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Other important works were published in the wake of this rich discussion on the formation of identities within the returnee communities established on the West African coast - in Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana - in the nineteenth century. These included Milton Guran's study of the Agudás of Benin. Guran used photography as a tool for investigation, along with research into the archives and intensive fieldwork, to shed light on individual trajectories and social strategies of affirmation among the African freedpersons who returned to Benin from Brazil (Guran, 1999). Paradoxical aspects of the history of the returnees, such as the strong presence of a positive memory of their Brazilian experience - in a context of enslavement - have been debated. Key considerations in this context include the mechanisms for building a self-image that allowed them to put themselves in a valued position within local societies.
[^0]
[^0]: 5 Manuela Carneiro da Cunha's field work was carried out when accompanying her husband, Marianno Carneiro da Cunha, who was conducting pioneering research in the 1970s on the Brazilian presence in the cities where the community of returnees from Brazil was established, with a particular focus on Lagos, Nigeria (Da Cunha, 1985).
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# Atlantic contexts
Another way of looking at the constitution of the returnee communities is through their Atlantic dimension, which influenced both the formation of the groups organized for the return trips and the construction of an identity in Africa itself. As part of his research into the Yorubas, Robin Law, a British historian long devoted to the study of the West African coast, considered the presence of returnees from Brazil and Sierra Leone acting as intermediaries between native and European groups. He saw this as a factor that contributed directly to the redefinition of local identities. This Atlantic perspective could be considered a key element of the history of returns from the Americas and of the formation of returnee communities in West Africa. This is true both in terms of the way these freedpersons organized their return trips and their integration into the places where they settled on the African continent. Law has published several papers on the subject. Studies by Beninese historian Elisée Soumonni continue along the same lines of analysis, incorporating sound African historiography and some advances in the debates around ancient Dahomey.
This perspective has taken on other dimensions in more recent academic papers, bringing to the debate elements of the wider context of the Back-toAfrica movement from other regions of the black Americas. This includes the political discourse and actions - especially those of the British - that drove these movements, which have had an influence on the black populations of Brazilian cities (Lima e Souza, 2008). In addition, the concept of Atlantic circularity comprises an analysis of cultural practices present on both sides of the ocean. More than just a recreation or transposition by the returnees, these practices are indicative of mutual influences undergoing a permanent process of contact and transformation (Silva, 2014).
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These and other discussions on the global and Atlantic contexts of the returns were given a special arena for discussion during a symposium held in Cape Town in 2008, the sole subject of which was the history of the returnees from Brazil and their communities. This meeting led to the publication of a book, bringing together pieces from several African and Brazilian scholars, which was published the following year by the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) with several contributions (Prah, 2009).
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# Returns
Studies on this subject, throughout its historiography, have been more concerned with the communities as they formed on the West African coast than with the return process itself. The demographic dimension of these returns, the constitution of the groups that made the trips, their motives over time and the conditions under which the trips could be carried out, although present, have received relatively little consideration. Identifying these aspects demands in-depth research using various types of sources, in archives on different sides of the ocean, with a view to gathering information and identifying the relationships between the different sources. ${ }^{6}$ Investigations of this nature can highlight aspects that, up until now, have received very little visibility in the handling of this subject. One of these aspects is the presence of social networks of kinship, religious ties and interdependence of the groups of returnees based on the discovery of connections between them. Such data can be obtained only through cross-referencing information from different sources, ranging from embarkation lists to travellers' personal data, which may be found in marriage and baptism records, as well as inventories and other documents held by the local police (Castillo, 2016). The travel contracts that larger groups of returnees signed with the ships' captains who took them back to Africa, along with their statements setting out the reasons they were asking for support in these endeavours, can reveal the conditions of travel and the justification given when seeking solidarity and support (Lima e Souza, 2008).
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For a time, the return of freedpersons from Brazil to West Africa was considered by historiography as a process with a similar general character throughout its implementation period. Some more recent studies indicate the existence of phases in these migratory movements. From the eighteenth century until around the 1820 s, the connections operated throughout the area covered by the Atlantic slave trade and were characterized by journeys made chiefly as individuals, or in small groups. From 1830, and especially after 1835, the groups became larger and their movement was prompted by the persecution and more restrictive conditions faced by freedpersons in Brazil. After the end of the slave trade to Brazil, the journeys were made in both large and small groups. The reasons behind them reveal both the intention to settle on the African coast in
[^0]
[^0]: 6 It moved in this direction, bringing quantitative and qualitative data, for example in the pioneering work of Verger, the thesis of Monica Lima e Souza and the article by Lisa Earl Castillo (Verger, 1987; Lima e Souza, 2008; Castillo, 2016).
a privileged position as partners working with the new European interests and the desire to return for personal and religious reasons - in the latter case, with the possibility of leaving to eventually return (Castillo, 2016; Lima e Souza, 2009, pp. 59-74).
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The prevailing focus on the communities of returnees from Brazil in the Bight of Benin, at the expense of research into the return journeys themselves, has also led to a reduction in the identification of their starting points and destinations. The port of Salvador was undoubtedly the place from which the majority of ships departed during the entire period of travel from Brazil. Nevertheless, several ships carrying groups of Africans and their descendants also left Rio de Janeiro for the African continent in the nineteenth century. Their destinations were not restricted to the West African coast; they also included the coast of the Congo-Angola region, in relation to which the history of these returns has not been sufficiently studied. There is a possible indication of notices attesting to the existence of returnee communities near the bay of Cabinda in travellers' reports cited by certain studies (Karash, 2000, p. 424; Lima e Souza, 2013), which undoubtedly merits further investigation.
There is still much to research in terms of the trajectories of these extraordinary men and women who managed to break free of the chains binding them to captivity and go against the current of the slave ships. Their stories reveal as much about the African diaspora in the Americas as they do the dynamic Atlantic contexts of the African coast in the nineteenth century; the ways in which they have been narrated in historiography bring to light the striking similarities between the interests and disputes on each of the various ocean shores inhabited by Africans and Afrodescendants.
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# References
Ajayi, J. F. A. 1965. Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841-1891. The Making of a New Élite. London, Longman.
Akinjogbin, I. A. 1967. Dabomey and its Neighbors, 1708-1818. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
Alberto, P. L. 2011. Para africano ver: intercâmbios africano-baianos na reinvenção da democracia racial, 1961-63. Afro-Ásia, No. 44, pp. 97-150.
Amos, A. M. 2007. Os que Voltaram. A bistória dos retornados afro-brasileiros na África Ocidental no século XIX. Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Tradição Planalto.
Blyden, E. W. 1978. Selected Letters of Edward Wilmot Blyden. H. R. Lynch (ed.). Millwood/New York, KTO Press.
Castillo, L. E. 2016. Mapping the nineteenth century Brazilian returnee movement: Demographics, life stories and the question of slavery. Atlantic Studies, Global Currents, Vol. 13, Issue 1, pp. 25-52.
Da Cunha, M. C. 1985. Da Senzala ao Sobrado. Arquitetura brasileira na Nigéria e na República Popular do Benim. São Paulo, Brazil, Nobel/Edusp.
Da Cunha, M. C. 2012 [orig. pub. 1985]. Negros, estrangeiros. Os escravos libertos e sua volta à África. São Paulo, Brazil, Companhia das Letras.
De Almeida Prado, J. F. 1956 [orig. pub. 1949]. A Bahia e as suas relações com o Daomé. O Brasil e o colonialismo europeu. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Companhia Editora Nacional, pp. 115-234.
De Bremoy, H. F. 1833. Le voyageur poète, ou Souvenir d'un français dans un coin des deux mondes. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France/Hachette.
De Carvalho Soares, M. 2000. Devotos da cor. Identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Civilização Brasileira.
De Carvalho Soares, M. 2004. A 'nação' que se tem e a 'terra' de onde se vem: categorias de inserção social de africanos no Império português, século XVIII. Estudos AfroAsiáticos, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 303-30.
De Macedo Soares, A.J. 1942 [orig. pub. 1874]. Estudos lexicográficos do dialeto brasileiro. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (IHGB), Vol. 177, pp. 3-269.
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De Macedo Soares, A.J. 1942 [orig. pub. 1874]. Estudos lexicográficos do dialeto brasileiro. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (IHGB), Vol. 177, pp. 3-269.
De Souza, S. 1992. La famille de Souza du Bénin-Togo. Cotonou, Les Éditions du Benin.
Freyre, G. 1973. Acontece que são baianos. G. Freyre (ed.), Problemas brasileiros de antropologia, 4th edn. Rio de Janeiro/Brasília, José Olympio/Instituto Nacional do Livro, pp. 263-313.
Guran, M. 1999. Agudás. Os "Brasileiros" do Benim. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Nova Fronteira.
Karash, M. C. 2000. A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850. São Paulo, Brazil, Companhia das Letras. [1987. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.]
Law, R. 2004. Yoruba liberated slaves who returned to West Africa. T. Falola and M. D. Childs (eds), The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University Press, pp. 349-65.
Lima e Souza, M. 2008. Entre Margens: O Retorno à África de Libertos no Brasil, 1830-1870. Ph.D. thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil.
Lima e Souza, M. 2009. Between shores: Brazil and the return of former slaves to Africa, 1830-1870. K. K. Prah (ed.), Back to Africa, Vol. I: Afro-Brazilian Returnees and their Communities. Cape Town, CASAS, pp. 59-74.
Lima e Souza, M. 2013. Histórias entre margens: retornos de libertos para a África partindo do Rio de Janeiro. Revista de história comparada, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 67-114.
Morton-Williams, P. 1964. The Oyo Yoruba and the Atlantic trade, 1670-1830. Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 25-45.
Olinto, A. 1964. Brasileiros na África. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, GRD.
Olinto, A. 1969. A casa da água. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Edições Bloch.
Prah, K. K. (ed.). 2009. Back to Africa, Vol. I: Afro-Brazilian Returnees and their Communities. Cape Town, CASAS.
Prah, K. K. 2012. Back to Africa, Vol. II: The Ideology and Practice of the African Returnee Phenomenon from the Caribbean and North-America to Africa. Cape Town, CASAS.
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Prah, K. K. 2012. Back to Africa, Vol. II: The Ideology and Practice of the African Returnee Phenomenon from the Caribbean and North-America to Africa. Cape Town, CASAS.
Réclus, E. 1876-1894. Nouvelle géographie universelle. La Terre et les Hommes. Paris, Librairie Hachette, 19 volumes. [1882-1898. The Universal Geography. The Earth and Its Inbabitants. Ernst Georg Ravenstein/A. H. Keane, 19 volumes.]
Sarracino, R. 1988. Los que volvieron a África. Habana Editoria de Ciencias Sociales.
Silva, A. F. 2014. 'Amanhã é dia santo'. Circularidades atlânticas e a comunidade brasileira na Costa da Mina. São Paulo, Brazil, Alameda.
Silva, A. F. 2016. Vozes de Lagos: Brasileiros em Tempos do Império Britânico: Costa da Mina, 1840-1900. Ph.D. thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
Soumonni, E. 2001. Daomé e o mundo atlântico. Amsterdam/Rio de Janeiro, SEPHIS/ CEAA-UCAM.
Strickrodt, S. 2004. 'Afro-Brazilians' of the western slave coast in the nineteenth century. J. C. Curto and P. E. Lovejoy (eds), Enslaving Connections. Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery. Amherst, NY, Humanity Books, pp. 213-44.
Turner, J. M. 1970. Escravos brasileiros no Daomé. Afro-Ásia, No. 10/11, pp. 5-24.
Turner, J. M. 1975. Les Brésiliens. The impact of former Brazilian slaves upon Dahomey. Ph.D. thesis (History), Boston University, Mass., USA. [Unpublished.]
Verger, P. 1987. Fluxo e Refluxo. Do tráfico de escravos entre o Golfo do Benim e a Babia de Todos-os-Santos, do século XVII ao XIX. Salvador, Brazil, Corrupio.
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# SECTION III
## LIFE STORIES AND FREEDOM NARRATIVES OF GLOBAL AFRICA
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# INTRODUCTION
## Life Stories and Freedom Narratives of Global Africa Paul E. Lovejoy
People in Africa have moved, migrated and mingled throughout history. We know this from archaeology, linguistics and historical documentation, which allow some reconstruction of how societies have evolved, social structures have developed and economic change has occurred. The General History of Africa (GHA) provides an overview of this long history. Historical analysis can reveal social and political forces that are important in examining the process of change and the resulting impact of climate, ecological and environmental parameters, war and economic development. Sometimes, however, the picture that is painted leaves out the fact that history involves individuals, whether in kin groups, villages, towns or cities.
Certainly, one of the most important, massive and long-lasting migrations that has affected Africa, and which formed the contours of Global Africa, arose from enslavement, the slave trade and slavery. Over the past five hundred years, many millions of people were displaced through slavery, at least 12.8 million across the Atlantic and several million more across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, although not all of these migrants survived the journey. Moreover, millions more were relocated within the African continent and, because enslavement was usually violent and the transfer of people over land and sea hazardous, the attendant mortality affected the lives and livelihoods of an even larger population. On one level, the tragedy of what this entailed has
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been recognized as a crime against humanity, demanding a full investigation of what happened, when and where. Only then can the suffering, degradation and exploitation that occurred be established, and the nature and extent of reparations determined. On another level, to understand slavery as forced migration, severance from home communities and imposed assimilation into new relationships requires careful historical analysis and reconstruction. How events of the past are interpreted is always contentious and subject to review and fresh insights. No other historical phenomenon deserves more attention than slavery because of the influence it has had on history over at least the past five hundred years.
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In this section, the focus is on individuals and their life stories, as far as these can be reconstructed. The reason for focusing on individuals is to unravel this crime against humanity, of people viewed as 'slaves', reduced to property, with individuals turned into commodities and things that could be bought and sold, punished in sometimes barbaric ways, and generally treated as objects rather than as human beings. The aim here is to reveal human dignity, resourcefulness and personality, which could involve a focus on open acts of resistance, expressions of culture and actions that reveal individuals as opposed to slaves. Life stories follow people to different parts of the world during the era of slavery. Their experiences offer a view of Global Africa that helps in understanding the slave trade across the Atlantic, within Africa, into the Islamic world and across the Indian Ocean. Too often, slavery is approached as if it was a uniform institution, unbending in its oppression and victimization, without an appreciation of the fact that the people who were enmeshed in this tragic history had lives filled with pain and suffering on the one hand, but also with joy and dignity on the other. A clear theme in many of the stories is the quest for freedom through escape from the conditions of enslavement. Personal accounts of individuals who were born free in their natal societies stand out. Despite their experience of a period of enslavement, they nonetheless re-established their freedom and thereby overcame the trials and tribulations of severe subjugation and humiliation.
