Western Africa and Cabo Verde, 1790S-1830S: Symbiosis of Slave and Legitimate Trades

By George E. Brooks

Western Africa and Cabo Verde, 1790s-1830s; Symbiosis of Slave and Legitimate Trades addresses the collaboration of slave traders and shipmasters engaged in legitimate commerce. This monograph is the third volume of a

trilogy treating the history of western Africa from the 11th to the 19th centuries. It follows Landlords and Strangers; Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (Westview Press 1993) and Eurafricans in Western

Africa; Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ohio University Press, 2003). All three monographs describe commercial, social, and cultural links between the

Cape Verde archipelago, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry, and Sierra Leone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452088693

George E. Brooks

George E. Brooks is emeritus professor of history at Indiana Universi1961, and has returned many times to this and other parts of Africa. He is a fellow of the African Studies Association and a member of the Mande Studies Association (MANSA), Liberian Studies Association, and the World History Association.

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© 2010 George E. Brooks. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 12/6/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-8870-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-8871-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-8869-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010915650

Printed in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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For my children

G3, Doug, Claire, and Annie

who have brightened and enlightened my life

Scarcely a hundred pounds of Tobacco or Powder that is sold but what sooner or later is used for purchasing slaves (Enoch Richmond Ware diary entry, November 27, 1844, in Bennett and Brooks 1965: 319).

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1

Senegambia and Sierra Leone during the Era of the French Revolution and European Wars, 1780s–1810s

Chapter 2

Cabo Verde and Guiné: A Shared Luso-African Heritage

Chapter 3

The Cacheu-Casamance Commercial Sphere, 1780s–1810s

Chapter 4

The Geba–Grande–Serra Leoa Commercial Sphere, 1780s–1810s

Chapter 5

The Symbiosis of Slave and Legitimate Trades and the Exploitation of Liberated Africans, 1810s–1830s

Chapter 6

Cabo Verde: The Era of Manuel António Martins, 1790s–1830s

Chapter 7

Senegambia: French and Franco-Africans, English and Anglo-Africans, 1810s–1820s

Chapter 8

Senegambia: Slave and Legitimate Trades, 1820s–1830s

Chapter 9

Casamance: Slave and Legitimate Trades, 1820s–1830s

Chapter 10

Cacheu, Farim, and Bolor, 1810s–1830s

Chapter 11

Geba, Grande, Bolama, and Bissagos, 1810s–1830s

Conclusions

Glossary

References

Captions for Art

Maps

1.1 Western Africa

1.2 Kaabu Empire and Fula almamate

2.1 The Atlantic islands and western Africa

2.2 The Cabo Verde archipelago

Figures

1.1 Ile de Gorée

1.2 Ile de Gorée, Rue Saint-Germain

1.3 Ile de Gorée, Maison des Esclaves

1.4 Ile de Gorée, Folgar

1.5 Ile de Gorée, signare with Franco-African children

2.1 Praia, São Tiago

2.2 Salinas, Ilha do Maio

3.1 Honório Pereira Barreto

3.2 Barreto Memorial, Bissau cemetery

4.1 Bissau from the anchorage

4.2 Bijougo War Canoe

5.1 Freetown

6.1 Salinas inside extinct volcano Pedra Lume, Ilha do Sal

7.1 View of Bathurst

7.2 Bathurst, signare and attendants, buildings constructed by captifs de case

7.3 Signare, Mandinka leader, Muslim traveler and wife

7.4 Sketch map of Bathurst

11.1 Nozolini Memorial, Bissau cemetery

11.2 Soo-Soo Slave Canoe

11.3 School on Bolama named for U. S. Grant

Preface and Acknowledgments

In 1971–1972, I was awarded a Social Science Research grant for sabbatical research in Portugal, followed in 1976–1977 by a National Endowment for the Humanities award for research in Portugal and western Africa. I appreciate the forbearance of both funding organizations in waiting for decades to see the publication of a promised monograph. My stated intention was to write a book treating nineteenth-century trade in western Africa. However, as I engaged in research in Portugal, Cabo Verde, and Guinea-Bissau and was mentored by Avelino Teixeira da Mota and António Carreira, I realized that I should learn about long-evolving economic, social, and cultural developments. Consequently, I extended my research further and further into the past to the earliest Portuguese sources and oral traditions. I published monographs and articles addressing rainfall and climate changes, movements of language groups, long-distance commerce, conquests and state building, and other topics. What I learned was incorporated in two monographs: Landlords and Strangers: Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000–1630 (1993) and Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (2003).

