Author: Patrick

Putting aside the fantastical elements that accrue to such stories retold over centuries, the legend offers several intriguing clues regarding the origin of the Dei.

First, it traces their origin to the mixing of a local woman (or, more probably, women) and a migrant man (or men), who apparently arrived from up north via the St. Paul River. Second, it points to knowledge of metal smelting as central to the identity of the new people that emerged.

Footnote: For the use of stereotypes and formulaic elements in oral traditions, see Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 88-91, also pp. 12, 21, 28, 47, 50, 52-53, 71, 86, 137, 139-140, 144-146.

The exchanged items were probably different in earlier versions of the story, but was updated to a ring and a coin to suit recent audiences. Third, the multiple metals used in making the dowry drum, as well as its elaborate decoration, suggest the men who descended from north brought a knowledge of metal working.

Dei oral traditions cite a town called Kambai Bli (on the current road to Bomi Hills) as one of their oldest and most economically important. This town was the site of a large clay pit for producing pottery products that attracted buyers from afar.

Footnote: Bureau of Folkways, 1955, p. 43.

Far more important than pottery was the production of salt from sea water for sale to northern markets. According to Dei oral traditions, it was principally their wealth from salt boiling that attracted other groups to join them.

Important salt boiling towns were located along the beach from the mouth of the St. Paul to Cape Mount. They included Duojena, Dugbei, Gakpoja and Mbaanwoin.

Footnote: Bureau of Folkways, 1955, pp. 50, 53.

Several routes linked the Niger to the salt-producing coast as well as the kola forest of Sierra Leone and Liberia.

All of those routes passed through Kankan, which was the main transit point for the flow of goods between the Buré gold-working region and forest societies on the one hand and the Sahel on the other.

Footnote:  Massing, 1985, pp. 36-37, 41; George E. Brooks, Kola Trade and State Building: Upper Guinea Coast and Senegambia, 15th and 17th Centuries (Boston, MA: Boston University, African Studies Center, 1980), p. 268; Person, 1968, p. 558; Beávogui, 2001, p. 54.

One route went from the Niger through Kankan to the Sierra Leone peninsula. The Dyula ancestors of the Vai ethnic group apparently took this route to the Sierra Leone peninsula before slowly moving east toward Cape Mount

A second path ran from Kankan to Musadu to Bopolu to Jondu to Gowolo to Gowolonamalo to Cape Mount.

Footnote: Massing, 1985, pp. 36-37, 41; Brooks, 1980, p. 268.

West African societies appeared self-contained because they produced their basic necessities. But, even in this early period, they were tied together by trade with distant markets.

At the west end, one trade route ran from Senegal through southern Mauritania to Sijilmasa in present-day Morocco. Meanwhile, seafaring groups along the Atlantic ferried goods to the mouths of navigable rivers. A central route went from Kwakaw up to Tahart in Algeria.

Footnote: Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1978, pp. 271, 276; Brooks, 1985, p. 5.

In the east, a track connected Lake Chad located between Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon to Jabal Nafusa in present-day Libya. A horizontal route ran from the Niger through the Aïr Mountain to Cairo, Egypt, which was a major stop for Muslim pilgrims en route to Mecca.

This network was probably connected to an early route that ran from the mouth of the St. Paul River through Bopolu (both in what is now Liberia) to Musadu (a town in present-day Guinea currently called Beyla), then up to the Niger River.

Footnote: Hunwick, 2006, p. 15: d’Azevedo, 1959, p. 54.

The African-American repatriates arrived along the Liberian coast just as slave trading was increasing in the area. In 1807, the British had outlawed human trafficking. One year later, the British navy began patrolling high-volume slave marts along the West Africa coast and seizing suspected slave ships.

Those actions unintentionally drove slaves buyers from major ports like Elmira and Bonny to previously underutilized areas like the coast of present-day Liberia.

Among people already living in the area, opinions were sharply divided regarding the slave trade.

This division was not between ethnic groups, with some being for and others against. Instead, each ethnic group contained some members who were proslavery while others were abolitionist. That was the case in societies all along the rim of the Atlantic.

Given the slave trade’s polarizing impact, local people did not respond in a unified and homogeneous way to African-Americans who came seeking land.

On the one hand, foreign slave buyers and their local allies vehemently and violently opposed the repatriates, whom they viewed as threats to their profits.

On the other hand, local abolitionists welcomed African-American returnees as allies whose global ties and external knowledge could help bring a speedy end to the trade in enslaved Africans that had ravaged local societies for centuries.

Beginning in the late 1830s, a key link between Bopolu and the Liberian colony was Gabriel Moore, who became one of the country’s richest merchants. Gabriel arrived as age 20 and identified as a farmer when he emigrated from Mississippi with his father and siblings in April 1835.

Upon arriving in Liberia, Gabriel “went native,” spending many years living in Bopolu. While there, according to a writer familiar with the details of Moore’s life, he “formed an intimate acquaintance with the native manners and customs.

Footnote: Gilbert Haven, “Up the St. John’s,” Christian Advocate, April 12, 1877, p. 225; Tom W. Shick,Roll of the Emigrants to the Colony of Liberia Sent by the American Colonization Society from 1820-1843 [computer file]. Madison, WI: Tom W. Shick [producer], 1973; “Death of Gabriel Moore, Esq.,” African Repository, Jan. 1886, p. 43.