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[^0]:    2 For a discussion of memories of the slave trade from an African perspective, see Bailey, 2007.  
in the Americas, that distinguishes this corpus as a genre, and tells us something about slavery and freedom in Africa. In North America, there are fewer narratives of individuals born in Africa than elsewhere, because the 'slave narrative' genre was almost entirely a nineteenth-century phenomenon in North America, and mostly involved persons who were born into slavery. Hence, the North American genre is largely a 'Creole' phenomenon.  
These 'freedom narratives' represent individuals who had known freedom, and they are not the only ones. As is clear from an emerging biographical database derived from numerous sources, ${ }^{3}$ we have accounts of people liberated off slave ships, who subsequently experienced conversion as well as emancipation. From an Africanist perspective, the surviving profiles of individuals who were enslaved but achieved emancipation was the fate of only a minority of those who crossed the Atlantic. Among those who did, some returned to Africa, and we know some details of their lives. Many others who were liberated in the nineteenth century and settled in Sierra Leone, or freed in Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, Trinidad, Saint Helena and other places, have left biographical trails. Thus, the corpus of narratives that involve the loss of freedom as well as its regaining is larger than has been recognized. While this genre shows us that the concepts of freedom and slavery are opposites, it also demonstrates that you cannot have one without the other. The best study of shipboard bonding is from the accounts from Sierra Leone, but in that case the bonding happened in freedom not in slavery. In that important sense, those accounts differ from the accounts of people who, after the Middle Passage, underwent slavery rather than freedom, or at least apprenticeship. Such 'transit bonding' has parallels with caravan trails and river traffic.