The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  The original plan had been for the settlers to arrive in January during the dry season, leaving them enough time to establish a settlement and plant crops before the main rains due in May. It was well known that the best season to trade along the Sierra Leone coast, with a lesser risk of ‘fever’, was in the months between December and March. Mortality rates were always higher during the rainy season between May and November. But a series of delays in England meant that the small fleet did not set sail until April.

  After putting ashore on the peninsula on 15 May, the settlers climbed to the crest of a hill, hoisted the British flag and named the settlement Granville Town and the bay beneath them St George’s Bay. Negotiations were started with a local Temne sub-chief, known to the English as King Tom, for the purchase of land. After several days of discussion, King Tom agreed to sell them ‘a fine tract of mountainous country covered with trees of all kinds’ that ran along the river for ten miles east of the settlement and twenty miles inland. In return, King Tom was presented with a variety of manufactured goods – 24 laced hats, 3 dozen hangers with red scabbards, 10 yards of scarlet cloth, 8 muskets, a barrel of gunpowder, 25 iron bars, 117 bunches of beads and 130 gallons of rum – altogether worth nearly £60.

  Granville Town quickly took shape. The settlers pitched tents, marked out streets and divided land into 360 lots of about one acre. But disaster soon followed. Within days, torrential rains started. It proved too late to grow crops. Fever and dysentery swept through the settlement. More than half of the community died in the first year. Some settlers deserted and went to work for slave traders. Disputes erupted both with slave traders and with King Tom. The final blow came in 1790 when a new local Temne sub-chief, King Jimmy, taking revenge for an attack on his own village, gave the remaining eighty-seven settlers three days to quit and then razed Granville Town to the ground. The survivors had to seek refuge with slave traders.

  The London philanthropists, however, had no intention of giving up. Despite opposition from slave trade merchants, they gained parliamentary approval in 1791 to form a new enterprise, the Sierra Leone Company, to finance the building of another town and recruited 1,190 black volunteers from Nova Scotia together with 119 Europeans to settle there. Their aim now was to establish a commercial colony where legitimate trade would be used as a means of undercutting the slave trade. They proposed to start schools for African children and to employ missionaries to teach them the Christian religion. A new town was duly built on the site of the old Granville Town and named Freetown.

  The ‘Nova Scotians’, as they were known, faced as many adversities as previous immigrants. Within weeks of their arrival in March, thirty-eight had died. A senior white official, John Clarkson, wrote in his diary in April:

  If putrid fevers do not break out amongst us, unsheltered as we are from the rain, crowded and living upon salt provisions, it will be owing to a particular interposition of Providence. Nothing made of steel can be preserved from rust. Knives, scissors, keys etc. look like old, rusty iron. Our watches are spoiled by rust and laid aside useless.

  When the main rains began in May, the ‘putrid fevers’ killed ninety-eight more of the new black settlers and almost half of the 119 Europeans. The colony was also plagued by innumerable disputes and feuds.

  Nevertheless, the Nova Scotians proved to be adept settlers. After two years, Freetown boasted twelve streets with four hundred wooden houses tiled with wooden slats and fixed on foundations of laterite stone. The settlement was self-sufficient in rice and vegetables, and had started to grow a few export crops. The governor, Zachary Macaulay, was especially proud of progress with schools, writing in December 1793:

  Our schools are a cheering sight, three hundred children fill them, and most of the grown persons who cannot read, crowd to the evening schools. We have made a schoolmaster of almost every black man in the colony who reads or writes well enough, and the business of instruction proceeds so rapidly within the colony, that in the course of a year or two, we expect there will be few within it who will not be able to read their bibles.

  The following year, however, the small colony was caught up in the war between Britain and France and suffered disaster once more. In September 1794, a French flotilla, manned by Jacobin crews, sailed into the harbour, bombarded Freetown and set about looting it. Sailors went from house to house, stealing items of value or destroying them, and killing livestock. ‘They killed all the cattle and animals they found in the fields, streets, yards or elsewhere, not sparing even asses, dogs and cats,’ wrote Adam Afzelius, a Swedish botanist. ‘These proceedings they continued the whole succeeding week, till they had entirely ruined our beautiful and prospering colony.’ Before leaving, the French burned down all the company buildings.