The present monograph treats western Africa from the 1790s to the 1830s, incorporating more than four decades of research in the United States, Portugal, France, Britain, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Sierra Leone. The book’s principal theme is the symbiosis of the slave trade and legitimate trade: commerce in African commodities such as beeswax, cowhides, tropical hardwoods, and peanuts. Symbiosis is addressed in the monograph’s epigraph: Scarcely a hundred pounds of Tobacco or Powder that is sold but what sooner or later is used for purchasing slaves was written by an American supercargo in November 1844—36 years after the United States and Britain outlawed the slave trade for their citizens and dispatched naval vessels to western Africa to enforce the prohibition; 29 years after France promised to outlaw the slave trade in the 1815 Treaty of Versailles; and 27 and 26 years, respectively, after Portugal and Spain signed treaties with Britain in 1817 and 1818 to prohibit slave trading north of the equator. Despite all these proscriptions, the Atlantic slave trade continued, to the considerable profit of American, European, Eurafrican, and African slave traders and American and European merchants and shipmasters participating in legitimate commerce.

Numerous—I am gratified to say innumerable—people contributed to this study, including scholars in several disciplines, archivists, librarians, missionaries, government administrators, former colonial officials, village elders, and people encountered by happenstance, the chance encounters that make research in western Africa so memorable.

The scholarship of Avelino Teixeira da Mota and António Carreira has principally informed me concerning Cabo Verde and Guiné, just as the work of Philip D. Curtin, Roger Pasquier, P. E. H. Hair, and Christopher Fyfe has enhanced my knowledge of the territories north and south of Guiné. Henrique Pinto Rema and Alexandre Marques Pereira provided unstinting assistance regarding Portuguese sources. Daniel F. McCall has been my mentor regarding all aspects of African history and especially concerning multidisciplinary analyses.

I am indebted to Deirdre Meintel, Bruce L. Mouser, Daniel F. McCall, Donald R. Wright, Joseph C. Miller, and Henrique Pinto Rema for expert commentary on drafts of the manuscript. Labelle Prussin and Gérald Gaillard addressed the provenance and meaning of Serpente do Mar on the cover and frontispiece. Ric O. Cradic prepared the photographs. I am inestimably fortunate that for this manuscript and the two preceding monographs, John Hollingsworth created the maps and Joan Sherman did the copyediting. My son Doug and daughters Claire and Annie provided computer expertise, as did my wife Elaine along with wise counsel.

Introduction

The Atlantic slave trade increased during the second half of the eighteenth century and was not suppressed until the mid-nineteenth century. The inhabitants of western Africa were increasingly involved in warfare and slave raiding as predators and victims, their precarious circumstances exacerbated by droughts and famine conditions during the prolonged c. 1630–c. 1860 dry period. Tragically, this era of deteriorating environmental and economic circumstances coincided with augmenting demands for laborers in the Americas and increasing prices paid for African slaves. African rulers and traders conspired to corrupt judicial processes in order to sell domestic slaves and free persons condemned as criminals into transatlantic slavery along with war captives.

In western Africa, the chief slave suppliers were the Mandinka-ruled Kaabu Empire, controlling territory between the Gambia River and the outliers of the Futa Jallon massif, and the Fula almamate, expanding from Futa Jallon to dominate markets along rivers flowing into the Atlantic Ocean. Warriors of both states relentlessly pillaged neighboring groups. Some Senegambian rulers and their entourages raided their own people. Elites were obliged to share pillage and European trade goods with retinues and relatives, and after guns, gunpowder, brandy, rum, cloth, tobacco, and other commodities received for captives were distributed and consumed, leaders were urged to undertake new wars and raids. Redistributive obligations were similarly incumbent on Eurafrican and European slavers who usurped landlords in western African societies.

During the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, inhabitants of western Africa were only sporadically affected by trade interruptions and wartime uncertainties, since much of the Atlantic slave trade was carried on by vessels from neutral countries, principally the United States. During this wartime period, Portugal, France, and Britain abrogated the charters of monopolistic trading companies and founded colonies administered by governors and officials mandated to implement mercantile regulations that proved impossible to enforce during war and that for decades afterward were flagrantly evaded by European, Eurafrican, and African traders.

