Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Transcription

Repercussions of the
Atlantic Slave Trade
The Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora
Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola, eds., Pawnship, Slavery and Colonialism
in Africa, 2003
Donald G. Simpson, Under the North Star: Black Communities in Upper
Canada before Confederation (1867), 2005
Paul E. Lovejoy, Slavery, Commerce and Production in West Africa: Slave
Society in the Sokoto Caliphate, 2005
José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France, eds., Africa and the Americas:
Interconnections during the Slave Trade, 2005
Paul E. Lovejoy, Ecology and Ethnography of Muslim Trade in West Africa,
2005
Naana Opoku-Agyemang, Paul E. Lovejoy and David Trotman, eds.,
Africa and Trans-Atlantic Memories: Literary and Aesthetic Manifestations of Diaspora and History, 2008
Boubacar Barry, Livio Sansone, and Elisée Soumonni, eds., Africa, Brazil,
and the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities, 2008
Behnaz Asl Mirzai, Ismael Musah Montana, and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds.,
Slavery, Islam and Diaspora, 2009
Carolyn Brown and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave
Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora, 2010
Edmund Abaka, House of Slaves and “Door of No Return”: Gold Coast Castles
and Forts of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 2010
Ute Röschenthaler, Purchasing Culture in the Cross River Region of Cameroon and Nigeria, 2010
Ana Lucia Araujo, Mariana P. Candido and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Crossing
Memories: Slavery and African Diaspora, 2010
Repercussions of the
••
The Interior of the
Bight of Biafra
and the African Diaspora
Edited by
Carolyn A. Brown
and
Paul E. Lovejoy
Copyright © 2010 Carolyn A. Brown and Paul E. Lovejoy
First Printing 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Book and cover design: Saverance Publishing Services
Cover photograph: Ekpe masquerade at Arochukwu by Eli Bentor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Repercussions of the Atlantic slave trade : the interior of the Bight of
Biafra and the African diaspora / Carolyn Brown ... [et al.], editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59221-357-X (hardcover) -- ISBN 1-59221-358-8 (pbk.) 1.
Slave trade--Biafra, Bight of, Region--History. 2. Slavery--Biafra, Bight
of, Region--History. 3. Slavery--America--History. 4. Biafra, Bight of,
Region--Social conditions. 5. Blacks--America--Social conditions. I.
Brown, Carolyn A. (Carolyn Anderson), 1944HT1334.B5R46 2005
306.3’62’096694--dc22
2004029019
Dedicated
to
Adiele Afigbo
(1937-2009)
On the 10th Anniversary of the
Nike Lake Conference,
“Repercussions of the Slave Trade:
The African Diaspora and the Hinterland
of the Bight of Biafra”
• T ab l e o f C o ntents •
Preface
THE ERA OF THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
1 | The Bight of Biafra and Slavery
Carolyn A. Brown and Paul E. Lovejoy
2 | The Slave Ports of the Bight of Biafra in the Eighteenth
Century
Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson
3 | Before the Middle Passage: Igbo Slave Journeys to Old Calabar
and Bonny
Johnston Akuma Kalu Njoku
4 | The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Ohafia Warrior Tradition:
Global Forces and Local Histories
John C. McCall
5 | Osu Social Outcasts and the Atlantic Slave Trade
Ichie P.A. Ezikeojiaku
6 | Equiano on Igbo Warfare
A.E. Afigbo
IGBO DIASPORA IN THE AMERICAS
7 | The Anguished Igbo Response to Enslavement in the Americas
Michael Gomez
8 | Buried Treasure: Searching with Francisco Castañeda, Negro
Esclavo Caravali, in Nueva Granada
Renée Soulodre-La France
9 | Ekpe in Cuba: The Abakuá Secret Society, Race and Politics
Christine Ayorinde
Repercussions of the Slave Trade
10 | Revisiting the Identity of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus
Vassa, the African
Vincent Carretta
11 | Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah
Equiano, the African
Paul E. Lovejoy
AFTERMATH OF THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
12 | Niger River Trade and the Interregnum at Aboh, 1844-1862
Femi Kolapo
13 | Ownership of Slaves in Nsukka in the Nineteenth Century
Christian C. Opata and Damian U. Opata
14 | From Children of Ham to Agents of Christ: The Place of
Former Slaves in Christian Evangelism in the Biafra Hinterland
Nicholas Omenka
15 | Semantic Implications of “Ohu” and “Amadi”: The Aftermath
of Slavery in Nkanu and Ezeagu
Nneka Nora Osakwe
16 | Contestation and Identity Transformation under Colonialism:
Emancipation Struggles in South Nkanu, 1920-1935
Carolyn A. Brown
CONTEMPORARY MEMORIES OF ENSLAVEMENT
17 | Aro Ikeji Festival – Historical Consciousness and Negotiated
Identities
Eli Bentor
18 | Precolonial Slave Relationships in Contemporary Local
Politics at Nike
Axel Harneit-Sievers
19 | The Stigmatization of Descendants of Slaves in Igboland
Paul Obi-Ani
20 | Those Ibos! Jus’ Upped and Walked Away’: The Story of the
Slaves At Ibo Landing as Transcendent Ritual
Abena P.A. Busia
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
viii
Table of Contents
TABLES
Table 1.1 | Departures from the Bight Biafra by National Carrier,
1531-1851
Table 1.2 | Destinations of Africans from the Bight of Biafra
Maps
Map 1.1 | The Bight of Biafra and its Hinterland, 19th Century
Map 1.2 | Udi District
Map 17.1 | Enugu and region
Map 18.1 |Southeastern Nigeria indicating main areas of Aro
settlements and Aro trade routes
Map 18.2 | Villages of Arochukwu Town
Map 19.1 | Nike and surrounding area
Illustrations
Figure 2.1 | Ekpe Masquerade, with Guard of Honor, at Funeral
of Mazi Maurison Ogbonnaya Nnadozie, alias OgaAdichama, Arochukwu, 1989
Figure 3.1 | Entering the Forest of God
Figure 3.2 | Crossing River of Blood at cave outlet in Iyi Eke
Figure 3.3 | Ahia Afo slave market in Bende
Figure 3.4 | Route leading from Uzuakoli via Ozu Item to Bende
Figure 3.5 | Eke Ukwu Agbagwu slave market
Figure 3.6 | Roots of the Achi tree in Eke Oba Agbagwu market
in Uzuakoli
Figure 3.7 | Ahia Nwaebule slave market in Azumini
Figure 16.1 | Conceptual/ denotative meanings of ohu
Figure 16.2 | Igbo synonyms for ohu
Figure 16.3 | Semantic connotations of ohu
Figure 18.1 | Nkuma Asaa Shrine to Osim at Amaikpe Square,
Arochukwu
ix
Figure 18.2 | Ofo Ukwu (Grand Ofo) marking the burial of Osim,
Oror Village, Arochukwu
Figure 18.3 | Brass rod currency
Figure 18.4 | Ancestral Sacrifice During Annual Ikeji Festival,
Ujari Village, Arochukwu
Figure 18.5 |Awada Aro at Ugwuakuma – The burial place of
Akuma and site of the culminating event on Avo
Ndulata Nwékpé
Figure 18.6 | Eze Aro signals departure of procession from Oror
to Awada Aro, Ikeji 2005
x
• Preface •
T
his volume has evolved from a conference that was held at Nike Lake
in Nigeria in 2000 that had as its intention an assessment of the repercussions of the trans-Atlantic migration of enslaved Africans from the
interior of the Bight of Biafra. The conference , “Repercussions of the Slave
Trade: The African Diaspora and the Hinterland of the Bight of Biafra,”
focused on broad levels of analysis and involved a dialog among scholars in
Nigeria and elsewhere. Inevitably, not all the contributions to the conference could be included here, and some papers were based on preliminary
work that undoubtedly will be influenced by the discussions and exchanges
at the conference, which included scholars from the southeastern states of
Nigeria – the geographical focus of the conference and this volume – but
also from the Caribbean, North America and Europe. The focus is on the
interior of the Bight of Biafra and the diaspora of peoples who were forcibly removed from this area. The chronology of the studies begins with the
period of trans-Atlantic slavery but extends into the nineteenth century,
after the slave migration ended, and into the colonial and post-colonial
eras of the twentieth century. It was intended to examine the consequences
and ramifications of trans-Atlantic slavery as well as the initial, defining
period in the history of the people of the interior of the Bight of Biafra.
