Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T23:00:32.336Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

SLAVERY, FREEDOM, AND FAILED RANSOM NEGOTIATIONS IN WEST AFRICA, 1730–1900*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2012

JENNIFER LOFKRANTZ  and
OLATUNJI OJO
JENNIFER LOFKRANTZ*
Affiliation:
St. Thomas University
OLATUNJI OJO*
Affiliation:
Brock University
*
Authors’ email: jlofkrantz@stu.ca
Authors’ email: oojo@brocku.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article builds upon previous work on the impact of ransoming on processes of captivity, enslavement, and slavery in West Africa. Ransoming is defined as the release of a captive prior to enslavement in exchange for payment. It was a complicated process with no guarantee of success. This article examines the responses of families of captives to the failure of ransom negotiations. The ability to respond to failed ransom negotiations and the type of response chosen was dependent on the political climate and the resources available to those seeking the release of a captive.

Keywords

West Africaslave tradeslaverylawwar
Type
New Perspectives on the Slave Trade in West Africa
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 25 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Tubman Seminar, York University, Toronto and at the 2011 Canadian Association of African Studies Conference. We are grateful to the participants at these meetings, especially Paul E. Lovejoy and Martin A. Klein, for their comments and suggestions. Our greatest appreciation is reserved for the journal's anonymous readers who provided us with such helpful comments and advice during the revision process.

References

1 Wadström, C. B., An Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa, with some Free Thoughts on Cultivation and Commerce; Also Brief Descriptions of the Colonies Already Formed, or Attempted, in Africa, Including those of Sierra Leona and Bulama, Volume II (London, 1794)Google Scholar, 77. The story previously appeared in the Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, to the General Court of Proprietors, on Thursday 27th of March, 1794 (London, 1794)Google Scholar, 76, 113.

2 See S. Diouf, ‘The last resort: redeeming family and friends’, in S. Diouf (ed.), Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens, OH, 2003), 81–100; J. Lofkrantz, ‘Ransoming policies and practices in the western and central Bilād al-Sūdān c.1800–1910’ (unpublished PhD thesis, York University, Toronto, 2008); Ojo, O., ‘“[I]n search of their relations, to set at liberty as many as they had the means”: ransoming captives in nineteenth-century Yorubaland’, Nordic Journal of African Studies, 19:1 (2010), 58–76Google Scholar; P. E. Lovejoy, ‘Internal markets or an Atlantic-Sahara divide? how women fit into the slave trade of West Africa’, in G. Campbell, S. Miers, and J. C. Miller (eds.), Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, Volume I (Athens, OH, 2007), 259–73.

3 J. Hunwick, ‘Islamic law and polemics over race and slavery in North and West Africa (16th–19th Century)’, in S. E. Marmon (ed.), Slavery in the Islamic Middle East (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 43–68; R. Law, ‘Legal and illegal enslavement in West Africa in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade’, in T. Falola (ed.), Ghana in Africa and the World: Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen (Trenton, NJ, 2003), 513–33; J. C. Curto, ‘The story of Nbena, 1817–1820: unlawful enslavement and the concept of “original freedom” in Angola’, in P. E. Lovejoy and D. Trotman (eds.), Trans-Atlantic Dimension of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London, 2003), 43–64; and Curto, J. C., ‘Struggling against enslavement: the case of José Manuel in Benguela, 1816–1820’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 39:1 (2005), 96–122Google Scholar.

4 P. E. Lovejoy and D. Richardson, ‘Anglo-Efik relations and protection against the illegal enslavement at Old Calabar, 1740–1807’, in Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade, 101–18.

5 Hunwick, J., ‘Al- Maghīlī and the Jews of Tuwāt: the demise of a community’, Studia Islamica, 61 (1985), 155–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fisher, H., ‘A Muslim William Wilberforce? the Sokoto jihād as anti-slavery crusade: an enquiry into historical causes’, in S. Doger (ed.), De la traite à l'esclavage du XVIII au XIVième siècle: actes du Colloque Internationial sur la traite des noirs, II (Nantes, 1985), 537–55Google Scholar; P. E. Lovejoy, ‘The context of enslavement in West Africa: Aḥmad Bābā and the ethics of slavery’, in J. G. Landers and B. M. Robinson (eds.), Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives:Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, NM, 2006), 9–38; Hunwick, J. and Harrack, F., (trans. and ed.) Mi'rāj al-Ṣu’ūd, Aḥmad Bābā's Replies on Slavery (Rabat, 2000)Google Scholar; J. Hunwick (trans. and ed.) Shari'a in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghīlī to the Questions of Askia al-Hājj Muhammad (Oxford, 1985).