  Once more, the town had to be rebuilt.

  Five hundred miles to the north, on the banks of the Gambia River, another British project was being attempted. In November 1790, a former army officer, Major Daniel Houghton, landed at Barra, a settlement at the mouth of the river, and presented his credentials to the local ruler. His mission was to find a route inland from the Gambia River to the Niger River and to reach the legendary city of Timbuktu. He had been sent from London by the African Association, formed by a small group of prominent public figures in 1788 to promote ‘the discovery of the interior parts of Africa’. Their central purpose was to advance geographical knowledge of the continent, although several members were also active in the campaign to end slavery and others had their eye on the business potential. As one of its priorities, the African Association had developed a particular interest in wanting to learn more about the course of the Niger River, where it started, where it went. The prevailing view was that it flowed to the west, as Leo Africanus had reported two centuries before. But some geographers argued that it flowed from west to east, heading in the direction of Lake Chad and the Nile.

  The Gambia River was an obvious place to start. British traders had been venturing along the river since the seventeenth century, lured initially by tales of the goldfields of Bambuk. Richard Jobson had sailed 300 miles up the river in 1620 and returned to write The Golden Trade, or a Discovery of the River Gambia and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians. Their main trade subsequently had been in slaves. At the end of the eighteenth century, the kings of the Gambia River region were supplying them with 3,000 captives every year. But the trading posts that the British established on the lower reaches of the river were notorious for high mortality and rarely lasted for long.

  In March 1791, Houghton reached the Mandingo kingdom of Wuli and sent a letter to his wife in England marvelling at the ease of living there:

  Gold, ivory, wax and slaves may at all times be had for the most trifling articles; and a trade, the profit of which would be upwards of eight hundred per cent, can be carried on . . . without the least trouble. You may live here almost for nothing: ten pounds a year would support a whole family with plenty of fowls, sheep, milk, eggs, butter, honey, bullocks, fish and all sorts of game.

  Houghton’s luck soon changed. Many of his possessions, including his compass, thermometer, quadrant and firearms, were destroyed in a fire; his interpreter deserted him; he joined the caravan of a slave trader and reached Bambuk but was robbed of more possessions; when the rainy season started he developed a fever and found it difficult to make progress; in the last recorded note he sent in September 1791, he said he had been robbed once more and deserted by his servants. In 1793, the African Association received reports that he was dead. Subsequent enquiries suggested that he had died alone and starving, abandoned by a caravan, on the edge of the Sahara desert.

  Another candidate was hired for the task. Mungo Park, a 24-year-old Scottish doctor who had previously served as a ship’s surgeon on a voyage to Asia, arrived on the coast of the Gambia in June 1795. He endured a litany of trouble: malarial fever, theft, demands for tribute; he was gradually stripped of most of his equipment. Much of the countryside through which he passed had been ravaged by war. For mont
hs on end he was held as a prisoner. But on 20 July 1796, six hundred miles from his starting point, as he approached Segu, the capital of Bambara, he caught sight of the Niger. ‘I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission; the long sought for, majestic Niger, glittering in the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing to the eastward.’

  Refused permission to cross the river and enter Segu, Park was obliged to observe it from a distance. ‘The view of this extensive city; the numerous canoes upon the river; the crowded population, and the cultivated state of the surrounding country, formed altogether a prospect of civilization and magnificence, which I little expected to find in the bosom of Africa.’

  But his own position was perilous. Tired, hungry and in poor health, he was directed to stay in a village on the north bank, but on arriving there he was met with ‘astonishment and fear’. No one there would give him food or shelter. A storm was brewing. Dusk fell. Dejected by the prospect of a hard night ahead, he was sitting beneath a tree when a woman returning from labouring in the fields took him to her family compound, fed him and provided him with a place to rest. As he lay down to sleep, one of the women in a family group spinning cotton began to tell his story in a song.

