Almost 200 years after thousands of kidnapped Africans died on an island in the middle of the ocean, study reveals where they came from

 by Mildred Europa Taylor, Face2FaceAfrica.com

After the slave trade was outlawed in the British Empire in 1807, the British Royal Navy had to patrol the Atlantic to enforce the ban on slave ships, as not all territories complied immediately. Royal Navy personnel intercepted around 1,600 vessels full of captured Africans, helping free some 150,000 people.

The British sent about 450 of the ships captured to the island of St. Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic, where the Navy had established a Vice-Admiralty court. Some 27,000 liberated Africans ended up being housed there in a settlement called Rupert’s Valley. 

While some of these newly freed Africans stayed on the island and raised families, others journeyed back to Africa.

An estimated 8,000 of these individuals, however, died on the island soon after they arrived, largely due to what Smithsonian magazine described as “common slave-ship maladies like scurvy, dysentery and dehydration.”

During an investigation of the settlement in 2008, archaeologists uncovered the remains of 325 skeletons. The majority were randomly buried without coffins, with some placed in shared graves.

“It became clear pretty quickly these were the remains of liberated Africans,” Hannes Schroeder, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, told Science magazine’s Andrew Curry. “The question came up, where did they come from? And if these people were liberated, captives brought to St. Helena, should they be repatriated to wherever they came from in Africa?”

In a study recently published in the journal Science, researchers sought to answer those questions by analyzing the teeth of the deceased. The researchers identified strontium isotopes in the tooth enamel of 152 skeletons from Rupert’s Valley. Analysis of strontium isotope ratios in their teeth indicated that many of these people grew up near the coast of western Central Africa.

Some of them lived farther inland, and may have been forced to travel a long way overland to reach the coast, the researchers found. At least 10 of them were children when they moved, probably from the interiors of Angola, Zimbabwe or elsewhere in southern Africa.

“It makes sense that slave traders wanted younger people, with the potential for many years as laborers,” David Head, a historian at the University of Central Florida who wasn’t involved in the research, said to Live Science. “But to have [this] reinforced through their [teeth] reveals the tragedy of enslaved children.”

One man buried at Rupert’s Valley possibly traveled between the ages of 7 and 9 from inland Angola to a “coastal region near the likely port of embarkation”, according to the study.

It’s “possible that their displacement during childhood was connected with their enslavement,” co-author of the study Schroeder told Live Science’s Owen Jarus.

Strontium isotopes are unique to specific water and plant types, and they become incorporated into children’s tooth enamel as it develops. Study co-author Vicky Oelze said that means the isotopes “reflect where they were at that specific time in their lives.”

“Even if they were displaced, the signature of where they grew up is locked in their teeth for eternity,” she told Science.

In the 19th century, when the Royal Navy liberated some of the enslaved Africans, they reported that they (the newly freed people) spoke multiple languages, including Congo and Benguela dialects. The authors of the new study said their findings align with the historical testimonies of Royal Navy personnel.

Still a British territory, St. Helena has a modern-day population of roughly 4,400. The St. Helena National Trust in 2022 reburied the skeletons discovered at Rupert’s Valley, with each laid to rest in a handcrafted wooden casket.

“We are a migration island, formed by settlers, sailors, soldiers and slaves,” study co-author Helena Bennett, head of the St. Helena National Trust, told Science. “Liberated Africans are accepted as part of our identity and history—we are connected to their story, because they shaped our story.”

Clement Bataille, an isotope geochemist at Purdue University who wasn’t involved in the study, said the methods used by the researchers to identify birthplaces represent “a first for the study of the transatlantic slave trade.”