we know not. And again I must let you know, that if there were no other reason for wishing for the welfare of the settlement, I should do it, that there might be a stop put to the horrid depridations that are so often committed in this country, by all countries that come here to trade.14

Naimbanna frames himself as a stately diplomat and sovereign, who wants peace between the repatriated African settlers and this own people. He emphasizes that “it was a pleasure” to give these repatriated settlers a new territory to call home in Africa, and that he longs to see an end to the “horrid depridations” of the slave trade. When the literary portrait of Naimbanna is placed alongside the legendary image of the king of Kasila, one gets a sense

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of the manner in which history, myth, and legend collide in the historical fiction of Cheney-Coker. The scene of The Last Harmattan in which Sebastian Cromantine, one of the leaders of the community of repatriated Africans, is mysteriously led in a trancelike state to the site where the king of Kasila’s house stood, also plays on this legendary image of King Naimbanna as benevolent diplomat and peacemaker: Something like an eagle’s talon lashed out and smashed the mirror of his confusion and Sebastian perceived the twelfth realm of reality and the unambiguous certainty of the globe that was this big house. It was the house of the first king of Kasila who had initially welcomed them. The realization that he had come to the place of his former anxiety and of how he must have struck the king as being unfit for life in the new country brought him back to why he had gone for a walk in the first place [ . . . ] He was going to make a bust of the king, because he felt that his destiny had been circumscribed by the proverbial meaning of the return of the prodigal son.15

In this mythical scene, destiny literally calls upon Sebastian Cromantine to pay homage to the “first king of Kasila” by creating a bust. The idea of the king welcoming the repatriated African settlers home from a life of exile across the Atlantic is framed within the Biblical allusion of the father welcoming the “return of the prodigal son.” Cheney-Coker also writes that, “He tried to sculpt him as he had seen him that day, reverent and dignified, surrounded by his courtiers, with the high forehead which was like a dome of great wisdom. Sebastian remembered that his eyes had been clear and kind, despite an unmistakable look of authority.”16 The creation of the bust evokes the idea of traditional reverence of African ancestors that is common to many African cultures. The reference to Sebastian’s attempt to “sculpt him as he had seen him that day” also points to the bust as a symbol of ancestral remembrance as well.

l Another important element to consider in this examination of The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar come from Simon Gikandi’s Reading the African Novel, where Gikandi expounds on the nature of the novelistic discourse. He refers to narratives as “real or implied communication from author to audience” and that “What is communicated is story, the formal content element of narrative; and it is communicated by discourse, the formal expression element.” 17 By establishing this concept of novelistic discourse, what becomes important for the reading of The Last Harmattan is “the functioning

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of the African novel as an instrument of understanding on the individual and socio-cultural levels.”18 Perhaps the most important concept to consider about the manner in which Cheney-Coker melds the historical realities of Sierra Leone with the mythical and fictional history of Malagueta, is that the novel is “the process of form recreating reality in the terms set by authorial consciousness, constituting a world which might resemble external reality, but is also the novelist’s own universe.”19 One could argue, quite validly, that Cheney-Coker draws from the archive and historical events that the archive is designed to preserve. In many ways, much like I have done in the first four chapters, Cheney-Coker reassembles and reconstructs the preserved pieces of literary history that make up the archive in order to create the resulting “instrument of understanding” that is The Last Harmattan. The idea that the study of an archive, used to register and preserve a record of the past, has everything to do with our present era; and that a contemporary African novel could enable the engagement and enhancement of an “understanding” of an archive through reconstruction, has everything to do with the fact that history, itself, is a constructed entity. Edward Glissant, in Caribbean Discourse, analyzes and constructs an understanding of the disjointed history of the Caribbean Black Atlantic, which is also useful for understanding the disjointed history that results from colonialism in Africa presented in The Last Harmattan. Glissant writes that: A history characterized by ruptures and that began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade. Our historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment, as it were, as happened with those peoples who have frequently produced a totalitarian philosophy of history, for instance European peoples, but came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negotiation, and explosive forces. This dislocation of the continuum, and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterized what I call nonhistory.20

I should qualify that Glissant distinguishes the postcolonial experience in African countries from the experience in the Caribbean when he states that, “the ancestral community of language, religion, government, traditional values—in brief, a worldview—allowed these peoples . . . the patience and the self-confidence created by such a cultural hinterland.”21 However, one of the several unifying factor that renders Glissant’s theoretical approach quite useful for study of the African archive and literary-historical discourse is that in both the Caribbean and West Africa, there exists “a history characterized by ruptures and that [perhaps did not begin with, but includes] a brutal dislocation, the slave trade.”22

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When Glissant asserts that, “Our historical consciousness could not be deposited gradually and continuously . . . as happened with those peoples who have produced a totalitarian philosophy of history,” this also refers to an important reality that applies to West Africa as well.23 Glissant’s thoughts on historical consciousness also offer a method for interpreting the first four chapters of this project dealing with the evolution of British colonialism in Sierra Leone and West Africa; particularly since a significant part of these chapters is rooted in colonialism that began with the repatriation of African slaves in 1787. The analyses of the African-British treaties, the Sierra Leone Company documents, and so forth, can be read as the study of those peoples who attempted to impose a course of history upon those peoples of West Africa who were thought to be void of civilization and history. On the notion of this history characterized by “ruptures and fissures,” Glissant also remarks that “the converging histories of our peoples relieves us of the linear, hierarchical vision of a single history that would run its unique course” and that “the depths are not only the abyss of neurosis but primarily the site of multiple converging paths.”24 This concept of the “multiple converging of paths” is also emblematic of the manner in which Cheney-Coker melds history, myth, and legend into the literary historical novel.

THE LAST HARMATTAN AND THE SIERRA LEONE ELECTION CRISIS OF 1967 Cheney-Coker also utilizes the concept of a fragmented and fissured history whose teleology must be reconstructed, and he does so from the very beginning of the novel. The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which revolves around the turn of historical events set into motion with the 1787 “Colony of Freedom,” opens with a fictional scene set in Malagueta (born out of actual historical events), which begins the 1960s decade of African independence. The reader is made aware that the political turmoil of the Malagueta (Sierra Leone) coup that has occurred in the 1960s, which forms the backdrop that the opening scene is presented against. The fluid shift from 1960 to 1787 evokes the implication that these historical events, separated by centuries, are not disconnected from one another, nor are they disconnected from the history of slavery and repatriation. The scene opens with General Tamba Masimiara sitting naked in an old slave dungeon, now adapted as a colonial prison cell, after a failed coup attempt that he undertook for the good of Malagueta. Cheney-Coker writes that the general “thought about the series of events that had led to his moving

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against the corrupt government in Malagueta.”25 Perhaps the greatest irony is that this scene, occurring in a slave dungeon, over 150 years after the settlement of Malagueta by English Black Poor, finds the general in a very similar place where his forefathers might have found themselves before they were shipped to the New World. The general “scrutinized his new home—a grim colonial dungeon where, in centuries past, the blood of his countrymen and -women had mixed with their own excreta and vomit, before they were transported across the treacherous sea.”26 The greatest difference, in this case, is that the general has been imprisoned and sentenced to death by his own countrymen in a Malagueta that is no longer prey for slavetraders, nor a British colonial possession, but now an independent African nation. Palmer remarks that Masimiara “has been no less a victim of oppression and tyranny, than the slaves who were brutalized and exported.”27 Cheney-Coker paints a very unflattering picture of the postcolonial political circumstances in which the newly independent Malaguetan nation finds itself. He makes it a point to emphasize that the general took his course of action in the interests of safeguarding newfound democracy in the fledgling nation: General Masimiara began to reflect on the future of his country, which was in the hands of the worst bunch of cutthroats that had ever ruled the place, and where members of the aristocracy spent countless hours conjuring the magic of their illusions about the power of God to change the place.28

The democracy and freedom that was supposed to supplant the colonial system in Africa, is quickly being replaced by a tyranny that could prove to be even worse. The power in the newly independent nation is not depicted as being in the hands of the people, but instead, firmly within the grip of “members of the aristocracy.” That the politicians point to “the power of God to change the place” is also symbolic of the manner in which religion is used to subdue the common population, much in the same way the colonial administration utilized religion to help subvert African sovereignty. Masimiara is depicted as a common, non-aristocratic man, who rose to the rank of soldier, and who has placed the future of his country before his own safety within the emerging corrupt power structure: He was not a politician, nor did he have any intellectual pretensions about how to solve all the problems of Malagueta. But in twenty-five years as a soldier, the last five as army commander during the reign of a despicable government that had embarrassed him by jailing its critics and hanging some of its opponents, General Masimiara had wondered at the docility of the people, at their ability to receive the endless instruments of pain.29

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This scene marks yet another denial of a dream for freedom and liberty for the people of Malagueta, and for national unity that came with the dawn of African independence, not only in Malagueta (Sierra Leone), but for practically every other African nation that achieved independence in the 1960s as well. The “docility of the people” evokes the notion that part of the blame lies with the people of the nation for readily accepting the corrupt state of affairs. So when the general makes coup plans in order to “rewrite that terrible history begun in 1787,” he is doing so out of a desire to not only “rewrite” the past, but erase it and start a new political reality. The introductory scene with General Tamba Masimiara is based on the events surrounding the election crisis of 1967. It involved the two main rival Sierra Leonean political parties, the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and their candidate Albert Margai, and the All People’s Congress (APC) and their candidate Siaka Stevens. The negative outcome of this election crisis, and Siaka Stevens’s rise to power along with the APC, was what would eventually lead to the establishment of a one-party state in Sierra Leone. I believe that Glissant’s approach to history, as an entity that must be constructed and reconstructed to achieve significant relevance and meaning, would be useful for reading and analyzing the scene from the novel and the actual historical event. He writes that “the writer must contribute to reconstituting its tormented chronology: that is, to reveal the creative energy of a dialectic.”30 The dialectic within The Last Harmattan is driven by a novelistic discourse that draws from and engages historical events—both past and present—with a conscious awareness that there is a firm connection between the two. The events of the past have played a monumental hand in determining the course of contemporary events in Malagueta, and the implication is that both past and present will determine the future of the nation as well. The question that this dialectical formula of chronology raises is whether the dysfunctional course of history in Malagueta will continue to repeat itself, or whether a figure (or figures) in the future course of events will succeed where General Masimiara has failed in his attempt to alter the dysfunctional course. To anyone familiar with the course of events in the postcolonial history of Sierra Leone, it is clear that the fictional character of General Masimiara is based on the historical figure of Brigadier David Lasana, commander of the Sierra Leone military, who attempted to use his military authority to preserve democracy during the national election of 1967.

l General elections were scheduled in Sierra Leone for March 1967 under the preexisting two-party state; however, on February 9 of that same year, the