  The winds roared, and the rains fell.

  The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree.

  He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn.

  Other women followed with a chorus.

  Let us pity the white man; no mother has he . . .

  Park recorded: ‘In the morning I presented my compassionate landlady with two of the four buttons which remained on my waistcoat; the only recompense I could make her.’

  Park had planned to travel downstream to Jenne and then to Timbuktu, but after six days, as heavy rains began, he abandoned the idea: ‘Worn down by sickness, exhausted with hunger and fatigue; half-naked, and without any article of value, by which I might procure provisions, clothes or lodging; I began to reflect seriously on my situation.’

  He turned back and made for the coast, but so ill was he from fever and so hazardous was the journey that there seemed little likelihood he would reach it. Relying for food and shelter on the charity of villagers, however, he managed to stumble into Kamalia, a village west of Bamako, where a slave-dealing merchant named Karfa Taura nursed him back to health.

  Once the main rains had ended, Park accompanied Karfa Taura and a ‘coffle’ of slaves which he was taking for sale to European traders on the Gambia River. The slaves were part of a much larger contingent captured in raids by the Bambara army and held in irons in Segu for three years. In his account of the journey, Park recorded that their ordeal was all the greater as they feared they would end up by being devoured by Europeans. ‘The slaves contemplate a journey towards the coast with great terror,’ he wrote.

  They are commonly secured by putting the right leg of one and the left of another in the same pair of fetters. By supporting the fetters with a string they can walk, though very slowly. Every four slaves are likewise fastened together by the necks, with a strong rope of twisted thongs, and in the night, an additional pair of fetters is put on their hands, and sometimes a light iron chain is passed around their necks.

  Upon his return to London in 1797, the African Association was duly appreciative. ‘We have . . . by Mr Park’s means opened a Gate into the Interior of Africa,’ its founder, Joseph Banks, told members.

  Eight years later, Park volunteered to try again. His plan this time was to take with him an army escort of thirty soldiers and a team of six carpenters, to follow the same route from the Gambia to the Niger, and then to build boats and to sail downriver until they reached the terminus. The British government approved the plan and agreed to provide funds, hoping to secure trade opportunities. ‘His Majesty has selected you to discover and ascertain whether any, and what commercial intercourse can be opened with the interior,’ Park was officially informed.

  Delayed in starting, Park’s expedition soon encountered difficulty. He was no more than halfway to the Niger in June 1805 when the rains began. Struck down by malaria and dysentery, soldiers and carpenters died along the way. Not until mid-August did Park finally reach the Niger at Bamako. ‘When I reflected that three-fourths of the soldiers had died on their march, and that in addition to our weakly state we had no carpenters to build the boats in which we proposed to prosecute our discoveries; the prospects appeared somewhat gloomy,’ he wrote in his journal.

  Nevertheless, he decided to press on. In Segu, the remnant of his expedition fashioned a forty-foot-long barge-like canoe and set off downstream. Wanting to avoid trouble, Park decided not to land anywhere until he reached the end of the river. He sailed straight past Timbuktu and Gao, traversed the great Niger bend, and was heading due south, only 350 miles from the Atlantic coast, when he and his few remaining colleagues perished at the Bussa rapids.

  The Atlantic slave trade, meanwhile, continued to thrive. At the end of the eighteenth century, about 80,000 African slaves were being taken each year across the Atlantic to ports all along the coastlines of North and South America and the Caribbean. British ships were the main transporters, carrying more than half the total. In the decade between 1791 and 1800, British ships made about 1,340 voyages across the Atlantic, landing nearly 400,000 slaves. Between 1801 and 1807, they took a further 266,000. The slave trade remained one of Britain’s most profitable businesses.

