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Africans and Ireland History, Society, and the Black Nexus

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Africans and Ireland History, Society, and the Black Nexus Africans and Ireland History, Society, and the Black Nexus C.L. INNES AND GORDON COLLIER OME YEARS AGO, while researching the context for Equiano’s very successful 1791 tour of Ireland,1 I (Lyn Innes) spent several days in S Dublin’s National Library leafing through eighteenth-century Irish newspapers. It soon became clear that the anti-slavery movement in Ireland was not just concerned with abolishing the slave trade and slavery in other parts of the world,2 for some of these papers carried advertisements for the sale of slaves or offers of rewards for the recovery of slaves or servants who had run away. Among the most poignant of these advertisements was the fol- lowing in a 1768 issue of the Dublin Mercury: A neat beautiful black Negro girl, just brought from Carolina, aged eleven or twelve years who understands and speaks English, very fit to wait on a lady, to be disposed of. Applications to be made to James 3 Carolan, Carrickmacross, or to Mr Gavan in Bridge Street, Dublin. Two years previously a notice in the Belfast News-Letter had promised three guineas for the capture and return of “a young negro manservant” named John 1 See Nini Rodgers, “Equiano in Belfast: A Study of the Anti-Slavery Ethos in a Northern Town,” Slavery and Abolition 18.2 (August 1997): 73–89, and Equiano and Anti-Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Belfast (Belfast: Belfast Society, 2000). 2 In which the Irish themselves had been active – see, for example, entries in the Works Cited for Nini Rodgers, Lydia M. Pulsipher, Lydia M. Pulsipher & Conrad M. Goodwin, and Joseph J. Williams. 3 Dublin Mercury (11–13 August 1768): 3. 196 C.L. INNES AND GORDON COLLIER a Moore, described as “straight and well made.”4 As late as 1781, several years after the outlawing of slavery in Scotland (but not in England), a notice in the Belfast News-Letter offered a reward for a runaway “Indian Black.”5 The Belfast Amicable Society responded to this last advertisement with an offer to assist and protect this “Indian Black” and to enable him to prosecute his “intended enslaver.”6 Five years later, the Belfast merchant Waddell Cun- ningham, owner of a plantation called ‘Belfast’ in Dominica, proposed the establishment of a ‘Belfast Slave-Ship Company’. The proposal was denoun- ced by the Irish dissident Thomas McCabe with the following curse: “May God wither the hand and consign the name to eternal infamy of the man who will sign the document.”7 If the existence of a slave community in Ireland has been ignored by most Irish historians, so, too, has the presence of free black and Asian men and women. In the early eighteenth century, some young Africans were brought to England and Ireland so that they could learn English and become interpreters and middlemen for English-speaking traders when they returned to Africa. One such person was the Ghanaian Thomas Awishee (or Ouisie), who was living with a Widow Pennington in Cork in 1715. There were also servants and freed slaves. We can catch just a glimpse of one of those freed black people in a letter written by the Irish radical William Drennan in 1790, where he describes a procession led by his fellow nationalists Grattan and Fitzgerald, and notes: “In particular I distinguish a negro boy well-dressed and holding on high the Cap of Liberty […].”8 The eighteenth century Irish actor and play- wright John O’Keefe refers in his autobiography to the singer Rachael Bap- tiste, whom he describes as an African and “a native of Ireland” and who led a successful career as a singer in Ireland and England for over twenty-five years. O’Keefe wrote: My fondness for song had often led me to the concerts at Marlborough Green, Dublin. Among the many fine singers there was Rachael Bap- 4 Mary McNeill, The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866 (Dublin: Allen Figges, 1960): 294. 5 McNeill, The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 295. 6 Nini Rodgers, “Equiano in Belfast,” 83–84. 7 Rodgers, “Equiano in Belfast,” 84 8 The Drennan Letters: Being a Selection from the Correspondence which Passed between William Drennan, M.D., and His Brother-in Law and Sister, Samuel and Martha McTier, During the Years 1776–1819, ed. D.A. Chart (Belfast: H.M.S.O., 1931): 51–52. .
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