Abolitionists Abroad

Lamin Sanneh's Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa is a work of historical argument written against a settled consensus. By the late twentieth century, two readings of antislavery had hardened: that abolition was fundamentally an economic and secular achievement, religion supplying only decorative rhetoric, and that Christian mission in Africa was colonialism's advance guard. Sanneh — born in the Gambia into a Muslim Mandinka family, later the historian of world Christianity who wrote Translating the Message — had spent his career arguing that the story looked different from the receiving end. Here he turns to the Black settlers, recaptives, and preachers who carried an antislavery Christianity from North America and the Caribbean back across the Atlantic, and asks what they actually built.

The argument is that the abolitionist impulse was religious at its root, and that its most consequential carriers were not English parliamentarians but formerly enslaved Christians. Sanneh follows the Nova Scotian settlers and Black Baptist and Methodist preachers into Freetown, the Quaker shipowner Paul Cuffee, Lott Carey and the Liberian venture, the liberated Africans of Sierra Leone and the returnees who moved inland to Abeokuta and Lagos. What these communities produced, he contends, were societies organized around a claim about the person: that human worth is not assigned by lineage, tribe, or caste, and cannot be traded. That claim, translated into vernacular languages and local idioms, dissolved older structures of dependency and slaveholding more thoroughly than any imperial decree, and it did so before and often against European colonial administration. Sanneh sets this Christian antislavery beside the Muslim states of the West African interior, where slavery had juridical standing, and beside the paternalism of white missionary societies, insisting on the distinctness of the Black abolitionist project in both directions. The result reframes modern West Africa not as something done to Africans but as something religiously conceived and largely African-led.

The book has continued to matter because it refuses the easy alliance between anticolonial critique and secular assumption. Anyone arguing that Christianity in Africa was simply an imported instrument of empire has to answer Sanneh, and the answer is not easy.

Who should read this: readers wrestling with whether the gospel can be separated from the colonial machinery that sometimes carried it, students of African Christianity and mission history, and those interested in how theological convictions about human dignity became institutions. It is a dense academic monograph with a polemical edge, not devotional reading and not an introduction to abolition; those wanting a narrative survey or a book for prayer should look elsewhere.