METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
In terms of the methodology that we are adopting, the teams include participants with experience in the development of the www.freedomnarratives.org and several other relevant websites that will be used in this project. In terms of methodology, we are employing what we have developed, and conceptually have proven, to a greatly expanded body of data which we intend to analyze in terms of the questions outlined above. In the Canadian context, we will pursue the expansion of the Freedom Narratives database from 2,000 individuals to 200,000. The French team will incorporate records on the slave trade, plantation records from the Caribbean, and the presence of Africans in France. The focus will be on francophone sources but also materials in Spanish and Portuguese.
These data contain many references to ethnicity and identity in West Africa (especially Senegal), the Caribbean and France. It is also as an example of early migration to Europe. To transform status and end the national silence on slavery, we will include Portugal, Spain and Italy. Similarly, the United Kingdom has records on the Anglophone side concerning Africans in the slave trade and in other countries that will expand the data set and address issues of demography, political and economic history, ethnicity, gender, racism and the study of the enslaved migration. To this end, our methodology has four components: 1) Sourcing, i.e., the identification and processing of various bodies of primary documents; 2) Execution, i.e., the application of our technological experience in creating, expanding and combining databases for purposes of analysis; 3)Analysis, i.e., close analysis of texts to address the research questions concerning the origins of individuals, the mechanisms for enslavement, the contours of enforced migration, the demographic implications of migration, and the interrelationship among trans-Atlantic, Saharan and internal West African experiences, their status and ethnic/linguistic identification.4)Interpretation, i.e., the reconsideration of the history of West Africa and the global context of migration that a re-evaluation of how slavery shaped the political, economic and social landscape of continental Africa and infused the receiving areas of migration with cultural influences, both within West Africa, across the Atlantic and in the Islamic world.
LITERATURE REVIEW
This proposal builds specifically on the SSHRC funded “SHADD: Testimonies of Enslavement” Project and the online digital repository of autobiographical accounts and biographical data of individual Africans assembled on the website www.freedomnarratives.org. By using the same methodology, it is possible to focus on ethnonyms and hence the meaning of ethnicity as associated with the individuals in the biographical database, which constitutes a second pillar supporting this application, the DATAS project – Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery. The SHADD and DATAS projects established the proof of concept for historical reconstruction through biography and ethnographic data. We have demonstrated that biographical accounts can be assembled and different types of data can be brought together in ways that enable analysis of historical context and change. Team members provided a great variety of sources including advertisements for fugitive slaves, baptismal records, and the registers of enslaved people taken off slave ships by the British Royal Navy after British abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Essentially, the SHADD and DATAS projects focused on several distinct types of data, including individual accounts that ranged in complexity from a single paragraph to multiple and numerous sources. The data that has been amassed are extensive. As proof of concept, the SHADD project has demonstrated that it is possible to analyze demographic patterns in the slave trade of West Africa, specifically in terms of where individuals came from, why they were enslaved, what happened to them, and often the language or ethnicity with which individuals identified.
Lovejoy and Schwarz have collaborated on the Sierra Leone Public Archives Project, supported by the British Library Endangered Archives Programme, which has resulted in the digitization of enormous amounts of material on Liberated Africans and the descendants of Nova Scotians who moved to Freetown in the 1790s. Digitized materials are accessible on the British Library website. Some of the data that will be used in this project is on Harriet Tubman Digital Archive, http://shadd.org. Besides Registers of Liberated Africans, The Digital Archive includes records of the British colonial government in Sierra Leone, police court records, magisterial proceedings, and birth and death registers. It also includes maps, photographs, letters, and other documents related to slavery and the African diaspora from archives in Nigeria, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia, and elsewhere. Under Lovejoy’s direction, the biographical website of the life and times of Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, who left West Africa in 1754 as a slave but, subsequently, became a leading abolitionist in the fight against slavery; see “Equiano's World,” www.equianosworld.org, and with Ph.D. student Bruno Véras, a website on Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Hausa (www.baquaqua.org). Similarly, Landers has developed Slave Societies Digital Archive, www.slavesocieties.org, which preserves nearly 500,000 endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and Afro-descended peoples in Cuba, Brazil, Colombia and other parts of the Americas. While most documents come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are also some Cuban documents from the sixteenth century and Brazilian documents from the seventeenth century. The collection incorporates material from Córdoba on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and ecclesiastical sources from Brazil and Cuba add to the Latin American Microform Project, 1995, which microfilmed records in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and which have since been digitized. Le Glaunec’s assemblage of fugitive slave advertisements resulted in “Le Marronnage dans le Monde Atlantique: Sources et Trajectoires de Vie.” Nielson Bezerra, following his tenure as a Banting Fellow, has conducted research on Liberated Africans in Brazil that contributes to the website organized by H.B. Lovejoy on over 200,000 people taken off slave ships in the 19th century, www.liberatedafricans.org. H.B. Lovejoy also manages www.slaveryimages.org that contains of images of individuals and provides context for life under slavery. Hall and Hawthorne in turn have biographical materials on www.slavebiographies.org, and Seck has uploaded information on all Africans on the Hayden Estate near New Orleans. Much of this material is being combined into website hub, “Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade,” www.enslaved.org that allows searches across databases and websites. Cottias conducted the European program (7th PCRD) called EURESCL “Slave Trade, Slavery, Abolition and their Legacies in European Histories and identities” with a workshop on “slaves voices” in the Caribbean, West Africa and Europe.The trans-Atlantic value of the project is that our research teams bring specialized knowledge and sets of data to the project as indicated by Image 1 and presented in the project website. Most of our team members have access to data and command knowledge of specific bodies of data that have been recovered or can be. Four team members (Chadha, Ladly, Fisher and An) have technical skills in digital humanities that are essential to the implementation of the project. Consequently, team members bring separate and over lapping expertise from different trans-national and trans-Atlantic contexts that allow access to primary source materials and specialized knowledge of relevant geographical regions, temporal periods and research methods to develop our research tool for an open source, relational database. The LPI and PIs are providing the intellectual leadership, coordination of this project and extensive bibliographic information on enslaved peoples. Our national teams have worked on biographies derived from testimonies and primary sources on southeastern Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guinée and Senegal. Similarly, Kolapo, Ojo and Salau have amassed extensive textual materials for Nigeria. Landers, Mann, Le Glaunec, Hall and Seck have materials that refer to ethnonyms from Latin America, the Caribbean and Louisiana – Landers concentrates on ecclesiastical sources in Cuba, Columbia, Spanish Florida, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Cabo Verde, and elsewhere. Mann’s focus is on the personal links between Lagos and Brazil; Le Glaunec’s work on fugitive slave advertisements in St. Domingue (Haiti), Guadeloupe, Martinique, Jamaica and Louisiana contain information on ethnicity; while Hall and Seck have data on Louisiana during Spanish, French and US occupations. We are aware of and have access to, similar digitized materials from The National Archives, London, the Mixed Commission Records and other repositories. Collectively, the participants have access to extensive documentation that will be mined for this project. Thus, DATAS addresses the challenge of identifying enslaved Africans, and with the help of our research teams will share the results openly so that others can learn from them.
