Liberated Bodies and Saved Souls: Freed African Slave Girls and Missionaries in Egypt

I early March 1887 twelve freed slave girls arrived at the Ezbekieh Boarding School run by American Presbyterian missionaries with fifty pounds and forty yards of calico for dresses. They had been sent by Sir Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer), the British agent and consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, from the Cairo Home for Freed Female Slaves, where they had been temporarily lodged.1 The dozen girls had been intercepted by British boats on the Red Sea or Egyptian police in caravans coming over land into Egypt ten years after the slave trade had been officially banned into and through the country and a few years before slavery itself became illegal. Their paths into slavery varied; their path out brought the dozen young girls together.