A Kick in the Belly. Stella Dadzie

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СКАЧАТЬ were slave owners or traders in their own right, political or commercial interests were probably a more pressing consideration than love and affection. The Queen of Winneba, who took the Royal African Company’s chief factor, Nicholas Buckeridge, as her lover, probably had more pragmatic motives. Further north, the formidable Senhora Doll, a member of the influential Ya Kumba family, was no doubt securing her interests, too, when she agreed to marry Thomas Corker of Falmouth, the company’s last factor. Known as ‘the Duchess of Sherbro’ by the European slave captains she entertained, she and her descendants went on to establish a small standing army of free Africans, maintaining control over a strategic stretch of land along the banks of the river Sherbro.²⁸

      Casting all African women as victims obscures the fact that relationships with European men, however short-lived or precarious, offered their concubines a degree of financial security that their wives back in Europe would have envied. Moreover, some women made a lucrative living from the trade. In the Bissagos Islands off Cape Verde, where an earlier preference for male captives had created a large female majority, women controlled most of the transactions. The children resulting from their liaisons with European men populated numerous offshore islands and coastal towns. Rarely acknowledged by the fathers, their Euro-African offspring would eventually become a trading force in their own right, known as caboceers. By straddling the cultural and linguistic divide between Europeans and Africans, both sons and daughters acquired increasing power and status, the latter often mentioned in surviving documents as wives, mistresses or favoured ‘wenches’.

      One such woman was Betsy Heard, the daughter of a liaison between a Liverpool trader and a local woman. Schooled in England, she returned home to inherit her father’s trading assets and subsequently rose to prominence as a dealer in slaves along the banks of the River Bereira. By 1794, she had established a monopoly on trade in the area. As owner of the main wharf in Bereira, including a warehouse and several trading ships, she wielded sufficient influence to act as mediator in a long-standing dispute between the Sierra Leone Company and local chiefs, who are said to have regarded her as a queen.²⁹

      The patronage of chiefs and the mediation of caboceers would become vital to Europe’s traders, as the theft of Africa’s people became entrenched. Procuring and enslaving captive Africans could be a slow and laborious business, especially when competing with faster or better-stocked ships. Once the local market became flooded with cheap European goods, the cost of ‘black ivory’ increased and the supply of captured Africans began to dwindle. In 1764, Captain Miller of the Black Prince complained that he’d waited six months for his agent to acquire just twenty slaves. And when the Pearl, which sailed out of Bristol in 1790, had to wait over nine months in Old Calabar for a viable cargo, both the crew and their captives suffered high mortality rates before they could set sail.³⁰ Many a captive perished in the disease-ridden holds of ships as they languished off the coast, waiting for the quota to be filled. Others endured the prolonged torture of captivity for months, forced to lie spoon-like in their own excrement, vomit or menstrual blood until the ships were fully loaded.

      Selection for sale involved detailed and intimate inspection, with specially appointed ships’ ‘surgeons’ examining ‘every part of every one of them, to the smallest member, men and women being stark naked’.³¹ Captain Phillips recorded an account of one such transaction in his diary. ‘Our surgeon’, he wrote, ‘is forced to examine the privities of both men and women with the nicest scrutiny’.³² It was also common practice for captives to be branded on the shoulder or breast with a hot iron, to ensure that they could be readily identified by their purchasers. Their suppurating wounds would have been magnets for infection.

      Cruelties like this went with the territory. Traders were not averse to beating or murdering those captives who, on account of ‘being … defective in their limbs, eyes or teeth; or grown grey, or … [victims of] the venereal disease, or any other imperfection’ were rejected by ships’ captains and other European buyers. It is doubtful that any concessions were made to women. These paragons of European civilisation simply turned away when ‘traders frequently beat those Negroes which are objected to by the captains and use them with great severity … Instances have happened … that the traders have dropped their canoes under the stern of the vessel and instantly beheaded them in sight of the captain’.³³

      Of course, brutality is not confined to any one race. It never has been. Both Africans and Europeans were guilty of such atrocities, reflecting contemporary attitudes toward violence on both continents. It is tempting to romanticise Africa by forgetting that slavery and human sacrifice preceded European encroachment or presenting the few chiefs who resisted as paragons of altruism. However, this would be a misrepresentation.

      Having said that, it was the Europeans who initiated and oversaw these transactions, and it was they who established the parameters of what was acceptable. The men involved showed such callous disregard for human life that ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, turning the popular stereotype of African barbarism on its head, remarked: ‘I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me … the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among any people such instances of brutal cruelty.’³⁴

      Negroes in the Bilge, 1835 engraving of painting by German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas (Alamy)

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