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reigning Prime Minister, Albert Margai, announced that plans for a military coup had been unearthed, and that he had appealed to Guinea’s Sekou Toure for assistance and protection. Eight military officers were relieved of their duty, and Force Commander Lt. Col. John Bangura was arrested and imprisoned. These were the conditions of turmoil under which the March 17, 1967, general elections were held, and the chaos was to continue well after the elections. Two days prior to the elections on March 15, a state of emergency was declared in all districts of the provinces outside of the Freetown Western area.31 At the height of election turmoil on March 20, 1967, it was broadcast that the SLPP and its leader Albert Margai was in a draw with the APC and its leader Siaka Stevens. It was at this point that Sierra Leonean GovernorGeneral Sir Henry Lightfoot-Boston invited Stevens and Margai to Fort Thornton, Freetown to persuade both of them to work out a compromise solution. Interestingly, Cyril Foray’s account states that the “Governor General was so impressed by Stevens’ arguments in an APC memorandum [that] he took care to inform Margai that he had no intention of reappointing him Prime Minister.”32 While Gershon Collier writes that “Sir Henry Lightfoot-Boston, the distinguished Creole Governor-General, constantly exposed to Creole pressures and influence, resolved the deadlock in favor of the APC.”33 While another account from Daramy states, “That night, certain influential persons paid, what the Governor-General’s secretary, O.P.A. Macaulay described at the first treason trial in Sierra Leone as a ‘social visit.’”34 Certainly, these three accounts offer us varying pictures of what occurred behind the scenes during the election turmoil. What we know for certain is that the Governor-General, on the morning of March 21, 1967, appointed Siaka Stevens as Prime Minister. After that factual certainty, we are again presented with different portraits of what occurred. One account given by Foray reads, “Barely had Stevens been sworn in as Prime Minister when Force Commander Brigadier David Lasana (upon whose character General Tamba Masimiara is based), on Tuesday afternoon, March 21st, declared martial law, imposed a dusk to dawn curfew . . . and put the new Prime Minister Stevens . . . with a few party stalwarts under house arrest.”35 However, Daramy writes that “the Governor-General invited Brigadier David Lasana to the State House and told him he had decided to appoint Siaka Stevens as Prime Minister.”36 Afterwards, he writes, “Lasana informed the Governor-General that the country was on the brink of civil war and that he should postpone the appointment to enable him to deploy his soldiers to cope with civil disturbances which he said, had already started.”37 After the swearing in ceremony, Lightfoot-Boston gave Thomas Decker, then Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,

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an official press release that was to be announced on SLBS—The Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service. Instead of doing so, Decker brought the document to General Lasana, who then declared martial law at 5:55 on March 21, 1967. In this declaration, he stated: We are now operating under Martial Law to protect the constitution and to maintain law and order (following) wide-spread rumor put out by the APC that the Governor-General has appointed Mr. Siaka Stevens as Prime Minister. I want to assure the public that if this rumor is true, it is unconstitutional because the results of the election have not yet all come in.38

Two days after Lasana’s implementation of martial law, Major Charles Blake made an announcement on the SLBS, and declared that several senior military officers had decided to relieve Lasana of his duties for what they saw as an attempt to impose Albert Margai on the country. Then almost immediately afterwards, the National Reformation Council or NRC was formed, which was comprised of various national interests. It then formed a Civilian Rule Committee or CRC, which was determined to hold elections anew, which in its eyes, would mean that power would indeed be in the hands of a true representative civilian government. Increasingly though, a widening gap came to exist between the military government and the civilian government, which continued to widen until there was a bloodless military coup on April 18, 1968. After the coup, Siaka Stevens was invited to return from Guinea, where he had sought protection, and was installed as the new Prime Minister of Sierra Leone. The installation of Stevens as Prime Minister marked the very fast decline of hopes for a democratic Sierra Leone. An example of this steep decline came in September 1970, when M.S. Forna and M.O. Bash Taqi, who were respectively Ministers of Finance and Development, resigned to form the United Democratic Party or UDP. However, efforts to jumpstart this new party to offer opposition to the APC were crushed when their leaders and several of their supporters were arrested and jailed by the APC government under the provisions of the state of emergency, which granted it widespread powers. For his part in the events, Commander Lasana “together with other top civil servants and some politicians, was tried for treason . . . and sentenced to death,” which means that the scene constructed in The Last Harmattan, in which General Tamba Masimiara sits in an adapted prison cell, is one that is pulled directly from historical records.39 This melding of historical narrative and historical fiction creates an enriched perspective on the events surrounding the election crisis of 1967. We come to see that the The Last Harmattan’s fictional character Masimiara, like the historical figure Lasana, was using his military power in an attempt to safeguard a fledgling democracy in Sierra

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Leone. Cheney-Coker constructs The Last Harmattan’s historical fiction out of the historical archive, which allows him to construct a teleology that links twentieth century events in Sierra Leone to the seminal eighteenth century events that set them into motion. He constructs this teleological connection by beginning the novel at a pivotal moment in the 1960s, shortly after Sierra Leone has emerged from British colonialism, and then shifting the novel’s narrative back to the seminal eighteenth-century moment in 1787 when British colonialism was planted in Sierra Leone. Cheney-Coker allows us to see that this pivotal moment in Sierra Leonean history, which signals the death of democracy in the 1960s, was over 150 years in the making. THE LAST HARMATTAN AND THE 1787 “COLONY OF FREEDOM” Cheney-Coker, in his reconstruction of the historical events that took place in 1787, recreates the historical circumstances in order to give the Black Poor settlers, who are being repatriated to Malagueta, a distinct face and story. His portrait of historical fiction presents the initial settlement as one that is distinct from the “colony of freedom” model envisioned and established by Granville Sharp and his compatriots. While Colonel Boulden Thompson is still present as the captain who transports the initial wave of Black Poor, he is given a unique role and a story that serves its own purpose in The Last Harmattan—a story of an attempt at salvation and redemption for past wrongs committed over the course of his life. A separate and unique story is also crafted to tell of the experience of the Black Poor in Cheney-Coker’s Malagueta, who in reality were transported from England to the Sierra Leone “Colony of Freedom” in 1787. However, in Cheney-Coker’s textual construction, these Black Poor were left to their own devices in Africa after being repatriated by the British. The British only reappear after the initial wave of repatriated Black Poor have made their lives in Cheney-Coker’s Malagueta after the original settlement is destroyed by the indigenous Africans—which, in itself, highlights the cultural differences between the settlers and indigenous. As a result of this artistic license that he takes with the history of Sierra Leone, he creates a thematically constructed fictional historical narrative that allows us to understand the sociocultural and colonial complexities that are involved in both repatriation and colonialism itself. The initial scene of the novel, which comes after the opening prologue describing General Tamba Masimiara’s ordeal, takes us back to the North American experience of the slave couple Jeanette and Sebastian Cromantine. In both of these characters, we see manifested prophetic dreams that speak

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of a return to Africa, from whence their ancestors were forcibly removed—a homecoming of sorts. However, these prophetic dreams of repatriation seem problematic, particularly since the preceding scenes of The Last Harmattan have depicted the general in bondage at the hands of his own corrupt countrymen in the 1960s, as well as the prophecy of the mythical figure Sulaiman the Nubian forecasting the “disaster” to come. The melding of history, myth, and legend are combined to forecast that this homecoming will have dire consequences for the history of the nation that will become Malagueta. In the case of the character Jeanette Cromantine, she is given to an elderly black preacher, who is also a freeman, after she is born to a slave mother (Sophie Mahogany) who was impregnated by the son of her white owners (William Blackburn). The preacher is a religious man who has been inculcated with the Bible, and has rationalized that the plight of the black Africans in slavery is essentially tantamount to the Hebrew people who suffered captivity in the desert: He was a free man who, because of a heart ailment, had earned the chance to pass his remaining years in pursuit of the meaning of the curse of Ham and the dispersal of his sons upon seas and in deserts. After years of exploring the curse, he came up one morning with a startling revelation: “Dey bin a walkin for three thousand years, but de good Lawd done hear their tears and he gon bring ‘em home soon, yes sir.”40

Were it not for the future events of Malagueta, of which the reader has been made aware, the preacher’s prophecy of a true “home coming” for the Cromantines and the Black Poor might actually seem plausible. Even the fact that the preacher has raised Jeanette with the help of the surrounding community of black women points back to African roots and connections to the notion of “belonging” to Africa: “Upholding a tradition traced back to Africa, the black women who came to his ministrations took turns nursing the baby.”41 The fictional historical narrative constructs a prophetic link that connects these black slaves, freemen and freewomen to the African continent from whence they came. However, the reader has already been made aware, through the presentation of historical fiction and the mythical prophecy of Sulaiman, that the smooth homecoming is not to be. The North America story climaxes when the husband, Sebastian Cromantine, decides to enlist to fight in the American Revolutionary War on the side of the British. Perhaps the most ironic thing about the war is that he is offered a picture of racial equality and humanity: “For the first time in his life he saw black men being embraced by white men, and for the first time in his life he was invited to share a meal by white men who were fighting for a cause that meant little to him other than the fact that he was now a free man.”42 In spite

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of fighting for the losing side in the Revolutionary War, the Cromantines would retain their status as freeman and freewoman, as they were transported to England at its conclusion. In the end, though, the freedom that the Cromantines enjoyed would be limited by the color of their skin as Black Poor in England, and they would face a similar situation once British colonialism came to Malagueta. “The rigors of the English weather, the miserable poverty of many people both black and white, upset them.”43 The picture of the Black Poor that is painted here is one of abandonment, desperation, and poverty in England (and in this way, the historical fiction utilizes actual historical occurrences). Finally, though, when the Cromantines embark on their journey to Malagueta, all of the misery of slavery and captivity is seemingly left behind. Cheney-Coker writes that, “Now, he (Sebastian) could evoke a lineage that was not defined by time, but by the spirit, by the force of all eternities and the running music of ancestral waters that coursed through his blood” and that “no door would be closed to him now.”44 As the story progresses, though, it becomes evident that this dream of an escape from captivity, hardship, and misery, will be a dream deferred, not only for Sebastian and his wife Jeanette, but for his “lineage” in Malagueta as well. Cheney-Coker begins the episode in Book I of The Last Harmattan, which tells the tale of the arrival of the Black Poor in Malagueta. The mode of relating the story in this episode causes one to remember that, “History, far from constituting a privileged form of (historical) knowledge, is simply the myth of modern man, and merely amounts to a method of analysis.”45 In this instance, historian Robert Young goes to the extent of labeling history as a myth itself (which rhymes with my understanding of The Last Harmattan as the melding of archival fact, mythical fiction, and historical narrative). The key concept that is important—whether a matter of myth and history, or myth as history—is that myth is a constructed teleology that is used to constitute the memory or the story of a people. The scene in which we are presented with the arrival of the Black Poor of The Last Harmattan to Malagueta is an example of a “consciousness [that] was broken up by sterile barriers,” and it is the writer “who must be able to give expression to all those occasions when these barriers were partially broken.”46 It is, therefore, quite fitting that Cheney-Coker begins the narrative of book I, that takes place in the eighteenth century, with a scene that takes us back to the fifteenth century, which saw the first slaves taken from West Africa by the Portuguese: One note of interest that caught the attention of Pedro Almerado, when he called to the Kasila coast in 1462 on his way to begin a reactionary tyranny that was

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to last four hundred years, was that the inhabitants of the place did not resemble any he had seen since he left Portugal. Tall, agile, dark, and fearless to the point of being treacherous, and possessed of a warlike character.47

This scene where we see the beginnings of the slave trade, coupled with the following fictional scene of the first British repatriation effort of 1787, brings us full circle to what should supposedly be the end of suffering and captivity for the former slaves who are being returned. However, the irony that awaits them is that they are to be thrust from one form of captivity into another in the form of colonialism. Malagueta is depicted as a land that moves from one cycle or mode of oppression and tyranny to another. Cheney-Coker paints the arrival of the Black Poor as something of an initial relief from the depredations that they had suffered in North America and the desperation that they had experienced after abandonment in England. The novel reads that, “the reality of being in a new environment brought about a discernible change in the spirits of the new voyagers” and that the grey clouds of death “over their lives gave way to an inordinate optimism which, in the brightness of that world, in the reaffirmation of creation before the naming of things, pushed them on.”48 This evokes a Biblical portrait of an Edenic setting after the creation and before the fall of humankind. However, given the prophecy of Sulaiman the Nubian, as well as the fate of General Masimiara, it is evident that this Edenic portrait of Malagueta will be short lived. The mythical prophecies the reader has been shown offer the sense that Eden has fallen long before these new settlers arrived. Historian Christopher Leslie Brown, in Moral Capital: Foundations in British Abolitionism, writes about the great hope that the Black Poor had of establishing their roots in an African homeland when they came to settle in Sierra Leone. He states: To them (the Black Poor who came to Sierra Leone), the colonization of the African coast meant something altogether different from what it had meant to an adventurer like Henry Smeathman or what it would mean to an abolitionist like Granville Sharp. The coast (of West Africa) presented an opportunity for independence, freedom, and self-sufficiency.49

The “Colony of Freedom” in Sierra Leone, represented, for the Black Poor, a reprieve from a sentence of living as second-class or subclass human beings in England. In this sense, the “Colony of Freedom” did represent a chance at reclaiming an “Eden” in Africa that these former slaves had lost. However, the reality is that these repatriated Africans were part of a larger colonial plan and vision that England had for Africa.

