Back to Africa - England’s Plan to Settle Freed Slaves in Sierra Leone

By Luke Wilmshurst

 

Sierra Leone was a British colony, the first country in West Africa to have European contacts. Today its capital is called Freetown. It is the interesting, forgotten stories and journeys that make Sierra Leone one of the most troubled nations in history.

 

In I652 slavery was rife in the American states of South Carolina and Georgia. Not many people know this, but America was still a British colony until late 1700’s and Sierra Leone was the place to go if you wanted slaves.

 

Slaves were often used for their farming skills. This is why they were so valuable. One question that pops into my mind is: “why were they sold on the cheap? Why were they mistreated when they had done nothing wrong?” And why not just ask, “Would you like to work on my plantation?” Or, “Please come and work for me?” It is not hard.

 

The fact is, Britain was also responsible for buying slaves, so there isn’t any point in trying to make out that the Americans are the bad guys in all of this.

 

In 1781, a man called Henry Smeathman was sent to the banana islands of the coast of Africa by Joseph Banks to collect botanical specimens. Smeathman, then in Sierra Leone, later found himself writing to Banks, telling him how you could send the ‘black poor’ for a mere £14 pounds each to the area, and the Treasury would pay for necessities and travel for a month for each man.

 

So who were the ‘black poor’? They were black loyalists. Like the name suggests, these were black people who were blackmailed into fighting for Britain in the American Revolution [1775-1781], when the great nation fought to the very end to gain independence. Obviously, the Africans wanted something in return. So the English gave the Africans something they longed to hear; their freedom.

There were 50,000 ‘black poor’ in London at this time. The English thought that they would want to go back ‘home,’ but where was home? These ‘black poor’ had come from all different parts of Africa, from different tribes and speaking different languages. But many were not even born in Africa. Instead they were in fact American or British. Unfortunately, they obviously didn’t consider ethnicity.

 

The other reason for the idea of sending them ‘home’ was to get rid of them, because they were poor and cluttering up the streets and the English couldn’t fund them. The reason given by the Sierra Leone Company, which created the scheme, was “it is a preferred solution than to continually support them financially in London town”.

 

By 1787 a “plan” was made to settle London’s overwhelming amount of ‘black poor’ in Sierra Leone. In the same year, some British people founded the “province of freedom”, known as Freetown.

This little front was where they were shipping the ‘black poor’ as well as white women who were prostitutes. How degrading to black people and how degrading to women in general! However, many questions still arise: were the ‘black poor’ indulging in the company of women? Or were they trying to say that black people were cramming up the streets like common whores? In which case they might as well kill two birds with one stone by putting them together?

 

Going over to Africa was a treacherous journey. Conditions were horrible and illness was at an all time high. For example, a ship called the Nautilus was travelling the seas and ended up marooned. Corpses were thrown overboard due to the deathly fever and excessive storms and tornadoes where like a barrier stopping the ship from going on its journey.

 

William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharpe are names that I’m sure you will have heard of and associate with the abolition of slavery. But it was Lord Mansfield that got things going. He formed an administration in 1806, which was said to be instrumental in the British Empire’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. They then established a naval base in Freetown to sniff out every nook and cranny of the high sea, looking for those who were illegally shipping slaves over from Africa to the Caribbean and America. The people they caught were fined £100, or one bill per head.

By1808, 50,000 more freed slaves were released into Freetown. Some were rescued off slave ships and slave traders. But yet again, they were silly to think all Africans had the same language. This only created more confusion.

Further down the line, British Parliament passed the Emancipation Act of 1833, so slavery was finally abolished. But not for America, slaves had to wait 32 more years before the 13th amendment. Their excuse was that if they didn’t have slave-trading then their nation would fall. Surely they could have found other means of harvesting a great nation.

I think the intentions of the British were supposedly good. It was right of them to want to settle the free black people in their native land, but as some weren’t even born there, it wasn’t the right decision. This put a strain and oppression on the black people who were not even originally from Africa. It couldn’t have been appropriate for them, as they were going to an unknown country, with people they couldn’t even speak too. It must have felt as if they were lost.

Sierra Leone, however, is still troubled today. There are civil wars, breaches in treaties and even bloodbaths over diamonds due to the Sierra Leone goldmine. But it is the histories and the questions that make this once great colony, so fragile. Even declaring its independence and freeing itself from debt, it still has much more work to do in order to escape its disastrous past.

 

LINKS

The long journey of Africans, through the 1500’s to the present day, encompasses so much of the world. From their original homes all over the continent, especially in West Africa, their journeys to enslavement on the plantations of the Caribbean, America and in the stately homes of Europe, are perhaps the most horrifying of all the journey tales in this project. Read more about this in ‘La Amistad’, and the brilliantly imagined ‘Cinque’s Story.’ And in modern times, there’s the story of the Caribbean’s, originally from Africa, and their migrant journey to Britain in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, told in ‘The World Comes to Wolverhampton,’ in the Black Country Section.