  During these years, however, the campaign in Britain to abolish the slave trade gathered momentum. Led by William Wilberforce, a coalition of abolitionists stressed both ethical and pragmatic arguments to make their point. Christian activists, propelled by evangelical fervour, emphasised the evils of the trade. Industrialists, at the forefront of Britain’s industrial revolution, were keen to find new markets for manufactured goods, promote ‘legitimate’ trade and gain access to tropical products. Despite determined opposition from slavers and plantation owners, parliament in London passed a bill in 1807 making it illegal for British merchants to participate in the slave trade and the British government agreed to set up a Royal Navy unit, the British West Africa Squadron, to patrol the African coast and enforce the law. Navy captains were given an incentive to arrest slave ships, bring them to shore and help convict their owners by being paid a bounty for each liberated slave – £60 per male, £30 per female and £10 per child.

  The outpost of Sierra Leone formed a key part of Britain’s anti-slavery strategy. The harbour there with its adjacent settlement provided an ideal base for Royal Navy ships. The private company set up by London philanthropists to run the Sierra Leone colony had become insolvent and was only too relieved to hand direct control to the British government. Captured slave ships and their crews were taken to Freetown to face proceedings before an Admiralty court. Freetown also served as a haven for liberated slaves – ‘recaptives’, as they were called. Instead of trying to return slaves to their original homeland, the British government decided to set them free in Sierra Leone. Every year, hundreds of recaptives were brought in, fitted out with cotton clothes and lodged in the King’s Yard; many went on to found their own settlements on the peninsula. By 1815, more than 6,000 had landed in Freetown.

  Christian missionaries were sent to Sierra Leone not just to spread the Christian message among the recaptive population but to establish schools for them, teach them English and practical skills and administer their villages on behalf of the government. From the ranks of the recaptives came the first English-educated elite in west Africa. In 1827, the Church Missionary Society, a London-based organisation, founded the Christian Institution at Fourah Bay, a training college for teachers and missionaries. One of the first students to enrol there was a young Yoruba man, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who had been captured by Muslim raiders at the age of thirteen, sold to Portuguese traders, put on board a trans-Atlantic slave ship, rescued by a British naval patrol and released into the care of Christian missionaries in Freetown. Named after a renow
ned English clergyman, Crowther proved to be an exemplary pupil and was sent to London for a year to study at St Mary’s Parochial School. He went on to become one of the most prominent African Christians of the nineteenth century.

  Other governments took steps to impede the Atlantic slave trade. In 1808, the United States made it illegal to import slaves. Several European states eventually imposed their own measures. But other than the British blockade in west Africa, few serious attempts were made over the next fifty years to enforce the law. Between 1810 and 1864, the Royal Navy liberated 149,800 slaves, landing many of them in Sierra Leone; the United States and France accounted for about 10,000. Their efforts, however, merely changed the pattern of the Atlantic trade. The demand for slaves for plantation work in Brazil and Cuba grew ever more intense. African merchants remained as willing as before to trade. There was no shortage of supply. Warfare and slave raids in the interior produced a constant stream of victims. British efforts to persuade local rulers to abandon the slave trade in return for cash incentives often came to nought. The king of Dahomey, Gezo, told a naval officer that he was ready to do anything the British government asked except give up the slave trade. ‘The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.’

  Slavers became adept at avoiding British patrols, hiding out in the labyrinth of bays, lagoons and creeks. One slaver captured in the Gallinas River told the Admiralty court in Freetown that he had previously made thirteen voyages without difficulty. In the 1820s, some 163,000 slaves were dispatched from the Bight of Biafra and a further 58,000 from the Bight of Benin. When the risks of capture in west Africa became too great, many slavers moved their operations further south to the coasts of Loango, Congo and Angola. In the 1820s, they shipped out some 442,000 slaves from depots along this stretch of the coast, mainly to Brazil. At Cabinda, a Brazilian ship was observed loading about 450 slaves and setting sail within 100 minutes of arrival. The total number of slaves carried across the Atlantic in the 1820s reached 850,000. Overall, in the fifty-year period between 1810 and 1860, the figure topped 3.5 million.