The History of the First West India Regiment — John Shaqi
The History of the First West India RegimentEllis, A. B. (Alfred Burdon)
History
The History of the First West India Regiment
Ellis, A. B. (Alfred Burdon)
Great Britain. Army. West India regiment, 1st
Next, as to the men of whom these negro regiments would be composed. It
is too much the custom in Great Britain, in describing a man of colour,
to consider that all has been said that is necessary when he is called a
negro; yet there are as many nationalities, and as many types of the
African race, as there are of the Caucasian. No one would imagine that a
European was sufficiently described by the title of "white man." It
would be asked if the individual in question were an Englishman,
German, Frenchman, and so on; and the same kind of classification is
necessary for the negro. On the western coast of Africa, the portion of
the African continent from which North and South America and the West
Indies obtained their negro population, there are at least twenty
different varieties of the African race, distinct from each other in
features and even in colour; and these are again subdivided into several
hundred nations or tribes, each of which possesses a language, manners,
and customs of its own.
In the days of the slave-trade, the slave-dealers adopted certain
arbitrary designations to denote from what portion of the coast their
wares were obtained. For instance, slaves shipped from Sierra Leone and
the rivers to the north and east of that peninsula, and who were
principally Timmanees, Kossus, Acoos, Mendis, Foulahs, and Jolloffs,
were called Mandingoes, from the dominant tribe of that name which
supplied the slave-market. Negroes from the Gold Coast kingdoms of
Ashanti, Fanti, Assin, Akim, Wassaw, Aquapim, Ahanta, and Accra were
denominated Koromantyns, or Coromantees, a corruption of Cormantine, the
name of a fort some sixteen miles to the east of Cape Coast Castle, and
which was the earliest British slave-station on the Gold Coast.
Similarly, slaves from the tribes inhabiting the Slave Coast, that is to
say, Awoonahs, Agbosomehs, Flohows, Popos, Dahomans, Egbas, and Yorubas,
were all termed Papaws; while those from the numerous petty states of
the Niger delta, where the lowest type of the negro is to be found, were
known as Eboes.
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