In this regard, it is worth noting that the Conference included excursions
to Bende and Aro Chukwu and interaction with dignitaries and notable
custodians of local history. Experiences of the group included a visit to
Uzuakoli and the shrine of Aro Chukwu, a dramatic masquerade at Bende
and the apparent operations of the ekpe society at Aro Chukwu.
The conference was funded by the Ford Foundation, the History
Department and Dean of Science and Humanities, Rutgers University, the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada
Research Chair in African Diaspora History, and the Harriet Tubman
Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, York
University. The conference was sponsored in Nigeria by Abia State University and held at the Nike Lake Hotel. We wish especially to thank Anayo
Enechukwu, Africana Research Centre, Enugu, and Renée Soulodre-La
France, King’s College, University of Western Ontario, for their assistance
in the organization of the conference in Nigeria and for the preliminary
stages of assembling a volume from the papers presented. We would also
like to thank Michael Siegel, Staff Cartographer, Department of Geography, Rutgers University, for the map in the Introduction. Eli Bentor provided the photographs of the Ekpe masquerade at Arochukwu that appear
on the cover and also in Chapter 1.
The volume is dedicated to Adiele Afigbo, whose pioneering role in
the study of Igbo history is hereby acknowledged. See especially Toyin
Falola, ed., Igbo History and Society: The Essays of Adiele Afigbo (Trenton, NJ:
Africa World Press, 2005). The present volume is published in Professor
Afigbo’s honor on the tenth anniversary of the Nike Lake conference.
Carolyn A. Brown
Paul E. Lovejoy
xii
THE ERA OF THE
T R A N S - AT L A N T I C
S L AV E T R A D E
••
•1•
The Bight of Biafra
and Slavery
Carolyn A. Brown
and Paul E. Lovejoy
T
he Bight of Biafra has a sordid yet fascinating history because of the
intense connection with slavery, first as a source of enslaved labor for
the Americas and then because of the continuation of forms of slavery in
the interior. The Bight of Biafra was a major source of enslaved Africans
in the terrible forced migration to the Americas, probably involving the
departure of 1.6 million people from the 1530s to the 1830s. During the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, incalculable numbers of people
were subjected to enslavement through kidnapping, religious determination, debt, and organized military campaigns. Enslaved victims figured
prominently in trade in the interior of the Bight of Biafra from at least
the early eighteenth century and probably earlier still. The scale of enslavement was massive, accounting for the 1.6 million people who were forced
to embark on slave ships for the Americas. If the numbers of people who
were enslaved but never left the region are also included, then the total
demographic displacement through slavery was considerably more than
this figure. Surviving evidence suggests intense insecurity in the region
since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century that resulted in problems of kidnapping. The arbitrary seizure of people was to a considerable
extent the reason why the region was able to sell people into slavery at
the coast. It seems that a system of (mis)governance developed that facilitated the deportation of significant numbers of people through slavery.
The impact on society in the interior of the Bight of Biafra and in the
diaspora that was formed in the Americas was profound. Moreover, slavery
persisted as an institution into the twentieth century under colonialism, as
has the legacy of relationships of dominance that were integral to slavery.
Very few people left the Bight of Biafra before 1640, perhaps no more
than 10,000 (Table 1.1). The numbers increased in the century after 1640,
when almost 254,000 people left by 1725. In the 1640s, the number of
people leaving was less than 150 per year but increased to 2,400 per year
in the 1650s, averaging at least that level, sometimes falling to 1,500 per
year, but also reaching 2,700 per year, through the 1720s. Then in the 1730s
there was a sharp rise in the number of people leaving, reaching almost
33,000 for the decade. In the 1740s, the number rose further to 45,000,
and peaked at 114,000 in the 1760s and 135,000 in the 1790s. Almost
950,000 people left the Bight of Biafra in the period 1730-1807. In the
nineteenth century, too, the number of departures remained considerable,
rebounding from the wars of Europe in the 1820s to 140,000 departures
before falling off under British anti-slave pressure in the 1830s and 1840s,
but still accounting for 2,300 per year in the 1840s, about the same level as
in the 1650s. About 360,000 people left in the period after British abolition.1
Before 1740 the Bight of Biafra provided a relatively modest 7 percent
of the transatlantic slave trade, but by the 1780s, when the trade was at its
peak, the area supplied over 20 percent of all enslaved Africans going to
the Americas, a remarkable increase from the early eighteenth century. It
should also be observed that 65 percent of departures went on British and
North American ships, and this accounted for most people who left before
1808. The people who went on Spanish, Portuguese and French ships, by
contrast, largely left after British abolition. Not surprisingly, most people
went to British colonies in the eighteenth century, with a secondary migration that continued to Spanish America. After 1807, most people went to
Spanish colonies, especially Cuba, where immigrants tended to associate
with the abakuá secret society that was derived from ekpe, the male only
association whose masquerade was the leopard and that was graded into
a hierarchy of membership. Ekpe effectively served as a judicial body and
executive that controlled society at Old Calabar, Arochukwu, and throughout much of the interior of the Bight of Biafra. Thus, the intensity of the
forced migration from the early eighteenth century lasted until the third
decade of the nineteenth century, slightly more than a century. This relative concentration of the enslaved migration in the century following the
2
The Bight of Biafra and Slavery
1730s, the direction of the movement, and its sudden collapse in the 1830s
have yet to be fully explained. The essays in this volume address issues
relating to this trajectory and subsequent adjustments into the twentieth
century.
Table 1.1 | Departures from the Bight Biafra by National Carrier,
1531-1851
Great Britain
Netherlands
North America
France
1,040
1,978
1,457
1,461
234
54
12,050
20,793
9,901
2,261
7,537
65,630
31,772
0
156,167
9.8
0
0
0
0
24,052
62,334
53,935
37,906
166,288
293,541
287,969
104,556
0
0
1,030,582
64.6
0
0
83
0
6,769
17,178
3,096
524
0
974
0
0
53
0
28,677
1.8
0
0
0
0
453
0
0
264
2,813
689
0
2,818
0
0
7,037
0.4
0
0
0
0
895
780
0
6,900
3,065
18,674
38,293
62,108
51,570
0
182,284
11.4
Totals
Portugal & Brazil
1,040
1,405
1,457
1,461
234
434
0
0
0
3,569
2,033
29,721
146,933
2
188,288
11.8
Denmark
Spain
1531-1550
1551-1575
1576-1600
1601-1625
1626-1650
1651-1675
1676-1700
1701-1725
1726-1750
1751-1775
1776-1800
1801-1825
1826-1850
1851
Totals
Percent
0
2,080
0
3,383
0
2,996
0
2,921
903
33,540
0
80,780
0
69,080
445
66,833
0
182,066
0
319,709
176
336,008
0
264,834
0
230,328
0
2
1,525 1,594,560
0.1
Source: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2www.slavevoyages.org).