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There are various types of life stories that are connected to the history of slavery and the quest for freedom from bondage. Sometimes these stories of enslavement are described as 'slave narratives', but in many cases it would be better to refer to them as 'freedom narratives', 'conversion narratives' or some other term (Lovejoy, 2011). Many accounts were written by individuals who achieved their freedom; others were dictated to people who recounted the quest of individuals seeking freedom. Thus, the life stories presented in this section recount more accurately how a number of people managed to escape from
enslavement. The narratives chronicle personal resistance, unwavering struggles for survival and successful achievements, demonstrating that enslavement did not destroy the humanity and dignity of those who were exposed to its oppression, an oppression that has since been recognized as a crime. This is specifically the case of individuals who were once free in Africa, and whose personal accounts help us understand more fully what enslavement meant to those who endured the Middle Passage across the Atlantic or the tortuous journeys within Africa, across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean. Their stories focus on the quest for emancipation, through escape, self-purchase or other means, but always resulting in freedom (Gates, 1987). The trauma of the Middle Passage has been the subject of considerable reflection in discussions of the impact of transatlantic slavery on the cultures and societies of the Americas. It is these narratives that attest to the 'curse of constant remembrance', as Laura Murphy (2008) describes the long-term effects of trauma resulting from the psychological scars of the Middle Passage that mark 'the unfortunate legacy of the slave trade' in modern literature. As her analysis in this collection demonstrates, there are thousands of testimonies of those who experienced enslavement in the United States of America, allowing us to hear the voices of these individuals who struggled to survive.
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The impact of the trauma of the Middle Passage raises issues of how people identified and how they were identified, relating to questions of consciousness of historical events and false consciousness arising from the strain of survival among the enslaved population. How do we understand the ability of individuals to modify and otherwise chart a course through the cultural oppression of enslavement and the inevitable subjugation they endured under exploitative work regimes, and the related racialized and dehumanizing social discourse of enforced inferiority? How do we unpack the complicated and debilitating experiences of these people? What does it tell us about Africa? It is important to recognize the impact of trauma because we want to understand how individuals made it through that experience.
The statistics of slavery inform our understanding of the odyssey, furnishing details in terms of mortality, malnutrition, exposure to disease, the incidence of rape, brutal treatment, suicide and the consequent degrees of degradation. Individual voices, however, are often lost in the analysis. Moreover, what does the experience of the Middle Passage tell us about Africa? We have long tended to look at the Middle Passage from the perspective of the Americas, as something that took place beyond the shores of Africa, as where African history ended. The study of slavery in the African context has often been overlooked.
Furthermore, that passage was sometimes reversed, as Kristin Mann and Lisa Castillo demonstrate in their study of individuals who returned to Lagos from Brazil and maintained relationships with kin on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Across the black Atlantic, individual voices bear witness to the quest for salvation, social status and economic autonomy. The accounts of settlers in Sierra Leone, who came from London, Canada and Jamaica, record varied reactions and positive adjustments to displacement and cultural survival. The freedom and conversion narratives of 'recaptives' - those taken off slave ships in Sierra Leone, Cuba, Brazil and elsewhere - also attest to this voiced resistance and declaration of personal identity. Are these to be considered within the context of the 'slave narrative' trope or do they represent something that is far wider, that allows a reconstruction of Global Africa through sources that give voice?
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The ways in which slavery and the slave trade have been remembered owe a lot to the personal narratives of enslaved Africans and their Creole descendants. In a real sense, these narratives are "survivals" of slavery and, hence, suggest that we revisit the approach of Melville Herskovits, who traced these cultural features of African background but did not concentrate on the recorded memories of individuals as one of those "survivals". Similarly, narratives reveal patterns of resistance to slavery among those who had been enslaved in Africa, providing evidence of cultural transference associated with their migration across the Atlantic. Whether individuals were able to identify with a reconstituted community mattered as much as the community that the Creole population was born into. Individuals coming from Africa were not always able to find comrades of similar background and had to form new associations, but arguments that suggest that the response of the enslaved population was relatively similar fail to appreciate the complex ways in which individuals had to respond and the ways in which they chose to resist as a strategy for survival. A study of individuals raises questions about the different ways in which Africans lived through slavery in the Atlantic world while attempting to retain or recreate their cultural and/or social backgrounds. Life histories illustrate the complexity of notions such as the 'Middle Passage' and 'diaspora' and what it meant to have been born in Africa. So the narratives of those born in Africa are accounts of Africa and slavery, and how African history was transferred to the Americas.
Of course, individuals had diverse experiences, which reveal the variety of conditions that existed under slavery. Not one of the men considered here was 'typical' or fits the stereotype of the slave. These were individuals, and they experienced the slave trade and their enslavement in virtual isolation. They had their own 'cultures' and 'origins', but they could not connect these
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with those of anyone else. There were, thus, connections, but it was difficult to sustain ties to a community. Consider the cases of Gustavus Vassa, Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua. Vassa was possibly an exception, in that he mentions knowing other Igbo in London and deceiving his 'countrymen' on the Mosquito Shore, where he worked for Doctor Charles Irving and Captain Alexander Blair in establishing a plantation on the Rio Grande de Matagalpa. Vassa became associated with the community of radical thinkers and activists in London in the late 1780s and 1790s. He had earlier attempted to return to Africa as a missionary, and he was officially tied to the first Sierra Leone expedition, until his dismissal. Kaba was able to interact with and indeed provide leadership to a community on the coffee estates and livestock pens in Manchester Parish, Jamaica, but it is not known whether any of his own 'countrymen' were present there. He was associated with John Lewis, and helped the latter purchase his freedom. It is quite possible that Lewis came from the Upper Guinea coast and was also originally Muslim. Later, Kaba's sons were implicated and, indeed, executed for alleged involvement in the Christmas uprising of 1831-1832. Baquaqua was involved in the radical abolitionist agenda of the Free Will Baptists, including plans for an African Mission and lectures on the abolitionist circuit. His story is recounted herein by Bruno Véras. To be able to follow the lives of individuals who experienced slavery, in the detail that these accounts allow, requires careful reflection. We need to test the accounts for veracity, examine their context, critique the forms of transliteration and composition. Nevertheless, these are the voices of survivors. I include Kaba here; although he did not leave behind an autobiography, a lot of information has survived regarding his remarkable life. ${ }^{1}$
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It is significant that these individuals were male. The enslaved population from the interior of West Africa sent to the Americas was predominantly male, which conformed to the pattern of trade: individuals from the interior were more likely to be male. Virtually all females who left West Africa as slaves came from near the coast, not from the distant interior, and the absence of Muslim women was almost certainly a factor in the eventual decline of Islam in the Americas. The collapse of social identities occurred for reasons relating to the imposed isolation from Islamic networks in Africa and the Middle East - not because the Middle Passage erased memory as posited by Stanley Elkins (1959), nor because the crossing amounted to a form of social death as argued
[^0]
[^0]: 1 For a discussion of Kaba's life, see Daddi Addoun and Lovejoy, 2004; Warner-Lewis, 2009.
by Orlando Patterson (1982), but for reasons relating to the internal history of West Africa. The notion of the Middle Passage, as it is frequently used, does not usually take into account the complexities revealed in the biographical profiles examined here. As demonstrated in many studies, the Middle Passage was a complex experience that varied greatly depending upon where people went and what happened to them. Generalized accounts of the 'crossing' usually fail to take into consideration these differences.
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We often forget that slavery involved individuals, and that thus, inevitably, each experience was unique. How people managed to survive under enslavement is revealed in these accounts, although it should be noted that these examples and, inevitably, most of the surviving narratives of slavery, concern individuals who became free. Venture Smith bought his own freedom in 1765; Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu outlived his enslavement in Jamaica, dying in 1845, twelve years after his sons had been executed for their alleged involvement in the Christmas uprising of 1831-1832, and seven years following the end of apprenticeship in Jamaica in 1838. Gustavus Vassa purchased his freedom in 1766, twenty-three years before he published his autobiography as Olaudah Equiano, the African; and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua escaped from enslavement in New York City in 1847 when his master took him there as he was delivering a shipload of Brazilian coffee. ${ }^{2}$ The actual amount of time spent in conditions of enslavement in these accounts varied considerably: for Baquaqua it lasted only two years, 1845-47; for Smith, it lasted 26 years, from 1739 to 1765 , after which he lived another forty years in freedom; for Kaba, it lasted from 1777 until the end of British slavery in 1834, that is 57 years, whereafter he lived again in freedom until his death in 1845; Vassa suffered slavery from 1753 until 1766, some 13 years, before attaining his freedom in his early twenties and living another 31 years, dying in relative affluence, as did Smith. The accounts reveal relative levels of success in surviving slavery and achieving some degree of prosperity despite obstacles that arose after purchasing freedom, including limitations on accumulation that amounted to an undeclared tax, racial in its determination. The narratives reveal struggle, sometimes bitterness, but always conviction. Achieving freedom was necessarily a personal and individual matter
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, racial in its determination. The narratives reveal struggle, sometimes bitterness, but always conviction. Achieving freedom was necessarily a personal and individual matter, and this uniqueness limits any purpose the narratives have in the discussion of slavery. These accounts stand apart from the stories of 'slaves' because these individuals achieved freedom while most did not. It is this feature, irrespective of whether the individuals were born in Africa or
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[^0]
[^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.
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In identifying accounts of those who had been born in Africa as 'freedom narratives', I am calling into question the major differences in accounts thus identified here from the narratives composed by or otherwise received from individuals who had been born into slavery, who were thereby distanced from the physical act of enslavement and, instead, exposed to slavery through birth, growing up in perpetual trauma. The Middle Passage reflected the life experiences of those who crossed the Atlantic. Doubts have been unnecessarily raised about Vassa's assertion that he was born in Africa and, therefore, about whether he ever experienced the Middle Passage. If the centrality of the shipboard experience is denied, then we are not really talking about Vassa as a 'founder' of a narrative tradition but rather as a fraud who lied. It is hard to imagine that falsification
[^0]
[^0]: 3 https://www.freedomnarratives.org/
of a personal story can be seen as a contribution to the slave narrative tradition, as Vincent Carretta (2005) suggests through his characterization of Vassa as a 'self-made man' who was more interested in selling his book, and thereby making money, than in advancing the fight against slavery (see Lovejoy, 2012). Vassa was a politically vocal hero of the Enlightenment, one of the leading proponents of abolition, not an opportunistic, self-serving villain of a crass, materialistic world more representative of twenty-first century academia than the religiously-inspired dedication of fighting the crime of slavery.
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The individuals in focus in the essays of this section include formerly enslaved individuals who rose to high positions in society after emancipation, as María Elisa Velázquez demonstrates in the case of Juan Correa, or free descendants of enslaved persons, as in Crosby-Arnold's discussion of Joseph Bologne de Saint-Georges, or the teaching and missionary career of Catherine MulgraveZimmermann, as examined by Maureen Warner-Lewis. Similarly, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was able to escape from enslavement and he became one of the first Africans educated in a college in the United States of America, as discussed by Bruno Véras. The remaining cases depict individuals who owned and trafficked in enslaved people, as Vanessa Oliveira reveals in the life of Dona Ana Joaquina dos Santos Silva of Luanda. Edward Alpers focuses specifically on children caught in the slave trade in East Africa and the Indian Ocean. The essays also look at fugitives (Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec and Mary Mitchell) and eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire (Özgül Özdemir). The struggle for autonomy and emancipation is a common theme, as in the Brazilian cases examined by Daniela Cavalheiro and Nielson Bezerra as well as the Sierra-Leone case of Fuseng-be presented by Suzanne Schwarz.
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The biographical studies presented in this section are intended to cover a wide geographical area of Africa in its global context, although it is inevitably impossible to reveal the full extent of the dispersal of Africans during the era of slavery. Alpers examines the movement of children in slavery and pawnship in eastern Africa, and the connections to the Indian Ocean. Bezerra and Cavalheiro follow the lives of Africans in Brazil, concentrating on Rio de Janeiro. Crosby-Arnold tells the story of a woman in Guadeloupe who became the concubine of a wealthy planter and of how their intimate relationship led to the stunning career of their son in France before and during the French Revolution. Imbua describes individuals who were taken from Calabar as slaves but emancipated in Sierra Leone after their ship was intercepted by the British Royal Navy. These 'liberated' Africans then returned to Calabar where they became involved in the palm oil trade, challenging the established elite of Calabar
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who had been responsible for their deportation as slaves, and building successful careers as merchants. Le Glaunec teases out the activities of fugitive slaves through an examination of advertisements placed by their owners in newspapers. Mitchell examines the narratives of those who survived enslavement in the United States of America, and how their written and recorded testimonies were fundamental to the assertion of identity and the establishment of claims to dignified survival. Osifekunde's story is particularly poignant, as revealed by Ojo. Taken from Rio de Janeiro to France by a French master, Osifekunde became the subject of anthropological enquiry. Laws against the immigration of Africans and people of African descent in France, and Osifekunde's desire to be reunited with his son in Recife, resulted in his return to Brazil where he was exposed to the brutality of lynch mobs, dying an untimely death in 1842. Mohammed Bashir Salau discusses the extraordinary life of Nicholas Said of Borno, enslaved globetrotter and American Civil War veteran who published his autobiography in 1873 in the United States of America. Oliveira exposes the complicity of elite women in Luanda in exploiting and sustaining slavery in the Portuguese colony of Angola. Her account offers a sharp contrast to Unigwe's sensitive portrayal of the life and times of abolitionist Gustavus Vassa, who was born into a free household in Igboland as Olaudah Equiano, and who successfully purchased his own freedom after serving in Britain's Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, which afforded him the opportunity of an education shipboard. Suzanne Schwarz relies on the 1809 court case documents in Sierra Leone to present the winning fight of Fuseng-be, an enslaved young woman who regained her freedom. Velázquez recounts the startling success of Juan Correa as a Baroque painter in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century New Spain (Mexico). Véras tells us about Baquaqua, his background, his period of enslavement in Brazil
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, his background, his period of enslavement in Brazil, and his subsequent escape to freedom in New York City. Warner-Lewis describes the journey of Catherine Mulgrave-Zimmerman. Kidnapped as a teenager on the beach near Luanda, shipwrecked off Jamaica and adopted by the incumbent governor, she subsequently pursued a teaching career at the Moravian mission in Jamaica and thereafter at Osu, now Accra, on the Gold Coast. Ibrahima Seck discusses a plantation on the Mississippi, owned by a German immigrant, and the life stories of the plantation's enslaved population, the plantation now being a museum near New Orleans. Özdemir introduces us to a eunuch in the Ottoman court who was from Ethiopia, apparently of Galla origin. The geographical distribution of these accounts allow some understanding of the parameters of Global Africa and the range of experiences
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of the enslaved population, including the achievement of unusual success and the tragedy of unwarranted death.
What we learn from these voices of freedom are the facts of diversity and courage in the face of oppression. No narrative is typical or representative of anything more than personal experience. Are there patterns in the accounts about slavery and freedom? There are, with reference to perseverance and endurance. The challenges facing each person were unique and called for individual strength, social bonds and a good measure of luck. How many people failed to achieve results like those whose narratives have survived is an open question. Disease, death, the arbitrary infliction of unbearable punishment, bad fortune and even fate undermined most of those caught in the nexus of slavery. Their voices were silenced. Hence, one of the common features of the narratives themselves is survival. Somehow, they were recorded or can be pieced together, however incomplete, fraught with inaccuracies and dependent on conjecture.
