Abstract
After the initial foundation of the colonies and the wars and disease that took their toll on the first groups of settlers, Sierra Leoneans began to focus on creating a new society that reflected their values and ambitions. Both colonies maintained strong links to the metropole — particularly the humanitarian societies that supported them — and both focused on establishing homes for freed slaves and centres for the promotion of Civilization, Commerce and Christianity. These similar objectives led to the gradual creation of quite different societies on the ground, though, and the development of quite different relationships with the metropole. This chapter examines the development of the colonial institutions — schools and churches — that were the foundation of settler life in Sierra Leone and the basis for the developing ideology of ‘Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity’. The development of these institutions and the emerging colonial ideology that accompanied them shaped the settlers’ relationships with the metropolitan organizations, particularly in the crucial years of the 1810s and 1820s.
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Notes
Chris Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism: Culture Contact from 5000 BC to the Present (Cambridge, 2004), 87.
Susan Lawrence, ed., Archaeologies of the British (London, 2003), 4.
Timothy H. Parsons, ‘African Participation in the British Empire’, in Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins, eds., Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford, 2004), 258.
Donal Lowry ‘The Crown, Empire Loyalism and the Assimilation of Non-British White Subjects in the British World: An Argument against “Ethnic Determinism”’, in Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, eds., The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London, 2003), 99.
Stiv Jakobsson, Am I Not a Man and a Brother? British Missions and the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery in West Africa and the West Indies 1786–1838 (Lund, 1972), 210–27.
Samuel Ajayi Crowther, The African Slave Boy: A Memoir of the Rev. Samuel Crowther (London, 1852), 7.
For more on Christian marriage in West Africa, see Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge, 1985).
John Herskovits Kopytoff, A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The ‘Sierra Leonians’ in Yoruba, 1830–1890 (Madison, WI, 1965), 21–2.
Ibid. See also Ausine Jalloh and David E. Skinner, eds., Islam and Trade in Sierra Leone (Trenton and Asmara, 1997), 5–14, 28–9.
Lamin O. Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 156–8.
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2006), 332.
Silke Strickrodt, ‘African Girls’ Samplers from Missionary Schools in Sierra Leone (1820s to 1840s)’, History in Africa, 37 (2010), 189–245.
Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), 175.
Robert Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, 1738–1925: In Comparison with Europe, Japan, and India’, The Economic History Review, 64, S1 (2011), 8–38; Pim de Zwart, ‘South African Real Wages in Global Perspective, 1835–1910’, unpublished paper presented at the Economic and Social History Graduate Seminar, Nuffield College, Oxford. In terms of the wages themselves, there were five different categories of wage recorded by the Colonial Government for the metropole. Four are articulated in the Blue Books: domestic labour, predial labour, trade, and timber loading. The first three were activities undertaken by either settlers or recaptives; the fourth was done by Kru labourers. The fifth wage category, taken from the Blue Books as well, is based on those in ‘professions’. Since this was a regular route for settlers after a few generations and participation in education both within and outside of the colony, it seemed important to include it as a wage category. It was calculated as an average wage over the period studied using a combination of data on the salaries of teachers, church ministers, colonial writers, clerks, those involved with the police force, and those employed as supervisors or managers for the Liberated African Department and its districts. This average does not include those employed in the private sector as lawyers or doctors. In all cases, the daily wage was calculated assuming a twenty-five-day working month in order to take account of holidays, festivals, and Sundays.
Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004), 98–9.
Freetown was not the only place that this kind of inculturation was occurring; it was also prevalent in the Gold Coast, where trading Fanti and Creole families established a new elite. See Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coast Society: A Family Study (London, 1969), 121–7.
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© 2013 Bronwen Everill
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Everill, B. (2013). An African Middle Class. In: Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291813_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291813_3
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