The area of our concern lies between the Niger and Cross rivers and
reaches from the coast to several hundred miles in the north. The people
inhabiting this region had a number of similarities, including decentralized
political organization, reliance on ideologies of kinship to establish core
cohesive values, a highly developed distributive trade system and a history
of population movement. The three key ethnic groups, Igbo, Ibibio and
Ijaw (Ijo), while identified as distinct groups by anthropologists and linguists, have been in contact for several centuries and hence ethnic distinctions disguise porous conceptual boundaries. The categorization of these
groups uses a linguistic classification developed by Joseph Greenberg.2 The
people themselves have not always accepted the ethno-linguistic catego3
ries of anthropologists but rather have tended to refer to themselves by
names that scholars consider as sub-groups, such as Efik rather than Ibibio
or Awka, Nri and others who are often conflated into the designation Igbo.
Moreover, status distinctions mattered, particularly because of indigenous concepts of slavery (osu, ohu).3 While it is not possible to establish
the extent of enslavement in the interior of the Bight of Biafra in the
period of trans-Atlantic slavery or during the period of the palm oil trade
in the nineteenth century, we know that slavery has existed for a long time
and persisted well into the colonial period. And its continuation after the
termination of the forced Atlantic migration is clear from the use of slave
labor in the processing and transport of palm oil for export, as well as
in yam production to feed the region of palm oil output. Hence, slavery
continued after the end of the trans-Atlantic traffic, as the essays in this
volume demonstrate. In the twentieth century, anthropologists and government officials were able to study the institution even as attempts were
made to shape the collapse of slavery through the so-called Native House
Rule Ordinance. The legacy of slavery and the institutionalized mechanisms of subordination have continued to plague the region to the present.
Available evidence indicates that almost everyone who left the Bight
of Biafra boarded at one of three ports, Elem Kalabari (New Calabar) and
Bonny (Iboni), both in the delta of the Niger River, and Old Calabar on
the adjacent Cross River and its tributaries, the Calabar and Creek Rivers.
From the 1740s, moreover, the overwhelming number of deportees passed
through Bonny. This concentration is important in explaining the relatively
homogenous identification of people from the Bight of Biafra culture in the
Americas as Kalabari and the association in Cuba with abakuá, although
identification as “Igbo” or “Moko” reveal that distinctions were retained that
reflected dispersed origins. The Igbo language in particular was useful as a
means of communication on virtually all the ships that left from the Bight of
Biafra and wherever people of the Bight of Biafra were concentrated in the
Americas. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, the process of “creolization” began in the Bight of Biafra. The individuals who passed through the
three ports in a sense were “processed” for shipment. What did this mean for
the lives of people? These are questions that affected not only those who were
deported but those who remained. Slavery affected the migrating population
as well as altering conditions of homeland. We cannot assume that cultural
change or that common backgrounds resulted in similar experiences. We can
be sure that homeland and diaspora suffered from the scourge of slavery, but
how this was realized is subject of enquiry, and is the underlying purpose of
this volume.
4
Map 1.1 | The Bight of Biafra and its Hinterland, 19th Century
The slave trade merged the pre-capitalist economies of West Africa
with the vibrant capitalist transformation of Europe and the New World
into an Atlantic economy. The types of adaptations made by the people
of the Niger delta demonstrate that West African leaders were astute in
understanding the complexities of international trade. Their willingness
to experiment with new ways of restructuring their societies engaged this
trade, although their “solutions” to the challenges ultimately put their societies at a disadvantage. Nonetheless the story of the extraordinary adaptations made by the coastal people and their hinterland suppliers when confronted with the slave trade demonstrates that political experimentation
of so-called “traditional” societies was more extensive then often thought.
In this volume, the core area, Igboland, is considered the “baseline” for
evaluating the transformations that marked the period of trans-Atlantic
slavery. Today there are some 20 million Igbo–speaking peoples in the
15,800 square miles inland from the Gulf of Guinea. The region appears to
have had one of the highest population densities in Africa, perhaps reach5
ing levels of from 400 to 1,000 persons per square mile as early as 1800.
Although the interior of the Bight of Biafra is within the Guinea coastal
climatic zone with heavy rainfall, there are distinct ecological subdivisions
with varying soil types, amounts of rain, and vegetation.4 This ecological
diversity accounts for the social, cultural and economic organization that
characterized the identification of the population with specific regions
within the climatic zone. People spoke different dialects of Igbo but they
shared cultural traits. However, it seems that they never perceived of themselves as a distinct ethnic group called “Igbo.” Rather, they emphasized
localized identities which facilitated kidnapping and warfare that benefitted the slave trade.5
Before the Atlantic trade, the people of the Biafra hinterland traded
to the north, where the Igala, with their monarchal tradition, controlled
trade along the Niger River. They traded slaves northward, using overland
networks that led ultimately to the Sahara. In return they imported horses,
cattle, salt and other commodities into the region south of the Benue River.
The earliest archeological evidence of commercial connections is the Igbo
Ukwu burial site near the market town of Onitsha, which dates to 700-900
A.D. Thurston Shaw has argued that a possible link to the sahelian kingdoms to the north is suggested in burial customs that included foreign
objects imported from North Africa and even Italy.6 Hence the region has
a long history of international trade that predates the trans-Atlantic slave
trade but was tied to the north.
Current research suggests that the ancestors of the Igbo originated
in the savanna region near the confluence of the Niger–Benue Rivers.7
Long before the period of trans-Atlantic slavery, these ancestors dispersed
to the Awka–Orlu plateau and then to Owerri and the southeast. Historians believe that this migration populated the heartland of Igboland,
with a tripartite division between Awka, Orlu, and Okigwi.8 Although
the precise dates of these migrations are vague, archaeological excavations
near Nsukka have identified pottery that is 4,000-5,000 years old.9 Subsequently, this proto-Igbo culture spilled over the Niger River to the west.
By the early seventeenth century small states had formed on the banks
of the Niger River and its tributaries. The states had common characteristics that demonstrated the advantage of a riverine location over settlements
in the interior. They were inhabited by Ndi Mili Nnu (“People of the Salt
Water”),10 founded by migrants, some from outside Igboland. K.O. Dike
has argued that the settlement of the Niger delta occurred in several migrations.11 The first occurred before the fifteenth century and was associated
with the expansion of the Benin kingdom. It resulted in the establishment of
Ijaw fishing and salt-making villages in the western delta. In the period after
6
the mid fifteenth century, several Ijaw villages were transformed into small
city states that subsequently dominated trade well into the late nineteenth
century, until the British imperialist invasion of the region.12 The arrival of
Portuguese in the Bight of Biafra added another layer of diversity to the
hybrid societies of the Niger delta. This further complicated an evolving local
culture that itself reflected the influences of the peoples of the interior.13
King lists provide a reliable source of historical information about
foundations of these states and how previous inhabitants were assimilated
or expelled. The various riverine communities were autonomous, with
no centralized government emerging that could conquer or otherwise
subjugate the others. Their proximity still necessitated the regulation of
relationships through diplomacy, however. Elizabeth Isichei argues that
the strategic advantages these settlements gained in access to the Atlantic
trade outweighed the military vulnerability of their locations along the
waterways.14 By the eighteenth century the heads of commercial houses
at Bonny and Old Calabar were not just men who were expert traders but
those who had military skills and could organize large war canoes.15 The
militarized leadership developed in response to the volatile conditions of
the slave trade and the competition over sources of supply for European
buyers. Nonetheless, this concentration of power did not result in the formation of a centralized state but, rather, led to increasing insecurity.
