“A Most Promising Field for Future Usefulness”: The Church Missionary Society and the Liberated Africans of Sierra Leone

Ryan, Maeve

doi:10.1057/9781137032607_3

Cited by 4 publications

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“…15 As the war with France drew to a close in 1814-15 and the legal basis of the Navy's suppression campaign became problematic, the nature of the intervention had to shift, and with it, the administration of both the prize money system and of liberated Africans. 16 During this time, the department entered into a partnership with the Church Missionary Society (CMS) whereby the CMS took over the "improvement" of liberated African villages and schools, and the Liberated African Department focused its energies on the Yard, where new arrivals were deposited from the slave ships and held for a period of weeks or months pending their adjudication, enlistment, apprenticeship or resettlement by other means.…”

Section: Evolution Of the Department 1808-91mentioning

confidence: 99%

A “Very Extensive System of Peculation and Jobbing”: The Liberated African Department of Sierra Leone, humanitarian governance and the fraud inquiry of 1848

Ryan¹

2016

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

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After the Abolition Act of 1807, over 100,000 Africans were liberated at Sierra Leone, and "disposed of" by the Liberated African Department. For over half a century, this department was integrated deeply into the fabric of colonial life. In 1848, a "most extensive and searching investigation" was launched into allegations of corruption and embezzlement. This article seeks to evaluate how the 1848 enquiry can inform our understanding of humanitarian governance in the British Empire, and broader, related intersecting themes of empire, slave emancipation, labour organisation and the possibilities of freedom for formerly enslaved Africans. Early on the morning of 4 June 1848, just as breakfast was being served, the Acting-Governor of Sierra Leone, Benjamin Pine, sent two representatives, Mr. Aiken and Mr. Pike, down to the Liberated African Yard to seize and bring back to Government House six of the wooden mess tubs, each containing breakfast for ten adults-in total, the breakfast for sixty of the approximately one thousand individuals recently liberated from slave ships and housed in the Yard at Freetown at that time, pending "disposal" and resettlement. Upon measuring each tub's contents, the commissioners reported, just as they had suspected following a tip-off from a local merchant, that the quantity of food being provided to the liberated Africans was about half of what it should have been. 1 Comparing the food in the tubs with the amounts signed off for that day by the department's chief clerk, William Dixon, they concluded that neither the regulation type nor amount of food was being provided.

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Section: Evolution Of the Department 1808-91mentioning

confidence: 99%