Akeiso, or Florence Hall, as she was renamed in Jamaica, was born in Igboland, in today’s southeastern Nigeria.

Her memories of West Africa were scant, after many years of captivity in the Americas: “I can scarcely remember beyond that I was still unclothed, sometimes employed in attending our people, while engaged in Fishing, at other times guarding the fowls and chickens from Hawks, or more frequently at play with other children.” Still, she had a few recollections of that tragic evening of her childhood: “While at a distance from our houses a party of the enemy came around and drove us, into an enclosed place, and immediately secured us—our hands were tied—while in vain our cries and screams were raised, but unheard, if heard, unattended.”¹ She and other members of her community were transported to the coast to be sold into slavery.

Documentary films, motion pictures, and television series have misleadingly portrayed the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade by featuring Europeans randomly catching men, women, and children along the coasts of Africa.² What these popular narratives omit is how these Africans were actually captured in the coastal areas and the hinterlands of West Africa, West Central Africa, and Southeast Africa. In this chapter, I examine the forms such enslavement took in reality, and I show how they evolved over time and varied across regions during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Exploring how free men, women, and children were captured on the African continent to be sold in the Americas, I argue that in all its forms, enslavement always involved violence. Though warfare was the most common method to capture large numbers of people, other actions such as raids, banditry, and kidnapping were also widespread. Enslavement could also occur as a result of religious punishments and sentences associated with crimes such as theft, adultery, robbery, and homicide.

In correspondence and other written and visual accounts, formerly enslaved individuals described how they were captured on the coast or in the hinterland of Atlantic Africa.

Seeking to emphasize the lived experiences of men, women, and children who were captured and enslaved is not without its challenges. Most existing published narratives were produced by freedmen who were enslaved in West Africa and transported to British North America and the West Indies. Hence, such accounts may not represent the experiences of the majority of enslaved Africans who were captured in West Central Africa and transported to South America, especially Brazil. Compared with the various enslaved men transported to the British colonies in the Americas who authored slave narratives, just one enslaved African brought to Brazil published a slave narrative, and in it he dedicates only a few pages to his ordeal in Brazilian territory.³ Similarly, although enslaved women born in the West Indies and North America left published slave narratives, no African-born enslaved woman published an autobiography narrating her experience of enslavement on the African continent. In the pages that follow, then, I seek to fill these gaps by considering the experiences of these neglected figures by combining fragments of their voices from existing written archival documents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.