Quick recap: We are spending five posts looking at ways in which the output of enslaved Africans contributed to British economic development. The main ideas are taken from Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery.

Last month we looked at shipping. This month we look at sugar.

For more on the history of the relationship between the UK and Sierra Leone, see my previous posts here.

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I know I said I was going to look at cotton in this post. But I was wrong, I need to look at sugar first. In many ways, this was the start of Britain’s industrial revolution.

For those who cannot picture it, sugarcane is a tall, tropical grass with thick, fibrous stalks. It can reach 3 to 6 metres high and has sharp, green leaves that spread from the side. During the rainy season (June to November), enslaved labourers would prepare the Caribbean land, lay a new rotation of cane, and nurture its growth for the next 10-18 months. Come dry season (January to May), they would be ready to harvest a previous rotation’s crop.

But sugarcane perishes fast. It will sour within 24 hours of being cut.

Before leaving the plantations, stalks were pushed into large mills; turned with wind, water or livestock. This squeezed out a thick, green, opaque juice, all too often crushing the limbs of the slaves as well. The juice was boiled down to a concentrated, sticky syrup. This was boiled again, to around 115 degrees Celsius, in large, steaming copper cauldrons, creating crystals of raw brown sugar (muscovado) and a dark, viscous byproduct (molasses).

Molasses is useful as a cheap sweetener, and, perhaps more famously, distills to rum. But muscovado was a precious commodity. The wet, sandy substance, clumping due to the remaining coat of sticky molasses, was packed tightly into large wooden barrels weighing up to 800 pounds (360kg). These were then loaded onto the very same ships that would have just offloaded a new batch of enslaved West Africans, perhaps brought from Bunce Island itself. A third of Africans died within three years of arrival in the Caribbean, so there was always a horrible demand for more.

The ship’s crew would tear down the temporary wooden slave decks of their vessels, creating a single, larger hold. This was washed with vinegar, brimstone and gunpower smoke, to clean it of the blood, vomit and excrement leftover from the hundreds of enchained prisoners who had just crossed the Atlantic below deck. Finally, the massive, heavy barrels of muscovado were loaded, alongside smaller barrels of molasses and rum, to start their journey to Britain.

The sailors joined the Atlantic’s warm Gulf Stream and utilised the ever-present westerly winds to carry them up the eastern coast of America, then across the ocean to Europe. After six to eight weeks at sea (more if they were unlucky), they would arrive at one of Britain’s rapidly growing port cities – most likely London, Bristol or Liverpool (as discussed in my previous post).

From the late 1600s, taxes were charged on the import of sugar. Duties were much lower on muscovado than they were on white, refined sugar. This was to ensure that the highly profitable final stages of production happened in Britain – heavily boosting local economies. Moreover, throughout the 1700s it was stipulated that all muscovado produced in British colonies must be shipped directly to Britain or other British colonies. It could be re-exported, but planters were unable to sell to other markets without first paying their British dues.

Once through customs, sugar hogs (the colloquial name for labourers with this particular skill set) used crow bars and ropes to roll the barrels onto the wharves. Because of their weight, carrying the barrels on traditional wheeled wagons would shatter the cobblestone streets. Instead, they were loaded onto low, wheelless wooden sledges or heavy-duty carts, and teams of draft horses (large and muscular, bred specifically for hard labour) pulled them to the sugar houses. To minimise this part of the journey, many prominent refiners owned their own private wharves and warehouses, directly connected to their factories.

The sugar houses themselves were a strange sight. Narrow, because quayside land was expensive, wood, brick or stone buildings, five to eight stories high. They had small windows at the top to minimise heat loss, and massive timber pillars to support the floors, so that they could bear the weight of many large ceramic sugar moulds.

The barrels were brought into the basement where they were broken open with axes, and the muscovado shoveled out into massive copper pans. It was mixed with water and heated again with coal fired furnaces. It was not uncommon for the sugar houses to set alight, burning down with entire shifts of workers inside. Lime water and bull’s blood were added to help rid the substance of impurities. The remaining hot syrup was then pumped or hauled to the top of these tall, skinny buildings, and poured into cone-shaped ceramic moulds with small holes at the bottom. Over the next few weeks, the last remnants of liquid molasses would drip out. Finally, a layer of wet clay was placed on top and water seeped through, to give the sugar one last wash.

In the end, after two continents, countless labourers (enslaved and free), ships, wagons, specialised equipment, animals, factories, fuel, and more than a year in production, the ceramic cone would be removed to reveal a hard, cone shaped, sugar loaf. The highest quality loaves were the brightest white, but also the smallest (five to eight inches high). As the quality fell, the size grew, and the colour browned. Large, brown sugar loaves were often sold to bakeries, taverns, brewers and grocers, who would chip smaller pieces off for their working-class clientele. These could be two to three feet tall, with a much larger base. No matter the grade or size, they were packaged in a unique dark blue paper, sealed with red wax, and sent out into the market.

By the mid-1700s, around 120 sugar houses were operating in Britain. The majority were in London’s East End – places like Whitechapel and St George, close to wharves along the River Thames. Bristol had over 20 sugar houses, and Liverpool around 10. By 1770 they had a combined output of over 70,000 tons of refined sugar per year. Among the British public, in just 100 years, sugar went from being a rare luxury for the elites to a staple in everyone’s daily cup of tea. By 1800, the average English citizen consumed a whopping 23 pounds of sugar (a lot … albeit half of what we consume today), and the business accounted for a staggering 4% of British gross domestic product. Where the average wage was around £15-£30 pounds per year, a wealthy West Indian sugar merchant or plantation owner may enjoy an annual income well into the thousands.

The backward linkages of the sugar boom were immense. The demand for copper cauldrons and kettles brought the mines of Cornwall and North Wales back from the dead. The demand for coal went through the roof, bringing business to Newcastle, Lancashire and South Wales. The pottery and ceramics industries enjoyed their share of the spoils, as they built their capacity to mass produce sugar moulds. The timber, forestry and coopering trades were needed for the continuous supply of barrels, crates and ship retrofits (not to mention the ships themselves, discussed last month). The demand for bull’s blood was a lovely secondary market for the slaughterhouses, and the demand for lime water is thought to have sustained lime-burning kilns right across rural Britain. Even the emerging chemical industry got a boost from the demand for sulfuric acid, and the paper industry for an endless supply of deep, blue wrapping paper.

This, as far as I know, was the first process quite like this in Britain. But it worked, and it became the prototype for combining an international, energy fueled production chain with a widespread, mass consumption network from which individuals could make their fortunes. This was the prototype for Britain’s industrial revolution.

Next month… Cotton

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Quick recap: During the 17th and 18th centuries European mercantilists made very large profits through a triangle of trade across the Atlantic Ocean. This involved trading goods for enslaved people in Africa, trading these people for raw products in the Americas (cotton, tobacco, sugar, metals etc.), trading these products for manufactured goods in Europe (clothes, refined sugar, guns etc.), and trading these for more enslaved people in Africa in a self-perpetuating cycle.

During this period the Americas were largely split into European colonies, with the plantations and mines owned by Europeans. The situation was different in Africa. Europeans established trading posts along the coast, but rarely entered the mainland. The large profits available, as well as the access to guns and ammunition it offered African rulers and elites, encouraged an ever growing supply of enslaved Africans to these coastal trading posts, with Bunce Island in Sierra Leone as a typical example.

For more on this history, see my previous posts here.

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Today, the United Kingdom is among the wealthiest countries in the world.

We have good health and education systems. Our labour market has a comparably large number of interesting, well-paid jobs. We have some financial protection if we lose our jobs. We have an OK state pension. We are broadly safe to walk the streets at night. Almost all of us have 24/7 water, gas and electricity in our homes. The shelves in our shopping centres have most of the things we need, and the food in our supermarkets is relatively cheap.

I am not completely naïve. There are large swathes of the United Kingdom where, upon reading this, people may think not me. We remain among the most unequal of wealthy countries in the world. Overcrowded, overpriced housing beset with damp and mould are common. Those exciting jobs are concentrated in small geographic pockets. And if you spend too much of a low income on bills and shelter, however cheap food is, it will still be too expensive.

But the ‘relative advantage’ stands. The United Kingdom offers a plethora of opportunities that many around the world want and cannot find at home. Leaning again on the work of Dr Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery), I want to present the case that this relative economic strength has grown from foundations that were built, in a large part, by the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

Williams argued that that monopolistic trade relations and slave labour throughout the 1700s (and late 1600s) produced the initial accumulation of capital that lit the fire beneath the industrial revolution. He highlighted how the slave trade, through its links with shipping, cotton, sugar, metallurgy and finance, transformed multiple aspects of the British economy and built the backbone of major cities we know today.

This argument has stuck with me. Far from being an abstract series of historic events, somewhat independent of our current world (as I used to consider it), this period directly shaped the world I grew up in.

Over the next five posts I will briefly look at the five industries Williams highlighted – shipping, cotton, sugar, metallurgy and finance – drawing out how the slave trade was integral to British development.

Shipping

Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow (not to mention London) were all completely transformed by shipping during this period. Building ships, loading ships, offloading ships, and sailing ships. Owning ships, insuring ships, financing new ships, and legal disputes between ships. Money, money, money, and yet more money.

Bristol and Liverpool grew from small regional docks into the largest slaving ports in the world. By 1795, Liverpool controlled 80% of the British slave trade and 40% of the European slave trade.

The sketch above is of the Sandown (a slave ship) in the Floating Dock (I think the one in London). It is from a journal kept by Samuel Gamble, who was a slaver working on the ship. I have not been able to read the journal myself, but apparently he recounts traveling from London to West Africa (including a stop in Sierra Leone with a rare journey into the mainland!) then on to Jamaica, in a voyage beset with disease and an attempted uprising from the enslaved peoples on board.

In 1715 the Lyver Pool was converted into an enclosed dock. This enabled Liverpool to load and offload more ships more efficiently. Between 1700 and 1771, largely through profit from this trade, the city grew from a sleepy port of 5,000 inhabitants to an international landmark of 34,000 inhabitants with annual dock duties reaching a whopping £648,000 (around 6.5% of total government revenue!)

