Uncovering testimonies of slavery and the slave trade in missionary sources: the SHADD biographies project and the CMS and MMS archives for Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and the Gambia

Abstract

This article highlights narratives of enslavement held in the Church Missionary Society and Methodist Missionary Society archives for the Sierra Leone, Yoruba, and Gambia missions in the nineteenth century. Its particular focus is on testimonies of Africans who experienced enslavement in Africa and were subsequently sold to Europeans on the coast and embarked on trans-Atlantic slave vessels. These documents form part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded SHADD: Studies in the History of the African Diaspora – Documents project, a digital publication of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University (http://tubman.info.yorku.ca/publications/shadd/). This article catalogues both the narratives uncovered to date – among the longest unpublished accounts of enslavement in Africa – and research strategies for uncovering more. It concludes with an appendix indexing digitized and transcribed documents available on the SHADD database as research and teaching resources.