In 1808, Britain and the United States made it illegal for their citizens to participate in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1817, King Louis XVIII fulfilled France’s obligation to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade mandated by a clause incorporated in the 1815 Treaty of Versailles, but French colonial officials along with slavers ignored the royal edict for decades. Portugal and Spain signed treaties with Britain in 1817 and 1818 to prohibit slaving north of the equator, treaties that were flawed in regard to enforcement. Suppression of the Atlantic slave trade was almost unilaterally prosecuted by the British navy, with little help from the American and French navies and none from those of Portugal and Spain.

In 1809 and 1816, Britain closed the Senegal and Gambia rivers to slave vessels, causing African slavers to redirect their caravans southward to the Casamance, Cacheu, and Geba rivers, which greatly profited Portuguese and Luso-African slave traders. Cabo Verde (the Cape Verde archipelago) served as an advance base for slave vessels of all nations en route to western Africa. Traders and colonial officials in Cabo Verde and Guiné flagrantly exploited a clause in the 1817 Anglo-Portuguese treaty that authorized the transfer of domestic slaves from Cacheu and Bissau to Cabo Verde. Some were retained as slaves in the archipelago; others were shipped to Brazil.

The Atlantic slave trade was highly profitable for American, European, Eurafrican, and African slave traders—and also for American and European merchants and shipmasters engaged in legitimate commerce. Captains and supercargoes colluded with slave traders and their intermediaries, selling spirits, tobacco, cloth, and other merchandise required to purchase slaves in a symbiosis of slave and legitimate commerce that contributed significantly to the long continuation of the Atlantic slave trade.

Between 1811 and 1834, more than 35,000 liberated Africans or recaptives were set ashore at Freetown, Sierra Leone, released from slave vessels captured by the Royal Navy. Triumphantly declared free by British agency, liberated Africans were subjected to arbitrary and despicable treatment. Men were compelled to serve in British military forces or to labor on public works. Women were coerced to marry anyone who paid a fee to the colonial authorities. Youths were made apprentices and indentured to serve until eighteen years of age. Girls were expropriated as mistresses by European and Eurafrican traders, colonial officials, and military and naval officers. Liberated Africans were settled in Freetown and villages scattered around the Sierra Leone peninsula, some to be kidnapped later on by Mandinka and Fula residing in Freetown, taken across the Sierra Leone estuary, and resold into the Atlantic slave trade. Hundreds of liberated Africans were sent to British settlements along the Gambia River; others were dispatched to Ascension Island, Fernando Po Island, and the West Indies.

French naval officers and colonial officials in Senegal disdained British exhortations to suppress the slave trade. Since the French navy did not intercept slave vessels and supply Saint-Louis and Gorée with liberated Africans, French and Franco-African traders purchased men from slave traders, and colonial officials declared them free (captifs rachetés), to be compelled to serve in French military forces and as laborers. Slaves were bought along the Senegal and Gambia rivers, and colonial officials also contracted traders to dispatch vessels to Bissau to purchase men from Portuguese and Cabo Verdean slave traders. Some captifs rachetés were dispatched to Madagascar, others to the West Indies.

As the Atlantic slave trade declined, the transition from slave to legitimate trade engendered numerous transformations of western African societies. During the 1830s, exports of peanuts commenced along the Gambia River and rapidly spread to other parts of western Africa. In some areas, peanuts were cultivated by free persons and migrant sharecroppers; elsewhere, they were grown in fields worked by slaves. Slave raiding and slave trading continued for many years, with captives driven along trade routes and transported coastwise in small craft, destined to cultivate peanuts, rice, and coffee, to cut timber, and to transport cowhides and other commodities sold to legitimate traders. The Serpente do Mar depicted on this volume’s cover and frontispiece invokes the predatory seafarers of all societies and nations who for centuries menaced the inhabitants of western Africa.

Chapter 1

Senegambia and Sierra Leone during the Era of the French Revolution and European Wars, 1780s–1810s

As the factors on the coast have no laws but of their own making, and of course such as suit their own convenience, they therefore like the Israelites of old, do whatsoever is right in their own eyes; in consequence of which, you ought to be very careful about receiving gold dust, and of putting your cargo into any but the best hands, or if it can be avoided, and the same dispatch made, into any hands at all, on any credit.

—Instructions to unidentified ship captain, November 12, 1785, quoted in Donnan 1932/1969: 3:79

The area of western Africa treated in this volume extends north to south a thousand kilometers from the fringe of the Sahara to rain forest along the Sierra Leone estuary and west to east some hundreds of kilometers from the Atlantic littoral to Bambuk and the Futa Jallon massif (see Map 1.1). The inhabitants of this huge and diverse territory speak languages belonging to the West Atlantic and Mande language families.

