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Article

Andrianampoinimerina  

Ari Nave

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Oral traditions recorded by Jesuit missionaries in the late eighteenth century suggest that Andriambélomàsina, ruler of the Imerina (the territory of the Merina ethnic group) from 1730 to 1770 , directed that his eldest son Andrianjàfy succeed him, followed by his grandson Ramboàsalàma, son of his eldest daughter. Andrianjàfy, however, intended for his own son to take his place and plotted to kill Ramboàsalàma, who, fearing for his life, fled to the north. Supported by a dozen Merina chiefs, Ramboàsalàma returned in 1787, overtaking the city of Ambohimànga and exiling his uncle, who was later killed.

Ramboàsalàma was crowned Andrianampoinimerina, “the prince in the heart of Imerina.” After consolidating power through treaties and marriage alliances and establishing a capital at Antananarivo in about 1795 Andrianampoinimerina also known as Nampoina began to expand the Merina Empire Eventually he controlled much of the island conquering and consolidating the Betsileo Sihanaka ...

Article

Andrianampoinimerina  

Jeremy Rich

Article

Publication History:

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

king of the Merina state of central Madagascar and a pivotal figure in its eighteenth-century expansion, was born around 1745 in the northern Malagasy town of Ikaloy. His father, Andriamiaramanjaka, was a member of the Zafimamy royal family of the northern independent kingdom of Alahamadintany. His mother, Ranavalonandriambelomasina, was the daughter of Merina monarch Andriambelomasina, who ruled Merina from roughly 1730 to 1770. He also was the nephew of Andriambelomasina’s successor, Andrianjafy, who was the king of Merina from 1770 to 1787.

He stayed with his father in Ikaloy until he was roughly twelve when he moved to the Merina court As a young man Andrianampoinimerina became a wealthy merchant and probably engaged in slave trading At the same time he presented himself as a defender of ordinary commoners fearful of slave raiding threats from neighbors like the Sakalava kingdom and unjust officials Supposedly Andriambelomasina had stipulated that ...

Article

Baartman, Sara  

Jodie N. Mader

Article

Publication History:

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

an enslaved woman from South Africa, placed on public display in nineteenth-century Britain and France, where she became known as the “Hottentot Venus.” “Hottentot” was a derogatory word used to describe groups now called “Khoisan” and likely derived from European disparagement of so-called click languages. She was born to a Khoisan family in an area north of the Gamtoos River valley in the eastern Cape Colony. Her name is written sometimes as “Saartjie” (Afrikaans); however, the Anglophone “Sara” is most commonly used. Her mother died when she was an infant, and her father was a cattle driver. A commando raid in 1810 by the Dutch Boers decimated her village, and Baartman, now orphaned, was sent to the Cape to be sold into slavery.

Pieter Cesars a freed black purchased her She became a nursemaid for his brother Hendrik Cesars and his wife Anna Catharina The British physician Alexander Dunlop saw ...

Article

Baartman, Sarah  

John Gilmore

Article

Publication History:

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

Also known as Sara or Saartjie, and as Bartman (1788?–1815/16), a member of the Khoisan people of southern Africa, exhibited as a ‘freak’ in 19th‐century Britain. Her original name is unknown, but when she was employed by a Dutch farmer called Peter Cezar, she was given the Afrikaans name of Saartjie [Little Sarah] Baartman, and this was later Anglicized in various forms. In 1810 she was brought to Britain by Peter Cezar's brother Hendric [or Henrick], a Boer farmer at the Cape, and Alexander Dunlop, a British army surgeon. Dunlop soon sold his interest in the enterprise to Cezar, who made money by exhibiting Baartman in London and elsewhere in Britain under the name of ‘the Hottentot Venus’. ‘Hottentot’ was a traditional derogatory term for Khoisan people, while ‘Venus’ appears intended to refer to the idea of ‘the Sable Venus or more generally ...

Article

Barber, Francis  

Vincent Carretta

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

servant to Samuel Johnson, was the son of an unidentified enslaved woman in Jamaica. His father may have been his owner, Richard Bathurst, a colonel in the Jamaica militia. Barber’s slave name, Quashey, suggests that his mother may have come from the Akan-speaking area of Africa that is now Ghana. Quashey was one of only four slaves Colonel Bathurst kept when he sold his 2,600-acre sugar plantation and 140 slaves in Jamaica in 1749. Barber later recalled having been 7 or 8 years old when Colonel Bathurst brought him to London, England, in 1750 to live with his son, Dr. Richard Bathurst, a close friend of Samuel Johnson. Johnson was soon to become the most eminent man of letters in the British Empire.

