"D?n Na Malata," Mixed-Race Identity and Status in Colonial Sierra Leone, 1831-1931.

This article examines the social categorization of mixed-race Sierra Leoneans of African and European descent by European colonial authorities in colonial Sierra Leone. Furthermore, this article analyzes the agency of mixed-race Sierra Leoneans to self-identify as Sierra Leoneans and later as Creoles and "mulattoes" between 1831 and 1931 in the Colony of Sierra Leone. Although some scholars of multiracial populations have previously argued that European colonizers were the determinants of identity and status in colonial settings, as historians such as Ann Stoler have argued, colonial authorities did not easily draw these artificial colonial categories. In an anti-slavery colony in which mixed-race people formed a segment of the intermediary proxy group between Europeans and the autochthonous population, the identity and status of mixed-race Sierra Leoneans were negotiated between the European colonial social categorization of mixedrace people and the agency of mixed-race people to determine their identity. This article examines the cultural similarities between mixed-race and non-mixed-race Sierra Leoneans that contributed to the amalgamation of both groups into the emergent Creole ethnicity between the middle to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing on subaltern perspectives and the practices of colonial Sierra Leoneans, this article assesses the attempts of European colonial authorities to categorize mixed-race Sierra Leoneans and the agency of mixed-race Sierra Leoneans to determine their identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]