Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies

Chapter 9

132 Chapter 9 “A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at Any Price” Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Ismail Rashid Contemporary European observers and regional oral traditions allude to large-scale slave revolts and numerous fugitive enclaves in the Upper Guinea Coast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These escapes and uprisings disrupted politics, the economy, and society. Though scholars have started paying attention to African resistance to enslavement in the continent, studies of the slave revolts and communities in West Africa have been limited (Lovejoy 1986; Lovejoy and Hogendorn 1990; Glassman 1995; Klein 1988; Miers and Roberts 1988). Exaggerations, if not misperceptions, about Africans’ complicity in the Atlantic slave trade and about their acceptance of servitude persist (Thornton 1992). Indeed, many scholars refuse to acknowledge the acts of resistance by enslaved Africans as part of a continuous thread of antislavery in the continent and still insist on seeing antislavery as emanating solely from the religious, economic , and philosophical ideas of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment (Miers and Roberts 1988; Sanneh 1999). Knowing the precise nature of the ideas and the forms of social consciousness You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. “A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at Any Price” 133 that animated enslaved Africans is dif¤cult since most of the historical evidence is refracted through the lens of European travelers, abolitionists, and colonial administrators . Nonetheless, these records point to the opposition to enslavement by Africans that were manifested in rebellious actions, the existence of free communities , and in some cases the appropriations and creative reinterpretations of hegemonic ideas. This chapter will show that, in the case of the Upper Guinea Coast, enslaved Africans routinely af¤rmed their freedom, not by absorption into the slaveholding societies or by renegotiations of dependent relationships—as argued by some scholars—but by outright rejection and opposition to servitude. The two rebellions in the region (the main focus here)—the Mandingo Rebellion in the eighteenth century and the Bilali Rebellion in the nineteenth—attest to the tenacity of the enslaved in resisting slavery and asserting their freedom. This chapter conceives of resistance as a plethora of spontaneous, organized covert or overt actions designed to thwart the intentions of kidnappers, slave traders , and slaveholders. On a continuum, these actions encompass the quotidian forms of resistance ampli¤ed by James Scott (1985) as well as the more violent contestations, which underline the works of C. L. R. James (1963, 1969). At the point of capture and the early stages of enslavement, the enslaved resisted primarily to reassert sovereign control over what John Stuart Mill de¤nes as one’s “self,” “mind,” and “body” and to reestablish a sense of personal dignity. At the points of the commercial exchange—holding pens and transportation—resistance took on an added layer, as captives fought against the processes that attempted to regularize and legitimize the theft of their persons and ¤x the badge of bondage on them more securely. Within slaveholding societies, where the weight of the hegemonic institutional and ideological forces and relationships were being manipulated to reinforce the subjugation of the enslaved, they fought to break the hold of these forces and relationships. This chapter pays considerable attention to violent resistance because violence was integral to the Atlantic slave trade. Also, violent actions sometimes provide texts not readily available from quotidian actions and hence give historians wider scope to study the ideas and actions of the enslaved. By the eighteenth century, military violence had become the dominant means by which major elite groups acquired and reproduced political and social power in the Upper Guinea Coast (Rodney 1970; Barry 1998). The Historical Context of Resistance Centuries of migration, Islamic expansion, and trade shaped the political and cultural landscape of the Upper Guinea Coast region, drained by the Kouleté, You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. 134 Ismail Rashid Scarcies, and Sierra Leone River basins, and bordered by the Futa Jallon highlands and the Atlantic coast. Limba, Bullom, Temne, Baga, Loko, Soso, Mandingo , Kuranko, and Fula both shared and competed for control of the terrain. By the mid-eighteenth century...