Colonel Bathurst had Quashey baptized and renamed Francis Barber in London The date and place of his baptism are unknown He sent Barber to Yorkshire for ...

Article

Barberá, Ana Josefa  

Eduardo R. Palermo

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born in Africa in the mid-eighteenth century and brought to the River Plate region as a slave at an unknown date. After she was freed and purchased her own land, Barberá donated her property for the establishment of Tacuarembó, a city in northern Uruguay, in 1832. The donation represents the only documented case of a person of African descent contributing land for the subsequent founding of a town or city.

The existing historical record refers to Barberá as a freedwoman or “morena libre.” Until the late 1790s, she is registered as residing in rural northern Uruguay, with the respective landowner’s permission. She settled at the intersection of the Tranqueras and Tacuarembó Chico rivers, a site that became known among locals as “el rincón de Tía Ana” (Aunt Ana’s Corner). In July 1804 in Montevideo Barberá signed a commitment to officially purchase the plot of land with an ...

Article

Barcala, Lorenzo  

María de Lourdes Ghidoli

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

who achieved the rank of colonel in the Unitarian militia, a political faction in Argentina. In the nineteenth century, he was one of the best-remembered soldiers of African descent, and his life transcended the boundaries of his community. He was born on 23 December in the city of Mendoza. His parents were African slaves, and he himself was a slave of Cristóbal Barcala, a native of Granada (Spain), whose last name he was given, as was the custom. He married Petrona Videla, with whom he had at least three children: Eusebio Toribio, Raymunda de la Concepción, and Ana del Corazón de Jesús. He was also the father of a son born out of wedlock, Celestino Barcala, who was a soldier like Lorenzo and fought the federals in the 1860s.

It is not known when and how Lorenzo Barcala got his liberty Some biographies indicate that General José de San Martín ...

Article

Barends, Barend  

Robert Ross

Article

Publication History:

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

Griqua leader and hunter in the region that is present-day South Africa, was born around 1770. During the second half of the eighteenth century, his family was one of several families of mixed Khoekhoe and Dutch descent who came to prominence in the dry lands of Namaqualand and along the Gariep River, on the northern frontier of the Cape Colony. Among them were two brothers, known variously as Claas and Piet Bastard or Claas and Piet Barends (sometimes spelled Berends). They first appear in the archival record in the 1760s accompanying Dutch and French expeditions to the Gariep and as overseers on the farms of the Van Reenen family who were then the Cape s most important butchers In time the family grew in wealth prominence and size primarily on the basis of hunting stock farming and trading to the Cape so that it was able to acquire ...

Article

Belle, Dido Elizabeth  

Asselin Charles

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

a mixed-race member of a noble Scottish family, was the illegitimate daughter of Captain John Lindsay of the Royal Navy and a slave of African origin, Maria Belle. Her parents met in the West Indies where Maria may have been captured from a Spanish ship. Belle may have spent part of her childhood in Pensacola, Florida, where Captain Lindsay was stationed for a year, from 1764 to 1765. He brought the child to England. His uncle, William Murray, first Earl of Mansfield, and his wife were childless. They were already raising another motherless great-niece, Elizabeth Murray, and they took Dido into their household, perhaps as a companion for Elizabeth. She was baptized on 20 November 1766 in St George s Bloomsbury London the parish church of Lord Mansfield s London house in Bloomsbury Square Her age is given as 5 years and her father is recorded as a ...

Article

Belley, Jean-Baptiste  

Philippe Girard

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

also known as Jean-Baptiste Mars or Timbaze, was a slave, freedman, officer, and deputy from the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). He was the first black deputy in the French Parliament and introduced the 1794 law that abolished slavery in the French colonies.

Belley’s origins are uncertain. By his own account, he was born on Gorée Island near present-day Senegal around 1747 and transported to Cap-Français (Cap-Haïtien) around the age of 2, presumably as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Another document, however, lists his birthplace as Léogane in 1755 Saint-Domingue. After obtaining his manumission, Belley, like many free people of color, acquired slaves. As a member of a Dominguan mixed-race unit, he may also have taken part in the 1779 siege of Savannah in support of the American Revolution, where he allegedly gained the warlike nickname of “Mars.”

