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  • The Registers of Liberated Africans of the Havana Slave Trade CommissionTranscription Methodology and Statistical Analysis1
  • Henry B. Lovejoy (bio)

Between 1824 and 1841, the Anglo-Spanish Court of Mixed Commission in Cuba was responsible for creating passenger lists for over ten thousand liberated Africans, or emancipados, found aboard forty-two different slave ships. The Registers of Liberated Africans are a unique historical source because they describe the following personal information for victims of the transatlantic slave trade: port and date of embarkation, register number, African name, Christian name, sex, age, nación (nation), height, physical descriptions (señales); and in some cases, the Christian name, nación and owner of the African-born interpreters who were used during the registration process.2 At present, David Eltis has been the leading expert working with these records in conjunction with a much larger sample of comparable registers from Freetown, Sierra Leone between 1819 and 1845.3 In the late-1970s, Eltis created “The African Names Database”—containing a total of 67,228 individual entries—using microfiche copies of these registers found in the Public Record Office, now National Archives. “The African Names Database” is searchable online as such or accessible via the “Additional Resources” link in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.4 This article provides a critique of the existing database in relation to the Caribbean data and examines the methodologies of transcription and database construction. As such, the registers from the “Archives of the Havana Slave Trade Commission” will be examined as a single unit of analysis. However, the implications of this report are relevant to the much larger Sierra Leone dataset.

Naming practices in most world cultures have rich cultural meanings which are usually passed on through family generations. It is, [End Page 107] for example, easy to identify the ethno-linguistic origins of the names John, Jean, Juan and João as being English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. This basic technique can therefore be applied to the analysis of the African names recorded in these registers.5 A native Yoruba-speaker from modern-day Nigeria, for example, will recognize Yoruba names from passengers aboard the ships leaving Lagos or Ouidah. Moreover, some of the listed Yoruba names are very specific to Yoruba sub-groups such as Ijẹbu, others to Ọyọ, Ẹgba, etc. Clearly, a native Yoruba-speaker will have more success isolating Yoruba names, even though s/he may be familiar with, yet not feel entirely comfortable identifying non-Yoruba names from neighbouring ethno-linguistic groups who also left from the Bight of Benin, such as Nupe, Borgu, Hausa, Fon, Edo, Mahi, etc. While the method of interpreting the African names is basic, the practice is inherently more complex because the forty-two ships in this collection left from nineteen different ports located between Bissau and Luanda. A Yoruba-speaker would presumably have much more difficulty recognizing, with any precision, names from the Upper Guinea Coast or West Central Africa. A complete analysis of the names will therefore require numerous volunteers from hundreds of different West African ethno-linguistic backgrounds.

The compilers of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database began The African Origins Project, which is co-directed by Eltis, based out of Emory University and released in 2011. It is a scholar-public collaborative intending to trace the geographic origins of these victims of the transatlantic slave trade. According to the website, this interactive online research tool will solicit volunteers with knowledge of African languages, cultural naming practices, and ethnic groups to draw on their own expertise to identify the likely ethno-linguistic origins of these documented names.6 In due course, the results should provide an idea of the ethnic composition of the transatlantic slave trade in this period. The project will enable people to search for names according to specific African regions and view a transcription of the names stemming from the spelling at the time of the nineteenth century registration. It will also be possible to listen to a sound-bite of the presumed pronunciation to [End Page 108] hopefully clarify any colonial distortions in spelling. Users will then be able to submit their opinions as to the name...

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