6 Law, ‘Legal and illegal enslavement’, 518. See also Curto, ‘Struggling against enslavement’; Curto, ‘The story of Nbena’; and Candido, M. P., ‘African freedom suits and Portuguese vassal status: legal mechanisms for fighting enslavement in Benguela, Angola, 1800–1830,’ Slavery and Abolition, 32:3 (2011), 447–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Theophille Conneau noted that the Baga of the Upper Guinea Coast ‘neither sell nor buy each other, though they acquire children of both sexes from other tribes, and adopt them into their own, or dispose of them if not suitable’. T. Conneau, , A Slaver's Log Book: or 20 Years’ Residence in Africa: The Original Manuscript (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976 [orig. pub. 1854])Google Scholar, 124.

8 C. Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, trans. by A. Dasnois (Chicago, 1991), 103.

9 Ojo, ‘[I]n search of their relations’.

10 Law, ‘Legal and illegal enslavement’, 518; J. Thornton, ‘African political ethics and the slave trade’, in D. R. Peterson (ed.), Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic (Athens, OH, 2010), 38–62.

11 Thornton, ‘African political ethics’, 44–5.

12 Meillassoux, , Anthropology of Slavery, 33, 101–9Google Scholar.

13 For African ideas about whites as cannibals, see quotes from Jean Barbot, William Bosman, William Snelgrave, Olaudah Equiano, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, and Joseph Wright in E. Isichei, Voices of the Poor in Africa (Rochester, NY, 2002), 36–8; and Rice, A. J., Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London, 2003), 120–46Google Scholar. Enslaved Yoruba destined for the Americas often sang this song ‘Ero aye o, e wa wo ero orun o’ (Let the living come and see the dead). Lucas, J. O., St. Paul's Church, Breadfruit Lagos: Lecture on the History of the Church (1852–1945) (Lagos, 1946)Google Scholar.

14 Bluett, T., Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon the High Priest of Boonda in Africa; Who was a Slave about Two Years in Maryland; and afterwards being brought to England, was set free, and sent to his native Land in the Year 1734 (London, 1734), 9–54Google Scholar; P. Curtin, ‘Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Bondu’, in P. Curtin (ed.), Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1967), 17–59.

15 Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade; Taylor, E. R., If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006)Google Scholar; Mouser, B., ‘Rebellion, marronage and jihād: strategies of resistance to slavery on the Sierra Leone Coast, c. 1783–1796’, Journal of African History, 48:1 (2007), 27–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richardson, D., ‘Shipboard revolts, African authority, and the African slave trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 58: (2001), 69–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thornton, J. K., ‘African dimensions of the Stono rebellion’, The American Historical Review, 96:4 (1991), 1101–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rathbone, R., ‘Some thoughts on resistance to enslavement in Africa’, Slavery & Abolition, 5/6 (1986), 11–22Google Scholar.

16 Diouf, ‘Last resort’, 84–9: ‘Testimony of William Littleton’, in S. Lambert (ed.), House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, Volume 68 (Wilmington, DE, 1975), 286. However, some witnesses testified that the ransoming of convicts was permitted. See ‘Testimony of Richard Miles’ and ‘Testimony of Jerome Bernard Weuves’ in Lambert, House of Commons 68: 120, 124, 126, 218.

17 A good illustration of this phenomenon is Mahommah Baquaqua's two experiences with captivity. In the first instance in 1841, his brother was able to arrange for his freedom. The second time he was taken captive in 1846, he was quickly moved to the coast and out of the region where he knew that people could track him and ransom him. See Law, R. and Lovejoy, P. E. (eds.), The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 130–1Google Scholar.

18 Diouf, ‘Last resort’, 89.

19 Bluett, Some Memoirs; Curtin, ‘Ayuba Suleiman Diallo’.

20 Bluett, Some Memoirs, 9–20.

21 Meillassoux, Anthropology of Slavery, 103.

22 Mouser, B. L. (ed.), Journal of James Watt, Expedition to Timbo Capital of the Fula Empire in 1794 (Madison, WI, 1994)Google Scholar, 40.

23 Ryder, A. F. C., Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897 (New York, 1969), 77–8Google Scholar, 130–3; Law, ‘On pawning and enslavement for debt in the precolonial slave coast’, in P. E. Lovejoy and T. Falola (eds.), Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, NJ, 2003), 62–4; Lovejoy, P. E. and Richardson, D., ‘Trust, pawnship, and Atlantic history: the institutional foundations of the Old Calabar slave trade’, The American Historical Review, 104:2 (1999), 333–55CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Ojo, O., ‘Èmú (Àmúyá): the Yoruba institution of panyarring or seizure for debt’, African Economic History, 35 (2007), 31–58Google Scholar.