British shipyards were run at maximum capacity. Ships had to be custom-built with reinforced decks, ventilation systems, and barricades to control the enslaved ‘cargo’. Ships were made sleeker, and copper sheathing was introduced to the hulls, both speeding up the journeys and increasing the longevity of a boat. More speed and vessel longevity meant more trading journeys and lower mortality at sea. This significantly increased profits in the short term, but it also changed the way the British built ships in the long term.

The strength of the British Navy is considered to have been one of the country’s key assets during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The transatlantic journey navigated by the slavers was viewed as an important training ground for future sailors, both providing a steady supply of potential recruits and ensuring capacity for rapid expansion during wartime. Tens of thousands of sailors gained their initial experience in this way.

Synergy with the Navy went beyond human resources. The Navy were vital for the survival of the trade because they protected British trading ships from French, Spanish and pirate attacks. In return, much of that government revenue mentioned above (from duties levied on the goods these ships brought to the UK) was invested back into the Navy in an economically fruitful feedback loop.

We will come to finance a few posts from now, but it is worth ending this post by mentioning shipping insurance. The ever-present risks of rebellion, shipwreck, attack and disease gave birth to a range of complex insurance policies. Lloyd’s of London, for instance, largely through insuring slave ships and their human ‘cargo’, became the heart of the world’s maritime insurance market, a strong vantage point from which to grow into one of the world’s major financial institutions over the next 250 years.

The lasting physical remnants are our docks and major coastal cities. Today, you can walk around Canning Graving Docks (Liverpool), the Floating Harbour (Bristol), Port Glasgow (Inverclyde), and West India Docks (Isle of Dogs, London). You will see some of the specific infrastructure that was used, either for the slave trade directly or for importing commodities produced by slaves in the Americas, or exporting products to exchange for slaves in Africa. But more than this, the period created large fires of economic growth across multiple parts of the United Kingdom. Not just from shipping along the coasts and waterways, but also inland, where the imported raw products were turned into manufactured marvels.

We will see this in the next post, with cotton. Update… we actually looked at sugar in the next post. This paved the way for cotton.

P.s. Astute readers may note that I said we were going to look at an amazing database that has been set up to document the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. We will come back to this, I promise!

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Quick recap: Throughout the 1500s and first half of the 1600s Europeans were looking for ways to extract profits from the Americas. They wanted the silver and gold that lay hidden beneath, and the sugarcane, tobacco and cotton that could grow on top. But they needed labour to get these. They tried forcing the indigenous Americans, indenturing poor or convicted Europeans, and enslaving Africans. The last was the most profitable, and would, in numbers, explode over the next 150 years.

In parallel, the Mane Invasions saw a group of exiles from the vast but crumbling Mali Empire travel south to the coast (around modern-day Ghana), then west to the Atlantic, eventually taking power in the land that will become Sierra Leone (around 1550). They observed the increasing number of European ships arriving along their shores, and the corresponding increase in demand for slaves. They met this demand, at first, as far as I can tell, with the local Bullum and Temne peoples that they had just conquered.

For more of this history, see my previous posts.

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This post is about the mechanisms through which the supply of enslaved Africans met the skyrocketing European demand between about 1650 and 1800, leaning on the part played by one small rock of land.

The Sierra Leone River estuary, on which Freetown sits, is the largest natural harbour in Africa. Nestled safely within these waters is Bunce Island.

Around 1670 a group of British slavers settled the island and built a small castle. As far as I can tell they did not claim to own the land. Instead, they paid rent to local African rulers for its use. The site served as their warehouse and shop front – from which they could play a part in the growing triangle of trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas.

At first (1672-1698), the British Crown restricted entry into West African waters (particularly areas like the Sierra Leone River estuary) to ships from the Royal African Company. Then, during the 1700s, it was opened up to any British owned vessel. Ships travelled south from London, Liverpool and Bristol with guns, kettles, jewellery etc. At Bunce Island these were exchanged for enslaved Africans, who were then shipped to the Americas and traded for sugar, coffee, metals etc., which were shipped back to Britain to be exchanged for more of those same manufactured products shipped before, and so on.

Bunce Island was supplied with slaves by the African rulers and a particular class of middlemen (to be discussed below), in exchange for the guns, kettles and jewellery etc. that had been brought from Europe. The British were not permitted to leave the coastal areas, as the local traders wanted to maintain their control of the internal supply networks. There are reports of slavers entering the mainland and kidnapping people, but this was fiercely resisted, and punishable by execution if caught by the local rulers.

The above-mentioned ‘middlemen’ were generally part of a Luso-African community that developed along the area’s riverbanks between the 1500s and early 1600s. They were bilingual descendants of Portuguese slavers and high society Africans. A similar thing happened again during the 1700s. British slavers working at Bunce Island married into the upper classes of African communities. By 1800 there were around 12,000 Afro-British people living in the area, which is where names such as Caulker, Tucker and Cleverland entered the Sierra Leonean family tree.

In 1728 José Lopez da Moura led a successful attack on the British occupation of the island (just one year after the above drawing was done). He is reputed to have been the richest man in the area, grandson of a Mane King, and part of the local slave trading Luso-African community. They were in competition with the British Royal African Company and its offshoot The Gambia Adventurers for control of the trade. After fighting off the British they destroyed the castle.

The island lay deserted until it was brought back to life by the Scottish owned Grant, Oswald & Company in 1740. Over the next 50 years it was an incredibly profitable venture, benefiting from Britain’s peak slave trading years. As a side note, this is the same Oswald that went on to form part of the negotiating committee at the end of the American Revolutionary War. Look at the difference between the fortress in 1727 (drawing above) and the rebuilt fortress in 1805 (drawing below).

You may remember from part 6 of this series that some groups along this part of the West African coast had developed skills in rice cultivation – particularly in the wetlands. This was something that British settlers in South Carolina and Geogia wanted. Slave auctions would boast whenever a shipment came in from ‘Bance’ or ‘Bense’ Island, because of what it implied about the slave’s agricultural knowledge (with respect to rice). Amazingly, recent work has uncovered clear cultural patterns between the contemporary Gullah Geechee people of the coastal southeastern United States and Sierra Leone’s contemporary Temne and Mende populations. This includes particular words, crafts, cooking styles and folklore.

Overall, the workings of this little island teaches us about the mechanisms through which enslaved Africans were supplied and traded for European goods. Similar examples existed up and down the continent’s coastline. The market was highly regulated on both sides, with social elites trying to maintain control and reap the profits.

Many African rulers did try to resist the sale and export of slaves. King Afonso I (the Kingdom of Kongo) wrote letters to King João III (Portugal) as early as 1526 informing him that Portuguese merchants were kidnapping his subjects, demanding that it stop. Queen Nzinga (modern day Angola) waged a decades long war against Portuguese expansion and slave raids during the 1500s. In 1550 the Oba (King) of Benin banned the export of male captives entirely because he realised it was draining his domestic workforce, causing a trade shift to pepper and ivory. This law held for two centuries, and the resistance was subsequently maintained by King Agaja Trudo of Dahomey (also in modern-day Benin). He launched military campaigns against coastal slave ports (similar to Bunce Island but further south) and blocked inland slave routes, hoping to disrupt the Atlantic market. In the 1780s Almami Abdul Kader Kan of Futa Toro (in modern-day Senegal, close to the home of the ancient Ghanaian Empire) passed a law prohibiting the transport or sale of enslaved people through his territory. French slavers had to return kidnapped children, and the regional slave caravans were shut down. The Kingdoms of Appolonia (in modern-day Ghana), Lozi (in and around modern-day Zambia), Kuba (in the modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo) and the Zulus (in modern-day South Africa) all fought European and Arab long distance slave markets.

But there was a significant cost to such resistance. The Europeans were exchanging guns and ammunition for slaves. African communities that participated in the trade became comparably well endowed with arms and could easily overthrow those communities that did not participate. Once overthrown, such communities were much more likely to be enslaved themselves, and so on. Resisting the sale and export of slaves became a systematic risk to self defence. It was a horrible trap. Participate in the trade, or become the commodity. Within this context, I can start to understand how the supply chain worked and proliferated.

A few months after I first arrived in Sierra Leone my parents and sister came to visit (this was the end of 2011.) We went on a day trip Bunce Island. This was not a package affair, although I understand it is much more accessible now. We had to coordinate our own boat (I think I did this from the Freetown Shipyard in Murray Town) and guide. We were lucky enough to go with Joe Opela. He is an American who first came to Sierra Leone in the 1970s as a Peace Corp volunteer. He took an interest in the again-deserted island, and over the subsequent 40 years coordinated a range of grants to do a basic archaeological survey and some maintenance work. Nonetheless, to my eyes it remained something akin to the scenes at the end of Jumanji, or perhaps something out of Indiana Jones. The remnants of a deserted fortress, falling, gradually being absorbed by the vines and trees that, presumably, once reigned before.

The ruins show a headquarters (home to the Chief Agent and senior officers), an open air slave yard, two watch towers, fortification with space for eight cannons, and a gun power magazine. At one end of the island lies a small scattering of tombstones. Graves of those who once worked and died there – some traders, ship captains, and a foreman of African workers. Nothing, of course, for any of the slaves. The open air yard was split into a large section for men, and a smaller section for women and children.

To be honest with you, I did not understand this history when I visited. It was not until a year later, visiting a similar site in Ghana, that I started to grasp the immense global significance of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. This is admittedly shocking, especially given my British education was meant to be quite good.

Nonetheless, walking in the ruins of the yard, it was impossible not to imagine the terror, anger and pain of the people sitting right there, chained, 250 years before. It has slowly sunk in for me over the last 15 years. For a short blink of history’s eye, this island became a portal into hell.

Next time … we will start to look at the impact of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans on the economic development of Britain.

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Quick recap: As the Mali Empire crumbled, an exiled group traveled south to the Atlantic, then west, growing in number all the way. They were militarily skillful, and by the mid 1500s had established power in what is now Sierra Leone. These were the Mane Invasions. Over time the Manes mixed with the existing communities, probably forming the contemporary Loko and Mende ethnic groups and ultimately ceasing to exist as a community in themselves. But, at least in the early days of Mane control, it seems that they chose to capitalize on a new opportunity. The Europeans, arriving in ships along the coast, wanted to buy slaves.

