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Article

ʿAli ibn Ibrahim  

George Michael La Rue

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

preeminent trans-Saharan merchant and caravan leader (khabir) from the Sudanese kingdom of Darfur, was born in Kubayh, the son of Ibrahim ibn ʿAli, a Tirayfi merchant from Kordofan who immigrated to Darfur, and an unknown mother. He was commonly known as khabir ʿAli. In the nineteenth century Darfur was Egypt’s leading supplier of trans-Saharan goods including ivory, ostrich feathers, and slaves. In 1838, when Darfur’s sultan Muhammad Fadl died, young ʿAli ibn Ibrahim had already crossed the Sahara along the route from Kubayh (Darfur’s commercial capital) to Asyut in Upper Egypt, perhaps as part of a caravan led by his mentor, paternal uncle, and future father-in-law, Muhammad Kannun, or one of the lesser Tirayfi caravan leaders. ʿAli ibn Ibrahim allegedly heard the news of the sultan’s death from Muhammad ʿAli, the viceroy of Egypt.

ʿAli married six times and had numerous children His first marriage was probably ...

Article

Alloron  

Stephanie Beswick

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Sudanese leader, was the first prominent Bari private merchant, slave trader, and opportunist insurgent warlord. He rose to power during the 1860s by exploiting poisonous dynastic rivalries between Nyigilo and Subek, the royal sons of Lagunu, the unchallenged Bari leader in 1840, and their respective noble offspring. The faction of Nyigilo had enjoyed the support of Catholic missionaries up to their departure in 1860, but thereafter allied with the northern slave traders who at that time were establishing fortified trading operations throughout southern Sudan. It was to become an era, for the first time in Bari history, during which commoner traders such as Alloron found it possible to acquire economic and political power. However, the upstart was often reminded of his humble origins by the epithet “man without rain,” implying that he lacked the arcane fructifying powers of royalty.

The arrival of Turks northern Sudanese and Europeans ...

Article

Anderson, Peter  

Susan Bragg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

tailor, store owner, and newspaper editor, was born in Pennsylvania, to parents whose names and occupations are now unknown. Little is known about Anderson's early life except that he was a member of the Masonic Fraternity, ultimately gaining appointment as Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge for the State of Pennsylvania. Anderson migrated west in the waning days of the California gold rush and in 1854 set up a tailor shop and clothing store in San Francisco. There he plunged into the city's small but energetic black community, a community linked by both the mining economy and by shared protest against injustices in the new state of California.

Anderson soon became a regular contributor to political discussions at the recently organized Atheneum Institute, a reading room and cultural center for black Californians. In January 1855 he and other prominent African Americans joined together to call ...

Article

Antera, Duke Ephraim  

David Northrup

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Atlantic merchant, was born and lived in Duke Town, a part of the trading community of Old Calabar, near the Cross River in what is now southeastern Nigeria. The names of his parents are unknown. His name is also given as Ntiero Edem Efiom. He married Awa Ofiong, whom he called his “dear wife,” as well as two other wives whose names are not known. His only known child was a son, Duke Antera.

Antera grew up in a family prominent in the marketing of merchandise brought by Europeans in exchange for African slaves and other goods In addition to the local Efik language the young Antera learned to speak English through contact with the British captains and crew who called at Old Calabar The fact that he could also read and write English suggests he may have received some formal education in England as did the sons of other ...

Article

Bannerman, James  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

a prominent trader in nineteenth-century Ghana, was born in 1790 His mother was a Ga woman from Accra who had family ties with the Alata chief in the neighboring town of Osu and the Asere chief of Kinka His father was Colonel Henry Bannerman a Scottish officer and a trader in the Royal Africa Company stationed at the British fort of Cape Coast Bannerman s father s connections in the British government and his mother s connections in southern Ghana helped prepare the way for his rise as a businessman Bannerman s ambitions were facilitated by the changing nature of trade between European nations and West Africa The British government s efforts to close the international slave trade posed some challenges for coastal communities on the Ghanaian coast although the stabilization of the Asante kingdom s borders had already led to a decline of slave exports from the region ...

