Africa, in its fullness
Plaque depicting warrior and attendants (16th-17th century), Edo peoples, Benin kingdom, Nigeria. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
byToby Green
teaches Lusophone African history and culture at King's College London. His latest book, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019), was awarded the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and will be published in paperback in January 2020.
Edited by Sam Haselby
To understand the complexity and significance of West African history, there is no better thing to do than to go to Freetown. Sierra Leone’s capital is sited in the lee of the ‘lion-shaped’ mountain that gives the country its modern name. Portuguese sailors began to visit this part of West Africa in the second half of the 15th century; after weeks of sailing down the flat mangrove-strewn swamps south from the Senegal river, they knew they were entering a different region when they saw this mountain, and named the whole part of the coast ‘Sierra Leone’. Today, the mountain shelters the upmarket beach resorts that stretch south of Freetown; and in the distance you can spy the large hump of Banana Island, where the slave trader John Newton (author of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’) was imprisoned by a Temne trader in 1747.
Other aspects of this early history of trade and African-European encounters also remain. By the harbour downtown, by a clutch of corrugated-iron-covered stalls where fish is dried and prepared for sale, is the ‘De Ruyter stone’. This stone is named after a Dutch admiral who visited in the early 17th century, during European wars to control the slave trade, and is believed to have carved his name into one of the rocks that still stands on the beach.
For a long time, historians in the West have seen the Atlantic slave trade as shaping the beginnings of West Africa’s engagement with Europe. There is no question that the slave trade exerted a profound influence in many parts of Africa. However, to look at African history as the history of slavery and the slave trade is no more accurate than to study the history of the Nazis as the sum of the German past. Even at the height of the Atlantic trade, there is much more to say about West African history than can possibly be glimpsed by focusing only on the slave trade. Digging a little deeper into Freetown, some of this begins to emerge; and what follows is a brief tour of the city and its historical sites to show how this works in practice.
Freetown was founded in 1792, and soon became a key site in the antislavery movement. After the Act abolishing the slave trade was passed by the UK parliament in 1807, the Royal Naval West Africa Squadron was based in Freetown. Navy ships patrolled the West African coast on the lookout for vessels that Britain deemed to be slaving illegally; if they were captured, the Navy brought them to Freetown, and liberated their captives. In this manner, Freetown came to be home to people from all over West Africa, from as far south as the kingdom of Kongo, from what is now southern Nigeria, and from Dahomey.
Just a few hundred yards above the De Ruyter stone is the Asylum. Founded in 1817, this was where Africans liberated from the festering holds of their ships were first brought. The gates to the Asylum are locked, but multicoloured name tags have been tied around them, embossed with the names of some of the captives who passed through and whom historians have identified. The sign above the Asylum declares it the ‘Royal Hospital and Asylum for Africans Rescued from Slavery by British Valour and Philanthropy’, passing over in silence the histories of the 17th and 18th centuries when British slave traders (such as John Newton) frequented Sierra Leone; as if to remind visitors how much of African history is still characterised by silence.
The sign above the Asylum, Kings Gate, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Courtesy Sierra Leone Heritage
Just a few blocks up the hill from the Asylum, away from the harbour, is the St John’s Maroon Church, founded in 1808 by members of the Maroon community from Jamaica. The Maroons were escaped slaves who had formed their own communities in the Jamaican highlands (just as they did in parts of Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Panama and beyond). Some of them fought in the revolutionary wars in the US in the late-18th century, and then found their way to Freetown in the early 19th century, part of the waves of migration and resettlement during the Age of Revolution. Their church, recently restored, stands as a testament to the ways in which African peoples challenged, fought and resisted colonial power throughout the era of the slave trade.
In Freetown, the Maroons were unpopular with colonial officials. They paraded up and down with their gumbay drums, the same drums they had used in Jamaica to communicate plans of uprisings. British officials disapproved, and tried to clamp down on ‘the racket’. But gumbay had a habit of spreading. It became the popular music as far north as Guinea-Bissau, where it remains the music of choice (as it does in Freetown). Some say gumbay was vital in defeating Portuguese colonisers during the independence wars of Guinea-Bissau (1963-74), for gumbay was performed in a language outside colonial control, or comprehension, and could help unseat it.
The Maroon church is full of reminders of this history. The rafters have recently been repainted – bright red. A maroon-coloured flag (the symbol of the Maroons) stands to attention outside the church, and a set of new gumbay drums accompanies the choirs at services. During a recent visit, the man who had shown me around was wearing a red cap – the symbol of royalty in this part of West Africa.