The United Nations declared slavery and the slave trade a crime against humanity in the twenty-first century, but it is important to recognize that the ways in which individuals survived such criminal activity in the past forms part of the history of Global Africa. An examination of the stories of those who suffered slavery makes it possible to appreciate the achievements of people from Africa in the development of the modern world.
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# References
Bailey, A. C. 2007. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Kingston, Ian Randle.
Carretta, V. 2005. Equiano the African. Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens, Ga., University of Georgia Press.
Daddi Addoun, Y. and Lovejoy, P. E. 2004. Muhammad Kābā Saghanughu and the Muslim Community of Jamaica. P. E. Lovejoy (ed.), Slavery on the Frontiers of Islam. Princeton, NJ, Markus Wiener Publishers, pp. 201-20.
Elkins, S. M. 1959. Slavery. A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago, Ill., The University of Chicago Press.
Gates, H. L. Jr. (ed.). 1987. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York, Signet Classic.
Lovejoy, P. E. 2011. 'Freedom Narratives' of Transatlantic Slavery. Slavery $\mathcal{E}$ Abolition, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 91-107.
Lovejoy, P. E. 2012. Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa - What's in a Name? Atlantic Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 165-84.
Murphy,L. 2008. The Curse of Constant Remembrance: The Belated Trauma of the Slave Trade in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments. Studies in the Novel, Vol. 40, No. 1/2, pp. 52-71.
Patterson, O. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Warner-Lewis, M. 2009. Religious Constancy and Compromise among Nineteenth Century Caribbean-Based African Muslims. B. A. Mirzai, I. M. Montana and P. E. Lovejoy (eds), Slavery, Islam and Diaspora. Trenton, NJ, Africa World Press, pp. 237-68.
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# CHAPTER 1
## CHILDREN IN THE INDIAN OCEAN
Edward A. Alpers
Historians recognize that women and children worldwide have been especially vulnerable to enslavement. No more vivid example exists than the famous autobiography of Gustavus Vassa/Olaudah Equiano (see chapter 6 in this volume). The same sad story holds true for the slave trade of the Indian Ocean, in which children were continuously preyed upon in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Morton, 2009; Alpers, 2009; Allen, 2009). Children were regularly kidnapped by rapacious slave raiders, sold into slavery by mercenary relatives or pawned off during famines before being sold into slavery. Even when already enslaved on Unguja (the island of Zanzibar), children were seized by unscrupulous slavers to be carried off to Arabia, Persia, and western South Asia. Descriptions of the enslavement of children in Indian Ocean Africa abound in official British antislavery accounts, both consular and naval, as well as in missionary and - a few - colonial narratives. The context of this evidence is strongly abolitionist, highly patronizing, and often racist. Nevertheless, through it all there emerges a body of fragmentary evidence that represents the voices of these children: the voices that I emphasize in this short chapter.
Although the full extent of the slave trade in eastern Africa is uncertain, there is no question that it reached its height during the nineteenth century. Demand centres in East Africa were part of the rapidly expanding clove and coconut plantation economy, first on Unguja and then, after the devastating
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hurricane of 1872, on Pemba Island. In the last decades of the century, sugar and grain plantations took root on the coast itself, creating further demand for labour (Cooper, 1977; Glassman, 1995). In Arabia the growing market for pearls in Europe and North America stimulated the demand for labour in the pearl beds of the Gulf (Hopper, 2015). Meanwhile, a steady market for both male and female domestic labour continued in Oman, even after the State was separated from Zanzibar following the death of Seyyid Said bin Sultan in 1856. In the insular southwest Indian Ocean, the abolition of slavery by Great Britain in 1834 and by France in 1848 made it more difficult to meet labour demands on the rapidly expanding sugar plantations of colonial Mauritius, Reunion Island, Nosy Be and Mayotte. The British resolved this problem by instituting a system of indentured labour from India, whereas the French resorted to a system of so-called 'free labour emigration' from East Africa that amounted to a form of thinly disguised slave trade. There was also an increased demand for agricultural slave labour in western Madagascar in the nineteenth century that did not cease until abolition in 1896 (Campbell, 2005).
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At the height of the slave trade, the strongest demand was for young adult labour, both male and female, but children - here defined as youths under 14 years of age - were also always sought. Unable to defend themselves from armed adults, children were easy prey for raiders and for senior authorities within their own extended families. Children were also valued because they had not yet acquired the habits of adulthood or the customs of their ethnic origins and were therefore more malleable once enslaved. Their ability to learn the languages of their 'masters' was equally enhanced by their young minds. To take but one example, in 1835 a British India official reported, 'The demand for African boys in Cutch [western Gujarat] is stated to be very great. They are there taught all the mechanical arts, and become most useful members of the community'. ${ }^{1}$ With the gradual imposition of anti-slave trade treaties on Zanzibar and the slight progress being made towards abolition by the Portuguese in Mozambique, the attraction for slavers of seizing children to be transported during the 'illegal' period of the slave trade was further increased. According to an 1867 report by a member of the British anti-slave-trade patrol,
The second day after leaving Zanzibar we took a dhow with 150 slaves, almost all children, or boys under fourteen; and as they had only just started they were in good
[^0]
[^0]: 1 British Library, India Office Records. 1 December 1835. MSS Eur E 293/125 (Willoughby Papers), Memorandum: On the Slave Trade to Cutch and Katthywar, para. 7.
health, all but a few, who are significantly called lanterns by the sailors, because, I suppose, you can almost see through them. ${ }^{2}$
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health, all but a few, who are significantly called lanterns by the sailors, because, I suppose, you can almost see through them. ${ }^{2}$
Subterfuge was frequently employed by Indian Ocean slavers to disguise shipments of allegedly 'free' passengers that actually included captive children. In one notorious case in 1893, a British naval vessel stopped an Arab dhow flying French colours that was headed for Muscat. Although its passenger list included only adults between the ages of 16 to 40 years, when the dhow was boarded by British sailors, most of the 77 passengers were found to be children in various states of distress. ${ }^{3}$ Children seem also to have been included in shipments of captive Africans to satisfy the French demand for plantation labour in France's Indian Ocean islands.
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One example of the latter situation dates back to 1880, when eleven boys were inappropriately included in a shipment of engagés from Ngazidja (Grande Comore) to Mayotte for several sugar plantations on the French island colony. These children were temporarily assigned by French authorities to the missionaries at Dzaoudzi because of 'the irregularity of the recruitment', which is to say that they were too young to have freely agreed to work as contract labourers. ${ }^{4}$ With the exception of one who was from Ngazidja, the boys - whose ages ranged from 8 to 14 years - all originally came from Mozambique. Each had been assigned a common Muslim 'slave' name by the recruiter, although in the short interviews conducted by French authorities, several were able to recall their original names (Prestholdt, 2008, p. 122). ${ }^{5}$ The question-and-answer format of the French interviews do not leave much room for individual voices, but they do reveal the means by which each boy came to be enslaved. According to one, Ktéa, his parents had sold him to an African slaver. Moanner, who had been given the name of Cazambo \#1, had been stolen from his parents' home. Cazambo \#2 could not recall his family name and stated that his parents had sold him. Cazambo \#3 stated that his real name was Jamloukou and indicated that he had been captured 'during the war'. Monyono, named Ouledi by the recruiter, said that he too had been seized 'in the war', as did both Michijaoué (renamed Canabois) and Mipazona (renamed Mabrouck \#2); perhaps these four boys had fallen victim to the same conflict in Mozambique. According to Kouara,
[^0]
[^0]: 2 Anti-Slavery Reporter, Vol. 15, No. 99 (16 September 1867), in Beachey, 1976, p. 92.
3 A.B. Grenfell, 11 April 1893, Foreign Office: Confidential Print, in Beachey, 1976, pp. 99-100.
4 Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer (CAOM), Aix-en-Provence, Madagascar 269, d.602, [Edouard] Sasias, Acting Commandant, Mayotte, 13 January 1880. I am indebted to Dr. Klara Boyer-Rossol for sharing this invaluable documentation with me.
5 Attachment to ibid.
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5 Attachment to ibid.
who had been dubbed Mabrouck \#1, his brother had sold him into slavery, while Miki had been sold by his father. Moériha, renamed for recruitment as Moukoupahy, claimed that his mother had sold him. The one Ngazidjan boy, named M’dahonna but called Moudoihoma by his captor, blamed 'the sultan' (without specifying to which of the several sultans on that island he was referring) for having taken him against his parents' wishes to be sold to the recruiter. ${ }^{6}$
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There are many other heart-rending stories of how children, both girls and boys, were forcibly removed from their households and villages in late nineteenthcentury East Africa. The story of a ten-year-old Yao girl named Swema, from the interior of northern Mozambique, is a particularly moving one. In around 1865, Swema accompanied her mother, who was forced by debt to pay with her person, on a harrowing journey on foot to Kilwa Kivinje, the most notorious slaving port in eastern Africa. After her mother died on the long march to the coast, Swema herself became the subject of enslavement. By the time she reached Kilwa and after having barely survived the voyage by dhow to Zanzibar Town, she was so wasted that the man who financed this slaving caravan determined that she was not worth saving and ordered her to be abandoned in a shallow grave (Alpers, 1983). A collection of thirteen life stories written in the 1880s by boys at the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) school at Kiungani, Zanzibar, reveals the wide range of circumstances that led to children being held captive. All these boys were 'liberated' from slavery by the British navy, then 'given' to the Anglican missionaries at Zanzibar; while they were not enslaved, they were by no means free. Some of the Kiungani boys were seized in targeted slave raids by groups of opportunistic young men from the far interior; some by coastal slavers operating near the coast; some were kidnapped; some were initially pawns for settling debts and then were sold into slavery. Nearly all suffered the ignominy of becoming the property of more than one owner before being released from bondage by the British. Furthermore, however violent and traumatic their odyssey, as the editor of this remarkable collection of stories observed,
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Even their omissions are sometimes significant - for instance, when a child finds nothing to record in all the horrors of the march of a slave-caravan from the far interior to the coast, except the number of days it seemed to occupy. What difference did a little more or less of starvation or torture make, after all, but a darker shade or so in the common tissue of human life? (Madan, 1887, pp. 3-4).
[^0]
[^0]: 6 CAOM, Madagascar 269, d.601, 'Immigration africaine. Recrutement des travailleurs à Mozambique à destination de Mayotte et Nossi-Be (1874-1880), Interrogatoire des enfants faisant partie du convoie d’engagés introduits dans la colonie par le boutre français le Machassy [...]', Sasias and interpreter Amadie, 13 January 1880. My gratitude again to Dr. Boyer-Rossol.
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A fascinating parallelism between two quite distinct stories exposes the special vulnerability of younger siblings to being offered up into captivity. According to a Makua boy at Kiungani, his married elder brother, who was a drunkard, stumbled into the home of another woman and proposed marriage to her. The next day, when she informed her kinsmen, they objected and demanded compensation. At first, the elder brother was seized and confined by the woman's family. But as this boy was the youngest in his family, 'at last my family took me, and gave me in payment to his captors' (Madan, 1887, p. 39). Despite his mother's protests, he was taken away and sold, eventually to end up at Kiungani. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a Norwegian missionary in Madagascar first recorded and then published, in 1919, a life story of a man born in Mozambique in around 1853 and named Kalamba Mahihitse Josefa. Kalamba was one of four children: three boys and a girl. Against his parents' admonitions, his eldest brother travelled to a local circumcision celebration being held some distance from their family home, but was captured en route by bandits. Since Kalamba's parents valued their eldest son, as it was he who would see to their proper burial when they died, they decided to exchange Kalamba for his brother. Thus Kalamba became enslaved; he tells us that he was only seven or eight years of age (Boyer-Rossol, 2015, pp. 864-865).
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What kind of existence did these children lead in captivity or freedom? Those who became Christians stood outside mainstream society in the mostly Muslim western Indian Ocean societies into which they were thrown. As a consequence, many remained essentially as wards of the missionary societies to which they were assigned, whether Anglican, Roman Catholic or Protestant. For the vast majority, captivity meant adapting to Islam and, eventually, becoming Muslim. Whether on the coast, on offshore islands, in Arabia, Iran, Baluchistan or Gujarat, this entailed a life that began in domestic service. Unless they married free men, women often continued in domestic work, although some did enter the larger labour force in towns like Zanzibar and Muscat (McMahon, 2013). For boys, reaching adulthood brought with it the labour requirements of men, such as pearl diving in the Gulf (Hopper, 2015). Some became sailors, skilled artisans or day labourers. In East Africa, under colonial rule, all gained emancipation, although the stigma of slavery persisted. In Arabia, manumission was relatively common; however, slavery did not end until as late as 1970 in Oman, meaning that those of the enslaved children who had survived and themselves had children saw them born into slavery.
Despite the trauma of being violently torn from one's kith and kin, or of the undermining of family values precipitated by the opportunities for personal gain
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Despite the trauma of being violently torn from one's kith and kin, or of the undermining of family values precipitated by the opportunities for personal gain
created by the slave trade, many East African children survived their captivity and gained a new kind of freedom. A few of the children who found themselves committed to the UMCA became men of the cloth themselves. Among them was Yohanna Abdullah, the first Anglican priest in East Africa, a proud Yao and author of Chiikala cha Wayao (1919), and Petro Kilekwa, a Bisa from Zambia who published his autobiography, Slave Boy to Priest, in 1937. Captured in an Ngoni raid, Kibuli bin Mchubiri, also a Bisa, received the name Rashid when he was enslaved on Zanzibar. He later adopted the patronymic bin Hassani from the husband of a woman to whom he was assigned by his mistress, a sister of Seyyid Barghash bin Said, Sultan of Zanzibar (r.1870-1888), and who was manumitted upon the mistress' death at the end of the century. Rashid bin Hassani had a variety of jobs in colonial Tanganyika and ended his career as a forest guard near Moshi, at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. Reflecting upon his life in captivity and freedom, he reminisced,
When I was a child my father went to the shamba with his bow and arrows and took us with him; he dared not leave us even for a day for fear we should be seized and sold as slaves... It is true you were free to live where you liked and go where you liked, but it was much more a question of living where you could and going where you dared (Perham, 1936, p. 118).
To be a child at the height of the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean slave trade meant that one lived an often precarious existence that was fraught with potential dangers. Yet the strengths of children are their ineffable resilience, their hopes for a better future and their ability to forget the past and carry on living. Those who survived the violence of the slave trade embodied these characteristics as free men and women.
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# References
Abdallah, Y. B. 1973 (orig. pub. 1919). The Yaos. Chiikala Cha Wayao, 2nd edn. M. Sanderson (ed. and trans.). E. A. Alpers (pref.). London, Frank Cass.
Allen, R. B. 2009. Children and European slave trading in the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Children in Slavery through the Ages. G. Campbell, S. Miers and J. C. Miller (eds). Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, pp. 35-54.
Alpers, E. A. 1983. The story of Swema: female vulnerability in nineteenth-century East Africa. Women and Slavery in Africa. C. C. Robertson and M. A. Klein (eds). Madison, Wisc., University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 185-219.
Alpers, E. A. 2009. Representations of children in the East African slave trade. Slavery $\mathcal{E}$ Abolition, Vol. 30, Issue 1, pp. 27-40.