Belley’s role during the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1789 ...

Article

Biassou, Georges/Jorge  

Jane G. Landers

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

former slave who became one of the leaders of the 1791 slave revolt on Saint-Domingue, was born on that French Caribbean island in the late eighteenth century. Biassou’s African-born mother, Diana, was a slave in Providence Hospital, affiliated with the Fathers of Charity, in the capital city of Cap-Français. Nothing is known of his father, Carlos. As an adult, Biassou served as a slave driver on a sugar estate owned by the Jesuit order in Haut de Cap. On 14 August 1791 Biassou joined other slave drivers at the Lenormand de Mézy plantation to plan the revolt that changed history. On 22 August 1791 several thousand slaves across the island’s northern plain set fire to the cane fields and great houses, and smashed the sugar-refining equipment on more than thousand plantations.

After the revolt s leader Boukman Dutty was killed Biassou assumed command of the slave armies sharing leadership with ...

Article

Bolio, Manuel  

Matthew Restall

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

African-born slave who was later freed and lived his adult life in several Spanish American colonies. He appears in the historical record largely as a result of the colonial authorities’ Inquisition, which prosecuted him for bigamy. He was also known as Felis Manuel Bolio and Manuel de Lara, after the surnames of his owners in Yucatán, Mexico.

His African name is unknown, but Bolio was likely born in the 1730s in West Central Africa, probably in the kingdom of Kongo (he claimed to be a “native of Kongo”). Caught up in the transatlantic slave trade as a boy or teenager, by about 1750 he had been sold to a Spaniard living in Campeche a small port town on the Gulf of Mexico coast of Yucatán He was then sold to a Spaniard named don Manuel Bolio who had the young African baptized as Felis Manuel Bolio in the predominantly ...

Article

Clapperton, Hugh  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born in Annan, Scotland, Hugh Clapperton went to sea at the age of thirteen and later became a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. In 1821 the British Colonial Office sent him, along with explorers Walter Oudney and Dixon Denham, on the Bornu Mission to trace the true course of the Niger River in Africa. They crossed the Sahara from Tripoli, in present-day Libya, and became the first Europeans to see Lake Chad, which Denham set off to explore on his own. From there, Clapperton and Oudney headed west into present-day Nigeria toward Kano, but Oudney died along the way and Clapperton reached it alone. He then traveled on to Sokoto but, detained by local rulers, was unable to find a guide to take him the 240 km (150 mi) to the Niger. He returned briefly to England before coming back to West Africa in 1825 With British ...

Article

Crioula, Mariana  

Mariana de Aguiar Ferreira Muaze

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

a Brazilian-born slave, accused of helping to lead a slave uprising that broke out in 1838 in Paty do Alferes, a coffee production center in the southeastern province of Rio de Janeiro, known as the Quilombo de Manuel Congo. Mariana was married to a slave named José, a field hand, and both were owned by Captain-Major Manoel Francisco Xavier (?–1840), a wealthy landowner of many coffee plantations and approximately five hundred slaves. Even though the captured slaves who participated in the revolt often referred to her as the “queen” of the quilombo (Maroon community), Mariana Crioula was acquitted of all charges in January 1839.

Crioula was a seamstress and worked as a maid for Francisca Elisa Xavier (1786–1865), the wife of Manoel Francisco Xavier, at the Maravilha fazenda plantation Despite her married status she lived and slept at the main house serving her mistress ...

Article

Fabien, Louis  

Silyane Larcher

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born on 17 March 1794 in Fort Royal (now Fort-de-France), Martinique. The legitimate son of Louis Fabien, a freeman of color, and Françoise-Julienne Capieau, a freewoman of color, he grew up with seven brothers and sisters in a prominent family from Fort Royal. As a carpenter, hat seller, tanner, and owner of a cabaret, the elder Fabien was a well-known figure in the local urban community of gens de couleur.

Little information is available about Louis Fabien Jr., an assistant trader (commis de négociant) and business owner in Fort Royal, other than that he was among the convicted after the famous “Bissette affair.” In 1823 several freemen of color were arrested, accused of spreading “seditious libel” by circulating a pamphlet titled De la situation des gens de couleur libres des Antilles françaises On the Situation of the Free People of Color in the French Antilles ...

