Attitudes towards slavery and the spread of Islam in Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth century English travelogues: a critical discourse analysis

Abstract

One of the issues the world has suffered from over centuries is slavery. Slavery was found in many different forms and all around the world from East to West. With respect to slavery in Africa, there is much there to discuss. In the early fifteenth century, the Portuguese travelers started “the Moorish stronghold” in Centa, in North Africa (Ferguson, 1992: 11). This, as a result, made it easy for Europeans to enter Black Africa. Portuguese traders were interested in gold rather than slaves (Lovejoy, 2000: 36). ). For the second half of the fifteenth century, the number of the Portuguese slave trade mounted to 80,000 along the Mauritanian, Senegambian, and Upper Guinea coast due to buying gold in the region of Senegambian (ibid: 37). With the expansion of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the number of slaves had increased. This slavery expansion had its effect when the British system colonized Sierra Leone in West Africa (Keefer, 2021: 39). The current study attempts to analyse the ideologies of English writers on African slaves in the late eighteenth century: Thomas Winterbottom’s first volume of Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone (1803) and John Matthews’s A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone, on the Coast of Africa (1788).