From St John’s church, you can go through the centre of Freetown until at the northern end you come to the Kongo Cross neighbourhood. Kongo Cross is where liberated Africans settled after they had been released from the slave ships by the Royal Naval Squadron. The city is a crossroads of peoples and places and cultures: the Cross was a powerful religious symbol in Kongo religious cosmology, one that signified the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Its name illustrates not just a literal crossroads, but also how ideas and beliefs came with Africans as they travelled in freedom and captivity throughout the era of the slave trade; in this case, religious ideas that were at the heart of how these migrants perceived themselves in relation to the world, as they arrived in the early 19th century.
Avisit to Freetown opens windows onto many aspects of Africa’s past: the place of music and culture in challenging colonial power, the movement of free as well as captive Africans across oceans, the unique role of religious ideas in connecting communities across the world, and – of course – the importance of slavery in African history. Yet very little of all this comes across in how the African past is perceived, even in Africa – let alone in other parts of the world such as Britain.
I had come to Sierra Leone to participate in an academic writing workshop for young African scholars funded by the British Academy. So I spent most of my time on the campus of the University of Sierra Leone, Fourah Bay College. It usually took around 40 minutes just to send an email (this was in mid-2017). It does not require a novelist to imagine the practical problems involved in studying anything. Meanwhile, the impact of structural adjustment policies on African universities, and of the Sierra Leonean civil war (1991-2002), meant that the institution had been starved of funds for decades. One day, friends and I visited the main library; we went down to the basement, where we had to use a mobile phone’s torch to see anything at all. It was 8:30 in the morning. One glance made clear that no books had been bought for a very long time because there were no funds for it.
Fourah Bay College is one of the oldest universities in West Africa, and its campus sits high above the old town on one of the hills that rings Freetown. There were universities in Africa in medieval times, but this is the oldest university in West Africa. It was founded in 1827 as a theological college for young African priests, usually freshly liberated from the slave ships. The first bishop of Nigeria, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was educated at Fourah Bay College. In the early 20th century, ‘FBC’ became the launch pad for ambitious young administrators in British colonial West Africa. During the civil war, the FBC campus saw battles between the government and the rebels. Students look down over the city and the Atlantic Ocean below, but the university remains scarred by these battles.
Publishing accelerates in the global North but historians in Bissau and Freetown can’t access basic resources
Many of the challenges that Freetowners face are shared elsewhere in West Africa. After that visit to Freetown, I flew to the city of Bissau, where I spent a few days at the National Research Institute (INEP). This was a regional leader in research during the 1980s and ’90s. However, the Guinea-Bissau civil war (1998-99) saw the building taken over as a headquarters by the faction supporting the incumbent president, João Bernardo ‘Nino’ Vieira. Many documents – some dating back to the 18th century – were destroyed. As with the once-estimable Fourah Bay College, one glance around INEP’s library shows that the combination of a civil war and a collapse in funds following structural adjustment has put to rest any institutional book-buying.
It’s not that there’s any lack of demand for books in Bissau, in fact quite the reverse. There is a small bookshop at INEP and, after one book launch that I attended, all the books on the tables outside the auditorium sold in a matter of minutes. Well-connected colleagues try to step in where the state has disappeared, buying their own stocks of books on trips abroad. This is obviously not a solution.
As a historian of West Africa, when I spend time in West African universities, I understand in a visceral and immediate way how power shapes what research is possible, and how the African past can be taught. While publishing accelerates month by month and year by year in the global North, historians in Bissau and Freetown (and in so many other places) often cannot access basic research resources. The internet is not yet a solution because of the slow connection speeds and unreliable electricity supplies that can take hold. Young people who are making decisions about their futures, and trying to find some way of earning a living, conclude that studying history is not going to put bread on the table or help them to start a family.
In these circumstances, West African governments have put most of their scanty resources into STEM subjects. However, the truth is that many aspects of the African past are vital to illuminating the current reality, and to understanding the challenges that both the continent and the world face as we move into the third decade of the century.
Stereotypically, Westerners have seen Africa as ‘the continent without history’. The misrepresentation follows G W F Hegel’s 1830s dictum that Africa ‘is no historical part of the world’. The misconception continues to condition the way that international agencies approach their work in Africa. Africa’s problems are pressing and can have immediate, proximate solutions (developed by external agencies, with international funding). But, of course, this approach merely replicates the idea of Africa as without history, of a continent that requires saving from the outside: by well-meaning abolitionists and missionaries in the 19th century, and by internationalists in the 21st century. History compels us to look at the causes of things, including current problems; and many powerful internal and external actors involved in African society today would apparently prefer to avoid that consideration.
