Captive Crossings: Slavery, Maritime Flight, and the Making of Freedom in Colonial Sierra Leone, 1875–94

This paper explores the interplay between slavery, commercial networks, and pathways of self-liberation within the waterscapes of British Sierra Leone in West Africa. During the late nineteenth century, the growing colony, which was located on banks of the Sierra Leone estuary, was reliant on produce, livestock, raw materials, and merchandise produced and transported by the region’s captive population. These goods were conveyed by enslaved laborers along trading circuits that connected the colonial capital of Freetown to plantations and cattle-raising areas in the interior via roads, footpaths, and systems of creeks, rivers, and coastline. Slaveholders brutally pressed their captives to meet the heightened needs of the expanding colony, which caused unprecedented slave unrest, including the most recorded instances of slave flight for the entire nineteenth century.

My paper draws on archival records of over 1100 fugitive slaves who fled their masters and sought freedom under the British administrations in Freetown between 1875 and 1894. Many of these fugitive slave reports reveal the experiences of enslaved porters who navigated the region’s waterways, as well as the testimonials of enslaved individuals and entire families of runaways who swam and/or commandeered their owners’ canoes to reach Freetown. My paper utilizes these accounts to illustrate the importance of Sierra Leone’s ‘captive waterscapes’ in maintaining vital economic sectors, such as staple agriculture, beef production, forestry, and coastal shipping. My analysis of these records also sheds light on how maritime knowledge, personal networks, and interpretations of British territorial and anti-slavery policies shaped the lives of enslaved women, men, and children, from their strategies of flight to their appeals for freedom and eventual integration into colonial society. By foregrounding the lived experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved people in Sierra Leone, my paper offers new perspectives on the history of slavery and emancipation in British West Africa.