Confronting Captivity in Freetown: Sierra Leone as a Site of Black Political Sovereignty and Legal Thought, 1787–1820

Building on a surge of scholarship aimed at unpacking the inherent contradictions at the core of Freetown, an ostensibly antislavery colony in Sierra Leone, this paper underscores the extent to which African and Afro-descendant legal practitioners critiqued British abolition as intellectually inconsistent, economically exploitative, and incompatible with diasporic visions of emancipation. Populated with Nova Scotian emigrants, Jamaican Maroon settlers, “Liberated African” captives, and Temne, Susu, and Mandinka sovereigns and subjects, among others, Sierra Leone was a microcosm of the African Diaspora. Situated within the Upper Guinea Coast, a region destabilized by the Atlantic Slave Trade and inter-imperial rivalries, my scholarship foregrounds the legal instruments deployed by Black men, women, and children as they sought to consolidate their political authority, reforge ruptured kinship ties, and advance their material conditions. Palavers, petitions, Islamic law, and natural law were all a part of Sierra Leoneans’ intellectual repertoire, collectively constituting a vast and varied corpus of thought that deepens our grasp of the political imaginaries of diverse Black communities, whose lives were situated at the intersection of the era of abolition and Age of Revolution.

Moreover, I stress the salience of flight as a political strategy for African and Afro-descendant communities. While Freetown symbolized a place of refuge from chattel slavery, indentured servitude, and internal processes of slavery in Africa, the colony also constituted a prison, with white and Black settlers implementing de facto slavery, apprenticeship, and other forms of forced labor. The prevalence of Maroon settlements throughout the Upper Guinea Coast, as well as the Royal Navy’s attempts to suppress American, French, and Cuban slave traders, further highlight the uneven terrain of freedom across Sierra Leone and the wider Black Atlantic.