Alas, Alas, Kongo": A Social History of Indentured African Immigration Into Jamaica, 1841-1865

By Monica Schuler

After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy recaptured in the Atlantic some 160,000 persons exported from Africa as slaves by other colonial powers (many destined for Cuba and Brazil) and took them to Sierra Leone or to St. Helena. Officials from several West Indian islands tried to induce some of these ‘recaptives’ to immigrate to the West Indies as indentured laborers. Monica Schuler’s “ Alas, Alas, Kongo” is a social history which focuses on the approximately eight thousand West Africans (primarily Yoruba, and also Igbo, Kalabari, Nupe, Temne, Mende, and Mandinka) and Central Africans [Kongo, Nsundi, Yaka, Ambaka, Bobangi (Bayanzi), and Ndongo] who came to Jamaica as indentured labourers.

“It was already clear that official policymakers were more concerned with rescuing West Indian planters and investors from ruin than with rescuing Africans from enslavement, and these provisions, mere opinion in 1841, eventually became law. The transformation of opinion into law required only that British policymakers be able to point out the continued rescue of slaves depended upon the “liberated” slaved themselves rescuing planters from financial ruin. The first rescue could be effected with some speed; the second, planters insisted, required a guaranteed number of years of cheap labor under indenture. When recruitment of liberated Africans did not work out as planters hoped, they turned to recaptives as a second source of labor.

West Indian planters aimed their first recruiting efforts at Sierra Leone and, a year later, at another British station for captured slaves – the island of St. Helena. The planters had high hopes of success in Sierra Leone, for the settlement upon which Alexander Barclay’s enthusiasm was about to burst was a British Colony by law and by virtue of the small body of British and British West Indian administrators and European missionaries who claimed to direct its life. But in fact, outside the precincts of Freetown, economic and administrative hub of the colony, Sierra Leone was an African country – African in its wattle-and-daub houses, its dress, its customs, and, most important, its social and political realities. The late eighteenth-century British philanthropist-founders of the colony, in a measure of self-congratulation, had called Sierra Leone the “Province of Freedom,” but the liberated Africans – who outnumbered the original Nova Scotian and Maroon settlers – had transformed the colony into their own province of freedom, insisting stubbornly that British paternalism encroach as little as possible on their political, social, and economic conventions. Their independent attitude did not bode will for the emigration scheme.” (Page 5)

“The three colonies continued to engage in stiff competition for emigrants, and recruiting for Jamaica was further complicated by activities of an independent agency established by the West India Emigration Society of London. For the first year it operated alongside, but independent of, the official Jamaica agency. Between September and December, 1841, six ships sailed for Jamaica, none of them full.

The first years emigrants, primarily from Freetown and Bathurst, were predominantly respectable, able bodied, middle aged, literate, Christian men; they were skilled carpenters, masons, stonecutters, and farmers. A number of the European community’s most valued domestic servants also emigrated. Emigrants from Waterloo and surrounding villages tended to be less European-influenced than those from Bathurst and Freetown. Ranging in age from twenty-five to forty, most were farmers. Women, reluctant to emigrate to strange countries, worried about crossing the salt water and feared stories they heard about burning seas and slavery. Thus many married men traveled without their wives, and the regulation requiring that one-third of every group of passengers be female proved unenforceable and just as unrealistic as Barclay had predicated.

What motivated those who emigrated? “Employment and good payment,” according to some. A few hoped to escape debts and family responsibilities. Without question, most were encouraged by the belief, unsupported by law until 1844, that emigrants would be repatriated after a few years in the West Indies. A passion for Africa as the homeland is a theme that unites three decades of the emigration scheme and still animates the memories of these immigrants’ Jamaican decedents. Their delegates’ safe return from Trinidad, Guiana, and Jamaica, and regular communications between Sierra Leone and the West Indies became the security that many demanded before registering with the emigration agencies. Even the women declared that such security would dispel their fears.” (Page 18)

Involuntary Emigration: Sierra Leone

“The Jamaica agent, dismayed to find Sierra Leonians unresponsive to recruiting efforts to for Glen Huntley early in 1843, turned instead to the liberated African schools. Trinidad and two British Guianese provinces Demerara and Berbice followed suit, and thus began the first steps toward involuntary emigration which culminated in the forced transportation of recaptives.