The Spanish and the Portuguese were doing this from the early 1500s. But for us, it is a voyage led by John Hawkins in 1562 that is most interesting. This was the first British venture of its kind. Hawkins bought 300 slaves, probably Bullom and Temne people from Mane sellers in what is now Sierra Leone. He made a great profit exchanging these slaves for pearls, hides and sugar in what is now the Dominican Republic, and was celebrated handsomely on his return to England with the prestigious award of his own coat of arms in 1565, depicting an enslaved African man.

For more history of the relationship between Sierra Leone and the UK, read my previous posts here.

After the Pope split the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese in 1494, other European nations were quick to jump aboard.

“England, France and even Holland, began to challenge the Iberian axis and claim their place in the sun. The negro, too, was to have his place, though he did not ask for it”.

This is a quote from Dr Eric Williams’ seminal account of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans: Capitalism and Slavery. Williams was first a historian, then politician. He led Trinidad and Tobago to independence from the British Empire, just one year behind Sierra Leone. At the start of this book he addresses two questions: why slave labour? And why Africans?

Adam Smith, a founding father of economics and modern capitalism, argued that slave labour is more expensive and less productive than free labour. The point is relatively simple – it takes violence and brutality to squeeze whatever you can from a slave, whereas a small salary can encourage someone to work surprisingly hard. So why go to the trouble of chaining people?

Williams’ answer (adapted from others before him) was that Smith’s argument only holds when there is abundant free labour. It may be cheaper for a baker in Birmingham to hire someone by wage than force them by whip to knead their bread. But it was quite different for Europeans trying to grow cotton, sugar and tobacco in the Americas. Not enough people were queuing up for the work.

At first the Europeans tried to force the indigenous peoples of the Americas to work the land for them. This was not successful. A range of reasons have been suggested, but the one I find most plausible stems from the catastrophic impact of the diseases brought by the Europeans. Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, diphtheria, malaria, yellow fever and mumps are all thought to have been introduced to the Americas by Europeans (and the Africans they came with) throughout the 1500s. It is estimated that the population of the Americas dropped from around 60 million to around 5 million in just 100 years. After what must have been an unimaginably horrific century for the indigenous populations, the Europeans were left with a land comparably bereft of people.

Next in line were Europe’s poor. This predominantly included indentured labour (where people contractually agreed to work for a specified term – 10 years – in return for their passage across the ocean), and convicts. At the time European elites were happy to cleanse their land of impoverished and felonious compatriots, especially if they could still make a profit on them. In 1606 Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, highlighted to King James I that this practice would earn “a double commodity, in the avoidance of people here, and in making use of them there.”

On a micro level too, people made a profit through the commission. Kidnapping of adults and children for shipment became a relatively common occurrence. Added to this, the new land’s opportunity was oversold. Perhaps like some of the global migration we see today, desperate people gave up what little they had in hope of freedom and prosperity abroad.

For convicts, who at the time could be hanged for such trivialities as pick pocketing, shop lifting or stealing rabbits, transportation was often an appealing alternative. An ever-changing list of crimes mandated transportation to the Americas as punishment, and some have suggested this would be modified according to the labour needs of the day. Surge in labour demand? No problem, add a new crime to this list. Political turmoil left its mark too. Many of Cromwell’s Irish adversaries, for instance, ended up in the West Indies. Transportation became common enough to merit its own verb in English – to Barbadoes someone.

Overall, it is thought that between 300,000 and 400,000 European ‘servants’ were brought to the Americas in an initial attempt to labour the land for European mercantilists. They made up a significant portion of the early colonial immigration. However, they were about to be dwarfed by the oncoming tidal wave of enslaved Africans.

These processes all overlapped. The first enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas in the 1520s, perhaps earlier, just 25/30 years after the Pope’s treaty; no doubt at the same time as Europeans were trying to force the indigenous peoples to work for them. And, if you remember from my last post, in 1562 John Hawkins bought 300 Africans from what is now Sierra Leone and exchanged them for pearls, hides and sugar in what is now the Dominican Republic. Throughout the 1500s Europeans tried all three means of labouring the land. Throughout the first half of the 1600s, as far as I can tell, this probably boiled down to mainly European servants and enslaved Africans.

By the second half of the century, however, things were changing. British mercantilists (and probably their peers in other European nations too) were shifting opinion on the merits of sending the poor and felonious abroad. Economic strategy was morphing from the import of raw products for domestic sale to domestic manufacture and subsequent export. This meant more manufacturing, which required low wages. They needed their labour back home. As Williams synthesizes, “the fear of overpopulation … gave way to a fear of under-population”.

As so often happens in economic history, it was a combination of seemingly disparate dynamics bonding that created a change. While demand for cheap labour was growing in England (and presumably wider Europe too), plantation owners were starting to prefer enslaved Africans to servant Europeans. The former was a permanent asset, children and all. The latter a long term rental. The former found it very hard to escape and remain free. The latter could blend into wider free society. Racial, cultural and language differences made the justification and implementation of slavery (or at least highly exploitative and violent working conditions) easier between Europeans and Africans than Europeans and Europeans. Add to this the drying up of European supply, and you reach a situation where, in Barbados for example, planters found that “three blacks work better and cheaper than one white man.”

Simultaniously, planters were realizing that with more labour the agricultural production of cotton, sugar and tobacco benefited from extreme economies of scale. In the French sugar islands, it was estimated that it cost as much to make 10 hogsheads of sugar as it did to make 100, which triggered a rapid expansion of small farms into large plantations.

And so, the transition from indentured Europeans to enslaved Africans was cemented, and the scale up began. In 1645 Barbados had 11,200 small white farmers and 5,680 enslaved Africans. By 1667 there were 745 large plantations and 82,023 enslaved Africans. The profit that absentee capitalists made on this transition was astonishing. Once aggregated, Barbados was estimated to be 17 times richer in 1666 than it was in 1650. And as water flows downhill, others followed suit. Between 1672 and 1708 the European population in Nevis fell by three fifths, while the African population doubled. Over roughly the same period the European population of Montserrat fell by two thirds while the African population increased 11-fold. The same was happening in the North American colonies too. Africans made up 5 percent of Maryland’s population in 1670, but 25 percent in 1730. Similar was said to be true of Virginia.

Enabled by a seemingly endless supply, throughout the second half of the 1600s and early 1700s small farms with both European and African labour gave way to ever larger plantations owned by a small, highly wealthy European elite, worked by a large, rapidly growing enslaved African population.

“Here, then,” argues Williams, “is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial … The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his “subhuman” characteristics so widely pleaded, were only later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor because it was cheapest and best. This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn was to come.”

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Williams published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, nearly two decades before either Trinidad and Tobago or Sierra Leone would gain their independence. He was working at Howard University, Washington D.C at the time. It is sobering to think that this was both 80 years ago, and just 80 years since slavery was abolished in the place he was writing. As an intellectual creation on the timeline of history, it sits at the almost exact mid-point between you and me learning today, and the twilight years of the horrific events themselves.

There are many things that this story makes me reflect on. First, it struck me that Williams felt the need to argue enslavement of Africans was the result of economic forces and not the natural order of humans. But this is just a reminder of the extent to which notions of the innate superiority and inferiority permeated society, and still do. The second extends from this and is also a fundamental part of Williams’ thesis. He argues that “Slavery [in the Americas] was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”. In other words, moral narratives were created that enabled the comfortable pursuit of economic interests. This is a cautionary tale for any era. The third builds on this again. As an economics student, I was regularly warned about the dangers of a planned/socialist society. ‘Look at the famines of China and Russia’, my lecturers said. ‘The communist administrators simply could not estimate the nutritional requirements of their people. The market traders would have done better.’ Perhaps their tutelage should have continued: ‘and look at the plight of the near extinct indigenous Americans, the indentured Europeans and the enslaved Africans (with the Indians and Chinese still to come). The market traders simply could not see the inhumanity of their profits.’

Next time, I want to look more into what was happening in the land that will become Sierra Leone that enabled the supply of enslaved Africans to meet the growing European demand.

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Yesterday was Sierra Leone’s 65th Independence Anniversary! Happy anniversary Sierra Leone, and all the best for the future. I miss my cassava leaf, Star beer and watching the sun set over the ocean, all to the sound track of P-Square (amazing to see that they were part of this year’s Independence celebrations! The crowd must have gone wild.)

Quick recap: At the beginning of the 1500s Queen Macarico was exiled from the Mali Empire. With a team of family, friends and dependents she traveled south, then west, fighting and picking up soldiers along the way. By the time she reached the western coast of Africa they were a formidable force. Queen Macarico died around 1545, but over the next 15 years her people took control of much of what is now Sierra Leone, and, through mixing with the groups they met, gave birth to both the Loko and Mende ethnic groups. These were the Mane Invasions.

For all previous posts, click here.

As with my last post, much of this is taken from Walter Rodney’s 1967 article A reconsideration of the Mane Invasions of Sierra Leone, published in the Journal of African History.

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The Mane Invasions had a dramatic impact on life in the area that will become Sierra Leone.

As far as is currently understood, the Manes apportioned the land into four – the Kingdom of the Bulloms, the Kingdom of Logos (the old name for Port Loko), the Kingdom of Sierra Leone (or Boure) and the Kingdom of Sherbro – with further subdivisions below. Each level had a leader who owed allegiance to the King above. These Kings owed allegiance to their seniors in Cape Mount (in what is now northern Liberia), who in turn paid allegiance to an overlord (who had remained behind, I guess within the realm of the Mali Empire).

However, by the early 17th century, Portuguese traders were suggesting that the Manes had already somewhat merged into the groups they had overrun just 60 or 70 years before. In 1616 Alvares de Almada wrote “It is difficult to speak of the Manes of Sierra Leone because of their assimilation into the life there. Such genuine Manes about whom one could speak are few and fast disappearing.”

An important factor that may have contributed to this is that large factions of the Mane invaders were made up of young men from surrounding lands. As Walter Rodney summarises: “When the Manes fought the Susus, Limbas and Fulas (in what appears to have been the upper Scarcies region), they did so using primarily Bulloms and Temnes. Similarly, it is to be expected that, when they attacked the Bulloms and Kissis of the Sherbro and Gallinas, their main troops were drawn from the neighbouring Malaguetta Coast.”

With each new settlement conquered, the Manes recruited more young men into their army. Soldiers were trained in the use of Mane arms and, reportedly, became puffed up with pride at being among the Mane ranks.