24 Wadström, Essay II, 93–7.

25 Ibid., 90.

26 Ibid., 87–118.

27 Ryder, Benin; R. Law, ‘Finance and credit in pre-colonial Dahomey’, in E. Stiansen and J. I. Guyer (eds.), Credit, Currencies and Culture: African Financial Institutions in Historical Perspective (Stockholm, 1999), 19–21; Lovejoy, P. E. and Richardson, D., ‘“This horrid hole”: royal authority, commerce, and credit at Bonny, 1690–1840’, Journal of African History, 45:3 (2004), 363–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 McWilliam, J. O., Medical History of the Expedition to the Niger During the Years 1841–1842, Comprising an Account of the Fever which Led to its Abrupt Termination (London, 1843)Google Scholar; Curtin, P., The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850, Volume II (Madison, WI, 1964), 58–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 483–87; Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘“Horrid hole”’.

29 Curtin, ‘Ayuba Suleiman Diallo’, 40, fn. 46.

30 Diouf, , ‘Last resort’; J. Lofkrantz, ‘Protecting freeborn Muslims: the Sokoto Caliphate's attempts to prevent illegal enslavement and its acceptance of the strategy of ransoming’, Slavery and Abolition, 32:1 (2011), 109–27Google Scholar; Ojo, ‘[I]n search of their relations’.

31 Wadström, Essay II, 17.

32 Conneau, A Slaver's Log Book, 144–7.

33 Personal communication with Ibrahim Amouren, Director of the Archives d'Agadez, Mar. 2007.

34 W. Allen, journal, 25 Sept. 1841 in Allen, W. and Thompson, T. R. H., A Narrative of the Expedition sent by Her Majesty's Government to the River Niger, in 1841. Under the command of Captain H. D. Trotter, R. N., Volume II (London, 1968 [orig. pub. 1848])Google Scholar, 92.

35 J. Lofkrantz, ‘Ransoming captives in the Sokoto Caliphate’, in B. A. Mirzai, I. M. Montana and P. E. Lovejoy (eds.), Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (Trenton, NJ, 2009), 125–37; Ojo, ‘[I]n search of their relations’.

36 National Archives, Ibadan (NAI), Bishop Charles Phillips Papers 3/1, Phillips diary, 11–23 Nov. 1885.

37 Diouf, ‘Last resort’, 87.

38 Klein, M., Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998), 7–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miura, T. and Philips, J. E. (eds.), Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa: A Comparative Study (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Stilwell, S., Paradoxes of Power: The Kano ‘Mamluks’ and Male Royal Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate, 1804–1903 (Portsmouth, NH, 2004)Google Scholar.

39 I. Kopytoff and S. Miers, ‘African “slavery” as an institution of marginality’, in S. Miers and I. Kopytoff (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison,WI, 1977), 3–81.

40 Wadström, Essay II, 17.

41 Ibid. 80.

42 Lofkrantz, ‘Protecting freeborn Muslims’.

43 Archives Nationales du Mali (ANM) FA 2M 22, Justice Correspondance Cercle de Médine 1887–1905, Médine, 28 juillet 1889.

44 G. Pálffy, ‘Ransom slavery along the Ottoman-Hungarian frontier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in G. Dávid and P. Fodor (eds.), Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders: Early Fifteenth – Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, 2007), 35–84; Davis, R. C., Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Meditteranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (New York, 2003)Google Scholar; Freller, T., ‘‘The shining of the moon’ – the Mediterranean tour of Muhammad ibn Uthmān, envoy of Morocco in 1792’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 12:2 (2002), 307–26Google Scholar; Brodman, J., Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia, 1986)Google Scholar; Diouf, ‘Last resort’; Lofkrantz, ‘Protecting freeborn Muslims’.

45 Also see A. Ambrus, E. Chaney, and I. Salitskiy, ‘Pirates of the Mediterranean: An Empirical Investigation of Bargaining with Transaction Costs’, unpublished working paper, http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/ambrus/files/Barbary.pdf.

46 Friedman, E.G., Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age (Madison, WI, 1983)Google Scholar, 142.

47 Weiss, G., ‘Barbary captivity and the French idea of freedom’, French Historical Studies, 28: 2 (2005), 231–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothman, E. N., ‘Becoming Venetian: conversion and transformation in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 21:1 (2006), 39–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 See also Peskin, L. A., Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public 1785–1816 (Baltimore, 2009)Google Scholar.

