Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa

封面
Harvard University Press, 1999 - 291 頁

In 1792, nearly 1,200 freed American slaves crossed the Atlantic and established themselves in Freetown, West Africa, a community dedicated to anti-slavery and opposed to the African chieftain hierarchy that was tied to slavery. Thus began an unprecedented movement with critical long-term effects on the evolution of social, religious, and political institutions in modern Africa.

Lamin Sanneh's engrossing book narrates the story of freed slaves who led efforts to abolish the slave trade by attacking its base operation: the capture and sale of people by African chiefs. Sanneh's protagonists set out to establish in West Africa colonies founded on equal rights and opportunity for personal enterprise, communities that would be havens for ex-slaves and an example to the rest of Africa. Among the most striking of these leaders is the Nigerian Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a recaptured slave who joined a colony in Sierra Leone and subsequently established satellite communities in Nigeria. The ex-slave repatriates brought with them an evangelical Christianity that encouraged individual spirituality--a revolutionary vision in a land where European missionaries had long assumed they could Christianize the whole society by converting chiefs and rulers.

Tracking this potent African American anti-slavery and democratizing movement through the nineteenth century, Lamin Sanneh draws a clear picture of the religious grounding of its conflict with the traditional chieftain authorities. His study recounts a crucial development in the history of West Africa.

搜尋書籍內容

內容

Introduction
1
The American Slave Corridor and the New African
22
A Plantation of Religion and the Enterprise Culture
66
著作權所有

6 個其他區段未顯示

其他版本 - 查看全部

常見字詞

關於作者 (1999)

Lamin Sanneh was born in a tiny river town in Gambia on May 24, 1942. He was born a Muslim but converted to Christianity as a teenager and became a practicing Roman Catholic. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Union College, a master's degree from the University of Birmingham, and a doctorate in Islamic history from the University of London. He held teaching posts at the University of Ghana, the University of Aberdeen, and Harvard Divinity School. He taught at Yale Divinity School and Yale University for 30 years. He was a naturalized United States citizen. He became a scholar of Christianity and Islam. He was the author or editor of more than 20 books including Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa, Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African, and Beyond Jihad: The Pacifist Tradition in West African Islam. He died from complications of a stroke on January 6, 2019 at the age of 76.

書目資訊