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l Cheney-Coker offers us various conflicting images of a Malaguetan settlement that, at some points, is on its path to establishing an Eden for the Black Poor, and at others, is on the verge of collapse. For instance, when presented with the literary portrait of the settler Gustavius Martins, there is the sense that he is one who feels he has come home. It is written that “Malagueta was in his blood,” and that “Many years earlier, as a young child, he had been taken out of the region south of the place they had landed, and although time, suffering and the war had worked havoc on his memory, they had not completely obliterated all the lines of the country from his heart.”50 The figure Gustavius Martins is, essentially, an adaptation of the historical figures Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa (whose autobiography I examine in chapter 1), who was purportedly kidnapped by his Igbo people of Nigeria and sold into slavery. It is clear that this is an instance in which the melding of an actual historical figure, like Equiano, with fictional history, is done for the thematic purpose of demonstrating that many of those transported to the New World as slaves still held fast to, and passed down, many African customs and cultural underpinnings of a world they once knew. Sebastian Cromantine is also presented as a figure who has taken quite well to the new land. In fact, he exemplifies the idea that is presented so many times, in the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company and African Institution, of being “incited to industry” and trade. He discovers coffee growing in the hills of Malagueta and decides that he will invest a significant amount of time in growing this produce. Cheney-Coker writes that “He was not to be put off, and tried to seduce her (Jeanette Cromantine) with the prospect of selling the beans to the ships that called at Kasila.”51 Sebastian envisions Malagueta as a land that will bring him prosperity after a lifetime of captivity and hardship. However, this vision of prosperity is also mixed with troubling mystic visions, from whence he does not know. A reader who has seen the prologue that includes the scenes with General Masimiara and the prophecy of Sulaiman the Nubian, knows that the visions are the earmark of prophecy of the bleak colonial future and postcolonial chaos to come. “He (Sebastian) saw himself on another stage; he was an actor in a play where he was the only performer obeying some instructions from a director whose hands were white, whose face was black, but whose voice was indiscriminate.”52 It will be evident, later on, that the “white hands” and “black face” represent the coming colonial administration that will utilize the hands of a black elite and merchant class population to wield English colonial justice, many times in place of displaying its own authorial face.

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This dream of the initial settlement begun in 1787, in Cheney-Coker’s text, is destroyed by the seeds of mistrust and suspicion that the indigenous of Kasila have towards a settler class of Black Poor who, to them, have come from a land unknown. The indigenous of Malagueta suspect the settlers are the cause of a plague that is ravaging the land. The novel reads that: A great horde of enraged men and women from Kasila was pillaging Malagueta, and Sebastian Cromantine, crouching over his wife, prayed that Malagueta would not go up in flames. The plague that had been killing the settlers had spread to their neighbors. At first, they had not thought much about it. But when their children succumbed to death soon after eating the sweet potatoes which the foreign woman (Jeanette Cromantine) had planted, they deduced with an age-old logic, contrary to reason, that the seed of the settlers’ misfortune had been planted in their world, which not even the totemic power of their gods could halt.53

This scene represents the failure of the 1787 “Colony of Freedom” that was eventually taken over by the Sierra Leone Company in 1791. The historical event is melded with myth and fiction in order to highlight the thematic issue of the growing rift between settler and indigenous, which in the future, will eventually become a rift between the aristocratic elite and the common class of people in Malagueta (and much of colonial Africa). In the end, or at least, at the end of this episode of Cheney-Coker’s novel, the Edenic promise of a homecoming that Malagueta initially held for the Black Poor settlers is shattered. The African home continent and homeland to which the settlers envisioned they had an inalienable ancestral connection, was in fact a bond that a period of captivity in North America and England had severely damaged. The construction of historical fiction and myth within The Last Harmattan also enables Cheney-Coker to address themes that include the intermingling of the repatriated African settlers and the indigenous Africans of Malagueta. This is a theme that deals with the complicated politics of a repatriation or return home to a place that had ceased to become home as a result of being violently torn away and taken across the Atlantic. The successful marriage of the settler Gustavius Martins and the indigenous Isatu Dambolla is a union symbolic of the idea that the cultural rift between the repatriated African settlers and African indigenous can, in fact, be navigated. The potential for successful union and coexistence is ever present within The Last Harmattan, however, the potential is never realized. The scene in which Gustavius encounters Isatu as she bathes in a stream, caused a passionate desire to rise up within him. However, this is not a desire that is limited by blindness to the cultural realities on the ground. Gustavus understands that there is a cultural

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rift between the two groups that has to be navigated if he is to be successful in courting Isatu. Cheney-Coker writes: Gustavius had decided to have that woman and had been planning accordingly. Unknown to Sebastian, he had been learning the language of the people of Kasila, adopting their food habits, and the wearing of the long gown was merely an extension of his preparedness.54

Gustavius bridges the rift between settler and indigenous by communing with the people of Kasila—“learning the language,” “adopting their food habits,” “wearing of the long gown”—demonstrating that, although he comes from a world away, he respects their customs and traditions. After destruction of the repatriated settlers’ village by the natives of Kasila, it is Isatu who, like a Pocahantas figure, teaches the surviving settlers, that include the Cromantines and Gustavius, how to survive once they flee the first settlement after its destruction. There is an informational and cultural exchange that occurs between Gustavius and Isatu over the course of the novel. As Isatu continues to think about the nature of their union of settler and indigenous, Cheney-Coker writes that: Gustavius had made her aware of things that would otherwise have escaped her: the equal role of women in the building of a community; the importance of believing in individual efforts for the good of the community; and how it was possible to arrive at the conclusion of an idea without having had a clear understanding of the idea in the first place.55

Gustavius brings Western ideas in tow that he shares with Isatu—“the equal role of women” in the community, “individualism,” and thinking outside of tradition. These elements represent a cultural exchange, and the intermingling of ideas and values of both societies; however, they also signify a potentially destructive cultural rift. The notion of a cultural rift that becomes even more significant when a teleological connection is made back to the prologue that occurs in the 1960s. Isatu represents the indigenous people of Malagueta, and she also represents General Tamba Masimiara—also of indigenous lineage—who waits in prison after the unsuccessful coup at the start of the novel. Masimiara, in many ways, represents the indigenous descendents of Isatu, who would find themselves on the margins of power at the dawn of the twentieth century. Isatu foresees this future of Malagueta, and is filled with doubt when she takes note of the class differences that are beginning to arise between the settlers themselves:

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She wondered how in God’s name they had come to that place, and whether the Almighty had not made a mistake in grouping them together. One day, she wasn’t sure when, they were going to give up all façade of unity and start fighting each other, because they were already beginning to talk of the poor and “aristocrats” among them and develop serious notions of class.56

Isatu’s actions of wondering “how in God’s name they (the settlers) had come to that place” is not the type of mystic vision manifested through the prophetic Sulaiman the Nubian, or even Sebastian’s vision of the “white hands controlling all.” Therefore, her internal ponderings about when “they were going to give up this façade of unity and start fighting,” are especially poignant because they are derived from real-time observation, not mythical superstition. Isatu’s thoughts are based on the observed evidence of emerging class distinctions that have been presented to Isatu. The seeds of national dysfunction and destruction have been planted, and they will come to fruition long after this eighteenth-century moment and well within the twentieth century in the time of Genral Masimiara. The discourse of the novel points to the growth of the Malaguetan settlement and the linguistic rift that is felt by Isatu, who lives within the settlement that seems to receive new repatriated Africans from around the globe with each passing day. She talks of: Trying to speak a new language which every day was receiving more and more words as more and more of them appeared from all parts of the world with their accounts of wars, famine, kidnappings, and revolts. It was through them that she had become acquainted with names like Lobito, Jamaica, Mississippi, Congo, Angola, and the ocean was so great that it took a whole season to cross it.57

The “new language which every day was receiving more and more words” refers to the Krio lingua franca of Sierra Leone, which emerged out of English and the many other African languages and cultures that surrounded it.58 All of this points to the complexity of the world that is coming into being as a “Colony of Freedom” for slaves, who have emerged from captivity in the various parts of the world—Lobito, Mississippi, Congo, Angola—that wanted them as slaves, but disowned and disavowed them as free human beings. The cultural difference between the settlers and indigenous is especially highlighted when Isatu brings Gustavius on a journey with her to see her family and reconnect with her people so that she may bear a child. Sawinda Dambolla, as a wise elder, and mother of Isatu, highlights the details of the rift that divides them: They have a dubious notion of freedom so that man is perceived as living in a world where he is independent of nature. Space is a thing they have not learned

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how to deal with, because they are pulling down everything: trees, groves, shrines; insulting the souls of the dead. Rites that help us into adulthood mean nothing to them, the spiritual is suspect, and very little thought is given to the relationship between what we bring into this world and what we take to our graves.59

The language in this passage that speaks of the repatriated settlers, who are “pulling down everything: trees, groves . . . [and] insulting the souls of the dead,” is thematically designed to convey the sense that these settlers are leaning toward European ways and rejecting traditional African values. The symbolic balancing of the two sides, represented by the marriage of Gustavius and Isatu, is not taking place on a large social scale in Malagueta. The rift signifies the problems that have been prophetically forecast for Malagueta earlier in the novel. THE LAST HARMATTAN AND THE RISE OF COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION As I have demonstrated through chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4, the emergence of the British colonial project in Sierra Leone can be split into three phases that are marked accordingly with the British institutions that attempted to create colonial civilizations: The initial settlement of 1787, the shift to company control at the hands of the Sierra Leone Company in 1791, and finally, the establishment of the official British Crown Colony in 1808. However, Cheney-Coker offers us a reconstructed narrative of history that highlights the coming of colonialism as an event comparable to the traumatic shock of the slave trade and relocation to the New World.60 In The Last Harmattan, the colonial project is depicted as one single unified effort that imposes itself upon the repatriated black settlers who have now made their home in Malagueta (in Cheney-Coker’s novel, there is no Granville Sharp or Sierra Leone Company). By the time the initial move to colonize Malagueta is enacted, the “Colony of Freedom,” in Cheney-Coker’s text, has already been established as a settlement independent of British and colonial influence. This is yet another convention and construction of historical fiction that Cheney-Coker utilizes so that we, as readers, see the actual faces, hopes, and dreams of the black settlers who came to Malagueta in the eighteenth century. Cheney-Coker also gives a concrete and distinct face to the emerging colonial system and its philosophies on civilization through the fictional character Captain David Hammerstone. Over the course of the novel, it is evident that Hammerstone goes through a colonial learning curve in West Africa, similar to what the British