49 R. E. Robinson, ‘The partition of Africa’, in F. H. Hinsley (ed.), The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume XI: Material Progress and World-Wide Problems, 1870–1898 (Cambridge, 1962), 617–20.

50 Thornton, J. K., Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (New York, 1992), 72–97Google Scholar; J. Inikori, ‘The struggle against the transatlantic slave trade: the role of the state’, in Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade, 170–98.

51 Eltis, D., The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000), 57–61Google Scholar, 224–34.

52 Diouf, Fighting the Slave Trade; Klein, M. A., ‘The slave trade and decentralized societies’, Journal of African History, 42:1 (2001)Google Scholar, 49–65; Hawthorne, W., ‘The production of slaves where there was no state: the Guinea-Bissau region, 1450–1815’, Slavery and Abolition, 20:2 (1999), 97–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Ajayi, J. F., ‘Professional warriors in nineteenth-century Yoruba politics’, Tarikh, 1 (1965), 72–81Google Scholar; Falola, T. and Oguntomisin, D., The Military in Nineteenth–Century Yoruba Politics (Ile-Ife, 1984)Google Scholar.

54 Friedman, E. G., ‘Christian captives at “Hard Labour” in Algiers 16th–18th centuries’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 13:4 (1980), 616–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dávid and Fodor, Ransom Slavery; Ojo, ‘[I]n search of their relations’, 66–7.

55 Johnson, S., The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest to the Beginning of the British Protectorate (Lagos, 1976 [orig. pub. 1921]), 287–8Google Scholar, 305.

56 On Ijaye, see Oguntomisin, ‘New forms of political organisation in Yorubaland in the mid-nineteenth century: A comparative study of Kurunmi's Ijaye and Kosoko's Epe’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Ibadan, 1979), 81–6, 94–108, 146–205, 243–300.

57 Johnson, History of the Yorubas, 250.

58 Smith, W., A New Voyage to Guinea: Describing the Customs, Manners, Soil, Climate, Habits, Buildings, Education, Manual Arts, Agriculture, Trade, Employments, Languages, Ranks of Distinction, Habitations, Diversions, Marriages, and Whatever Else is Memorable Among the Inhabitants (London, 1967 [orig. pub. 1744]), 101–2Google Scholar.

59 Ibid. 102–4; Law, ‘Legal and illegal enslavement’, 525.

60 Smith, New Voyage, 104.

61 While rare, counter-seizures were not unknown in the Mediterranean world and in New Mexico. See Friedman, Spanish Captives, 136–7; Brooks, J. F., Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002)Google Scholar, 52.

62 Church Missionary Society Archives (CMS) CA2/031, S. Crowther to H. Venn, 4 Nov. 1848; Rev. T. Peyton, ‘Journal’ 25 Dec. 1848, Christian Missionary Intelligencer, 1:1 (1849), 4–5.

63 Johnson, History of the Yorubas, 270.

64 Ibid. 270–1.

65 Ibid., 455–7.

66 Bowen, T. J., Adventures and Missionary Labors in Several Countries in the Interior of Africa from 1849 to 1856 (London, 1968 [orig. pub. 1857]), 148–9Google Scholar.

67 Williams, G., History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque, with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade (London, 1897), 541–8Google Scholar; Lovejoy and Richardson, ‘Anglo-Efik’.

68 Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, 541–8; Sparks, R.J., The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, MA, 2004)Google Scholar.

69 Echenberg, M., Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH, 1991)Google Scholar.

70 For an example of a European acting as a ransoming mediator see ‘Testimony of John Marshall’, in Lambert, House of Commons, 73, 384.

71 For the French colonial conquest see Kanya-Forstner, A. S., The Conquest of the Western Sudan: A Study in French Military Imperialism (London, 1969)Google Scholar; K. Idrissa, ‘Guerres et sociétés: les populations du Niger Occidental au XIX siècle et leurs reactions face à la colonisation 1896–1906’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Université de Paris VII, 1979).

72 ANM FA 1E 47, Rapports politiques et rapports de tournées, Cercle de Kita 1883–1905: Rapport sur la situation politique du Cercle, Kita, 15 oct. 1889.

73 ANM FA 2M-7, Justice Indigène Correspondence Cercle de Bougouni 1896–1920, Bougouni, 22 mai 1900.

74 For more on slavery under French colonialism, see Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule; Getz, T., Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast (Athens, OH, 2004)Google Scholar.

75 Interview with Chief Joel Ige, Omu-Ekiti, 9 June 2001.

76 Richardson, ‘Shipboard revolts’.