The people of western Africa have long exchanged products between ecological zones. By the early centuries a.d., their trade networks were linked with trans-Saharan routes connecting North African markets. When Portuguese mariners and traders arrived in the mid-fifteenth century, they were constrained to accommodate to centuries-old landlord-stranger reciprocities regarding host societies and traders, hunters, migrants, healers, Muslim clerics, and other travelers. Portuguese were compelled to pay tolls and taxes, visit only where they were invited by landlords, and adhere to local customs and practices. Africans refused to rent strangers more land than was needed for dwellings and stores, rendering the Portuguese dependent on African communities for food, water, and other necessities.

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Of inestimable consequence for the Portuguese and other Europeans who followed was that landlords allowed them to marry local women, usually relatives and dependents of influential community members who exploited the traders. Wives were invaluable to Europeans as interpreters of languages and cultures and as collaborators in commerce, roles undertaken by many of their children as well. The lifeways of Eurafrican children, raised in African societies, were chiefly determined by the social status of their mothers. There were significant differences in regard to stratified and acephalous societies.

The stratified and patrilineal (and, as time passed, increasingly Muslim) societies of Senegambia—Wolof, Serer, and Mandinka—prohibited Europeans and Eurafricans from marrying free persons. Eurafrican children were excluded from the power associations that educated youths and conferred adult status in these societies. Eurafricans lacked the privileges of other members of their age sets, including the right to cultivate land. Eurafrican males in these societies sought employment as grumetes (hired African seamen)—sailors, interpreters, and compradors with the bleak prospect that whatever wealth and possessions they acquired would be expropriated by rulers and other elites. Female Eurafricans shared the same disabilities; consequently, they competed to become the wives, interpreters, and compradors of European traders and African elites. Eurafrican men and women contested their separate status by wearing European garments displaying crucifixes and rosaries, by speaking Crioulo (the commercial lingua franca derived from Portuguese and West Atlantic languages), and by asserting that they were Portuguese, whites, and Christians—claims derided by the Portuguese and other European traders who relied on their knowledge, expertise, and linguistic capabilities in Crioulo and African languages.

Circumstances were significantly different among acephalous and matrilineal societies south of the Gambia River, such as Papel, Beafada, Temne, and Bullom. In these societies, elders and community leaders generally allowed European and Eurafrican traders to marry daughters and female dependents in order to derive commercial advantages from kinship affiliations. Eurafrican children in these societies shared the same socialization and opportunities as other children, including membership in Simo, Poro, Sande, and Bundu—the male and female power associations whose leaders dominated as village heads, monitored trade routes, and exercised other transsocietal powers. Eurafricans trading with these societies exploited the advantages of both heritages.

Dutch, French, and English traders arriving in the sixteenth century were compelled to accommodate to landlord-stranger relationships like the Portuguese before them. Dutch trade with western Africa ended at the close of the seventeenth century, leaving France, Britain, and Portugal to contest western African commerce. Frenchmen and Franco-Africans focused on the commerce of the Senegal River and the coastal and riverine communities south of the island of Gorée; English and Anglo-Africans traded along the Gambia, Nunez, Pongo, Sierra Leone, and Sherbro rivers; and Portuguese, Cabo Verdeans, and Luso-Africans strove to monopolize commerce with Africans living between the Gambia and Grande rivers.

The decade between the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 and the renewal of Anglo-French warfare in 1793 was a period of unprecedented commercial expansion in western Africa, comprising not only slave trading but also commerce in gum arabic, beeswax, palm oil, timber for ship construction, dyewoods, cowhides, and other sylvan and agricultural commodities increasingly demanded by European industries. During these years, French and English entrepreneurs schemed to found colonies, the English pioneering with settlements established in the Sierra Leone estuary in May 1787 and on the island of Bolama in May 1792. France invested considerable resources on entrepôts at Saint-Louis and Gorée, and the French and Franco-Africans aggressively expanded their trade southward at the expense of the Portuguese and Luso-Africans; in the process, they took advantage of the demise of the Companhia Geral do Grão-Pará e Maranhão, which had exploited a monopoly of Portuguese commerce with Guiné and Cabo Verde from 1756 to 1778.