Beachey, R. W. 1976. A Collection of Documents on the Slave Trade of Eastern Africa. London, Rex Collings.
Boyer-Rossol, K. 2015. Entre les deux rives du canal du Mozambique: histoire et mémoires des Makoa de l'ouest de Madagascar, XIX ${ }^{e}-$ XX $^{e}$ siècles [The Two Sides of the Mozambique Channel: the Story and Memories of the Makoa in western Madagascar, nineteenth and twentieth centuries]. Ph.D. thesis, University of Paris Diderot, France. (In French.)
British Library, India Office Records. 1835. MSS Eur E 293/125 (Willoughby Papers), Memorandum: On the Slave Trade to Cutch and Katthywar.
Campbell, G. 2005. An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750-1895. The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
Cooper, F. 1977. Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa. New Haven, Conn., and London, Yale University Press.
Glassman, J. 1995. Feasts and Riot. Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swabili Coast, 1856-1888. Portsmouth, UK/New Haven, Conn./London/Nairobi/Dar es Salaam, Heinemann/James Currey/E.A.E.P./Mkuki na Nyota.
Hopper, M. S. 2015. Slaves of One Master. Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire. New Haven, Conn., and London, Yale University Press.
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Hopper, M. S. 2015. Slaves of One Master. Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire. New Haven, Conn., and London, Yale University Press.
Kilekwa, P. 1937. Slave Boy to Priest. The Autobiography of Padre PetroKilekwa.K. H. Nixon Smith (trans. from Chinyanja). London, Universities' Mission to Central Africa.
Madan, A. C. (trans. and ed.). 1887. Kiungani, or Story and History from Central Africa. Written by Boys in the Schools of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa. London, George Bell and Sons.
McMahon, E. 2013. Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa. From Honor to Respectability. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
Morton, F. 2009. Children in the nineteenth-century East African slave trade. G. Campbell, S. Miers and J. C. Miller (eds). Children in Slavery through the Ages. Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, pp. 55-70.
Perham, M. (ed.). 1936. Ten Africans. London, Faber and Faber.
Prestholdt, J. 2008. Domesticating the World. African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif./London, University of California Press.
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# CHAPTER 2
## JUAN CORREA, A BAROQUE PAINTER OF AFRICAN DESCENT FROM NEW-SPANISH MEXICO
María Elisa Velázquez
The first Africans arrived in Mexico City, which was then called Tenochtitlán. By way of example, some of them, possibly Juan Cortés and Juan Garrido ${ }^{1}$ came with Hernán Cortés, according to accounts related in various chronicles and images of the period. Some of the Africans who arrived with the conquistadores received rewards in the form of properties or encomiendas for their participation in the conquest of indigenous towns and cities (Restall, 2005).
A few years after the conquest, thousands of men, women and children began to arrive in New Spain to meet the needs of colonial businesses such as mining, agricultural estate farming and cattle farms, craft occupations and housework, work in convents, colleges and estates. The demographic catastrophe suffered by the indigenous population, starting from the time of the conquest in terms of outbreaks of epidemics of new illnesses, combined with ill treatment and cultural malaise, as well as the prohibition of enslaving indigenous peoples, were causes that won over and 'justified' the demand for slaves from different parts of Africa to migrate to New Spain. Slavery studies have calculated that around 250,000 enslaved people from Africa arrived in Mexico (Velázquez and Iturralde, 2012).
Authorized ports for the slave trade were Veracruz and later Campeche, although it is known that slaves arrived in Acapulco with the Nao de China,
[^0]
[^0]: 1 Hernán Cortés was the main Mexican conquistador; he arrived in 1519 and took the city of Tenochtitlán in 1521.
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[^0]
[^0]: 1 Hernán Cortés was the main Mexican conquistador; he arrived in 1519 and took the city of Tenochtitlán in 1521.
from areas of East Africa or New Guinea. From different ports on the Pacific or Atlantic they were taken to Mexico City to be distributed among different places in the centre, north and south of the country: Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Puebla, Morelos, Colima, Hidalgo, Monterrey, Sinaloa, Chiapas, Tabasco, Yucatán and practically all the modern-day states of Mexico took in African men and women during the period of the viceroyalty, particularly between the years 1580-1650. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the slave trade ceased to have the importance it had had in previous centuries, given that the indigenous and mestizo populations had increased and therefore slavery was no longer as profitable as it had been in previous eras in New Spain (Gonzalbo, 1998).
Over time, many people of African descent succeeded in gaining their freedom and along with this, a better standard of living. Freedom was attained in several ways; it could be granted by their masters, by means of testaments or letters of freedom, and enslaved people could also buy their freedom in the event that they had been able to save money by doing extra work on the side or through financial help from family and friends.
It is important to state that interracial group marriages were not forbidden by the Church, and that many unions took place outside of wedlock, which fostered interbreeding between indigenous peoples and Africans. By the eighteenth century, Mexico had a significant Afrodescendent population throughout its entire territory; some of them had managed to acquire certain economic resources by means of military service, commerce or holding offices, whereas others continued to suffer poverty and marginalization like many other groups in society, especially indigenous ones (Gonzalbo, 1998 and Velázquez, 2006).
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Juan Correa's studio work was well known by historians of New Hispanic art; however, it was thought, at least until the 1980s, and in spite of signposting by Carrera Estampa, ${ }^{2}$ that only a very few 'negros' and 'mulattos' had managed to attain guild master status, and still fewer had achieved widespread recognition and prestige.
In the 1980s a group of art historians decided to carry out an investigation into the life and works of Juan Correa and to catalogue his output, both in Mexico and in other Latin American countries. ${ }^{3}$ It was confirmed on the basis
[^0]
[^0]: 2 Translator's note - the Carrera Estampa is a Mexican guild dealing with the regulation of crafts and arts with Spanish antecedents.
3 The results of this study were published in various volumes; one of them revealed all the archived documents found, on which the majority of the data revealed in this text has been based. Elisa Vargas Lugo and Gustavo Curiel, Juan Correa, su vida y su obra. Cuerpo de documentos, tome III, (Juan Correa, his life and work. Documentary body, tome III) Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1991.
of documental sources that Juan Correa was a mulatto, that his mother had most likely been an oriunda ('native black') from Africa and that his father was a Creole also 'dark-skinned', a well-known barber-surgeon of the Inquisition. On the basis of this information, and thanks to a series of documents in the possession of the work study team of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the life and works of Juan Correa was located and published, and became a watershed in the assessment of the situation and qualities of Afrodescendent peoples in New Hispanic society, of the possibilities of social and economic mobility that existed, and of the diverse and complex family networks and blood relationships that were established during that period.
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Juan Correa was born in 1646, in Mexico City, New Spain. His father, also known as Juan Correa, was a famous barber-surgeon of the Spanish Inquisition, a native of Mexico City, himself the son of a Spaniard whose mother was a native of Cádiz, Spain, probably a mulatta or a Christianized Moor, although there are at present no documents to confirm this. His mother was a free black woman, Pascuala de Santoyo, who had already given birth to two children in an illegitimate union by the time she got married to the doctor, by whom she had two sons, José, a master gilder, and Juan Correa himself.
Correa's artistic output was generally founded on religious themes, and in many instances were copies of European pieces, as was the custom at that time. Acknowledged and appreciated by New Hispanic society of the day, Correa churned out important, heterogeneous and numerous pictorial works in the final quarter of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth century on the order of individuals and civil and ecclesiastical authorities. His production touches on all the iconography of the period: the subjects of archangels, Marian devotions, Christological themes, allegories, male and female saints, souls from purgatory, and even screen partitions bearing humanistic themes. Catering to the localized interests of New Spain, keen to highlight certain themes related to evangelical mission work, the didactic passages and American prayers, among them presumably the one to the Virgin of Guadeloupe, it is to Correa that we owe the first copy of the image of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, of whom the mulatto painter was a devotee, and a particular promoter of her culture. Throughout his life as a master, Juan Correa took several mulatto apprentices into his studio and trained important future New Spanish painters, including José de Ibarra (Velázquez, 1998).
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A contemporary of thinkers such as the poetess Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the writer and scientist Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and the also famous painter Cristóbal de Villalpando, Juan Correa was born into a founding era in
the history of vice-royal Mexico, in which the presence of Africans and their interbreeding with other groups notably increased; an era, in short, in which the social and economic dynamics were complex.
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The life of Juan Correa bears witness to the complex social diversity that was being lived out in the New Hispanic viceroyalty; on the one hand, Juan Correa's parents attained quite a comfortable standard of living in the Calle Águila (currently a Cuban Republic section of the old historic centre of Mexico City), which allowed them to lend their son the 300 pesos it took to buy the freedom of his slave Tomasa Gutiérrez, and fifty pesos more for the freedom of her similarly enslaved grandson, while conversely, Juan Correa had a black slave woman of 50 years of age in his service, whom he sold towards the end of the seventeenth century. Not much is known about the artist's early life and adolescence. His earliest works date from the 1660s. On stylistic evidence, some scholars believe he was part of Antonio Rodríguez's studio, and although the exact date of Juan Correa's entry into the guild of painters and gilders is unknown, it was reported that that he took the master's exam alongside other contemporary painters of the class of 1687, in other words, when he was already 41 years old. Guild studios, like the painters and gilders, were the only places qualified to exercise different arts and offices. Each one of them relied on a brotherhood (a congregation with religious and social welfare aims) and their patron saint determined the ordinances which regulated the technical and religious criteria that had to govern the creation of works of art, conditions of sale and the knowledge and characteristics which those who aspired to be masters had to attain. Despite the restrictions imposed and issued by certain guilds towards the indigenous peoples, Africans and people of castes holding offices, their entry into these corporations as apprentices, officials and in some cases, masters, was inevitable.
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The characteristic themes of the era represented by Correa were those of the communion and the Eucharist, as well as those linked to the triumph of the church. These included representations of male and female saints, the iconography of Christ, the Virgin, archangels and other biblical themes. Among the painter's varied output, two interesting folding screens that were traditional in the Orient, which Correa created for historical and humanistic purposes, should be taken into account. They catch the eye with their pictorial production, which leaves a singular imprint on the work, the images of angels, cherubs and children of 'broken colour' (one adjective among many others used to describe mulattos in the colonial period). The depiction of these dynamic and almost exclusively blond celestial beings, exhibiting typical Baroque characteristics, had already been used
by other New Hispanic painters, but in Correa's work these figures acquired a new physiognomy. In light of investigations carried out by Elisa Vargas Lugo on his work, Baby Jesus with Musician Angels, it was the painter's intention to reflect artistically and spiritually the diverse ethnicity of his time, and probably also the presence of African descendants in New Spain, by endowing two of the angels who accompany the scene with a darker tint than the rest who make up the piece. Correa seemingly based his work on the work of the Czech artist, Wenceslaus Hollar, entitled, Concert of Cherubs on Earth, and he gave two of the musician angels, in particular one of them, positioned immediately behind the Baby Jesus, a noticeably darker skin tone, which contrasts with the light skin colour of the scene's protagonist; the other, positioned on the far left, curiously playing two tambourines, also differs from the other angels by having a skin colour more akin to that of mulattos (Rodríguez, 2011).
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In 1706, sometime after taking his master's exam, and ten years before his death, Juan Correa was elected Guild Overseer, an important function in the hierarchy of this institution. In order to be elected overseer, a master had to be a person of renown and experience in the office, since they carried out the orders of mayors and town halls, and ensured compliance with the ordinances, orders and board of director agreements, or the advice of elders in their respective guilds. Other roles Juan Correa was associated with were that of asset valuer and inventory executor.
Juan Correa married twice in his life; the dates of the weddings are not known, nor is the 'status' of each wife. There were no children from his first marriage, since his wife María de Páez died prematurely, but there were four offspring from his second marriage to Úrsula de Montoya: Miguel, Francisco, Diego and Felipa. Two of them took up painting as a profession: his firstborn, Miguel, who later became an officer, and Diego, who reached the level of master, but died very young. So far, around 400 works by Juan Correa have been catalogued, with another 40 located in museums or colonial buildings in Mexico being attributed to him, as well as those in private collections at home and abroad. The life and works of Juan Correa reflect the vital, dynamic and contrasting history of vice-royal Mexico in the seventeenth century, which, far from being a gloomy and static period, was in truth an era of intense mobility, profound transformations and important cultural bonding in which people of African descent played a fundamental role in Mexico's economic, social and cultural construction. Juan Correa died in Mexico City in 1716.
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# References
Gonzalbo Aizpuru, P. 1998. Familia y orden colonial. Mexico, El Colegio de México.
Restall, M. 2005. Conquistadores negros: africanos armados en la temprana Hispanoamérica (Black conquistadores: Armed Africans in early Spanish America). J. M. de la Serna (ed.), Pautas de convivencia étnica en la América Latina colonial (Indios, negros, mulatos, pardos y esclavos). Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, pp. 19-72.
Rodríguez Nobrega, J. 2011. El Niño Jesús con ángeles músicos de Juan Correa (1646-1716/17). Arte Colonial en Venezuela. http://artecolonialvenezuela.blogspot. com/2011/04/el-nino-jesus-con-angeles-musicos-de.html (Accessed 26 February 2016)
Vargas Lugo, E. and Curiel, G. 1991. Juan Correa, su vida y su obra. Cuerpo de documentos, tomo III. Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Velázquez Gutiérrez, M. E. 1998. Juan Correa, "mulato libre, maestro de pintor". Mexico, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.
Velázquez Gutiérrez, M. E. 2006. Mujeres de origen africano en la capital novohispana, siglos XVII y XVIII. Mexico. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
Velázquez Gutiérrez, M. E. and Iturralde Nieto, G. 2012. Afrodescendientes en México: Una historia de silencio y discriminación. Mexico, Consejo Nacional para Prevenir la Discriminación, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
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# BIOGRAPHIES OF AFRICANS IN DIASPORA
Individual Trajectories and Collective Identities<br>Nielson Rosa Bezerra
As a field of study, the history of the African diaspora has yet to face a significant challenge. Even considering the continuous advances made over the years, we still need to listen to the voices of the Africans narrating their personal histories. Using biography as a historiographical method has been a valuable tool in confronting this challenge. Thanks to this perspective, more than 12 million Africans, who came from different parts of Africa to the Americas during the period of the Atlantic slave trade, can be seen not as mere statistical data, in terms of numbers and percentages, but rather as human beings, with personalities, interests and, above all, as creators of their own histories. ${ }^{1}$ Besides, biography as a method for studying the African diaspora offers a powerful alternative to the idea of slavery as the central feature of the history of Africans in the Americas. ${ }^{2}$ However, the challenges that historians face begin long before, with the selection of historical sources capable of offering information about the lives and trajectories of African people who were taken from their homelands to live in other places, all too frequently under slavery. Not only the
[^0]
[^0]: 1 For the number of Africans who were taken from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade, see http://www. slavevoyages.org/. This project also supports research on the origins of Africans in diaspora. See http:// www.slavevoyages.org/about/origins.
2 For biographies of Africans in diaspora, see http://www.freedomnarratives.org and https://www.yorku. ca/research/tubman/.
method of treating sources but also the criteria used for choosing documents and information about people must be rethought. This way, documents that have been used only to generate numbers and statistics can also be used to reconstruct the trajectories of these people.
