TERRITORY OF THE KROOMEN,Upper Guinea,West Africa

1890s HISTORICAL MAP CHART

Kru workers from Liberia and Sierra Leone were the most numerous of the alien African peoples who lived and worked along the Cameroon coast in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if not earlier . These laborers were frequently referred to as "Krooboys," but over time their specific ethnic identity became blurred. The Krooboys, or Kroo, represented many different peoples recruited from eastern Liberia, Sierra Leone, and present-day Cote d'Ivoire. Europeans hired as mariners men originating from the five towns identified with the Kru name . Migrant workers came from the Kru and Grebo of Grand Cess and the Grebo and other groups inhabiting the region around Cape Palmas and areas in Cote d'Ivoire. Later, other peoples from the interior as well as from western Liberia who were hired as migrant laborers came to be known as Krooboys . Any reconstruction of Kru ethnicity and history is, at best, difficult. The Kru were indispensable to European success in Africa, and constituted "the backbone of white effort" especially in West Africa . They were employed as deckhands and laborers on European ships plying the coast. According to George Brooks, "the earliest reference to Kru shipboard employment ... is on a Spanish vessel which stopped at Elmina in February 1645" accounted for approximately 2,000 Kru laborers hired annually in the Niger and Cross River Deltas by the mid-nineteenth century. Many returned home and took foreign artistic conventions with them, including those of the Niger Delta and environs. In the early nineteenth century, British Anti-Slavery patrols contributed to the transmission of Ijo conventions when they intercepted slaving ships and deposited the freed men and women, which included Ijo and other Delta peoples, in Sierra Leone and Liberia

1890s Wood Engraving Antique Map

Approximate Overall Size: 7 X 10 1/2 inches

CONDITION: Book Plate INTEXT MAP - Excellent Condition. Beautiful with excellent detail. There is Text on Front and Back Side.