Current research indicates that Igbo communities have long been
organized into decentralized corporate units in which kinship played an
important role in fostering cohesion. The basic unit of affinity was the sublineage or ummuna, whose members lived in wards or quarters of villages
founded by the descendants of a common ancestor, usually male but sometimes female.16 Clusters of villages formed village groups or “towns” and
were often settled in dispersed patterns in adjacent areas. Members of an
ummuna lived in compounds (ezi or obi) that were sometimes walled but
other times were clusters of households near a central meeting place.17 The
ummuna was the smallest unit of political control and headed by senior
men. Status within the community was an important safeguard against
slavery. In the context of kinship, slavery was the mechanism through
which outsiders were forcibly incorporated into the group as subordinates
to the gerontocracy. While we do not know the trajectory of slavery as a
means of subordination from the distant past, we do know that a system
of controlling non-kin in the interests of the village group developed well
before written documentation establishes its presence.
Historians of the Biafra hinterland trade have reached a tenuous consensus that few of the Igbo slaves sold in the ports of Bonny, Old Calabar
and Elem Kalabari were secured through warfare. Instead, most slaves
7
appear to have been obtained as a result of kidnapping by troupes of men
who then sold the captives to merchants. The most important of these
merchants were the Aro of the Cross River escarpment, whose origins
are traced to Igbo and Ibibio ancestors and whose commercial network
appears to have expanded after the late seventeenth century and especially
by the middle of the eighteenth century.18 The Aro oracle, Ibin Okpabi,
functioned as a court of appeal and dispenser of justice that also enabled
the enslavement of victims. Aro settlers moved from their home town at
Aro Chukwu and attached themselves to local markets by establishing satellite villages and cementing alliances through marriage to local women.
These alliances promoted the reputation of Ibin Okpabi, which further
enhanced their legitimacy as adjudicators of disputes throughout the
region. Because there was no centralized state to guarantee security, establish a standardized currency or enforce rules of exchange, traders operated
through a relay system that assured safe passage. They established networks
based on introductions to prominent residents in particular villages that
facilitated travel throughout the interior.
Other merchants who traded in slaves included the Nri and Awka. The
Nri claimed a sacro-political identity derived from myths of Igbo origin,
which they turned to advantage for commercial purposes.19 The Nri preserved
an aura of sacred specialization that allowed them to induct wealthy men
into prestigious titled societies that were expensive to join. Similarly, itinerant blacksmiths from Awka traded widely and also bought and sold slaves.
As with the Aro, the Nri and Awka merchants asserted religious functions
that served to further their economic activities. Many papers in this volume
are concerned with these commercial and religious dimensions and thereby
attempt to account for the complex and integrated system of slave supply that
underlay the expansion of trade after the mid seventeenth century, and especially after the 1730s. The supply system tapped into a periodic market system
based on four-day or eight-day cycles that correspond to the Igbo week.20
What we want to know is why people were enslaved, where they came
from and why they went to particular New World destinations. The gender
and age profiles of the population that went to the Americas, or to much less
frequent destinations in Europe and elsewhere in Africa, are not entirely
clear. The data presented in Table 1.2 provide some clues as to the direction
of migration and hence allow some assessment of the impact on Africa and
the degree to which cultural survivals may have crossed the Atlantic. Over
1.3 million people from the Bight of Biafra arrived in the Americas, and
almost 60 percent were taken to British possessions in the Caribbean and
North America, with about 297,000 disembarking in Jamaica and 137,000
landing in Barbados and from there some were sent to further destina8
tions, whether the Spanish mainland, the North American colonies or the
French islands. In North America, they were heavily concentrated in the
Chesapeake region, about 45,000 out of total arrivals of about 65,000, or 71
percent, while almost all of the rest, about 18,000, landed in the Carolinas
and Georgia. The French colonies received about 45,000 people before the
St. Domingue revolution in the 1790s, whereas afterwards, the remaining
French possessions received another 72,000 people. The number of people
arriving in Brazil accounted for about 122,000 people, including 62,000
before British abolition in 1807 and another 60,000 afterwards. Because
of British anti-slave trade patrols after 1810, almost 39,000 people never
made it to the Americas but rather were disembarked in Sierra Leone,
some of whom subsequently returned to the Bight of Biafra.
Table 1.2 | Destinations of Africans from the Bight of Biafra
All Areas
336
0
0
390
3,588
11,263
50,968
122,957
45,186 296,599 136,979 189,502
Africa
18,735
33,412
9,568
5,636
24,479
39,632
3,718
1,799
Brazil
7,210
14,335
2,256
52,238
67,968
119,747
32,846
Cuba
Jamaica
1,116
3,802
12,997
21,248
6,024
Barbados
Chesapeake
1626-1650
1651-1675
1676-1700
1701-1725
1726-1750
1751-1775
1776-1800
1801-1825
1826-1850
Totals
5,157
269
9,212
18,170
8,881
2,327
6,736
53,378
18,005
122,135
172
922
0
0
0
29
162
8,492
30,173
39,949
26,014
59,248
48,976
51,811
145,939
253,687
293,461
230,979
199,601
1,309,716
Source: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org).
While the pattern seems clear, imprecision on many points requires
close study because the degree of concentration of people from the Bight
of Biafra in different parts of the Americas has implications for the study
of ethnic formation and the process that racialized slavery. The demography of migration suggests that the people who left the Bight of Biafra
assimilated to a cultural amalgamation that has since been referred to as
“Igbo.” Moreover, because there was an unusually high representation of
females, the migration from the Bight of Biafra affected what is meant by
“creole.” This gendered pattern of enforced migration meant that many of
9
the mothers of the creole generations can often be associated with Igbo
and, to a lesser extent, Ibibio (often identified as “Moko”).
The astounding increase in slave exports from the Bight of Biafra was
associated with revolutionary transformations in the indigenous societies that dominated the Biafra coast and hinterland. The story of how the
people of this region transformed their communities to deal with the
Atlantic trade cannot be recounted with scholarly certainty, but there is
enough information in both the accounts of European traders and the oral
traditions of these communities to allow us to paint a reasonably accurate scenario of just how enslaved people were extracted from this area.
Partly the story is one of distorted development in which local merchants
manipulated indigenous systems of exchange and distributive trade to
their advantage. Another part of the story is the tragic subjection of people
to draconian forms of justice, spiritual manipulation, and personal insecurity that drew unwilling victims into this global trade. The two stories are
perhaps ironically intertwined in the triumphant narrative of elite development, which in the end only resulted in a momentary period of economic
expansion. Paradoxically, slavery prepared the region for British imperialist
conquest. The proto-bourgeois elite that emerged in the era of the slave
trade and continued to dominate the region during the palm oil trade of
the nineteenth century was not able to transform the productive relations
that trade stimulated into centralized government, but colonialism did.
