1254036 Global Narratives of Slavery 2

Organizer(s):

Gretchen Head, Yale-NUS College (gretchen.head@yale-nus.edu.sg)

In the second of our two connected panels, presenters will focus on a different set of geographies, including South Asia and East Africa, while paying particular attention to the question of empire and the institutions that support it. In “‘I shall eat her heart’: Sentimental Speech in the Court Records of the Cabo de Goede Hoop, 1700-1795,” Nienke Boer turns to the Dutch East India Company’s practice of transporting enslaved people from its outposts in South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. Looking at 18th century court cases from the Cape, she asks why lawmen chose to incorporate direct speech by slaves expressing strong sentiment–romantic love, self-pity, nostalgia, or filial affection–into legal documents. Slaves, though confined by the circumstances of the courtroom and their status as property, are allowed a full inner life in these court documents. Boer reads these cases not only to uncover the lived experience of slaves in this period, but to consider their form: their juxtaposition of the different discourses of high legal rhetoric and everyday language; their construction of a logical narrative; their transformation of the dialogue of the interrogation and different witness statements into a single authoritative legal narrative. The inclusion of affective slave speech in court documents, she argues, forms part of a larger system of legal verisimilitude with notable effects. By comparing these court records with 19th century British legal documents about enslaved people at the Cape, she ultimately suggests that, in spite of the introduction of a legal system which provided increased protection for slaves and slave families in the 19th century, these latter legal and administrative documents that erase slave speech ultimately police sentiment in a way distinct from the 18th century records.

Vinil Paul will then turn to Kerala’s plantation system in “‘You May Sell or Kill:’ The History of ‘Slavery’ in EIC Plantation in Colonial ‘Kerala,’ c. 1798-820” to explore how 19th century South West Indian (Kerala) ‘slavery’ entered global antislavery debates. While south Indian slave castes were an integral part of the master’s landed property, the European history of slavery in the age of ‘discoveries,’ capitalism, and the structure of the political economy cannot fully explain caste slavery in Kerala. In the 19th century, global attention to Kerala slavery arose from the history of Anjarakandy plantation. In 1798, the Bombay government established this plantation in Malabar, appointing Murdoch Brown as overseer, who obtained permission to buy forty-five Pulaya slaves. Brown and his agents then began to abduct people of the slave caste and their children. Information received by Malabar district magistrate T H Baber implicated one of the parties in the traffic of children and slaves from native states; as a result, seventy-six slaves and their agents were questioned in Malabar court. The British parliament published these court reports, painting an unflattering picture of Anjarakandy plantation. T H Baber’s detailed replies to the Law Commissioners’ slavery report have been extensively cited not only in Indian and British journals –mentioned even in Parliament - but also across the Atlantic, in journals and pamphlets produced by antislavery campaigners and associations in the United States. Paul will show that research into the history of Anjarakandy and the life experiences of the plantation slaves allow us to ask not only new questions about the social history of South Asia, but about the importance of the transnational circulation of these slave narratives as well.

Remaining within the broad context of the British Empire, Banjo Olaleye will consider a canonical slave narrative with his paper, “Recasting Africanness: Ignatius Sancho and the Question of Identity.” Olaleye begins with a semantic intervention; the prejudice against blacks, a designation which in eighteenth-century Britain described all non-white people, including those from India, Africa and the Caribbean, is what he suggests be tagged as ‘Africanness.’ He proposes, therefore, a substitution of nomenclature. In Olaleye’s theorization, Africanness describes the supposed inferiority of black races, and is tied more to the British understanding of blackness than to any direct connection to the African continent itself. It was the predominant ideology in eighteenth-century Britain that blacks were immoral and unrefined, a people lacking in mental acuity. In Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, Ignatius Sancho demonstrates his education, Christianity, and morality, along with many other traits that contradict what most Europeans assumed “Negurs” to be. Caught between identities—African, slave, immigrant, Briton—Sancho represents an insider-outsider observer of British culture and literature. Olalye will focus here on Sancho’s demonstration of refinement and intelligence as factors that strategically situate him as a man who defines, belies, and finally redefines Africanness to his society, setting the stage for the anti-racism discourse that followed his death.

Moving finally to the Horn of Africa and a subset of its indigenous literature, our concluding panelist Assefa Dibaba will present, “The Ethnographic History of Oromo Folklore Study.” His paper aims to construct the ethnographic history of the study of Oromo folklore based mainly on works by the freed ex-slave Oromo evangelists in the second-half of the nineteenth century in Monkullo, Eritrea. Using available sources from early Oromo philology, ethnology, folklore collection, “ex-slave narratives,” and travel writings, Dibaba has two objectives - to reconsider the historical background of Oromo folklore research and ethnographic undertakings in order to offer a critical history of it; and, to analyze individual (and group) folklore research endeavors in 1880s at Monkullo in Northeast Africa using a historical and literary approach. Early Oromo folklore scholarship was initially preoccupied with collection and documentation, something he will illustrate before turning to sample narratives in order to reveal the literary and folkloric significance of the collections. In this way, Dibaba will construct the intellectual history of the study of Oromo folklore. His proposition is that those early collections and documentations by the “ex-slave” Oromo evangelists not only facilitate an understanding of the intellectual history of Oromo folklore study but also for the history of Oromo lexicography, (bible) translation, and literary history.