ABSTRACT
The other segment is usually referred to in the literature as the Liberated Africans or recaptives. These were people who had been captured at various places in West Africa and sold as slaves, but were recaptured by the British navy trying to give effect to British anti-slave trade laws on the West African coast. They were all landed in Sierra Leone, conveniently chosen for the purpose of liberating these ex-slaves, as a British ‘colony’ already existed there, taken over by the British Crown in 1808. The recaptives came from a variety of African subcultures (Koelle, a German missionary working in the colony at the time, recorded some 200 of them).