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went through with the attempts to establish colonial administration in Sierra Leone. Hammerstone’s first attempt at colonization of Malagueta fails, and it takes one more attempt to gain a successful colonial foothold in Africa. The character of the British Captain David Hammerstone is one that draws from the historical figure Governor Charles MacCarthy, who was perhaps the most proactive governor in terms of striving to ensure that the imprint of his own vision of colonial civility in Africa was enacted. Fyfe, in A History of Sierra Leone states, “Where previous governors saw an administrative problem, how to settle them cheaply, he saw a heaven-sent way of transforming Africa by changing them into Christian communities, orderly villages, each grouped round its own church tower, instructed and cared for by benevolent European guidance.”61 The name Hammerstone is aptly chosen by CheneyCoker because, like his fictional character, the actual historical figure MacCarthy viewed Freetown and Sierra Leone, and in fact, West Africa itself, as a blank slate upon which he could fashion a new world through means of colonialism. MacCarthy believed, very strongly, that the British should expand as far and wide as possible in the West African region, and was extremely displeased with a British governmental policy that handed Goree and Senegal back to the French in 1816.62 When MacCarthy took over as governor, Freetown had scarcely half a dozen stone buildings, public or private, and no governor’s house or official public offices. It also lacked a church, and instead, services were held in a hired room which was also used as a courthouse and girls’ school. He was shocked at the state of disrepair which he met in Freetown upon his arrival.63 However, Fyfe writes that MacCarthy spared no expense to make villages reflect his vision. “Bells, clocks, and weathercocks were ordered from England for church towers, forges for village blacksmiths, scales and weights for village markets. Quill-pens and copy-books, prayer books, and arithmetic books were ordered for schools.”64 MacCarthy’s vision involved the idea that by dramatically altering the African environment itself, the Africans within that very environment would inevitably be impacted, supposedly for the better. Weatherclocks, hats, bonnets, gowns, petticoats, and so forth all reflected MacCarthy’s vision for establishing a “proper” English civilization in Africa. Literacy, education, and religion also went hand-in-hand for his vision of what Sierra Leone had to become. Governor MacCarthy also felt a degree of entitlement for all that he had accomplished through his colonial endeavors in Sierra Leone, and was not bashful in expressing his belief that he should be rewarded for his undertakings in Africa. He would write to the British Crown, petitioning for knighthood, and include in this request a certified pedigree of descent from the ancient Irish kings. He would eventually receive this knighthood in 1820, at

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which time he took a leave from Sierra Leone to reap his reward from King George.65 It is this image of zealousness and boastful colonial arrogance, as well as the methodology of colony building in Africa, that Cheney-Coker attempts to depict by giving Captain David Hammerstone his own stage in the novel on which to perform.

l We are introduced to Captain Hammerstone near the beginning of Book II, after the settlement or “colony of freedom” has been established at Malagueta. He sits in retirement from a life of seafaring adventure, and is described as one who is “exiled from the tempestuous wave of adventure” at home in his comfortable English country cottage.66 Cheney-Coker presents the image of an adventurer who is bored with life on the English Isle, and who views those lands and peoples he encounters on his adventures as objects upon which he might make firm and lasting impressions. When he had been made to give up command of his ship six months earlier, because of an acute case of nervous disorder brought about by the effect of blackwater fever, he had rejected the offer of a job in an office preparing export documents, in favor of a retirement at forty-seven. But after twenty years at sea, he felt like a seal out of water in the pleasant meadow where even the gentle nature of life and the splendid bulls did not compensate for his former life. He missed the turbulence of the great oceans, the freedom and music of the waves . . . and the chance of being feted by the natives of enchanting islands.67

Perhaps the most ironic element of this passage lies in the fact that the sea, for Hammerstone, represents the greatest amount of freedom possible. The “turbulence of the great oceans” is a favorable thing for him, and the waves, in addition to offering a sort of freedom, carry with them a sort of “music” as well. However, the very same ocean that represents freedom for Captain Hammerstone, as we will recall, for General Tamba Masimiara is “vast and crude”—something “which in some unexplained way had tormented him since he was a child” and which “he had come to believe held the key to the terrible wound and pain that was his country’s history.”68 For Masimiara, the sea represents the coming of invaders, the bondage of his people throughout history in slavery and colonialism, and even as he sits in the cell overlooking the sea, bondage at the elite of his newly independent Malagueta. In the thematically oriented fictional history that Cheney-Coker constructs, he paints a picture of Hammerstone as a man who can’t handle a life of sitting still in obscurity, and consequently, turns to colonialism with a sort of religious zeal after reading reports similar to those which we explored in the

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previous chapters of this book from the Sierra Leone Company, African Institution of London, and so forth. The novel reads that: It came unexpectedly. He had been reading the exploits of the missionaries, about the omnivorousness of the Bible for all men and women. Going to the deepest resources of the Bible, he concluded that God had arranged it so that they could blaze the trail for empire builders and explorers in Africa. He had not sinned in the story seasons of his past, because what he had done during those extremes of passion was to reshape the cacques of the human race.69

Subsequently, Hammerstone “Once again, saw himself as a captain, flying the ensign of a new ship, behind the liturgy, to the ends of the world just to get away from England.”70 It’s also both interesting and disturbing to note that Hammerstone is able to rationalize away the wrongs or crimes against humanity of his past because the literature he has read leads him to believe that his actions “reshape[d] the caciques of the human race.” The captain has rationalized and recreated his existence as a god-given and god-driven force, that is destined to reshape the supposedly uncivilized portions of the globe. The thematically oriented story of Hammerstone is constructed in order to depict the mentality of emerging colonialism in West Africa. Recall from the previous four chapters of this book, that reports like those of the Sierra Leone Company, African Institution, and so forth were written with a keen eye on generating public interest in global commerce and colonial endeavors. It is no coincidence Cheney-Coker writes that Hammerstone, “overheard a conversation about a place where ‘a bunch of blacks had established a republic where the earth had not been explored,’ and for which the British government was looking for men with experience to go out and set up businesses, backed of course by a garrison to ‘protect their interests.’”71 Six months later, Hammerstone has a commission from the Colonial Office, and is at the head of a force of sixty men, with whom he would build a fort at Malagueta. The idea is that he will “protect the traders who would follow on his heels to build warehouses and shops, guarantee peace and stability, and to put down any rebellion.”72 He went out with a zealous belief that “his new life had already been sanctioned by Divine Providence” and was a man “utterly convinced of his own worth . . . determined to impose his rule.”73 The colonial mentality depicted in the novel reflects a philosophy of African inferiority and perfectability through colonial conditioning that is reflective of the protocolonial scientific theories that I explore in chapter 4 of this book (i.e., Blumenbach, Wadstrom, etc.). Manifested in the mentality of Hammerstone, and similar to the historical figure MacCarthy, is an implicit, and many times explicit, belief in superiority based on European origins and white skin, as well as a belief in the supposedly inherent inferiority of African origins

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and black skin.74 This philosophy of superiority comes through when we read the speech that Hammerstone makes when coming on shore to speak with the black settlers: He told them that he was a representative of a king who already controlled a large portion of the world between the islands of the Nordic tribes and the ancestral grounds of the aborigines of Australia, and with vast trade in sugar, cotton, spices, and gemstones. How they had pacified the warring peoples of Borneo and sent an expedition to crush a rebellion by dogeaters in China.75

The explicit notion of superiority lies in the fact that he represents “a king who already controlled a large portion of the world,” and that the British have conquered the “warring people of Borneo” and the “dogeaters in China.” The implicit notion is that the British have a right to conquer supposedly “lesser peoples” like those in Malagueta because the British supposedly possess “civility” and “civilization.” Perhaps the most striking part of Hammerstone’s bold introduction to the repatriated African settlers and the African indigenous comes when he speaks of the underlying reasons of trade and its importance to the cause of his colonial mission. He remarks, “This place is good for trade and we are going to build a garrison, new shops and a tannery, a distillery, and other business; and what we produce we can sell to other people. You can work for us any time you want, just so you know that we intend to stay and run our business unmolested.”76 The implied notion is that the strategically important location of Malagueta is “good for trade,” and therefore, the British have a right to dominion over the land since colonization will put the “idle” land to “industrious usage.” The novel presents an economic vision of European settlement in Africa for commercial purposes—comparable to what we see in the more complex economic philosophies of Adam Smith and the Sierra Leone Company—that is simplified into terms that even a sea captain turned African colonialist and civilizer, like Hammerstone, could understand.77 At the center of this economic model is the military defense and protection of territorial interests, which in turn, effectively means protection of colonial trade interests.

l In book III of The Last Harmattan, Hammerstone has not lost his colonial and religious zeal when he storms back to take the Malagueta settlement with his new fighting force that is a mix of his remaining British soldiers, and new indigenous Africans soldiers, who have been recruited from the region to which he fled after being pushed back. Cheney-Coker writes that

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“Soon Malagueta had a flag,” and that the morning after, “the captain went into action to reorganize the administration of Malagueta.”78 Demonstrating the tendency of colonial officials to be suspicious of that which they don’t understand, in addition to a desire to institute Christianity as the religion of the colonial state, Hammerstone also “abolished the prosperous business in divination by Modibo the Susu on the grounds that it was subversive” and imposed “a dusk-to-dawn curfew” upon the entire settlement.79 The implicit idea is that any religion not linked to the colonial state undermines the authority of the colonial government. Church and colonial state, in this case, must be aligned if the colonial mission is to succeed. The “dusk-to-dawn curfew” is also designed to impose the idea that freedom is, in fact, not a given right, but is instead something that can be given and taken away by the colonial state. The next scene, like several in Cheney-Coker’s text, is evocative of that which we see in the 1807 Report of the African Institution, in which Mungo Park is quoted as saying that in regards to the supposedly uncivilized state of the African, “Nothing is wanting to this end but example to enlighten the minds of the natives, and instruction to enable them to direct their industry to proper objects.”80 Indeed, the communiqué that Hammerstone sends back to England, on behalf of himself and his new colonial settlement, is very similar to the type that one would encounter in an Institution Report: Seizing the advantage that victory gave him, he dispatched two leading members of the aristocracy on a schooner to London, with a letter for the partners who had commissioned the expedition to Malagueta. In the fine methodical handwriting of a man schooled in the art of flattery, he thanked them for giving him advantage further, he mentioned the potential for growth in Malagueta, its untapped wealth and the richness of its vegetation, and made his only concession to the people by praising their kindness, concluding that they were so peace-loving they had refused to follow en masse that hot-headed one eyed bandit to a certain death. Saying that the people were just waiting for expertise which could be given only by men who had created advanced tools and were already putting their skills to building industries, he urged his partners to send young men out to settle in Malagueta.81

Hammerstone contextualizes part of the letter in terms of economics and commerce when he speaks of “untapped wealth” and “richness of vegetation.” He also frames the Africans he encounters through terms that suggest docility of the people: “praising their kindness” and emphasizing “they were so peace-loving.” Hammerstone describes the African territory as land that is “just waiting for the expertise” that British colonization and conquest will bring.