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This essay is a contribution to the debate about the individual trajectories and collective identities of Africans in diaspora using the biographical method. Using testaments attached to death entries, it is possible to elaborate a part of the trajectory of Gracia Maria da Conceição Magalhães, for example, who initially was known only as Gracia Guiné, an enslaved African in Rio de Janeiro. Through labour, ingeniousness and effort, she managed to obtain her manumission, marry a man of mixed African and European background, become a member of a religious confraternity, and own slaves and a manioc flour mill. Her trajectory is a demonstration of the social re-elaborations of Africans, especially women, in diaspora. They were responsible for the changes that occurred in their lives over time, by building relationships that enabled social mobility or perpetuated the stagnancy in which they lived. Furthermore, this essay sheds light on the importance of the biographical method in providing a perspective on diaspora, revealing particular areas of interest within Brazilian historiography that are distinct from those produced by anglophone historians.
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# Gracia Maria da Conceição Magalhães: An African in the Recôncavo of Rio de Janeiro
Even after she was no longer a slave, the memories of the journey from Africa to Rio de Janeiro never disappeared. Gracia Maria da Conceição Magalhães had time to remember everything before her death. She took comfort in the knowledge that she had earned enough money in her life to guarantee all the Catholic sacraments. She would be shrouded in the habit of Saint Anthony, a special item, and her burial would be held in the cemetery of the confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary, located in the parish of Nossa Senhora da Piedade de Iguaçu, where she lived out her last years. Judging by the pompous name she bore after being manumitted and by her ostentatious possessions, few people would imagine that Gracia Maria was an African, born in Guinea. She died just before Christmas, on 18 December 1789. Though a member of Our Lady of the Rosary, she was especially devoted to Our Lady of the Conception. Wrong were those who thought that she owed her surname only to Luiz de Magalhães, the former master who liberated her. Always canny, she paid her contributions
to the confraternity. In this manner, she ensured that everything would be done according to her will, since she was certain that the confraternity would meet the obligations that governed the religious institution. She was a widow when she passed away, her husband, Manoel Gomes Torres, having died years before.
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While alive, she sometimes felt sad that she had not had children. The travails of slave labour may have been responsible for that. As she was a widow without children or heirs, she needed to leave her possessions in good hands. When her executor read the testament, there were no surprises. She was not rich but had two Angolan slaves, Lucrécia and Antônio. She had bought them rather cheap as the trade flow between Angola and Rio de Janeiro had been gradually increasing since 1750, decreasing the average value of slaves and making it easy for small farmers to have a slave labour force. Gracia Maria also had a wellequipped manioc house. The building was quite old, but it served its purpose. Among its items, there were boxes for flour storage and tools (axes, hoes, knives and so forth). She had a rifle, usually used by Antônio to frighten away predators from the forest of Tinguá, though only on her instructions. The conciliatory accounts and remarks recorded in her testament make it clear that Gracia Maria did not like to have her slaves involved in problems with the authorities. Her property was modest even by the standards of her parish - she had no more than 30 acres. However, that was enough for a good crop of manioc, which was processed into flour before being sold. She favoured her slaves, but not for fear of being unable to find peace after death. She had already received every possible Catholic sacrament. Gracia Maria had a certain affection for Antônio and Lucrécia, especially the latter. So, in her will, both of them benefited from the manioc crop and the manioc house for one year from the day of her death. Gracia Maria hoped that Antônio and (particularly) Lucrécia would save up enough money in one year to buy their letters of manumission. However, if Antônio could not buy his freedom by the end of that period, the executor was to sell him at market price. Gracia Maria stated that, in that case, he should only be sold to someone of his liking. However, she held Lucrécia in higher esteem. As a freedwoman herself
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, in that case, he should only be sold to someone of his liking. However, she held Lucrécia in higher esteem. As a freedwoman herself, from the parish of Nossa Senhora da Piedade de Iguaçu in the Recôncavo of Rio de Janeiro, she stipulated that if Lucrécia Angola could not buy her freedom by the end of the period, the executor should offer her an extension of a year and a half so that she would not have to live as a slave any more. Gracia Maria also settled on a price for Lucrécia: 38,400 réis, which, it seems, was below the average price. In Lucrécia's case, it was clearly stated that as soon she gave the executor the money, her letter of manumission should be delivered immediately.
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Obviously, Gracia Maria da Conceição Magalhães was not rich or powerful. For example, she owed 24,000 réis to a slave named Damião, who belonged to Francisco Barbosa. It was an old debt from when her husband, Manoel Gomes Torres was still alive. At the time, Damião was saving that money to buy his own manumission. To ensure the money would not be lost, Damião confided it to Manoel Gomes Torres, a man he trusted. However, things became difficult for Gracia Maria when Manoel got sick, so Damião's money was used to buy medicine and pay for medical services. When Manoel died, the remaing money was used to pay for his burial. Gracia Maria was a very decent woman. In her testament, it was stated that Damião should receive all his money back without any legal dispute. She was in debt to another slave, named Francisco, who also belonged to Francisco Barbosa, in the amount of 14,080 réis. It is clear that Manoel Gomes Torres had good relationships with the slaves owned by Francisco Barbosa, otherwise they would not have entrusted money to him.
Manoel Gomes Torres was a freedman of mixed racial background, devoted to Our Lady of the Conception, the preferred saint of people who came from this social background. In her testament, Gracia Maria da Conceição said that her deceased husband belonged to that confraternity. Besides owing money to the slaves owned by Francisco Barbosa, Manoel Torres was also in debt to his religious confraternity. So, before her death, Gracia Maria declared that part of the money collected by the sale of her possessions should be used to pay the debt of her deceased husband. Being a fair person, she had already paid 16,000 réis to the confraternity. Hence, for a debt of 42,430 réis, the executor had to pay only 26,430 réis.
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Gracia Maria had her own debts. As she had done with her husband's debts, she declared that hers should be duly paid. She had already received 4,000 réis from Lucrécia Angola. Having reached an agreement concerning her manumission, Lucrécia periodically paid Gracia Maria three coins as part of the agreement. However, she was not the only person Gracia Maria had such relations with. She also owed 11 patacas to a freedwoman called Izabel de Almeida, money she borrowed in a moment of need. Besides stipulating the payment of her debts, Gracia Maria also said that she might owe money to someone else she could no longer remember. So, after her death, in case any creditor claimed a 'low amount', the executor was to pay it unquestioningly.
Gracia Maria did not only have debts but was owed money, since she had profited from buying and selling slaves in the competitive manumissions market created by freed Africans. She registered in her testament that the freed African named José Rodrigues owed her 38,400 réis, credit that she had granted him to
pay the second instalment of the amount required to liberate the slave named Izabel Crioula, his biological daughter. In full control of her faculties when she wrote her will, she declared that the money should be paid so that Izabel could receive her letter of manumission. If the due date expired, the executor should get Izabel Crioula back and sell her as a slave to any interested person, as stated in the agreement with her biological father.
Cautious in business and religious affairs, Gracia Maria da Conceição Magalhães wished to have four funeral masses held for her soul. For each mass, she offered a sum of 640 réis. Besides that, she stipulated that two more masses be held at any convenient place of the executor's choice and offered 320 réis for each one. Having in mind her old and new debts, she considered her money might not be enough. If needed, her gold earrings were to be sold to guarantee the money for the masses. The leftover money was to be donated at the altar of Our Lady of the Conception.
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Her possessions included a little box that she wished to give Izabel Crioula, whose manumission had been settled. Her opulent skirt was to be inherited by the freed African named Escolástica de Magalhães, who lived in Rio de Janeiro, a friend from the days when she had been a slave. Both had belonged to the same master, from whom they had taken the surname Magalhães. Gracia Maria was very fond of her painted image of Our Lady of the Conception and her gold necklace, which were to be given to the freed African named Custódia, wife of Domingos Francisco Ramos. In appreciation of her old master, Gracia Maria also wanted 13 masses to be undertaken for the soul of the deceased Luiz Magalhães. Everything was to be done within four years. Gracia Maria was an experienced woman, and she knew very well that things would not work as planned if done in a rush.
Then, once her slaves, possessions and manioc crop were sold, Rosa and Ana, daughters of José de Azevedo, were to receive 2,000 réis each. The remaining money would belong to the executor, Manoel Rodrigues, an old and inseparable friend, for all the trouble taken with the execution of her will, and for being close to her after her husband's illness and death. It was only fair for him to receive a proper reward for his trouble.
However, her last wish concerning the manioc house could not wait four years to be fulfilled. Gracia Maria expected that Antônio and Lucrécia, her Angolan slaves, would make enough money with the manioc house to pay for their manumissions. Thus, by the end of the term appointed, the manioc house,
its items and her lands were to be donated to a freed African named João Gomes da Conceição who lived in the city of Rio de Janeiro. ${ }^{3}$
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its items and her lands were to be donated to a freed African named João Gomes da Conceição who lived in the city of Rio de Janeiro. ${ }^{3}$
There is much to be learned about the trajectory of the freed African named Gracia Maria da Conceição Magalhães. She came from Guinea, arrived in Rio de Janeiro as a slave, then was liberated, became a member of the Our Lady of the Rosary confraternity, was devoted to Our Lady of the Conception, owned a manioc house and some slaves, and had influence over many people who, from the point of view of the legality of slavery, were not under her power. However, this trajectory is only a small demonstration of the importance of biography as a method that yields the possibility of 'listening' to the voices of Africans in diaspora. In this case, the testament is particularly rich since Gracia Maria da Conceição Magalhães was the one who revealed all the information about her life. With similar data, it is possible to examine people and institutions mentioned by her and amplify the information concerning her own context, her community and the social interactions she had built, from the time she was a slave until the moment of her death, as a freed African with property, as reported in her testament.
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# Biographies of Africans in diaspora: Methodological contributions
In Brazil, biographies are used in historiography. Biographical studies of Africans or people who underwent the experiences of the Atlantic slave trade are recurrent. While biographical studies in the anglophone world are embedded in the tradition of using autobiographical narratives followed by a long contextualization, Brazilian historiography is devoted to writing about individuals who continually appear in the documentation. Some of them are so present that it is possible to establish details about them. Thus, one can identify two historiographical traditions in relation to biographies of Africans: one is a tradition focused on autobiographies, focusing on narratives written by the individual himself or herself, and with direct participation. The other is more consistent with establishing a 'historical imagination' based on documents containing information, testimony or evidence of the person's trajectory. However, in both cases, the methodology involved in using biography needs to
[^0]
[^0]: 3 Livro de Assentos de Óbitos e Testamentos de Livres - Freguesia de Nossa Senhora da Piedade de Iguaçu, 1777-1798, Arquivo da Cúria Diocesana de Nova Iguaçu.
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[^0]
[^0]: 3 Livro de Assentos de Óbitos e Testamentos de Livres - Freguesia de Nossa Senhora da Piedade de Iguaçu, 1777-1798, Arquivo da Cúria Diocesana de Nova Iguaçu.
be grounded in the following four parameters: first, a focus on the subject of the biography is crucial, seeking as much information about his or her physical characteristics, activities, occupations, beliefs and cultural perspectives. When it is impossible to find an autobiography where the person is described with some accuracy, self-descriptive information can be found in documents such as reports of escape, rental or purchase and sale advertisements, police records and testaments. Second, context can help when considering an individual trajectory. Even if it is not possible to fill in all the gaps, it is possible to place the subject in his or her context, searching out close relations, taking as examples other people who held similar social positions, and using baptisms, marriage and death registers in ecclesiastical books that can provide information. Third, establishing collective experiences is crucial as people generally live in a collective, and it is that social living that characterizes people. Hence, thinking about a person and his or her trajectory also involves considering at least some collective parameters of social relations, regardless of the condition of the individual in the social sphere. Many documents - commitments to brotherhoods, testaments of freedmen or letters of manumission - are available to conduct biographical research into the lives of Africans in diaspora. Finally, it is important not to expect definitive answers because the diversity of human experiences cannot be condensed into a few descriptive lines of a police record, a baptism entry or even an act of commitment to a brotherhood. People are generally involved in a multitude of contexts, which can be confusing if the researcher is not able to discern the African subject, independent of his or her social status.
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Paul Lovejoy and Robin Law (2007) have investigated the life of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua using documents from diverse places relating to his Atlantic trajectory, taking into consideration the clues provided by his autobiography. The most significant of clues are to be found in the name Baquaqua - that he chose to use after reaching freedom in the city of New York in 1847. In his autobiography, Baquaqua says that, when he was a slave in Brazil, his Christianized name was José da Costa, a common enough name in the Christian universe. The last name was derived from that of his master, Captain Clemente José da Costa. When he found shelter with activists of the American abolitionist movement, together with another escapee, the latter, a slave named João da Rocha, chose a typically American name: David. Given the possibility of choosing his own name, José da Costa opted for Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, a name that bore a reference to his cultural heritage, retracing his past in Africa, a place Baquaqua wished to return to during his lifetime.
Law and Lovejoy argue that the names that Africans adopted when they became free possibly alluded to overcoming slavery.
Considering the methodology in examining Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua's autobiography, one could think about using testaments as autobiographical documents that offer information about the way Africans lived in diaspora, their interests, and the circumstances and contexts of their lives. I think the same method can offer many perspectives when applied to various documents, mostly with the objective of discovering the trajectories of various individuals so that their identities may be revealed despite the long hiatus between the times in which they lived and the present time in which their lives are being studied.
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Besides her remarkable declarations in her testament, Gracia Maria da Conceição Magalhães provided proof of her conversion to Catholicism. Nevertheless, the fact is that we cannot know if she had truly adopted Christian attitudes while she was alive. I would like here to underscore the analysis of the name of our protagonist. Throughout her testament, Gracia Maria praised the fact that she bore Our Lady's name, a mark of Catholic Christianity often seen in societies shaped by European colonization. Interestingly enough, she was a confrère of Our Lady of the Rosary in whose cemetery she was supposed to be buried. The contributions duly paid were the only thing she did for the confraternity. Judging by her testament, Gracia Maria was truly devoted to Our Lady of the Conception. She had already paid 16,000 réis for her husband's debts and instructed the executor to pay what remained. Also, she insisted that the money left from the sale of her earrings be offered at the altar of Our Lady of the Conception. Gracia Maria had an image of Our Lady of the Conception. Besides, she had adopted her devotion as her surname. It might be coincidence, but her testament expressed her desire to give her manioc house to an old slave of hers, a freedman named José Gomes da Conceição. I would presume, with some certainty, that Gracia Maria da Conceição was only buried in the cemetery of the Rosary because the presence of Africans among the brothers of the Conception (her husband had been one of them) was restricted or at least frowned upon.
Historiography shows that it was common for slaves to adopt the surnames of their former masters when they were manumitted. I analysed the subject in research about manumissions in Jacutinga in the nineteenth century (Bezerra, 2008, chapter 2). For Gracia Maria, her surname ensured her freedom. The name Magalhães made people think of her master, so her freed condition would not be questioned. Perhaps those 13 masses required for the soul of her former master were not ingenuous. Incidentally, Gracia Maria left her ostentatious skirt
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to Escolástica Magalhães, a freed African. They may not have been sisters by blood, but they were certainly in captivity together when they were owned by Luiz Magalhães. Gracia Maria respected Catholic symbolism. Long before her death, she had already had her habit of Saint Anthony made, that being one of the most popular practices of devotion in the Recôncavo of Rio de Janeiro.