The British found that despite their use of persistent African slavery as
a reason why the continent needed conquest, it was prudent to “soft pedal”
the issue of emancipation. Additionally with officials rather “thin on the
ground” alliances with cooperative “Big Men” were not only necessary but
politically contradictory. Thus many of the crucial collaborators were, in
fact, slave owners who attempted to thwart the efforts of their subordinates
to reach full emancipation. Thus colonial emancipation policy was inconsistent at best and often completely ineffective. Therefore, in some areas
the legacy of slavery has been a persistent factor in contemporary politics.
The volume is divided into five sections. In the first section of the
book, THE ERA OF TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE, Paul E.
Lovejoy and David Richardson, “The Slave Ports of the Bight of Biafra
in the Eighteenth Century,” explore the concentration of trade at Old
Calabar and Bonny and how these two ports connected with the interior
trading network of Aro merchants, who were associated with shrines at
their home town of Aro Chukwu. This location on the escarpment overlooking the Cross River was also easily accessible to Bonny, particularly
after Bonny defeated Andoni, in the eastern Niger delta, which had formerly controlled the route into the interior. Aro communities were sub10
sequently established in many parts of the Igbo and Ibibio regions of the
interior. Aro merchants monopolized slave trading to the coast. Johnston
Akuma Kalu Njoku, “Before the Middle Passage: Igbo Slave Journeys to
Old Calabar and Bonny,” traces the routes to the coast along which most
captives were taken. John C. McCall, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and the
Ohafia Warrior Tradition: Global Forces and Local Histories,” explores
the role of Ohafia warriors in the enforcement of the slave trade through
contractual relationships with the Aro. Ohafia warriors effectively served
as a militia at the disposal of the Aro to protect its commercial network and
exact retribution on communities that in some way or another offended the
Aro. The Aro used the powers of the Ibin Okpabi shrine at Aro Chukwu
to enable safe travel in the interior amidst the insecurity of kidnapping
and warrior justice. In “Osu Social Outcasts and the Atlantic Slave Trade,”
Ichie P.A. Ezikeojiaku explores the role of a special group of ritual slaves,
the osu, who have been compared with India’s Dalit (Untouchables) caste.
They were dedicated to shrines as places of sanctuary. Osu were feared for
their powers with the supernatural and hence regarded as social pariahs.
Their position continues today, posing problems of human rights violations and discrimination that have defied successive government attempts
to eliminate the pariah status.
The second section of the book, IGBO DIASPORA IN THE
AMERICAS, focuses on “Igbo abroad,” the myriad of communities in
which people from the Bight of Biafra came to live in the slave societies of the Americas. In “The Anguished Igbo Response to Enslavement
in the Americas,” Michael Gomez examines the displacement patterns of
people from the Bight of Biafra and where people were concentrated in the
Americas. Renée Soulodre-La France, “Buried Treasure: Searching with
Francisco Castañeda, Negro Esclavo Caravali, in Nueva Granada,” demonstrates that many enslaved people from the Bight of Biafra went to the
Spanish colonies of mainland America, including Neuva Granada (Colombia) and points further south. Other scholars, such as Rina Cáceres, have
demonstrated that Igbo were to be found elsewhere, such as at the fortified
settlement of Omoa in the Bay of Honduras.22 Christine Ayorinde, “Ekpe
in Cuba: the Abakuá Secret Society, Race and Politics,” demonstrates how
the elite Ekpe society could be transformed into a religious lodge that
could represent slaves engaged in working the docks and thereby play a key
role in Cuban politics. The two essays by Carretta and Lovejoy are an addition to the conference proceedings but engage the debate over the identity
of Olaudah Equiano, perhaps the most famous of Igbo slaves. According
to Carretta, in “Questioning the Identity of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus
Vassa, the African,” it is possible, indeed perhaps probable, that Vassa was
11
actually born in South Carolina, and not Africa. That is, he was a son of the
diaspora and his account of enslavement and the Middle Passage ficticious
renderings of stories that he had heard. However, the issue of “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African”
is the subject of Lovejoy’s contribution. Considering the implications of
Carretta’s interpretation of the evidence, it seems appropriate to situate
Vassa, alias Equiano, in the diaspora from the Bight of Biafra.
In the third section of the volume, AFTERMATH OF THE
TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE, Femi Kolapo describes the
political impact of the slave trade and its demise on local political traditions and political stability. In “Niger River Trade and the Interregnum at
Aboh, 1844-1862,” he explores the political crisis generated in the Niger
River kingdom of Aboh during the transition from the slave trade to the
palm oil trade. In the case of northern Igboland, Christian C. Opata and
Damian U. Opata demonstrate in “Ownership of Slaves in Nsukka in the
Nineteenth Century,” that slavery remained a viable institution locally
throughout the colonial period. Similarly, Nicholas Omenka, “From Children of Ham to Agents of Christ: The Place of Former Slaves in Christian
Evangelism in the Biafran Hinterland,” historicizes the role of Christian
converts, from the fifteenth century involvement of the Portuguese through
the nineteenth century when “recaptured slaves,” liberated in Sierra Leone,
spread Christianity throughout the interior. The legacy of this conversion
and its association with salvation from slavery influenced the propagation
of Christianity that was based on experiences of liberation.
In“Semantic Implications of ‘Ohu’ and ‘Amadi’: The Aftermath of
Slavery in Nkanu and Ezeagu,” Nneka Nora Osakwe discusses how the
stigma of slavery persists in popular culture and daily society. As demonstrated by Carolyn A. Brown, in “Contestation and Identity Transformation under Colonialism: Emancipation Struggles in South Nkanu, near
Enugu, 1920-1935,” slaves and masters struggled to redefine their relationships under a colonial regime that had ambivalent attitudes toward
matters of slave status, masters’ rights and social equality.
Finally, the contributions in the last section, CONTEMPORARY
MEMORIES OF ENSLAVEMENT, illustrate the legacies of the slavery
past, both in its trans-Atlantic forms and its ongoing indigenous manifestations. Eli Bentor’s essay, “Aro Ikeji Festival – Historical Consciousness and
Negotiated Identities,” focuses on the Aro and how the presence of slaves
within Aro society is marked ritually through the “New Yam Festival.”
The problems incurred in the performance of this ceremony express the
on-going negotiations between “free” Aro and “former slaves.” Similarly,
Axel Harneit-Sievers, in “Precolonial Slave Relationships in Contempo12
Map 1.2 | Udi District
rary Local Politics at Nike,” shows how slave-free distinctions spill over
into local politics as villages try to establish themselves as Local Government Areas, a precondition for receiving state resources. More generally,
Paul Obi-Ani, describes in “The Stigmatization of Descendants of Slaves
in Igboland,” that social stratification arising from slave status persists in
various forms. Finally, Abena P.A.Busia explores the ways of coping with
myths of enslavement in “‘Those Ibos! Jus’ Upped and Walked Away’: The
Story of the Slaves At Ibo Landing as Transcendent Ritual.”
The essays in this volume address the impact of slavery on the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra, which reinforced political decentralization but
did not stifle economic development and social change. The region was
transformed by commercial factors generating from the engagement with
Atlantic trade and resulted in insecurity caused by the brutality of slaving.
