{"id":19147,"date":"2026-01-01T12:37:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T12:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/?p=19147"},"modified":"2026-01-01T12:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T12:37:07","slug":"what-does-a-diary-entry-reveal-about-the-west-african-origins-of-apongo-a-rebel-leader-in-jamaica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/19147\/what-does-a-diary-entry-reveal-about-the-west-african-origins-of-apongo-a-rebel-leader-in-jamaica\/","title":{"rendered":"What does a diary entry reveal about the West African origins of Apongo, a rebel leader in Jamaica?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Devin Leigh<\/a>*<\/strong><\/p>\n

For over three centuries, between 1526 and 1866,\u00a0at least 10.5 million Africans<\/a>\u00a0were forcibly trafficked to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade.\u00a0Over half of them<\/a>\u00a0(with known places of departure) left from a 3,000km stretch of the west African coast between what are today Senegal and Gabon.<\/p>\n

Scholars trying to uncover the lives of these diasporic Africans are forced to work with historical records produced by their European and American enslavers. These writers mostly ignored Africans\u2019 individual identities. They gave them western names and wrote about them as products belonging to a set of supposedly distinct \u201cethnic\u201d brands.<\/p>\n

Now, however, the curious biography of an 18th-century Jamaican rebel confounds this inherited language. The rebel in question is Apongo, also known as Wager. His biography is a 134-word handwritten passage in the diary of an 18th-century enslaver named Thomas Thistlewood.<\/p>\n

As a\u00a0historian<\/a>\u00a0of the Atlantic World in the 1700s, I use the life stories and archives of British enslavers to better understand these times.<\/p>\n

My recent\u00a0study<\/a>\u00a0uses Thistlewood\u2019s biography of Apongo as a window into the origins of enslaved west Africans, particularly those from what are today the nations of Ghana and Benin.<\/p>\n

Apongo\u2019s story offers an opportunity to better understand the complexities of west African identity and to put a more human face on those enslaved.<\/p>\n

Who was Apongo, aka Wager?<\/h2>\n

Like many enslaved Africans, Apongo had two names. Unfortunately, neither of them completely unlocks his backstory. \u201cApongo\u201d is probably the rendering of his African name into English script according to how it sounded to his enslavers\u2019 ears. \u201cWager\u201d is a name Apongo was given by his white \u201cmaster\u201d. It had nothing to do with his African origins. In fact, it was the name of his enslaver\u2019s ship.<\/p>\n

Thistlewood was an English migrant to Jamaica who thought of himself as a gentleman scholar. According to one of his diary\u00a0entries<\/a>, Apongo led an extraordinary life defined by twists of fate. He was the prince of a West African state that paid tribute to a larger kingdom called \u201cDorme\u201d. After subjugating the peoples around him, the king of Dorme seems to have sent Apongo on a diplomatic mission to Cape Coast Castle in what is today Ghana. At the time it was the headquarters of Great Britain\u2019s trading operations on the African coast.<\/p>\n

While there, Apongo was apparently surprised, enslaved, and trafficked to Jamaica. At the time, Jamaica was the\u00a0British Empire\u2019s most profitable colony<\/a>. This was due to its sugar plantation complex based on racial slavery.<\/p>\n

Once in Jamaica, Apongo reunited with the governor he had visited at Cape Coast. He tried to obtain his freedom but, after failing for a number of years, led and died in an uprising called\u00a0Tacky\u2019s Revolt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unfolding over 18 months from 1760 and named after another one of its leaders, Tacky\u2019s Revolt left 60 Whites and over 500 Blacks dead. Another 500 Blacks were deported from the island. It was arguably the largest slave insurrection in the British Empire before the 19th century.<\/p>\n

The mystery in the diary<\/h2>\n

To appreciate why Thistlewood\u2019s diary entry is so valuable, we must know something about the lack of biographical information on enslaved Africans. Almost all came from societies with oral rather than literary traditions. They were then almost universally prohibited from learning to read and write by their European and American \u201cmasters\u201d.<\/p>\n

Enslavers almost never recorded enslaved people\u2019s birth names. Instead, they gave them numbers for the transatlantic passage and westernised names after they arrived. Rather than recording the specific places they came from, they lumped them together into groups based on broad zones of provenance. For example, the British tended to call Africans who came from today\u2019s Ghana \u201cCoromatees\u201d. Those from today\u2019s Republic of Benin were known as \u201cPopo\u201d. So, despite being just one paragraph long, Thistlewood\u2019s diary entry on Apongo is among the most detailed biographical sketches historians have of a diasporic African in the 1700s.<\/p>\n

