A Kick in the Belly. Stella Dadzie
doing it. The Captain accordingly sent Mr — with them to a distance … of some miles from the ship. The two young women were … brought down, but under the pretence of seeing a relation at Suggery Bay to the windward of Cape Mount. When they had been enticed under this pretence to the water’s edge, they were ordered to be swum off on board the (ship’s) boat in a very heavy surf, each of the women between two men. When they were put on board the ship they were treacherously sold for slaves.’20
Few accounts have survived by those on the receiving end of such trickery, and none of them by women. Abu-Bakr al-Siddiq, born in 1790 in Timbuktu, was one of a literate minority who could record the details of his capture in writing, so he speaks for the silenced, both male and female alike. His captors, he said,
tore off my clothes, bound me with ropes, gave me a heavy load to carry. They sold me to the Christians and I was bought by a certain captain of a ship at that time. He sent me to a boat, and delivered me over to one of his sailors. The boat immediately pushed off and I was carried on board of the ship. We continued on board ship, at sea, for three months and then came on shore in the land of Jamaica. This was the beginning of my slavery until this day. I tasted the bitterness of slavery from them, and its oppressiveness!21
Captives who were not taken directly on board could be confined in the coastal forts or ‘barracoons’ for months at a time. Elmina bears witness to the many thousands who languished in filthy, overcrowded holding cells or slave pens until loaded onto ships that, if they survived the journey, would transport them to the Americas. The dehumanising process began long before embarkation. Yet despite the terrifying consequences, there is evidence that women played an active part in barracoon insurrections during the long months spent awaiting embarkation. Women were almost certainly among those who attempted a rebellion on Bence Island, ‘armed only with [their] irons and chains’.22 They also resisted in other ways, as the solitary cannonball in Elmina Castle bears witness.
Keeping in mind the evocative images of the coffle line and the barracoons, it’s worth remembering that by no means all African women who encountered European men did so in shackles. In the coastal fortresses and trading posts, despite phenomenally high mortality rates, some Europeans survived disease, foreign bombardment, political intrigue or the effects of excessive alcohol consumption long enough to form intimate relationships with local women. In fact, the promise of copious sex, typically with young girls, was probably one of the attractions used to lure them overseas. At Cape Coast Castle, just up the coast from Elmina, it was common practice to supply newly arrived officers with an African ‘wench’ to serve as cook, maid and bed warmer.23 Similarly, in settlements around the estuary of the River Sierra Leone, it was said that ‘every man hath his whore’.24
Polygamous arrangements were commonplace, mimicking local practices. During a visit in 1694, Thomas Phillips, a ship’s captain, described the European habit of taking African mistresses as ‘a pleasant way of marrying, for they can turn them on and off and take others at pleasure’. This, he observed somewhat smugly, ‘makes (the women) very careful to humour their husbands, in washing their linen, cleaning their chambers &c, &c. and the charge of keeping them is little or nothing’.25 Some of these women may have been willing victims. Others – like the ‘Shanti beautee’, purchased for around £21 in equivalent goods when her male owner, the governor, died; or ‘DM’s lady’, who was ‘sent off the coast’ in similar circumstances – found that their favoured status offered them no guarantee of any long-term security.
Relationships with local women were typically casual or short-lived, though some clearly weren’t. Officers’ wills, letters and other surviving records suggest that marriages at Cape Coast Castle, while not recognised in British law, conformed largely to local customs by requiring payment of a dowry to the girl’s mother and a monthly allowance. This practice was not confined to the British. In his letters home, Paul Erdmann Isert, chief surgeon to the Danish in Christiansborg, Accra, from 1783 to 1786, declared that ‘one of the most peculiar customs here is the marriage of the Europeans to the daughters of the country’. He went on to describe how ‘a Black woman is paid one thaler monthly and a Mulatto woman two thaler monthly by their husbands, and … given clothing twice a year’. Not only was this payment for services rendered viewed as an entitlement, but when a woman found herself wedded to a ‘ne’er-do-well’, she had the right to complain. By way of recompense, her allowance would either be deducted at source from the man’s wages or his wages paid over to the woman in their entirety, for her to manage on his behalf.26
Isert also described how ‘the new husband can send his wife packing the next day if he feels like it’, implying that some European men were happy to exploit these arrangements to suit their own sexual appetite. Even so, it is clear that some of these relationships endured. At Cape Coast, Officer Miles arranged for monthly payments be made to his ‘Mulattoe Girl’ Jamah for over three years, possibly longer, from May 1776, suggesting more than a casual fling. Similarly, on his death in May 1795, Thomas Mitchell left his woman, Nance, the princely sum of twenty pounds, to be paid in gold dust, plus two gold rings ‘in consideration of her strict attention and attendance on me during the three years we have lived together’.
Occasionally – perhaps more often than was admitted – such unions led to genuine mutual affection. James Phipps, who was a governor of the castle early in the eighteenth century, is said to have implored his ‘mulatto’ wife, who bore him several children, to return with him to England. She refused the offer but allowed him to take their four children there to be educated. Another governor, Irishman Richard Brew, fathered seven children with the same woman before returning home in the 1790s.27 His contemporary, Dutchman Jan Neizer, having married a local woman called Aba, was apparently so content with his lot that he built her a grand house and named it ‘Harmonie’.
For some powerful local women, many of whom were slave owners or traders in their own right, political or commercial interests were probably a more pressing consideration than love and affection. The Queen of Winneba, who took the Royal African Company’s chief factor, Nicholas Buckeridge, as her lover, probably had more pragmatic motives. Further north, the formidable Senhora Doll, a member of the influential Ya Kumba family, was no doubt securing her interests, too, when she agreed to marry Thomas Corker of Falmouth, the company’s last factor. Known as ‘the Duchess of Sherbro’ by the European slave captains she entertained, she and her descendants went on to establish a small standing army of free Africans, maintaining control over a strategic stretch of land along the banks of the river Sherbro.28
Casting all African women as victims obscures the fact that relationships with European men, however short-lived or precarious, offered their concubines a degree of financial security that their wives back in Europe would have envied. Moreover, some women made a lucrative living from the trade. In the Bissagos Islands off Cape Verde, where an earlier preference for male captives had created a large female majority, women controlled most of the transactions. The children resulting from their liaisons with European men populated numerous offshore islands and coastal towns. Rarely acknowledged by the fathers, their Euro-African offspring would eventually become a trading force in their own right, known as caboceers. By straddling the cultural and linguistic divide between Europeans and Africans, both sons and daughters acquired increasing power and status, the latter often mentioned in surviving documents as wives, mistresses or favoured ‘wenches’.
One such woman was Betsy Heard, the daughter of a liaison between a Liverpool trader and a local woman. Schooled in England, she returned home to inherit her father’s trading assets and subsequently rose to prominence as a dealer in slaves along the banks of the River Bereira. By 1794, she had established a monopoly on trade in the area. As owner of the main wharf in Bereira, including a warehouse and several trading ships, she wielded sufficient influence to act as mediator in a long-standing dispute between the Sierra Leone Company and local chiefs, who are said to have regarded her as a queen.29
The patronage of chiefs and the mediation of caboceers would become vital to Europe’s traders, as the theft of Africa’s people became entrenched. Procuring and enslaving captive Africans could be a slow and laborious business, especially when competing with faster or better-stocked ships. Once the local market became flooded