Unlike other parts of Atlantic Africa, communities did not cluster into
larger, protective units, nor did military leadership result in the concentration of power in centralized states. To the contrary, specific communities in the region came to specialize in particular tasks with some, in fact,
concentrating on the slave trade. The autonomous groups of settlements
in the Biafra hinterland were able to establish a precarious coexistence
despite the fractionalization that actually enabled slaving. Consequently,
when the export of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic stopped in the
1830s and 1840s, there was no end to slavery. As the essays in this volume
demonstrate, the history of the region was complex, and the abolition of
the export trade in slaves coincided with the expansion of palm oil production and export. While this economic transition influenced political
13
conditions in the nineteenth century, the persistence of slavery and the
reliance on pawnship were major factors that governed production and
stimulated trade, but without political consolidation. The imposition of
British rule after 1900 led to incorporation into the colonial state, but the
transition was rocky and indeed slavery and pawnship continued well into
the twentieth century, as has the legacy of the slavery past.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
The voyage database constructed by David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen
Behrendt and their associates has become an invaluable tool in assessing the
scale of the migration; see The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.
slavevoyages.org).
Joseph H. Greenberg, The Languages of Africa (London: Frank Cass, 2nd ed.,
1966), 8.
Igwebuike Romeo Okeke, The ‘Osu’ Concept in Igboland: A Study of the Types of
Slavery in Igbo-Speaking Areas of Nigeria (Enugu: Access Publishers, 1986).
For previous studies of slavery in the interior of the Bight of Biafra, see E.J.
Alagoa, “The Slave Trade in Niger Delta Oral Tradition and History,” in Paul
E. Lovejoy, ed., Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade:
Essays in Honor of Philip Curtin on the Occasion of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary
of African Studies at the University of Wisconsin (Madison: African Studies
Program, University of Wisconsin, 1986), 127-36; S.J.S. Cookey, “An Igbo
Slave Story of the Late Nineteenth Century and its Implications,” Ikenga, 1, 2
(1972): 1-9; W.R.G. Horton, “The Ohu System of Slavery in a Northern Ibo
Village-Group,” Africa, 24 (1954): 311-36; David Northrup, “The Ideological Context of Slavery in Southeastern Nigeria in the Nineteenth-Century,”
in Paul E. Lovejoy (ed.), The Ideology of Slavery in Africa (Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage, 1981), 100-22; Victor Uchendu, “Slavery in Southeast Nigeria,” TransAction, 4 (1967), 52-4; Uchendu, “Slaves and Slavery in Igboland, Nigeria,”
in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff , eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and
Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977),
121-32; and Carolyn Brown, “Testing the Boundaries of Marginality: Twentieth Century Slavery and Emancipation Struggles in Nkanu, Northern
Igboland, 1920-1929,” Journal of African History, 37 (1996), 51-80.
W.B. Morgan and J.C. Pugh, West Africa (London, 1969), xxiv.
See K.O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1956).
Thurston Shaw, Igbo Ukwu: An Account of Archaeological Discoveries in Eastern
Nigeria (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
A.E. Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture (Nsukka,
1981).
14
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Aniakor, Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos
(Los Angeles, 1984), 1.
Cole and Aniakor, Igbo Arts, 1.
See Dike, Trade and Politics of the Niger Delta.
Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta.
The origins of the Ijaw have been difficult to interpret, but see E.J. Alagoa, A
History of the Niger Delta (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1972); and Dike,
Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta.
Among others, see Dike, Trade and Politics of the Niger Delta; David Northrup,
Trade without Rulers: Pre-colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern
Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978); G.I. Jones, The Trading States of
the Oil Rivers: A Study of Political Development in Eastern Nigeria (London:
International African Institute, 1963).
Elizabeth Isechei, The Igbo People and the Europeans (London: 1973), 37.
One of the primary structures of both commerce and social organization
was the “house.” This was an organization that used the idiom of kinship
to enforce loyalty as a trading organization. The “house” was led by a “head”
who, with his family, constituted the “aristocracy” of the organization. Below
them were dependants, both related and not, and on the bottom, various
ranks of slaves. The most authoritative scholar on the “house” structure is
Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta.
Afigbo, “Southeastern Nigeria in the 19th Century,” 535–36.
In the analysis of Igbo culture, there is no agreement on the parameters of
ummuna. Afigbo’s definition is used here; see A.E. Afigbo, “Southeastern
Nigeria in the 19th Century,” in History of West Africa, vol. 2, 2nd ed., ed. J.
F. A. Ajayi and M. Crowder (New York, 1974), 535–36. By comparison,
Uchendu argues that the term was fluid and “in its smallest sense means
children of the same father but different mothers; in its widest referent is the
patrilineal members, real or putative, whom one cannot marry.” See Victor
Uchendu, The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria (New York, 1965), 39–40.
Afigbo, “Southeastern Nigeria in the 19th Century,” 535–536.
For the historiography of the Aro, see K.O. Dike and Felicia Ekejiuba,
“The Aro System of Trade in the Nineteenth Century, Part I”, Ikenga 1:1
(1972)11-26; Dike and Ekejiuba, “The Aro System of Trade in the Nineteenth Century , Part II,” Ikenga 1:2(1972) 10-21; and Dike and Ekejiumba,
Aro of South-eastern Nigeria, 1650-1980: Study of Socio-economic Formation
and Transformation in Nigeria (Nsukka: African Books Collective, 1996).
Also see Ugo Nwokeji, BOOK title
M.A. Onwuejeogwu, An Igbo Civilization: Nri Kingdom & Hegemony
(London: Ethiope Publishing Corporation, 1981).
The Igbo have two types of week, the little week, izu, which is divided into
four ubochi or mbosi (days), e.g., eke, orie/olie, afo/aho and nkwo, and the big
week, izu ukwu, of eight days. In the big week the four days have the same
15
name, and the second four days end in ukwu or “big.” Hence the fifth day
is orie ukwu (big orie) and so on. See Ukwu I. Ukwu, “The Development of
Trade and Marketing in Iboland,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria,
3, 4 (1967), 647-62; and Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe, 36n.
For a discussion of the Igbo market system, see Barry W. Hodder and Ukwu
I. Ukwu, Markets in West Africa (Ibadan: University of Ibadan Press, 1969).
22. Rina Cáceres Gómez, “On the Frontiers of the African Diaspora in Central
America: The African Origins of San Fernando de Omoa,” in Paul E.
Lovejoy and David Trotman, eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of the Ethnicity
in the African Diaspora (London: Continuum, 2003), 115-38.
16
•2•
The Slave Ports of the Bight
of Biafra in the Eighteenth
Century 1
Paul E. Lovejoy
and David Richardson
T
he Bight of Biafra emerged as one of the principal sources of enslaved
Africans for the transatlantic trade in the eighteenth century, especially after the 1730s. Some slaves departed earlier, perhaps reaching levels
of 1,000–2,000 per year in the second half of the seventeenth century and
increasing to almost 4,000 per year by the 1730s. Thereafter, the increase
in slave departures from the Bight was spectacular, almost tripling between
the 1730s and the 1750s, and then nearly doubling again by the 1780s. In
the 1760s over 15,000 slaves left each year; in the 1780s the average was
about 17,500 annually. There was a slow decline until British abolition
in 1807, whereupon departures virtually collapsed before rebounding in a
final surge from the late 1810s through the early 1830s. Almost 900,000
slaves left the Bight of Biafra in the period 1740–1807, very largely through
Old Calabar on the Cross River, and Bonny in the Niger delta, with Elem
Kalabari (also in the delta), Gabon, and the Cameroons reaching some
importance in certain years in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Before 1740 the Bight of Biafra provided a relatively modest 7 percent of
the transatlantic slave trade, but by the 1780s, when the trade was at its
peak, the area supplied over 20 percent of all enslaved Africans going to
the Americas, a remarkable increase from the early eighteenth century. The
implications of this rapid increase have been poignantly captured in the
autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, whose account describes his kidnapping in c.1753-54 and then his shipment to Barbados and Virginia.
