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The Enslavement of Koelle's Informants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

P. E. H. Hair
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Extract

Accounts by 179 Africans of how they came to be enslaved are analysed. The Africans were drawn from a wide range of tribes in Western tropical Africa: their accounts were recorded in Freetown around 1850, and appear in S. W. Koelle's Polyglotta Africana of 1854. The majority of the informants were men enslaved before they were aged thirty; who shortly after enslavement were taken to the coast and shipped, then recaptured, liberated, and brought to Freetown; and who had lived in Freetown for a decade before they were interviewed. One third of the informants had been enslaved after capture in war, another third had been kidnapped by other tribes or by fellow-tribesmen. The remainder had not been enslaved by direct violence, but had been sold by relatives or superiors, Sometimes to meet a debt, sometimes, after a judicial process, as criminals.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , July 1965 , pp. 193 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1965

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References

1 Curtin, P. D. and Vansina, J., ‘ Sources of the nineteenth century Atlantic slave trade”, FAH (1964), v. 2, 185–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Koelle and the compilation of the Polyglotta, see the historical introduction by the present writer to the reprint of Koelle, S. W., Polyglotta Africana (1854), Granz, 1963Google Scholar

2 Koelle's vocabularies have been “indentified” in terms of present-day knowledge of African languages by Curtin and Vansina (in the article cited, on pp. 191–207 , ‘Koelle's linguistic inventory”) and by Dalby, D. (‘Provisional indentification of languages in the Polyglotta Africana’, Sierra Leone Language Review (1964), III, 83–90).Google ScholarGenerally the indetifications agree, but the names are tramsliterated more accurately by the latter. (Curtin and Vasina ignore all diactiticals, which occasionally produces a misleading name, e.g., Mande for Mende). In the present article, Koelle's names and the indentifications are given as in Curtin and Vansina, with a few corrections from Dalby. When the language is a particularly obscure one, reference is instead given to a better known lager unit which conrains the language: these larger units are taken from Westermann, D. and Bryan, M. A., Languages of West Africa, 1952.Google Scholar (Doubt expressed by these authors about the relevant larger unit is shown by a question-mark before the name in capitals.) Since Koelle, Curtin and Vansina, and Dalby all fail to give an alphaberical list of the languages, we supply one for the languages mentioned in this paper, in an appendix at the end. Because the names given are all language-names, the term used in this paper, ‘a X’, should be understood to mean strictly, ‘a speaker of the X language’.

3 Mair, L. P., in Phillips, A., Survey of African Marriage and Family Life (1953), 59, 91, s135–6.Google Scholar

4 The estimate of course gives only an approximate age, but in many cases the stated age was also only approximate.

5 For the purpose of these and following calculations, we assume that all informants were interviewed in 1850. Curtin and Vansina used 1849 as their date-base.

6 On the significance of this for the evaluation of the Poluglotta as a linguistic source, see the 1963 reprint, 14–15.

7 For Bath's criticism of Koelle's work on Kanuri, see the reprinted Polyglotta (1963), 10, 13 of the Introduction: Bleek criticized Koelle's information about the origin of the Vai script because ‘the aborigines generally take great care to conceal [such] from the eyes of a missionary’ W. H. I. Beek, ‘On the languages of Western and Southern Africa’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1855, on p. 49.