Jeffrey Gunn - Outsourcing African Labor

Jeffrey Gunn

Outsourcing African Labor

Africa in Global History

Edited by

Joel Glasman

Omar Gueye

Alexander Keese

Christine Whyte

Volume

Jeffrey Gunn

Kru Migratory Workers in Global Ports, Estates and Battlefields until the End of the 19th Century

ISBN 9783110680225

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110680331

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110680416

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

No great undertaking can be completed alone. In this spirit, I would like to thank my wife, Saowakhon Pansri, my parents, Sandra and David Gunn, my sister and her family, Julie, Frank, Blake, Logan, and Hailey Rozsas, my cousins, Terrence Jon and Jay Craig, and my lifelong friends Jon Brohman, Jeff Vanderby, Josh Mills, Matt Lindsay, Michael Morris, Julie Quinn, Julie Tamaki, Kristian Shepherd, and Bill Merritt for their encouragement, love, and support throughout the completion of this book.

I am extremely grateful to my mentor and friend Paul Lovejoy for always driving me to perform at my best and for the incredible opportunity to travel the world for research and conferences. I give special mention to George Brooks at Indiana University for generously providing me with many boxes of unpublished sources from the 1970s, and Suzanne Schwarz and Stephen Rockel for enthusiastically sharing information on the Kru when they came upon it in their own research. And, I thank Mark Williamson for his sketches.

The completion of this book has been a monumental journey, which has led me to conduct research in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, the United Kingdom, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and the United States. None of these research trips would have been possible without the support of several scholarship programs and funding from key institutions. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support I received to finance my doctoral studies, which inform this book, from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program (OGS), The Harriet Tubman Institute, and the Department of History at York University.

I extend a deep sense of gratitude to members of the Kru communities I visited in Sierra Leone including Chief Tuleh Davis, Rev. Joseph Kamara, and Doe Smith; in Liberia, Kru Governor Alice Weah, Deputy Governor S. Tugbe Worjloh, Rev. Nyanford Gibson, Anthony Teah, Jacob P. Myers, Moses Baryor, Edwin Wiah, and L. Slewion Kontons; and in Ghana, Okyeeme Gikafo and Allwei Bonso III. It is an honor to share your stories and memories of Kru workers in your communities.

I would like to give thanks to those friends whose efforts made for successful research trips including Aiah Yendeh, Taziff Koroma, and Abdullai Brima, for their guidance and lodgings in Freetown, and to Charles for motorcycle transport from Sierra Leone to Liberia; Kae Sun for arranging lodgings in Accra, Rev. Kwaku Darko-Mensah for his hospitality, and Sidney Palupa for his guidance, transportation, and translations; Connie Abbe and Silvastone for providing lodgings in London while I worked at the British Library, The National Archives and SOAS; Nigel Baptiste and his family for providing lodgings while researching at the National Archives and the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago; Eon and Marilyn Sinclair for providing contacts in Guyana, and Osric Best for his time and generosity; George and Elaine Brooks for their hospitality in Bloomington, Indiana; and Bruno Vras, Leidy Alpzar, Vanessa Oliveira, and Dina Issakova for assistance with logistics. Sections of this book were written in various locations including Toronto, Rice Lake, Thailand, and the Hollywood Hills. I would like to thank the Pansri family in Nakhon Ratchasima for their hospitality, as well as Donald Colhour and Terrence Jon for their generosity and the opportunity to write at the Luftschloss in the Hollywood Hills.

It is a great privilege to share the story of the Kru. It has been a grand adventure.