African Origins Project

The African Origins Project is an online historical research project that invites members of the public to assist in identifying the historical origins of Africans transported in the transatlantic slave trade. It will create a website to present details of 67,000 Africans liberated from slaving vessels in the early 19th century. Africans, members of the African Diaspora, scholars, and others will assist in identifying these Africans’ origins by drawing on their own expertise to identify the likely ethno-linguistic origin of an individual’s name. The African Origins website is currently scheduled to open for contributions in January 2010.
Importance of volunteers
The project relies on engaging public help in identifying likely ethno-linguistic origins of African names. While scholars at a number of institutions and of different specializations are already engaged with and contributing to this project, scholarly knowledge alone is not up to the task of identifying individuals representing thousands of African languages and dialects. The number of different languages and ethnic groups found in Africa - for example, over 300 in modern-day Nigeria alone - poses great difficulty to marshalling a sufficient team of linguists, Africanists, and historians to determine the likely group or language associated with names for all 67,000 Africans in these registers. Where other citizen-science projects canvass the general public and may require no particular expertise or previous knowledge, contributors to this project must have some pre-existing understanding of African languages, cultural groups, and naming practices, as well as familiarity with African regions. Scholars on this project will reference literature on African naming and scarification patterns, including several works containing long lists of African names. But such resources are insufficient compared to the knowledge possessed by those who have lived in the societies from which the original captives came.
Historical records of Africans in the slave trade
The transatlantic slave trade was abolished by Britain and the United States in 1808. Because slaving ships continued to illegally transport Africans, U.S. and British naval vessels would patrol the African coast and intercept slaving ships. International courts (called Courts of Mixed Commission, or Courts of Joint Commission) were established around the Atlantic Basin to process these cases. After naval cruisers had detained and diverted the vessel on which they were imprisoned, Africans on these vessels were registered by the Courts, in an effort to prevent their future re-enslavement. In total, at least 150,000 Africans were liberated and disembarked at Courts in Havana, Cuba; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Cape Town, South Africa; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Jamaica, and others were taken before British domestic courts located at St. Helena and on several Caribbean islands. Almost all the Africans on board vessels that were diverted to ports in the Americas, and many of those taken to Sierra Leone, eventually became part of the black population of the Americas.
The Courts of Mixed Commission registered all Africans on board the intercepted ships. When freed Africans disembarked in the port in which the court was located, officials entered personal details of each individual into large registers, many of which have survived to the present. The descriptions available from the Courts’ registers are unrivaled in the history of any long-distance migration before the early 20th century and stem from the desire of the Courts to preserve the future liberated status of these Africans by establishing a many-faceted picture of their identities.
Court registrars, working with an interpreter, recorded each individual’s age, sex, and height, along with the African port where they departed Africa, the ship on which they were carried, and in some cases a ‘place of origin’ (an answer to a query about where an individual was from). Each African was also asked his or her name, which the registrar, upon hearing, would attempt to spell in the book. Many of these spoken African names had no written counterpart. Consequently, names recorded in the Courts of Mixed Commission registers were often unintentionally altered as they were transcribed. Even though most were recorded with an African interpreter on hand, the range of possible languages spoken by Africans on these vessels meant that in some cases the translator’s help was limited.
In the case of the Havana registers, however, the interpreter is identified and turns out to have been an earlier liberated African from the same part of the coast as the new registrants; thus, the information in these registers was recorded under the guidance of an African interpreter who would likely have been familiar with the individuals’ language and possibly even country of origin. Most records are not this clear, but many do provide written estimations of the Africans’ names that offer a significant clue to their ethnic and regional identities.
G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis The Voyages site also includes digital images of pages from the Havana and Freetown registers from which this data is drawn.
Using names to uncover origins
The linking of names and ethnicity carries no necessary implications for the definition of ethnicity itself. For example, people who today identify themselves as Igbo, Efik, or Banyangi have recognized names in these registers, but whether those populations on which the transatlantic slave trade drew in the 1820s and 1830s saw their group identities in these terms does not much matter. This situation is not very different from the peasants of Brittany and Normandy who went to Quebec in the seventeenth century, or those from Germany who traveled from various parts of the Rhine to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. If a vessel carrying either of these groups had been stopped mid-Atlantic and the names and descriptions of everyone on board had been entered into registers without any indication of the nationality of the passengers or the political circumstances under which they traveled, many historians today would infer the geographic origin and language of the passengers based on this limited information. As this analogy implies, ethno-linguistic continuity in both Europe and West Africa has persisted over the centuries.
African names have also proven particularly distinctive and persistent: Mende, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Kongo (to cite only some major peoples) have generated a much wider range of personal names than is common in European cultures. This suggests not only that people familiar with certain African languages and cultures can readily identify names common to certain groups, but that they might also recognize these names among those listed in the Courts of Mixed Commission registers. In contrast to many plantation records in the Americas, where names of slaves are almost invariably Christian or western, the ethnic basis of the names in the Courts of Mixed Commission registers is usually recognizable. For example, it is possible to say with some certainty not only whether an individual was Ibibio, but also, in some cases, whether he or she was Anang Ibibio.
This promising fact provides the impulse behind recording the pronunciation of these names and making both the recording and the written representation of each name available on the African-Origins Portal. Nwokeji and Eltis first attempted to use data in the Sierra Leone Court of Mixed Commission registers to derive Africans’ origins. Northrup compiled the approximate place of habitation for 3,000 individuals who embarked from Bight of Biafra ports in the 1820s.
Data on heights and age from the Sierra Leone registers formed the basis of several studies of nutrition and age and sex patterns. In the last few years four publications have used these registers to track origins of Africans liberated through the Courts of Mixed Commission. The first two cover Cameroon only,. Sponsorship of the African Origins Project comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Emory University, with additional funding provided by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and the Research for Collaboration in the Humanities Program at Emory University. Current funding supports two years of site development and initial outreach to potential contributors. The identification and publication of origins of Africans listed in the registers, as well as the development of historical maps of African ethno-linguistic regions, is expected to continue for several years and will rely on the collaborative and voluntary contributions of academic and African communities.
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