by Jan Morris
This was a hideously successful enterprise. Blanco had established an alliance with the chiefs of the surrounding countryside, notably King Siaka of Gallinas, and the coastal tribes acted as his agents, paid in advance for the slaves they could catch inland. A regular trade was established with Cuba, in Portuguese, Brazilian and American slave-ships, and the barracoons were nearly always full of slaves awaiting shipment, sometimes 5,000 at a time. Two or three ships arrived each month at the estuary. Blanco imported his shackles from England, and recruited a staff of Spaniards: King Siaka dined off silver plate.
The Royal Navy knew this place well from a distance, and had blockaded the estuary for months at a time. But it was independent territory, and until October, 1840, the British could find no excuse to go ashore. Then a black British subject, Mrs Fry Norman of Sierra Leone, was kidnapped by King Siaka’s son Manna as security for a debt. ‘I have to inform you’, Mrs Norman wrote to the debtor, a Mrs Grey of Freetown, ‘that Mr Manna has catched me on your account, and is determined to detain me until you come yourself. Between now and night all depends on good or evil heart of Mr Manna. Therefore you will lose no time in coming to my assistance on your account.’ But instead of Mrs Grey it was Commander Joseph Denman, R.N., with the armed schooner Wanderer and the brigs Rolla and Saracen who, in an early exertion of the Victorian imperial principle civis britannicus sum, arrived wrathful and determined at the bar of the Gallinas.
Denman was the son of a distinguished abolitionist, Lord Chief Justice Denman, and had himself felt passionately about the evils of the slave trade since, as a young lieutenant, he had sailed a captured slaver across the Atlantic with 500 half-dead Africans on board. ‘I was forty-six days on that voyage, and altogether four months on board of her, where I witnessed the most dreadful sufferings that human beings could endure.’ Denman was aching to settle scores not only with Siaka, but with the Spanish traders too, and he used the plight of poor Mrs Norman as pretext for a double action.
He had no mandate for an attack upon the barracoons—Britain was not at war with the Gallinas chiefs—but he acted Nelsonically, on his own. With three boatloads of blue-jackets he rode the surf, crossed the bar and seized the biggest of the estuary islands. Almost at once, without a shot, the whole iniquitous enterprise collapsed. Hustling as many slaves as they could into canoes, the Spaniards fled up the creeks into the bush. Mrs Norman was triumphantly released. More than a thousand slaves were freed of their chains. All the barracoons and warehouses were burnt. Siaka and the chiefs signed an abject treaty of renunciation, promising to abandon the slave trade altogether, whatever the ju-ju men said, and expel all the slave traders from their territories. The Gallinas trade was extinguished, and the British consul in Havana reported a stream of anxious slave-traders, requesting his advice about future prospects.
Some years later one of Blanco’s associates at the Gallinas station, whom the Navy had rescued from his own infuriated captives and shipped away to safety, ungratefully sued Denman for trespass and the seizure of property—a familiar hazard of the slave patrols: but the judges of the Court of Exchequer, who knew the Commander’s father well, directed the jury to clear him.
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This bold little action was a foretaste of imperial manners to come, but its effect was transitory. Though it led to treaties with most of the slave-trading chiefs along the West African coast, they were seldom honoured for long. The legal complexities remained insoluble, and the movement towards Free Trade at home actually encouraged the slave traffic, for it greatly bolstered the economies of slave States like Cuba and Brazil. Though the Royal Navy liberated in all some 150,000 souls, the Atlantic slave traffic did not end until the victory of the North in the American Civil War, twenty years later. As for the Red Sea trade, it continued fitfully much longer still, with illicit shipments of boys to the pederast princelings of Arabia, or allocations of retainers to the Sultan of Muscat. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the slave patrol remained one of the Navy’s principal chores, a duty as implicit to the fact of British maritime power as guardship duty in Gibraltar, or cruiser service on the West India station.1
No less demanding a concern of the imperial evangelists, though, was what to do with the slaves when they were liberated, for of course they could not be returned to barbarism. Fortunately the empire already possessed a haven. In the eighteenth century there had been some 14,000 slaves in Britain itself, scattered in gentlemen’s houses throughout the kingdom.2 When domestic slavery was made illegal in 1772 many of these people, together with ex-slaves from Nova Scotia, became the nucleus of an experiment in humanitarian imperialism—the creation of a new British colony, specifically for liberated negroes, on the coast of West Africa. It was to contribute to the ending of the slave trade everywhere, its sponsors said, by ‘civilization, Christianity and the cultivation of the soil’.
The chosen shore had been named by the Spaniards Sierra Leone, for the crouching lion-shape of the hill above its bay, and the capital of the new settlement was called inevitably Freetown, but most of the hamlets upon the peninsula were given names of ineffable Britishness, to stand as texts of enlightenment. There was Wilberforce, there was Buxton, there was Charlotte and there was Regent. Gloucester was down the road from Leicester, and the road from Waterloo to Wellington ran through Hastings, Grafton and Allen Town—all this at a time when the vast mass of Africa had never seen a white man at all, and there was not a single European consul between Freetown on the one shore and Zanzibar on the other. From the very start Sierra Leone, though its population was almost entirely negro, represented an implanted culture: a black British culture, evangelically Christian, conventionally diligent.
