John Kizell (c. 1760-?), international entrepreneur and
abolitionist. Many of the details of Kizell’s early life, including his birth
date and name, are unknown. He was born around 1760 in the Gallinas River
region on the coast of West Africa. This era was the peak of the Transatlantic
Slave Trade, the largest forced migration in world history, in which 12 million
people from West and Central Africa were sold to Europeans and taken to the
Americas in slave ships, including 8,000 to South Carolina in the year 1773.
One of those was probably thirteen-year-old Kizell, who was living with his
uncle when he was seized by a neighboring ethnic group and sold as a domestic
servant. Although Gallinas custom banned selling slaves to Europeans unless
they had committed a crime, many masters got around the ban by falsely accusing
their servants of crimes; in Kizell’s case, witchcraft. He survived the ship voyage
across the Atlantic Ocean that killed on average 10-33% of the slaves before
arriving in Charleston, home to one of the largest African populations in the
Americas. There he was sold to a white family that owned a tavern and gave him
the name John Kizell. He learned to speak, read, and write English, and like
other Africans he developed a new identity not as a member of an ethnic group
but as a black person, in part because of the legal and social climate which
declared all people of African ancestry inferior to whites. He may have also
been influenced by Charleston’s many slaves who operated small businesses on
behalf of their owners. Kizell also arrived at a time of great political unrest
that in 1775 erupted into the American War of Independence. Although white
Patriot leaders like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington had no intention of
applying their ideas about liberty to African Americans, they became an
important part of the war anyway. When Britain promised freedom to any
Patriot-owned slave who fought for them, Kizell and thousands of others fled
from their masters and joined the so-called Ethiopian Regiment. He became an
army cook before being captured at the Battle of King’s Mountain but then escaped
and fled to New York. When the war ended in 1783, the government of the new
United States demanded that Kizell and the other Black Loyalists be returned to
their masters, but the British government evacuated them from New York and sent
many to Port Roseway, a small town in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.
Although they were free, the government did not give them the same land grants
as it did to white veterans, their employers refused to pay them, they were
forced to live in holes in the ground, and many died of disease and exposure.
After several years Kizell and others decided that white society would never
treat them fairly and that they should go to Africa. This was supported by many
people in Britain, who hoped that sending free blacks to their ancestral
continent would not only remove them from white society but also spread white
culture in Africa. For this reason, in 1787 the British government established
the colony of Sierra Leone. Five years later Kizell, his family, and nearly
1,200 other black Canadians sailed back across the ocean to the Sierra Leonean
settlement of Granville Town. This was close to his home region on the Gallinas
River, making him one of only a few former slaves who returned not just to
Africa but to his specific place of origin.
In
Granville Town Kizell helped establish a Baptist church and became one of its
ministers, but he was also respectful of African customs and did not want
Africans to simply assimilate into white culture. As historian Kevin G. Lowther
has written, “[whites] regarded witchcraft and superstition as inherently wrong
and emblematic of an inferior culture. Kizell, however, understood these in the
context of the people’s worldview…[He] knew that witchcraft and magic were
often manipulated for personal gain – to obtain slaves, for instance – but he
also knew that these were more real than [whites] could credit.” He also hoped
that West Africans could develop coffee and ginger crops that could be sold to
Europeans and Americans, creating an international economy based on agriculture
rather than slavery. This was part of his broader goal of making Sierra Leone
an independent black nation where people of African descent could thrive free
of whites. On one occasion he called on “all our Breathren who may Come from
the British Colonies or from America and Become farmers in order to help us
Cultivate the Land,” while on another he told a visiting American that “Africa
is the land of black men, and to Africa they must and will come…They have not
forfeited a right to the inheritance of their forefathers, by being carried by
force from their country.” These efforts led him to meet with local African
leaders to try to convince them to stop slave trading. He told one group “You
must be sensible that the Slave Trade cannot be carried on much longer…[only
farming will enable you to] rise above the poverty which renders you so
dependent on Europe…If the inhabitants of Europe had sold each other…do you
suppose that we should have the ships and fleets, and armies, and riches, as we
now have?” On another occasion he drew on Biblical language to plead his case,
declaring that “the blood of their people cried out against them, and that God
had heard it. They had killed the poor of the land; the people that should work
the land; and had sold them to fill their bellies. All their people were gone
or going to other countries. They allowed the Slave Trade to stop their ears,
and blind their eyes: for a little rum and tobacco they allowed their people to
be carried off, and said nothing.” He also met with British officials in Sierra
Leone and Europe, experimented with various crops, financed the construction of
a sailing ship, ran a trading business, and partnered with an African American
shipowner to establish trade networks between Africa and America.
Unfortunately, most whites were not interested in ending slavery or in black
economic independence. Even after Britain ended the slave trade in the 1800s,
it made little effort to stop slave ships from working in a business that was
now illegal. Kizell also had to deal with armed conflicts between the settlers
and local Africans, the British government, and each other. In 1794 he traveled to Britain to testify on
behalf of settlers who had been falsely accused of treason, also using this
trip to purchase merchandise to sell back home. In 1806 he mediated a truce
between two slave traders and thus helped stabilize the region. He helped
integrate freed captives from slave ships into the settler society and adopted
one boy who like him had been stolen from his family as a teenager. When the
United States created the neighboring settlement of Liberia, Kizell wrote one
of its leaders to declare that “‘Rachel mourneth for her children,’ and ‘will
not be comforted till they come home.’” His last known activity is an 1830
letter to the settler government informing them that he had taken a slave
trader into custody. Nothing is known of his life or death after that. In the
end, his efforts to create a strong, independent black nation were defeated by
more powerful desires to continue exploiting Africa and its people. His ideas
about blacks returning to Africa and gaining political and economic autonomy,
though, helped pave the way for later activists like Marcus Garvey and Angela
Davis, and in 1961 Sierra Leone finally gained its independence from British
rule.
©David Brodnax, Sr.
