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.
Prelude to Scandal: Liberia and Fernando Po, 1880–1930
In 1923–30 the League of Nations investigated the shipment of migrant labour between Liberia and the Spanish island colony of Fernando Po. Although the League concentrated its attention on Liberia, a closer examination reveals labour abuse as very much the product of conditions on Fernando Po itself. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, black planters on the island shifted from palm oil trading to cocoa cultivation. Dependence on migrant labour and increasing competition from Europeans resulted in economic crisis in the first years of the twentieth century, with detention of labour and the nonpayment of contracts as the outcome. The eventual investigation of the trade was the product of a desire to conserve Liberian labour for use on the African mainland, rather than an attempt to relieve its abuse.
West African Studies
FOR the last three years Miss Kingsley has been known to the scientific world as a careful collector of facts relating to West Africa, while to the unscientific public interested in works of exploration and travel she is known as a writer with an original and very entertaining manner. Her book entitled “Travels in West Africa,” which was published in 1896, was the result of two journeys to West Africa, where she had devoted herself to the study of fetish and fresh-water fishes. In the preface to her present volume she tells us that her previous work, which she rather unjustly refers to as “a word-swamp of a book,” was of the nature of an interim report. She there confined herself to facts, and eliminated as far as possible any inferences that might be drawn from them, distrusting at the time her own ability to make theories, and intending that ethnologists should draw from her collections of material such facts as they might care to select. The use that has been made of the volume since its appearance has certainly justified Miss Kingsley's method of publication. But there was obviously room for another work on the same subject from her pen. No one was better qualified than herself to form opinions with regard to the beliefs and practices she studied, and we are glad to find that in the present work she has formulated the conclusions at which she has arrived. We welcome the book as a valuable supplement to the first volume of her travels.West African Studies.By Mary H. Kingsley. With illustrations and maps. Pp. xxiv + 639. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899.)