Article

Barchi, Cesare de  

Trevor Hall

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
17 September 2020

based in Portugal whose merchant ships traded between the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands and Valencia, Spain. Nothing is known about his family. Barchi’s reason for renown was that during the last two decades of the fifteenth century his ships transported thousands of enslaved Africans from the Cape Verde Islands to Valencia. Although not much is known about Barchi himself, his business opens a window into the working and scope of the Old World Atlantic slave trade from the Portuguese archipelago in Cape Verde Islands, West Africa to Spain.

During the fifteenth century Portugal had a monopoly over European maritime trade with West Africa. Although the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479) and the protocol of Tordesillas (1494 prohibited non Portuguese ships from trading with sub Saharan West Africa the treaties permitted European merchants to trade with Portuguese islands off the West African mainland The Portuguese crown established customs ...

Article

Beman, Jehiel C.  

W. Caleb McDaniel

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

shoemaker, clergyman, and abolitionist, was born in Chatham, Connecticut, to Sarah Gerry and Cesar Beman, a manumitted slave and Revolutionary War veteran who may have chosen his surname to indicate his freedom to “be a man.” By 1809 Jehiel had moved to Colchester, Connecticut, and married Fanny Condol, with whom he fathered seven children, including the noted abolitionist Amos G. Beman. Jehiel worked in Colchester as a shoemaker and Methodist exhorter until 1830, when he moved to Middletown, Connecticut, to pastor the city's Cross Street African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church. On 11 August of that same year Jehiel's first wife died, and he married Nancy Scott on 17 October. In 1832 he left Cross Street after being appointed an itinerant missionary by the annual AMEZ conference, but he remained in Middletown as a preacher, shoemaker, and reformer until 1838 at ...

Article

Cale, Hugh  

Benjamin R. Justesen

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

merchant, public official, religious leader, and longtime state legislator, was born in Perquimans County, North Carolina, the eldest son of free, mixed-race parents John Cail (Cale) and Elizabeth Mitchell, a homemaker, who were married in 1827. His father worked as a miller, later as a fisherman, and moved his large family—as many as nine children—to Edenton in nearby Chowan County in the 1850s. Little is known of Hugh Cale's early life or education, although he had learned to read and write by the end of the Civil War.

After the Union army occupied much of northeastern North Carolina in early 1862, Cale began working as a manual laborer for federal installations at Fort Hatteras and Roanoke Island. In 1867 he moved to Elizabeth City North Carolina where he commenced a singularly successful career as a grocer and held a number of local offices during and after ...

Article

Cesar  

Elizabeth D. Schafer

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave and medical practitioner who developed primitive pharmaceuticals, is thought to have been born in Africa or the Caribbean and transported to the southern colonies as a slave. He might instead have been born into slavery in South Carolina. (His name is often spelled Caesar.) The names of his parents are unknown. He may have been the descendant of skilled medicine men, who transferred medical knowledge from their native cultures to the colonies, sharing drug recipes and folk remedies that used herbs and roots, or of slave midwives, who had performed cesarean sections in Africa and taught other slaves that procedure.

Cesar might also have had Native American ancestors because many Carolina slaves had intermarried with native tribes Southern Native Americans were known for their potent herbal remedies Slave physicians either were self taught or acquired some training from fellow slaves or masters and they became celebrities within their communities ...

Article

Colston, Edward  

Madge Dresser

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Controversial philanthropist and merchant involved in the slave trade. He was the Bristol‐born son of a Bristol merchant who spent his early life in London, but it is in Bristol that he is most famous. A staunch Anglican and Tory, he was briefly MP for the city in 1710. His huge donations to church renovation and school building projects, mainly but not exclusively in Bristol, ensured his reputation as the city's greatest benefactor, as his major statue in the centre and his fine tomb by Michael Rysbrack attest. Several Bristol streets, schools, buildings, and venerable local charities still bear his name, and his birthday is still honoured in civic celebrations.

Colston s relevance to black history lies in the fact that he was involved in the British slave trade and in the trade of slave produced goods By the 1670s he was a City of London merchant trading ...

