When Britain had first been looking around for an African territory in which to dump its convict population in 1785, it had been warned by Henry Smeathman of the unsuitability of Sierra Leone: the climate was unhealthy and the natives hostile. The government shelved the convict project, but came up with another idea. If it was not possible to transport white convicts to West Africa, might not poor blacks usefully be shipped out? Perhaps they might not mind the climate.
Many impoverished blacks lived in London at the time, some of them former slaves or veterans of the war in North America. The British government felt little responsibility for them, and existing Poor Law legislation decreed only that paupers were the responsibility of their ‘parish of origin’. Former slaves could hardly be returned to their ‘parish’ in America, so what better idea than to ship them off to Africa? Smeathman suggested that the local Temne population ‘would not be inconvenienced by the newcomers’1
Granville Sharp was the leader of a group of wealthy English radicals who sought ways of mitigating the plight of British blacks. He was the financial supporter of a proposed new settlement on the Sierra Leone River, but he believed that it should be established with ‘the consent (and association, if possible) of the native inhabitants’ This did not happen. Conflict between the black settlers and the indigenous population was inevitable from the start, for the message of Islam, brought from across the Sahara, had long ago reached the western coastal region. Some of the inland Mandingos could speak and write in Arabic.2 European ships sailing down the coast of Africa had stopped there over the centuries to load up with food and fresh water. Others, filled with slaves, still left regularly for the Americas. The Africans were all too aware of a wider world beyond their river, and it was not unusual to find an African speaking a European language: English or French, Dutch or Portuguese. Sharp was an evangelical Christian and thought that ‘Pagans, Papists, Mahometans, Infidels, etc.’ should not be allowed in the new colony.3
A British warship, HMS Nautilus, arrived at the Sierra Leone River in May 1787 accompanied by three transport vessels. On board were 400 free blacks from Britain, with sixty white prostitutes brought along at the last moment. All had been told they could have a new life as settlers in Sierra Leone. A Temne chief, ‘King’ Tom, who controlled the lands bordering the river, made a commercial deal with Captain Thomas Thompson of the Nautilus. The chief was a smalltime supplier of slaves to European purchasers, and he lived with his followers in Romarong, a village of fifty huts built under the hills on the south side of the harbour. The Temne chiefs had grown accustomed over the years to securing a substantial income from the slave traders.
Tom agreed to provide the settlers with a tract of land, twenty miles square, on the edge of the harbour. In exchange for ?59 worth of goods, he signed away his rights to the land ‘for ever’. The settlers measured out plots and built simple huts, calling their settlement Granville Town, in honour of their philanthropic benefactor.
A rival Temne chief, ‘King’ Jimmy, was not a party to the agreement, and was hostile to the black settlers from the start. It transpired that the territory that Tom had given away ‘for ever’ included the watering place of Jimmy’s people, a harbour from which his predecessors had received rent from ocean-going ships. Several Temne villagers claimed that the area was holy ground and was being profaned by the presence of the settlers.
The following year, 1788, Jimmy seized power from Tom and sought to remove the unwelcome intruders. First he demanded tribute from them, and when this was not forthcoming he took some of them captive, selling them to slave traders to compensate for his loss of earnings. By the end of the first year, some 300 of the original black settlers had melted away; those who remained felt isolated and nervous.
In November 1789 a passing British warship, HMS Pomona, commanded by Captain Henry Savage, sent a party ashore to Romarong to protect the survivors, burning a Temne hut as a punishment. Jimmy’s villagers put up a fierce resistance, forcing the British to withdraw. Captain Savage poured a heavy bombardment into the village before sailing away. Then, with the British safely over the horizon, Jimmy took his revenge, attacking the surviving settlers and burning down their huts at Granville Town.
The victory of ‘King’ Jimmy and the Temne did not last long. The colony’s supporters in London argued that a larger group of settlers might fare better, and in faraway Canada they knew of a problem to which Sierra Leone might provide an answer. In 1783, at the end of the American war, the British had felt obliged to look after the settlers, known as ‘Empire Loyalists’, who had fought with them against the rebels. These were shipped up to Canada and given settlement grants, some 30,000 being established in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the former lands of the Acadians expelled in 1755.4 Among them were 3,000 former black slaves, granted their freedom in exchange for fighting on the British side.