The colony made several false starts, for the ex-slaves proved inept colonists at first, and its early years were disturbed. As the wit Sydney Smith observed, there were always two Governors of Sierra Leone, the one who had just arrived, and the one who was just leaving. Among the new settlers there were understandable prejudices against white patronage of any kind: some citizens, after all, believed that the uniforms of the redcoat garrison were dyed with the blood of slaughtered negroes, and that British officers’ brains were developed by a potion of boiled African heads. As the years passed, and the neighbouring African peoples infiltrated the colony, and liberated slaves arrived too from the West Indies, and from captured slave-ships, some unsuspected doctrines were grafted upon the Christian orthodoxies, and distinctly heretical pieties were pursued in the less respectable quarters of Freetown. Witchcraft was practised when the clergymen were not looking. Secret societies flourished. Streets named for statesmen, governors or eminent men of God found racier local nicknames. Yet Sierra Leone remained above all a Christian settlement upon the African shore, a ward of evangelical imperialism: spires and chapel roofs ornamented the Freetown skyline, and if Saturday nights were rumbustious in the backstreets, Sunday mornings were rich with hymns and self-improvement.
Architecturally the little town was remarkable, for here alone the Georgian style was applied to tropical Africa. Freetown was built to a grid system, partly as an image of European order, partly perhaps to make it easier to police. Some of its streets were surprisingly elegant. They were lined with deep-eaved villas three or four stories high, built of a heavily mortared yellowish sandstone, with white balconies and well-proportioned windows—comfortable, solid-looking houses, pleasantly sited on the slopes of Howe or Trelawny Streets, and made piquant by a certain naïvety of design—a gentle crudeness, which gave them a child-like charm, like rows of dolls’ houses in the sunshine. Handsome stone steps led down to the harbour of Freetown, an Anglican cathedral stood predominantly above, and the little capital kept as its fulcrum the handsome oak tree, now the hub of a cross-roads, at whose feet in 1787 the founding fathers of the colony had declared their intentions with a short and low church service.
Freetown society was rich and strange. The founders had been concerned to create an educated African bourgeoisie, to be t
he governing class of the place, and to perpetuate its Christian origins: the evangelicals were seldom radicals in any modern sense, and generally held strong Whiggish views about property and the continuity of class. Almost at once they founded a place of higher education, Fourah Bay College, which inhabited an imposing building on the hill, and which presently produced an entire social layer of educated Africans—clergyman, lawyers, school-teachers, civil servants. These were the first of the Sierra Leone Creoles, a people destined to play an important part in the development of the British Empire. ‘Creole’ was a word of many meanings. In the French colonies of America it meant a locally-born European. In Spanish South American it meant a half-caste predominantly white. In West Africa it meant at first a liberated slave or his descendants, as distinct from a local African: but there it presently came to mean more too, and signified a person who subscribed to the particular Anglo-African culture propagated by Fourah Bay.
The Creoles became an imperial caste. They developed their own Afro-English language, Krio—far more than a pidgin language, but a tongue with its own literature, which sounded indeed like a hazily slurred recording of cultured southern English, but was graced with its own nuances and idioms, and eventually became so divorced from the parent language that scholars translated Shakespearian plays into it.1 They wore European clothes, conveniently differentiating them from the local tribespeople, whom they tended to despise, and who were either draped in blinding swoops of textile, or almost totally nude. They filled their houses with the orthodox bric-à-brac of the English middle classes, upright pianos and lithographs and portraits of the Queen and framed embroidered samplers. They aimed above all at respectability. We see them, in starched white collars and stifling crinolines, presiding stiffly over public functions, or trailing beneath sunshades to morning service. We see their heavy black features sweating over dog-collars (the first black Anglican bishop was a Creole) or stuffed into red serge jackets (the first black British Army doctor was another) or crowned with judge’s wigs, or hung about with stethoscopes, or bespectacled over philosophical treatises. They ran the colony more or less themselves, with intermittent advice from white governors and transient civil servants, and by and large they did it well. One of the earliest coherent plans for self-government in British African colonies was produced by Major Africanus Horton, who had enjoyed a successful career in the British Army before settling down to a literary and commercial retirement in Horton Hall, Freetown.1
Presently, too, the Creoles began to demonstrate talents more specifically their own—throw-backs, so to speak, to the distant times before their redemption. They turned out to be marvellous money-makers. Capitalism sprouted and thrived in Sierra Leone. The paternalist white clerics of Fourah Bay found some of their most promising pupils, steeped in the maxims of Dean Stanley or the examples of William Wilberforce, abruptly blossoming into immensely rich entrepreneurs, landowners or speculators. Dynasties of rich Creoles were founded, and those modest houses of Trelawny Street were often abandoned for more ostentatious mansions and country estates. At the same time the Creoles, while still honouring the principles of the evangelical faith, threw off its gloomier forms. They became a particularly gay and hospitable people. Half-forgotten ancestral rhythms enlivened the cadences of metrical psalms, and the sons of sober bureaucrats discovered in themselves inherited aptitudes for dance and buffoonery.