One clever innovation was to carry small bows and arrows. The small arrows were said to be useless with their enemy’s larger bows, while the enemy’s larger arrow was perfectly compatible with the Mane small bow. This would have been a significant advantage on a battlefield littered with such ammunition. The Manes also carried large shields made of reeds (big enough for full coverage) and two knives (one always tied to the left arm). They wore red caps and loose cotton shirts with wide necks, each adorned with abundant feathers.

From the perspective of the contemporary Portuguese traders and missionaries, the cultures of the two groups made the outcome somewhat inevitable. There is talk about the groups already settled along the coast starting as virtually ignorant in the arts of war. Father Barriera (the Jesuit missionary we met in the last post) described them as highly intelligent, quick learners, but with “weak and effeminate minds.” De Almada, writing at almost the same time (early 1600s) claimed that they were “given to feasts and pleasures, which they continually have, because the land gives everything in abundance.” The Mane methods of warfare, on the other hand, were described with great admiration, superior even to those of the Senegalese Wolof warriors.

I am a little skeptical of these comparisons. I think it is unlikely that Europeans writing in the early 1600s would have a decent cultural understanding of these people in the early 1500s, but there are other things to suggest some fire beneath the smoke.

Rodney argues that the “bows, shields and knives described as being in the possession of most of the inhabitants of Sierra Leone in the early seventeenth century [at the end of the fighting] were exactly the same as those which distinguished the Manes on their arrival [in the mid sixteenth century]. After service, both for and against the Manes, the people of Sierra Leone had learnt to fight in formation, using squadrons of archers and bowmen carrying the large Mane shields. The Mane entrenchments known as atabanka were in general use. These consisted of three or four fences of stout palisades, with a ditch on the outside. Tall towers and garrison posts were built on the walls, within which the older and less energetic archers remained. Planning encirclements and breaking out of sieges had become commonplace in Sierra Leone before the end of the sixteenth century.”

On the other hand, the coastal peoples (pre-Mane Invasion) were known for their craftsmanship, particularly in ivory and raffia. Elaborate and precise spoons, saltcellars and dagger hilts amazed the European traders. One noted with awe that whatever he could draw on paper, they could carve out of ivory. Another professed that the carved animal heads and birds were completed “with such perfection that when one has viewed them one has seen everything.”

But, while these items could be still found in the markets throughout the early 1600s, by this point they were old. No one was producing them anymore. Manuel Alvares made his thoughts on the matter very clear: “It is the fault of these foreign kings that the country is so poor, because they have captured so many master craftsmen, and ... have committed so many vexations on the indigenous people that these latter have become less and less concerned and have given up the exercise of their arts.”

Another lost art may relate to the sculpting of what the Mendes now call Nomoli (meaning found spirit) or what the Kissis now call Pomdo (meaning the deceased). These are anthropomorphic carvings found throughout much of southern Sierra Leone. While they come up from time to time as agricultural soil is turned, they are generally considered to predate the Mane invasions. There isn’t evidence of them being routinely made since. It is thought that they played some sort of religious or ontological function. If so, the sudden halt in their production is a reminder of the cultural trauma such invasions can unleash.

The more detailed cultural descriptions may be suspect, but it does seem that the Mane methods of battle became standard, and that a range of creative skills were lost. Of course it is not binary. There is also a suggestion that the Manes brought more advanced methods of cloth work, weaving, metallurgy and medicine with them. The latter two especially may have been an ingredient of their superior battle skills.

The loss of certain aspects of art and culture was not the extent of it. In 1564 the British naval commander John Hawkins described a visit to Sierra Leone (just 20 years after the Manes are thought to have arrived). He reported that the island of Sherbro had been morphed into some sort of granary, with the Manes making harsh use of Sape labour to produce large quantities of millet, rice, root crops and palm wine. ‘Sape’ was the European collective term for the groups along this coast before the Mane’s arrived. In this case they were likely Temne and Bullum communities. There are records of people trying to escape this Mane granary, which says something about the nature and conditions of the experience.

But now we must pause. We have reached one of those points in history where we need to zoom out. We are at the edge of something bigger. Something that will go on to engulf each of the groups we have met so far and plenty more besides. Something that will grow into centuries of unimaginable pain, violence and heartbreak, showcasing the very worst of what humanity has to offer. It will create new populations, many of whom will go on to form new independent countries. It will, some argue, underpin the industrial revolution, give way to global capitalism, and become an important socioeconomic determinant of the modern world, both between and within countries.

As well as being a naval commander, Admiral Sir John Hawkins was a slaver. He, along with his Portuguese and Spanish peers, were among the first to take slaves from Africa to the Americas. The Manes, during the mid-1500s, started selling ‘Sapes’ to the Europeans in their thousands.

We are at the start of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

Over the next 300 years, this will turn into thousands then millions and then tens of millions. In the 18^th century alone six million slaves will be captured and transported across the Atlantic, of which 2.5 million will be on British ships. It is suggested that large sections of the African population stagnated or even shrunk during this period, and that this paved the way for some of the subsequent colonisation by Europe.

From the perspective of this Substack series (looking at the relationship between the UK and Sierra Leone), this is where the two entities really meet for the first time. The very thin edge of this wedge was the above-mentioned John Hawkins. He is the first British merchant known to have profited from the triangle of trade. On a trip to Sierra Leone in 1562 he traded English goods for 300 slaves. He then sailed to Puerto de Plata and Monte Christi (in the modern-day Dominican Republic) and exchanged them for pearls, hides and sugar, before returning back to England. This trio of exchange will become a major part of Britain’s subsequent economic growth. Such was the interest and excitement at the profit of this conjuring trick that, on his return, Hawkins was granted his own new Coat of Arms. The unique feature of this emblem was an enslaved African man.

Next time - the origins of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

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Quick recap: The Ghanaian and Mali Empires dominate West Africa from the end of the first millennium to the middle of the second - roughly 600 to 1600 CE (common era). They are both major trading systems, linking communities from north and south of the Sahel. Gold is the most significant good, but other important commodities include salt, ivory, slaves and certain agricultural products like kola nut. The Ghanaian Empire started to fall around 1100 CE, giving way to the Mali Empire, and triggering a southbound exodus that is probably the origin of the contemporary Sierra Leonean Temne population (among others.) For more of this history, see my previous posts.

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Mansa Musa, the most successful of the Malian kings, died in 1337. After this, the empire was never the same. Internal struggles left room for vasal states (such as the Songhai) and external groups (such as the Tuareg and Mossi) to rise and take important cities such as Timbuktu.

On top of this, an increasing flow of Portuguese ships along the West African coast undermined Malian dominance of the region’s trade routes. Traders no longer needed to traverse the Sahara and Mali lost its gate keeping trump card. By the early-1600s, the once vast and powerful empire had ceased to exist altogether.

This decline triggers what may be one of the most important chapters in Sierra Leone’s history.

Due to the comparative lack of historical and archaeological work that has been done in West Africa, it is extremely hard to draw a detailed picture of what happened. The main approach is similar to that already discussed in my post on Sierra Leone before the 1500s. The few small pieces of information available are triangulated; for example, comparing language patterns with oral traditions. By the 16^th century we can add the written accounts of contemporary European traders to the mix.

The work of André Donelha, a Portuguese trader born in Cape Verde around the mid 1500s, was recently rediscovered and is probably the best account of this story. He spent 50 years in and around the Upper Guinea Coast. His father, also a Cape Verdean trader, bought three Mane people (presumably as slaves) around 1560. They told Donelha (presumably a young teenager at the time) about the origins of their people. Half a century later he wrote it down, and this is how we know it today.

As their grandparents told them, the Mane’s first chief was a lady named Macarico. In around 1505 she offended her Emperor (in what was then a crumbling but not dead Mali) and had to leave. She took a large number of people with her – friends, family, dependents. This group became an army, and this army became very successful. They travelled south, accumulating new recruits as they went. It was rumoured that, such was the size of their party, to meet their nourishment needs they would feast on their enemies. Accusations of cannibalism are a common trope throughout world history, and it has been suggested that this part of their story was enhanced or fabricated in order to breed fear in their adversaries.

They travelled south like this all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, where they split into three groups. They then moved west in parallel columns, each with a vanguard, a main army, and a rear guard. They reached a Portuguese fortress in Mina (I assume this is the fort in Elmina), fought a little, and moved on. A fourth group split and travelled east, while the bulk continued west along the Malagueta Coast. Around Cape Mount they fought hard with the Bullom (remember their history at along the southern coast of Sierra Leone) and Macarico’s son was killed. Macarico herself died shortly after, of old age and grief. It was then 1545 – forty years after her departure from Mali.

Over the next 15 years the Manes established a powerful presence in the area, expanding north across the Sherbro, Rokelle, Port Loko and Scarcies rivers. Owing the disunity of the peoples they met, with a few notable exceptions they were able to expand dominion one community at a time without many setbacks. At this point they did not aim to consume or convert the peoples they conquered, but they did absorb them into their army. Hence, for example, the expansion of the Manes through what is now Sierra Leone was carried out by an army including many young Temne and Bullom men.

Notably, at points it also included European sailors or traders affiliated with European ships. There are at least two accounts of this. In one, two surviving crew of a Portuguese ship that was wrecked off the Malagueta Coast (one African, one European) joined the Manes on their journey and served as soldiers all the way to what will become Sierra Leone. In another, the Manes enlisted a Portuguese man on account of his being a highly skilled musketeer. Unfortunately, according to accounts, he failed to reload after firing his first shot, somewhat scuppering their military strategy.

What gives Donelha’s version of the three Manes’ story weight is the extent to which it is corroborated by smaller details noted by other contemporary writers.

In 1594 Alvares d’Almada, a Cape Verdean of mixed African and European heritage, hypothesised that the Manes had originated somewhere around Mali because they spoke almost the same language as the Mande people (from Mali), wore the same clothes, and had the same weapons, although d’Almada did not know any of the details Donelha would soon write down. Interestingly, d’Almada would later be brought to Lisbon to advise on the Portuguese colonisation of Sierra Leone.

A variety of other writers have also noted that the original leader of the Manes was a women who died shortly before reaching Sierra Leone. Father Baltezar Barriera (a Jesuit missionary) was informed by a Mane king in 1606 that their invading forces had fought with the Portuguese at Mina. The two shipwrecked soldiers, later identified, confirmed the direction of the invasions. Barriera, De Almada and Donelha, all writing independently, say that the invasions along the southern half of the West African cost started around 1540 or 1550.