Article

Falconbridge, Anna Maria  

Sharon Harrow

Article

Publication History:

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

the first English woman to write and publish a narrative of her travels to West Africa, was born Anna Maria Horwood to Grace Roberts and Charles Horwood in Bristol.

In 1788 she married the physician and abolitionist Alexander Falconbridge; friends and family disapproved of the match. Alexander’s vehement abolitionist views resulted from his service as surgeon on four slave ships. The year of their marriage, he published An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa in order to publicize the horrors of the Middle Passage. He worked with Thomas Clarkson’s abolitionist campaign and was subsequently contracted by the St. George’s Bay Company (later renamed the Sierra Leone Company) to rescue the ailing colony of Sierra Leone. Earlier in the century, it had been a trading site for the Royal Africa Company, and it remained a country of economic interest to England. In 1787 the abolitionist Granville ...

Article

Gladstone, John  

David Dabydeen

Article

Publication History:

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

Slave owner, instigator of the ‘coolie trade’, and father of the British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98). Sir John Gladstone was a leading member of the West Indian Association of Liverpool, a group of plantation owners and merchants trading with the West Indies in slave‐produced commodities. He owned sugar estates in Jamaica and British Guiana and was a passionate opponent of abolition. In 1830, in a series of last‐ditch attempts to persuade the government not to end West Indian slavery, Gladstone (then a member of Parliament and spokesman for the West India interest) argued that slavery was normal in primitive societies, and that West Indian Blacks had peculiar constitutions, enabling them to work easily under a tropical sun. He held up the dreadful prospect of freed slaves slaughtering the smaller white populations.

In 1833 Gladstone was deputed by Liverpool's West Indian interest ...

Article

Hilario Congo  

Daryle Williams

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

Free African liberated in Brazil whose multiple efforts to secure “full freedom” led to an important diplomatic-juridical exchange between the governments of Brazil and Britain in 1853–1854, was likely born in the late 1820s or early 1830s, somewhere in the hinterlands of northern Angola. (It should be noted that the term “Free African” is a discrete proper noun applied to Africans liberated under special legal conditions of the suppression of the slave trade. It is distinct from “a free African,” which would mean any African who was not enslaved.)

Angola was a region that supplied the insatiable demands of Brazilian slave markets once the legal trade through Luanda was shut down around 1831. Through a surprisingly rich set of historical documentation related to Africans rescued from the Brazilian-flag slave ship Cezar it is possible to reconstruct significant portions of Hilario s life in Brazil during his successive ...

Article

Jea, John  

David Dabydeen

Article

Publication History:

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

African preacher who travelled around England and Ireland sermonizing. Jea was born in Old Callabar, Africa, and at the age of 2½ was taken, along with his family, to North America, where they became the slaves of Oliver and Angelika Triebuen. They were ill‐treated and not properly clothed and fed. Working hours were long and intense, as Jea records in his narrative The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher (1815).

The text captures his life as a slave his rebellion against Christian hypocrisy the finding of his faith his travels and the significance of his sermonizing Laden with quotations from the Bible it is itself a piece of Jea s preaching often questioning the virtues and beliefs of his readers Following his discovery of Christianity at the age of 15 when as he writes the Lord was pleased to remove gross darkness superstition ...

Article

Kingsley, Anna Madgigine Jai  

Philippe Girard

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

also known as Anta Majigeen Njaay or Anna Madgigine Jai, was an African-born slave, freedwoman, and planter who spent her adult life in North America and the Caribbean. Kingsley, originally named Anta Majigeen Njaay, came from the present-day country of Senegal on the western coast of Africa. Her exact birth date is unknown. Her ethnic background was Wolof, so she may have come from the Jolof Empire. She may have been exported through Gorée Island, a prominent slave-trading emporium near present-day Dakar, Senegal. After enduring the Middle Passage, she arrived on the Danish ship Sally in Havana, Cuba, in July 1806.

In October 1806 Kingsley was purchased by Zephaniah Kingsley Jr a Bristol born Quaker planter and merchant who had successively lived in England the United States and the Danish West Indies He was supportive of slavery an institution that underpinned his vast wealth but also progressive in ...