Preserving records of social and political life in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone (EAP1366)

Aims and objectives

Digitisation in the Sierra Leone Public Archives will focus on manuscript and printed sources that offer an insight into the lives of people of African origin and descent in and around the colony. These endangered sources include information which makes it possible to trace the identities, social status and residential location of Liberated Africans, as well as some of the earliest settlers in the colony. Political and social relationships with African leaders in the hinterland of the Crown colony in the nineteenth century are documented in a series of Arabic Letter Books and Native Letter Books.

Professor Schwarz has written a blog for the University of Worcester website explaining how her research involves tracing the names and identities of men, women and children forcibly shipped from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century.