The pieces of the puzzle fit together. In all likelihood, a group, potentially very large, travelled south, perhaps from the northern hinterlands of modern day Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, hit the Atlantic then mostly travelled West, accumulating recruits and growing in strength all the way, ultimately settling in what is now Sierra Leone.

But then what? Today there is no single ‘Mane’ population. During my time in Sierra Leone I never heard of the Manes. Where did they go?

The idea is that they merged with already existing peoples to create new groups that we are well aware of today. The northern column primarily encountered the Temne, and established a centre of power around what is now Port Loko (then called Logos). One suggestion is that the mixing of the Manes and the Temne gave birth to the Loko. To add credibility to this idea, the Loko language sits within the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo family of languages, rather than the Mel branch, on which many of the other languages spoken in the area sit. But also has distinct Temne features (which does sit on the Mel branch). Moreover, the Limbas still call the Lokos ‘Gbande’. The Gbande are an ethnic group in northern Liberia and south eastern Guinea, and say that their brothers left them many years ago to fight a war in the west - perfectly fitting with the idea of a westward invasive migration, picking up soldiers as it moved across the hinterland.

The southern columns (moving closer to the coast) primarily encountered the Kissi and Bullom. Today, there is a large group living throughout southern and eastern Sierra Leone who are culturally similar to the Bullom but with clear Mande traits, have oral traditions that distinguish between original settlers and an invading group, speak a Mande language and are often associated with the Loko. These are the Mende; now, the second most populous ethnic group in Sierra Leone.

The most significant impact of the Mane Invasions on Sierra Leone may have been the creation of the Loko and Mende ethnic groups. But it did stop there. The invasions are thought to have been so pervasive that they had social and cultural impacts on almost all pre-existing groups.

Next time we will look at how the invasions changed manufacturing, cloth work, military capacity, art and religious practice right across the different groups of Sierra Leone.

Much of this post and the next are based on Walter Rodney’s 1967 article A reconsideration of the Mane Invasions of Sierra Leone, published in the Journal of African History.

We need a small side bar at the end of this post. In my last post I wrote about lasting Christianity arriving in Sierra Leone around the end of the 1700s through former slaves who had converted to Protestant branches of Christianity in the United States. However, they were not the first people to try and spread Christianity in the area. Father Barriera, at the beginning of the 1600s, may claim this title. He spent ten years ministering along the West African coast and rivers between 1606 and 1616, and in 1607 baptised a King, his family and others in the community. However, from what I understand the seed does not grow. Christianity does not become in any way endemic, and potentially dies out. Today Catholicism represents only a tiny fraction of Sierra Leone’s Christians.

Next time - what is the social and cultural legacy of the Mane Invasions?

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Quick recap: Medieval Europe operates within a feudal social system. Monarchs sit at the top, with Noblemen and Knights beneath. Peasants work the land in exchange for the basics they need to survive. A few generations after the Norman conquest of England, the Noble class force a new and unpopular King to sign the Magna Carta, agreeing to certain rights and freedoms (for the Noblemen) in exchange for permission to collect taxes (for the Monarch).

Meanwhile, West Africa is dominated by two very large trading empires, one after the other - Ghana then Mali. The fall of Ghana during the 11th and 12th centuries CE birthed an exodus, both from Ghana itself and the smaller satellite states that operated within its sphere. This included the Temne and the Baga, who made their way south from the Futa Jallon heights to what is today Northern and Coastal Sierra Leone.

For all previous posts look here.

We now enter the second section of this series - roughly 1500-1800 CE.

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This post is about an idea.

Salvation is achieved through faith alone, and the only source of spiritual authority is the Bible.

The idea ruptured western Christianity in half, fuelled long and brutal wars, and ultimately shifted power from religious to secular authorities. Some say it marked the end of medieval Europe, and the start of the modern era. From our perspective, it had a defining cultural impact in the places that will become the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone.

We are talking about the Protestant split from the Catholic Church.

You could fill multiple libraries many times over with all that has been written on this. I will focus on two things – the idea’s origins and its journey to Sierra Leone.

The origins

In part four I introduced Mansa Musa, the Catalan Atlas and the Mali Empire. I did not mention that this was also the era of the European Black Death. In 1346 the bubonic plague started decimating European communities. Over the next 10 years it killed around 50 million people – one third of the continent’s population.

That such a thing could happen undermined the power and spiritual authority of the Catholic Church (the region’s major religious institution of the time). Moreover, it is thought to have killed up to 60% of the clergy. Rapid attempts to replenish this workforce resulted in an inflow of young, inexperienced and sometimes corrupt ministers, further reducing the Church’s credibility. Out of necessity and choice, personal piety started to gain popularity. There was a rise in mysticism and lay-led religious movements. It is too much to say that the Black Death caused the Reformation. But it is probably reasonable to say it created hairline cracks in the institution of the Roman Catholic Church.

Another phenomenon commonly credited with tipping the balance was the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of selling forgiveness. It worked almost like governments selling bonds today. The Church would offer forgiveness in exchange for a financial contribution. Selling ‘certificates of indulgences’ became a standard Papal fundraising method. In one example Pope Leo X wanted to complete St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. To raise the money, he issued a new round of certificates. One of his Friars ran a particularly active marketing campaign, with the catchy slogan “As soon as the coin into the box rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.”

In response to this sort of thing, in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the Castle Church in Wittenberg (in modern day Germany). These were both an ethical challenge to the sale of indulgences and a theological argument that repentance is an internal spiritual process, not an external action (however ‘good’ that action may be.) Put together, the Church was getting rich by conning the poor into paying for forgiveness – a process that left them worse off in this world, and no better in the next. Instead, one should achieve forgiveness (and access to heaven) through personal reflection, prayer and repentance.

The main difference was that in Catholicism access to God and spiritual salvation were/are mediated through the clergy, not achieved directly through personal prayer.

With the help of the new printing press, these ideas spread like wildfire. They became the dominant form of Christianity throughout large areas of Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic, the British Isles (except most of Ireland), and significant parts of Western mainland Europe. The early British migrants to America (often referred to as the Pilgrims) were Puritan separatists from the Anglican Church of England (part of this Protestant movement).

The Reformation’s spread was not entirely theological; King Henry VIII of England’s political manoeuvres were a prime example. He orchestrated a split between the English and Roman Catholic Churches because he could not get the Pope to annul his first marriage. In 1534 an act of Parliament put the reigning British monarch at the head of the Church of England (as is still the case today), removing the Pope’s authority. With this he got the Church’s annulment and married again, and again… It so happened that many of Henry’s inner circle at the time, (including his new wife Anne Boleyn) were in favour of the Reformation. With this, the newly independent Church of England shifted away from Catholicism towards Protestantism.

But how did these ideas get to Sierra Leone?

The answer: via formerly enslaved Africans who converted to Christianity in the United States and then built a new home along the West African coast. This was then fermented further by British missionaries throughout the 1800s.

I think the conversion from various African religions to Christianity during enslavement is a fascinating metamorphosis. I find it hard to understand the appeal of an abuser’s theology. Thankfully, we have a handful of first-hand accounts in which people who made this conversion explain it.

Olaudah Equiano’s account is perhaps the most famous. His knowledge of the Bible went hand in hand with learning to read while a slave. He found that the ideas gave him spiritual solace through the brutality of his experience, and the opportunity of salvation provided space for hope. More pragmatically, later on in his life (while campaigning for the abolition of slavery), he was able to use the moral teachings of the Bible to expose the hypocrisy of the Christian slave master. Moreover, his image as a pious Christian was palatable to British public (to whom he was appealing for abolition). This last point may call into question the first two – was he just saying what he thought people wanted to hear as part of his bigger ambition to encourage the end of slavery?

Nonetheless, it resonates with what little other information we have about this widespread conversion. The key appealing features are thought to have been the theology’s foundations in spiritual equality (in opposition to the ultimate physical inequality that the slaves bore) and the promise of future liberation through prayer. On the latter point, some have suggested that West African religions often did not have concepts exactly comparable to heaven and hell. The afterlife was considered a spiritual realm coexisting and with the physical realm. Perhaps the offer of an entirely different paradise was appealing?

It is also thought that a lot of the conversion happened away from the view of either White clergy or slave masters. First hand accounts suggest it happened in secret meetings that have since become known as the ‘invisible institution’. Slaves would meet in the woods or hidden areas where they could enjoy free expression of faith without the controlling presence of White authority. They would interweave their previous religious and spiritual practices, giving rise to new forms of Afro-Christianity, but outwardly still presenting under the labels brought over from Europe. Overall, it was the Baptists and the Methodists (two Protestant branches originating in England) that accumulated the most recruits like this.

It is not hard to imagine how important the Protestant amendments to Christian doctrine were with respect to the subsequent theological conversion taken by slaves. It is these amendments that made the invisible institution, preaching of lay people and personal, private pursuit of faith much more achievable. Individuals and communities could take control of their own salvation, independent of the power structures around them. This is quite different to the manner of conversion that took place in the large Catholic colonies such as Brazil, where adult slaves were forcibly baptised on arrival. Such a process would be meaningless in a Protestant community.

And this brings us to two people that we will get to know much better over the course of this series – David George (a Baptist) and Boston King (a Methodist). These two people were slaves in the United States. They escaped their respective plantations during the American War of Independence (1775-1783 CE) and made their way to Loyalist (British) lines. Given freedom, they were first shipped north to Nova Scotia. When this did not work, they were shipped south. In March 1792, along with just over 1,000 other freed slaves, George and King arrived at a deep, natural harbour on the west coast of Africa.

This place became Freetown. David George established the first Baptist church in West Africa, and Boston King both established a Methodist Chapel and was the first Methodist missionary in Sierra Leone. Along with their small congregations, these people were the basis of lasting Christianity in Sierra Leone. The wave of British missionary work (throughout the 1800s) built on that of George and King, with a bias towards the Methodist teachings.

This last couple of paragraphs may seem rushed, but we will come back to this story in much more detail later. It is truly astonishing.

Today, 20-25% of Sierra Leone’s population are Christian (probably around 2 million people), the majority of whom are Methodist. While broadly concentrated in the capital, there are also Christian communities throughout the southern and eastern provinces. The Krio are predominantly Christian, but the Sherbro, Kissi and Kono all have significant Christian segments too. Overall, Christianity has been a major part of both Freetown’s and Sierra Leone’s politics and culture for the last 200 years.

