The British slave-free colony in Sierra Leone

The British attempt to found a slave-free colony in Sierra Leone is the best known of the three examined here.⁷ As Christopher Leslie Brown has pointed out, the publications of Henry Smeathman were central to the Sierra Leone project.

Smeathman had studied the botanical riches of Sierra Leone in the years 1771—1775. Returning to England with ideas about ways to exploit African land, in 1780 he wrote the Proposals for Printing by Subscription, Voyages and Travels in Africa and the 'West-Indies, from the Tear 1771 to the Year 1779 Inclusive. The book, however, was never published, and Smeathman’s proposal did not meet with any immediate interest, even though he sought sponsors in England, France and the United States.⁸ Then in 1786, Smeathman published Plan of a Settlement to be made near Sierra Leone, on the Grain Coast of Africa intended more particularly for the Service and Happy Establishment of Blacks and People of Colour, to be shipped as Freemen under the Direction of the Committee for Relieving the Black Poor, and under the Protection of the British Government. As the title reveals, the publication was linked to the aims of a charitable committee. Smeathman came into contact with the Committee for Relieving the Black Poor through his ties with Grandville Sharp, a wealthy philanthropist who had fought slavery for several years. It was Sharp who had funded the Somerset case which led to the abolition of slavery in Britain. Liking Smeathman’s plan for a colony in Africa—seeing in it an ideal solution to the growing numbers of black poor residing in the British capital—Sharp, together with Smeathman, suggested establishing a ‘province of freedom’ in Africa and using as settlers the poor black Londoners.

In Sharp’s plan, the Sierra Leone establishment should be a self-governing agricultural community, and he drew up a set of regulations to that effect.⁹ He soon obtained the support of the government.

In April 1787, a ship carrying 259 poor blacks set sail for Sierra Leone, arriving on 19 May. Soon after their arrival, however, the settlers faced a range of unforeseen problems. For one, they arrived just as the rainy season set in, which led to a high number of deaths. A second issue was that the land on which the settlers were to build their colony had been ceded by a local chief (named Tom) and not the supreme leader of the Temne people (named Naimbana). Moreover, property rights in Africa were perceived very differently than they were in Europe, permanent alienation of land being unknown in the Sierra Leone region.¹⁰ To the Temne chief the land was therefore not for the British to claim. A further issue quickly became a life-threatening problem: failure of cultivation, which made the colony completely reliable on provisions from Britain. Perhaps the most worrying issue of all was the dysfunctional relationship between the settlers and the local population. Some of the London settlers were captured by locals and sold back into slavery. Other settlers, who spotted a chance to make a quick profit, began selling slaves themselves.

Disputes with locals became the ultimate cause for the failure of the colony. A local monarch, named King Jimmy, ordered the colony be demolished, and this first colonial initiative in Africa came to an immediate, yet predictable, halt as the year 1789 drew to a close. As Michael Turner has stressed, ‘[i]llness, the climate, poor soil, Temne hostility and the counter-attractions of the slave trade meant that many settlers had already abandoned the site by the time it was destroyed by natives in 1789’.¹¹ Sharp’s early attempt, however, had only just failed when the newly established Sierra Leone Company took up the idea again. With Henry Thornton as chairman of its board of directors, and with William Wilberforce—statesman, cleric and anti-slavery activist—as the colony’s chief parliamentary spokesman, the company wished to transform the Sierra Leone project into a venture that combined humanitarianism and business.

The new enterprise was opened to shareholders and governed from London. Instead of using metropolitan poor blacks, settlers were brought in from Nova Scotia in the form of freed slaves who had fought on the British side in the American War of Independence.¹² Despite the larger backing for this new attempt, it did not prove much more successful. Although a veritable colony did emerge, it faced problems similar to the first one—the climate caused difficulties, tensions with the locals continued, there were often food shortages and, with much of the land infertile, several crop failures occurred. Stephen J. Braidwood, who has made a detailed study of the Sierra Leone projects, concluded that the colony never managed to make a profit and survived only due to the capital raised through further subscriptions and by grants from the British government.¹³ The colony suffered perhaps its biggest blow in 1794 when it was attacked and plundered by French traders.

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

The British slave-free colony in Sierra Leone

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