Article

Coree the Saldanian  

Christopher Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
19 March 2007
Published online:
30 September 2008

Reluctant early 17th‐century Khoikhoi immigrant to Britain, tragically manipulated by the East India Company. Coree was taken from the area around the Cape of Good Hope (then known as Saldania) in southern Africa, and unwillingly brought to Britain. He and a companion both suffered the misfortune of being captured after boarding Gabriel Towerson's East India Company ship Hector, but of the two, only Coree survived the voyage. The cause of his fellow captive's death was recorded, unconvincingly, as being due to ‘extreme sullenness’. On his arrival in Britain, Coree was placed in the household of a merchant and then governor of the East India Company, Sir Thomas Smith. It was hoped that Coree would provide the company with useful information about his homeland and, as a result, he was relatively well treated with accommodation, food, fine vestments, and even a suit of armour. However, according to Peter Fryer ...

Article

Dallington, Maftaa  

Roy Bridges

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

also known as Dallington Scorpion Muftawa, a scribe and adviser to Muteesa I, the kabaka (king) of Buganda (in present-day Uganda) in the late 1870s, was a freed slave whose date of birth and parentage are unknown. Dallington was a Nyasa from near the eastern shore of Lake Malawi. Like many others in this region, he was taken into slavery by Yao or Swahili traders, marched to the coast, and put in a dhow for transport to Arabia or another part of East Africa. His fate, however, was to be rescued by the British anti–slave trade patrol vessel HMS Daphne and to be assigned to the care of the Anglican Universities Mission to Central Africa which had opened a school for freed slaves at Kiungani outside Zanzibar City Converted to Christianity he became known as Dallington which was probably a corruption of the name of one of the missionaries the ...

Article

Davis, Noah  

Julia Sun-Joo Lee

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave, shoemaker, and pastor, was born in Madison County, Virginia, to John and Jane Davis, slaves belonging to Robert Patten, a wealthy merchant and mill owner. Both of Davis's parents were devout Baptists who instilled in Davis a strong relationship to the church.

By Davis's account, Patten was a comparatively fair master who valued his slaves and who accorded John Davis many privileges, among them the ability to raise livestock and to keep his children with him until they were old enough to go into trade. John Davis was the head miller at Patten's merchant mill located on Crooked Run, a stream between Madison and Culpeper County. He was able to read and figure, but he could not write.

When Noah Davis was about twelve Patten sold his mill and emancipated Davis s mother and father Davis s family moved to one of Patten ...

Article

Dumbaya, Dala Modu  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

an influential trader in early nineteenth-century Sierra Leone, was born in the town of Wonkafong in the Sumbuya district near Conakry, Guinea, around 1770. His father, Fendu Modu, was a prominent merchant from the Susu ethnic community who also served as the chief of Wonkafong and advised the ruler of the small Sumbuya kingdom. Dala Modu first came to the fledgling British colony of Sierra Leone in 1794 with his father. Fendu Modu realized the commercial potential of the colony’s capital of Freetown, and so he sent his son and roughly fifty followers to the outskirts of this town in 1795 The community they established would become known as Dalamodiya in honor of Dala Modu Sumbuya was a major producer of white polished rice that was much in demand in Freetown and Fendu hoped to secure new markets for that crop This proved beneficial to the British administration ...

Article

Jack, John  

Theresa Vara-Dannen

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2015

former slave and shoemaker, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, to unknown parents. Concord church records record his birth as “Jack, Negro” and the earliest records indicate he was owned by Benjamin Barron, a farmer and shoemaker, who taught Jack the shoemaking trade; when Barron died on 13 July 1754, Jack was included as part of his estate and was valued at £120, along with “one Negro maid Vilot, being of no value.” Barron's widow, Elizabeth, agreed to allow Jack to purchase his freedom with his earnings from his shoemaking. By 1761 he had saved enough to pay the £120 and buy four acres of land from Barron s estate and more property from a neighbor He would eventually own about eight and a half acres near Merriam s Corner in Concord Since the record of his birth indicates a single name Jack as was common in the ...

