Island Citizens: Environment, Infrastructure, and Belonging in Colonial Gambia, 1816-1865

Abstract

My dissertation, Island Citizens: Environment, Infrastructure, and Belonging in Colonial Gambia, 1816-1965, is a history of the urban environment and diasporic communities in post-emancipation Gambia under British imperial rule. After the British Empire banned participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807, the newly founded British settlement of St Mary’s Island at the mouth of the Gambia River became a place of resettlement for Liberated Africans—Africans rescued from slave ships by British naval squadrons. In the early 19th century, Liberated Africans found their new home on St. Mary’s Island to be precarious and dangerous. They were settled on the lowest-lying sections of a flood prone, tidal, mangrove-covered island. In the always partially submerged landscape of St. Mary’s Island, which came to be home to Bathurst, the colonial capital, the ownership of dry land was a privilege. Facing mounting demand for dry land from Liberated Africans in the mid-19th century, the colonial government turned to “reclamation,” the creation of new dry land from the mangrove estuaries surrounding Bathurst. Based on 16 months of archival research and fieldwork in Banjul (formerly Bathurst), The Gambia; Senegal; and the UK, the dissertation argues that, for the community of formerly enslaved Liberated Africans in The Gambia, participation in colonial political life became contingent upon the ownership of property in the form of dry, reclaimed land carved from mangrove estuaries surrounding the island city of Bathurst. Over the course of the 19th century, Liberated African claims as free persons, as Island Citizens, became inextricably linked to the ongoing maintenance and creation of dry land. As this dissertation shows, owning dry land at different points in Bathurst’s history marked who could vote in municipal elections, who could be guaranteed British military protection, and who could access financial credit to participate in the colonial economy. Land reclamation and drainage were therefore not only foundational to Liberated African politics and their claims to autochthony, but also to the origins of Gambian municipal politics and African involvement therein. By the early 20th century, land ownership in Bathurst had become a legal marker of colonial subjecthood in opposition to a protectorate subjecthood. This political, social, and legal division was created through the territorial division of the Gambia Colony into a “colony” that included only St. Mary’s Island, and a “protectorate” that encompassed all other British-held territory along both the north and south banks of the Gambia River. Invested in the benefits of being colonial subjects, Liberated Africans pushed to maintain their privileged colonial status in the mid-20th century by advocating for more land reclamation in Bathurst and resisting the relocation of people and government institutions from the island to the protectorate mainland. By centering Liberated Africans and the environmental transformation of mangrove swamps through land reclamation and drainage, this dissertation brings together the literature on British antislavery and abolition, African urban history, and African environmental history. In so doing this dissertation attempts to open a conversation on the environmental history of post-emancipation era societies outside of the Americas. It moves beyond the colonial state as the originator of consequential ecological transformation in modern Africa, pushes beyond the duality of indigenous-colonizer in its examination of the Liberated African community, and deepens our understanding of West African urbanization.