Although free men, and pensioners of the British state, these ‘Black Loyalists’ found Nova Scotia unattractive. The climate was bleak, and the existing white settlers were unwelcoming and racist. The blacks learned of the African schemes of Granville Sharp and his band of evangelicals in London, and discussed among themselves their possible transfer from Canada to West Africa. Many greeted the idea with enthusiasm, and in 1792 - after a group of London evangelicals had taken over Sharpe’s colonisation project, renaming it as the ‘Sierra Leone Company’ - the project to transfer some of the ‘Black Loyalists’ went ahead. They sailed in fifteen ships for the new settlement in Sierra Leone, now called Freetown.
The arrival in Africa of 1,000 American-Canadian former slaves introduced a new era in the history of empire, one characterised by the inter-imperial transfer of populations. William Dawes, the new colony’s governor, was already an expert at such transcontinental migration, having been a junior officer accompanying the first shipload of convicts to New South Wales in 1788. He was replaced by Zachary Macaulay, father of the British historian, who had also had imperial experience working on a plantation in Jamaica, following which he had become an opponent of the slave trade.
Freetown lay ‘a musket’s shot distant’ from ‘King’ Jimmy’s village of Romarong, and the Temne looked on in amazement at the arrival of the large group from Canada, fearing that they would take over their land. The black settlers quickly asked for guns. ‘King’ Naimbanna, a more senior chief than Jimmy, was located and befriended by the officials of the Sierra Leone Company. His son was sent on a scholarship to England - always a popular bribe with the native elites of Empire.5 Naimbanna accepted a deal which provided the settlers with rather less land than the earlier group had had, and gave the Temne guaranteed access to their ancient watering place.
The local Africans remained hostile and unfriendly, yet the first significant threat to Macaulay’s colony came not from the Temne but from the settlers’ opposition to the governor’s autocratic rule, and from their tactical alliance with a French naval squadron during an attack in September 1794. The squadron, operating without challenge off the West African coast, had bombarded the town, and the black settlers had joined forces with the French sailors to loot the offices of the Sierra Leone Company. Macaulay protested to the French that his was a humanitarian colony. ‘That’s as may be, citoyen, replied the Republican French captain, ‘but you’re still English.’ Many black settlers claimed that they were American, which in a sense they were.6 The immediate problem was solved when the French sailed away, and the colony’s internal disputes subsided after the pugnacious Macaulay returned to London in 1795.
As with Sharp’s earlier project, the Sierra Leone Company had an evangelical Christian enthusiasm, and hoped to use Freetown as a base from which to Christianise the African continent. Yet the Mandingos, inland from Freetown, had already embraced another religion. As converts to Islam, they stood ready with an indigenous challenge to this imperial ambition.
Some years later, in 1802, the Temne living along the Sierra Leone River laid siege to the fort at Freetown in an attempt to recapture it from the settlers. They were led by Nathaniel Wansey, a settler from Canada banished into the interior two years earlier. ‘Supported by a number of marksmen who kept up a very destructive fire on those who advanced to repel them’, Wansey attacked and captured the fort, and, according to a report sent back to London, Lieutenant Laidlaw, Sergeant Blackwood and a private from the Africa Corps were killed. Several others were wounded, including William Dawes, the former governor.7
The fighting lasted for more than two weeks, and a fresh group of black settlers - 500 Maroons from Jamaica who had sailed into Freetown harbour in October 1800 - were called in to crush it. The Maroons had been forcibly exiled to Nova Scotia after a rebellion in 1795, and had found Canada no more welcoming than had the ‘Black Loyalists’ from America.8 The Canadians had jumped at the chance to shunt them on to Sierra Leone. On their arrival at Freetown, the Jamaican Maroons found that the existing population of ‘Black Loyalists’ were engaged in a rebellion against the colonial authorities. Their first task was to help crush it.
Robert Dallas, a contemporary chronicler, explains how useful they were to the British authorities: ‘Had the Maroons been the disciples of revolutionary emissaries, or the abettors of anarchy and equality, they would in all probability have joined the people of their own complexion to extirpate the white tyrant; on the contrary, they joined with alacrity in quelling the insurrection.’9 Some of the rebels were killed; others were captured and tried. A few were executed, and some, like Wansey, were banished into the interior. Not until 1807 did the Temne finally agree to sign a peace treaty.
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