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This chapter explains the understanding of the African end of the slave trade through an analysis of the Registers of Liberated Africans in conjunction with the revised edition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD₂). The slave trade from Sierra Leone never came close to matching the export figures of the more active slaving centers south of the equator. By providing a linguistic identification of recaptive names from the Havana Registers and pinpointing the geographic regions in which they are currently used, an estimation of the point of enslavement for these recaptives is possible. Comparing the Rio Pongo results with the distances traveled by slaves from southern Sierra Leone ports leads to some noteworthy contrasts between the north and south. Thus, the potential that culturally significant evidence such as African names can have for shedding further light on the African end of the slave trade is demonstrated.

The Introduction to this volume (Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery) sets out the current context of scholarship on the history of Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery and the slave trade and its abolition, and work around the memory of this history. This chapter considers what is ultimately at stake through configuring, reconfiguring and contesting the place of slavery and the slave trade in British national identity narratives, how this has changed in the last thirty years and why examining such relationships through a ‘local’ lens is important for interrogating the relationship between history, memory and identity. The Introduction sets out the structure of the book in its two parts and gives brief overviews of the following chapters.

Before the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, colonial Sierra Leone was an experiment in free trade and free labour, founded by the Sierra Leone Company, a joint-stock company led by antislavery activists, and settled by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia. This chapter explores the early history of the colony, and shows how antislavery was undermined by the routines of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, African American settlers were marginalised, and the arrival of 500 Jamaican Maroons in 1800 helped to cement the relationship between the leaders of the antislavery movement and the British armed forces.

The transfer of this Afro-Iberian tradition from West-Central Africa to Manhattan is apparent when seen in the context of the Dutch involvement in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century. In chapter five, entitled “The Pinkster King as Leader of a Brotherhood,” it is shown how the Charter Generation in New Netherland established a cultural and social pattern modeled upon Afro-Iberian customs that for many decades would continue to influence African American celebration culture and the master-slave relationship in Dutch-speaking areas in New York and New Jersey. It shows the Pinkster celebrations were not only important from a cultural point of view but also served as inter-social negotiations both within the African American community and between masters and slaves.

This essay examines the nature, scope and consequences of the seism of memory since its eruption in 2000 in Guadeloupe, French West Indies. In particular, it questions how the context of a multifaceted appetite for collective remembrance took the form of competing strategies for memorialization in the space. As such, it focuses on the heritage of pain, resistance and pride at the local, national and regional levels. I draw on Shalini Puri’s analysis of the repressed memory of the 1983 Grenada revolution in Operation Urgent Memory to identify in the landscape of Guadeloupe submerged, residual and eruptive ‘platforms of memory’ (Puri, 2012). In the specific case of Guadeloupe, the collective efforts of the Guadeloupean people for re-appropriating their non-French and non-European heritage on the island have turned into competitive post-traumatic approaches of the history of transatlantic slave trade. This essay eventually analyses the case of the Mémorial ACTe (MACTe) – Museum of Contemporary Caribbean Art and Memorial for the History of the Slave Trade – as constituting the most successful expression of what I define as cultural marronage, in the ambivalent postcolonial environment of the French Overseas Regions.

This chapter reports on Rufino’s life as a cook on the Ermelinda, a slave ship whose name changed more than once, usually to to fool the domestic and foreign authorities who were combating the illegal slave trade. The Ermelinda was a much larger vessel than the Paula and São José, on which Rufino had previously worked. The Ermelinda had to be carefully prepared in order to avoid unnecessary incidents and losses. Captains, masters, supercargoes, cooks, and sailors in general had specific tasks to fulfill. The Ermelinda’s crewmen included people from several nationalities—Africans, Brazilians and Europeans. Africans were employed in several tasks, and their knowledge of indigenous languages was greatly valued in the African trading ports.