The Remarkable Story of Adrian Atiman: Freed Slave to Medical Missionary
Posted: 16 Apr 2013
Date Written: April 16, 2013
Abstract
Some time in the early 1870s a young boy from Tundurma on the Niger River near Timbuktu was pawned and sold into slavery. Passing through a series of masters he was taken across the Sahara. In Algeria he was redeemed by White Father missionaries. Baptized Joseph Adrian Atiman, he was educated and trained in medicine. In 1888 Atiman travelled to Zanzibar and to Karema on Lake Tanganyika with a missionary caravan. Thus began a remarkable career of 67 years as a medical catechist. Atiman left a rich autobiographical account of his enslavement, manumission, and incorporation into the White Fathers’ mission and medical work. Recent work on slavery in Africa illuminates the slave experience by tracing lives from enslavement through incorporation into host societies and the construction of new identities, or social rebirth. Slaves and freed slaves were not only commodities and labourers; they also took part in the development of new communities. This paper contextualizes Atiman’s story highlighting three themes: processes of enslavement and manumission; transcontinental aspects of the 19th-century slave trade; missionaries and freed slaves in the construction of new communities in the East African interior. Sources include the autobiography of Adrian Atiman; mission documentation; colonial records; ethnographic material.
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