Rescued from the Slave Trade? African Girls, Rape and the Limits of Caribbean Freedom in the Age of Abolition

Slavery scholars know well the accusations that Africans rescued from slave ships during British slave trade suppression often faced conditions close to enslavement not only in the thriving slave societies of Cuba and Brazil but also when settled as agricultural or manual laborers in Sierra Leone or in the British Caribbean itself.  In the first two decades of British slave trade suppression several thousand such Africans ended up settled in a handful of British Caribbean islands after the adjudication of slave trade cases in local vice admiralty courts.  During the late 1820s, as a part of a political culture of inquiry around slavery and possible emancipation, the British government conducted a multi-year investigation into the lives of these first so-called liberated Africans.  The inquiry process produced detailed, although very much mediated, data about the work and personal lives of these particular free Africans.  This paper specifically tracks the life stories of children of mixed race who appear in the inquiry records; children born to young African mothers—often themselves teenagers--rescued from illegal slave ships and sent as domestic servants into households in Antigua, the Bahamas and Tortola.  Though the numbers of such children are small, and the details of their lives fragmentary, their presence provides a telling window on the limits of freedom and the intimate exploitation of black bodies, even in the midst of a putative anti-slavery project.