Children of Hope. Sandra Rowoldt Shell
outcomes—was ignited deep within me there in the Cory Library over forty years ago.
However, my passion was tempered by pragmatism and life circumstances that intervened. At the time, I was busy with my part-time professional studies at Rhodes as well as working at the Cory Library. In addition, I was a social science graduate without a history major. It took years to acquire the essential grounding in history master’s-level study, first at Rhodes and later at the University of Cape Town, always driven by that unquenchable flame.
What I could do immediately was to make photocopies of the children’s narratives to take home. Many years later, I showed them to my husband, the late Robert Shell, a leading historian of Cape slavery. As one of the few cliometricians in the history profession, he was proficient in the use of quantitative methodology. Robert read the stories through with gathering enthusiasm. He pointed out that these stories, besides being a set of rare individual mini-biographies of slave children, were clearly the result of consistent interviewing and lent themselves readily to systematic analysis. He told me that if I encoded these narratives, translating them into numbers, the children’s stories would allow for, at the very least, an opportunity to glimpse trends in the patterns of slavery and the slave trade in the Horn of Africa—in addition to enabling the individual children to tell their own stories. Theirs were authentic African voices relating their first-passage experiences within weeks of their liberation.
Analysis at a group level meant mastering the methodology of quantitative history (cliometry). Further, the nature of the documents suggested the development of a cohort-based, longitudinal prosopography, based on the core documentation of the Oromo children’s own first-passage accounts. While biography is familiar as a tool by which we examine the lives of individuals, prosopography is a collection of biographies that allows for the study of groups of people through systematic analysis of their collective characteristics. Prosopography hands the historian a tool with which to discover common attributes within a group as well as to highlight any variation. From that variation, historical knowledge is generated.
In looking at the history of prosopography, we discern three distinct phases. In the first phase, prosopographers focused on studies of elites, mostly in the classical era, producing static, paper-based texts in the precomputer era. Almost without exception, the earliest applications of prosopography were within the context of studies of classical, Byzantine, and medieval nobility.4 In 1929, Lewis Namier, an influential historian, launched his lifelong prosopography of eighteenth-century British parliamentarians. His work dominated British historiography during the 1930s.5 In response, the British Parliament commissioned the Houses of Parliament Trust, which, in 1951 and under Namier’s oversight, began the monumental project of documenting the biographies of all British members of Parliament.
Static text prosopographies were not the preserve of the precomputer era alone. In 2005, Ghada Osman, an Arabic scholar and linguist, published a rare slave prosopography—a bottom-up rather than top-down study—examining the position of foreign slaves in Mecca and Medina during the sixth century.6 To do this, the author looked at Christian slaves used as “teachers” of the Prophet and slaves used as builders of the Ka’aba, as well as a selection of Byzantine, Abyssinian, Egyptian, Persian, and Mesopotamian slaves in Mecca and Medina during the same period. She listed the names of slaves and as much biographical information as she was able to glean from the available sources.
Prosopographers of the second phase also engaged in top-down studies of elites but had moved into the age of the mainframe computer. Lawrence Stone, an influential historian of the Tudor period, kept the spotlight on elites in 1966 when he published his studies of the British aristocracy.7 In 1971, Stone defined prosopography as “the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives.”8 Stone used the mainframe computer to process machine-readable texts so that he could maximize the application of the techniques of prosopography.9 However, Stone conducted his study nine years before the advent of the personal computer in 1980. Stone had to query or process everything in terms of the hierarchy of operators and programmers who were largely insensitive to the needs of the historian. These interlocutors came between Stone and his data.10 Nevertheless, scholars acknowledge Stone as the pioneer of modern prosopography in the premodern era, although he never used the computer again.
In 1981, Bruce M. Haight, using an IBM 134, contributed one of the few African prosopographies with his study of the rulers of the Gonja of West Africa.11 Four years later, in 1985, he and William R. Pfeiffer II, the president of a Michigan-based computer service bureau, published a methodological account of their “pilot study in the use of the computer to handle information for the writing of African oral history.”12 The mainframe computer enabled them to test hypotheses that would have been too complex and impractical to test manually.
The third and present phase began with the advent of the personal computer in 1980. This not only democratized the approach to prosopography but coincided with the inclusion of bottom-up analyses, which, under the influence of the Annales school, were becoming popular. A persistent feature of prosopography was that it remained a methodology applied largely to top-down studies of society. However, following the introduction of the personal computer, prosopographers used the collective biography approach with great effect for bottom-up as well as top-down analyses. For example, Katharine Keats-Rohan, a pioneer prosopographer, lauded the technological advances, pointing out the suitability of the relational database to prosopographical research.13 Her work, widely regarded as seminal in the field of modern prosopography, and her prosopography portal resource site,14 have provided an invaluable stimulus to such research. Since the 1990s, with the escalating sophistication and accessibility of technology and the ever-increasing capabilities of the PC, the popularity of historical quantitative methodology—including prosopography—has experienced a flourishing resurgence.
While the children’s narratives provided the core set of unique documents distinguishing this episode of postemancipation slavery, the Royal Navy (which liberated this group of children in the Red Sea) kept excellent records of the events, and fortunately the Scottish missionaries at the Keith-Falconer Mission in Sheikh Othman maintained full records. The prosopography also links with information gleaned from various external sources, including school records, the responses to a repatriation poll taken by the Lovedale Institution in 1903, death registers, street directories, census data, official documentation, and the personal correspondence of the children themselves. Such documents transformed the core prosopography from a synchronic to a longitudinal or diachronic database.15
The use of the prosopographical technique allows for a flexible analysis that goes far beyond anecdotal methods. Encoding the narratives enables the researcher to move from the realms of narrative, social history to an empirical, systematic analysis and creates the potential for generating new insights into one of the least researched areas of African slavery: the first passage.16 Robert was right: this prosopographic technique yielded a profoundly different and more complex picture of the children’s first passage, which emerged as a far longer, more intricate, and more varied ordeal than generally recognized.
Exploring the historiography of the slave trade and slavery in the Horn of Africa region, I soon discovered for myself the scarcity of personal slave accounts of that “first passage” (i.e., contemporary accounts of captives’ experiences from capture to the coast). As sources in the historiography of slavery and the slave trade, a large clutch of contemporary and systematic child slave narratives such as this is virtually unknown.17
Three discrete traditions impinge on this book: first, the study of the slave trade, namely the first and middle passages, which includes the phenomenon of prize slaves;18 second, the study of missions in the nineteenth century; and third, the study of the histories of Ethiopia and of the Oromo people.
In the course of exploring slavery and the slave trade, I have long been curious about the identity and experiences of the slaves themselves: Who were they? What was their status within their own societies? What were their lives like? How and why and by whom were they enslaved? In the majority of accounts of the slave trade, answers to these questions do not emerge, simply because of the dearth of information