But it also contains a mystery. The word Thistlewood used to describe Apongo\u2019s origins, \u201cDorme\u201d or perhaps \u201cDome\u201d, is unfamiliar. Since 1989, when historian Douglas Hall first\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0about Apongo, scholars have assumed it was a reference to Dahomey. This was a militarised west African kingdom in the southern part of today\u2019s Benin.<\/p>\n

Yet scholars never defended that assumption. Recently, it was called into question by historian Vincent Brown in\u00a0Tacky\u2019s Revolt<\/a>, the first book-length study of the slave uprising Apongo helped lead. Enslaved people from what is today Ghana have a\u00a0well-documented history<\/a>\u00a0of leading slave revolts in the Americas, particularly in British Jamaica. Brown suggested that it made more sense if \u201cDorme\u201d referred to an unidentified state in that region.<\/p>\n

Now, in my study, I have built on this work to make two related arguments. Uncovering three contemporary texts that use variant spellings of the word \u201cDorme\u201d to refer to Dahomey, I argue that Thistlewood\u2019s term was, indeed, a contemporary word for \u201cDahomey\u201d in 18th-century Jamaica and that Dahomey was almost certainly the kingdom he had in mind. Moreover, I demonstrate that it was both possible and reasonable for a diplomatic mission to have taken place between Dahomey and Cape Coast in Apongo\u2019s time. In fact, such a mission actually did take place in 1779, when\u00a0King Kpengla of Dahomey<\/a>\u00a0sent one of his linguists to Cape Coast as an emissary.<\/p>\n

But none of this resolves the central question. The evidence of \u201cCoromantee\u201d involvement in Tacky\u2019s Revolt and other Jamaican slave rebellions \u2013 including the presence of Ghanaian names among rebels and the statements of historians at the time \u2013 is overwhelming. Additionally, although Africans from Dahomey made the trip to Cape Coast Castle during the 18th century, visitors from states in today\u2019s Ghana were certainly much more common.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, to argue that Apongo had origins in Dahomey, one must explain how a subject of that kingdom came to be a general in a rebellion largely characterised by Ghanaian leadership.<\/p>\n

A question of origins<\/h2>\n

What are we to make of Apongo\u2019s origins? One answer is that Thistlewood was wrong. Apongo was \u201cCoromantee\u201d and we should think of him as Ghanaian. Thistlewood merely associated him with Dahomey because that was the militarised African kingdom best known to Europeans at the time.<\/p>\n

Another possibility is that Thistlewood was correct. Apongo was \u201cPopo\u201d and so we should write about him as Beninese. Thistlewood simply relayed a fact of Apongo\u2019s life and was unconcerned with questions that now preoccupy us, such as how Apongo came to lead a rebellion that appears characterised by \u201cCoromantee\u201d leadership.<\/p>\n

A third answer is that Apongo\u2019s identity was more complex than this inherited \u201cethnic\u201d language allows. Perhaps he was someone who traversed and was fluent in the cultural and political worlds of both Ghana and Benin. If that\u2019s the case, then perhaps his story reminds us that at least these two adjacent regions were not as distinct as early-modern writers claimed and later colonial and national borders supposed.<\/p>\n

The search for Apongo is just a small part of historians\u2019 larger, ongoing, and collaborative work to recreate the lives of Africans taken in the transatlantic slave trade.<\/p>\n

While asking these questions requires us to work with sources written by enslavers, we do so in the hope that we can ultimately see beyond them. Our reward is better understanding how Africans\u2019 forgotten perspectives shaped the history of our world.<\/p>\n

\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640\u0640<\/p>\n

* Lecturer, Global Studies, University of California, Berkeley.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For over three centuries, between 1526 and 1866,\u00a0at least 10.5 million Africans\u00a0were forcibly trafficked to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade.\u00a0Over half of them\u00a0(with known places of departure) left from a 3,000km stretch of the west African coast between what are today Senegal and Gabon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":4,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"1"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","source_name":"The Conversation","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[2362,9,27],"tags":[4739,4471,158,2037,4741,4740],"class_list":["post-19147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-figures","category-west-africa","tag-apongo","tag-cape-coast-castle","tag-ghana","tag-jamaica","tag-tackys-revolt","tag-thistlewood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19149,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19147\/revisions\/19149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}