Judging by the methodology developed by Law and Lovejoy (2007), the name Maria did not allude to Africa, but to an advanced process of ladinization (Reis, 2015). Usually, when an African was baptized, he/she would receive a Christian name. His/her origin completed the identification. It did not mean conversion to Catholicism, but the imposition of Catholic rituals on enslaved Africans, with a view to justifying the institution of forced labour. Then, during captivity, our African protagonist was possibly known as Gracia da Guinéou, or simply Gracia Guiné. In case of Gracia Guiné, it seems that the process of ladinization resulted in her conversion to Catholicism, as she dictated in her testament. It is not difficult to understand why she adopted Maria as her second name. The Maria devotions were many. Besides, such devotions were allocated among confraternities, which served to represent social hierarchy during the colonial period. The Rosary confraternity was more appropriate for Africans. Conception was mainly attended by men and women who were identified as 'mulattoes'. Gracia Maria, a freed African, did not object to such social hierarchy and joined the Africans' confraternity. However, when she had the chance to choose another Catholic representation as a name, she chose Conceição, and when she manumitted her slave, he started to call himself José Gomes da Conceição.
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As we can see, analysing the names of people is a possible way of revealing individual trajectories and collective identities. The Christianized names adopted by Africans reveal many things to researchers who, on the basis of numbers and percentages, have determined the flow of the Atlantic trade. The names chosen by Africans after manumission, even those taken in relation to their former masters, may offer some perspective on people about whom we know very little.
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# Final considerations
The method of studying biography not only contributes to understanding individual trajectories but also makes possible a detailed investigation of the collective identities that people wove throughout their lives. However, a historian cannot investigate archives at random, in search of an opportunity to produce the biography of an African. Such opportunities must be made. Therefore, it is necessary to review the criteria used for selecting documents. The method of biography of Africans in diaspora should not be chosen after the selection of the sources because one can select documents according to the voices one wishes to hear, the narratives one wishes to create and the people one wishes to study as protagonists of history. In this case, the choice of documents, the modes of analysis and the style of the narrative are fundamental, so that Africans can be more than numbers, so that they can be seen as individuals who were able to manage their histories.
The documents with narratives about Africans in diaspora should be privileged. Testaments are particularly interesting since the information they present is usually dictated by Africans themselves. Besides, they did so at a moment when they were examining their own lives carefully, emphasizing interests and stating what should be done with their possessions and their bodies as well as stating their convictions about the afterlife. In this process, evidence that was ignored by statistical methods turns out to be fundamental, aiding historians in identifying and analysing transformations that people underwent over the course of their lives.
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# References
Bezerra, N. R. 2008. As chaves da liberdade: confluências da escravidão no Recôncavo do Rio de Janeiro (1833-1888). Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, EdUFF.
Bezerra, N. R. 2010. Mosaicos da Escravidão: identidades africanas e conexões atlânticas do Recôncavo da Guanabara (1780-1840). Ph.D. thesis, Universidade Federal de Fluminense, Brazil.
Bezerra, N. R. 2011. Escravidão, Biografias e a Memória dos Excluídos. Revista Espaço Acadêmico, No. 126, pp. 136-44.
De Carvalho, M. J., dos Santos Gomes, F. and Reis, J. J. 2010. O alufá Rufino. Tráfico, escravidão e liberdade no Atlântico Negro (c. 1822 - c. 1853). São Paulo, Brazil, Companhia das Letras.
De Carvalho Soares, M. (ed.). 2007. Rotas atlânticas da diáspora africana: da Baía do Benim ao Rio de Janeiro. Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, EdUFF.
Fragoso, J. 1992. Homens de grossa aventura. Acumulação e bierarquia na praça mercantil do Rio de Janeiro (1790-1830). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Arquivo Nacional.
Karash, M. C. 1986. A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850. São Paulo, Brazil, Companhia das Letras.
Ki-Zerbo, J. (ed.). 2010. General History of Africa, I. Methodology and African Prehistory. Heinemann, Calif./UNESCO.
Law, R. and Lovejoy, P. E. 2007. The Biography of Mabommab Gardo Baquaqua. His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. Princeton, NJ, Markus Wiener Publishers.
Lovejoy, P. E. 1997. Biography as Source Material: Towards a Biographical Archive of Enslaved Africans. R. Law (ed.), Source Material for Studying the Slave Trade and the African Diaspora. Stirling, Scotland, Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, pp. 119-40.
Lovejoy, P. E. 2002. Identidade e a Miragem da etnicidade. A jornada de Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua para as Américas. Afro-Ásia, No. 27, pp. 9-39.
Lovejoy, P. E. 2012. Transformations in Slavery. A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
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Lovejoy, P. E. 2012. Transformations in Slavery. A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
Reis, J. J. 2015. Divining Slavery and Freedom. The Story of Domingos Sodré, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
Rodrigues, J. 2005. De Costa a Costa. Escravos, marinheiros e intermediários do tráfico negreiro de Angola ao Rio de Janeiro (1780-1860). São Paulo, Brazil, Companhia das Letras.
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# CHAPTER 4
## JOSEPH BOLOGNE DE SAINT-GEORGES (1745-1799)
Margaret Crosby-Arnold
Eulogizing his long-time friend, the playwright Jean-Guillaume-Antoine Cuvelier de Trie (1766-1824) captured his contemporaries' esteem for Joseph Bologne de Saint-Georges (1745-1799) when he described the latter as 'the Voltaire of the musical arts'. While many biographical sketches of Saint-Georges have been published, most scholars have unquestioningly relied on race as their main category of analysis, treating him as a 'mulatto' anomaly in a western world otherwise marked by the enslavement of Africans. The global Atlantic of the eighteenth century was, however, a highly cosmopolitan world, far more marked by migration and diversity across colour than scholars have previously depicted. Particularly from the second half of the eighteenth century on, when human migration on a global scale - forced, coerced or otherwise - accelerated everywhere, almost everybody was either a newcomer, or not more than a generation or two removed from somebody who was. Increasing globalization and migration drove the increase in diversity and, in that atmosphere of cultural exchange, transfer and hybridization, a tremendous flowering of new and agglomerated ways of being was inevitable. Whether German or West African, French or East Indian, Scottish or Chinese, Irish or Walloon, urban or rural, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, crypto-Jewish or a blend of some sort, the great patchwork of eighteenth-century populations shared common histories of migration and experiences of being newcomers. It is important to understand
that the horrific circumstances of enslaved African migration occurred alongside not only the coerced migration of a host of non-African peoples but also the voluntary migration of free people of African descent. It was, thus, a world of fluid identities, socioeconomic multiplicity and constant migration as well as cultural transfer and flowering that both shaped Saint-Georges and made his rise to international celebrity possible.
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Diverse families, whether ethnically so or recomposed, were as much the norm in metropolitan Europe as they were in the colonial Americas and elsewhere. Kings and ennobled aristocrats across Europe sired children with multiple women, chose whether or not to recognize them and/or adopted a diversity of children, including some of African descent. Irrespective of any verbal condemnations that may have arisen from the clergy, among the nobility and other estates, extramarital relationships amongst men and women were the accepted norm. In the colonial Americas, this merged with the polygynous familial cultures of West Africans and Native Americans, and a variety of conjugal unions and familial relations prevailed in the Americas. For this reason, neither Saint-Georges nor his polygynous family were unusual or irregular in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, including metropolitan Europe.
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Saint-Georges was born on Christmas Day, 1745, in the French colony of Guadeloupe, on the sugar plantation named Saint-Robert, belonging to his father, Georges de Bologne de Saint-Georges. By then, the de Bolognes had long been marked by familial diversity, so much so that they defied strict ethnic or national identification. Like so many migrant families from a Europe torn by religion, they had fled persecution time and again and, despite their eighteenthcentury surname, were no more native-born French than their enslaved Africans. Following the Siege of La Rochelle (1628) that quashed Protestant resistance in western France, the Protestant patriarch of the Guadeloupe line, Louis de Bologne (1605-1664), fled to the Dutch Republic, where the family name became 'van Bolongien'. With the Union of Utrecht (1579), the Dutch Republic embraced multiconfessionalism as a basic organizing principle of the State and, thenceforth, became a haven for a diversity of religious refugees from across Europe. In Rotterdam, Louis married a Dutch woman and had two sons, Willem (1631-1670) and Pieter (1645-1721). The influx of religious refugees to the Dutch Republic, including wealthy Sephardic Jews, helped finance and stimulate overseas expansion. By 1630, the Dutch Republic controlled most of northern Brazil, paradoxically expanding the slave trade as well as tolerance and freedom consciousness across the Atlantic. This made the colony attractive to religious 'others' fleeing Europe, and the van Bolongiens were among the many
who immigrated to the Pernambuco region of north-eastern Brazil in the mid1630s. There, even Indigenous populations and enslaved Africans were left to their own religious beliefs.
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Louis established his family in Recife, in the Atlantic sugar trade, and there they prospered until the city fell to Portuguese forces in late January 1654. By March, Louis was once again a refugee, but this time along with his family and a multiconfessional, multi-ethnic group of other refugees, including enslaved people of African descent. Led by Nicolas Jacob Classen, lieutenant colonel of the infantry at Recife, a large vessel carrying refugees first sailed to Martinique where, at the behest of zealot Jesuit priests, the party of 'Jews and other heretics' were denied entry. The Governor of the new French colony of Guadeloupe, Charles Houël, however, was keen to expand the sugar business, and he welcomed them. The immigration of this diversity of refugees from Pernambuco to Guadeloupe sparked a critical advance in the French sugar business, and the latter was on the verge of global dominance by the time of Saint-Georges's birth in 1745. Four additional ships carrying refugees arrived in the days following the arrival of Louis and his family. The motley crew of migrants numbered, roughly, nine hundred people, three hundred of whom were soldiers. The other six hundred civilians comprised one hundred babitants (planters), two hundred women and three hundred 'Brazilians'. Many of the latter group were described as free and practised their various faiths, but it also included a good many enslaved people of non-Catholic Judeo-Christian faiths, who were specifically skilled in the cultivation of sugar cane and the production of sugar. In 1647, Houël had written to the King, complaining about the exorbitant prices that Dutch traders charged for slaves and asking for some means of augmenting the slave workforce. The refugees, who were wealthy in slaves, were thus quite the windfall. In early accounts, special mention was made of two nègres, especially skilled in the manufacturing of sugar moulds, while the others had been brought along specifically to prepare the new land for the cultivation of sugar cane.
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This diverse party of refugees, many of whom had immigrated to Dutch Brazil from hither and yon, brought memories of persecution as well as cultures of diversity and liberty of consciousness with them to Guadeloupe. Nevertheless, as non-Catholics in the French Antilles, their position was not secure, and they again faced the prospect of expulsion in 1664. Many Protestants were dispersed to North America and elsewhere. Louis died in 1664, and it is not clear whether this was in Guadeloupe or Rotterdam.
Willem (now Guillaume) and Pieter (now Pierre), remained in Guadeloupe and were eventually numbered among the convertis, religious converts for economic convenience. Willem was naturalized in 1667 and Pieter in 1672. In 1670, Willem was condemned for contraband trading with the Dutch colony of Sint Eustatius. In 1678, Pieter made his fortune the old-fashioned way, marrying a twice-widowed Dutch woman, Catherine van Eybergen. Her first husband was the aforementioned Lieutenant Classen, with whom she had two sons and from whom she inherited the sugar plantation in Montagne Bellevue, Basse-Terre, that Pierre renamed after himself when she died. With her second husband, Nicolas van Houten, she had one daughter and, with Pieter, a son, Pierre de Bologne (1678-1744), Saint-Georges's grandfather. In 1701, Pierre married a woman of Basque descent, Catherine d'Hirigoyen (born in 1680). As a matter of fact, Georges de Bologne de Saint-Georges (1707-1774), SaintGeorges's father, was the first in the family to formally marry someone French, Jeanne-François Méricane (1722-1801). She was from the area of Grenade, north of Toulouse, along the vital inland navigation corridor of the Garonne River and the Canal Royal de Languedoc (now called the Canal du Midi), that connected trade on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
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This prelude of intra-European migration and familial diversity is important for a number of reasons. First, as crypto-Protestant immigrants living in the French Antilles, the de Bolognes, regardless of their wealth, had equality and inclusion problems. Second, just as it is far from surprising that the history of dispersal and its threat contributed to the formation of alternative familial ties among enslaved peoples of African descent in the Americas, by the same token, it is unsurprising that similar responses emerged among the coerced and dispersed religious migrants of Europe in the Atlantic world. This goes a long way towards explaining not only the siring of Saint-Georges but also the normalization of the increase in African diversity within Europe and European families. The massive refugee crisis that accompanied the religious wars between 1524 and 1648 and persecution had already so shuffled the demographic make-up of continental Europe that the immigrant experience and living in diversity were predominant. Thus, by the time of Saint-Georges's birth, more than a century of migration had shaped diverse familial identities in Europe. The factors shaping the latter included intra-European migration as well as resettlement in the Americas. Families like the de Bolognes were, quite often, not age-old, nativeborn subjects of the metropolitan powers whose colonies they inhabited. Given this diversity, resettlement in the Americas and/or everyday life with still more newcomers, whether Fulani, Mandinke, Wolof or otherwise, perhaps did not
require as much adaptation as scholars once thought. And then, in the eighteenth century, two generations later, many of the refugees-turned-planters returned to Europe with a sociopolitical vengeance, African offspring and all. This diversity meant that the socioeconomic environment, especially in the Basse-Terre region of Guadeloupe, was far more complex than any understanding that categories of analysis like 'race' or even 'ethnicity' would allow.
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Saint-Georges was born into a colony where identity and place were fluid and contested. Census-makers in Guadeloupe did not create the category blanc (white) until 1729. Authorities in Guadeloupe lamented the prosperity of the presque libres, an unofficial estate of almost free persons who engaged profitably in trade and professions. Since he lived twenty-two years before the category was created, we simply do not know whether Georges de Bologne ever became blanc, any more than we know whether he became a practising catholic français. It also seems likely that Saint-Georges's mother, Anne (1722-1795), called Nanon, may have numbered amongst the presque libres, and there is some indication that cultural diversity and cosmopolitan consciousness were influences in her case as well. Anne's mother was an enslaved woman named Marguerite, and Anne was born in Grand-Cul-de-Sac on a plantation belonging to Saint-Georges's grandfather, Pierre. From the visa authorizing her voyage from Guadeloupe to Bordeaux in 1748, we have a description of Nanon as a négresse, of petite stature with a visage rougeâtre (reddish face). A number of travellers to West Africa described Fulbe, 'Mandingo' and Wolof women as beautiful, as Anne was recognized to be by contemporaries, but only the Fulbe were consistently described as having reddish brown complexions. Following his travels in West Africa between 1785 and 1787, the French geographer, Sylvain de Golbéry (1742-1822) described Fulbe women as 'spirited and handsome' with a skin colour of 'reddish black'. This is consistent with the observations recorded by his contemporary, Moreau de Saint-Méry, of enslaved Fulbe in the French colony of Saint-Domingue: leur couleur est rougeâtre (their skin colour is reddish). It is likely, therefore, as some have suggested, that Anne was of Fulbe descent. This is also not surprising given French dominance in the slave trade from the region of the Sénégal River: enslaved Africans destined for French colonies in the Caribbean first disembarked in Martinique, and Georges de Bologne's uncle
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, and Georges de Bologne's uncle, Samuel de Bologne, and cousin, Joseph de Bologne, owned a twelve-ton ship, La Félicité, that, amongst other trading activities, was heavily involved in the inter-island slave trade.
