Escaping to Freetown: The Lives of the Runaway Slaves and the Question of Slavery in Late 19th-Century Sierra Leone

In January 1885, an enslaved woman named Damley Coray fled her master after he abruptly sold her three children to another owner. She trekked thirty kilometres to the city of Freetown, taking refuge with the British regime of the colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa. After being read a caution outlining her rights as a freed person, Coray was officially liberated from slavery. Her case is the first of over four hundred to appear in a long, now matted colonial logbook, The Sierra Leone Register of Escaped Slaves. My paper uses this document to reconstruct the lives of these few individuals who reclaimed their freedom, and connect their lived experiences with the colonial administration's shifting interventionist (and non-interventionist) stances against slavery within the colony and its hinterlands in the late nineteenth century. 

To better understand this "question of slavery"—which loomed over successive governments in Sierra Leone and elsewhere throughout West Africa—I concentrate specifically on the everyday, human realities of slavery in this context. Using qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, this study uncovers important elements about the experiences of the enslaved in Sierra Leone through individuals found in the Register, specifically illuminating definitions of mistreatment, paths of resistance, labour exploitation, and the demographic structures of the enslaved population. With the lives and actions of former slaves at its core, this paper adds new, distinctly West African experiences to the histories and conceptualizations of slavery and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World.