A Free Town
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How do you solve a problem like freedom? As abolitionist campaigns gained traction in the late 1700s, the population of formerly enslaved people grew. Black Africans and their offspring who had been enslaved in the British colonies were freed, at first in dribs and drabs, then all at once via two landmark pieces of legislation in 1807 and 1834. But a new question arose:

What would the formerly enslaved do with their freedom? They had been swallowed up by Britain's imperial project and endless demands of labour. Now they were nominally free in British lands and could, in theory, set up lives wherever they wanted. In practice, however, the British state was not about to roll out the welcome mat. I'm Moya Lothian-McLean, a journalist on the journey to discover the truth about Britain's slaving history. This is Human Resources.

And over 200,000 of them are so excited. The other one is...

Hello Human Resources listeners, this is Renee Richardson, producer and co-creator of the Human Resources podcast. I'm popping in to let you know that even though the podcast has ended, Arisa Lumba, who was a researcher on the podcast, and I have written a new book called Human Resources, Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things. And just like the podcast, the book...

takes modern Britain items and traces their roots back to slavery. We're introducing new topics that weren't quite covered in the podcast, like accounting, the Church of England, the colour indigo, denim blue jeans, sugar, Lloyds of London. But we also revisit some topics from the podcast and go a little further, like the Bank of England, chocolate and the Green King Brewery, which was in our pubs episode.

We'd love for you to support the book and get a copy. I hope you enjoy it. It's for all ages. And just as the podcast focused on accessibility and making this history accessible, the book does the same. And we hope it encourages conversations between different generations and helps people get a step into this history and encourages more research and more reading on this subject. Thank you.

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My name is Melissa Bennett and I'm a historian and researcher and at the moment I work in community engagement. My name is Iyamide Thomas and my day job is with a health charity known as the Sickle Cell Society but outside of that I am very much interested in showcasing my heritage which is uniquely linked to Britain. There were two periods of abolition legislation in Britain, 1807 and 1834

What are we going to discuss today? In terms of what happened after emancipation in 1834, the majority of people remained in the Caribbean. But the story we're going to tell today relates to kind of that earlier act, which is the abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which occurred in 1807. And we're going to go back a little bit further even to talk about

A group of people who were freed by Britain, essentially for siding with them in the American War of Independence. How did that promise of freedom to black enslaved people in America work? There was a proclamation given during that war when Britain was struggling against American forces to basically say to any enslaved people, if you manage to find a way to us and to serve us,

in our army, we'd ensure that you have freedom. And obviously when we lost that war, there were a lot of people who had been promised that, but who could not remain in the United States because the people that they had fought against weren't going to guarantee their freedom. So some ended up in the Caribbean, in Jamaica, in the Bahamas, but a large number did end up

in Britain and I guess that's where we're going to start the story. Let's set the scene. What time period are we in? Were these Black people in Britain? We're sort of talking now around sort of the 1780s and by this point there are a large number of what became known as the Black Poor living in London.

And the Blackpool had diverse origins. So some of them were people who were formerly enslaved and had been brought to London and were now free and were struggling to find work and accommodation. But the largest group of people making up the Blackpool were these people who had fought on the side of Britain in the American War of Independence.

Were these formerly enslaved Black people able to settle in London? They became a really big problem because there weren't enough opportunities for them to access aid and support.

and housing. So a committee was set up called the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor in 1786 and that committee was founded by a well-known British abolitionist called Granville Sharp. He set up this committee that met regularly at Batson's Coffee House in London and they had lots of conversations about the problems facing the Black Poor and what the solutions might be. Out of one of those conversations came this idea to re-settle the Black Poor in Sierra Leone.

To reiterate, that's a proposal to deport and resettle thousands of Black people across the Atlantic Ocean, sending them to Africa. But Granville Sharpe and supporters are presenting this as a good thing. Did other backers of the resettlement scheme see it like that?

Government officials, however, were more keen on the scheme because it meant that they could resettle a large group of poor citizens that they were having to pay out for elsewhere and kind of make them somebody else's problem. And the prime minister at that time was very interested in the scheme because he saw it as a means to repatriate the black poor to Africa and saying it was necessary that they should be sent somewhere else.

and be no longer suffered to infest the streets of London. So as I said, there was a kind of benevolent aspect of it, but also, I guess, shirking responsibility for those people that they had brought over that they no longer wanted to support. How many people were on the first expedition ship that left in 1787?