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The zealous and euphemistic rhetoric of Hammerstone’s enthusiasm at the potential for European colonizers in Africa typifies the language that we see in the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company and the Reports of the African Institution. Recall that in the postscript of the 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company, company officials wrote about the potential of Sierra Leone and Africa as a whole: [Africa is] a market, indeed, to the demands and extent to which it is difficult to assign a limit. But the benefits Africa was to derive from this connexion are still more important: The light of religious and moral truth, and all the comforts of civilized society. To insure the attainment of these benevolent purposes, it was necessary for the Company to be possessed of a tract of land in Africa.82

The emphasis on Africa as a “market” (or an “economic and commercial market”) speaks to the heart of the colonial project and the wealth that the British metropole hoped would come as a result of the colonization of an untapped African continent. Cheney-Coker, through his construction of the character Hammerstone, captures the spirit of colonial zeal that we read in the reports of institutions like the Sierra Leone Company, and he constructs a teleological connection to the bitter fruits that this colonial zeal will bear in the postcolonial twentieth century. While his zeal still remains, Hammerstone’s colonial learning curve also becomes evident. Instead of the heavy, impatient hand that he once wielded upon arriving in Malagueta to enact his first attempt at colonization, his new approach is more of an effort to cajole through diplomatic means. He now reasons that: Malagueta was not a tidal wave or a tamed beast, but a difficult mistress. So he would have to be patient in the courtship, win her with acts of generosity and understanding. He prayed for the day when people of the town would get to see that his motives were good, that his men were not the murderous butchers they appeared to be. The river between them was not one of blood brewing with hate, but a case of misunderstanding. He was bringing the benefits of civilization, the justness of English laws [ . . . ] He saw the day when after Malagueta had become a town stamped with the permanence of English laws, when the blacks were themselves the messengers of the metaphysical transition—darkness to light, neo-paganism to classicism—the enclyclopaedic mind of the English would be admired by the best sons and daughters of the town.83

Hammerstone reasons that his actions are justified, and that “his men were not murderous butchers” because “He was bringing the benefits of civilization.” He reasons that, like children being brought from “darkness to light,” the Africans of Malagueta would come to see that all of these seemingly bru-

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tal actions of colonization were enacted for the sake of “enlightenment”—a term which implies that the violence that Hammerstone undertakes in the name of spreading his form of civilization is supposedly distinguishable from the violence of a so-called “un-civilized” people. To quote Robert Young, “Enlightenment is totalitarian. The very powers of rationality which enabled modern man to free himself from nature and control it had also become an instrumental device to dominate him.”84 What problematizes Hammerstone’s vision of this “metaphysical transition from darkness to light” is that there is never enough room for all kinds or varieties of humankind within this vision of “enlightenment.” There are those who will always be left out in the dark, simply because they are deemed too barbarous, too undesirable, or simply incapable of being civilized. For instance, the Africans soldiers that Hammerstone recruits for his second attempt to establish a colonial state in Malagueta are examples of those who cannot be made or molded to fit: He tried to picture them in the uniform of soldiers of the king, teaching them how to salute, how to make their beds and raise a flag. These men, he concluded, were not born for that kind of discipline. Order for them was merely a momentary password to kill, rape, and plunder, and once their appetites were satisfied they would revert to their ancient barbarism. He liked those bastards, but the thought of running a town with them filled him with the deepest imagination of horror. “Good Lord,” he thought, “imagine me presenting this lot to a representative of the king!”85

These African soldiers, in Hammerstone’s eyes, could never fit into his vision of European enlightenment. In the “totalitarianism of enlightenment” that Young speaks of, there always exists a glass ceiling, or a boundary, that the colonial subject can never cross. These African soldiers of Hammerstone’s makeshift army are supposedly not “born for that kind of discipline” and exist as tools of the colonial state. Governor Charles MacCarthy, like his fictional counterpart Captain Hammerstone, was a colonialist who had determined, in his religious zeal, that he knew the face of God, and endeavored to create Freetown and Sierra Leone in the British image of what civilization should be. For example, Fyfe writes that: In 1816, an ordinance was passed to acquire for them, [the black colonial inhabitants in Sierra Leone] compulsorarily, land by the shore beyond Sanders Brook belonging to Eli Ackim, a Nova Scotian Trader, who had bought it from its Maroon owner. A jury awarded him £62 compensation which he took with bitter protests at being dispossessed in favor of aliens.”86

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In the eyes of MacCarthy, infrastructural development was of the utmost importance, and was directly related to colonial and civilizational development in Africa. Fyfe also writes further about the fervor with which Governor MacCarthy went about developing Freetown and Sierra Leone in order to maintain his British soldiers as well. The governor had a penchant for building, in large part, because he and the Colonial Office viewed Africa as a blank slate upon which it was their duty to make an impact and alter forever. 87 It is these historical realities that Cheney-Coker draws from when, in The Last Harmattan, he writes, “Rapidly, Malagueta underwent a transformation,” and then proceeds to outline the manner in which Hammerstone goes about building the colony to suit his own vision and design.88 The text then reads that: The plans for development of the town that Captain Hammerstone had drawn up were eagerly accepted by his associates. But after declaring himself governor, he allowed contrary views to be expressed by his men. In them, they appealed to him for understanding, trying to convince him that the difficult task of modernizing that part of the world required a combination of skills and the experience derived from previous endeavors of a similar kind. They spoke of the urgency of acquiring more Lebensraum. “We have to think ahead, Captain, to the time when trade would be good.” They jolted him with the dazzling prospect of expanding Malagueta from the Guinea coast right to the very reaches of the desert; the merchants of Liverpool, the stockbrokers in London, and even the church would each contribute.89

Here, in Cheney-Coker’s historical fiction, the grand vision of building and expanding Sierra Leone, or “difficult task of modernizing that part of the world” is attributed to the MacCarthy-like figure Hammerstone. The “dazzling prospect of expanding Malagueta from the Guinea coast to the very reaches of the desert” represents the insatiable desire for territorial conquest that is characteristic of imperialism. As the first firmly held colonial foothold in Africa, Malagueta (or Sierra Leone) was to be the launching point for a grand colonial vision of expansion that involves all of West Africa, and eventually, the African continent as a whole.

l The moment, within The Last Harmattan, that truly brings the reader into the modern era of colonialism and colonial administration comes in Book IV. The elderly Jeanette Cromantine, who was among the first wave of Black

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Poor settlers in 1787, is depicted surveying Malagueta almost eighty years later in the final years of her life. Cheney-Coker writes that: The town had grown beyond her recognition since the time of the last war. On the site of the first settlement that they had built almost eighty years ago, she saw the fort built as a new home for the governor, next to the splendid courthouse where they administered the laws of their Queen. The streets had been widened to make room for the coaches of the new merchant class; the harbour was crowded with the ships of the trading nations with which Malagueta was doing business. But it was the new administrative building of the colonial regime that held her spellbound: huge, imposing, and occupying much of the land where some of the finest battles took place.90

The symbolism here is unmistakable—the site of the first settlement in 1787 has now been trumped by the “fort built as a new home for the governor.” There is a “splendid courthouse” where the “laws of the Queen” are administered—indeed, the courthouse itself represents the administration of law, which conveys the sense that Malagueta is now truly a British colonial possession. The “widened streets” that are designed to accommodate the “new merchant class,” as well as “the ships of trading nations” in the harbor, signify that the colonial economic plan for Malagueta is succeeding, and the class distinctions and divisions in the nation are becoming sharper and more pronounced. Out of all of the characters of the text, Alphonso Garrison best represents the creation and rise of this new aristocratic elite class in Malagueta. One of the richest men in town, he arrived in Malagueta from the Island of Cape Verde (a Portuguese possession off the coast of Sierra Leone) with his wife Olivia, and his two daughters Arabella and Matilda. He owns a brewery in Malagueta where rum was distilled, and he “was able to predict the best time to invest in a printing machine”; and as “the proprietor of the only newspaper in town, he printed all the news and gossip worth reading and thus made a fortune.”91 Cheney-Coker links the elitist Alphonso Garrison with the Malaguetan Star, the first newspaper of Malagueta—a mirror of the Sierra Leone Gazette that was started by the Sierra Leone Company. The original incarnation of the Sierra Leone Gazette faded away in 1810, however, Governor MacCarthy resurrected the newspaper in 1817 as the Sierra Leone Royal Gazette. Fyfe writes that, “The Gazette was filled with reports of dinners, balls, and fetes champetres, given by the leaders of Freetown society, ‘the fashionables’ as they were styled. The social season culminated in Fair and Race Week about Christmas. Tents were pitched in Water Street for the fair, horse-races were organized by the Sierra Leone Turf Club.”92 If a figure like

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Alphonso Garrison represents the elitist class of Malagueta, then the imprisoned General Masimiara, who opens the novel, represents the common class of citizens and a futile struggle against the tyranny of the elite in postcolonial Malagueta. Cheney-Coker draws from this history to construct the narrative in which he writes that, “a new class was beginning to influence the social life of Malagueta . . . some of the wealthy citizens came out onto the street to shake the hands of the soldiers as if they were freeing them from a long occupation.”93 I think that Simon Gikandi offers us another consideration useful for the manner in which Cheney-Coker draws from historical realities to create historical fiction. Gikandi adapts an idea, first proposed by Georg Lukacs, for his analysis of the African novel, when he remarks that, “If the historical novelist can succeed in creating characters and destinies in which the important socio-human context, problems, movements of an epoch, appear directly, then he can present history from below, from the standpoint of popular life.”94 At the conclusion of the war, which saw Captain Hammerstone come to power once again, Alphonso Garrison was made “mayor of Malagueta with the responsibility for civic and social order.” Cheney-Coker writes that he “put on his ceremonial robe of ermine, scarlet hat and white gloves and the heavy chain with the pendant of the Queen dangling from his neck,” with an air that made it obvious he had been preparing for this moment for a long time.95 In this scene, the prophecy of Sulaiman the Nubian comes to pass, and the downfall of Malagueta is truly realized. Garrison comes to view those who rebelled against the colonial government as a “harum-scarum of barbarians who did not know what was good for them.”96 His line of thinking continues, “How could they have revolted against people who only wanted to do the right things for them, feed them, clothe them, and insure that they did not die from excessive drinking, harlotry, and witchcraft to which they were so prone?”97 In many ways, Garrison has not so much been co-opted by the colonial government, but instead, the reality is that he has much to gain in terms of the power aspect and the financial aspect of colonialism and the colonial state. However, there is also the matter of Garrison as one who is seemingly desirous to cast off any traces of what is deemed “unfavorably African, and therefore, uncivilized” by the British, in favor of that which is “British and supposedly civilized.” Cheney-Coker also makes a point to direct our attention to the desire for the generativity of this new aristocratic line in Malagueta on both the part of the aristocrats themselves and the colonial administration. This leads to hegemony of the elite in Malagueta that will last well into the twentieth century. The novel reads that:

