Professor keeps slaves’ names from vanishing

By Robert Frahm

The Hartford Courant

STORRS, Conn. — Nearly two centuries after the British Navy rescued thousands of Africans from slavery, a University of Connecticut professor is rescuing their names from obscurity.

G. Ugo Nwokeji, a history professor, is building a database from passenger logs compiled in the early 19th century as British sailors intercepted slave ships on their way to the Americas.

The project is expected to give historians a clearer picture of the geographic and ethnic origins of slaves — information not available in many plantation records in the Americas because the names of slaves were often changed.

"We still know almost nothing about the people who were forced on board slave vessels on the African coast and how they came to be captives," Nwokeji and a fellow researcher wrote in a paper scheduled for publication early next year in the Journal of African History.

After England banned slavery in 1808, the British Navy hunted down slave ships and returned them to ports such as Havana, Sierra Leone and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There, court clerks recorded the name, age and sex of each liberated captive, along with physical characteristics such as height, tattoos or other distinguishing marks. In some cases, hometowns also were noted. The information was to be used as evidence against the slave traders.

"There is no other body of data like it in the entire history of the slave trade," said Nwokeji, who is conducting the project with slavery historian David Eltis of Queen’s University in Ontario.

About one-third of the database is complete, and the project could take another three years to finish, Nwokeji said.

"It helps us understand more clearly what was going on in the hinterlands of Africa, where most of these captives were coming from because we do not have written records from Africa during this period," he said.

"We can understand the society from which they came … There were children, there were women, there were men. Some were enslaved because they were war captives, some because they were kidnapped. Some were enslaved by their political enemies."

Because researchers often can determine the point of embarkation and intended destination of each ship, the records also reveal slave-trading patterns such as the geographic distribution of various ethnic groups in the Americas.

The British Public Records Office contains names of as many as 70,000 Africans rescued from slave ships between 1819 and 1845. What makes those records particularly important is that the information was provided by the captives themselves.

"In contrast to the plantation records of the Americas, these names were African names, not some slave name," Nwokeji said.

Nevertheless, cataloging the names is a painstaking process because the names were recorded by European clerks and African interpreters who produced phonetic interpretations of the original names, he said.

Thus, the African name Mgboli — which would help researchers trace the captive to the Igbo group in the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra — might show up on the logs as Imbolee, Imbolay or Embolee. Or the African name Emenike might show up as Amanekay.

"A variation in a particular name can tell you what part of a region" someone is from, Nwokeji said. "We look for every detail."

In one piece of the study, Nwokeji and Eltis examined six slave vessels that left the Cameroons River and Bimbia between 1822 and 1837.

The researchers were able to trace those captives to a small area of what is now Western Cameroon and found that two groups, the Tikari and Banyangi, lost more of their people to slave traders than surrounding communities.

The records also show that those ships contained more women and children than ships from other regions.

Such findings pose new questions for scholars. Why more captives from some groups than from others? Why more children from certain regions? Do such differences reflect the choices of the American buyers or the African sellers?

Most of the captives whose names appear on the British Navy logs came from the Bight of Biafra and the Bight of Benin — regions within what are now the nations of Nigeria, Cameroon and Benin.

Because most slaves were renamed when they arrived in the Americas, the database of original African names will be of little use for genealogists but will provide considerable insight "for anyone attempting to establish links between cultural patterns of all types in particular parts of the Americas and those in Africa," Eltis said.

Nwokeji, 37, a native of Nigeria, is in his third year at UConn. He studied at the University of Toronto and turned his research interests to the slave trade after meeting some of the world’s foremost slavery historians, he said.

He was a graduate student when he met Eltis at an academic conference in Toronto in 1997. It was there the two scholars began talking about the potential information locked in the slave ship records.

Because there are so few written accounts from Africa during the height of slave trading, historians have had to rely on other sources — such as records of the 1839 trial in Connecticut of Africans intended for slavery who staged an uprising on the schooner Amistad — to learn more about the people who were enslaved, said slavery historian David Brion Davis, a retired Yale University professor.

"Only in recent years have historians been able to compile a vast amount of information about the Atlantic slave trade in general," he said.

The database compiled from the British Navy records is another piece in the puzzle.

"No one, to my knowledge, has made a really thorough study of these records," said Davis, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.

"I think it has tremendous significance."

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