There are around 400 people on board the ship that left to go to Sierra Leone. But unfortunately, that first mission, that first resettlement was largely a failure. They weren't given the supplies and support that they needed.

They were decimated by disease and abandonment and eventually the Temu leader, who is a leader of an ethnic group that kind of lived on the outskirts of where they were settled, died and his son took over and he no longer liked the idea of the settlement being there. Settlement ended up being overrun. So sort of between, they arrived there in 1787 and by 1789,

That settlement no longer existed. However, that wasn't kind of the end of the plan. That wasn't the end of the story. So this is the first attempt, but there were many other groups of people who were sent to Sierra Leone to settle there. Some were kind of initiated by government schemes and some were forcibly relocated elsewhere.

Who made up those first resettled people? Was it Black adults only? Amongst the Black poor that were resettled, there were actually some white women who were wives and girlfriends who went to Sierra Leone on that ship that took

the Black Corps. After the Black Corps, as Melissa said, they were, after a couple of years, that first settlement, most of them were killed and only a few remained. The next attempt was to resettle people known as the Black Loyalists. And these were formerly enslaved people who fought on the side of the British in America during the American Revolutionary War.

And they were firstly sent to, they went to Nova Scotia, mostly from New York. Otherwise, they would have faced re-enslavement because, of course, Britain lost that war.

And these black loyalists were in Canada, Nova Scotia and Canada. What about 1,200 of them asked to be resettled to Africa because things in Canada weren't that much better than, you know, what they had been going through in America when they were enslaved anyway. So, yes. So they went to Sierra Leone and they were led by one Thomas Peters. He had actually come to England.

to advocate for their return to Africa. And that always surprises me, you know, that even during slavery, he came to England, sought out the likes of Granville Sharp, etc. And one of the abolitionists called Thomas Claxton sent his brother, John Claxton,

to go and accompany these 1,200 or so Nova Scotians. They were also called to go to Sierra Leone and they founded Free Town. Initially, it was actually two words, Free Town, but with time it got combined and became Free Town, which is the capital of Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is a significant location to found a settlement made up of formerly enslaved Black people in because it was a really big slave trading port.

Bunce Island, which is located in the Sierra Leone River, saw tens of thousands of Africans shipped to America from there because it was such a strategic location for that type of trade. Both the Royal Africa Company and Scottish slave business Grant Oswald & Company owned and operated the island throughout its history. And it was still in operation as a slave trading hub when Granville Town was founded just 20 miles down river from Bunce Island. The same goes for Freetown. So

So almost next door to one another, you had these two different sites representing different sides of British colonisation. One an island shipping out enslaved people, the other a struggling settlement where Britain could send unwanted, formerly enslaved people. I asked Aymide what happened during the second attempt to found a British colony for free slaves in Sierra Leone.

After the Black Loyalists, another lot that were resettled were called the Maroons, and they were from Jamaica. These were enslaved people who rebelled against the British and went up to the mountains and formed their own colony there. But they were tricked, you know, to come down. They were deported first to Canada, and they found that very cold, apart from everything else. And they asked, about 500 of them, asked,

to go to Sierra Leone and they also went to Sierra Leone. And there's quite a legacy in Freetown around the Maroons. There's a Maroon town. There's streets named after parishes in Jamaica, Trelawney Street. The place is named after...

some of the British generals that actually were part of the American Revolution as well. That legacy is there in Freetown. But by far the biggest number that were resettled in Freetown were known as liberated Africans or recaptives. And these were a whole thousands of enslaved people who were on their way to the Americas. They were on the slave ships.

And the British Navy intercepted those ships and took them to Sierra Leone where the slavers faced mixed courts of commission and all this sort of thing. And one other interesting bit is that those slave ships were actually, some of them were bought by the liberated Africans who then became traders in a later time and shipped, turned them into merchant ships. So that's very interesting. And even the Maroon Church that was built

Some of the rafters were made from slave ships. These four groups of people combined to the melting pot. You know, I mean, can you imagine there were some who'd never been to the West? The majority were from Nigeria, the Congo, Ghana. These were the liberated Africans. Then they had to mix with people who had African-Americans and then they had to mix with Jamaicans.

And, you know, they formed that melting pot that became the Creole culture. And you can see it in the architecture in Sierra Leone. You can see it in the language. You can see it in the dress, the lifestyle and tradition.