Sierra Leone still had its ups and downs. Periodic scandals excited the little colony, and heavy-bearded commissions of inquiry occasionally disembarked at Freetown quay to put things straight again. Here as elsewhere, even the most compliant Africans sometimes disappointed their mentors and liberators—as was said by one judicial commission, ‘the known Christian moral lesson should be continually impressed on their minds that we must earn our bread with the sweat of our brow’. But the settlement survived, and Freetown itself became the principal base of the Royal Navy on the West African coast—a town where generations of transient Britons, on their way to grimmer places farther south, would be surprised by the gaiety of their welcome, and first discover that there might be some element of fun, after all, in the prospect of a posting to the White Man’s grave.2
7
So the first monuments of Queen Victoria’s empire were monuments of liberty. The fight against slavery at its source would continue throughout the Victorian era, being a prime motive as we shall see of the great mid-century explorations, and it proved a fertile seed of imperial emotion. It was seen as a stake in providence—as Lord John Russell told the House of Commons in 1850, ‘it appears to me that if we give up this high and holy work … we have no right to expect a continuance of those blessings, which, by God’s favour, we have so long enjoyed’. The adventures that were to come, as imperialism itself developed into a kind of faith, and dominion became a national ambition for its own sake, were grounded upon this good old base, erected so long before by the earnest philanthropists of Clapham and Exeter Hall: and when evangelicalism had long lost its dynamism, when a harsher generation was in command, impelled by cruder ends, still the memory of these aspirations tempered the brashness of the British Empire, and sometimes touched the imperial conscience.
1 Orange Valley is a cattle ranch now, through whose compounds stylish negro cowboys ride. Most of its slave-buildings are in ruins; rats, lizards and a barn owl live in the derelict Great House; but overgrown behind the garden the mausoleum of its founding family, the Jarretts, has monumentally survived the centuries, and is fluttered over by yellow butterflies.
1 Mr Knibb’s church was destroyed by a hurricane in 1944, but its present successor, named in his memory, contains a marble panel depicting this scene. In the churchyard is a monument to Knibb ‘erected by the Emancipated Slaves, to whose enfranchisement and elevation his indefatigable exertions so largely contributed’, and when I went to service there one Sunday morning in 1969 I found his parishioners as merry, kind and passionate as ever.
1 One Jamaica estate that netted £11,000 annually in the 1820s was sold in the 1840s for £1,650, and by the 1850s was said to be worth about £800.
2 Their descendants survive, around Seaford Town in Westmoreland County, and look today, thanks to a century and a half of in-breeding, whiter than anyone else in Jamaica.
1 As against the Pernicious Article, which is what the British themselves called the most profitable commodity of their eastern commerce, opium.
1 Now renamed the Kerefe, and a popular weekend resort for Freetown sportsmen.
1 Ships of the Royal Navy continued to carry slavery manuals until 1970.
2 Of whom I cannot forbear to mention ‘Jack Black’ of Ystumllyn, near my own home in Caernarfonshire. He was the only black man in North Wales, and the local girls adored him: as his biographer austerely observed in 1888, gwyn y gwel y fran ei chyw—‘the crow sees its young as white’. Jack’s gravestone bears the inaccurate but touching epitaph, in Welsh:
India was the land of my birth,
But I was christened in Wales;
This spot, marked by a grey slab,
Is my cold, dark resting place.
1 For example:
Paddy dem‚ country, una all way day
Nor Rome. Make una all kack una0 yase.
Are cam berr Caesar, are nor cam praise am.
Dem kin member bad way person kin do
long tem after de person kin don die.
But plenty tem de good way person do
kin berr wit im bone dem….
1 And who was not above giving some sensible advice to white residents in Sierra Leone: ‘A strict moral principle is beneficial in the tropics. Agreeable society should always be courted, as it relieves the mind a great deal. The society of real ladies will be found preferable to any other’.
2 The fun persists, the Afro-English culture having become distinctly more Afro in independent Sierra Leone, but Fourah Bay thrives still, the Creoles are still pre-eminent, and there are still sixty-five Christian churches for the 128,000 inha
bitants of Freetown. Sierra Leone was the original inspiration for the neighbouring republic of Liberia, settled by freed American slaves, and for the French ex-slave settlement of Libreville, on the Gabon river to the south.
CHAPTER THREE
Sweet Lives
IT was only to be expected that the improving instinct would presently father the interfering impulse, as the evangelical power of Britain pursued new fields of action. It was much easier to reform people if you ruled them, and so the British began, tentatively at first, guardedly, even unwittingly, their long attempt to mould the world in their own image. ‘The complete civilization and the real Happiness of Man,’ decreed the Aborigines Protection Society, ‘can never be secured by any thing less than the diffusion of Christian Principles’; and the diffusion of true Christian Principles could best be achieved by the exertion of British authority.
