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Archiver > CARIBBEAN > 2003-07 > 1057246118


From: "Tim & Una Anderson" <>
Subject: New threads -- Slave immigrants from West Africa -- Gold Coast, Slave Coast
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 11:30:38 -0400


Although I have given most of my library on African history over to
my daughter, I have found the following on a slave rebellion in
Antigua which is a suitable start for Richard Allicock's call for a
thread on African slave immigrants to the West Indies.


From: Bondmen and Rebels: A study of Master-Slave Relations in
Antigua, David Barry Gaspar, Johns Hopkins University Press. 1985
From Part II. Slaves and Slave Society
As in other parts of plantation America, Antiguan slaveowners showed
a definite preference for certain ethnic groups and an aversion to
others. Their first choices were blacks from the Cold Coast
generally, whom they called Coromantees (Koromantyns, Callamantees),
an those imported from Whydah in Dahomey. Coromantee was not the
name of any particular Gold Coast group but a generic term adopted
after the Dutch fort at Kormantin. The largest ethnic groups in the
Gold Coast belonged to the Akan language group (Fanti, Asante), and
here too were to be found the Guang an Ga-Andangme peoples and
numerous others of the hinterland. Of the Coromantees Bryan Edwards
wrote: "The circumstances which distinguish the Koromantyn, or Gold
Coast, Negroes, from all others, are firmness both of body and mind;
a ferociousness of dispositions; but with al, activity, courage and
a stubbornness, or what an ancient Roman would have deemed an
elevation, of soul, which prompts them to enterprises of difficulty
and danger; and enables them to meet death, in its most horrible
shape, with fortitude or indifference. They sometimes take to
labour with great promptitude and alacrity, and have constitutions
well adapted for it."..
Africans loaded as Whydah, a port in Dahomey, on the Slave Coast,
were Antiguans' choice after Coromantees. These slaves were called
Pawpaws or Poppas, a term that referred to the Fon, Gun, and other
related groups of that region. Stephen Blizard [Tim's note: S.
Blizard was the owner of Green Island Estate and others in Mid 18th
Century] noted that Gold Coast slaves "always answer better than any
Slaves from Africa except Papaws."..These Antiguan preferences for
Coromantees and Pawpaws corresponded to the make-up of the British
slave trade during the first three decades of the eighteenth
century, when most British exports came from the Gold and Slave
coasts. Although slaves continued to be shipped from these regions,
their slaves in their overall British trade declined after 1730 in
favor of the Bight of Biafra, further down the coast. Curtin's
calculations indicate that the Gold Coast, which had contributed
38.3 percent of the export trade during the decade 1721-30, held
only 15.8 percent between 1751 and 1760. For the same periods the
shares of the Bight of Biafra - where the main groups were Ibos,
Ibobios, Edos, and Ijaws - were 3.2 percent and 40.4 percent
respectively... When Antiguans bought Ibos, or slaves from Calabar
or Angola, they risked "mortality and failure of that kind of
Negroes."

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