So a new ethnic group forms in Sierra Leone, from the descendants of these freed, enslaved black people, the Creole. They became elites in Sierra Leone, didn't they? But what was their post-slavery experience of interacting with British authorities like? Certainly the Creoles, they...

For instance, even the Black loyalists were thought of as Black British men because all their dress, their whole attitude and everything was very Anglicized, you know, because they've been to the West compared to the liberated Africans. So even within that, there was sort of hierarchy within that Creole settlement. And I think the British actually stood out.

stoked that fire, you know, and treated those that had been to the West a bit better than those that hadn't been to the West. There was all that. So it wasn't as hunky-dory as one would think. But yes, the Creoles were the ones who were part of the legislative councils and all this. And one thing that your listeners might not know is that Sierra Leone, Britain, was the first place that women were given the vote.

even before England. England celebrated the centenary a few years ago. But in Sierra Leone, in that colony, women, heads of households, were actually given the vote

before women were allowed to vote anywhere else in the world. Sierra Leone was like an experiment to then start colonization or whatever they planned to do elsewhere. And a lot of Sierra Leones, of course, they had that education. They were then sent to work along the coast because they master builders, the doctors, lawyers. It all stemmed from

from Sierra Leone and then they were sent to Ghana, Nigeria, The Gambia, which is why there's a high score of Creoles in those countries. I presume they still experience racism at the hands of the British state though. Well,

One particular case where when they had doctors, Creoles were the one in Freetown became the educated elite from the 1800s. They were coming to British universities. The university was founded in Sierra Leone. The first university in sub-Saharan Africa was linked to Durham University here. And you'd get a degree from Durham University if you'd been to Friar Bay College, as it was called. But Friar

examples of that racism. There was a case where the doctors, you know, doctors who qualified as medical doctors, they were paid differently to their white counterparts. That was one. Another one was even earlier, there was a case where, you know, some of the people who

were in the British Army. And there was a case where one of the lieutenants who returned after when the Second World War was finished, he was with his uniform and everything, and they refused to salute him, you know, to give him the acknowledgement that he deserved.

Because normally as a lieutenant you go and all the other army people respect that. And they didn't do that. In fact, we wrote about him in one of the Black History Month magazines. His surname was Eastmont, you know, Lieutenant Eastmont. And there was a whole lot of racism. I mean, you know, people not being paid the right amount, people not being given the right housing. You know, one could go on. Sadly, from the sounds of it, the same discrimination happens now, particularly when talking about salary disparity. Yeah.

iMedia has a personal connection to this Sierra Leone story though.

I'm Creole. I know that from my dad's side, I'm bound to be liberated Africa because we associate to one of the villages. But from my mom's side, her ancestors actually came from America as religious people. So my great grandfather from Virginia. Again, I haven't been able to trace that, but they came from the United States and settled in Sierra Leone. But from my dad's side, it would be liberated Africa. And I belong to some of these organizations, Creole descendants organizations.

that tried to show the unique link to Britain. And I think it really was because I know of all this pioneering stuff that's been done here, you know, and I wanted that to be out there. How did the British use Sierra Leone as a foothold in West Africa after the abolition of slavery? Because after slavery ends in the traditional sense, that's when Britain starts looking at other ways of maximising wealth and profit from Africa.

It's in the mid-19th century we see a new wave of land grabs and colonial outposts in the likes of what are now called Ghana and Nigeria.

I think it's important to understand that the British didn't really ever go for a long time that far beyond Freetown. So they kind of had Freetown as their base and then the less developed areas of Sierra Leone at that time, they would often call it like the hinterland and things like that and they didn't often venture out there. They didn't have control over those areas. Those areas are still very much led by leaders of the various ethnic groups and that worked for a long time.

until the late 1800s, 1890s, when Britain wanted to make more money, as it always did. I decided to try and tax people in the hinterland and they tried to implement this tax on homes called a hut tax and people rebelled against this. There were lots of very aggressive, in some ways very successful rebellions against this tax.

And in some of those rebellions, the Creole people got a bit caught in the crossfire because they were seen as too close to the British establishment. In one of those particular wars, they were very much targeted by the people from the hinterland because they were seen as too close to the British and they were deliberately targeted and killed. What does the experience of the Creole tell us about Britain's attitudes to the people they'd enslaved? How did they view them?

Did they try in parts to keep some of that labour? We know in Jamaica there was the apprenticeship system. It would be useful to compare the experience of the Creole to the fates of other formerly enslaved people post-abolition.