English and Anglo-Africans supplanted Portuguese and Luso-Africans in the Nunez and Pongo rivers and extended commercial networks northward to challenge Portuguese and Luso-Africans trading in the Grande River and Bissagos archipelago. Contending with these better-supplied rivals, Portuguese, Cabo Verdean, and Luso-African traders seemed destined to be subordinated as compradors incorporated in the French and English trading spheres, only to be spared by the renewal of Anglo-French warfare in February 1793. During the two decades of war that disrupted French and English commerce, Luso-Africans, Cabo Verdeans, and the Portuguese reasserted their commercial ascendancy in the Cacheu-Casamance and Geba-Grande commercial spheres. They would be challenged anew, and more aggressively, by the French and Franco-Africans and the English and Anglo-Africans after the making of peace in 1816.

European and Eurafrican residents of Saint-Louis and Gorée experienced growing prosperity from the 1760s through the 1780s. Saint-Louis is sited on the western point of Guet N’Dar, a 2.5-kilometer-long island some 18 kilometers up the Senegal River. There is a dangerous shifting sandbar at the river mouth, and when conditions were unfavorable in that era, vessels might anchor for days before skilled Lébou seamen could pilot them into the river. In 1785, Saint-Louis had an estimated population of 6,000, including 600 French soldiers, government officials, employees of the Compagnie du Sénégal, some 60 permanent white residents, 2,400 Eurafricans and free Africans, around the same number of domestic slaves (captifs de case), and about 1,000 slaves in transit (Golberry 1802: 1:154–155). Annual flotillas of river craft traded with Moors and Tukulor at escales (river ports) along the middle reaches of the Senegal River for slaves and gum arabic, the famed gomme Sénégal collected from acacia trees when their bark cracked in desiccating harmattan winds, and with Mandinka and Soninke for slaves and gold as far as the Felu Falls some 925 kilometers away by river. Gum arabic had numerous uses, particularly in glazing textiles and in the manufacture of beaver hats. French traders and manufacturers notably prospered when France controlled both Canada’s trade in beaver pelts and gum arabic trade along the Senegal River. Chapeliers fabricated the fashionable and expensive beaver hats with felted beaver fur stiffened with gum arabic and shaped over wooden hat blocks (Searing 1993: 114–120; Webb 1995: 97–109; Tesdahl 2003).

In 1785, Gorée, an island less than a kilometer long and a few hundred meters in breadth, had an estimated population of 1,840, comprising 70 to 80 Europeans, 116 Eurafrican and free African property holders and their families, 522 free Africans without property, 1,044 domestic slaves, and approximately 200 slaves held in transit (Golberry 1802: 2:60–61). Gorée’s caboteurs (coastwise traders) traded with Cape Verde, the Petite Côte, and the Sine-Saloum, Gambia, and Casamance rivers for slaves, beeswax, and ivory. Communications between Gorée and Saint-Louis were principally via overland routes, taking five to six days. Adverse northeast winds prevailing from November to June or July stymied sailing vessels: it might take a month to navigate the 200 kilometers by sea. During the months of the rainy season when winds shifted to the south-southwest, a voyage between Gorée and Saint-Louis might be achieved in twenty-four hours (Durand 1806: 27–28).

Both Saint-Louis and Gorée had mayors (maires), chosen from notables in the Eurafrican and free African communities, who assisted European authorities in mediating disputes and coping with increasing numbers of inhabitants, for both islands’ populations doubled between the 1760s and 1780s. Cooperation between Europeans, Eurafricans, and free Africans was promoted by the introduction of European legal systems that secured their rights to house plots and dwellings, permitted the ownership of slaves, and encompassed inheritance laws. Unprecedented in western Africa, Eurafricans and Africans in this area could not only accumulate wealth but also ensure that it would be inherited by their children, to which end they increasingly married before clergy and registered children’s births and baptisms. Literacy was prized, and the more affluent residents sought instruction for their offspring.

Saint-Louis and Gorée were renowned for Eurafrican women known as signares, the name derived from the Portuguese word senhora, denoting a free woman of property and social consequence. Signares collaborated with Frenchmen and Englishmen in marital and commercial alliances for mutual advantage. Europeans formed unions with signares à la mode du pays (country-style, in English usage), accommodating to Wolof and Lébou marriage and inheritance practices. A child of such a union bore the father’s name. When a European died or left Senegal, a signare might remarry, taking the new partner’s name and raising a new family along with the children of a previous marriage who retained their father’s name.

Signares who were successful in commerce and marriages lived in spacious residences with European furnishings. They owned numerous domestic slaves who lived in thatched dwellings in their compounds. Male slaves included sailors, shipwrights, coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, and weavers. Female slaves were cooks, washerwomen, wet nurses, maids, and female confidantes. Signares and their families lived on the upper floor of houses constructed with high ceilings and latticed doors for cooling ventilation. Kitchens, storerooms, and cells for trade slaves awaiting shipment on slave vessels were on the ground floor. Fortunate indeed was the European newly arrived at Saint-Louis or Gorée who could make an alliance with a signare possessing a large household, a skilled labor force dwelling in her compound, and prospering commercial networks.