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The children of the noveau riche mixed with the few sons of the colonial administration in the grammar schools. Their expensive jackets and ties marked them as a special breed; they stood out like precious bulls: proud, stubborn and opinionated. They had a brazenness and arrogance which came from a claim to the world that was the preserve of those who wielded power and meted out justice.98

It is there with this new aristocratic class, which “had a brazenness and arrogance,” that power would be centralized among the black colonial population, and through whom the colonial administration would wield its power. The reality of Sulaiman the Nubian’s prophecy rings true here, that black people from the sea “would live under the impression of being in control of their own destinies.”99 In fact, Cheney-Coker explores the creation of this elite further when he writes that, “They were so fascinated with the prospect of being accepted into the houses of the English that they went to the Notary Public and changed their names from ‘African’ to ‘Christian’ ones so that the pronunciation would not break the jaws of the English when they met at parties.” In many ways, these nominal changes represent symbolic baptisms from so-called “uncivilized” to “civilized” in the construction of fictional Malagueta and the historical realities of Sierra Leone. Cheney-Coker also points to the colonial expansion into the hinterland or interior that lay outside of the Freetown settlement and what are presently the provinces of Sierra Leone, separate from the seat of power in the Freetown Western Area. It points to a rift between the settler population, favored by the British, that would come to be called Krio, and the indigenous population.100 He writes that: Gradually, Malagueta began to attract a new breed of settlers. They came from the surrounding towns: colorful men with bright glassy bead necklaces, gaps in their teeth and women distinguished by a terracotta beauty. With large bundles on their heads, they settled into the outskirts of Malagueta, went to work as houseboys, labourers and dock workers and allowed themselves to be conscripted into the new army that the administration was assembling to serve the Queen. One such conscript was Sheku Masimiara, whose grandson was to stage a coup against a corrupt president seventy-five years later.101

Another grave class distinction begins to emerge, alongside the one that exists between the common black settlers and aristocratic settlers. CheneyCoker specifically refers to this native group of settlers as “a new breed” and points to their “colorful men,” “glassy bead necklaces,” and “women distinguished by terracotta beauty.” They stand in stark contrast to the black Krio who seemingly strived for “Englishness.” The indigenous man in this scene—Sheku Masimiara, grandfather of General Masimiara—travels from

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the indigenous hinterland to live within the colonial seat of power there in the capital of Malagueta. However, the irony is that although the Masimiara’s lived physically within the capital—the seat of power, in actuality, they would always exist on the margins of society as nonelites. In the actual history of Sierra Leone, this class distinction became even more amplified as the British Parliament declared an Order-in-Council on August 28, 1895 that pronounced the British Crown and colonial authorities had jurisdiction in the foreign countries adjoining the Sierra Leone colony. Almost a year after that, on August 31, 1896, the British government formally declared that land surrounding the colony—in what are now the provinces outside of the Freetown Western Area—an official Protectorate of the Crown. The argument given was that this assimilation was the “best for the interests of the people over the territories lying on the British side of the French and Liberian frontiers.”102 As a result, this set up a distinction between the colony of Sierra Leone and the protectorate of Sierra Leone.

l In concluding this chapter on The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, I will highlight that the African novelist, as well as the archival scholar, holds an important place in this revival of historical memory, the revisiting of history, and the construction and piecing together of these histories that tell the story of multiple converging paths. Glissant’s observations on the nature of a fragmented and fissured history are very relevant for this chapter, and for my examination of an African-British long eighteenth century as a whole. He writes that: The past to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is . . . obsessively present. The duty of the writer is to explore, to show its relevance in a continuous fashion to the immediate present. This exploration is therefore related neither to a schematic chronology nor to a nostalgic lament. It leads to the identification of a painful notion of time and its full projection forward into the future . . . That is what I call a prophetic vision of the past.103

This notion of the writer or novelist as an explorer, who shows the relevance of a fragmented history to an audience of the “immediate present,” sums up, precisely, the reason I have turned to The Last Harmattan as the centerpiece of the final chapter of this book on the African-British long eighteenth century. Cheney-Coker draws from historical actualities, myth, and legend in order to construct a literary vision of African history, spanning from 1787 to the 1960s decade of African independence. However, the key to the novel is that relevant thematic constructions or tropes are imbedded within the historical

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vision that he constructs—among them, the evolution of British colonialism in West Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular. The thematic historical constructions or tropes are what allow The Last Harmattan to be read in conjunction with the archival documents, such as those we have explored in chapters 1 through 3 of this project. However, these thematic constructions also allow Cheney-Coker’s novel to stand on its own as a unique text of historical fiction. “History as a consciousness at work and history as lived experience are therefore not the business of the historian exclusively,” and as Cheney-Coker demonstrates, the business of history belongs, equally as much, to the writer as well.104 This notion of history as a “lived experience” is especially important because it means that we, as scholars, can engage in our own construction of history that allows us to arrive at a point of relevant thematic constructions and tropes that enable a specific mode of interpreting the events of history. In many ways, this has been the task of my project in the first four chapters, and it is also an essential part of my analysis in this chapter as I proceed with my reading of Cheney-Coker’s novel of historical fiction. I think that it is important, in my final few words about The Last Harmattan, to speak about the manner in which Cheney-Coker reconstructs history for the ends of creating a historical narrative fiction about Sierra Leone. My decision to utilize Cheney-Coker’s novel in order to conclude this project, that deals with the history of Sierra Leone, is born out of a belief that the study of literature, history, and the study of the archive have as much to do with our own present era and postcolonial world, as it does with the periods of the past from whence this history we are constructing came. The process of constructing a historical narrative of a past colonial era is the process of moving forward and projecting a vision of empowerment that will guide us into the future. It is the process of picking up the fragments and pieces of a disjointed world that has been marked by the pain and shock of a history that has been imposed, and creating a new world of hope that coincides with this new vision of history. NOTES 1. Eustace Palmer, “Re-lighting Sierra Leonean History: A Comparative Study of the Re-Interpretation of Aspects of Sierra Leonean History by Syl Cheney-Coker and Yema Lucilda Hunter,” in New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio, eds. Mac Dixon-Fyle and Gibril Cole (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 201. 2. Abiola F. Irele, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & The Black Diaspora (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11. 3. Palmer, “Re-lighting Sierra Leonean,” 201.

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4. Palmer, “Re-lighting Sierra Leonean,” 202. 5. Syl Cheyney-Coker, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (London: Heinemann International, 1990). This label “a novel of magical vision” is actually included on the front cover page of the 1990 Heinemann edition. 6. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 19. 7. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 71. 8. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 19. 9. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan. 10. See chapter 1 of this book. I speak about Equiano’s vision for Africa in the final section of the chapter. 11. Recall that, in chapter 2 of this book, I examine the Treaty of 1788 signed by Naimbanna. 12. Recall that in chapter 2, both the nullified Treaty of 1787 and the ratified Treaty of 1788 are examined. 13. Recall that Naimbanna’s communiqué to Granville Sharp is also analyzed in chapter 2. 14. This communiqué can be located in The 1791 Sierra Leone Company Report. Naimbanna later goes on to speak of his son John Henry (named after the director of the Sierra Leone Company), who was to be taken to England for educational purposes. More will be said about this in the subsequent chapter on the Sierra Leone Company. 15. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 141. 16. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan. 17. Simon Gikandi, Reading the African Novel (London: James Curry Ltd, 1987), x (Introduction). 18. Gikandi, Reading the African, x (Introduction). 19. Gikandi, Reading the African. 20. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 61–62. 21. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 62. 22. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 61. 23. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 61–62. 24. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 66. 25. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, vii. 26. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan. 27. Palmer, “Re-lighting Sierra Leonean,” 202. 28. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, vii. 29. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, vii–viii. 30. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 65. 31. Sheikh Batu Daramy, Constitutional Development in the Post-Colonial State of Sierra Leone, 1961–1984. African Studies Volume 30 (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), 38–44. Daramy offers a very detailed overview of the events leading up to, during, and after the 1967 general election chaos. 32. Cyril Foray, “The Road to the One-Party State: The Sierra Leone Experience,” Africanus Horton Memorial Lecture (University of Edinburgh, November 9, 1988), 26.

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33. Gershon Collier, Sierra Leone: Experiment in Democracy in an African Nation (New York: NYU Press, 1970), 64. 34. Daramy, Constitutional Development, 45. 35. Foray, The Road to, 26. 36. Collier, Sierra Leone: Experiment, 45. 37. Daramy, Constitutional Development, 45. 38. Daramy, Constitutional Development, 46. Again Daramy gives a very detailed account of all that transpired during the election turmoil of 1967. 39. Neville Shrimpton and Njie Sulayman, “Introduction to Thomas Decker’s Juliohs Siza,” in Thomas Decker, Juliohs Siza (Umea, Sweden: Umea University Press, 1988), xiii (Introduction). 40. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 4. 41. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan. 42. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 8. 43. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 13. 44. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 14–15. 45. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 45. 46. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 65. 47. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 68. 48. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 71. 49. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations in British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 283. 50. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 72. 51. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 98. 52. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 87. 53. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 101. 54. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 89. 55. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 191. 56. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 191. 57. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 191–92. 58. Tom Spencer-Walters, “Creolization and Kriodom: (Re) Visioning the ‘Sierra Leone Experiement,’” in New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio, eds. Mac Dixon-Fyle and Gibril Cole (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), 224. As Tom Spencer-Walters writes in “Creolization and Kriodom,” “The ability of Kriodom to absorb and utilize bifuricating, multicultural, and multilingual influences to ensure its own survival is, indeed, symptomatic of the syncretic process of creolization.” 59. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 198. 60. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 65. Glissant speaks of History as neurosis. He writes, “Would it be ridiculous to consider our lived history as a steadily advancing neurosis? To see the Slave Trade as a traumatic shock, our relocation (in the new land) as a repressive phase?” 61. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 128. 62. Fyfe, A History, 131.

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63. Fyfe, A History, 133–34. 64. Fyfe, A History, 131. Fyfe also writes that, “Quill-pens and copy-books, prayer books, and arithmetic books were ordered for schools, with tin cases for the children to carry them in, lamps to read them by. Hats were ordered for the men, bonnets for the women, shoes for all. Gowns and petticoats, trousers and braces—buttons too, with needles, thread and thimbles, soap and smoothing-irons, even clothes-brushes, nothing was forgotten.” 65. Fyfe, A History, 140. 66. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 151. 67. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 152. 68. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, ix. 69. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 153. 70. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 153. 71. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 156. 72. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 156. 73. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 156. 74. Hammerstone could easily be substituted with several other colonial figures— i.e. F. D. Lugard, the nineteenth-century colonial figure of Nigeria. 75. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 158. 76. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 158. 77. See chapter 3 of this book for further clarification on my examination of colonial economics. 78. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 236. 79. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan. 80. See chapter 4 of this book for the reference to Mungo Park in the 1807 Report of the African Institution. 81. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 237–38. 82. 1791 Report of the Sierra Leone Company, 29. 83. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 259. 84. Young, White Mythologies, 7. 85. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 233. 86. Fyfe, A History, 135. 87. Fyfe, A History, 134. Fyfe writes that, “As commander-in-chief MacCarthy could also draw on the Treasury for military buildings. An elegant officers’ mess was built on the slope between Fort Thornton and Pademba Road, and magnificent Commissariat buildings. The Commissariat store, three stories of stone with a wooden superstructure, was built at the wharf. MacCarthy estimated it would cost £4000: The eventual cost was believed to be £50 – £60,000.” 88. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 297 89. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan. 90. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 338. 91. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 264. 92. Fyfe, A History, 145. 93. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 263. 94. Gikandi, Reading the African, 30.