From now on posts will be every two weeks. Credit to those who manage to put out newsletters and posts more regularly. It is a lot of work!

Next time we will look at the Mane Invasions.

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Quick recap: The Ghanaian and Mali Empires dominate West Africa from the end of the first millennium to the middle of the second - roughly 600 to 1600 CE (common era). They are both major trading stations, linking communities from north and south of the Sahel. Gold is the most significant natural resource, but other important commodities include salt, ivory, slaves and certain agricultural goods like kola nut. By the mid 1300s CE, Mansa Musa, King of Mali, is one of the most powerful people in the world, and probably the wealthiest. For more background, see my previous posts.

Thank you to Michael Duff for giving permission to use some of his beautiful aerial photos of Sierra Leone. See more of his work at https://www.duff.tv/home.

We are now going to travel south, just a little, and zoom in to the land that will eventually become Sierra Leone.

I can only find a few fragments of information from before the late 15th century - likely reflecting the lack of historical and archaeological work that has been done. This post builds from the work of Joe A. D. Alie, published in A New History of Sierra Leone.

Some tools were discovered in a cave in Yengema (in Kono District), that are dated around 2500 BCE (before common era). There suggests people have been on this land for at least 4,500 years. There are also a number of iron smelting sites that have been identified in Kuranko Country (an area that straddles Guinea and Sierra Leone). Based on better researched sites elsewhere in West Africa it is thought that this process spread throughout the region from about 800-400 BCE, and one account suggests that iron was used in the area that became Sierra Leone by 800 CE, but their source is not clear. There are also some broken pieces of pottery found in a cave near Makeni, that are said to be pre-historic. Exactly when, however, appears unknown.

Other than this, the light is out.

Or so I thought…

An alternative way to unpick history, in the absence of written or physical evidence, is to map oral histories and contemporary language patterns.

When the Portuguese traders first arrived in the late 1400s, they were met by various established groups. The Baga, Bullom, Krim and Vai were settled along the coast. Moving slightly inland, the Temne had their place in the north-west, the Limba were further north, and the Kono were to the east.

All groups of people use things like songs, stories, proverbs and poems to pass on knowledge about their culture and history from one generation to the next. While these may become vague or distorted over time, it is possible to marry them with patterns of language in different areas to regain a sense of what happened.

The Limba, for instance, apparently have no semblance of an arrival myth in their oral traditions. Moreover their language, Hulimba (also referred to as Limba), is distinct from all the others in Sierra Leone. It sits on its own branch of the Atlantic-Congo family of languages, itself a branch within the broader Niger-Congo family (the importance of this branch structure will soon become clear). Because of this, they are generally thought to be the first of Sierra Leone’s contemporary ethnic groups to have occupied the land. Today they mainly live around the Northern regions, such as in Bombali, Koinadugu, Kambia, Karene, and Tonkolili.

Temne oral tradition suggests they come from Jalunkando in the Futa Jallon mountains (an area of modern day Guinea). Jalunkando was a significant political entity when the Ghanaian Empire was at its peak, situated just to the south. Both Jalunkando and Ghana are thought to have fallen apart between the 11th and 12th centuries. This may have been when the Temne left their highlands and travelled south, settling in what is now northern and central Sierra Leone between the Kolenté (Great Scarcies) and Rokel Rivers. Today they are one of the two biggest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone. The Temne language, along with several others still spoken along the coasts of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia sits on the Mel branch of the Atlantic-Congo family of languages.

The Baga are thought to have left Futa Jallon along with the Temne, but settled closer to Sierra Leone’s coastline. They were able to corner off access to swamplands, where they honed their skills in rice cultivation.

The Bullum, like the Limba, do not have an obvious origin or migration story in their oral traditions. They were at the coast when the Portuguese arrived, and are still there now. It is thought that expansion of the Temne people forced a split between the northern Bullum, who became heavily influenced by the Temne, and the southern Bullum, who spread out into the coastal islands and eventually became what we now know as the Sherbro.

The Krim are thought to be an off shoot of the southern Bullom (Sherbro), sharing many cultural and linguistic traditions. Today they mainly occupy coastal areas of southern Sierra Leone (Bonthe and Pujehun).

Like the Temne, the Baga, Bullum and Krim all speak languages that are part of the Mel branch of the Atlantic-Congo family.

The Vai, however, do not speak a similar language to their coastal brethren. Their language is actually more closely related to that of the Kono people, way over in the east of Sierra Leone. The Kono and the Vai both speak languages on the Mande branch of the Niger-Congo family. Mande and Atlantic-Congo are adjacent branches of the Niger-Congo family.

In one story the Vai and the Kono are said to be a related people, with an original home somewhere in modern day Guinea. Following a shortage salt, they set out in search of new supplies. Along the way the group split. Some were tired, and established a new home. The others continued, calling out as they departed ‘O maa kono, kanii na’, meaning ‘you wait for us, we will return’. In the end they found their salt along the coast, but they never returned. The group that stopped half way named their land Kono (those that waited), the others named their land Kanina (those that were to return). This second group were the Vai, now living along the country’s south west coast.

It is thought that by the early 1500s the rest of the Sierra Leone’s contemporary ethnic groups had not yet arrived or formed. Perhaps the most obvious of these are the Mende - the second of the two major ethnic groups today - and the Krio. The Krio, as a people, wont exist until the end of the 1700s with the birth of Freetown. The Mende will arrive a little earlier, fleeing the fall of the great Mali Empire throughout the 1600s.

Next week … The Reformation, the birth of Protestantism and Christianity’s journey to Sierra Leone.

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Quick recap: In 1066 CE the Normans invade England and defeat the Anglo Saxons. William the Conqueror becomes King of England. The next 20 years see a major transfer of land from the old Anglo Saxon elite to the new Norman elite, and the language of high society switches from Old English to Norman French. The Norman intention is to minimise the change felt by the everyday person through maintaining the feudal and tax structure that already existed. Read all previous posts here.

William the Conqueror, followed by two of his sons, ruled over England and the Norman Empire for 70 years.

After the second of these sons (Henry I) died, a 20 year civil war ensued. Eventually, Henry II took power. He happened to be the eldest son of Henry I’s daughter (so still the blood line of William). Then came Richard I (more commonly known as Lionheart, or, as they would have said, Cœur de Lion). He was one of Henry II’s sons. And then King John, another of Henry II’s sons.

This brings us to 1215 CE, and the next chapter of our story.

Upon taking the reigns, John rapidly lost most of the empire he inherited and, in the expensive process of doing so, frustrated the cadre of noble society below him. Perhaps it is precisely this quality that gave him his special place in history? For it is under King John that the Magna Carta was first signed.

He (and his predecessors) had come to demand too much with too little predictability from the Barons and Dukes. The Williams, Henries, Richard and John had grown accustomed to rule through force and will, making arbitrary executive decisions on the basis that a King is above the law. Sounding a little familiar?

There was a common view among contemporary writers that royalty should rule in line with laws and norms. But, it was not clear what to do when this did not happen. Sounding very familiar?

In opposition, the North and the East of England united! Ok, this does not sound at all familiar.

In 1215 CE a group of Barons demanded that King John confirm the Charter of Liberties - a previous royal declaration, perceived as protecting the rights of the Barons (against things like excessive taxation and arbitrary imprisonment). As both sides started escalating violence, John asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been working with the Rebels on their demands, to arrange peace talks.

They agreed to meet on neutral grounds, half way between the lofty Royal Windsor Castle and the Rebels’ base in Staines. The Rebels offered their list of demands to King John, and, with the Archbishop’s mediation, they were moulded into something agreeable. The demands protected church rights, defined and prohibited illegal imprisonment, ensured access to swift justice and put limits on taxation owed to the crown. The Rebels renewed their oaths of loyalty. John signed copies of the charter. And … no one kept their word.

It was such a palaver that the Pope, who deemed the charter to be “not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust”, had to be brought in to annul the document. This led to a civil war between the major land owning Barons and the King. Just one year later, while moving from battle field to battle field, King John died of dysentery.

All of this, in itself, was nothing special. Similar ‘agreements’ were being signed elsewhere in Europe, and probably all over the world. What is special is the life that this particular charter goes on to have.

In a bid for peace, in 1217 CE John’s son (Henry III) signs a slightly revised version of the charter. This is where it takes the name Magna Carter (Great Charter). He reissues it again eight years later, in exchange for the introduction of new taxes. And then, at the end of the century (1297 CE), his son (Edward I) confirms the charter as part of England’s statute law.

Over the next 300 years marginal changes were made to the charter, and its confirmation became a routine protocol between the Royals and their noble class. For those of you who read last week’s post, and to give context to what else was going on in the world at the time, this is the period through which the Mali Empire rose to prominence throughout the Sahel and North Africa, and the era depicted by The Catalan Atlas.

But then, in the 1500s, lawyers and historians started to argue that the Magna Carta was actually something deeper. They suggested there had been an ancient English constitution, dating back to the Anglo Saxons. These rights, they said, had been supressed by Norman rule, and reborn through the Magna Carta. This gave it a somewhat timeless authority with enhanced power. It came to be framed as a cornerstone of longstanding English tradition, protecting the rights of individual Englishmen against the overreach of royal power. By the 1600s it was being used to argue against the divine rights of Kings and Queens - so much so that both James I and Charles I tried to stop people discussing it.

By the 1700s we are approaching the birth of the United State of America. The ever growing ideological mythology surrounding the Magna Carta as a liberating document for the everyday person against royal tyranny made it the perfect framework from which to build this new land of hopes and dreams.

I should clarify that this view is now generally considered inaccurate, not least because the original charter governed the relationship between nobles and the King. It did nothing for the mass peasantry. But it is the story that matters. And this story made the Magna Carta perfect for nascent America.

Not only did it influence attempts to establish systems of governance in the British Colonies of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maryland during the 1600s. But it went on to contribute directly to both the American Constitution itself (1787 CE) and the subsequent Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the constitution, 1791 CE).

The fifth amendment, stating that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” comes almost directly from the Magna Carta. As do the sixth and seventh amendments (guaranteeing the right to a fair trial), the eighth amendment (prohibiting excessive bail or cruel/unusual punishment), and the ninth amendment (clarifying that other rights obtained outside of this charter retain their effect). Components of article one and three of the constitution itself also draw from the Magna Carta (regarding the right to challenge unlawful imprisonment, and the right to trial by a jury of ones peers).