Signares were distinguished by the elegant cone-shaped turbans they wore, contrived with as many as nine colored fabrics. They flaunted expensive garments enhanced by gold and silver jewelry. Renowned for their beauty and female artifices as well as their entrepreneurship and business acumen, signares were reputedly irresistible to European men and alleged to ruin many careers. A popular diversion of elite social life at Saint-Louis and Gorée were folgars, entertainments in signares’ dwellings that featured music, dancing, wines, and other libations. Folgars provided signares opportunities to display their beauty, social graces, splendid garments, and jewelry; they were occasions on which to observe and be observed. Newly arrived European traders, colonial officials, and military and naval officers might be introduced to potential partners, whether unattached signares or signares acting as matchmakers for their daughters, female relatives, and friends (G. Brooks 1976, 1980c, and 2003: 216–217; see Figures 1.1 through 1.5). Of numerous depictions of signares, not one shows them with French or Franco-African partners; Figure 1.5, depicting a signare with Eurafrican children, is unique.

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Fig. 1.1

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Fig .1.2

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Fig. 1.3

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Fig. 1.4

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Fig. 1.5

One enthralled Englishman who recorded his encounter with signares was twenty-five-year-old Thomas Perronet Thompson, the first royal governor of Sierra Leone. During a week’s visit to Gorée en route to Freetown in June and July 1808, Thompson attended a folgar. His biographer related how the captivated young Briton was vamped:

It was marvelous, [Thompson] wrote, to see how the Gorée damsels kept up the dance in a sultry night and in a small room just able to contain the dancers. When not dancing, the ladies moved with the easy languishing pace of the chameleon when fly-catching. Exactly this languor adorns the beauteous mulattoes; they speak to you in a drawling tone without looking at you, and then cast one sleepy glance out of the corner of their long silky eyelashes to see if you have been listening. (L. Johnson 1957: 36)

Numerous Senegalese women moved to Freetown, and some were celebrated participants in the vanity balls described in Chapter 5.

French traders monopolized commerce between Senegal and France, but as time passed, Eurafricans and free Africans acquired vessels and expanded their role in riverine and coastwise commerce. Opportunistically, they took advantage of circumstances afforded during the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. In January 1789, the Compagnie du Sénégal’s privileges were substantially modified as a consequence of financial retrenchments undertaken by the French government during the financial crisis preceding the French Revolution. Funding for establishments in Senegal was reduced by two-fifths, but the company’s asserted trade monopoly was expanded from the Cape Verde peninsula to the Sierra Leone River (Monteilhet 1917: 365).

Reports and rumors concerning events during the first months of the French Revolution quickly circulated among Eurafricans and Africans living at Saint-Louis and Gorée. The time had come, it seemed, when they might cast off the oppression of the hated Compagnie du Sénégal and engage in commerce with vessels of all nations. On April 15, 1789, the leading inhabitants of Saint-Louis addressed a memorial to the Estates General demanding the end of the company and freedom of commerce. The memorial was drafted by Dominique Harcourt Lamiral, a French trader with personal grievances against the company, and it was signed on behalf of the principal habitants by Charles Cornier, the mayor of Saint-Louis. The document asserted, Negroes or Mulattoes, we are all French, since it is the blood of Frenchmen that flows in our veins, or those of our nephews. This origin fills us with pride and lifts up our souls! Hence no People has displayed more patriotism and courage! Another passage charged that the agents of the Compagnie du Sénégal were collaborating with traditional rulers, by authorizing the pretensions of the Chiefs of the country, by making them enormous presents, most inappropriately, and by failing to compensate us for their vexatious depredations against us (Lamiral 1789: 1–3, translated in Hargreaves 1969: 84–85).

Saint-Louis’s traders obtained some redress. The Compagnie du Sénégal’s privileges were abolished by decree on January 18, 1791 (although the company was awarded a contract to continue furnishing supplies to Senegal until October 1791). Meanwhile, a committee was convened to make recommendations concerning the colony. French merchants with vested interests in colonial trade gained political influence, and legislation enacted in September 1793 stipulated that commerce with colonies had to be carried on exclusively by French vessels. This reassertion of mercantilist practices was a declaration of intent only, for with