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95. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 322. 96. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan. 97. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan. 98. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 325. 99. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 19. 100. See Figure 1.1: Sierra Leone Ethnic Map. 101. Cheney-Coker, The Last Harmattan, 326. 102. Fyfe, A History, 541. Fyfe gives a detailed history of the events surrounding the declaration of the Sierra Leone Protectorate. 103. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 63–64. 104. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 65.

Epilogue The African-British Long Eighteenth Century and Imagination

My goal in crafting the final section of this project is to avoid constructing a conclusion, or conclusive discourse, that provides a neatly conceived closure for my exploration of an African-British long eighteenth century. This pluralistic and interdisciplinary endeavor in which I have attempted to work across several modes of discourse, that began in 2001, has led me to an exploration of several archival holdings in Sierra Leone, England, and the United States; and over these years of formulating this project, I have come to view this age of increasing globalization and geopolitical consciousness as positive stuff of the imagination. Similar to the mode that imaginarily conceived boundaries allowed European colonizers to establish negative fictive notions of familiar and unfamiliar, of civilized and uncivilized, our age of increasing pluralization and multicultural interface has utilized the imagination to establish bonds of human connectivity (in spite of the setbacks of imagined ignorance that sometimes occur). It is the desire and drive toward pluralization, and working across imagined boundaries that have fueled my exploration of this African British long eighteenth century. Throughout the years of traveling, research, and pouring over the various archival documents—treaties, novels, reports, treatises, and so forth—I have had much time and space to deliberate what it means to be strongly committed to the concept of working across imagined boundaries, and listening to each individual voice in order to hear the unique story that it tells. Each of these five chapters of my project, as well as the individual pieces and modes of writing examined within them, have their own unique elemental roles to play in an exploration of an African-British long eighteenth century. This is, in large part, the reason that I have avoided any attempt to provide a neatly packaged ending—indeed, I feel that it would be disingenuous of me to do so. In many ways, as I stated at the outset, I see this project as the beginning 165

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of an explorational endeavor, and would therefore contradict my original intentions were I to engage in summation here. This project brings to light African-British treaties and Sierra Leone Company documents that have never been explored in this sort of critical manner before, in addition to making links to the emerging colonial project and eighteenth-century anthropological science. However, it also should be clear that while this archival project is about the African-British eighteenth century and the emergence of colonialism in Sierra Leone, the archival dimension holds a larger scope and greater implications. The archival dimensions of this project carry the important implications that are inherent in being able to know oneself and having the ability to knowledgeably construct the history and identity of a people in an increasing age of global citizenship. By knowing ourselves and understanding that we have the power to knowledgeably and responsibly construct histories of our past, we as human beings are strengthened and empowered with a greater understanding that we can knowledgeably and responsibly construct our “presents” and our “futures” in this age of increasing globalization. To conclude this epilogue, I think it would be fitting to be redundant for the sake of effect, and to end where I began in my introduction—by evoking Glissant’s thoughts about the duty of the writer. “The duty of the writer is to explore this obsession [with the events of historical consciousness], to show its relevance in a continuous fashion to the immediate present,” and the task is to do this with “a full projection forward into the future” (Glissant 63–64). In the end, the archive is a powerful tool, and the job of the archivist, the writer, the historian, and literary scholar, who commits to working with the archive, is to empower generations so that they may knowledgeably go forward to construct sound, stable, and knowledgeable “presents” and “futures.” My hope is that this exploration of the African-British long eighteenth century will inspire others to see the possibilities of intercultural and interdisciplinary scholarship, and the futility of imagined boundaries of separation and negativity.

Appendix of Treaties

SIERRA LEONE TREATY OF 1788 Know all men by these present that I King Naimbanna chief of Sierra Leone on the Grain Coast of Africa by and with the consent of the other Kings, Princes, Chiefs, and Potentates subscribing hereto. In consideration of the present as by a list annexed now made me by Captain John Taylor of His Britannic Majesty in behalf of and for the sole benefit of the free community of Settlers, their Heirs and Successors lately arrived from England and under the protection of the British Government have granted and by these present do grant and forever quit claim to a certain district of land for the settling of the said free community to be their’s, their heirs and successors forever. That’s to say all the land, wood, water, etc, which are contained from the Bay Common called Frenchman’s Bay, but by these presents changes to St. George’s Bay coastwise up the river Sierra Leone to Gambia Island and Southerly or inland from the river side twenty miles. And forth be it known unto all men that I King Naimbanna do faithfully promise and swear for my Chief Gentlemen, and People likewise, Heirs and Successors, that I will bear true allegiance to His most Gracious Majesty George the third, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, &c &c &c . . . That the customs payable by vessels anchoring in St. George’s Bay shall pay Ten Bars to the Free Settlers and Subjects of his Britannic Majesty. And the Customs paid for watering to be paid to King Naimbanna his representatives or successors. That is to say Fifteen Bars as customary. Signed, John Taylor Richard Weaver Thomas Peall 167

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Benjamin Ellet King Naimbanna James Dowder Pa Bongee Bick Robbin Abram Elliot Griffin A List of the Presents given in consideration for Completing the Purchase of Land, &c, hereunder annexed, viz: One embroidered bersode coat, waistcoast, and breeches. A crimson satin embroidered waistcoast. A lead coloured satin coat, waistcoat, and breeches. A mock diamond ring. Two pairs of pistols. One telescope. Two pairs of gold earrings with necklaces and drops. Eight doze[n??] bottles of wine. One puncheon of rum. A tierce or three hundredweight of pork. One box of smoking pipes. Seven muskets. Twenty points of tobacco. One piece of fine white cotton or calico. Ten pounds of beads in lots. Two cheeses weighing twenty-eight pounds. Two hundred gun flints. One dozen bottles of red port wine. This is to certify to all to whom these presents may come, that we whose names are hereunto subscribed maketh oath that the purchase of the land, &c, made by Captain Thompson was not (to our certain knowledge) valid; it having been purchased from people who had no authority to sell the same.

SIERRA LEONE TREATY OF 1807 (JULY 10) Treaty of capitulation between the Governor of Sierra Leone and King Firama and King Tom (Courtesy of British National Archives, Kew Gardens, England) Treaty of peace and alliance between the Governor of the Colony of Sierra Leone, for the Sierra Leone Company, on the one part, and King Firama and King Tom, with their Princes and Headmen, on the other part.

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1. It is agreed that there shall henceforth be peace and friendship between the British Colony of Sierra Leone and King Firama and King Tom, and all the Princes, Headmen, and people subject. 2. King Firama and King Tom, with the consent of all the Headmen at this time assembled, do hereby surrender to His Majesty the King of Great Britain, for the use and benefit of the Sierra Leone Company, all the right, power, and possession of every sort and kind in the peninsula of Sierra Leone and its dependencies which they or either of them formerly had to the westward of the Colony of Sierra Leone or any part thereof. 3. It is, nevertheless, agreed that the claim of the proprietors of Bance Island to the possession of Cape Sierra Leone and the adjacent land, shall not be altered or affected by this Treaty; neither shall the claims of any other person or persons to the same or any part thereof be affected or altered by it; but all such claims shall remain the same as if this Treaty never had been made. 4. No native town shall be built nearer to the Colony than Robiss, except Robiss, Salt Town, and Ro-Cupra; the land between Robiss and Ro-Cupra shall be left to the people of those places for their luggars; and in consideration of the permission thus given to rebuild Ro-Cupra, the Governor of Sierra Leone shall have the right to make what use he thinks proper of Sig. Domingo’s point and the land adjacent thereto, he engaging to make a reasonable compensation to Sig. Domingo for the same. 5. The customary payment of one hundred bars to King Firama, as agreed upon between him and the Governor of Sierra Leone on the 7 March 1794, shall continue to be paid to him. 6. The Governor of Sierra Leone engages that the usual customs for watering in St. George’s Bay shall be collected regularly and paid to King Firama and his successors, or to such person as he or they may appoint to receive the same. 7. And to prevent disputes it is hereby acknowledged that the duties payable for water are fifteen bars (each bar being of the full value of three shillings and four pence sterling, if paid in goods or specie) for every trading vessel that takes water, whether it takes little or much except crafts belonging to traders residing on the Coast of Africa, and vessels of any description belonging to the Sierra Leone Company, or to the colonists of Sierra Leone, or to the proprietor of Bance Island. And further, that no vessel ought to pay for water more than once in one voyage, unless that voyage continue more than a twelvemonth. 8. If any dispute shall arise concerning the boundary between the Colony and Robiss and Ro-Cupra, the Governor of Sierra Leone and the Headmen of Robiss and Ro-Cupra shall meet and settle it in a friendly way. Done at Robiss this tenth day of July, in the forty-seventh year of the reign of our sovereign Lord George the Third, of the United Kingdom of Great

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Britain and Ireland King, and in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and seven. A. Smith

Alexr McCaulay King Firama (X mark)

King Tom (X mark)

King Banna Firama (X mark)

London In presence of— William McCaulay John Thorpe John McCaulay Wilson David Edmund, junr George S. Caulker Charles Shaw

SIERRA LEONE TREATY OF 1819 Agreement for Mar Porto & Ro Bompe–renamed called Waterloo & Hastings, Sierra Leone Convention between His Excellency Lieut. Colonel Charles MacCarthy, Captain General and Governor Chief in and over the Colony of Sierra Leone and its Dependencies Vice Admiral of the same &c. &c. and Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s Forces on the West Coast of Africa on the part of His Majesty the King of Great Britain and Ireland, and Pa Loudon commonly known by the name and style of Ka Conko, and his Chieftains, Headmen &c. &c. &c. His Excellency the Captain General and Governor in Chief being anxious to maintain the happy union and harmony which have for several years past

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subsisted between the Colony of Sierra Leone and the Timmanies, wishing to strengthen and renew the former Treaties made by his Predecessors with the King and Chieftains, to prevent all misunderstanding which might arise from misconception as to the proper limits and boundaries of the Colony, the rights and titles of British subjects under the Authority of the Governor and Council hereafter to former Establishments on such parts of the left bank of the Bunch River as are at present unoccupied by British Subjects, and Pa Loudon commonly called Ka Conko and his Chieftains, Headmen and Gentlemen, being animated with the same sentiment, have for the benefit of all parties concerned agreed as follows The said Pa Loudon Commonly called Ka Conko his Chieftains, Headmen and Gentlemen have for themselves and their Successors, ceded, transferred, and given to his said Excellency Governor McCarthy as Governor for the time being, for the use and on the behalf of His Majesty, the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and his successors, the full, entire, free, and unlimited possession and Sovereignty of the Territory and lands commonly known under the name Mar Porto and Ro Bompe situated on the Banks of the Bunch River and extends from, to, with all right and title to the Navigation of the same River; water on the Riverlet situated on the left side of the aforesaid. The extent and limits of the aforementioned Lands of Mar Porto and Ro Bumpe shall be duly established in the presence and with the consent of Pa Loudon commonly called Ka Conko or a Person or Persons duly authorized by him to that affect and no alterations in said limits shall hereafter under any pretence or plea be permitted under the authority or Sanction of His said Excellency the Governor or his Successor without the concurrences of the said Pa Loudon or his Successor, it being fully understood that within the extent of those limits only British subjects shall have right to occupy lands in the district. In consideration of which transfer of Land, His said Excellency the Captain General and Governor in Chief for himself and Successors as the Governor of Sierra Leone for the time being, on the part and on the behalf of His Britannic Majesty engages, promises and agrees to pay yearly and every year to the said Pa Loudon commonly called Ka Conko, or to such person as may succeed him or be appointed or authorized to receive the same, the Sum of Fifty Bars in lieu of all other claims or demands of whatever nature or description/the yearly Rent of a hundred Bars to Kin Farima excepted which shall continue as hereto-for/And His Excellency solemnly promises for himself and his successors for the time being on the part of His Britannic Majesty, not to disturb or molest any of the native Inhabitants who may now occupy any Town, House or Falt, whither the extent of the limits of the place aforementioned.

