Black Atlantic: The History of Africans Fight for Freedom

Name
Lecturer
Black Atlantic
Date
Introduction
Jose´ Guadalupe Ortega presents the history of Africans fight for freedom, identity and social in colonial regimes in the black. The case involves a Charleston –based French privateer in 1795 and members, subjects and citizens of multiple society from western Africa, Cuba, Spain and Great Britain. The main aim is to highlight the legal element of transatlantic trade as much as slave and their freedom were concerned.
A forty year litigation battle ensured with the capture of Britishvessel by the French maritime in the Caribbean and the subsequent transfer of enslaved African people from the British to French. The legal battle take place in in Madrid, Philadelphia, and Havana. The Atlantic society were confronted by the most prominent issue of that era (Ortega, pg. 2). While the officials in French and Britain competed to outsmart each other in identifying the legal identity of the carabali-oru people on the British vessel, their Philadelphia counterpart refrained from participating in the process. Faced by unjust environment, the carabali-oru people exploited the ambiguity created by the system of Atlantic jurisprudence in order to challenge the system.
This paper analyses the text by Ortega to evaluate and understand the competing notions of freedom and liberty across colonial times. And also explain to what extent the African experiences contribute to modernity.
Discussion
The competing legal interest in the black Atlantic region was necessitated by the transfer of two hundred African people from British to French. The legal battle would rage for forty years culminating to French’s early decision to abolish slave trade thereby creating a platform for the slaves, magistrates and publicdefenders participated in the development of Atlantic jurisprudence. Slaves thus became free men thanks to the authority from the French republic. However, the magistrates in Madrid would argue that the two hundred and seven slaves who now possessed civil legal personality could sue for their freedom as because the French claimed content of the Spanish and British ship after capturing them.
The economic merits of maritime seizures become a question for the officials in Madrid and Philadelphia, and while they struggle to grasp its relevance, the survivors of the harrowing experience, most of them the carabali-oru people confronted the actual economic, political and legal system that they were faced with in the unjust system in Cuba. Even though they enjoyed limited legal privileges, a group of carabli-ouru women refused to bow to pressure from the colonial system to determine their fate, by gathering and reliving their memory of the middle age passage, these women used the narratives, memory and cultural identity to establish a strategy for manumission that complemented imperial policies (Ortega, pg. 4).
They then became aware of news and information that relate to their case for freedom and they passed the information to less informed member of their group. In an attempt to secure their freedom, the carabali-oru women constructed a cultural and ethnic identity, combined it with their new found status of free to leverage and develop a legal strategy for e...