The Sierra Leone government regarded the schools as a partial solution to the problem of what to do with orphans landed from the slave ships. Such children under the age of thirteen, and after 1844 under the age of twelve, were entitled to from one to four years of education at institutions separate from those attended by Creole children born in the colony of liberated African parents. Children from nine to thirteen could, in 1841, be apprenticed to “respectable” families in whose service they might learn a trade or, in the case of girls, where they could be protected until they married. In 1844 the British government ordered that all children over the age of twelve be given a choice on enlistment, emigration, or self-support in Sierra Leone, but Governor Fergusson retained the apprenticeship system as a substitute for these callous alternatives. Schools thus became way stations where children too young to be apprenticed could be housed and initiated into “regular habits” preparatory to service in liberated African, Maroon, settler, or European households.

No wonder emigration recruiters eagerly sought liberated African school children. W.G Terry, an official who had at first opposed child emigration, accurately summed up the British view of the schools when in 1844 he expressed the hope that the future would bring “a never-ceasing flow of young emigrants from these wholesome nurseries of laborers, and the great advantage of these school-farms can then be justly appreciated. Few bothered to ask whether children deemed too young for apprenticeship might not also be too young to emigrate.” (Page 23-24)

Involuntary Emigration: St. Helena

“The same international situation that made Sierra Leone the recipient of large numbers of captured Africans produced a similar result for the island of St. Helena which, like the Cape of Good Hope, had a Vice-Admiralty Court for the trail of slavers captured south of the equator. But unlike Sierra Leone, St. Helena could not be considered a permanent home for large numbers of liberated Africans. The island, formerly a way station for ships of the East India Company, experienced a sharp economic decline after it passed to Crown Control in 1834, and the establishment of a Vice-Admiralty Court in 1840 and the resultant presence of a naval squadron and the Liberated African establishment increased employment and prosperity only temporarily, both ceasing when the squadron departed in 1864.

The St. Helena community was able or willing to absorb only a small number of Africans as domestic servants. A few hundred were sent to Cape Colony, and the rest-several thousand-were sent to the West Indies and British Guiana between 1842 and 1867. Twenty-seven voyages from St. Helena to Jamaica occurred in this period. Three vessels sailed in 1842, one in 1844, three each in 1846 and 1848, four in 1851, one each in 1860 and 1861, six in 1862, and two in 1863. A final eleven Africans from St. Helena arrived in Jamaica in 1867. In later years many emigrant ships, en route from India to Jamaica with Indian emigrants, called at St. Helena to embark relatively small numbers of recaptured Africans from a declining slave trade.

The resettlement of Africans outside of St. Helena may have been necessary, but it was not as voluntary an emigration as British authorities insisted. When the first experimental migrant labor recruiting took place in 1842, there were about three thousand Africans at the two liberated African depots, Lemon Valley (for women, girls, and married couples) and Rupert’s Valley (for men and boys). Ships’ officers found it difficult to persuade any of them to leave. The first Trinidad recruiters, for instance, received an unqualified “no” from the males at Rupert’s Valley, and the recruiters’ visit to Lemon Valley sent the inhabitants rushing up the nearby mountain in a panic. A second visit was only slightly more productive – just a few married couples, their children, and friends could be persuaded to emigrate. Back at Rupert’s Valley some men changed their minds, and this swayed others. The powerful imperative of kinship, shipmate, and internment camp bonds may have been at work here for, according to a ship’s surgeon, previously reluctant men became as anxious to go as they had been to stay. “the sick, the lame and the blind all wishing and pushing forward to be chosen.” Some “jumped about and protested against being left behind, some even crying to accompany their fellows and relatives…”

The behavior of these same people as the ship neared Trinidad suggests that they did not understand the purpose of their emigration; only the obvious impossibility of remaining indefinitely in the depots; makeshift tents had persuaded them to leave. As the ship made its way to Port-of-Spain, everyone began to cry and scream from apparent fear of being eaten on shore, and no one could calm them. An old fear of European sorcery, that is, anti-social behavior, expressed during centuries of the Atlantic slave trade as a fear of being eaten by Europeans, was still very much alive and with good reason.

The years from 1846 to 1850 were for St. Helena, as for Sierra Leone, a period of heavily influx of recaptive Africans, and between 1846 and 1851 more than two thousand Africans left the island for Jamaica. Again, as with recaptive Africans from Sierra Leone, mortality on ships sailing from St. Helena reached shocking levels in 1848 and 1849, the busiest years of capture and emigration, and then declined in the fifties and sixties. The tragedy of the St. Helena chapter of slave capture and emigration is that remaining on the island would not have stayed the high morality. Appalling conditions at Rupert’s Valley in the late 1840s – lack of any toilet facilities but the open ground between the dispensary and hospital; contaminated water; attacks by rats on the dying and dead; amebic dysentery, eye infections, smallpox, scabies, malaria, venereal disease, severe malnutrition and its complications – meant that the liberated African depot was nothing more than a death trap for the living skeletons who had survived enslavement and capture at sea.” (Page 27-28)