Because British shipping dominated the slave trade of the Bight of
Biafra, British abolition in 1807 caused an immediate and sharp decline
in slave departures, but within a decade the slave trade experienced a
resurgence, as French, Portuguese, and Spanish carriers filled the void left
by the British. By the 1820s slave shipments had returned to levels only
moderately lower than those attained at the height of British slaving activity. This revival in slave departures, moreover, was largely sustained until
1841, when direct British action brought the traffic to an end. Overall,
between 1660 and 1841, some 1.5 million slaves left the Bight of Biafra,
two-thirds of them between 1740 and 1807,2 when seventeen out of every
twenty slaves went on British ships. Outside of Portugal’s control of the
slave trade south of the Congo River, few European nations achieved such
continuing dominance of slave trading in a particular region of Atlantic
Africa as did the British in the Bight of Biafra.
Three ports—Old Calabar, Elem Kalabari (sometimes called New
Calabar, although, of course, bearing no relation to Old Calabar), and
Bonny—dominated shipments of slaves from the Bight of Biafra, but the
relative importance of the three ports shifted through time. The westernmost, Elem Kalabari, appears to have been the most important of the three
before 1700 but thereafter was overshadowed by its two eastern rivals. By
the end of the eighteenth century, if nor earlier, Elem Kalabari’s trade
was closely associated, if not mostly subsumed by first Old Calabar and
then its closest neighbor and rival, Bonny.3 In the decades before 1730
Old Calabar accounted for nearly two-thirds of slave exports, with Elem
Kalabari loading most of the rest. In the 1730s, and especially after 1740,
Bonny rapidly developed as a port and soon eclipsed Old Calabar’s ascendancy in the Biafra slave trade. Between 1740 and 1780 almost six in ten
of all slaves taken from the three ports were loaded at Bonny,4 with Old
Calabar accounting for most of the remainder and the trade of Elem Kalabari apparently subsumed through Bonny. According to Robert Norris’
testimony before the parliamentary committee on the slave trade in 1789,
some 14,500 slaves a year were shipped from Bonny and Elem Kalabari
by European carriers, or more than twice as many as were shipped from
Old Calabar and the Cameroons combined.5 From 1780–1841, Bonny
accounted for two out of every three slaves departing.6 Old Calabar’s share
of slave departures declined, falling to about one in five of those leaving the
18
The Slave Ports of the Bight of Biafra in the Eighteenth Century
Bight of Biafra. Overall, Bonny handled more than twice as many slaves as
Old Calabar, despite Old Calabar’s early advantage in the trade.7
The great expansion in the number of people leaving the Bight of Biafra
was almost entirely the result of the activities of British merchants, initially
from Bristol and to some extent from London, and then overwhelmingly
from the port of Liverpool. Before 1807 British shipping accounted for
over 85 percent of all slaves shipped from the Bight of Biafra, while French
ships accounted for most of the rest. Liverpool ships took about half of all
slaves, according to a sample of over 640,000 slaves, while a quarter left
on Bristol ships. London ships took another 6.6 percent, while French
ships accounted for 13.8 percent.8 Liverpool dominance of trade at Bonny
was pronounced. Indeed the rise of Liverpool as a major port was directly
related to the expansion of trade in the Bight of Biafra after 1740. Conspicuous by its absence was Portuguese shipping until British abolition in
1807, the consequence of a century-long breakdown of Portuguese trade
in the Bight of Biafra.
The predominance of British merchants in the trade of the Bight of
Biafra tied the merchants of Old Calabar and Bonny to their counterparts
in Liverpool and Bristol. This close commercial connection determined
that English became the commercial tongue, which surviving letters and
other documents and the testimony of contemporaries confirm. As Thomas
Clarkson observed in the 1788:
I must not forget here, that several of the African traders or
great men, are not unacquainted with letters. This is particularly
the case at Bonny and [Old] Calabar, where they not only speak
the English language with fluency, but write it. These traders
send letters repeatedly to the merchants here, stating the situation of the markets, the goods which they would wish to be
sent out to them the next voyage, the number of slaves which
they expect to receive by that time, and such other particulars, as
might be expected from one merchant to another. These letters
are always legible, void of ambiguity, and easy to be understood.
They contain, of course, sufficient arguments to shew, that they
are as capable of conducting trade, and possess as good an
understanding as those to whom they write.9
Through mercantile connections, some merchants from Old Calabar
were educated in England. In 1788, John Matthews, James Penny, and
Robert Norris, representing the merchants of Liverpool, told the Committee of the Privy Council, “respecting the Natives of Africa, who have been
sent from thence to England to be educated:”
19
It has always been the Practice of Merchants and Commanders
of Ships trading to Africa, to encourage the Natives to send their
Children to England, as it not only conciliates their Friendship
and softens their Manners, but adds greatly to the Security of
the Trader, which answers the Purposes both of Interest and
Humanity.10
How many years “always” means in this context is unclear, but it suggests
that West Africans had been educated in Britain for at least a generation
or two, with the result that their command of English must have improved,
but even more important, that commercial connections were consolidated.
John Adams, who traded at Old Calabar in the 1790s, also noted that
“many of the natives write English, an art first acquired by some of the
traders’ sons, who had visited England, and which they have had the
sagacity to retain up to the present period.” Adams reported that the merchants of Old Calabar “have established schools and schoolmasters, for the
purpose of instructing in this art the youths belonging to the families of
consequence.”11The first school started in the 1790s.
