scholarly journals The Court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone and the Abolition of the West African Slave Trade

2006 ◽  
Vol 115 (5) ◽  
pp. 1122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Helfman
1964 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Polanyi

The records of trading between Africans and Europeans on the Guinea Coast since antiquity raise issues the practical resolution of which has never ceased to occupy economic historians. The Herodotean inadequacies of dumb barter in Carthaginian goods and in gold dust were fully resolved only at the time of the eighteenth-century slave trade. In Senegambia and even on the Windward Coast, as we now know, the Royal African Company had still to go without an effective profit-and-loss accountancy. With the advent of the regular slave trade two new commercial devices had to be introduced by the Europeans. Both the ‘sorting’ and the ‘ounce trade’ sprang from the vital need for adjustment between the radically different trading methods of Europeans and Africans. And it was not so much a case of mutual adjustment, for of the two systems only one, the European, adjusted.


1990 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 367-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Law

Captain William Snelgrave's A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea, and the Slave Trade, first published in 1734, is a work well known to historians of West Africa. The largest and most valuable section of it comprises a detailed account of voyages by the author in 1727 and 1730 to the ports of Whydah and Jakin on the Slave Coast, then recently conquered by Dahomey, and offers the earliest extended account of the latter kingdom to be published. The information in Snelgrave's book can also be supplemented by records of testimony which he provided on two occasions, in 1726 and 1731, before the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London.Snelgrave was a slave-trading captain with, at the time of his book's publication, some thirty years' experience of the West African trade. The details of his career are documented principally from his book, which in addition to the voyages of 1727 and 1730 (which form its principal subject), also alludes to several earlier slave-trading voyages undertaken by him. Snelgrave's first voyage to Africa, in which he served as purser on a ship commanded by his father, was to Old Calabar in 1704; a second voyage to Old Calabar was undertaken in 1713, a voyage to Sierra Leone (on which Snelgrave was captured by pirates) in 1719, and a voyage to the Gold Coast in 1721-22. This is not, however, a comprehensive catalog of Snelgrave's voyages, since he also alludes to having visited Whydah on “several voyages” before 1727. Other evidence documents two such earlier voyages by Snelgrave to Whydah, in 1717 and 1725. He was apparently still alive in 1735, the year after the publication of his book, when he is mentioned among a group of people involved in legal proceedings to press claims on the estate of Patrick West, a recently deceased merchant of Antigua.


Author(s):  
M. Govier

This paper presents evidence of the interrelationships that existed between the Royal Society in its early years, the slave colonies, and the West African slave trade, first under the auspices of the Royal Adventurers, and later the Royal African Company (RAC). First, it examines the extent of the overlapping of memberships between the bodies. Second, it chronicles the Society's ownership of shares in the RAC. Third, it investigates involvement by Fellows of the Society in the administration of the (then) slave colony of Jamaica. Finally, it presents a few relevant extracts from the Society's foreign correspondence from outposts of the rising empire, and also extracts from discussions at ordinary meetings concerning the cause of the differences in colour between Europeans and Africans. Following the sale of its shares in the RAC in 1699, no further investments in the slave trade by the Society are known to have occurred.


Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Dalla Malé Fofana

Recently, the Senegalese people have learned to speak more openly of their history. But, as late as the 1980s—the years of my youth and early schooling—the wounds of colonialism were still fresh. I contend that slavery had been so powerful a blow to the Senegalese ethos that we—my family, friends, and schoolmates—did not speak about it. The collective trauma and shame of slavery was apparently so powerful that we sought to repress it, keeping it hidden from ourselves. We were surrounded by its evidence, but chose not to see it. Such was my childhood experience. As an adult, I understand that repression never heals wounds. The trauma remains as a haunting presence. But one can discover its “living presence,” should one choose to look. Just 5.2 km off the west African coast of Senegal lies Gorée Island, where millions of Africans were held captive while awaiting transport into slavery. Much of the four-century history of the African slave trade passed through Senegal, where I grew up. In this essay, I explore the history of the island and its role in the slave trade. I describe my own coming to terms with this history—how it has haunted me since my youth. And I argue for the role of visual rhetorics in the formation (and affirmation) of Senegalese ethos. As Baumlin and Meyer (2018) remind us, we need to speak, in order to be heard, in order to be seen: Such is an assumption of rhetorical ethos. And the reverse, as I shall argue, may be true, too: Sometimes we need to see (or be seen), in order to know what to speak and how to be heard. It is for this reason that we need more films written, directed, produced, and performed by Africans (Senegalese especially).


Author(s):  
Daniel Bailey ◽  
Jane Shallcross ◽  
Christopher H. Logue ◽  
Simon A. Weller ◽  
Liz Evans ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Ulrike Gut

This chapter describes the history, role, and structural properties of English in the West African countries the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, the anglophone part of Cameroon, and the island of Saint Helena. It provides an overview of the historical phases of trading contact, British colonization and missionary activities and describes the current role of English in these multilingual countries. Further, it outlines the commonalities and differences in the vocabulary, phonology, morphology, and syntax of the varieties of English spoken in anglophone West Africa. It shows that Liberian Settler English and Saint Helenian English have distinct phonological and morphosyntactic features compared to the other West African Englishes. While some phonological areal features shared by several West African Englishes can be identified, an areal profile does not seem to exist on the level of morphosyntax.


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