Plaque depicting warrior and attendants (16th-17th century), Edo peoples, Benin kingdom, Nigeria. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
byToby Green
teaches Lusophone African history and culture at King's College London. His latest book, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019), was awarded the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and will be published in paperback in January 2020.
Edited by Sam Haselby
To understand the complexity and significance of West African history, there is no better thing to do than to go to Freetown. Sierra Leone’s capital is sited in the lee of the ‘lion-shaped’ mountain that gives the country its modern name. Portuguese sailors began to visit this part of West Africa in the second half of the 15th century; after weeks of sailing down the flat mangrove-strewn swamps south from the Senegal river, they knew they were entering a different region when they saw this mountain, and named the whole part of the coast ‘Sierra Leone’. Today, the mountain shelters the upmarket beach resorts that stretch south of Freetown; and in the distance you can spy the large hump of Banana Island, where the slave trader John Newton (author of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’) was imprisoned by a Temne trader in 1747.
Other aspects of this early history of trade and African-European encounters also remain. By the harbour downtown, by a clutch of corrugated-iron-covered stalls where fish is dried and prepared for sale, is the ‘De Ruyter stone’. This stone is named after a Dutch admiral who visited in the early 17th century, during European wars to control the slave trade, and is believed to have carved his name into one of the rocks that still stands on the beach.
For a long time, historians in the West have seen the Atlantic slave trade as shaping the beginnings of West Africa’s engagement with Europe. There is no question that the slave trade exerted a profound influence in many parts of Africa. However, to look at African history as the history of slavery and the slave trade is no more accurate than to study the history of the Nazis as the sum of the German past. Even at the height of the Atlantic trade, there is much more to say about West African history than can possibly be glimpsed by focusing only on the slave trade. Digging a little deeper into Freetown, some of this begins to emerge; and what follows is a brief tour of the city and its historical sites to show how this works in practice.
Freetown was founded in 1792, and soon became a key site in the antislavery movement. After the Act abolishing the slave trade was passed by the UK parliament in 1807, the Royal Naval West Africa Squadron was based in Freetown. Navy ships patrolled the West African coast on the lookout for vessels that Britain deemed to be slaving illegally; if they were captured, the Navy brought them to Freetown, and liberated their captives. In this manner, Freetown came to be home to people from all over West Africa, from as far south as the kingdom of Kongo, from what is now southern Nigeria, and from Dahomey.
Just a few hundred yards above the De Ruyter stone is the Asylum. Founded in 1817, this was where Africans liberated from the festering holds of their ships were first brought. The gates to the Asylum are locked, but multicoloured name tags have been tied around them, embossed with the names of some of the captives who passed through and whom historians have identified. The sign above the Asylum declares it the ‘Royal Hospital and Asylum for Africans Rescued from Slavery by British Valour and Philanthropy’, passing over in silence the histories of the 17th and 18th centuries when British slave traders (such as John Newton) frequented Sierra Leone; as if to remind visitors how much of African history is still characterised by silence.
The sign above the Asylum, Kings Gate, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Courtesy Sierra Leone Heritage
Just a few blocks up the hill from the Asylum, away from the harbour, is the St John’s Maroon Church, founded in 1808 by members of the Maroon community from Jamaica. The Maroons were escaped slaves who had formed their own communities in the Jamaican highlands (just as they did in parts of Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Panama and beyond). Some of them fought in the revolutionary wars in the US in the late-18th century, and then found their way to Freetown in the early 19th century, part of the waves of migration and resettlement during the Age of Revolution. Their church, recently restored, stands as a testament to the ways in which African peoples challenged, fought and resisted colonial power throughout the era of the slave trade.
In Freetown, the Maroons were unpopular with colonial officials. They paraded up and down with their gumbay drums, the same drums they had used in Jamaica to communicate plans of uprisings. British officials disapproved, and tried to clamp down on ‘the racket’. But gumbay had a habit of spreading. It became the popular music as far north as Guinea-Bissau, where it remains the music of choice (as it does in Freetown). Some say gumbay was vital in defeating Portuguese colonisers during the independence wars of Guinea-Bissau (1963-74), for gumbay was performed in a language outside colonial control, or comprehension, and could help unseat it.
The Maroon church is full of reminders of this history. The rafters have recently been repainted – bright red. A maroon-coloured flag (the symbol of the Maroons) stands to attention outside the church, and a set of new gumbay drums accompanies the choirs at services. During a recent visit, the man who had shown me around was wearing a red cap – the symbol of royalty in this part of West Africa.
