Of Rivers, Swamps, and Seacoasts: Maritime Slavery, Waterborne Resistance, and the Currents of Belonging in the Waterways of Colonial Sierra Leone

• In Event: Rivers and enslaved lifeworlds

Description for Program

This paper focuses on slavery, commercial networks, and pathways of self-liberation within the waterscapes of colonial Sierra Leone during the late nineteenth century. This British colony was originally founded in 1792 as a settlement for former slaves from the American South via Nova Scotia. Yet, throughout the entire nineteenth century, illicit traffics in slavery, and the parallel pathways that led captives to freedom, created overlapping, interconnected, and previously unconsidered Black geographies within the coastal waters, mangrove swamps, sandy shoals, tidal creeks, and often torrential riverways of Sierra Leone and its surrounding hinterlands. This paper will draw on approximately 300 fugitive slave reports, from 1875 to 1894, that document the experiences of enslaved porters who worked along the colony’s waterways, as well as the testimonials of individual runaways, and entire families and communities of captives, who swam and/or commandeered dugout canoes and other vessels to desert their enslavers.

My analysis of these archival records will, on one hand, emphasize the violence, exploitation, and dislocation of slavery, trafficking, and colonialism as captives were subjected to physical abuse, exploited as laborers in maritime industries, and sold for both profit and as punishment. On the other hand, I will illustrate how maritime runaways used coastal and riverine waterscapes in Sierra Leone to collude with fellow captives, evade recapture, reunite with kin, and forge free communities of belonging within and beyond the power of the colonial state. This paper will ultimately highlight common strategies of resistance to slavery, such as the use of aquatic skills, the circulation of freedom rumors, and the utilization of social networks, that were long practiced by African and African Diasporic communities across the empires of the Black Atlantic.

Author

• Myles Ali, University of California, Merced