‘It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women’: Colonial Governance and the ‘Disposal’ of Women and Girls in Early Nineteenth‐Century Sierra Leone

Abstract

The colonial archive offers comparatively few glimpses of the individual lives of enslaved African women and girls brought to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and ‘liberated’ under the terms of the British Abolition Act of 1807. This article sets out to do four things: first, to consider what colonial sources reveal about how women and girls experienced and responded to becoming ‘liberated Africans’, and to the ‘disposal’ practices of the Liberated African Department – including schooling, indenture and arranged marriages. Second, it considers what factors might have shaped those experiences. Third, it seeks to make a contribution to the literature on marriage in early colonial Africa by considering whether, and to what extent, British colonial policy towards liberated African women in Sierra Leone meets a modern definition of government‐led coerced or forced marriage. Finally, it evaluates the usefulness and limits of official archives, missionary records, court records and the accounts of self‐styled British Sierra Leone experts for studying the experiences of women and girls, and indicates potential avenues for further research.