From St John’s church, you can go through the centre of Freetown until at the northern end you come to the Kongo Cross neighbourhood. Kongo Cross is where liberated Africans settled after they had been released from the slave ships by the Royal Naval Squadron. The city is a crossroads of peoples and places and cultures: the Cross was a powerful religious symbol in Kongo religious cosmology, one that signified the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Its name illustrates not just a literal crossroads, but also how ideas and beliefs came with Africans as they travelled in freedom and captivity throughout the era of the slave trade; in this case, religious ideas that were at the heart of how these migrants perceived themselves in relation to the world, as they arrived in the early 19th century.
Avisit to Freetown opens windows onto many aspects of Africa’s past: the place of music and culture in challenging colonial power, the movement of free as well as captive Africans across oceans, the unique role of religious ideas in connecting communities across the world, and – of course – the importance of slavery in African history. Yet very little of all this comes across in how the African past is perceived, even in Africa – let alone in other parts of the world such as Britain.
I had come to Sierra Leone to participate in an academic writing workshop for young African scholars funded by the British Academy. So I spent most of my time on the campus of the University of Sierra Leone, Fourah Bay College. It usually took around 40 minutes just to send an email (this was in mid-2017). It does not require a novelist to imagine the practical problems involved in studying anything. Meanwhile, the impact of structural adjustment policies on African universities, and of the Sierra Leonean civil war (1991-2002), meant that the institution had been starved of funds for decades. One day, friends and I visited the main library; we went down to the basement, where we had to use a mobile phone’s torch to see anything at all. It was 8:30 in the morning. One glance made clear that no books had been bought for a very long time because there were no funds for it.
Fourah Bay College is one of the oldest universities in West Africa, and its campus sits high above the old town on one of the hills that rings Freetown. There were universities in Africa in medieval times, but this is the oldest university in West Africa. It was founded in 1827 as a theological college for young African priests, usually freshly liberated from the slave ships. The first bishop of Nigeria, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was educated at Fourah Bay College. In the early 20th century, ‘FBC’ became the launch pad for ambitious young administrators in British colonial West Africa. During the civil war, the FBC campus saw battles between the government and the rebels. Students look down over the city and the Atlantic Ocean below, but the university remains scarred by these battles.
Publishing accelerates in the global North but historians in Bissau and Freetown can’t access basic resources
Many of the challenges that Freetowners face are shared elsewhere in West Africa. After that visit to Freetown, I flew to the city of Bissau, where I spent a few days at the National Research Institute (INEP). This was a regional leader in research during the 1980s and ’90s. However, the Guinea-Bissau civil war (1998-99) saw the building taken over as a headquarters by the faction supporting the incumbent president, João Bernardo ‘Nino’ Vieira. Many documents – some dating back to the 18th century – were destroyed. As with the once-estimable Fourah Bay College, one glance around INEP’s library shows that the combination of a civil war and a collapse in funds following structural adjustment has put to rest any institutional book-buying.
It’s not that there’s any lack of demand for books in Bissau, in fact quite the reverse. There is a small bookshop at INEP and, after one book launch that I attended, all the books on the tables outside the auditorium sold in a matter of minutes. Well-connected colleagues try to step in where the state has disappeared, buying their own stocks of books on trips abroad. This is obviously not a solution.
As a historian of West Africa, when I spend time in West African universities, I understand in a visceral and immediate way how power shapes what research is possible, and how the African past can be taught. While publishing accelerates month by month and year by year in the global North, historians in Bissau and Freetown (and in so many other places) often cannot access basic research resources. The internet is not yet a solution because of the slow connection speeds and unreliable electricity supplies that can take hold. Young people who are making decisions about their futures, and trying to find some way of earning a living, conclude that studying history is not going to put bread on the table or help them to start a family.
In these circumstances, West African governments have put most of their scanty resources into STEM subjects. However, the truth is that many aspects of the African past are vital to illuminating the current reality, and to understanding the challenges that both the continent and the world face as we move into the third decade of the century.
Stereotypically, Westerners have seen Africa as ‘the continent without history’. The misrepresentation follows G W F Hegel’s 1830s dictum that Africa ‘is no historical part of the world’. The misconception continues to condition the way that international agencies approach their work in Africa. Africa’s problems are pressing and can have immediate, proximate solutions (developed by external agencies, with international funding). But, of course, this approach merely replicates the idea of Africa as without history, of a continent that requires saving from the outside: by well-meaning abolitionists and missionaries in the 19th century, and by internationalists in the 21st century. History compels us to look at the causes of things, including current problems; and many powerful internal and external actors involved in African society today would apparently prefer to avoid that consideration.
