Dâaga
- John Saillant
Extract
Dâaga (c. 1800/05?–1838), also known as Donald Stewart, Longa Longa, and, possibly, King’s Man, was an African-born soldier of the British First West India Regiment. Dâaga was probably born in modern-day Benin and reared among the Popo. He became a captive in the Portuguese transatlantic slave trade probably around 1830, although he himself had worked as a raider or trader in the Portuguese–African trade in slaves that took place in modern-day Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. Information available on Dâaga derives from local Trinidadian and British military responses to a mutiny of soldiers, apparently all African-born, that he led in June 1837. There are no records of any family members other than a brief mention of a Popo “king” who adopted Dâaga as a boy. He became a Trinidadian folk hero in the century and a half after his death.
The mutiny led to an investigation of its ...
A version of this article originally appeared in The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography.