So they did have an apprenticeship system in Sierra Leone as well. And I guess that's one of the darker sides of this narrative around like a province of freedom. So maybe not so much for people that had come over from the Caribbean in a more free way, but definitely for the people who were liberated. And I sort of say that holding back a bit. It was very similar to the experience that people had after emancipation in Jamaica. So there was this, in most cases, forced apprenticeship. Yeah.

It was even longer in Sierra Leone, it was 14 years. I think in Jamaica after 1834 it was supposed to be, I think it was supposed to be eight years and it got cut down. But initially when the liberated Africans first landed in Sierra Leone, many of them were apprenticed for up to 14 years. They were often coerced. They weren't told exactly where they were going, exactly what jobs they would be doing. Some ended up in the military, so helping Britain to secure its various outposts in colonial West Africa.

Some were put onto like big public work schemes, so building fortresses, building roads, helping to build ports and things like that. And a lot of them, particularly children, ended up in apprentice as domestic servants and many of them were treated

horribly as you can imagine. They'd end up in homes of British settlers or even in homes of Maroon settlers who had been there a little bit longer and they had quite harsh working conditions. So the apprenticeship scheme was supposed to be a way to educate people and to give them a start so they could live independently after but often that education side didn't really happen and it was almost like domestic slavery in a lot of cases and certainly in the first

20 or so years after 1807, there was a lot of outrage over how these people were being treated. In some cases, like apprenticeships were sold, so you would pay to take on someone as an apprentice. You'd select them from a yard, again, very similar to what would happen if you were buying a person to be enslaved. There were lots of things that didn't quite work in the beginning and lots of people who were badly mistreated. That sounds an awful lot like slavery.

How did Britain square that with its promises of emancipation? Eventually this stopped because obviously Britain were telling the world that they were liberating people from enslavement and other countries started to notice what they were doing. And again, it became sort of this financial thing. So you won't let us have these people in our country to work for us, but you're taking them and making them do pretty much the same work for you in the name of freedom.

So eventually this stopped and things did become better, but a lot of the liberated Africans rebelled against this. They voted with their feet. So they decided that they would leave the place that they were apprenticed to and walk to some of the settlements that had been set up by the Nova Scotians or the Maroons or other liberated Africans who had arrived earlier. So they'd kind of set up on their own.

And eventually schemes were set up to support people to do this better. They were given a certain amount of land, a certain amount of tools, a certain amount of supplies. But initially the government didn't manage this well at all. So there was lots of room for people to be exploited. It wasn't really until the missionaries were involved that there became kind of like a better system to support people.

Just to clarify, because I think it's important for the listeners to understand that when we're talking about liberation post-abolition of the British slave trade, we're talking about the British going around policing slave ships that are still trying to take enslaved Africans to continuing slave colonies. The British intercept those ships and say they're liberating these people.

But then these people are being made to work under awful conditions and some of them would be essentially forced into military service. It's amazing how the history of Britain's black soldiers and conscripts has been swept under the rug.

Some were conscripted into the army, so those who were physically strong were often put into the army. So there were kind of different things that they would be attached to. One would be the colonial militia. So these are people that would be expected to help out if something happened in Freetown and kind of support with it, because obviously at this time there weren't sort of police systems like we have today. The number of them were

were conscripted into the West India Regiment, which is kind of the first official unit in the British Army that was made up of predominantly men of African descent.

The West India regiments were much like the Warwickshire regiment or the Hampshire regiment. They were paid the same amount of money. They were treated as part of the British army rather than part of the colonial army. And people were taken from Sierra Leone to join that because initially, after the abolition of the trade, initially conscripts were kind of purchased to join the West India regiment. Obviously, once we abolished the slave trade, that became a bit complicated and didn't look ethically correct.

So we started to think about different ways to conscript people into that regiment. And they served all over the Atlantic world. So some would have fought against America again in the War of 1812. Some would have been used to suppress slave revolts in the Caribbean in sort of 1816 in Barbados, for example, in 1832 in Jamaica. And some would have been stationed in Sierra Leone and the Gambia and other places in West Africa.

This resettlement programme brings to mind the framings of resettlement policies today. In 2022, Britain's Conservative government announced a plan to deport so-called illegal asylum seekers to Rwanda. They frame this as an exciting opportunity to build a life elsewhere rather than a punitive way of sending isolated people thousands of miles away to a place where they know no one.

What sort of legacy has the resettlement programme of Sierra Leone left on the British state and its method of dealing with people that it really doesn't want to?