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It is further agreed by the contracting parties that the Year Rent of Fifty Bars shall become due and payable on the fourth day of June in each year, the same to commence from the fourth of June next and payable on the same day of the year One-Thousand Eight hundred and Twenty, and to consist of the following articles which are to be taken at rate here agreed upon, and not liable to any alteration. Lastly in fault of due on regular payment of the yearly Rent above agreed upon, the present Treaty shall be considered as null and void. In Witness whereof the said Contracting parties at Freetown in the Colony of Sierra Leone on the Twenty-Fifth day of May One-thousand eight hundred and nineteen, have hereunto set their hand and seals in presence of the subscribing Witnesses. Lt C. MacCarthy “Pa Loudon + Konko” “Pa Naingbanna” “Moimadoo Bandio” “Pa Kattena”

Bibliography

ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS British National Archives, Kew Gardens, England British National Library, London, England Fourah Bay College Library (University of Sierra Leone), Freetown, Sierra Leone Newberry Library, Chicago, IL Sierra Leone National Archives, Freetown, Sierra Leone

ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTS From British National Archives Sierra Leone Treaty of 1807

From Sierra Leone National Archives 1791 Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company 1796 Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company 1798 Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company 1801 Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company Sierra Leone Treaty of 1788 Sierra Leone Treaty of 1819

Maps and Images Chodowiecki, Daniel. “The Five Varieties of Human Kind” in Beytrage zur Naturgeschichte (1790) by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. 173

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Index

African-British Long Eighteenth Century: chapter-by-chapter overview of book, xx–xxii; explanation of the concept of African-British eighteenth century, xi–xxviii, 1 African-British treaties, 37–55; Treaty of 1788, 42–46, 128, 167–68, 130; Treaty of 1807, xviii, 46–49, 83, 168–70; Treaty of 1819, 49–52, 170–72 African Company, 77 African Institution of London, xxi, 114–22, 142; 1807 Report of African Institution, 115–16, 118, 119; 1813 Report of African Institution, 120; 1824 Report of African Institution, 120–21; Mungo Park in African Institution Reports, 117–18, 151; The Oxford History of the British Empire’s description of, 114; plan of African Institution, 116; Reports of the African Institution, xiv, xvi, 90, 91, 102 Alie, Joe, A. D., 30–31, 42, 47–48, 50; A New History of Sierra Leone, xviii, 47, 52n1; Anderson, Benedict, 29; Imagined Communities, 4, 33n12

Appiah, Kwame Anthony: In My Father’s House, xxvii–xxviii Aravamudan, Srinivas, xii, 1, 10, 30; on pluralization of eighteenthcentury studies, 39; Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, xii The Autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, 25–32; comments on Equiano by Mary Wollstonecraft, 26 Azim, Firdous, 3, 9; The Colonial Rise of the Novel, 3 Behn, Aphra. See Oroonoko Benton, Lauren, 39, 41, 46; Law and Colonial Cultures, 39 Bhabha, Homi: The Location of Culture, 3–4 The Black Prince, xiv, xx, 1, 2, 3, 4, 16–25, 68; caption from, 18; cheap repository of shorter tracts, 1, 16–17, 20 Blumenbach, Johann, 60, 90, 91, 108– 14; Chodowiecki’s rendering of Five Varieties of Humankind, 111–12; Contributions to Natural History, “On the Negro,” 113–14; list of five categories of humankind, 109; On

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Index

the Natural Varieties of Mankind, xxi, 89, 92 British companies in Africa, history of, 76–79 British Crown Colony, 37, 46, 48, 119, 146, 158 British East India Company, 61, 83 Brown, Christopher Leslie: on economic premise of African colonization, 42, 57, 76, 115, 141; Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, xvii Burton, Antoinette: Dwelling in the Archive, 65–66 Caribbean Discourse. See Glissant, Edouard Cheney-Coker, Syl. See The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar Chodowiecki, Daniel: images of Blumenbach’s The Five Varieties of Mankind, 111–12 Coleman, Deirdre: Romantic Colonization and British AntiSlavery, xvii, 80 The Colonial Rise of the Novel, 3 Colonialism and Culture. See Dirks, Nicholas Colony of Freedom (Sierra Leone), xii, xx, 30, 37–42, 70, 119, 128, 130, 141–42, 143 Dauton, Martin, and Halpern, Richard: Empire and Others, 2 Defoe, Daniel: An Essay Upon Trade to Africa, 76, 77, 78 Desai, Gaurav: Subject to Colonialism, xvi Dirks, Nicholas, Colonialism and Culture, 2; on colonial power 20, 83; on the colonial project and science, 89 Dwelling in the Archive. See Burton, Antoinette

Empire and Others. See Dauton, Martin, and Halpern, Richard Equiano, Olaudah, xx, 1, 25–32, 129, 142 Essay on Colonization, xxi, 89, ethnic map of Sierra Leone, 38 Festa, Lynn: Sentimental Figures of Empire, 71. See also Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave Foucault, Michel: The Archaeology of Knowledge, 44; Discipline and Punish, 63, 64, 68; Discourse on Language, 71, 74; The Order of Things, 91, 93, 107 Fyfe, Christopher, on eighteenth-century history of Sierra Leone, 28, 47; on Granville Sharp and Colony of Freedom, 40; in relation to The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, 153 Gikandi, Simon, Reading the African Novel, 131 Glissant, Edouard: Caribbean Discourse, xix; on myth and history, 128; on the postcolonial experience, 132–33 The Global Eighteenth Century. See Nussbaum, Felicity Hawkins, Sir John, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv Imagined Communities, 4, 33n12. See also Anderson, Benedict Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. See Pratt, Mary Louise In My Father’s House. See Appiah, Kwame Anthony Joseph, Betty: Reading the East India Company, xiv–xv, 61 King George III, 42

Index

Kryza, Frank T.: The Race for Timbuktu, 122 The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, xii, xvi, xxii; similarities to Sierra Leone Company Reports, 152; in relation to the “Colony of Freedom,” 128, 138–46; in relation to the rise of colonial administration, 146–59; Sierra Leone election crisis of 1967, 133–38 Loomba, Ania: Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, xv MacCarthy, Governor Charles (of Sierra Leone Colony), 49–52, 147, 149, 153–154 Markley, Robert: The Far East and the English Imagination, xiii Mitchell, Timothy: Colonising Egypt, on colonial strategies of control, 65, 68 moral tracts of long eighteenth century. See The Black Prince Mudimbe, V. Y.: The Invention of Africa, xvi; on civilization and Christianity in Africa, 21–22 Naimbanna, John Henry, xi, 3, 50, 70, 130; in relation to The Black Prince, 16–25, 31–32, 68 Naimbanna, King, in relation to The Black Prince, 17; in relation to Colony of Freedom, 40–41; in relation to The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, 130 Treaty of 1788, 42–46, 50–51 A New Account of Guinea, 13 A New History of Sierra Leone, xviii, 47, 52n1. See also Alie, Joe, A. D. Nussbaum, Felicity, The Global Eighteenth Century, xiii Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, xi, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 4–16, 31–32; Festa, Lynn,

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critique of Oroonoko, 6, 31; Lipking, Joanna, critique of, 5; sentimentality and spectacle, 6, 10, Park, Mungo, 117–18, 151 Palmer, Eustace, “Re-lighting Sierra Leonean History,” 127 Pratt, Mary Louise: Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, xiv; on travel writing, science, and systematizing, 90 The Race for Timbuktu. See Kryza, Frank T. Reading the East India Company. See Joseph, Betty A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinee, xi, xx, 1, 13–16; French influence in Comendo, 15, 16; Gold Coast, 15 Renaissance contact between Africans and Europeans, xxii–xxviii; Corker, Thomas and Caulker family, xxv, xxvi; Hawkins, Sir John, xxiv, xxv; Portuguese in Africa, xxii, xxiii Reports of the Sierra Leone Company. See Sierra Leone Company Romantic Colonization and British AntiSlavery, xvii, 80 Royal African Company, 78, 79 Sharp, Granville, 25–26; Sommerset Case, 26–27 Sierra Leone. See ethnic map of Sierra Leone Sierra Leone Company, xx, xxi, 102, 142, 150, 152, 155; 1791 Company Report, 45–46, 59–63, 67, 68, 152; 1796 Company Report, 68, 69, 79, 80, 81; 1798 Company Report, 64–66, 70; 1801 Company Report, 79–80, 81, 82; concept of joint-stock company, 75, 77–78; role in education of Prince John Henry Naimbanna, 19–21

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Index

Smith, Adam, xxvi, 150; on European settlements in Africa and East Indies, 75; Theory of Moral Sentiments, 58, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75; Wealth of Nations, 58, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79 Snelgrave, William 13–16; A New Account of Guinea, 13 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 25–26, 40 Subject to Colonialism. See Desai, Gaurav

Treaty of 1807, xviii, 46–49, 83; text of treaty (1807), 168–70 Treaty of 1819, 49–52; text of treaty (1819), 170–72 Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. See Aravamudan, Srinivas.

Temne/Shebro (African indigenous peoples), 6, 17, 39, 40, 43, 46, 47, 48, 69, 83, 129; ethnic map of Sierra Leone, 38 Thorton, John, Africa and Africans in Making the Black Atlantic, 43; A Treatise Upon Trade from Great Britain to Africa, xxvi; on France and global commerce, xxvi; on new colonial economic modes of AfricanEuropean relations, xxvii Treaty of 1788, 42–46; text of treaty (1788), 128, 167–68, 130

Wadstrom, C. B.: Essay on Colonization, 89, 90, 91, 92–108; images from Wadstrom Map of Africa, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104; plan for Africa, 93–94; Wadstrom’s image of slave ship, 106 Wilson, Kathleen: A New Imperial History, xi; on identity, empire, and nation-state, 27; The Island Race, 3 Wyse, Akintola: ethnic map of Sierra Leone, 38, 129; on subject of Colony of Freedom and Black Poor, 31, 129

Villault, and deBelleford: A Relation of the Coasts of Africk Called Guinea, 13

About the Author

Tcho Mbaimba Caulker is currently a scholar/practitioner-in-residence at the University of New Haven (New Haven, CT), and is also currently researching at the Yale University Sterling Memorial Library and Special Collections for his next critical project. He holds a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in the areas of English literature (British long eighteenth-century and early modern), postcolonial literature and theory, and African literature. During his tenure at Michigan State University, Dr. Caulker was a KCP Future Faculty Fellow and a competitive doctoral enrichment fellow. He also holds a master’s degree from Seton Hall University (New York City Metro Area) and a bachelor’s degree from Sacred Heart University (Fairfield, CT).

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