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Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah,THOUGHTS AND
SENTIMENTS ON THE EVIL OF SLAVERY Edited
with an introduction and notes by Vincent Carretta. Notes, app, bib,
xxxvi, 198pp UK. PENGUIN BOOKS USA, 0140447504 1999 PB GBP7.95 Born in present-day Ghana, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was
kidnapped at the age of thirteen and sold into slavery by his fellow Africans in
1770; he worked in the brutal plantation chain gangs of the West Indies before
being freed in England.
Equiano's Travels (Olaudah Equiano, Paul Edwards editor) London 1986
Walvin, James, An African's Life, The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797,Continuum, London and New York, 1998 and 2000.'Olaudah Equiano: Representation and Reality' - An International One-Day Conference, 22 March 2003 - Kingston University. Academic study of Olaudah Equiano has been energised in recent years by arguments asserting that some aspects of The Interesting Narrative (1789) may not represent Equiano's personal experience. In particular, the critics S.E. Ogude and Vincent Carretta have cast doubt over Equiano's account of his birth and upbringing in Africa, his kidnapping, and his experience of the Middle Passage. While Ogude's argument is based in textual analysis, Carretta's evidence emerges from archival work - yet both reach similar conclusions: that Equiano probably never visited Africa, and that the early parts of his Narrative are most likely rhetorical exercises, largely 'based on oral history and reading, rather than on personal experience'. As yet, Ogude and Carretta's findings have not been fully tested by the academy, nor have all the possible implications been explored. The many students and general readers of Equiano are invited to read the early Narrative as unproblematic, while professional critics and historians, even when reading the text as 'literary' or 'rhetorical', tend to accept that its underlying narrative reflects Equiano's actual childhood experience. This conference invites scholars to assess the state of Equiano studies after Ogude and Carretta's essays, and to point the way for further research. Contributions from all disciplines are welcome, as are contributors with all points of view. In addition to reading Equiano's work in the light of Ogude and Carretta, we hope also to find room for more general discussion of the historical, interpretative, biographical, rhetorical, and literary issues arising from our reading of The Interesting Narrative.
Montejo, Estaban Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, World Publishing Co. (Cuban Slave describes life on a large sugar estate)
Sancho, Ignatius, The letters of the late Sancho 1782 ed P. Edwards 1968Haenger, Peter, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast, Towards an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa, Edited by J.J.Shaffer and Paul E.Lovejoy, Translated from the German by Christina Handford, Introduction by Paul E.Lovejoy, Basel (P.Schlettwein Publishing), 2000, 213p., ill., index. ISBN 3-908193-04-4 "Peter Haenger has used the rich and textured source material contained in the Basel Mission Archives to penetrate the curtain of cultural specificity that often hides the complex ways in which people interacted beyond the gaze of outsides. Haenger lets the life histories of individuals - missionaries, converts, slaves, pawns, slave owners, males and females - reveal the ways in which slavery and debt bondage were interwoven into the fabric of African society on the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century, and how people tried to determine the pattern of social interaction through the uncertain and changing times of the precolonial and early colonial eras." Paul E.Lovejoy
Anonymous Louisiana Slaves Regain Identity
By David Firestone <fstone@nytimes.com>
New York Times July 30, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/073000la-slaves.html
NEW ORLEANS -- From the darkness of
history they emerge out
of a silver spinning disc: two black
slaves sold by a sugar
plantation owner named Levi Foster on
Feb. 11, 1818, to his
in-laws. The first slave, named Kit, was
28 years old, and
sold for $975. The other, named Alick,
was 9, and was
possibly Kit's son. He was sold for $400.
For nearly two centuries, the names of
those two slaves were
lost in time, with tens of thousands of
others who worked
the sugar and cotton fields of Louisiana
and made fortunes
for their owners. Their identities,
scratched with quill
pens on transaction records of human
property, have moldered
in the basements of parish courthouses
for more than 150
years, virtually untouched by researchers
who were usually
put off by the difficult French and
Spanish script.
Black families often lacked the resources
for the extensive
detective work required to find their
original African
forebears, and many white families simply
did not want to
know about slaveholding ancestors. Levi
Foster, in fact,
is the great-great-grandfather of Gov.
Mike Foster of
Louisiana, who said recently on a radio
program that it
would be "news to me" if anyone
in his family had owned
slaves.
