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Studying Atlantic Slavery from Qatar

The records to independence

sarahs-hist.pdf

Certificates of freedom of those enslaved, particularly women, including their birthplace and skin complexion.

A document that presented the privilege to power and reassurance of finally being granted their right. A guarantee to freedom and liberty, affirmed by a piece of paper. Of enslavement to emancipation, granted in 1810 to a thirty-seven-year-old woman of a yellowed complexion. A certificate that recorded Sarah’s data and many other previously enslaved women too, documenting all from their complexion, height, and age. This document expressed unattachment, owning one’s own life, and the exemption from having to answer to an extraneous presence. It is a document created towards the right to liberty and granted the utmost fundamental and necessary rights. Though uncomplicated and compact, it meant peace, knowing one’s life belonged to them, rather than having to serve and subordinate one’s life to another. While it expressed freedom, its writing presented otherwise, to a more constitutional approach. It meant families had a chance towards normalcy, a stable mother figure that was allowed to be present in her children’s lives instead of her enslavers.

To be given freedom is being granted a fundamental right to owning one’s own self. For Sarah and many others in her position, this certificate represents the freedom they have received, both mentally and physically, from the constraints of slavery. Breaking the circle of injustice and exploited labor in no longer having to be owned by anyone. It symbolizes ownership over one’s own body, beyond the sexual and physical exploitation once received. In the transatlantic slave trade, women were bought from the slave trade at a lower price than men, of which this certificate ends this misogynistic factor as well. Moreover, ending the submission and association of having a degrading status such as “slave” to none. Breaking the chains of slavery and sexism, of being tied to domestic servitude and abusive reproductive labor. Making way for kinship and generations to form, creating a society and a place to call home, following the years of alienation.

This source is crucial as it presents a myriad of detailed documentation. With its being a physical record of the information of a multitude of women; and the years they were enslaved. It is essential to the Atlantic world as it exhibits the interactions and relationships between those in power and natural hierarchies. Mainly because, as though there was much exploration, there was also wrongful tyranny and exploitation.

Bibliography : 

Robertson, Claire. "WOMEN AND SLAVERY: Changes and Continuities." In Holding the World Together: African Women in Changing Perspective, edited by Robertson Claire and Achebe Nwando, 191-209. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,2019. Accessed November 14, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvfjcxvh.13.

Eltis, David, and Stanley L. Engerman. "Was the Slave Trade Dominated by Men?" The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 2 (1992): 237-57. Accessed November 14, 2020. https://doi-org.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/10.2307/205275

"Statue of Emancipated Slave, Philadelphia, 1876", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/529 Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (Aug. 5, 1876). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-38373)

 “A NEGRO WOMAN THE PROPERTY OF FR. MIGUEL, 1814”, http:// slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/26

Lolwa Al-Mannai

GUQ class of 2023