Elena A. Schneider

This project examines several hundred freed Afro-Cubans who returned to West Africa during the era of the nineteenth century slave trade. These Middle Passage survivors were mostly (but not entirely) self emancipated Yoruba speakers who undertook dangerous journeys back to their homelands using British abolitionist networks. Through research in Spanish, Cuban, and Nigerian archives, as well as British abolitionist, missionary, and state records, this project will create a collective biography tracing their paths from childhoods in West Africa through Cuban slavery to “homegoing” in West Africa and the Bight of Benin. This work reveals the complexity of African diaspora, the power of African identities in the Americas, and the links between Caribbean slavery, British antislavery, and early African colonization.