Similar stories can be told for constitutions or legal frameworks in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, India, and New Zealand, among many others. Because of the global Imperial position that Britain went on to take, and the resulting vast footprint of English common law, the Magna Carta in some way underpins relationships between governments and their people all over the world today - not least in Sierra Leone. This manifests in the principles that a government is not above the law, that individuals have the right to due legal process and trial by a jury of peers, and that taxation requires some form of consent.

And of England? What mark remains there?

Three of the 37 clauses first enshrined into English law in 1297 CE remain in force today, nearly 800 years on. Clause one, guaranteeing rights of the English church. Clause nine, guaranteeing the rights of London, and other cities, towns and ports. And clause 29, stipulating that no free man shall be imprisoned or stripped of rights without lawful judgment by his peers or by the law of the land, and that justice cannot be sold, denied, or delayed.

It is amazing to think of a few individuals in feudal England, over 800 ago, making an agreement that goes on to characterise our world today. I would not say that the agreement itself caused our modern system of governance. I am more inclined to the view that an underlying social wave of change was able to use some of the ideas, but that we may have ended up with systems somewhat like this anyway.

The bigger point I take from this is how much things can change, albeit over very long periods of time. The metamorphosis of the everyday individual from nothing to a position of social and political presence, with rights that, on paper, should be respected, is change on a scale incomparable to anything we generally consider, perhaps for obvious reasons.

What could the equivalent be for the year 2826 CE, if we are still here?

Next week we are back to West Africa, this time focusing on the land that will become Sierra Leone.

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We are now back in West Africa, but we will travel forward in time to 1324 CE and the ancient Empire of Mali.

Mali achieved what Ghana had before but on a much grander scale. At its largest, it is thought to have reached as far east as the borders of Hausaland (in modern day Niger), and as far west as Takrur (on the Atlantic coast of modern day Senegal and The Gambia). Again, Mali was a trading empire, and that trade was based largely on gold, salt, slaves and ivory, with a few kola nuts now added to the mix.

It started as a small state of Malinke people who acted as middle men, taking the gold of Wangara (in modern day Guinea) to the market centres of ancient Ghana. It grew in strength as Ghana fell.

For a short period the Sosso filled the void left by Ghana. But in 1235 the Malinka overthrew them, taking control of the trans-Saharan trade routes. The Malian empire grew to be hugely wealthy, with control over a vast array of gold mines in the south and salt mines in the north.

Mansa Musa is probably the empire’s most famous king. In one incredible story, in around 1324 CE he made a pilgrimage to Mecca that left him famous throughout North Africa and the Middle East, with ripples travelling north into Europe. He took a procession of 60,000 men (12,000 of whom were slaves carrying packs of gold bars) and 80 camels, each carrying up to 130kg of gold dust. The group is said to have been travelling with around two tons of gold, slowing moving through North Africa.

Along the way, Mansa Musa gave this gold out to the poor, traded excessively and, astoundingly, built a Mosque on every Friday. A. J. H. Goodwin, writing in the 1950s, compiled an account of the aftermath of Musa’s pilgrimage from contemporary chroniclers. “With all this gold, his gifts and his trading, King Mansa Musa had upset the greatest gold market of the medieval world. As he left Cairo, Mecca and Medina, prices rocketed as everyone tried to pay in depreciated gold. However, Musa had not made ample provision for his return journey. On reaching Cairo once again, he borrowed back all the gold he could get. The money lenders were entranced: they lent at a high rate of interest. The value of gold mounted to unprecedented heights; prices dropped accordingly. All went well until Musa got back to Melle [Mali]. He immediately repaid the vast loans as well as interest in one single astounding payment. The money lenders were ruined as the price of gold fell through the floor. For the first and last time one man had played ducks and drakes with the world price of gold.” Even now, if you google Mansa Musa, you will see various articles asking ‘was he the richest man in history?’

While in Mecca, Musa met the Spanish poet and architect Abu Isak (later known as Es Saheli). Musa persuaded Isak to return with and work for him. When back in Timbuktu, which had to be recaptured from the Sultan of Mossi who had sacked the city in Musa’s absence, Isak set to work on The Great Mosque (otherwise known as the Djinguereber Mosque), which still stands today. Musa also invested in the University of Timbuktu. It was re-staffed with jurists, astronomers and mathematicians from Fez. It went on to become a centre for teaching of Islamic Law.

Musa may not have been the first King of Mali to attempt significant geographical explorations. While travelling through Egypt, Musa stayed with one of Cairo’s governors. This governor later told a scholar (al-Umari) of a story he had heard from Musa. The Malian King claimed to have come to power after his predecessor disappeared while out searching for the limits of the Atlantic Ocean. Musa’s predecessor first sent 400 ships out into the Atlantic ocean, instructing them not to return until they either reached the end, or their water and provisions ran out. Only one boat returned, reporting that the others had got caught up in some sort of river with a powerful current out in the open sea. On hearing this, the predecessor assembled another 2,000 ships, but this time commanded them himself, leaving Musa in charge of the empire. As he never returned, Mansa Musa became King of Mali.

al-Umari’s write up of the governor’s version of Mansa Musa’s story is the only record we have of these two voyages. But the possibility is thought provoking. What if West Africans had achieved command of the Atlantic ocean before Europeans came sailing south 150 years later?

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News of Musa’s extravagant pilgrimage to Mecca travelled far and wide, and it left its mark on one of the rare surviving examples of medieval European cartography - the Catalan Atlas. This is currently held in the national library in Paris, dated around 1375 CE. It covers the known world at the time from an Iberian perspective, spanning the Atlantic to China, Scandinavia to West Africa. Sure enough, there in West Africa, sits Mansa Musa with his gold.

The six-panel map was made by Elisha ben Abraham Cresques (perhaps in partnership with his father), a cartographer living in Majorca, likely as a royal commission. Majorca was then part of the Crown of Aragon, which dominated much of the Mediterranean. It was relatively multicultural, with large Christian, Muslim and Jewish populations. Cresques was fluent in Catalan, Hebrew and Arabic, and it is thought that he pulled on knowledge from each of these communities to make the atlas.

More attention is given to the North Africa (going quite far south), the Middle East, Asia and Russia than is is given to Europe. The island that will become Great Britain is there, with England, Scotland and London all identified, but there are no significant characters or descriptive texts - just a list of coastal place names that would have been known to sailors. Perhaps this reflects what was considered important to the Crown of Aragon? That said, Great Britain is painted purple, unlike anywhere else on the map, which to this day has not been explained.

In this playful use of AI, someone has created moving lifelike images of characters from the Catalan Atlas, providing a somewhat Netflix style attractive rendition. For me, the intriguing thing about this map is that it may be the first relatively accurate description of the world that includes something close to the land that became Sierra Leone and that which became the United Kingdom. For the first time (that I know of) we have a clear connection between the two places, albeit indirect.

Next week we are back in England for something perhaps less extravagant, but hugely influential. Some say it is the birth of the social contract, the rule of law and trail by a jury of one’s peers. Others say that description is too grand.

Whatever the truth, the Magna Carta is an amazing cornerstone of this story because it may be the first event (over 800 years ago) to directly connect the contemporary Sierra Leonean and British political infrastructure.

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Quick recap: The United Kingdom is rapidly reducing the amount of aid it sends to Sierra Leone. This series aims to give historical context by telling the story of Sierra Leone’s birth and development, giving particular attention to the role of the UK.

We started with Ancient Ghana at the turn of the second millennium (1067 CE). Tunka Manin is sitting on the throne of a relatively large empire, endowed with plentiful gold. Traders are traversing the Sahara dessert for a chance to exchange it for salt, ivory and slaves. Islam has already reached, and Arabic is the written language of court. There are fresh water wells, prisons, mosques, political buildings, and sprawling residential neighbourhoods that take days to pass through.

Just one year before, but 1,000 miles to the north, the Duke of Normandy (subsequently known as William the Conqueror) invaded England. The Anglo-Saxons were defeated, and England became part of the growing Norman Empire…

See previous posts here.

William the Conqueror was only able to defeat the Anglo-Saxons with the help of his Franco-Norman allies. These were largely Dukes from Normandy, who brought ships, soldiers and wealth to the venture. In return, they wanted a their share of the spoils.

Anglo-Saxon England (as well as much of medieval Europe) was a feudal society. The royal family sat at the top and bestowed land to a small group of nobles (such as dukes). These nobles provided loyalty, military support and resources to the royals. The nobles bestowed smaller plots of land to knights, who provided local protection and were central to the military support provided to the royals. Peasants were at the bottom of the food chain. They did not own land, but they worked it (providing a portion of their harvests in taxes) in exchange for their subsistence and could be called on to fight.

William the Conqueror wanted to maintain this structure, with himself now at the top. He commissioned a survey of who owned what (which dukes and knights had been bestowed what areas of land), and the resources on the land (how many animals and peasants were available). From this, he could build a decent idea of how much tax to collect and support to rely on.

The survey was written up and presented to him on Christmas day, 1086 CE, in what has since become known as The Domesday Book. It included two dates for each plot of land - one before the Norman invasion, one after.

One of the many things it shows us is that within two decades the Normans (particularly those who had helped William take England) had completely taken over the Anglo-Saxons at the upper end of this landholding feudal hierarchy.

More than this, however, the monetary value of the land held by the King (under the Normans compared to the Anglo-Saxons) more than doubled. It came to account for 20% of the total landed wealth in the country, with the barons (nobles) sharing 50%, and the church a further 20%.

The Norman rulers tried to minimise the change felt by those beneath them in the feudal system. For most, what was owed remained the same, it was just owed to someone new. The language among the ruling class, however, did change to a dialect of French (now referred to as Anglo-Norman French). Much like Arabic in West Africa, French came to dominate government, court and law in England, continuing for nearly three centuries. The average person spoke Old English, but over the years the two merged. Many modern English words have French routes through this period. The English garden comes from the Norman gardin, which has subsequently morphed into the French jardin. The same pattern maps castle to caste(l) to château, and fork to fouorque to fourche… and so on.

