Africa's Stolen Childhood: The Illegal Enslavement of African Children in the 19th and 20th Centuries

FAIN: FA-55892-11

Benjamin Nicholas Lawrance
Regents of the University of California, Davis (Davis, CA 95618-6153)

My book examines African child slaves in the 19th and 20th centuries as slavery became illegal in the Atlantic and Africa. As slavery becomes unacceptable, the proportion of children, particularly girls, increases. 19th-c slave traders and 20th-c labor recruiters turn to children as legal coercion is stymied. The life histories of five children associated with the trial of La Amistad are segues to five thematic chapters exploring topics in illegal enslavement. They journey from West Africa to Cuba, the US, and back and crafted child-specific strategies to survive. Childhood identity markers and child slave subjectivities were shaped by children’s encounters with law. Their stories contextualize the circumstances in which children were pawned, kidnapped, enslaved, re-enslaved, rescued, and freed. Based on archival and oral data from the US, Africa, and Europe, I demonstrate that children’s encounters with enslavement and emancipation were qualitatively different from adults’.

Media Coverage

NEH award to RIT (Media Coverage)
Author(s): n/a
Publication: Internal RIT newspaper
Date: 2/11/2011
Abstract: outline of two NEH grants awarded to RIT
URL: http://print.rit.edu/news/show/498

National Endowment for the Humanities Funds RIT Preservation/Research Projects (Media Coverage)
Author(s): William Dube
Publication: RIT University News
Date: 2/9/2011
Abstract: The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded two 2011 humanities project grants to Rochester Institute of Technology to promote the development of humanities research and education on campus.
URL: http://www.rit.edu/news/story.php?id=48092

Associated Products

Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (Book)
Title: Amistad's Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling
Author: Benjamin N. Lawrance
Abstract: The true story of the seizure of the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839 by Africans who had been illegally captured and sold as slaves is well known--immortalized in books, poetry, theater, and film. Six African children, ranging from nine to sixteen years old, were embroiled in the fateful voyage and the ensuing court battles. In a fascinating revisionist history, Benjamin N. Lawrance recounts the experiences of the six children through eyewitnesses testimonies, court records, and the children's own writings, casting new light on the illegal transatlantic slave trade of the mid-nineteenth century. Allowing the children to speak for themselves wherever the historical record permits, Lawrance reconstructs their lives in what is now Sierra Leone, their enslavement, and the aftermath of the historic uprising. In so doing, the author illuminates the dismal world of child slavery, demonstrating its qualitative difference from adult slavery, while cogently analyzing the interdependence of the African continental and American hemispheric slave systems. Lawrance's work is an important contribution to the slave trade literature, challenging widely held beliefs about children and slavery by bringing the captured young ones to the foreground of the Amistad narrative.
Year: 2014
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300198454
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

‘A full knowledge of the subject of slavery’: The Amistad, Expert Testimony, and the Origins of Atlantic Studies (Article)
Title: ‘A full knowledge of the subject of slavery’: The Amistad, Expert Testimony, and the Origins of Atlantic Studies
Author: Benjamin N. Lawrance
Abstract: This article explores the role of testimony, expertise, and the academy in the production of knowledge about slavery in the context of the trials of the Africans aboard the slave ship La Amistad, 1839–1841. Testimony provided by enlisted self-professed experts formed the intellectual architecture to the legal argument as it advanced to the Supreme Court. When considered separately from the trials, and distinctly as a question of the production of knowledge, the role of expert testimony provides crucial insight into the function of the university in antebellum anti-slavery thought and action, the marginalization of the lived African slave experience, and the emergence of Atlantic studies in the contemporary present. Examining the relationship between the university and the marshalling of expertise – broadly understood as linguistic, political and cultural knowledge of slavery and the slave trade – suggests that the early use of expert testimony had an important albeit neglected role in the birth of Atlantic studies.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2014.947091?journalCode=fsla20
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Slavery and Abolition
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

‘Your poor boy no father no mother’: ‘Orphans,’ Alienation, and the Perils of Atlantic Child Slave Biography (Article)
Title: ‘Your poor boy no father no mother’: ‘Orphans,’ Alienation, and the Perils of Atlantic Child Slave Biography
Author: Benjamin N. Lawrance
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2013
Primary URL: http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
Publisher: Univ. of Hawaii Press

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