Becoming African: Identity formation among liberated slaves in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone1

Abstract

In an effort to move the acrimonious debates on African identity formation in the Americas in a more fruitful direction this paper places these debated in a larger historiological context and presents a case study of ethnogenesis among Africans who were liberated from the Atlantic slave trade and resettled in the West African colony of Sierra Leone. For these culturally diverse Africans the dynamic processes of creolization and Africanization were generally complementary aspects of personal and communal struggles for survival. Developments among liberated Africans in Sierra Leone offer many richly documented and complex outcomes that might usefully be considered when trying to reconstruct the parallel processes taking place among enslaved Africans in the Americas.