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Ultimately, Saint-Georges's matrilineal line needs more research, but Nanon, his mother's name, was unusual - not only in French culture, but also for an
enslaved woman in the eighteenth-century French Atlantic. 'Nanon' is 'Anne' in Hebrew. Thus, the name she went by suggests that her family's history of enslavement may have included bondage to a crypto-Jewish family or Jewish owners, prior to the expulsion of Jews from the French Caribbean colonies in 1685. It also seems that, sometime after she was emancipated, she gave herself a surname and signed her will, bequeathing all her possessions to SaintGeorges, as Anne Danneveau. This choice of surname may suggest a conscious identification with the diverse, martial world of the eighteenth-century French Atlantic world that made possible the social mobility of not only her son but also many other newcomers. Indeed, members of the van Bolongien family had also taken up military service to cement their naturalized status as de Bologne(s), and almost all of Saint-Georges's patrilineal forebears had served as musketeers. Danneveau, the gentleman from Picardy, appears as one of the original Musketeers in Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras' popular, fictionalized depiction of Charles de Batz de Castelmore (1611-1673), called Monsieur d'Artagnan in Les Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan (1700). D'Artagnan was a famous seventeenth-century military figure whose early career, like that of Anne's son Joseph, included service in the King's guard. De Sandras' novel later inspired Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers (1844).
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We do not know when the relationship between Georges and Anne began, but it was a love affair that spanned the Atlantic and continued until Georges's death in 1774. It is worth keeping in mind that being 'white' was a concept that was less than two decades old when Saint-Georges was born in 1745, and it is likely that public acceptance of the concept took some decades. As prosperous but naturalized and crypto-Protestant planters in the Catholic French Antilles, unwanted 'administrative' attention would have gone with the territory for the de Bolognes.
The correlation between times of economic dislocation and the targeting of 'others' in the French Atlantic world was unmistakable. Having disrupted trade, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) was such a period. In addition, the Protestant German immigrant and illegitimate son of the elector of Saxony, Maurice de Saxe (Moritz von Sachsen), was raised to the highest military command in France and, amongst his notable additions to the French army were regiments composed of a diversity of soldiers of African and Arab descent. Voices of rabid opposition echoed from the French planters to the Ministry of Navy and Colonies in the very year that Georges and Anne welcomed the birth of their son. Brought up on trumped-up murder charges in December 1747, Georges was condemned to death by hanging and his property subjected to confiscation in May
1748. He chose to flee Guadeloupe for metropolitan France before the sentence was handed down, but, in his absence, he was hanged in effigy.
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Travelling together, Georges's polygynous family soon followed. On 4 January 1749, his legal wife Elisabeth Méricane, their daughter and SaintGeorges's sister Elisabeth-Bénédictine, Georges's concubine Anne, their son Saint-Georges, and a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old 'mulatto' male valet François, arrived in Bordeaux on board the La Paix. Centrally positioned between the Atlantic ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle, Angoumois provided the Atlantic world with many Protestant refugees and was a Protestant stronghold. Its capital, Angouleme, sits on the navigable Charente waterway. By the mideighteenth century, the crypto-Protestant Angoumois diaspora, comprised of the transatlantic descendants of religious refugees, was not only diverse but had grown wealthy from trade in critical colonial commodities (sugar, coffee, indigo and slaves). This diaspora was bound together by global trading ties, not infrequently cemented by intermarriage and familial bonds. After their arrival in France, the polygynous family stayed with Georges's older brother and the toddler Saint-Georges's uncle, Pierre de Bologne (born in Martinique, 17061792) at his home in the St. Jean parish of Angouleme. After serving in the European campaigns, as a musketeer in the diverse army commanded by Maurice de Saxe in the War of the Austrian Succession, Pierre married Bénédictine Husson in 1738. By the time of Georges's legal crisis, he was well established in ancien régime parliamentary circles and, through his connections at court, was able to secure a King's pardon and return of property for his brother Georges. Elisabeth-Bénédictine remained in France to begin her education. JeanneFrançois Méricane was left to travel with Georges's nephew François Cazaux, on the Chaste Catherine, back to Guadeloupe, via Martinique. They departed from Bordeaux on 1 August 1749. Georges, however, travelled together with Anne, the four-year-old Saint-Georges, François and the plantation manager, François Beraud (born in Angouleme). They left Bordeaux on the Achille a day later, with a layover in Martinique.
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Undoubtedly, there were some tensions in this polygynous family, something that is suggested by the fact that Méricane procured an arrêt dated 27 September 1776, towards ensuring that she and Elisabeth would inherit the estate after Georges's death in 1774. By all accounts, however, Saint-Georges enjoyed the childhood privileges of a cherished only son of a wealthy planter, both in Guadeloupe and France. In the summer of 1753, Georges, accompanied by a 'mulatto' valet, Jean Charles, escorted his son Joseph and two of Méricane's nieces to France for their education. They arrived in Bordeaux on Le Bien Aimé on 12
August 1753 and headed for Angouleme. There Joseph was entrusted to the care of his brother, Pierre, and enrolled in the Collège de Saint-Louis. It cannot be emphasized enough that, by the mid-eighteenth century, there would have been nothing unusual about the presence of polygynous families or their offspring in France more generally, and particularly along the Atlantic coast. It was not accidental that the wealthy indigo planter of colour from Saint-Domingue who would be so influential in the revolutionary years, Julien Raimond, and his wife, settled in Angoumois, near Angouleme, and that Raimond travelled back and forth to Paris from there in his efforts to persuade officials at Versailles of the injustice of new and mounting discriminatory colonial decrees. In this Atlantic region, with its major, decidedly cosmopolitan port cities, populated by sizeable immigrant populations that, for historical reasons, were barely French and crypto-Protestant, people of colour were not unusual. Joseph was not the first 'mulatto' son of a wealthy planter to be schooled in metropolitan France and, it is more than likely that he encountered a diversity of people in his Angoumois years, including but not limited to people of colour.
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Presumably, in association with the completion of Joseph's studies, Georges and Anne travelled together from Guadeloupe and arrived in Bordeaux on L'Aimable Rose on 26 August 1755. Georges joined the ranks of the countless absentee planters living in France and, in 1757, purchased a title of nobility from the French crown. Anne, reunited with her son, Joseph, was in France to stay, and the purchased title meant that Joseph would become known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Georges settled with Anne and Joseph in a threestorey home at 49 rue Saint-André des Arts, on the left bank of the Seine River, in the Université section of Paris. As the district's name suggests, it was in the area of the Sorbonne, today called the Latin Quarter. In the mid-eighteenth century, this area of Paris was home to a diverse population of both temporary and permanent newcomers. It was home to the Collège des Lombards that was founded for students from the Italian peninsula in the fourteenth century, but when the Irish Catholic refugees migrated to France in the late-seventeenth century, it was acquired by Irish clerics and became the Collège des Irlandais. In the first emancipation era, the neighbourhood would also be home to the troubled Institution nationale des colonies, a school that specifically recruited students of colour. As residents of the Université neighbourhood in the late 1750s, Georges, Anne and Saint-Georges were surrounded by diversity in what was among the most cosmopolitan cities in early-modern Europe.
Georges actively promoted the equality, social mobility and inclusion of his only son in high Parisian society, at a moment when economic dislocations,
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Georges actively promoted the equality, social mobility and inclusion of his only son in high Parisian society, at a moment when economic dislocations,
associated with the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), were again bringing on rising xenophobia in metropolitan France and its wider reaches. It was expressed in anti-noir (anti-black), anti-Protestant and other terms, all of which identified a more generalized anti-immigrant fever. Saint-Georges had already shown a talent for fencing and music while in his uncle's care in Angouleme. In Paris, he was among the first students enrolled in the fencing institute of Nicolas Benjamin Texier de la Boëssière (1723-1807), which opened on the main artery of the rue Saint-Honoré in 1759. He excelled immediately, so much so that, out of spite, Alexandre Picard de Brémond, head of a newly opened rival school in Rouen, disparaged him as 'the mulatto of Laboissière'. Georges took offence and encouraged Saint-Georges to challenge the more experienced Picard, promising his son a horse and cabriolet if he beat Picard. Held in Rouen, the match was a cause célèbre attended by hundreds of spectators from Paris, Rouen and elsewhere. Saint-Georges dispatched his rival decisively and with ease.
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The eighteenth century marked the rationalization and rise of modern fencing as an elite sport, especially in France. Through his show-match and decisive victory against the bigot Picard, Saint-Georges helped to open a path for social mobility and acceptance for people of colour in the arena of highculture athletics in metropolitan Europe. This, in turn, opened more doors, metaphorically speaking, on the right bank of the Seine River. Acknowledging his victory, Louis XV made him a Gendarme du Roi (King's Guard) and his father, Georges, bought him his prize as promised. The King's appointment was significant insofar as it represented a public repudiation of the bigoted calls of the procurator of the naval and colonial ministry, Guillaume Poncet de la Grave (1725-1803) and others, who were calling for the banning of people of colour in metropolitan France and, to some degree, it helped forestall the incorporation of racial ideology in French law.
Subsequently, Georges returned to Guadeloupe at the end of the Seven Years' War but left Anne and Saint-Georges a sizeable annuity of between 7,000 and 8,000 livres. And it is clear that he journeyed across the Atlantic and continued to be involved in his son's advancement.
Throughout the eighteenth century, but especially from the middle of the century onwards, the colonial powers were flooded with intra-European newcomers, notably German-speakers, in addition to those from beyond Europe. While many moved on to the colonies, many also stayed in the metropolitan dominions of England, France, the Dutch Republic and Spain. The changes in the world of music reflected this broader demographic change, with the newcomers clamouring for recognition and acceptance. It was in this
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environment that the wealthy bourgeois and leading patron of music, Alexandre Jean Joseph Le Riche de La Pouplinière (1693-1762), built the most important of the private orchestras. His musicians were almost exclusively young outsiders and newcomers, from everywhere except France, who challenged the dominance of the French style. Heated controversies over the merits of French versus other forms of music, such as the Querelle des Bouffons (1752), marked the midcentury. At the Paris Opera, supporters of the French style took to gathering beneath the King's box, while critics gathered under the box of the Queen, Marie Leszczyńska, of Polish-Lithuanian extraction. She was the daughter of the deposed King of Poland, Stanislaw Leszczyński, later styled the Duc de Lorraine. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (born in Geneva); Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm (born in Regensburg); and Baron d'Holbach (born Paul-Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim) were amongst the most prominent agitators for the inclusion of other cultural genres of music, and all were newcomers. The fact cannot be overemphasized: the rising agitation for equality and inclusion in civilian circles, coming from such newcomers, occurred after many decades of African, Scottish, Irish, Polish, German, Turkish and other soldiers had donned the uniform and fought the many global wars of France.
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As a result of these ongoing tensions, in their diversity, a community of newcomers and outsiders across estates evolved in metropolitan France and its wider orbit. Saint-Georges and people of colour more generally were not alone in feeling the sting of bigotry, whether in the colonial or metropolitan world. Recognized as a young, handsome, ennobled son of a wealthy planter, Saint-Georges was popular in Paris and rarely seen without a diverse entourage of friends. One such friend was François-Joseph Gossec (1734-1829), his composition teacher and lifelong friend. Just as the military, commerce and athletics offered opportunities for social mobility, music was another important pathway. Born in Vergnies, Gossec was of Walloon extraction and, as the son of a poor farmer, came up through the choirboy ranks. At eighteen, he landed a position as a violinist in Pouplinière's private orchestra, and, in 1755, he succeeded Johann Stamitz (born Jan Václav Antonín Stamic in Maribor, Slovenia), the preeminent composer and violinist of the Mannheim school, as director. Following Pouplinière's death in 1762 and after a stint with the Prince de Conti, Gossec founded the Concert des Amateurs in 1769. Performing at the Hôtel de Soubise, the present location of France's Archives nationales, it was one of the first independent orchestras. While it is not clear exactly when Gossec and Saint-Georges met, it seems clear that the latter was under Gossec's training and was becoming known in music circles before Georges returned to
Guadeloupe in 1764. Already in 1764, the violinist and composer, Antonio Lolli had dedicated concertos to Saint-Georges, and in 1766 and 1768, respectively, Gossec dedicated a set of trios and sonatas to him.
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The Concert des Amateurs was the largest orchestra of its kind. Gossec extended an invitation to Saint-Georges immediately and, in 1769, he took the Paris stage in the first violin section. String quartets were a relatively new genre in the mid-1760s, and it was in this new genre that Saint-Georges first excelled. He made his debut in the 1772-1773 season. He advanced into concertos and, according to Gabriel Banat, initiated the modern French violin school, the technical aspects of which influenced, among others, Ludwig van Beethoven. As an upwardly mobile newcomer who, in making his way up the ranks of Parisian music circles, was helped by similarly positioned upwardly mobile newcomers who had preceded him, it is not surprising that Gossec mentored Saint-Georges. In 1773, he named Saint-Georges his successor. As its director, Saint-Georges transformed the Concert des Amateurs into the leading orchestra in France and, arguably, Europe. It comprised some 80 musicians, and many of the period's leading musicians debuted at the Hôtel de Soubise with Saint-Georges. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate his influence on the development of classical music. By the mid-1770s, his orchestra was recognized as the finest in Europe, and he was an intimate of the entourage of musicians of the French queen, Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793), along with Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (born in Erasbach, 1714-1787) and André Grétry (born in Liège, 17411813). When the position of music director at the Paris Opera opened up in 1776, Saint-Georges was seen by many as the best candidate to fill what was the most prestigious music post in Europe. An anti-mulatto backlash thwarted his appointment, but the fact remains that the iconic musical innovation of the classical period (1750-1820), prized as the emblem of European high culture, was heavily influenced, in both technique and style, by an upwardly mobile, half-Fulbe, Creole newcomer.
