A History of the Rio Pongo: Time for a New Appraisal?

I

Forty-five years ago (1965), when some of us were beginning our studies of the history of the Upper Guinea coast, there existed only a few published general histories of Guinea-Conakry or region-based models to guide us. André Arcin's substantial works (1907 and 1911) provided original but awkward structures from which we could commence our work, but his monographs tended to be based heavily upon a colonial presence, a necessity to make sense of a complex colony, and a reliance upon oral traditions or other uncitationed sources, many of which could not be tested a half century later.¹ Christopher Fyfe's comprehensive history of Sierra Leone had just been published in 1962. Fyfe's foremost emphasis was to chronicle the development of the Sierra Leone settlement and chart that colony's progress, but his extensive documentation was extraordinary in that it demonstrated the clear link between the "Northern Rivers" and British enterprise from Freetown and opened Britain's archives as sources of information about the history of these rivers in new and profound ways.²

Earlier works by Lucien Marie François Famechon, Jules Machat, Fernand Rouget, Laurent Jean B. Bérenger-Férand, Ch. Bour, and others, centering upon the peoples, economies, and terrain of coastal rivers, continued to be instructive, but these authors were writing at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and they tended to treat the histories of indigenous peoples as interesting and exotic and at the same time relatively unimportant to the colony's regional development.³ Only a single serious overview, seventy pages in length and written by Jules Hubert Saint-Père, had been produced on the history of the Rio Pongo, and while it included both oral traditions and documented history, it minimized the British period which dominated the river's commerce from 1750 to 1850.⁴ Only four studies, by Antoine Marie Jean Demougeot, A. Corre, J. Figarol, and Dr. Méo, had been written for the Rio Nunez. Little if anything had been done with respect to pre-colonial development within the Konkouré, Morebaya, Forékariah, or Melicouri rivers, and where those did exist, they tended to focus upon events that explained aspects of colonial conquest, pacification, or economic transformation.⁵ In effect, those of us then carving out for ourselves sections of coast or particular ethnic groups for analysis and historical reconstruction found it necessary to begin almost from scratch and generally with only a vague notion of where our research might lead us.⁶ Ours, also, was the dilemma of which model to follow: an Africacentric approach that emphasized oral traditions and required our physical immersion among the peoples we were studying; an Atlantic-centric approach that placed its focus upon the impact of commerce and other western influences upon Africa's development; or perhaps even a mix of the two.

My early exploratory efforts upon this section of coast were not focused originally on the Nunez and Pongo rivers, nor was it clear which model I might follow. Indeed, political events helped to shape my research and my approach when it became evident, by the mid-1960s, that tensions existing between the Republic of Guinea and the United States would make it unlikely that an American could expect to conduct research within Guinea or perhaps even to visit it. Norman Bennett and George Brooks' work on American merchants trading in Africa and Fyfe's documentation with respect to Sierra Leone and circumstances within its "Northern Rivers" were sufficient to suggest, however, that an archive-based and non-Africa-centric study of trade and politics in the coastal rivers would be possible, even if that were inadequate.⁷ In any case, it was clear that archival sources would need to be mastered if one expected to make sense of any other material found within and about these rivers. John Davidson's thesis of the Sherbro and its hinterland (finished in 1969) provided a useful model, one that might be adapted to fit different conditions...