The Voices of African Canada: A Foreword

During my 2013-14 term as the twenty-seventh William Lyon Mackenzie King Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University, I was privileged to host a conference, nigh the terminus of my tenure, which I titled "International Perspectives on African-Canadian Literature." It was my aspiration to see the presented papers published and to enjoy a couple of days of hobnobbing with other scholars and intellectuals intrigued by the whole idea of African Canadian literature—for that rubric entails a meditation upon an African diasporic culture that is not merely a pallid imitation of the globally recognized African American culture adjacent. So, I am grateful to African American Review for, again, expressing interest in Black Canada, this "Nordic" black culture of the Americas, which is also in part a product of the enslavement of Africans, conducted by British and French imperialists in their colonization of the northern half of North America (1600s-1834). Of course, African Canada is also a product of the antislavery and antiracist outmigration of African Americans from what became the United States. Nevertheless, this polity begins with slavery—I mean, as part of the first true instance of globalization—the Atlantic slave trade, which transported Africans from Old World to "New" (Turtle Island), on routes that plunked folks down not only in the Caribbean and the deep-south Ethiopian (Atlantic) Ocean (see St. Helena, for instance), but also in Arabia, Mauritius, and throughout the American continents, from Hudson's Bay to Argentina.

I now review "Canadian" slave history and black settlement briefly. Nouvelle-France (whose "Canadian" portions consisted of present-day Quebec, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton Island) held 5,000 slaves in its territory. However, two-thirds were an Indigenous people, the Pani. European enslavement of Africans and Pani fostered a triangulated African, European, and Indigenous hybridity. (A similar triangulation manifested, although on a smaller scale, in colonial Nova Scotia.) Importantly, because Nouvelle-France was part of the French Empire, Africans were moved about the whole—from Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to Guadeloupe, Martinique, "Canada," France, Africa, etc., and/or in the reverse order, thus helping to establish a basis for the profound multiculturalism of Black Canada today. The first recorded black person in colonial Canada showed up in Nova Scotia in 1605; the first recorded black slave appears in colonial Quebec in 1629. Slavery flourished in English-speaking Canadian colonies in the eighteenth century. So, after expelling Acadians, who soon become "Cajuns" in Louisiana, Britain allowed Yankee and Dixie "Planters" to bring hundreds of slaves to Nova Scotia in 1760. These numbers were increased by Loyalists, colonials whose allegiance was to the Crown, who fled the American Revolutionary War and brought more than a thousand slaves, principally to Nova Scotia, in 1783. However, slaveholding soon became difficult there because well over 2,000 free "Black Loyalists"—African Americans either escaped or born free—also arrived, and they were able to assist the locally enslaved to slip their bonds.

By 1805 or so, then, although slavery remained legal in British North America, it was so challenging to enforce that it became virtually a dead letter, though not formally abolished until 1834. Abolition began in Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1793, as Governor John Graves Simcoe forbade the importation of any new slaves: This was the first antislavery statute passed in the British Empire. In 1796, 800 Jamaican Maroon guerrillas, tricked into boarding British ships, were importuned to become farmers in Nova Scotia, to drop their muskets and sabres and pick up ploughs and hoes. However, the Maroons despised agriculture and deplored Nova Scotia, so they were relocated to Sierra Leone, West Africa in 1800, which is above present-day Liberia at north by northwest. The Maroons anchored just in time to put down the first insurrection against European colonization on African soil, which was led by the 1,200 African Americans (now called "Nova Scotians") who had been transplanted to Sierra Leone from Nova Scotia in 1792. Next, during the War of 1812-15, the British, as a war tactic, seized some 2,200 African Americans, whether slaves or escapees, and...