Aspects of the Prehistory of Freetown and Creoledom

The immediate circumstances which led up to the founding of Freetown in the 1790s were highly contingent, even freakish. Christopher Fyfe has stressed the role of the scientist and dubious adventurer, Henry Smeathman, in publicizing the misguided view that the Sierra Leone district provided an ideal ecological environment for settlement. More recently, Stephen Braidwood has shown that the 1787 choice of Sierra Leone as a suitable locality for settlement by the Black Poor of London, the earliest settlers, came about as a result of acceptance of Smeathman's view, not by the white philanthropists and politicians who masterminded the exodus of the Black Poor, but by the London Blacks themselves—who knew nothing of Sierra Leone from personal experience but were convinced by Smeathman's rhetoric. That the Blacks were allowed to insist on their choice might itself be regarded as freakish. Yet, seen in a wider historical context, the foundation of Freetown, and the subsequent development of the community eventually termed “Creole,” appear less accidental and extraordinary. Why, for instance, did Smeathman chose Sierra Leone for his butterfly-collecting on his only visit to Africa? Presumably it was because he was aware that he could obtain the support and protection of the trading settlements in the Banana Islands, on Sherbro Island, and along the coast between—settlements which had been established in earlier decades by the English-speaking families of the Caulkers, Parkers, and Tuckers, families whose very names (even if corrupted from African names) point back to the later seventeenth century and the activities on this coast of the Royal African Company. And perhaps Smeathman had read John Newton's published account of his early career as a resident trader on the same coast which, although full of complaints about his treatment by his African employers, at least showed that a white could survive there.