Pawns and Family Members
The custom of keeping free individuals as pawns in slave ships and European forts for the duration of slave-trading transactions was a common practice during the era of the Atlantic slave trade.
In certain slave-trading ports in West Africa, such as Anomabu on the Gold Coast, European merchants provided Fante traders with “cloth, liquors, metal wares, beads, weapons, and other goods,” which they used to procure enslaved people in the interior. Meanwhile, these Fante agents also offered their own children to European traders, who kept these pawns as collateral either in the forts or aboard their ships, sometimes for several weeks or even months.71 Still, records of the Royal African Company, the English mercantile company that engaged in the trade of human beings in West Africa starting in 1660, reveal that in the late seventeenth century ship captains also provided European crew members as collateral to African traders.72 Likewise, as noted by the French officer Robert Durand during the voyage of the slave vessel Le Diligent, French slave merchants also offered hostages to local agents east of the Gold Coast.73 In West Central African ports, European agents also took African men, women, and children as pawns to secure the delivery of human cargo.74 On the ports of the Loango coast, north of the Congo River, observers at that time reported that local agents provided relatives as collateral to ship captains.75 When African agents failed to respect the terms of these commercial agreements, these pawns could be sold into bondage. To different extents, Atorkor’s story evokes several forms of enslavement, including pawnship and panyarring.Selling members of the same family was not a significant way to provide captives for the Atlantic slave trade. But there were exceptions. In Dahomey, because there was no consensus on who had the authority to choose the new king, periods of succession to the royal throne were marked by political instability, giving rise to plots involving the mothers and brothers of the aspirant successors.
When the new ruler was eventually selected, it was not uncommon that he punished the defeated competitors for the throne, as well as their supporters, by selling into slavery the members of the opposing factions to other neighboring regions or to the Americas.76 This was the fate of Na AgontimĂ©. She was one of the several wives of King Agonglo and putative mother of the future King Gezo, who reigned Dahomey between 1818 and 1858. AgontimĂ© may have participated in the conspiracy that led to the assassination of her husband, King Agonglo. After a long period of disputes, one of Agonglo’s sons, Adandozan, was enthroned. According to oral tradition, once made king, he avenged his father by selling into slavery all Dahomean subjects who allegedly took part in the plot that led to his father’s death. Among these individuals was Na AgontimĂ©, who was sold into slavery and sent to Brazil. Despite the lack of archival evidence, AgontimĂ© became a legendary figure in Brazil as the woman who probably introduced into the country the Vodun of Dahomey and founded the CandomblĂ© temple Casa das Minas in Maranhão.77Families also sold their own kin to pay debts and to get rid of undesired family members. These stories not only appear in written archival records but also remained alive in oral tradition. In the early nineteenth century, a Nupe man named Gouye, from Bida (present-day west-central Nigeria), a region also affected by the wars that led to the collapse of the Oyo Empire, was sold by his family and sent into slavery in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he was baptized as Sabino. After purchasing his freedom, Sabino took the last name of his owner, Vieyra, and returned to the Bight of Benin, settling in Ouidah with other former slave returnees. In the early 1990s, one of his descendants explained that Sabino’s brothers sold him to the slave merchants, probably because of a dispute related to the family’s inheritance.78 However, in 2005, a younger female member of the family told a slightly different story about her ancestor’s enslavement, which was quite comparable to Baquaqua’s biographical account.
According to her, Gouye was not an ordinary person but the son of a Nupe chief. By omitting any family dispute, she also explained how her ancestor was deceived by his Brazilian friends: “He came with his white horse to see the Brazilian ships that arrived at the coast, they became friends with him, and very gently they made him enter in the ship and the ship departed very gently and he left.”79 Although keeping the idea of treachery, and perhaps because she ignored the full story, this member of the Vieyra family embellished her ancestor’s enslavement story by suppressing all traces of violence.80 At the private level, these embellished accounts allow the descendants of enslaved individuals to cope with the inherited trauma of enslavement. But because these descendants of bondspeople very often still occupy positions of political and economic power in West African societies, when these accounts are disseminated in the public sphere, they are rather intended to conceal the embarrassment associated with the sale of family members into slavery, and also to diminish the role of those who benefited from the Atlantic slave trade. Still, selling relatives into slavery was also the result of the general disorder caused by the Atlantic slave trade. For example, the death of the head of the family usually provoked rivalries. On these occasions, as in the disputes for the throne in the royal families, disagreements related to the division of assets or quarrels regarding who would become the next chief of the family could easily result in selling to slave merchants kinfolk considered to be undesirable or perceived as competitors, even though most enslaved Africans were sold into slavery as the result of warfare and raids.Existing estimates show that nearly 5.7 million enslaved Africans boarded slave ships from the ports along the coast of West Central Africa, including the Loango coast.81 Of all regions of Atlantic Africa, this is the area that provided the largest number of captives to the Atlantic slave trade.
Most of them were transported to Brazil. But despite the centrality of West Central Africa, there is no published firsthand account by Africans who boarded in West Central African ports such as Luanda and Benguela.European agents rarely directly abducted men, women, and children. Yet, some isolated episodes are worth exploring. In 1767, British slavers captured Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin John, two members of one of the slave-trading ruling families of the Efik city-state Old Calabar (present-day Calabar), a major port on the Bight of Biafra (the coastal area from the Niger Delta to Cape Lopez) during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Historian Randy Sparks, who studied this case in great detail, has showed that the incident occurred in the context of persisting conflicts between British slave ship captains and opposing African agents in the neighboring ports of Old Town and New Town. The two princes who acted themselves as slave traders were invited to board the slave ship Duke of York, one of the seven vessels anchored in the river at Old Calabar, to mediate the conflict between the two parties. As a bloody battle emerged between the British slave traders and the agents of Old Town and New Town, the Robin Johns were made captives. Dragged to the hold of the Duke of York, they were sent into slavery in the British colony of Dominica along with other enslaved individuals who survived the massacre.82 Once in the West Indies, they were sold again to the North American British colony of Virginia, whence they eventually escaped to Britain and finally returned to West Africa.
Since their arrival in West Central Africa, Portuguese agents kept meddling in regional affairs. As late as the early nineteenth century in the hinterland of Benguela, Portuguese and Brazilian officers continued to organize wars, conduct raids, and kidnap people to meet the external demand for African captives. Despite the gradual prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade by various European and American nations starting in the early nineteenth century, the trade to Brazil, Cuba, and even the United States increased on the coasts of West Africa and West Central Africa, consequently amplifying the demand for enslaved people.
Between 1808 and 1862, following the abolition of the British slave trade, ships illegally transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas or other African destinations were intercepted mainly by the British Royal Navy. These apprehensions led to the emancipation of approximately 175,000 enslaved Africans of the total of 2.8 million transported during this period. These men and women went before courts that recorded their testimonies, creating registers providing information about how they were captured and enslaved.83 By 1850, in Sierra Leone, German missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle, who worked for the Church of Missionary Society, interviewed 179 formerly enslaved persons, who according to estimates were captured in their homelands between 1795 and 1847, then sold into slavery in Africa or the Americas.84 As in the previous century, most of these “liberated” Africans and also Koelle’s interviewees were enslaved through warfare. Still, several testimonies highlight stories of individuals who were kidnapped, traded by their relatives or superiors, or sold to pay debts contracted by family members, or who were enslaved through judicial process because of robbery or adultery. These cases illustrate that members of various African societies could temporarily give away relatives as collateral for a loan or credit, a practice known as pawnship. Although these arrangements were intended to be temporary, as the slave trade increased, a growing number of pawned persons could be simply sold into slavery, therefore breaking customary law.85