If we think of the Jamaican example, it's probably a really good one. Up until this day, we have a lot of people of Jamaican descent who are living in the UK, for example, who are seen as problematic or who are seen as criminals being deported to Jamaica and they may not have ever stepped foot there in their lives. We can think of that as quite similar to what happened with the Maroons. So they lived in Jamaica after the Maroon Wars. They were seen as problematic. The colonial government in Jamaica didn't want them around.

that as Gemma Day said they were kind of tricked into resettling first in Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone. This idea of moving people who deviate or who are problematic out of the places where they can cause trouble is something we definitely see still today and we saw back then. Also the lack of support given to people, the lack of mechanisms that are available to begin with

to help people, people are just dumped somewhere without any connections and without much understanding of that place.

and without much help and that's definitely something that we could think about in the case of the liberated Africans who were resettled in Sierra Leone. It wasn't a place that they connected to, many of them, it's just a place that was chosen for them to be sent to and it may have been very close to where they came from but they probably wouldn't have known even if they came from sort of neighbouring countries how to return in many cases. I think there are a lot of similarities

And as well it's similar to the way that systems treat people who can't support themselves. So again with the Black Poor, the solution that seemed best at the time was to remove them so they didn't sort of blight the landscape and people didn't have to see them and people didn't have to know that they were there, rather than supporting them to kind of set up life in London. So I think that resonates a lot today with how we treat people and the kind of people that we also allow in.

Why is the history of the Creole not something that's more widely known in mainstream British history? When we talk about the post-slavery era, I honestly hadn't heard of the Creole origin and I hadn't heard of the Sierra Leone settlements or the role the country had in Britain's post-abolition plans. It seems like such a key part of the story.

I guess from a historian's perspective, I think a lot of it is because it kind of challenges the dominant narrative about how we see abolition, particularly in the British context. So often, you know, British history laws Britain as like the first nation to abolish the slave trade, even though it actually wasn't. And the fact that this went on and that things didn't turn out

as they were advertised, I think challenges some of those dominant narratives. It demonstrates the kind of abolition of the trade wasn't because the British government was so moral and so ethical and so concerned about people. It brings it back to the fact that a lot of the time it was about money and that they saw opportunities of how

these people could be used in more financially efficient ways rather than thinking about their freedom and I think a lot of the time when we think about abolition that the outcry was because it was seen as like an unchristian thing to own somebody else it wasn't that they believed that people of African descent were actually equal to them and we can see that with how things

turned out across the empire after abolition and emancipation, freeing people didn't change their status, really, or change the everyday struggles that many of them had faced as enslaved people.

So yeah, we're told a story often that's like incomplete or airbrushed and Britain's kind of presented as this like uncomplicated hero that championed abolition and I think this story challenges that. So sometimes things that challenge the dominant narrative aren't allowed to sort of leak through. Sometimes when history is complicated it's harder to get it into sort of mainstream textbooks or into school classrooms

because it takes quite a lot of time to unpick this and quite a lot of words and it's quite difficult to understand when you first come to it. Emancipation legally ended chattel slavery in all British-controlled territories. Unquestionably, this was progression. But it didn't end the story of slavery, nor the deep societal inequalities it embedded. In Britain, we try and wrap slavery and its legacies in a neat little bow and package it away in a big box labelled the long-ago past.

It's the same drive that led to the foundation of Sierra Leone, trying to parcel off living reminders of an atrocity we were responsible for to another far-flung colony thousands of miles away from Britain itself. But British slavery, the forcible movement and death of millions of black Africans around the world, is a living history.

It established the financial system we live under today. It set up the geopolitical powers in the West that still dominate the rest of the world. It created new countries, a wealthy elite that still persists, new ethnic groups and invented social concepts like race. How could we think that the truth about a system of this magnitude, influence and yes, trauma would stay buried in the soil of faraway islands? How could we want it to?

Human Resources is not an exhaustive guide to the British slave trade. It is an introduction, an attempt to shine a light on the work that's gone into excavating the truth about Britain's plantation society. We are almost at the end of this particular journey, but there is one more episode in store for you. An exploration of the real meaning of emancipation. Human Resources

Human Resources was written by me, Moya Lothian-McLean. Our editor and producer is Renee Richardson. Our researchers are Dr. Alison Bennett and Arisa Lumba. Production assistant is Rory Boyle. Sound design by Ben Yolovitz. This is a Broccoli Production, part of the Sony Podcast Network.