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It also cannot be overemphasized that, in the world of inner circles and salons that characterized Parisian society, almost nobody was likely to find acceptance in all of them. For one reason or another, many in elite circles experienced some form of social rejection. One such person was another of Saint-Georges's important friends and patrons, Charlotte Béraud de la Haie de Riou (17381806), known as Madame de Montesson. Widowed in her early thirties, her second marriage was to the fourth Duc d'Orléans, prince of the blood and the King's cousin, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, also widowed. She was a marquise by marriage but, because she was a commoner by birth, the marriage required Louis
XVI's consent. He gave it only reluctantly, refusing recognition by the Crown. They were, furthermore, required to wed clandestinely, with only the blessing of the Church. This they did at midnight on 23 August 1773. Effectively, Madame de Montesson became wife to a prince of the blood without a title. The PalaisRoyal, originally the Palais-Cardinal, had been the main residence of the House of Orléans since the mid-sixteenth century, but, wishing to avoid scandal, the couple moved out, leaving it to the Duke's son, Louis-Philippe II (1747-1793). The Duke built a palatial new residence on the Chaussée d'Antin, equipped with a theatre named after his new wife. Perhaps out of spite at having been shunned, Madame de Montesson sought to have the best private entertainment in Paris and soon began making overtures to Saint-Georges. He maintained his position with the Concert des Amateurs but was now also engaged as the director of the Théâtre Montesson. Sweetening the deal, the Duke also named Saint-Georges lieutenant of the hunt for his country estate, Château du Raincy, and gave him a premium apartment in the Paris residence. The partnership was a success for Saint-Georges since an invitation from Madame de Montesson was among the most sought after in Paris.
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Louis-Philippe II, or Philippe-Égalité as he was styled after the French Revolution, emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of the ancien régime. In October 1773, he was elected as the first grand master of perhaps the most important Freemason order in continental Europe, the Grand Orient de France. Conveniently, as the residence of a prince of the blood, the Palais-Royal was exempt from government censorship and intrusion. It was not long before Louis-Philippe II made it a haven for groups and individuals who, like himself, were critics of Louis XVI and the house of Bourbon. It is not clear when SaintGeorges became a Freemason, but he was a brother in the legendary NeufSœurs (Nine Sisters), an affiliate of the Grand Orient de France and an order filled with notable revolutionaries from both sides of the Atlantic. The Concert des Amateurs was hit hard by the financial crisis that accompanied the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and was forced to close in 1781. Even under these circumstances, Saint-Georges was well enough connected and resourceful enough that a new replacement, an orchestra of 65 musicians, Le Concert de la Loge Olympique or Concert Olympique, was founded under the umbrella of the Masonic lodge Société Olympique.
Unfortunately, Saint-Georges's woes were not over. In 1785, the Duc d'Orléans died and, after the King refused to allow her to ceremonially mourn the loss of her husband, Madame de Montesson shuttered her home and theatre and moved to a convent. For Saint-Georges, this meant not only the loss of an
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important performance platform but also income and his home. At the same time, the King, who was not pleased with Louis-Philippe II's various political activities, did not renew the Concert Olympique's permit to perform in the Salle des Cents Suisses in the Tuileries Palace. The orchestra was forced to relocate to the grand salon of the Palais-Royal, but Saint-Georges must have maintained some measure of friendship with the Queen. She attended his concerts fairly regularly over the years, and was there for the Concert Olympique's premier of Hadyn's 'Paris Symphonies' in 1786.
Despite the misfortunes that Saint-Georges faced, he proved resilient. However, the mid-1780s were years of political and financial crisis in the Atlantic world. The French monarchy emerged from the American Revolutionary War in financial ruin, and, by 1787, it seemed likely to many that the ancien régime would fail. Across the Channel in England, the loss of the North American colonies was a global humiliation that also plunged the English economy into a depression. What is more, these were the years when Parliament seriously questioned the mental stability of George III and debated the need for a regency government. At the same time, many reform-minded aristocrats in Europe came to fear the prospects of revolution from below and favoured controlled political reform. In France, many reformers favoured the setting up of an emergency government headed by a lieutenant-general chosen from among the princes until a constitutional monarchy could be formed.
As the new Duc d'Orléans following his father's death, Louis-Philippe II and members of his entourage, notably the abolitionist Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754-1793), plotted to position Louis-Philippe for the position if circumstances permitted. Obtaining the neutrality of the British government which was facing its own challenges - was critical. In particular, it was crucial to obtain the tacit consent of the likely regent, George IV, in case of an abdication by George III on account of insanity.
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Now, more dependent than ever on the patronage of Louis-Philippe, SaintGeorges soon became a pawn of trans-Channel political intrigue. While LouisPhilippe was interested in positioning himself, Brissot also wanted to renew his associations with prominent English abolitionists and promote the cause in France. George IV had long expressed a desire to meet Saint-Georges and hold a fencing match in England, and this provided Louis-Philippe and Brissot the opportunity to make overtures. Louis-Philippe asked Saint-Georges to visit London as a personal favour to him and, by 10 January 1787, the Morning Herald announced Saint-Georges's imminent trip to London. He stayed with Henry Angelo, another famous head of a renowned fencing academy, at his
home on Carlisle Street. Angelo's home drew an eclectic crowd of visitors to say the least, including the transgendered Chevalier d'Éon de Beaumont (1728-1810), commonly known as Madame la Chevalière d'Éon. In the event, the matches between Saint-Georges and d'Éon, among others, were held on 9 April 1787, and were to some degree a grand spectacle.
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Saint-Georges returned to France the day after his matches, but he had been influenced by English abolitionism and, in 1788, was one of the founding members of the Société des amis des noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks). He continued to write operas but, in the wake of financial crisis and the French Revolution of 1789 , his best years in music were behind him. In August 1789, he returned to London, but this time he stayed at the Grenier's Hotel, among the finest in London, at Louis-Philippe II's expense, until he was cut off. He was again a part of George IV's circle of leisure until he was unable to pay his debts and had to accept a fencing match to cover the costs of the remainder of his stay at Grenier's. Saint-Georges returned to France in July 1790 but appears to have stopped in Lille where, lacking other sources of income, he gave a number of fencing exhibitions. Soon after the matches, Saint-Georges took ill for several weeks with pneumonia or meningitis. He was nursed back to health and adored in Lille, however, where he was able to revive his music, premiering his opera, Guillaume tout Coeur. We should not be surprised, however, by Saint-Georges's warm reception in Lille. The town had long played host to the soldiers of African descent in Saxe's army, who had been transferred there after Saxe's death in 1750. Saint-Georges was adored in Lille and, in September 1790, he was among its first citizens to join the National Guard. In September 1792, SaintGeorges was named colonel of the new unit of soldiers of colour, the Légion des américans et du Midi (Legion of the Americans and of the South). Men of colour from all over France came out of the shadows to join this regiment, and it was here that the famous French Revolutionary General of colour, Alexandre Dumas, launched his career as an officer in the army. Many of the soldiers served in the notorious fighting in the Vendée, including Dumas, but conspiracy theories and suspicion about 'counterrevolutionary' designs shadowed the revolutionary years of the early 1790s. On 25 September 1793
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, including Dumas, but conspiracy theories and suspicion about 'counterrevolutionary' designs shadowed the revolutionary years of the early 1790s. On 25 September 1793, only a week after the enactment of the Law of Suspects that gave the Committees of Public Safety and Public Security sweeping powers, Saint-Georges and ten other officers of his regiment were arrested. No formal charges were brought against them. They were simply arrested, but it is likely that they had been caught up in the ongoing reactions to the Haitian Revolution and debates about both the status of people of colour under the new political system and the abolition
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of slavery. In the only justification later offered of Saint-Georges's arrest, he was accused of disseminating 'Liberticidal' principles (Banat, 2006, p. 405). He remained incarcerated at Houdainville military prison for more than a year before he was cleared of all charges and released on 23 October 1794. Earlier that year, on 4 February 1794, the National Convention had passed a decree abolishing slavery in France and its territories but, paradoxically, perhaps the most famous and celebrated Creole of colour spent the first eight months of full liberty in revolutionary France jailed on questionable grounds. He was not reinstated after and was given only a brief command in September 1795 before being dismissed entirely in October of the same year. He returned to Paris, ill and impoverished. Though he performed, it was in a much diminished music world, a relic of the bygone ancien régime. His dear mother, Anne, passed away on 16 December 1795, nearly fifty years to the day of her son's birth and just three-and-a-half years later, on 12 June 1799, Saint-Georges died in Paris, aged 53, from a bladder ulcer.
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In conclusion, the early modern Atlantic was an important axis of a dynamic global world where identities and categories could not be fixed and were in a constant state of alteration and transformation. The sheer pace of global migration meant that social realities were never as simple as academically convenient dichotomies of black/white, slave/free, African-descent/Europeandescent/indigenous, or even nègre/mulâtre and French/English divisions suggest. As a man of colour, Saint-Georges was simultaneously outside and inside the inner circle of the classical music world. On the one hand, he was a newcomer and/or 'other' among many others like himself, and the consequent levelling effect made his social mobility conceivable and possible. On the other hand, neither his education nor his tremendous athletic and musical talents erased the colour line. Time and again, he was disparaged as a 'mulatto'. Here, it is important to remember that there was a lot of xenophobic tension in late ancien régime France, and a variety of populations were targets. The Police des noirs of 1777, for example, was introduced at a time of economic dislocation brought on by the American Revolutionary War and, at the same time, regime-wide Protestant hunts were revived. Local police went looking for Protestants in Bordeaux at the same time that they were looking for noirs (blacks).
Accordingly, while the history of the African diaspora is clearly an important prism through which to view Saint-Georges's life, his biography's strongest contribution is to the development of the presently woefully lacking history of immigration and diversity in metropolitan European history. Saint-Georges did not identify himself in racial terms, as 'black', as 'Afro-French' or as 'Afro-
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European'. Settling his mother Anne's estate in 1796, he identified himself only as a citoyen français (French citizen). Indeed, the last decade of his life spanned the years when early-modern equality, diversity and inclusion reached its apex in revolutionary France, which not only abolished slavery, but also specifically rejected the so-called 'aristocracy of skin'. Saint-Georges, like contemporary generals Alexandre Dumas and Toussaint Louverture, sought identification, recognition and acceptance as full French citizens without hyphenation, a struggle that continues into the present for people of colour around the Atlantic World. Experiencing anti-black bigotry was, nonetheless, an inescapable torment in their lives. They did not race themselves, but were racialized and made black, post-mortem in Saint-Georges's case, as a result of Napoleon Bonaparte's constitutional and legal innovations. Scholars, therefore, must be careful not to reify this racialization that was imposed and designed to diminish the very humanity of Saint-Georges and all those of colour, a racialization of the First French Empire that was begotten by the Napoleonic regime through genocide.
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# References
Arbell, M. 2001. Jewish Settlements in the French Colonies in the Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Cayenne) and the "Black Code". P. Bernardini and N. Fiering (eds), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800. New York, Berghahn Books, pp. 287-313.
Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer. Arrêt de surséance en faveur d'Élisabeth Mérican, veuve de Georges de Bologne-Saint-Georges, et d'Élisabeth de Bologne-Saint-Georges, sa fille, épouse d'Étienne Le Velu de Clairefontaine, pour le règlement de la succession de Georges de Bologne-Saint-Georges mort à la Guadeloupe, héritage consistant en une babitation nommée Saint-Robert ( $n^{\circ} 47$ ) (27 septembre 1776). COL A/15/F 362.
Banat, G. 2006. The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press.
Bardin, P. 2015. Anne Nanon: La mère du Chevalier de Saint Georges enfin retrouvée ! Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe. http://www.ghcaraibe.org/articles/2015-art01.pdf.
Brana-Shute, R. and Sparks, R. J. (eds). 2009. Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World. Columbia, SC, The University of South Carolina Press.
Garrigus, J. D. 2006. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Golbéry, S. M. X. de. 1802. Fragmens d'un voyage en Afrique. Paris, Treuttel et Würtz. Moreau de Saint-Méry, M. L. E. 1797-1798. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et bistorique de la partie française de l'isle Saint-Domingue, Tome premier. Philadelphia. Penn., Printed by the Author.
Lamotte, M. 2015. Colour Prejudice in the French Atlantic World. D. M. Coffman, A. Leonard and W. O'Reilly (eds), The Atlantic World. New York, Routledge, pp. 151-71.
Loiselle, K. 2014. Brotherly Love: Freemasonry and Brotherly Love in Enlightenment France. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Saugers, E. 2002. Bordeaux, port négrier: Cbronologie, économie, idéologie. XVII ${ }^{e}-X I X^{e}$ siècles. Paris, Karthala.
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Saugers, E. 2002. Bordeaux, port négrier: Cbronologie, économie, idéologie. XVII ${ }^{e}-X I X^{e}$ siècles. Paris, Karthala.
Schnakenbourg, C. 1968. Note sur les origines de l'industrie sucrière en Guadeloupe au XVII ${ }^{e}$ siècle (1640-1670). Revue français d'bistoire d'outre-mer, Vol. 55, No. 200, pp. 267-315.
Schwarz, S. B. 2011. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 14501680. Chapel Hill, NC, The University of North Carolina Press.
Spitzer, J. and Zaslaw, N. 2004. The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 16501815. Oxford, UK, and New York, Oxford University Press.
Stein, R. L. 1988. The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge, La., and London, Louisiana State University Press.
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# CHAPTER 5
## NOTICES FOR FUGITIVE SLAVES IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD ${ }^{1}$
Life Stories and 'Little[s] Pace[s] of Narrative' Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec
Fugitive slave notices have fascinated historians (especially in the United States) at least since the 1960s. There are articles, books, doctoral theses, anthologies of notices and now online databases: while some sources are no longer of interest to the specialists, fugitive slave notices continue to arouse curiosity. The reason for this is simple. By contrast with other sources available to historians of slavery, notices describing fugitive slaves are easy to find (they appear in all the newspapers of all the slave-owning societies, from Brazil to Canada, via Cuba and Barbados, not forgetting London or Bristol) and to interpret (notices are short and do not require training in palaeology). They offer countless sources that adapt to all historiographic shifts, whether it be the recent trend to merge Atlantic and biographical history, or the advent of digitization that has prompted many historians to explore the possibilities of interpretation offered by the world of computer programming.
Fugitive slave notices fascinate us, but the opinion I want to put forward in this chapter is that they are probably largely misunderstood. Was their main purpose really to give readers objective information that would lead to the capture of these runaway women and men? The answer to that question is obvious (I could add 'of course') if one relies on the historiography. And the implications of that answer are the following: fugitive slave notices are said to be predictable sources that offer no surprises. They are all said to be drafted in the
[^0]
[^0]: 1 'Petite[s] allure[s] de récit', Farge, 2005, p. 15.
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[^0]
[^0]: 1 'Petite[s] allure[s] de récit', Farge, 2005, p. 15.
same way, from one slave-owning society to another, as their purpose, from the standpoint of the person drafting them, was to lead to the capture of a hunted slave. So, there is no need to compare them in time or across the Atlantic. It is enough to gather and collect them, transcribe and study them, like so much incriminating evidence. Evidence that slaves wanted to be free, and that slavery was a violent institution, based on terror. Evidence.
But what if the main function of the notices was not to lead to capture? And those well-known sources were something other than mere transparent pieces of evidence? What if it is time to read them again and allow ourselves to be surprised? Those are the three questions this chapter will set out to answer. The notices that follow are drawn from three regions: Louisiana, South Carolina and Jamaica, in the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century. The analyses presented rest on hypotheses that will have to be verified by sampling other bodies of evidence from other regions.
Meanwhile, let us open the gazette from Spanish Town, Jamaica:
Trafalgar, November 12, 1808. RUNAWAYS.
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