Stone, an influential historian of the Tudor period, kept the spotlight on elites in 1966 when he published his studies of the British aristocracy.7 In 1971, Stone defined prosopography as “the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives.”8 Stone used the mainframe computer to process machine-readable texts so that he could maximize the application of the techniques of prosopography.9 However, Stone conducted his study nine years before the advent of the personal computer in 1980. Stone had to query or process everything in terms of the hierarchy of operators and programmers who were largely insensitive to the needs of the historian. These interlocutors came between Stone and his data.10 Nevertheless, scholars acknowledge Stone as the pioneer of modern prosopography in the premodern era, although he never used the computer again.
In 1981, Bruce M. Haight, using an IBM 134, contributed one of the few African prosopographies with his study of the rulers of the Gonja of West Africa.11 Four years later, in 1985, he and William R. Pfeiffer II, the president of a Michigan-based computer service bureau, published a methodological account of their “pilot study in the use of the computer to handle information for the writing of African oral history.”12 The mainframe computer enabled them to test hypotheses that would have been too complex and impractical to test manually.
The third and present phase began with the advent of the personal computer in 1980. This not only democratized the approach to prosopography but coincided with the inclusion of bottom-up analyses, which, under the influence of the Annales school, were becoming popular. A persistent feature of prosopography was that it remained a methodology applied largely to top-down studies of society. However, following the introduction of the personal computer, prosopographers used the collective biography approach with great effect for bottom-up as well as top-down analyses. For example, Katharine Keats-Rohan, a pioneer prosopographer, lauded the technological advances, pointing out the suitability of the relational database to prosopographical research.13 Her work, widely regarded as seminal in the field of modern prosopography, and her prosopography portal resource site,14 have provided an invaluable stimulus to such research. Since the 1990s, with the escalating sophistication and accessibility of technology and the ever-increasing capabilities of the PC, the popularity of historical quantitative methodology—including prosopography—has experienced a flourishing resurgence.
While the children’s narratives provided the core set of unique documents distinguishing this episode of postemancipation slavery, the Royal Navy (which liberated this group of children in the Red Sea) kept excellent records of the events, and fortunately the Scottish missionaries at the Keith-Falconer Mission in Sheikh Othman maintained full records. The prosopography also links with information gleaned from various external sources, including school records, the responses to a repatriation poll taken by the Lovedale Institution in 1903, death registers, street directories, census data, official documentation, and the personal correspondence of the children themselves. Such documents transformed the core prosopography from a synchronic to a longitudinal or diachronic database.15
The use of the prosopographical technique allows for a flexible analysis that goes far beyond anecdotal methods. Encoding the narratives enables the researcher to move from the realms of narrative, social history to an empirical, systematic analysis and creates the potential for generating new insights into one of the least researched areas of African slavery: the first passage.16 Robert was right: this prosopographic technique yielded a profoundly different and more complex picture of the children’s first passage, which emerged as a far longer, more intricate, and more varied ordeal than generally recognized.
Exploring the historiography of the slave trade and slavery in the Horn of Africa region, I soon discovered for myself the scarcity of personal slave accounts of that “first passage” (i.e., contemporary accounts of captives’ experiences from capture to the coast). As sources in the historiography of slavery and the slave trade, a large clutch of contemporary and systematic child slave narratives such as this is virtually unknown.17
Three discrete traditions impinge on this book: first, the study of the slave trade, namely the first and middle passages, which includes the phenomenon of prize slaves;18 second, the study of missions in the nineteenth century; and third, the study of the histories of Ethiopia and of the Oromo people.
In the course of exploring slavery and the slave trade, I have long been curious about the identity and experiences of the slaves themselves: Who were they? What was their status within their own societies? What were their lives like? How and why and by whom were they enslaved? In the majority of accounts of the slave trade, answers to these questions do not emerge, simply because of the dearth of information about the identity of the slaves themselves. There have, however, been several first-person slave accounts—single biographies—and the vast majority of those have emanated from West Africa. Those studies have contributed considerably to our knowledge of the lives of specific individuals such as the celebrated Nigerian Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa, as he was known throughout his life, dubbed “the father of African literature” by Chinua Achebe)19 and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua.20 Crossing to the other side of the African continent, the leading Oromo sociologist and scholar Mekuria Bulcha included “four biographical vignettes” in his study of the Oromo in the diaspora, which offered examples of “the different ways of wresting honour from the dishonour of slavery.”21
In recent years, clusters of scholars have gone beyond the standard Western sources and instead have searched for authentic African voices within the African communities themselves: oral traditions and testimonies, life histories gleaned from interviews with missionaries and colonial authorities, as well as folktales, songs, and other African sources. This ongoing drive, led by Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene, and Martin Klein, seeks to illuminate African perspectives.22 Still, their focus remains largely on the slave trade of West and North Africa, with only a relative nod toward personal slave accounts drawn from the Horn or East Africa. They have aimed, primarily, to bring the essential human perspective into play through seeking qualitative interpretations to supplement the purely numeric quantitative assessments offered by, for example, Abdul Sheriff’s statistical work on the slave trade of Zanzibar.23
With this study it has been possible to offer both, pulling the quantitative and the qualitative together in a unique and unified set of insights. On the one hand, the prosopography (or, loosely, group biography) presents group analyses suggesting trends and practices in the slave trade of the Horn of Africa; and on the other, it presents the personal accounts of each of the sixty-four children, tracking them not only during their period of enslavement but from cradle to grave.
We need to bear in mind that these accounts were almost exclusively penned as memoirs years after enslavement. The genre of the memoir is essentially one of reconstruction of an elusive past, informed in part by the inevitable interventions of experience and learned knowledge. We all experience this in recalling events from our own childhoods—how much of what we “remember” is what really happened, and how much has been suggested by and inextricably interwoven with our conversations and readings, with the natural subliminal adjustment born of the knowledge of hindsight, and with our own experiences and interpretations across the intervening years?
For example, the East/Central African life histories assembled by Marcia Wright were part biography and part autobiography, compiled by a female Moravian missionary in Tanzania “when the women were grandmothers” at the turn of the twentieth century.24 By contrast, the immediacy of the children’s narratives analyzed in this study adds a significant new dimension to our knowledge and understanding of child slave experiences. Interviewed within weeks of their liberation, each Oromo child answered the same series of questions, presenting the reader with freshly minted, systematic detail without the filter of hindsight, learned experience, or suggestion.
First-person slave accounts have, for the most part, been retrospective records of stand-alone experiences, snapshots of individual
