Betrayed and Sold
Treachery is also described as one of the ways of capturing people to be sold into slavery. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw narrates how he was enslaved in Borno (modern Nigeria) in the 1720s, when he was about fifteen years old.
His narrative is unclear on whether he was a victim of slave traders’ treacherous conduct or whether his family handed him over as a pawn to pay a debt. According to Gronniosaw, when he became a young man and started experiencing physical and emotional disturbances, his parents agreed to send him to the Gold Coast with a merchant of ivory who, in his own words, “expressed vast concern for me, and said, if my parents would part with me for a little while, and let him take me home with him, it would be of more service to me than any thing they could do for me.”61 Omitting any references to slave ships, the merchant attracted Gronniosaw by telling him he would “see houses with wings to them walk upon the water, and should also see the white folks.”62 After a long trip by land, once the young captive reached the Gold Coast, he was sold into slavery to a captain of a Dutch slave ship.The enslavement of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, the only known enslaved African brought to Brazil whose written narrative was published, is also associated with treachery. Baquaqua was born in Djougou (northwest of Ouidah in the modern-day Republic of Benin) between 1820 and 1830, and in approximately 1844, he was captured, sold, and sent into slavery to Recife, Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil, where he may have landed in 1845.63 In his biography, published in 1854, he described the internal conflicts that provoked wars in his homeland and how captives were sold to the Atlantic slave trade: “The kings are continually quarreling, which quarrels lead to war.... When a king dies, there is no regular successor, but a great many rivals for the kingdom spring up, and he who can achieve his object by power and strength, becomes the succeeding king, thus war settles the question....
Slavery is also another fruitful source of war, the prisoners being sold for slaves.”64Baquaqua’s account confirms that among royal families, during the period of succession, it was not uncommon to sell members of opposing factions into slavery. Similar to Equiano’s narrative, Baquaqua narrated his enslavement as the result of the deceitful behavior of a group of fake admirers, who encouraged him to drink a copious amount of an alcoholic beverage and managed to lead him to a house in a neighboring village where they said a king lived. The following morning, he realized he had been betrayed and sold into slavery. However, in an earlier account of 1847, Baquaqua told that he was “taken captive when a child, while playing at some distance from his mother’s door.” Then later, in another version, he stated he was kidnapped “while playing truant from school.”65 As Baquaqua’s story indicates, enslavement as the result of betrayal is common in slave narratives, travelogues, oral tradition, and historical records, and usually involves alcohol, which was a major commodity with which European traders purchased enslaved Africans.66
In West Africa, oral traditions also evoke the use of treachery to enslave men, women, and children. Traditions passed down through various generations and recorded by historians Sandra Greene and Anne C. Bailey each report a horrifying episode that occurred at the Anlo village of Atorkor in southeast Gold Coast in 1856. According to the story, the crews of a group of European slave ships anchored at the shore, supposedly attracted by the local music, and invited a group of drummers to come aboard one of the ships to play for them. The musicians accepted the invitation and boarded the vessel, followed by women and children. To award and celebrate the performance, the European crew gave their African musicians a great amount of alcohol, and the guests were so intoxicated that they failed to notice that the ship was sailing away.67 Other informants provided Bailey different versions of the same story.
In one version, a local chief suggests that the conflict was caused because Atorkor’s agents were indebted to Europeans from whom they bought tobacco.68 Even though Europeans leading a large group of Africans to inadvertently embark on a slave ship and taking them away is rather implausible, Atorkor’s story is an expression of the collective memory of the Atlantic slave trade. More probably this story is an amalgamation of several episodes. As we have seen, historical records clearly show that as the Atlantic slave trade increased over the eighteenth century, individuals and entire communities living along the coast feared being captured and sold to slave traders. Although the account suggests that Atorkor’s residents were unaware of the dangers of being captured by European enslavers, evidence clearly shows previous cases of Anlo individuals being kidnapped and sold into slavery.69 Hence, by the mid-nineteenth century, in the final years of the Atlantic slave trade, it would be rather unlikely to find a coastal community on the Gold Coast unaware of these risks. More probably what happened in Atorkor was an episode of panyarring, an organized action targeting “a family, kin group, or community, which was held collectively responsible for the debt, crime, or violation.”70 In some cases, individuals seized through panyarring could also end being sold in the Atlantic slave trade market, which may explain why Anlo inhabitants remembered this traumatic story probably as a cautionary tale evoking episodes in which local people were deceived and sold into slavery.