Friday, March 16, 2001

Historians Seek to Digitally Document the Slave Trade By SCOTT CARLSON In a sense, G. Ugo Nwokeji bases his studies on the measurements of ghosts. Mr. Nwokeji, who is from Nigeria, is an assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs. He is compiling an electronic database of information about Africans who were rescued from slave ships. In the future, scholars could crunch the data to get general ideas of where slave raiders were finding their human cargo and what factors those raiders might have considered to be marketable commodities. In the early 1800's, after England had banned slavery, the British Navy established a special fleet that hunted and captured slave ships on the Atlantic Ocean. The navy vessel would escort the slave ship to a nearby British port -- in Sierra Leone, Havana, Cape Town, or Rio de Janeiro -- where clerks would record the name, age, sex, height, and specific physical attributes, like cuts or tattoos, of each slave on board. The information would later be used as evidence against the slavers in court. Mr. Nwokeji's partner in the project has been David Eltis, a slavery historian at Queen's University in Canada. The two scholars base their work on the logs maintained by the British Navy from the early to mid-1800's, which include names and descriptions of about 70,000 Africans. Mr. Nwokeji and Mr. Eltis, with the help of other scholars of African culture and history, are working to standardize the data and enter it into a statistical-software table. The scholars started on the project in 1999; Mr. Nwokeji says it should be finished within the next two years. Because the information was recorded by many different clerks, standardizing the data -- especially the names -- can be difficult and time-consuming. For example, the female Igbo name "Mgboli" could appear in the logs as "Imbolee," "Imbolay," "Bolee," or "Boley," or in some other variation. The database will feature the names both as they were originally written and in the standardized form. Because the names can be specific to an ethnic group, they will play a big part in determining where each slave came from in Africa. "That will help us better understand the African diaspora in the Americas," Mr. Nwokeji says. Some names, however, were used in more than one ethnic group. So the scholars are also entering detailed information about each slave's cuts and tattoos, which can also help identify the slave's ethnic origins. Mr. Nwokeji hopes to publish the material on a CD-ROM. From there, the electronic aggregation of the data will let scholars look at all of it at once or sort through it by name, age, height, sex, or another quality. "You can do a run to tell you how many girls were among the sample between 1821 and 1825," he says. Mr. Nwokeji says that scholars in the past have used portions of the logs to support research, but that this is the first time the data will be collected in electronic form. The British Navy captured only a few of the total number of ships that crossed the Atlantic with slaves in their holds. But Mr. Nwokeji says the data will represent a sample of the slave trade, hinting at where other slave ships -- ones that eluded capture -- picked up and dropped off human cargo. "We know the distribution of the trade -- what proportion of people in Africa went to certain regions in the Americas. We know where the [captured] ship sailed from in Africa and we know the ethnic composition of the ship. And we know where it was headed in the Americas, even though it was captured." Most of the slaves represented in the database came from Igbo and Yoruba cultures, which are based in the area encompassed by present-day Nigeria and Benin. Mr. Nwokeji and Mr. Eltis have received financial support for the project from the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research; the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; and the University of Connecticut. Mr. Nwokeji estimates that research for the project will cost $200,000. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a senior historian of slavery who lives in Louisiana and formerly worked at Rutgers University, said that Mr. Nwokeji and Mr. Eltis's project could be "important" research for the field. Just last year, Ms. Hall put out a database of slave identities. Her CD-ROM, published by the LSU Press, holds the computerized records of more than 100,000 slaves who were brought to Louisiana. The project was the culmination of 15 years of work by Ms. Hall. Ms. Hall says that the rise of information technology and the Internet has put such information into the hands of African-Americans who seek a link to the past. Web sites like AfriGeneas have put some of the data online and allow users to exchange information about their family histories. The Mormon Church just released a CD-ROM of records from the Freedman's Bank Savings and Trust, a bank that was established for former slaves and black soldiers after the Civil War. Because of corruption and mismanagement, the bank went bust 15 years after it was founded, and its depositors lost most of the $57-million held there. Ms. Hall predicts that electronic aggregation of slavery-era data will one day be used in court to secure reparations in cases like that one. "It's probably going to turn into a huge class-action lawsuit," she says. "In this suit you will have a combination of genealogy, history, and law -- and, of course, all relying heavily on technology." 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House lawmakers settle dispute over structure of panels governing college programs G.O.P. senators argue for elimination of federal estate tax President taps Pennsylvania's Hickok for No. 3 post in Education Dept. Loyola of Chicago prepares to scrap a Jesuit mainstay -- the classics department 2-year and black colleges agree to join in helping students on the path to graduation College's choice for its new president has some grumbling about nepotism Historians seek to digitally document the slave trade Some professors are surprised to be on a university's roster