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Sierra Leone
By 1460 Portuguese explorers had sighted the west African region they named Sierra Leone and soon after brought the first enslaved Africans to Europe. (From this region, known as Upper Guinea, came about six percent of the ancestors of African Americans.) We will read two accounts of the peoples of Sierra Leone, both by English physicians who travelled to Africa in the 1700s, study a map of "Guinea propria" (Upper Guinea) from the period, and view a selection of drawings that scholars feel are accurate and not fanciful representations of this region.
Both John Atkins and Thomas Winterbottom were Englishmen who travelled to west Africa not as slave traders but as physicians (both provided descriptions of "sleeping sickness"). Surgeon to the Royal Navy, John Atkins visited Africans in 1720 and in 1735 published A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies. Physician to the Sierra Leone Company (one of many colonization projects to return freed slaves to Africa), Thomas Winterbottom travelled to the region in 1792 and in 1803 published An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone. While neither is a scintillating writer, their dedication to their causes, including the abolition of slavery, is evident. Be sure to compare Atkins's and Winterbottom's vocabularies of African languages with those of Jean Barbot in #1: Senegambia.
The illustrations in this collection are by several European observers, although not Atkins and Winterbottom. What do the illustrators choose to emphasize? What attitudes do they convey about the Africans? Finally, study the zoomable 1743 map of Upper Guinea produced in Germany titled Guinea propia, nec non Nigritiae vel Terrae Nigrorum maxima pars. (xx pages.)
Discussion questions
- Compare the tone and emphasis of Atkins's and Winterbottom's descriptions of the people of Sierra Leone. What does each man choose to emphasize?
- How can you identify their attitudes toward slavery? toward the African people?
- What do the drawings and the map illustrations communicate to you about the region and the people? Compare the drawings of missionaries, explorers, and slave traders in this theme.
- How does one evaluate the accounts of African cultures by non-African observers?
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Framing Questions
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How did Africans live in freedom before enslavement? |
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How did Europeans and African Americans perceive African cultures? |
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What was the experience of capture and enslavement for those who became African Americans? |
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Printing
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Supplemental Sites
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Images:
- Drawing captioned "Jellemen of Soolimana," in Alexander Gordon Laing, Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko, and Soolima Countries in Western Africa, London: 1825) facing, p. 369. Library Company of Philadelphia. Permission pending from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Digital image from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library, in online collection The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record. Permission pending.
- Drawing captioned "A warrior with poisoned arrows," in Francis Spilsbury, Account of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa; Performed by His Majesty's Sloop Favourite, in the Year 1805, London: 1807, facing p. 39. University of Virginia Library, Special Collections, in online collection The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record. Permission pending.
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