In addition to those who returned to the West African coast of their own volition, there were also the Africans recaptured by Britain's Royal Navy on their expeditions to suppress the Atlantic slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. Those who had been recaptured were sent to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where some trained in the city's religious schools before returning to their native region, mainly in Nigeria, and becoming local leaders. ${ }^{2}$ Much like the Brazilian returnees, freedpersons and their direct descendants from Cuba also went back to the West African coast, in voluntary migratory waves, the characteristics of which changed over time. In the Yoruba region in the nineteenth century, the  
[^0]
[^0]:    1 In 1817 in Philadelphia, United States of America, around 3,000 people gathered for a demonstration against the back-to-Africa campaigns, which they had interpreted as a form of expulsion.
2 One of the best-known examples is Reverend Samuel Ajayi Crowther, of Yoruba origin. He followed this path and ended up returning to Nigeria, where he worked as a translator and missionary alongside English Christian expeditions and missions. In the nineteenth century, Crowther also published studies of native languages in Nigeria, which now serve as a reference for local language knowledge.  
returnees who came through Sierra Leone were often called Saros, while those returning from Brazil and Cuba were called Amaros (Ajayi, 1965; Sarracino, 1988, p. 218). Some Cuban returnees mingled with the more numerous freedpersons arriving from Brazil in the communities of the West African coast, taking on new identities and even rendering more Portuguese the Spanish surnames they had adopted (Sarracino, 1988; Da Cunha, 2012).