Now, however, the identities and
backgrounds of Louisiana
slaves are beginning to emerge from
centuries of anonymity,
infusing property once sold like
livestock with names like
Kit and Alick. Thanks to years of
painstaking work by a
71-year-old historian who lives in a
small house here
surrounded by plantain trees, an enormous
amount of
information is coming to light about the
captives who
were brought to Louisiana in the 18th and
19th centuries.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a New Orleans
native who has devoted
much of her life to the study of slavery,
spent 15 years
in the courthouses of Louisiana, as well
as in archives
in Spain, France and Texas, seeking all
records of slave
transactions and entering them into
laptop computers. Aided
by several research assistants, she
amassed computerized
records on more than 100,000 slaves --
the largest collection
of individual slave information ever
assembled -- and in
March the Louisiana State University
Press published the
documents as a searchable database on a
CD-ROM.
The disc has amazed historians of slavery
and genealogists
with the breadth of its information about
the slaves.
Because the French and Spanish
proprietors of Louisiana kept
far more detailed records than their
British counterparts at
slave ports on the Atlantic coast, the
records show not only
the names of the slaves, but also their
birthplaces in
Africa, their skills, their health, and
in many cases a
description of their personality and
degree of rebel-
liousness. For historians who thought
such information was
lost or could never be collected and
analyzed, the database
is a once-unimaginable prize.
"This is groundbreaking work,"
said Ibrahim K. Sundiata,
chairman of the history department at
Howard University
and a scholar of African history.
"Americans have tended to
think of the slaves as simply being
Africans, but now we can
begin to understand where these Africans
came from and who
they were. For the first time, this takes
us beyond the
guestimates, and it's very
exciting."
It also has a great deal of unpublished
information about
who owned the slaves, which many
prominent white families
have never been particularly eager to
research. Marsanne
Golsby, a spokeswoman for Governor
Foster, said he learned
about his family's ownership of slaves
after The New York
Times looked up his ancestors on the disc
and found
transactions involving eight slaves,
three of them children.
Unrelated documents on file in the Tulane
University library
show that his great-grandfather, Thomas
J. Foster, owned
50 slaves in 1860, three years before
emancipation. (The
governor was not particularly happy about
the disclosure;
Ms. Golsby said the newspaper should not
have singled out
his family from the many others that
owned slaves.)
Dr. Hall's database is the latest example
of a recent
explosion of popular and scholarly
interest in the African
diaspora, the scattering of African
people after they left
or were removed from their home
continent. The field has
grown in part because of the availability
of computerized
tools that make research a less tedious
task than tracking
down crumbling documents, often in
foreign languages.
Another CD-ROM, compiled at Harvard
University and published
in December by Cambridge University
Press, documented more
than 27,000 trans-Atlantic slave ship
voyages, describing
their human cargo, their points of origin
and destination,
and the outcome of the voyages. A popular
Web site,
<http://www.afrigeneas.com>, has collected and
published
large amounts of slave data and
encourages those tracing
their roots to share their information
with others on the
Internet. Genetic researchers have been
assembling a DNA
database that may someday allow
African-Americans to trace
their origins to specific regions in
Africa.
Tony Burroughs, an African-American
genealogist who lectures
widely on the subject, said the Louisiana
database is as
significant as the publication of Alex
Haley's "Roots" in
1976, in part because the demand is even
greater now for
accessible information. It also provides
hope to those who
believed they could never trace their
origins back more than
a few generations.
"We've got all these baby boomers
now who want to
learn about their families' past, and
they want to use a
computer," said Mr. Burroughs, who
teaches genealogy at
Chicago State University and was a
consultant on the PBS
"Ancestors" series. "They
can't go around and find all
the old documents and do the
translations, but now we're
starting to get these amazing databases
like Gwen Hall's,
and people can use them. If you have
ancestors from
Louisiana, it's like a treasure
chest."
Dr. Hall's odyssey through the whispered
history of her
state shows how daunting such research
can be. She had
taught Caribbean and African-Latin
history for many years at
Rutgers University in New Jersey when she
began researching
a book in 1984on the development of
Creole culture in
Louisiana. In the courthouse at New
Roads, La., the seat of
Pointe Coupee Parish, she discovered a
cache of documents
set down by French-speaking notaries in
the 1770's that
showed the ethnicity of hundreds of
slaves.
