John Kizell

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.