Cassandra Pybus
12 Noon -- Thursday, January 20, 2005
John Burns Hall 3121/25
East-West Center
Black Refugees of the American Revolution: Chesapeake Bay to Botany Bay, Yorktown to Freetown
During the American Revolution, tens of thousands of slaves allied themselves with the British in order to negotiate their freedom. When the British left America in 1783, they evacuated about 9,000 self-emancipated slaves to the imperial center in England and
parts of the British colonial empire: Nova Scotia, Bahamas, Jamaica, St Lucia, the Mosquito Coast. This paper follows the path of two individual runaways from Virginia, one of them a runaway from George Washington, into two bizarre colonial experiments begun in 1787: the Province of Freedom
in Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa and the penal settlement of Botany Bay on the east coast of Australia. In howling wilderness, at opposite ends of the globe, their struggle to find dignity and self-determination provides an insight into the complexities of the African diaspora, as
well as the slippery concept of freedom.
Cassandra Pybus is one of Australia’s most admired historians and writers. She is the author of ten books and Australian Research Council Chair in History at the University of Tasmania. Her latest book The Woman Who Walked to Russia, is a cross
between travel, history and autobiography and was published in the USA in 2003. Her next book Jubilee is Come: Black Freedom and the American Revolution will be published by Beacon Press in February 2006.
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Sponsored by:
Islands of Globalization Project, Pacific Islands Development Program, East-West Center
Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
Department of History, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
