"A "Disgrace to the very Colour

Perceptions of Blackness and Whiteness in the founding of Sierra Leone and Botany Bay

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4549334
AutoresEmma Christopher (0000-0001-7335-5388, autor correspondente)
Ano2008
Volume9
Fascículo3
Data de publicação2008-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Colonialism and Colonial History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1532-5768 • E-ISSN: 1532-5768
EditoraProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/cch.0.0025
OpenAlexW2068788002
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas9
Referências citadas13

A "Disgrace to the very Colour": Perceptions of Blackness and Whiteness in the founding of Sierra Leone and Botany Bay Emma Christopher One of the most intriguing aspects of the founding of the Province of Freedom in 1787 is that it exactly coincided with another bizarre colonization plan, one which was both its twin and its exact opposite. Just as the Atlantic, Belisarius and Vernon were embarking members of the 'black poor' for Sierra Leone, the British Government was loading hundreds of its unwanted convicts onto ships to send them away to Botany Bay in the continent now called Australia, with the understanding that they would somehow found a penal settlement there. While one project was ostensibly a plan to let men, women and children of African origin, along with their families and some other colonists, begin a utopian antidote to slavery (as reflected in the name they chose), the other scheme involved the banishment of convicted criminals, overwhelmingly white, to long term forced labor. In a world in which the transatlantic slave trade was booming, 1787 thus saw the progression of schemes which were about black freedom and white non-freedom. It was a remarkable episode.1 Their success, though, was the inverse of what was expected, not least by the settlers themselves. The free colony in Sierra Leone, founded with so much hope, was soon found to be a disastrous and deadly experiment. Against the odds, it was the penal colony in New South Wales which went from strength to strength. Despite their status as convicted felons, deemed so evil as to be too dangerous to remain in their homeland, it was the prisoners who founded an incredibly successful colony in a place soon considered, at least by those not incarcerated there, to be an earthly paradise. The black poor, ostensibly being rewarded for their loyalty and assistance during the War of Independence, instead suffered total destruction in their initial attempts to found a settlement. This paper will argue that this was not entirely a matter of random chance. The years leading up to 1787 had seen a number of attempts to banish British convicts to Africa, schemes which revealed a great deal about attitudes towards racial attributes, climatic appropriateness and liberty in this era.2 The fact that the prisoners were not bound for Africa in 1787 was because these earlier endeavors had gone so very badly wrong. It was not that the terrible fate which befell the black poor in Sierra Leone – the catastrophic mortality rates, the torrential downpours which made building or planting impossible, the hostility of the local people and the ever-present menace of the slave trade – had been unanticipated by anyone in Britain. The government had long assessed all of these problems, discussed them at length in several parliamentary enquiries, and decided that the west coast of Africa was unsuited to settlement. Or rather that it was inappropriate to settlement by Europeans, 'whites'. The non-governmental authorities behind the colonization of Sierra Leone chose instead to believe that nowhere was more apposite for settlement by the black poor than their ancestral motherland where they hoped they would be a frontier against the evils of slave trading. In some ways this evidence runs counter to the recent work of scholars such as Roxann Wheeler, Kathleen Wilson, Colin Kidd and Dror Wahrman who have emphasized that the concept of 'race' in eighteenth-century Britain encompassed far more than skin color, instead being imbued in a person's lineage, civility, religion and even dress.3 What it actually reveals more fully, however, is the uneven progression of the firm linking of skin color with race throughout the British world. It was the British slave traders in West Africa who forcefully fought against receiving convicts because of their whiteness; it was they for whom such men were a "disgrace to their colour". These were not necessarily the views of those in Britain who were in charge of the felons' fate; much less so those who were behind the Sierra Leone scheme. What this evidence suggests, therefore, is how the fragmentary progression of understanding about race and skin color intersected at this most fundamental of moments in

Archaeology · Art · Bay · Biology · Ethnology · Genealogy · Maroon · Political science · Sierra leone · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy