The place of Guinea Coast Creole English (GCCE) and Sierra Leone Krio (SLK) in the Afro-genesis debate (original) (raw)

Corcoran, Chris. 1998. The place of Guinea Coast Creole English (GCCE) and Sierra Leone Krio (SLK) in the Afro-genesis debate. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, held in New York, January 8-11, 1998.

1. Introduction

This paper examines the role sociohistorical evidence may play in untangling the relationship between Guinea Coast Creole English, Sierra Leone Krio, and Settler English and by extension their roles in the Afro-genesis debate. In this brief presentation, I am not able to propose a solution that would completely untangle the varieties, but, in particular, I evaluate the proposal that Sierra Leone Krio originated in the Americas. Perhaps more than most fields of linguistics, creolistics has grappled with sociohistorical evidence and its bearing on linguistic questions; however, within creolistics to date no sociohistorical work has addressed the modern location most associated with Sierra Leone Krio, that is, the Sierra Leone peninsula. [of course this was before we heard the work of Magnus Huber]

The most comprehensive work on the question of Sierra Leone Krio’s place in the AfroGenesis debate has been done by Hancock (1969, 1971, 1986, 1992). Though Hancock uses sociohistorical as well as linguistic evidence, he has not investigated the relationships between the groups that came to make up the creole community within the Sierra Leone Colony specifically.

Nearly every other scholar who has addressed the issue of Sierra Leone Krio’s provenance or role in Afro-genesis suggests that SLK is the product of transplanted Jamaican Maroon English or some combination of Nova Scotian and Maroon varieties. This list includes: Schuchardt 1893, Berry & Ross 1962, von Bradshaw 1965, Wilson 1976 (cited in Hancock, 1986:73-74), Hall 1966, Coomber 1969, Bickerton 1977, Fyle & Jones 1980, and as recently as McWhorter (1997: 141) who says “Sierra Leone’s sociohistory rather inescapably suggests that today’s Krio was brought to the colony by Jamaican maroons in 1800.”

An initial exploration of the extremely complex social and linguistic situation of the Sierra Leone peninsula during the 19th century indicates that the settlers-the Maroons and

Nova Scotians-were not numerically, politically, geographically, or socially situated to have been central in the creation of modern SLK. First, I will give a brief description of each of the four major communities that eventually became known as Creoles and establish that the Liberated Africans and their descendants became the majority of the members of the Creole “ethnicity” 1{ }^{1} and by extension the speakers of SLK in the Sierra Leone peninsula. Second, despite their mutual membership as Creoles, I establish the physical and social distance that existed between the Liberated Africans and the other groups, and based on 19th-century observations of linguistic and specifically English-speaking differences between them suggest the distance was inscribed in linguistic terms as well.

2. The Creoles

The short version of the development of Kriodom, as the Sierra Leonean Sociologist, Arthur Porter, dubbed it, starts with the four groups whose descendants came to be known as Creoles in Sierra Leone. [this list with brief descriptions are on the handout under 2.1 along with a table that summarizes the settlement history]

2.1. Black Poor

The first group known as the Black Poor were the founders of the colony. In 1787, 377 freed slaves, soldiers who had fought for Britain in the American Revolutionary war, and poor whites all left London to establish a settlement in Sierra Leone at a cite just east of modern Freetown. 34 people died during the voyage and having arrived during the rainy season without proper shelter another 86 died before September of the same year (Peterson 1969:26). In 1789 the settlement was burned to the ground by the Temne ruler, King Jimmy, in retaliation for the burning of a Temne town by an English ship captain. One settler was killed and the others took refuge with other nearby leaders. In 1791 Alexander Falconbridge, an agent of the Sierra Leone

[1]

1. 1 “Ethnicity” in quotes because core to Creole identity is the notion that other Sierra Leoneans belong to tribes and, therefore, have an ethnicity. But Creoles do not. ↩︎

Company started in 1790, managed to gather 64 heads of households back into the settlement near the location of the newly established trading company.

2.2. Nova Scotians

The second group of settlers were the Nova Scotians. Like many of the ‘Black Poor’, the Nova Scotians were loyalists in the American revolutionary war. Rather than making their way to London, they were settled in Nova Scotia where they found their arrangements and climate unsatisfactory. After lobbying London to better their situation (Peterson 1969:28), half-or nearly 2000 -of these settlers agreed to go to Sierra Leone. In 1792, 1,200 sailed for the colony though only 1,030 arrived. Clarkson, who traveled with the Nova Scotians, became the new governor and invited the remaining sixty or so original settlers to join their community. They agreed and subsequent records make no clear or consistent distinction between the two groups (Porter 1960:73). The community survived though under the unwelcome governance of the Sierra Leone Company. The Nova Scotians had originally negotiated to form a self-governing community and were in the midst of rebellion in 1800, when the Jamaican Maroons arrived.

2.3. Jamaican Maroons (called Settlers, in contrast to Liberated Africans)

This third group, called the Maroons, signed a treaty with the Jamaican government forces in 1795. The governor of Jamaica “took advantage of a technical breach of the treaty by the Maroons and had the entire population of Trelawny Town […] transported to Nova Scotia” (Dalby 1971:40). After arriving in Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotian government and the Jamaican government were unable to agree on which government was responsible for the support of the Maroons, and in 1800 they were all sent to Freetown (Black 1958:143). 550 Maroons accompanied by 45 soldiers of His Majesty’s 24th Regiment arrived later that same year (Peterson 1969:34). The day they arrived, the Sierra Leone Company used them to put down the Nova Scotian rebellion creating a rift between these communities that lasted well into the mid 19th

century (Rankin 1836) [check p.99]. Only a decade later, the colonial government used the same tactic against the Maroons with a militia of newly liberated Africans.

2.4. Liberated Africans

The fourth group and the numerically most significant is the liberated Africans, often called recaptives. In 1808 when the first liberated Africans arrived, there were less than 2000 Black Poor, Nova Scotians, and Maroons total. After 1808, when the slave trade had been abolished by Britain, the Royal Navy captured slave ships in the Atlantic and forced them to land. The “Liberated African Register” kept by Colony Courts on emancipation lists a total of 84,420 persons liberated between 1808-1848. After 1848 the Liberated African Register numbers were no longer assigned, but an additional 9,414 were recorded between the years of 1848 and 1861 for a total of 93,834 . Asiegbu notes that the “records [were] badly kept. Actual figures very probably far exceed[ed] the entries in the records.” (Asiegbu 1969:191).

When Koelle interviewed recaptives for his Polyglotta Africana first published in 1854, he recorded nearly one hundred and sixty different languages being spoken in the Colony (Curtin 1975:292). The slaves had been sold at ports as far south as Angola, but many of them were from the Bight of Biafra; thus accounting for the large number of Yoruba words in modern SLK.

3. Liberated Africans as speakers of SLK

Krio is not a term that was used to apply to the language of the Creoles until some time early in the 19th century. In an 1885 newspaper article the language of the Creole community is called the Sierra Leone vernacular. So in the 19th century neither the settlers nor the liberated Africans were described as being ‘Creole’ speakers; however, the Liberated African community, in particular, is described as speaking broken English and patois.

As early as 1820, Fyfe reports that the C.M.S. asked the missionaries to send verbatim accounts of what their converts said, to print in the annual reports, that pious hearts be touched by their broken English (Fyfe 1962:130). (These reports were printed in the Religious Intelligencer and the Boston Recorder as pointed out to us on the Creolist by Sarah Roberts.)

In William Fox’s 1851 history of the Wesleyan Missions, he notes the advantages and necessity for using an English patois with the Liberated Africans:
[A missionary in the East Indies,] finds himself [ . . . ] speechless until he has acquired a knowledge of the language. [ . . . But] the missionary in Western Africa is not so circumstanced [ . . . ] for he may at once commence his ministry among them; and though this murdering of the queen’s English cannot be commended in the pulpit, yet in common conversation on matters of business, as also in some of the society meetings, it may be tolerated, at least for some time, for the sake of benefiting those newly-imported liberated Africans, whose knowledge of the English language is necessarily so imperfect, that this Negro patois is the only means of holding communication with them (Fox 1851:294296).

A third example of this association between the Liberated Africans and a non-standard variety of English, is the 1860 example of the letter written by newly converted Methodists at Murraytown to the Rev. R. Fletcher which is the longest example of text written during the 19th century that both resembles modern Sierra Leone Krio and was written by speakers of the variety.

These examples are consistent with the fact that the community that eventually became known as ‘Creoles’ was by far made up of Liberated Africans and their descendants. It is also consistent with Charles Jones’ analysis of letters written by Nova Scotian Setters between 1791 and 1793(?). Charles Jones (1991) notes that in Governor Clarkson’s journal, he represents the speech of most Nova Scotians when quoting them verbatim with language close to his own, but records the speech of Africans in Sierra Leone using broken English. There is one exception, Clarkson in his diary dated November 22, 1791 records a lengthy conversation with a man speaking a creole-like variety who says that he intends to travel to Sierra Leone as a Nova Scotian and that he is from the coast of Africa (Charles Jones: 1991:81). This man may very well

have contributed to the features available for inclusion in Sierra Leone Krio, but it seems that his variety was not representative of Nova Scotians generally.

Regarding the entire collection of letters Jones (1991:80) says, the usage is “not significantly unlike” speech forms we would “expect from contemporary lower class white American English speakers and [which] shows no unambiguous evidence” of possessing creole features. It is difficult to determine from these letters how the Nova Scotians spoke, but Jones’ evaluation of this small collection of letters is also entirely consistent with the results of feature analysis done by Poplock and Tagliamonte (1991;1994)(1991 ; 1994) who hired and trained residents of the African Nova Scotian communities to conduct interviews. (There is also the evaluation of this same set of letters done by Michael Montgomery which is coming out soon in a volume edited by John Lipski though Montgomery is talking about the beginnings of AAVE rather than Krio.)

In addition, Western schooling began in Nova Scotia and continued in the Colony almost as soon as they arrived. Many of the Nova Scotians and Maroons who became clerks and teachers in Sierra Leone were educated in London at Clapham, the home of the Church Missionary Society (Fyfe 1962: 88 and 100). In 1808 Governor Thompson " suggested young men be sent to England for military and naval instruction, and that John Thorpe and George Caulker, both educated at Clapham, return to study at his own college, Queens, Cambridge" (Fyfe 1962: 108). This suggests that there were some Nova Scotians and Maroons who spoke a variety that was close to what appeared in the letters examined by Jones.

During these same periods when some kind of Colony variety is linked with the Liberated Africans, there is evidence that the Settler and Liberated African populations had limited contact.

4. Settler and Recaptive Segregation

4.1. Numbers of Liberated Africans

After the first groups of Africans were liberated in the colony in 1808-9, The Liberated Africans lived in mud huts very near the Settlers or with the Settlers. An early group of Ashanti were welcomed by the Maroons and taken into their homes. Many others were apprenticed to Europeans, Nova Scotians and Maroons (Fyfe 1962: 107).

The relationship between the Settlers and the Liberated Africans during the first year and a half is analogous to the relationship between Creole slaves and slaves from Africa on West Indian plantations when during the height of the plantation economy ‘seasoning’ was practiced. If this situation had persisted, the varieties of English spoken by the Settlers would have had a central role in the Colony at the time. Not only were they all physically located in the same area, but the Settlers would have undoubtedly been linguistic models. However, in the case of Sierra Leone, there were no plantations and as soon as the numbers of Liberated Africans exceeded the number of Settler households and businesses that were able to accommodate them, space had to be found elsewhere.

In 1808 and 9, according to the colony’s Liberated African Register, 358 people were released, in 1810, there were 464 . Fyfe reports that in 1811, they already outnumbered the Settlers (Fyfe 1962: 115): “by the end of 1811, 1,991 slaves had been captured” and the Settler community only numbered 1,789 in the 1811 census. By 1815, 7,871 Africans had been emancipated according to the official records; by 1825 , the total number was 20,570 ; and in 1835,50,7611835,50,761. I am not suggesting that the demographics alone constitute a barrier to the transmission of a variety spoken by the Nova Scotians or Maroons to the Liberated Africans.

I want to suggest that in this situation, the huge disproportion between the two populations is what motivated colonial policy which in a classic divide-and-conquer approach

reinforced the differentness between these two groups and in turn lead to a kind of segregation that would have presented a barrier to the transmission of the Settler varieties to a substantial number of the Liberated Africans.

4.2. Colonial Policies

As the numbers of arrivals increased, the colonial government sought to control the relationship between the Settlers and Liberated Africans. The Colony had a militia primarily made up of Maroons. When Charles Maxwell became governor in 1811, he passed a provocative new Militia Ordinance (Fyfe 1962:118) which required militiamen to take an oath of allegiance. Through a complicated turn of circumstances, the militiamen were lead to believe - probably rightly-that taking the oath would degrade their status from free citizens to soldiers who could be shipped from their homes. A large number of Settlers refused to swear the oath; they were outlawed, left their property behind, and went with their families to the Bullom Shore. Gov Maxwell used a new Liberated African militia to enforce the ordinance of the oath.

Fyfe (1962:118) compares the government’s use of the Maroons to suppress the Nova Scotian rebellion with the government’s use of recaptives to suppress the settlers.

In 1800 the Maroons counterbalanced Nova Scotian disaffection: in 1811 Maxwell saw in the ever-growing body of recaptives as an answer to the Maroons…[the Maroons] returned [to Freetown] to a new status, no longer the courageous warriors of the Jamaican mountains, but civilians kept in order by recaptive troops. The suppression of the 1800 revolt set the Nova Scotians against the Maroons: enlisting recaptives set both against the liberated outsiders given arms against them (Fyfe 1962: 118-119).

In addition to this political divide, the government supported the CMS missionaries to the Liberated African populations with most of the village administrators being from the CMS mission. They supported the arrangement of separate and not-all-together equal educational facilities, and separate residential areas.

4.2.1. Separate Churches and Schools

In the 19th century, the Anglican church of the CMS missionaries was the only church of the Liberated African villages. The Church Missionary Society did not leave their Susu mission at the Rio Pongas to become missionaries among the recaptives until 1816, but in many cases CMS agents were given official colonial charge of the Recaptive villages which included administration of their educational and religious welfare. Even for those Recaptives who lived in Freetown with the Settlers, churches and schools were also separate. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) did not have many parishioners among the already Christian Settlers. The Settlers arrived in the colony with their own church affiliations which they continued. Among the Nova Scotians was the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, an independent church which had seceded from the Church of England, Moses Wilkinson’s Methodist Church which was unconnected to the Wesleyan Conference in England, and David Georges’ Baptist Church.

Even when CMS and Wesleyans dealt with both Settler and Recaptive populations as part of their agreement to administrate schools, each group had its own set of schools. Of the 1830s, Dr. Clarke notes that “The Creoles are taught in schools separate from the Liberated African children. This distinction inspires the Creole children with ideas of their own superiority” (Clarke 1843: 33). Even earlier, Porter (1960:180) indicates there was educational segregation: In 1817 there were Colony schools in addition to the missionary schools that were exclusively for Settler children: Daily Colonial School for Boys, Daily Colonial School for Girls, Evening Colonial School for Boys, and Sunday Colonial School for Girls.

In 1840, many Liberated African villages were still without schools, and of the schools in Freetown, Miller, the Inspector of Schools reports there were

Forty-two schools, of which 14 were schools of Government, 6 of them being instituted for and receiving exclusively Liberated African children, while 8 are formed as exclusively of children born in the Colony. The remaining 28 are conducted by the

Church Mission, or by the Mission of Wesleyan Methodists, and receive Colony born children only (Porter 1960:180).

Although as time passed, Liberated Africans would have had children in the Colony who would then have been eligible for one of these schools, those children would need to have been in Freetown’s center living amongst the Maroons and Nova Scotians, i.e. Settlers.

4.2.2. Geographic Separation

This segregation was also mapped in geographic terms. In the government’s efforts to prevent Settlers from influencing new comers and gaining power from the increased number of Colony residents, the Colony’s boundaries were extended in 1808 to include the entire Sierra Leone peninsula (now called the Western Area) (Fyfe 19622:96) and new villages were founded to accommodate the recaptives.

The village of Leicester was founded in 1809 because as Fyfe (1962: 107) says,
[Governor Thompson] hated the Nova Scotians as he hated the Company, and suggested they be deported. The Maroons he liked better, as less infected by democratic insolence. Best he liked the liberated slaves, whom he hoped to turn into ‘a free and hardy peasantry’. . .[He] sent one group from the Bambara and Jolof countries to farm on the slopes of Leicester Mountain…beyond reach of Nova Scotian contamination (Fyfe 1962: 107).

About 25 villages were created by 1830 . See the last page of the handout for the location of the major villages and their dates of establishment. The peninsula is approximately 20 miles from Aberdeen to Kent and twelve miles wide (Clarke 1843:2). In 1843, the Colony’s surgeon Dr. Clarke estimated that Freetown was 3 miles in circumference. A line of mountains crosses the peninsula, and Leicester, Gloucester, Regent, Charlotte, and Bathurst are located on the mountain slopes. Three villages are also located on the Banana Islands that are approximately three miles from the shore of Kent.

5. Conclusion

Any one of these details alone may not have been a barrier to the adoption of a Settler variety in the Sierra Leone Colony and ultimately the basis for modern Sierra Leonean Krio. However, the extent to which Settlers were out numbered by Recaptives and the fact that their institutionalized segregation resulted in both physical and social distance would seem to have conspired against the adoption of a Settler variety as the vernacular of the Sierra Leone Colony. Additionally that the nature of the social distance between Settlers and Recaptives peculiar to the Sierra Leone Colony had been overtly remarked upon by colonials of the era in overtly linguistic terms represents substantial evidence that the demographic, political, and geographic distance that existed did, in fact, result in differences in the English spoken by the two communities and makes the prospect of Settler origins extremely unlikely.

References

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Meeting of The Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics
January 8-January 11, 1998

The place of Guinea Coast Creole English

and Sierra Leone Krio in the Afro-genesis debate

Chris Corcoran

1. Introduction

An initial exploration of the extremely complex social and linguistic situation of the Sierra Leone peninsula during the 19th century indicates that the settlers-the Maroons and Nova Scotians - were not numerically, politically, geographically, or socially situated to have been central in the creation of modern Sierra Leone Krio.

2. The Creole Ethnic Group

2.1 Black Poor

The first group known as the Black Poor were the founders of the colony. In 1787, 377 freed slaves, soldiers who had fought for Britain in the American Revolutionary war, and poor whites all left London to establish a settlement in Sierra Leone at a cite just east of modern Freetown. 34 people died during the voyage and having arrived during the rainy season without proper shelter another 86 died before September of the same year (Peterson 1969:26). In 1789 the settlement was burned to the ground by the Temne ruler, King Jimmy, in retaliation for the burning of a Temne town by an English ship captain. One settler was killed and the others took refuge with other nearby leaders. In 1791 Alexander Falconbridge, an agent of the Sierra Leone Company started in 1790, managed to gather 64 heads of households back into the settlement near the location of the newly established trading company.

2.2. Nova Scotians

The second group of settlers were the Nova Scotians. Like many of the ‘Black Poor’, the Nova Scotians were loyalists in the American revolutionary war. Rather than making their way to London, they were settled in Nova Scotia where they found their arrangements and climate unsatisfactory. After lobbying London to better their situation (Peterson 1969:28), half-or nearly 2000 - of these settlers agreed to go to Sierra Leone. In 1792, 1,200 sailed for the colony though only 1,030 arrived. Clarkson, who traveled with the Nova Scotians, became the new governor and invited the remaining sixty or so original settlers to join their community. They agreed and subsequent records make no clear or consistent distinction between the two groups (Porter 1960:73). The community survived though under the unwelcome governance of the Sierra Leone Company. The Nova Scotians had originally negotiated to form a self-governing community and were in the midst of rebellion in 1800, when the Jamaican Maroons arrived.
2.3. Jamaican Maroons (called Settlers, in contrast to Liberated Africans)

This third group, called the Maroons, signed a treaty with the Jamaican government forces in 1795. The governor of Jamaica “took advantage of a technical breach of the treaty by the Maroons and had the entire population of Trelawny Town […] transported to Nova Scotia” (Dalby 1971:40). After arriving in Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotian government and the Jamaican government were unable to agree on which government was responsible for the support of the Maroons, and in 1800 they were all sent to Freetown (Black 1958:143). 550 Maroons accompanied by 45 soldiers of His Majesty’s 24th Regiment arrived later that same year (Peterson 1969:34). The day they arrived, the Sierra Leone Company used them to put down the Nova Scotian rebellion creating a rift between these communities that lasted well into the mid 19th century (Rankin 1836) [check p.99]. Only a decade later, the colonial government used the same tactic against the Maroons with a militia of newly liberated Africans.

2.4. Liberated Africans

The fourth group and the numerically most significant is the liberated Africans, often called recaptives. In 1808 when the first liberated Africans arrived, there were less than 2000 Black Poor, Nova Scotians, and Maroons total. After 1808, when the slave trade had been abolished by Britain, the Royal Navy captured slave ships in the Atlantic and forced them to land. The “Liberated African Register” kept by Colony Courts on emancipation lists a total of 84,420 persons liberated between 1808-1848. After 1848 the Liberated African Register numbers were no longer assigned, but an additional 9,414 were recorded between the years of 1848 and 1861 for a total of 93,834 . Asiegbu notes that the “records [were] badly kept. Actual figures very probably far exceed[ed] the entries in the records.” (Asiegbu 1969:191).

When Koelle interviewed recaptives for his Polyglotta Africana first published in 1854, he recorded nearly one hundred and sixty different languages being spoken in the Colony (Curtin 1975:292). The slaves had been sold at ports as far south as Angola, but many of them were from the Bight of Biafra; thus accounting for the large number of Yoruba words in modern SLK.

Table 1: Constituent Communities of the Creole Group: 1787-1864.

3. Liberated Africans as speakers of SLK

-1820s: CMS missionaries asked to send verbatim accounts because broken English was a marker of religious sincerity
-1851: William Fox’s History of the Wesleyan Missions notes the advantages and necessity for using an English patois with Liberated Africans
-1860: Letter written by newly converted Methodists at Murraytown to the Rev. R. Fletcher which is the longest example of text written during the 19th century that both resembles modern Sierra Leone Krio and was written by speakers of the variety.

4. Settler and Recaptive Segregation

4.1. Numbers of Liberated Africans

Liberated African Register

*grouped this way because no dates were entered in the register, though the register numbers fall between those of 1810 and 1814.
(Liberated African Register reproduced in Asiegbu 1969)

4.2. Colonial Policies

-1811: Liberated Africans used to put down Settler protest
-With increasing numbers, Government does not want them to assert desires for self-government

4.2.1. Separate Churches and Schools

Church
Nova Scotians
-Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, an independent church which had seconded from the Church of England.
-Moses Wilkinson’s Methodist Church which was unconnected to the Wesleyan Conference in England
-David Georges’ Baptist Church
Maroons
-Maroon Methodist congregation
Church Missionary Society (CMS)—name adopted in 1813
Areas outside of Sierra Leone Peninsula
1795-1815 short term missions among the Fula, Bullom, and Sherbro
(London Missionary Society);
1806 Rio Pongas Mission
Sierra Leone Peninsula
1816 Mission among the Liberated Africans

Schools

1840: Many Liberated African villages without schools
Freetown: 42 totual
36 receive Settlers and Colony born children
6 receive exclusively Liberated African children

4.2.2. Geographic Separation

see maps

5. Conclusion:

Any one of these details alone may not have been a barrier to the adoption of a Settler variety in the Sierra Leone Colony and ultimately the basis for modern Sierra Leonean Krio. However, the extent to which Settlers were out numbered by Recaptives and the fact that their institutionalized segregation resulted in both physical and social distance would seem to have conspired against the adoption of a Settler variety as the vernacular of the Sierra Leone Colony. Additionally that the nature of the social distance between Settlers and Recaptives peculiar to the Sierra Leone Colony had been overtly remarked upon by colonials of the era in overtly linguistic terms represents substantial evidence that the demographic, political, and geographic distance that existed did, in fact, result in differences in the English spoken by the two communities and makes the prospect of Settler origins extremely unlikely.

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