"I was astounded at how much
information there was in the
records," said Dr. Hall, whose
eventual book "Africans in
Colonial Louisiana: The Development of
Afro-Creole Culture
in the 18th Century," on the
Louisiana Africans won several
history prizes in 1992. "In the
English colonies, there was
almost no information like this. The
French just seemed more
interested in the origins of people, who
they were and where
they came from. Maybe it's because they
had a much longer
history of slave trading posts in
Africa."
After deciding to pursue the potential of
such records
around Louisiana, she won a research
grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and began a
lengthy trek
through every courthouse and archives
depot in the state,
where slave transactions were recorded as
carefully as
exchanges of real estate.
Clerks would frequently tell her that the
documents were
unusable because they were in French or
Spanish, although
she is fluent in both languages. Often,
she and her
assistants would find old record books on
a shelf next to a
heater, or in a damp basement. In one
courthouse, she said,
someone had tried to burn the records,
apparently afraid
they would expose a black family that had
been passing for
white for several generations.
The years of staring at documents and
computer screens took
a toll on Dr. Hall's eyesight, which
deteriorated to the
point that she could barely make out
black ink on a white
page. A pair of specially designed
eyeglasses has since
improved her ability to see contrasting
colors.
She also had to familiarize herself with
the design of
computer databases, working to make the
collection of
information as flexible as possible to
answer any
conceivable question a researcher might
ask. Using the
disc requires a separate database program
but with a little
experience it is possible to enter a
first or last name and
find out a great deal about a matching
slave or owner.
The disc is available from major Internet
book sellers
for $45.
An entry for a slave named Hector is
typical: Born in the
Congo, he was sold by St. Pierre Etier on
Jan. 1, 1797, for
400 piastre gourdes (about $700) to
Francois Prevost, in St.
Martin Parish. But the bill of sale went
on to note that
Hector was a chronic runaway who was at
large at the time of
sale. The buyer "will be responsible
for his care if he is
found and is suffering from any illnesses
or wounds," the
document says in French.
Many of the records were originally
produced for trials
or other legal actions regarding slaves.
One describes an
accusation against two slaves, Pierrot,
of the Bamana ethnic
group from Senegambia, and Nicolas, a
Louisiana Creole, for
killing and eating their owner's cow in
1764 in the New
Orleans region. Both were publicly
flogged.
"Finally we're going to be able to
recover these workers as
people with pasts, with names and
families," said Michael
Gomez, a professor of history at New York
University and
a leader of the growing movement to study
the African
diaspora. "These records humanize
people who were
thought of as a kind of undifferentiated
mass."
Beyond the light that the collection has
strewn on
individuals, it has also illuminated many
larger cultural
questions. Dr. Hall and other experts in
the field say the
data have conclusively proved that
two-thirds of African
captives brought to Louisiana in the
early part of the slave
trade, before 1730, were from the
Senegambia area of West
Africa, unlike other ethnic groups that
went to the East
Coast. The culture they brought with them
-- music,
language, food, folklore -- became the
foundation of
Louisiana's distinctive Creole culture, a
way of life for
both whites and blacks for hundreds of
years to this day.
"Even the Uncle Remus stories were
originally Wolof
folktales which were first written down
in Louisiana,"
Dr. Hall said, referring to one of the
Senegambian ethnic
groups. "For so long there was this
tendency, even in the
most prestigious academic circles, to see
Africans as an
abstraction, coming from a simple single
place. But now
we're starting to see it as a place of
great complexity, and
the different ethnicities greatly
affected the development
of African-American culture."
Dr. Hall, who is white, has never
hesitated to buck academic
or social conventions. The daughter of
Herman Midlo, a labor
and civil rights lawyer in New Orleans
who defended many
black clients in the 1930's and 40's when
other white
lawyers would not, she became radicalized
as a young woman
by the segregation she had observed
growing up. After a
brief flirtation with the Communist Party
in the 1950's,
she married Harry Haywood, an outspoken
black Communist,
who died in 1985.
She championed the study of African
ethnicities at a time
when mainstream scholarly opinion was not
interested, and
says she is delighted that the field has
finally caught up.
"I'm hoping this database will help
smooth the path for
others to make Africans concrete as human
beings," she said.
"Some day, people will be asking
this database questions
that I can't even imagine right
now."
Copyright (c) 2000 New York Times
Company. All Rights Reserved.
Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920 [SGML viewer]