We cannot end this quick snap shot of Norman England without mentioning the Bayeux Tapestry. This is a 70m long, 50cm high embroidery depicting the build up to William’s conquest and the Battle of Hastings itself. It is thought to have been commissioned in time to embellish the new Bayeux Cathedral in 1077 CE.

Where the Book of the Routes and Realms provides a contemporary written description of ancient Ghana, the Bayeux Tapestry provides a contemporary graphic description of the ancient Anglo-Saxons and Normans. You can see the sorts of clothes people wore, the way they rode together on horseback and the animals they lived alongside, the way their built their castles and churches, they way they sailed their ships, the weapons and armour they had, how they used them and the injuries they suffered. But, perhaps most importantly for William, you can see the story of how he conquered England.

Go ahead and scroll through the entire thing here, it is well worth it.

And so our story starts with two contemporaneous Kings. Tunka Manin, leader of the ancient Ghanaian Empire, and William the Conqueror, leader of the ancient Norman Empire.

I wonder if they knew of each other? In about 80 years the Normans will take and briefly hold Tripoli, capital of modern day Libya. Here they would definitely have known about the Land of Gold, south of the Sahara.

There is another reason for telling this part of the story. Just a few generations from now, in 1215 CE, this feudal society will do something that, astonishingly, still directly affects both the UK and Sierra Leone today.

But we will come back to this. First, another trip to West Africa.

Next week … the ancient Malian Empire, the Catalan Atlas, The Djinguereber Mosque and perhaps the richest person in the world, ever.

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“Ghana is a title given to their Kings.”

So begins one of the earliest accounts of West Africa we have - The Book of the Routes and Realms, written around 1067/1068 CE by Abu Ubaydallah al-Bakri.

For context, 1067 is 435 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed and subsequent spread of Islam. It is one year after the Norman invasion of England and 100 years before the birth of Genghis Khan.

Quick recap

The UK government is rapidly reducing the amount of aid it sends to Sierra Leone. This series is in response - to give context by describing the history, emergence and economic development of Sierra Leone, and the role that the United Kingdom played.

Our story starts with two amazing early primary sources, written 1,000 years ago in different corners of the earth, but within 20 years of each other - The Book of the Routes and Realms, and the Domesday Book.

Wagadu began as a small West African trading station around 500 CE, connecting caravan routes from north and south of the Sahara. With the area’s abundant supply of gold, it grew in size and power. By 1067 it was at it’s peak. Read part 1 here.

This is the Book of the Routes and Realms.

This post is quite quote heavy. They will not all be like this, but I find The Book of the Routes and Realms such a descriptive and rich window into the past, I could not resist. All quotes are from this source.

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Tunka Manin had just inherited the throne from his uncle Basi. It was custom that a King’s sister’s son inherit the throne as a King “has no doubt that his successor is a son of his sister, while he is not certain that his son is in fact his own, and he is not convinced of the genuineness of his relationship to him.”

“The city of Ghana consists of two towns situated on a plain”, one of which was mainly Muslim, the other mainly non-Muslim.

“One of these towns, which is inhabited by Muslims, is large and possesses twelve mosques, in one of which they assemble for the Friday prayer. There are salaried imams and muezzins, as well as jurists and scholars”.

Moreover, “The King’s interpreters, the official in charge of his treasury and the majority of his ministers are Muslims … In the King’s town, and not far from his court of justice, is a mosque where the Muslims who arrive at his court pray.”

Of those who followed the King’s religion Al-Bakri tells us that “only he [the King] and his heir apparent … may wear sewn clothes. All other people wear robes of cotton, silk, or brocade, according to their means. All of them shave their beards, and women shave their heads.”

In the environs of the Muslim town were “wells with sweet water, from which they drink and with which they grow vegetables.” The King’s town was close (six miles through residential land), and called Al-Ghaba. “The houses of the inhabitants are of stone and acacia wood. The king has a palace and a number of domed dwellings all surrounded with an enclosure like a city wall … Around the king’s town are domed buildings and groves and thickets where the sorcerers of these people, men in charge of the religious cult, live. In them too are their idols and the tombs of their Kings. These woods are guarded and none may enter them and know what is there. In them also are the King’s prisons. If somebody is imprisoned there no news of him is ever heard.”

“When people who profess the same religion as the King approach him they fall on their knees and sprinkle dust on their heads, for this is their way of greeting him. As for the Muslims, they greet him only by clapping their hands.”

And, of course, al-Bakri mentions the gold.

“The King adorns himself like a woman, wearing necklaces round his neck and bracelets on his forearms, and he puts on a high cap decorated with gold and wrapped in a turban of fine cotton. He sits in audience or to hear grievances against officials in a domed pavilion around which stand ten horses covered with gold-embroidered materials. Behind the King stand ten pages holding shields and swords decorated with gold, and on his right are the sons of the vassal kings of his country wearing splendid garments and their hair plaited with gold.” The King owned all the nuggets of gold discovered throughout the country. It was even rumoured that he owned one “as large as a big stone” — however big that was. The gold dust, however, was left for the people. “But for this [they] would accumulate gold until it lost its value”.

To give a sense of the empire’s size, the best gold came from a town 18 day’s travel from the King, through continuous dwellings of tribes. When the King called his army, he could put “200,000 men into the field, more than 40,000 of them archers”. While often referred to as Ghana, there is a suggestion that this is only what others called it, because of the King’s title, and perhaps to those who lived there it remained Wagadu. At its largest, the area is said to have spanned areas of modern day Mali and Mauritania, with Koumbi Saleh as its capital. It is was the first major trading empire that we know of in West Africa.

This is still a little distance from modern day Sierra Leone. But we will get there. This gives a flavour of the region one thousand years ago.

Over the two or three hundred years that followed al-Bakri’s account it is thought that war from the north destabilized the State and that over-farming and excessive grazing triggered environmental crisis and an exodus. It is also thought that the monarchs converted to Islam, but that the majority of the population did not, and that it became hard to hold the empire together. It gradually fell apart.

But the period left its mark. In 1957, 900 years after Tunka Manin held the throne, modern day Ghana took this name. It did so in recognition of the ancient King and State, as it led Sub Saharan Africa to independence from European colonialism.

Next week … Ancient Norman England and The Domesday Book

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When I started working in Sierra Leone the UK government spent around £55m a year supporting aid programmes.

This funded big, important projects in health care, education, clean water supply and private sector development. It transformed many people’s lives. It also contributed towards a financial backbone that the Sierra Leonean government could lean on as it developed the basic infrastructure of a State. That was 2012.

Fast forward 14 years, the world has changed. Last year the UK government gave £30m. This year it will give just £17m. Next year, who knows? And this is not because Sierra Leone is any less poor.

Have we forgotten our history? The United Kingdom’s wealth and Sierra Leone’s poverty go hand in hand.

With regular short posts (3-5-minute reads), I will trace the emergence and growth of Sierra Leone, giving particular attention to the role that the United Kingdom played.

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This history is largely absent in our ‘development dialogue’. We focus, almost exclusively, on an economic analysis of the world today to inform the design of our policies. This will never capture the real path that development takes.

Staggeringly high rates of maternal and child mortality, low levels of education and next to no economic opportunity are all what they are, not because of this year’s economy and the last, but because of hundreds of step by step changes, one shift in power after another, forging its own path that needs stories as well as numbers to be understood.

We will travel to the ancient Ghanaian, Norman and Malian empires. We will look at the introduction of Islam and Christianity among the populations living on the land that becomes Sierra Leone. We will look at the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans and the establishment of Freetown. We will encounter the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and British industrialisation. We will follow the gradual British Colonisation and subsequent administration of the Freetown Colony and Sierra Leone Protectorate. Finally, we will look at Independence.

It is a captivating story and one that, in my opinion, forms part of the reason the UK has a moral duty to provide serious financial development assistance to Sierra Leone.

Subscribe to get full, free access as I go step by step through the journey.

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Share The history of a relationship: Sierra Leone and the UK

As fate would have it, two of the most important early sources of information about England and West Africa were written within 20 years of each other - over 1,000 years ago.

But to introduce these, our story will begin a little earlier still. Around 1,500 years ago a small trading state was born. It was established by the Soninke people, early ancestors to some modern day Senegalese. They called their state as Wagadu, and they had something everyone wanted - gold.

Berker traders from across North Africa would traverse the Sahara Desert to exchange salt, slaves and ivory for this beautiful yellow metal. They took the gold back to Egypt and sometimes Europe. By the 8th century CE the area just south of the Western Sahara was known as the land of gold.

This is the same time that the Vikings were raiding towns and villages throughout England, and eventually settling.

Over the next two hundred years Wagadu grew, connecting caravan routes that came up from the south and down from the North. Ghana was one of the King’s titles, meaning ‘war chief’. More and more Kings took this title, and eventually the so did the State.

Intrigued by this mysterious place of gold, North African and Arabic scholars started to write about it. Abu Ubaydallah al-Bakri, a Cordovan scholar (Cordova was then a part of Muslim al-Andalus), interviewed merchants who had crossed the desert, and in 1067 CE he combined these with previous Arabic literature to publish The Book of the Routes and Realms. Today, this is our best available contemporary account of the ancient Ghanaian Empire.

Just as al-Bakri was interviewing these merchants, but 1,000 miles to the north, the Duke of Normandy was preparing to invade England. In 1066 CE, at the Battle of Hastings, his Franco-Norman army defeated the Anglo-Saxons, and the area was absorbed in the Norman Empire. William the Conqueror was declared King of England.

In a bid to establish control and extract what he wanted, William the Conqueror commissioned a survey of England and parts of Wales to determine who owned the land, it’s value, and what resources were available for taxation. in 1086, the Domesday Book was published.

It was originally known as the Book of Winchester (because it was kept at the Winchester Royal Treasury). But within 100 years it took its colloquial name on account of it’s finality of verdict (i.e. an unalterable account of who owned what), like that of the biblical Last Judgement. Doom was an old English term for law or judgement.

These two documents, The Book of the Routes and Realms and The Domesday Book are astonishing windows to our past. They provide an intriguing twist of narratives from which to start our story.

Neither Sierra Leone nor the United Kingdom existed yet, but England did. As we shall see, parts of West Africa and Europe were flourishing. While we won’t know much about the area that became Sierra Leone for another 300 years, we already know a fair bit about England. And right now, in many ways, it is a colony of the Norman Empire.

Next week … The Ancient Ghanaian Empire and The Book of the Routes and Realms

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