17 - “Perpetual Expatriation”: Forced Migration and Liberated African Apprenticeship in the Gambia

Summary

John Campbell, an Aku liberated African, arrived in the British settlement of Bathurst at the mouth of the Gambia River after a tumultuous series of ocean voyages. A victim of the violent upheavals that swept Yorubaland in the 1820s and 1830s, Campbell was enslaved at the age of twelve after the destruction of his village. Led to the coast in chains, he was sold to a Portuguese merchant and forced aboard a slave vessel bound for the Americas. But Campbell's ship never reached its intended destination. British naval cruisers intercepted the vessel three days into its voyage and escorted it to Freetown, Sierra Leone, where Campbell was legally emancipated from slavery by an international court.

Sierra Leone, however, was not Campbell's final destination. Five days after his arrival in Freetown harbor, Campbell was forced upon another oceangoing vessel and transported to the Gambia with eighteen other recaptives to be apprenticed to members of the Bathurst merchant community. Campbell spent his first night in Bathurst in the military barracks, where he and the other liberated Africans from the vessel were held until an apprenticeship could be arranged. The next day, British officials invited the Bathurst merchants to meet the newly arrived liberated Africans, and Campbell was apprenticed to local trader John Grant. Campbell began his apprenticeship under Grant as a cook, but was soon placed aboard the cutter Highland, where he worked as a sailor in the lucrative river trade.

While most of the formerly enslaved Africans “liberated” in Freetown were settled in Sierra Lone, approximately 3,478 recaptives were forcibly transported an additional five hundred miles up the coast to nascent British settlements along the Gambia River. Secondary migrations away from the place of emancipation from slavery were common among liberated Africans throughout the Atlantic world. Recaptives emancipated in Cuba were often transferred to British Caribbean islands, and many of those emancipated on the island of St. Helena were forced back on board ocean vessels and transported to the British Caribbean or to Cape Colony, South Africa. These secondary migrations show that “liberation” from slavery often meant an immediate additional voyage in a debilitated state to an uncertain destination.