Article

Jaja of Opobo  

Elsie A. Okobi

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

merchant and king of Opobo, was born in the village of Umuduruoha in the densely populated Igbo heartland of eastern Nigeria (now in Imo State). He was born into the Isu clan, and his father, Ozurumba, was most likely a farmer who supplemented that work by trading or with a skilled profession such as blacksmithing. His mother’s name was Uru. At the approximate age of twelve, Jaja was sent to live with relatives in Nkwerre, from where he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. From Nkwerre he was brought to Akwete and sold to a trader named Odiari from the Royal Canoe House of Opobo. (Canoe houses had begun in the delta as trading and fighting communities capable of manning and maintaining a war canoe; the trading center city-states of the eastern delta—Brass, Nembe, Bonny—each consisted of several organized canoe houses.)

Given the name Jubo Jubogha Jaja stayed with his ...

Article

Johnson, James Collins  

Lolita K. Buckner Inniss

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 September 2012

vendor, was born in Easton, Maryland, as the slave of Philip Wallis of Maryland. The names of Johnson's parents are unknown. Johnson is said to have run away in his early twenties, after having been sent on an errand for his master. Johnson first took a boat from Maryland and later a train. In 1839 he reached Princeton, New Jersey, where he was employed as a laborer and janitor in Nassau Hall in the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). He had been known as James Collins in Maryland but called himself James Johnson once he reached Princeton.

In 1843 Johnson was recognized as an escaped slave and was seized and put on trial in Princeton as a fugitive slave The son of Johnson s owner Severn Teackle Wallis traveled from Maryland to claim Johnson The younger Wallis was later a well known lawyer politician provost of the ...

Article

Lane, Lunsford  

Cynthia Current

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

entrepreneur, abolitionist lecturer, and autobiographer, was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the only child of Clarissa Haywood and Edward Lane. Clarissa Haywood was the slave of Sherwood Haywood, an agent for the Bank of Newburn and clerk of the North Carolina State Senate from 1786 to 1798. Edward Lane belonged to John Haywood, the brother of Sherwood Haywood, and though manumitted at the death of John, circa 1830, continued to serve the family as a steward for fourteen years. As a slave, Lunsford Lane was fortunate to be raised by both of his parents who were certainly models for what Lane would later achieve in his life.

About the time that Lane became emotionally aware of his enslaved state when set to work at the age of ten or eleven he recalls that his father gave him a basket of peaches ...

Article

Lima, Geraldo de  

Nana Yaw B. Sapong

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

domestic slave, slave trader, and merchant prince, was born Adzoviehlo Atiogbe in Agoue in Dahomey (Benin) in 1804 He is also known as Adzoviehlo Atiogbe or Geraldo de Vasconcellos A man of several names he is one of the least understood and most complex characters in modern West African history Geraldo de Vasconcellos probably a Brazilian name given to him by his master in servitude entered into a period of apprenticeship under Brazilian slave trader Cesar Cerquira Lima who had a slave factory warehouse at Vodza in present day Ghana Slaves were kept in the Vodza factory before shipment to various destinations Cesar Cerquira Lima was one of a succession of Brazilian traders who had been establishing factories along the eastern coastline of the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century Geraldo de Vasconcellos became one of Cesar s trusted agents in Anlo who kept the supply of slaves steady ...

Article

Lutete, Ngongo  

Isabelle de Rezende

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

prominent trader and warlord in present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa, former Zaire), was born between 1855 and 1860 in what today is Congo’s Maniema Province, between the rivers Lomami to the west and Lualaba to the east. Ngongo’s origins are unclear. Most commentators situate him as a Tetela-Kusu, Songye, or Hina (Lomami River people, connected linguistically and culturally to their various neighbors); the preferred spelling of his name by these communities is Ngongo Leteta.

What we know of Ngongo’s life was lived in the context of eastern and central Congo in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Swahili traders, the most famous of whom was Tippu Tip, culturally mixed Muslims from the East African island of Zanzibar, began incursions into the Congo west of the Lualaba. They established the slave and ivory market towns of Kasongo and Nyangwe.

There are different stories about how Ngongo came to Tippu Tip ...