Theatre-Royal. Mr. Holman and Miss Holman. The New Grand Play of The Africans: or, War, Love, and Duty… This present Friday, May 19, 1809… with entirely new Scenery, Dresses, and other African Decorations…. by Colman, George. [Playbill for The Africans at the Theatre-Royal, Liverpool] - 1809

*** ON HOLD 01/30/20222 *** Broadside on laid paper with a large armorial watermark. Folio [29.5 x 19.5 cm] Very good. Loose as issued. [1321]

Extremely rare, well-preserved playbill for the second night of Colman's anti-slavery polemic The Africans, poignantly staged in Liverpool - the epicenter of the British slave trade – in the years immediately following the Slave Trade Act of 1807. The play was not well-received in London where it premiered in 1808, and no contemporary version ever appeared in print; indeed, the earliest published edition we have traced corresponds to a performance in Philadelphia, where The Africans gained popularity beginning in 1811. The details of the performance recorded on the present playbill may thus constitute a valuable historical source for the history of the play; at the very least it visually reflects an intriguing aspect of vernacular Liverpudlians' interactions with slavery in popular culture. "[Abolitionist] messages also found resonance in the theatre as… Colman… took the distressing image of the poor, innocent slave to heart, pushing it to the forefront of… The Africans." (Appleton). As Gibbs points out, the play "materialized developing racialized taxonomic categories via its text, actors, sets, costume, and makeup." As advertised here, the cast of characters includes 'Demba Sego Jalla, King of Kasson', played by Mr. Powell; the 'Mandingo Chief' played by Mr. Howell; 'Negro Warriors' played by Messrs. Woodward & Howell; and an entire bevvy of 'Female Slaves' played by Mss Turpin, Moreton, Parker, Grant, Parsons, Andrews, Larkman, Howell, etc. Also prominently advertised is the content of the Act I: 'A Negro Bridal Dance'. We also gain some details of the scenography from the announcement, which boasts "a View of the Town of Fatteconda in Bondon, a district of Africa"; "the Interior of Ferulho's house'; "Ferulho's Tent, with a distant view of the Town of Fatteconda"; "The Camp of the Mandingo King"; and so on. The plot of The Africans revolves around two West African nobles, Selico and Berissa, separated on their wedding day when a slave-trading Mandingo tribe invades their village. Berissa is captured by these raiders, who intend to sell their captives to European slave traders. The distraught Selico, believing Berissa to be dead, seeks out the Mandingo camp to sell himself into transatlantic slavery to feed his starving mother. To his surprise he is re-united with his fiancé, and their release is eventually successfully negotiated by none other than Selico's mother. "The Africans lifted a veil on indigenous slavery and exposed the role European slave traders played as instigators of interethnic bellicosity… Colman's villains were a group of vicious European slave traders, pointedly named Marrowbone, Grim, Flayall, and Fetterwell… the play offered a firm condemnation of slavery while at the same time it portrayed an Africa in need of enlightened Western liberty" (Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850, pp. 98-107). By 1740 Liverpool had surpassed Bristol and London as the slave-trading capital of Britain. One in five African captives crossing the ocean was carried on one of Liverpool's approximately 130 slaving ships (by contrast Bristol had 42 and London only 22). With 40% of the local income dependent in some form on the traffic of Black humans, abolitionist sentiments did not find an easy footing in Liverpool – making the appearance of Colman's play in that city all the more remarkable. Appleton notes that "for the most part, Liverpool's critics remained silent on the presence of abolitionary sympathetic texts in the town's theatres. It seems that there was a conscious effort to keep debates on race and slavery removed from the cultural entertainment in the town during this period. In the 1820s the Theatre Royal began to put on Morton's The Slave and Colman's The Africans, both of which subtly supported the continuing efforts of the town's campaigners with their passionate rhetoric, but were not directly aligned with, or publicly adopted by, any local movement." (Appleton, pp 156-157). The 1807 Slave Trade Act, a modest precursor to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, ostensibly brought an end to these Liverpudlian merchants' livelihood. "Set before the [Act of 1807], Colman deliberately places matter of fact and unfeeling language into the mouths of his English traders to highlight the inhumanity of slave trafficking. As merchants Fetterwell and Marrowbone examine the slaves put before them for sale, they compare the captives to pieces of meat hanging up in a butcher's shop… Both The Slave and The Africans stand out as particularly key dramatic pieces at the turn of the nineteenth century for one important reason. They were amongst the first extensively popular plays appearing on the British stage to portray a richly complicated web of inter-racial relationships and ideologies of loyalty, debt, gratitude, and power on foreign soil." (Appleton). We have been unable to trace a copy of the present playbill in COPAC; but we note a copy of some version in the Leeds Brotherton Library (Nineteenth-Century Playbills collection). As described above, no printed version of The Africans exists contemporaneous with the present advertisement; indeed, the edition used in eg. Appleton's study is the Cumberland's British Theatre edition of ca. 1843. * cf Alexandra Appleton, In Search of an Identity: The Changing Fortunes of Liverpool's Theatre Royal, 1772-1855 (PhD thesis, University of London, 2015).