The peoples of The Gambia consist of the Aku, the Fula, the Jola, the Serahule,the Serer, the Mandinka, the Wollof and a recently- settled Ethiopian Managing the Daily Observer. Over the next few weeks the Daily Observer will give an historical introduction to these peoples of The Gambia. In alphabetical order we start this week with the Akus.

One of the results of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was the emergence of a district ethnic group along the West Coast of Africa generally referred to as the Creoles, with a Krio language spoken throughout the region. The Creole is said to derive from the Yoruba word ‘akiriyo’, meaning “these who go about paying visits after a church service.” In The Gambia, the Creoles are known as the Akus.

The origin of the Akus dates back to the late eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth when their ancestors, a number of groups of freed slaves, were landed in Sierra Leone.

The first batch of settlers to be landed were freed black slaves who had been living in England and sent to settle in Sierra Leone in 1787. The original settlement, known as the Province of Freedom, was the beginning of Freetown, the present capital of Sierra Leone.

Some’ of the settlers were discharged soldiers and sailors who had served with the British forces during the American War of Independence. Others were former slaves who had escaped from their American masters. Many of these people congregated in London unemployed and destitute.

It was for this reason that the British Government agreed to suggestions that they be sent to found a new home of their own in Africa, and so it was that this first batch of settlers landed in the “Province of Freedom” in May 1787.

In 1792, new settlers were to join the settlement from Nova Scotia. These were former slaves who had fought for the British in the American War of Independence and settled in Nova Scotia by the British. By 1800, a group of Maroons also joined the settlement from Nova Scotia. The Maroons were former slaves who had revolted against their owners in Jamaica and set up their own state. They were defeated by the British who sent them first to Nova Scotia and then to the Province of Freedom.

The number of these settlers were to be increased considerably by another group known as the “recaptives”. These were men and women rescued from ships that were carrying them to be sold as slaves despite the formal abolition of the slave trade and slavery.

Ship loads of these recaptives were constantly landed in the area and by 1811 they outnumbered the Nova Scotian and Maroon settlers combined. These recaptives originally came from countries throughout West Africa from The Gambia to the Congo. Few of them came from East Africa.

By the middle of the nineteenth century this mixture of settlers and recaptives had blended into a distinct cultural group. Without a common language of communication they would invent the Krio language which, based on European languages, was developed under the influence of the recaptives own various African languages including that of their neighbours, the Temne and Mende.

Cut off geographically and spiritually from their community based ancestral religions, and unable to perform their own rites, they embraced the Christian preachers in their midst. They took new names and began to wear European styled clothes.

Realising the practical advantages education and technical skills could offer them, they were ready to learn and see to it that their children also learned the white man’s culture and civilisation. Through hard work as tailors, masons and blacksmiths, they would earn enough capital to give their children the education which would prepare them for important positions in trade and commerce.

Sir Charles MacCarthy, who was Governor in Sierra Leone from 1814 to 1824, saw the settler community in Sierra Leone as people who could advance the prevalent European view that what Africa needed was Christianity and European civilisation. He proposed that the Colonial Government and Christian missions should cooperate to transform them into a Christian population who would spread Christianity and European ways throughout West Africa.

As a result of missionary activities Western education flourished in Sierra Leone. In deed mission schools were started since the founding of the settler colony in 1787. By the 1840s there was a large network of primary schools, and grammar schools for boys and girls were established. From 1876, Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, was empowered to award degrees of the University of Durham. As a result of this investment in education, a distinguished body of Aku professional men emerged.

Among this body of distinguished professionals were men like John Thorpe who became the first West African to qualify as a lawyer in 1850; Samuel Ajayi Crowther who became the first West African Christian Bishop in 1864, and Africans Horton who qualified at Kings College, London, as West Africa’s first medical doctor in 1859.

Meanwhile the small Sierra Leone colony offered only limited scope for this ambitious and enterprising population whilst all along the coast of Africa their skills were in demand. They found jobs as clerks and agents for European exporters or set up as exporters on their own.

As missions spread they found jobs as pastors ad teachers. Their skilled tradesmen built and repaired houses in the growth coastal towns of West Africa. By the middle of the nineteenth century Akus were scattered in communities from The Gambia to Fernando Po, forming distinct societies widely apart from the indigenous inhabitants they preferred to Call “natives”. In deed for the whole of their history the Akus had though of British West Africa as one unit.

In the case of The Gambia, the British had, in the 1830s, sponsored a large scale immigration of the sick recaptives and criminals not wanted in Sierra Leone society to Bathurst (Banjul) and to Janjangburey in the Central River Division.

As in Sierra Leone, some outstanding Akus emerged in The Gambia. One such leading Gambian Aku was Thomas Joiner. Joiner was a Mandinka griot born about 1788 who was captured and sold into slavery in the Americas. He was to work hard and bough his freedom. He worked as a steward on a boat sailing to West Africa. On reaching The Gambia, he left the boat and started a new life as a trader and soon became a prosperous merchant and ship owner.

Another prominent Aku was Thomas Rafell, an Igbo recaptive, who settled in The Gambia in the early 1820s as a discharged soldier. Having been wounded in the Anglo-Niumi Wars he was granted a pension of four dollars a month by the British.

He also became a successful businessman. He used his wealth and influence to establish, in 1824, an Igbo Social Society which became a very active watchgod on British colonial administration in The Gambia, especially in matters affecting the welfare of the people.

Perhaps the most outstanding Gambian Aku has been Edward Francis Small who, as well shall see, was the doyen of modern Gambian politics. Indeed the Aku community in The Gambia, as their counterparters in other West African colonies, became the first vigorous advocates of a modern nationalism whose concepts were to spread not only in West African but throughout the whole African continent.

However, with Independence and political power being assumed by the indigenous peoples of the societies in which they settled, and forming small minorities in such societies, the Akus became a submerged people.

The History of The Gambia by Dawda Faal is available at Timbooktoo.

Timbooktoo: 4494345