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Commerce, Christianity and the Origins of the ‘Creoles’ of Fernando Po*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Martin Lynn
Martin Lynn
Affiliation:
Queens' University, Belfast
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , July 1984 , pp. 257 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

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39 CJS, II, II Nov. 1844.

40 CJF, I, 14 June 1841.

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85 As examples, CJF, II, 18 Dec. 1841, 10 Jan. 1842.

86 CJF, II, 18 Sept. 1841.

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90 A remarkable journal of one of these Jamaican settlers has survived in the B.M.S. archives, ‘Autobiography of J. J. Fuller’ and his ‘Recollections of the West African Mission’, A/5, BMSA.

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92 CJF, I, 20 June 1841.

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96 CJF, I, 14 May 1841.

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102 Church Book of Clarence, 9 and 11 March 1848.

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106 BMH, March 1844, 154–155.Google Scholar

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108 Links between Clarence and Freetown were assiduously maintained, not least for purposes of children's education: Fyfe, , History of Sierra Leone, 228, 238, 422, 460.Google Scholar Some were educated in England: Laird, and Oldfield, , Narrative, II, 395–396.Google Scholar

109 CJS, III, 22 March 1846.

110 It needs to be noted that the Baptists' concentration on the mainland after 1846 was partly responsible for this.

111 CJS, II, 21 Nov. 1844.

112 Church Book of Clarence, 5 Oct. 1847.

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114 CJS, I, 21 Feb. 1844, 4 Nov. 1844; II, 1 Feb. 1845.

115 BMH, March 1844, 155–156.Google Scholar

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117 Account of Meetings and Negotiations with the Spanish Authorities… 29 Dec. 1845 and I Jan. 1846, in ‘Correspondence on the Spanish occupation of Fernando Po’; Moreno, , Reseña Historica, 33–34Google Scholar; Slageren, , Les Origines de l'église, 21–34.Google Scholar

118 CJS, III, 21 Oct. 1846; Church Book of Clarence, 13 and 15 May 1848.