Fenda Lawrence

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fenda Lawrence (also: Finda or Venda; born around 1742 ; died after 1772 ) was a West African slave trader .

Life

According to historian Hassoum Ceesay , Lawrence was born to a family of the Serahule people who lived on the upper reaches of the Gambia River in the Kingdom of Wuli . Her father worked in various factories , her mother as a maid for white traders.

Accordingly, she married the British James Lawrence in 1760, who was her parents' employer. While her husband frequently negotiated upstream, she lived in the then trading center of Kau-ur and worked there and in Niani Maru as a slave trader. She presumably acted as a middleman for English and French traders.

It was quite common for women to work as traders. The place formed a trading post for British traders on James Island (now Kunta Kinteh Island ).

In mid-May 1772 she set out from Kau-ur in the Kingdom of Saloum to what was then the British colony of Georgia (now the USA). She may have been widowed at the time, but she was certainly separated from her husband. She traveled in the company of five slaves on the slave ship New Britannia , which brought 220 slaves to Georgia and South Carolina . Atlantic crossings were uncommon for traders from Africa at that time, especially for women from Africa. After 36 days of sailing, the ship docked in Charleston (South Carolina) . Upon arrival, Stephen Deane, the ship's captain, accompanied Lawrence to Savannah , the colony's most important city at the time.

There he made a statement on her behalf to the Senior Assistant Justice of the General Court of Georgia , Noble Jones, and Acting Governor James Habersham , according to which he had known her for seven or eight years and that Lawrence was a free black woman and influential trader in Kau-ur was that for some time ( for some time wanted to stay) in Georgia. She was accompanied by three house slaves and two house slaves, including a boy named James Lawrence, who could have been either her son or a slave who had been given her family name. With this statement, Deane was probably trying to support Lawrence's legal security. Habersham replied in late July, confirming her personal freedom and granting her the right to settle in Georgia.

Apart from this document from 1772, nothing is known about Lawrence's whereabouts. Stephen Deane died in 1783. His property was auctioned off to Chief Justice John Simpson, who also took financial responsibility for the upbringing of Deane's children. Since Lawrence was probably not mentioned in Deane's (now lost) will of 1779, she may have died by that time.

It is likely that Lawrence was the mother of several or all of Stephen Deane's children and raised them on his property. She was relatively certain to be the mother of David Laurence, who later lived in South Carolina. This is probably the case with Mary (Polly) Kest or Keast, who trained as a tailor with a former business partner of her father, as well as with Fanny and Joe (born around 1772).

Hassoum Ceesay describes this time as follows: In 1772 she only looked around Georgia. In 1780 her husband died and left her three children. At the time she owned three sloops and traded in goods and slaves. Possibly due to traditional laws, a lack of local support or pressure from the King of Wuli, she had to hand over the ships and parts of her property to him. The move to Georgia on the slave ship New Britannia took place in 1792, for which, however, no sources are given.

literature

  • Lillian Ashcraft-Eason: 'She Voluntarily Hath Come': A Gambian Woman Trader in Colonial Georgia in the Eighteenth Century . In: Paul E. Lovejoy (Ed.): Identity in the Shadow of Slavery . London / New York 2000, ISBN 0-8264-4725-2 , pp. 202-221 ( academia.edu ).
  • Hassoum Ceesay : Gambian women: an introductory history . 1st edition. Fulladu Publishers, Gambia 2007, p. 21-23 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Robert Scott Davis: Free But Not Freed: Stephen Deane's African Family in Early Georgia . In: The Georgia Historical Quarterly . tape 97 , no. 1 , 2013, p. 61-72 , JSTOR : 24636305 .
  2. ^ William Henry Foster: Gender, Mastery and Slavery: From European to Atlantic World Frontiers . Macmillan International Higher Education, 2009, ISBN 978-1-137-23880-1 ( google.de [accessed March 2, 2019]).
  3. ↑ a b c d Hassoum Ceesay : Gambian women: an introductory history . 1st edition. Fulladu Publishers, Gambia 2007, p. 21-23 .
personal data
SURNAME Lawrence, Fenda
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lawrence, Finda; Lawrence, Venda
BRIEF DESCRIPTION West African slave trader
DATE OF BIRTH around 1743
DATE OF DEATH after 1772