King Siaka
Coastal African Ruler
(a.k.a. Shaka, Shiakar, Shuckar) Sometime in the late-1810s, as the volume of slave trading on the Gallinas River began to grow, a Vai chief named Siaka emerged as a dominant power in the region. The story here comes to us indirectly, and details are obscure, but by 1819, Siaka was establishing a reputation among European slavers as a chief who could provide slaves quickly and cheaply in substantial numbers. Over the next several decades, as the volume of slaving increased, Siaka's political and military power grew apace -- "King Siaka," the Europeans and Americans began calling him. Eventually his influence extended not only through the Vai country along the Gallinas coastline, but into the interior as well.
It was an expansion that drove and that was driven by the slave trade: Siaka expanded to acquire new supplies of slaves and to secure food supplies to feed them while they waited in the coastal baracoons for slave ships to arrive. And meanwhile, as the scale of his slave trading increased, Siaka's access to armaments (muskets and powder) and wealth grew correspondingly, swelling his power. He hired Mende mercenaries to subjugate rivals. And he maintained close relationships with European slave traders on the Gallinas, particularly Pedro Blanco. So the rise of “King Siaka” tells us something about the slave trade's impact on the region: he represented a new kind of ruler among the Vai -- part of what anti-slavery activist James Hall called a "new order of society and a novel form of government" as this part of the African coast adapted to the slave trade.
AMISTAD: Several of the Amistad captives passed directly through Siaka's hands. Cinque himself was sold to "Ba-ma-dzha, son of Shaka, king of Gen-du-ma." And Beri, too, was sold to "Shaka." In all likelihood, Siaka implicated himself in the enslavement of many of the other Amistad captives as well, by collecting a what European slavers called a "dash" -- a fee for each slave handled by the factories within his territory.
Fred Dalzell
SOURCES: Adam Jones, From Slaves to Palm Kernels: A History of the Galinhas
Country (West Africa), 1730-1890 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983) (esp. Chapter
5).
