Commerce, Christianity and the Origins of the ‘Creoles’ of Fernando Po
During the early and middle years of the nineteenth century a Creole elite emerged on the island of Fernando Po. The origins of this lay in the fact that for the thirty years after 1827 the island was at the centre of European political and economic interests in the Gulf of Guinea. The short-lived British occupation of Fernando Po, 1827–34, established the town of Clarence and brought to the island a number of settlers, and in particular ‘liberated Africans’, freed from slave ships captured by the Royal Navy. The situation they faced in Clarence and the treatment they received, not least once the British government withdrew and a succession of British traders attempted to run the town, led to the emergence of a homogeneous society out of the various ethnic groups they comprised. This society was to be transformed by the development of a palm oil trade on the island, particularly during the 1840s. This led to the emergence of a group of middlemen between the Bubi producers of the interior and the European traders who collected oil from Clarence, and concurrently, to the stratification of Clarence society into a trading elite and a group of labourers and servants. This trading elite was attracted to the work of the Baptist Mission in Clarence after 1841, and in particular saw the value of the Mission in giving itself a distinct identity. Over time this elite and the Baptists drew apart, but this was not before the interrelation of social stratification with the work of the Mission had produced a class of Creoles whose descendants – the Fernandinos – still survive as a distinct group in Equatorial Guinea today.
Misunderstandings Arising from the Use of the Term ‘Creole’ in the Literature on Sierra Leone
Opening Paragraph Throughout the growing body of literature on Sierra Leone a considerable degree of error has persisted over the use of the term ‘creole’ and the resultant confusion has led to repeated failure to describe accurately the society of the colony. This is not merely an academic problem. The very existence of such literature feeds back into the ‘collective representations’ of the society and has provided a false historical basis for the descriptions of the contemporary culture of the group who are referred to as creoles. Résumé L'USAGE ÉQUIVOQUE DU TERME ‘CRÉOLE’ DANS LES ÉCRITS PUBLIÉS SUR LE SIERRA LEONE Les diverses études relatives au Sierre Leone ont laissé entendre que les descendants des Africains Libérés de cette colonie, étaient, depuis le milieu du 19ème siècle unifiés et convertis au Christianisme, et cela en dépit d' un grand nombre de faits qui portent témoignage des divergences entre eux que l'on note sur le plan de la langue, de la culture et de la religion et qui se prolongent bien au delà du debut du 20ème siècle. Les écrits qui portent sur le Sierre Leone ont fait appel à des études effectuées au cours des années 1950, époque à laquelle la société dite ‘créole’ s'efforçait de maintenir le pouvoir politique qui était le sien. Cet effort avait pour thème majeur l'affirmation d'une base historique principe sur lequel reposait la supériorité culturelle. Il semblerait que les chercheurs de cette époque furent inconsciemment influencés par les idées dominantes de l'élite Créole. Quelqu'en soit la cause, leur analyse avait fait abstraction de certaines sources importantes d'information si bien que les interprétations de l'histoire du Sierre Leone au 19ème siècle se sont limitées à un cadre très étroit. La même erreur a eu tendance à se répéter dans des études plus récentes parce qu'on n'avait pas remis en question les conclusions des travaux précédents ou parce que l'on n'avait pas vérifié l'interprétation qui avait été faite originellement des sources principales. Un nouvel examen des données historiques révèle l'existence d'une société complexe, extrêmement diversifiée, au sein de laquelle l'évolution des institutions politiques et socio-économiques du Sierre Leone était soumise à l'interaction et à l'influence des chefs de nombreuses communautés ethniques et religieuses. La nécessité d'une recherche interdisciplinaire est évidente si l'on veut aboutir à une vue plus précise de la société du Sierra Leone au cours des 19ème et 20ème siècle.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.