This interesting book examines the immigration of “liberated” Africans to the Caribbean after the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade two hundred years ago. As the British government committed the navy to the suppression of the continuing transatlantic trade, conducted mostly by Spanish and Portuguese slavers, it had to dispose of the human cargoes in the intercepted ships. Over half of the total (probably over one hundred thousand people) were resettled in Sierra Leone, but some forty thousand individuals were persuaded or forced to settle in the British Caribbean colonies under schemes of temporary apprenticeship or indenture. These people, arriving between 1808 and 1862—though the great majority came after 1834, when slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire—formed a unique group within the larger African-Caribbean population.
Roseanne Adderley focuses on two colonies, the Bahamas and Trinidad; the former received some six thousand, the latter over eight thousand, of these “liberated Africans” (the term she uses in preference to “recaptives”). She contends they provide “ideal cases” (9) for comparative study because of the striking differences between them. Trinidad in the 1830s had a rapidly expanding plantation economy hungry for laborers after emancipation; the Bahamas had few plantations and little need for additional labor. Culturally, Trinidad was mainly Roman Catholic with a weak missionary presence; the Bahamas were overwhelmingly Protestant with an active Nonconformist evangelical project, especially in New Providence, the main island. These (and other) differences helped to shape distinctive trajectories for the liberated Africans coming to each colony, though they came from much the same places and under similar administrative arrangements under the overall supervision of the Colonial Office in London.
The author identifies her study as a work on the cultural history of the African diaspora, exploring the specific social and cultural worlds of the immigrants in the Bahamas and in Trinidad. These Africans provide an excellent case study because their experiences were well documented, since they were important to British abolitionism for fifty years. Voluminous records, generated from branches of the imperial government as well as the island administrations, form the documentary base of this book, supplemented by contemporary accounts, newspapers (especially from Trinidad), and some oral history interviews of descendants of the immigrants by the author and other scholars. This is a well-researched and readable study, though with a tendency to excess wordiness and even repetitiveness at times.
Chapters 1 and 2 narrate the settlement of the liberated Africans in the Bahamas and Trinidad between 1808 and 1862, focusing on the legal, administrative, and diplomatic aspects of this scheme of free, yet hardly voluntary, immigration. These chapters also discuss the different responses of the local elites and officials of the two colonies to the arriving Africans: they were more likely to be welcomed as potential plantation workers in Trinidad than in the Bahamas, where they might instead be seen as “troublesome savages” (the title of chap. 1) in a colony with little need of additional labor.
The heart of the study can be found in chapters 3–7, where Adderley considers the social and cultural world of the immigrants in the two colonies. Chapter 3 provides an interesting discussion of the ethnic origins of the liberated Africans, using richly detailed records of the Court of Mixed Commission set up at Havana to adjudicate on slavers that were seized by the navy but originally destined for the flourishing slave economy of Cuba. These records (now in the British National Archives) give the ethnic origins of about ten thousand individuals from 1828 to 1838. Adderley examines how the immigrants themselves conceptualized and understood their ethnic identities. She notes that African, Yaraba, and Congo were quite often taken as surnames by immigrants in Trinidad, and that ethnic identities, especially among Yorubas and Radas, survived well into the mid-twentieth century. In Nassau, she finds friendly societies organized around African ethnic groups.
Chapter 4 considers gender and family formation among the immigrants. Adderley probes how they negotiated between African and Western ideas about women's roles and family forms. In Trinidad, she uses the 1888 newspaper report of a court case about a Yoruba woman's cocoa estate to discuss issues of kinship, marriage, widowhood, property, and women's place. Religion, of course, was central to the cultural world of the African diaspora, and chapter 5 considers this. Here, the contrast between the two colonies is striking. In New Providence, the immigrants became enthusiastic members of Methodist, Baptist, and Anglican congregations. In Trinidad, African-derived, though syncretic, religions, especially the Yoruba orisha (“Shango”) and the Rada faiths, flourished mainly through liberated Africans. Adderley accepts that part of the explanation lies in the traditional view that Catholicism lent itself more readily to syncretism with African belief systems and rituals than did Protestantism. But she also stresses more specific reasons, especially the extent, nature, and persistence of missionary involvement. In New Providence, the immigrants came under consistent and effective missionary influence; in Trinidad, most of them received little Christian attention other than a perfunctory Catholic baptism, if that. These differences may also help to explain why contemporary reports suggest that “Obeah,” a complex of African-derived magical and healing practices, was strongly linked to the liberated Africans in Trinidad but much less so in the Bahamas, (“supernatural practice beyond religious spheres” is the focus of chap. 6).
Finally, chapter 7 considers how the immigrants thought of Africa, of exile and return, always an important issue in diaspora studies. Adderley's interesting discussion considers both folklore and oral tradition—for instance, the idea of “flying back” to Africa, or spiritual return after death, found all over the Americas—and more formal, textual evidence, such as newspaper discussions in Trinidad and the Bahamas about Africa and the “progress of the race” throughout the diaspora, and the petition, addressed to the king of the Belgians in 1888, from the Congo No.1 Friendly Society, Nassau—men who self-identified as “Congos” yet who were also active Baptists—requesting him to help them return to the Congo.
This interesting and well researched book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the multifaceted experiences of the “liberated Africans” who were brought in the nineteenth century to the Caribbean and, through them, to the cultural history of the African experience in the Americas.
