1831 Louis Asa-Asa’s story, or ‘The Negro Boy’s Narrative’ as the title had it, was published on this day as a short addendum to the far more substantial History of Mary Prince, but it added the dimension, normally lacking in slave narratives, of the subject’s treatment within his native country before ever boarding ship for Europe, the West Indies or the United States.
Prince’s story, the first by a woman slave to be published in England, had traced her life from her birth to slave parents in Bermuda, through her sale to four masters, to her arrival and life in England as a servant. There, after a series of disagreements with her master and mistress, she was thrown out of the house. Through her connection with the Moravian Church she met the abolitionist Thomas Pringle, who arranged for her story to be taken down by Susanna Strickland, later to become one of Canada’s literary founding mothers (see 21 August).
Shortly before the History of Mary Prince went to press, Pringle was given Asa-Asa’s narrative, as dictated to a friend and fellow abolitionist, George Stephen. Asa-Asa had fetched up in England when a French slaver on which he was imprisoned lost its bearings in a storm and sought refuge in St Ives, Cornwall. His story was transcribed, according to Pringle, in ‘as nearly as possible the narrator’s words, with only such correction as was necessary to connect the story, and render it grammatical’.
Asa-Asa’s narrative tells how his village in Sierra Leone was terrorised repeatedly by a tribe he calls the Adinyés, who would burn buildings, killing some people and marching others off to be sold as slaves: ‘They took away brothers and sisters and husbands and wives.’ When they caught Louis and about twenty others, they marched them to the sea, forcing them to ‘carry chickens and meat for [their] food’. One man, who was too ill to carry his rations, they ‘ran … through the body with a sword’.
When they got to the sea – another departure from the typical slave’s story – they weren’t put on an ocean-going slaver right away, but taken around in a small boat to be sold and re-sold repeatedly. Louis himself ‘was sold six times over, sometimes for money, sometimes for cloth, and sometimes for a gun’. It was half a year before he saw ‘the white people’ who would chain him side by side with others aboard the slave ship, to endure the foul conditions of the middle passage.
But it was a French slave ship that carried Louis Asa-Asa away. The British had abolished the slave trade in 1807, after two decades of campaigning by William Wilberforce, Charles Fox, Lord Grenville and others. And it was Africans who had done the initial buying and selling of human beings.