How many children and youths from Old Calabar, and indeed Bonny
and elsewhere from West Africa, were educated in England during the
second half of the eighteenth century is difficult to judge, although it seems
likely that quite a few were. According to Matthews, Penny and Norris:
There are at present [1787] about Fifty Mulatto and Negro
Children, Natives of Africa, in this Town [Liverpool] and its
Vicinity, who have been sent here by their Parents to receive
the Advantage of an European Education. During the Time
of Peace, there is generally that Number here, and sometimes a
few more, but we do not know that they are more than Seventy
at any one Time, nor are we able to say, what Number are sent
to London or Bristol, but we believe there are some at both
Places.12
From his experience on the coast in the 1780s and 1790s, the slave trader
and former governor of the English fort at Ouidah, Archibald Dalzell,
reported “that at Bonny and Callabar there are many negroes who speak
English; and that there is rarely a period that there are not at Liverpool,
Callabar negroes sent there expressly to learn English.”13 Written English
was in evidence in other forms, too. British slaving firms gave large bells
that were inscribed in English to specific Old Calabar merchants, such
as the one to King Effiwatt in 1799. These bells also made their way to
Arochukwu and perhaps elsewhere in the interior.14 At Bonny, ivory disks
were inscribed as references as part of the trust-building regime.15
20
British traders certainly recognized the value of good social relations
and honest dealings in building trust and maintaining trade. In 1761
William Earle of Liverpool promised Duke Abashy of Old Town that two
of his sons, who had been mistakenly shipped from the coast, would be
safely returned; Earle reassured Duke that “I do not Want to wrong Nor
I never did wrong any man one Copper.” The personal dimension of this
correspondence should be noted: “You know very well I Love all Calabar,”
wrote Earle, observing that he himself had three sons and a daughter. In
conveying his sympathies and reiterating his pledge to correct the injustice,
Earle also passed on the greetings of his wife, who “Sends you her Love.”16
In 1773 Otto Ephraim of Old Town sent a young boy to Liverpool to
become a companion to Joshua Lace, son of the Liverpool slave trader,
Ambrose Lace. As was the case with other sons and dependents of the
leading Calabar merchants, he was probably also to be educated. Ephraim
was willing to supply slaves to one of the Liverpool ships then at Old
Calabar because of Ambrose Lace’s connection with the ship; the master
“told me you have part of his ship.”17
Promoting good relations was doubtlessly helped by the familiarity of
Efik traders with the English language. As observed in the early 1790s,
the “Black Traders of Bonny and Calabar” were “very expert at reckoning and talking the different Languages of their own Country and those
of the Europeans.”18 In 1819 it was claimed that “the greater part of the
male-natives” at Old Calabar “can read and write English.”19 The leading
traders at Old Calabar appear to have been both literate and relatively
fluent in English or pidgin versions of it as early as the 1760s. The clearest
demonstration of this is Ntiero Duke’s diary for 1785–1788, fragments
of which, written in pidgin English, have survived. But Ntiero Duke was
not alone among the Efik in being literate and English-speaking. William
Earle’s letter to Duke Abashy in 1761, discussed earlier, was in fact a reply
to a written complaint by the Calabar trader. Moreover, in another letter,
Otto Ephraim asked Ambrose Lace to “Send me some Writing papers
and 1 Bureaus to Buy.”20 Furthermore, accounts were often registered on
board European ships. Thus in 1792, Thomas Codd lodged provisions and
gunpowder for one of James Rogers’s ships, the African Queen, with Duke
Ephraim, Egbo Young, and Ntiero Duke of Duke Town and had “taken
their receipts” for the same.21 Anglo-Efik relations in the late eighteenth
century thus appear to have been underpinned by a common language and,
if Codd’s experience was typical, Calabar traders were accustomed to the
commercial conventions of European merchants.
As Ntiero Duke’s diary shows, commercial transactions between Efik
traders and ship captains were interwoven with social gatherings. Indeed,
21
the diary suggests a pattern for the 1780s in which captains regularly
attended dinner parties given by Old Calabar merchants, including parties
on Christmas and New Year’s day.22 Moreover, they shared in other activities such as fishing trips.23 Discussion of business matters doubtless helped
to enliven conversations on such occasions, and in this sense these gatherings of masters and traders perhaps helped to produce the conspiracies
against the public interest that Adam Smith feared, except that in this
case the victims were not local consumers but those enslaved. Be this as
it may, slaving transactions—and the credit advances necessary to sustain
them—clearly took place at Old Calabar between agents of radically different cultural backgrounds—British and Biafran—who reduced these
differences to some extent through social interaction, but who, as we shall
see, could not totally eliminate them.
Old Calabar in transatlantic commerce
The early slave trade of Old Calabar was dominated by merchants
based at Creek Town, located on a channel that connected the Calabar
River with the Cross River. By the 1750s trade was concentrated on the
Calabar River at the confluence with the Cross River, which was closer
to the sea than Creek Town. The earliest ward on the Calabar River was
Old Town (or Obutong), which claimed seniority by the 1760s, although
in fact other wards were prominent, including Duke Town and Henshaw
Town. The Efik traders, a group of Ibibio-speakers, who originally settled
at Creek Town some time before 1650, were subdivided into seven wari
(wards or houses), each with its own settlements. A few traders within each
ward seem to have controlled the commercial houses. According to surviving correspondence of the trade and the fragments of the diary of Ntiero
Duke, which covers the years 1785–1788, about thirty merchants were
involved in the slave trade in the last decades of the eighteenth century.24
Prominent among these were Eyo Nsa (or Willy Honesty) of Creek Town,
Tommy Henshaw of Henshaw Town, Egbo Young, Ntiero Duke, and
Edem Ekpo and his son, Efiam Edem (both known as Duke Ephraim) of
Duke Town. Of the traders mentioned in Duke’s diary, about half of them
had supplied slaves to British ships two decades earlier.25 Moreover, several
of those active in 1785–1788 remained involved in slaving beyond 1800
while others were clearly succeeded as merchants by their descendants.
The merchants at Old Calabar participated in the Ekpe (leopard)
secret society, which was a graded association of adult males that interlocked with similar associations in all the commercial centers of the Biafra
interior.26 The network of Ekpe lodges served to enforce payment of debts
22
Figure 2.1 | Ekpe Masquerade, with Guard of Honor, at Funeral of
Mazi Maurison Ogbonnaya Nnadozie, alias Oga-Adichama, Arochukwu, 1989 (Photograph by Eli Bentor)
and to protect the commercial interests of the export trade in slaves. Theoretically the society was “secret” in that the decisions of the Ekpe council
were enforced collectively, thereby absolving individuals of responsibility
for its policies and decrees. Secrecy was reinforced through masquerades,
elaborate costumes, coded hand and body gestures, and an elaborate pictograph system of unknown antiquity that effectively reduced Efik, Ibibio,
Igbo, and other local languages to writing.27 The secrecy in meaning that
23
underlay the hundreds of pictographs in use allowed communication across
language frontiers, but only to the initiated, and was used along the trade
routes into the interior. Moreover, initiation into each of the seven grades
involved mastering specific rituals, dances, and signs that allowed initiates
to communicate with each other in secret.28
Because initiation fees for the various grades of the society were high,
the wealthiest and most powerful merchants dominated the highest grades
of Ekpe and competed for its principal offices. These men were responsible,
among other things, for debt enforcement, having the power to “blow”
Ekpe, that is, to punish offenders through summary justice. Through collective decisions of the senior Ekpe council, individuals could be forced to
comply or suffer the consequences. As Ntiero Duke recorded in his diary
on 18 January 1785, “we got all the Ekpe men to go to the Ekpe Bush to
make bob [i.e., reach a settlement] about the Egbo Young and Little Otto
palaver.”29 Although the cause of the dispute between the two men is not
mentioned, a settlement was reached and the two men forced to pay a fine:
“Egbo Young paid one goat and 4 rods and Little Otto paid 4 rods.” Virtually all men in Old Calabar belonged to one of the grades of the society
and paid its fees, which in turn were shared among the members of the
highest grade of the society, that is, the principal merchants. Ntiero Duke
refers to these payments in his diary.30 Membership in Ekpe extended to
Aro traders, who formed similar closed associations of their own in the
interior known as Okonko. Moreover, the Aro controlled the Ibinukpabi
oracle at Arochukwu, their capital.31 The oracle was recognized as the
supreme court of appeal for a range of legal issues that pertained to credit
and trade, including the protection of merchants and markets and the
settlement of sectarian disputes, and thereby accumulated slaves through
fines and fees levied on litigants. Ekpe also regulated European shipping,
serving as a collective means of imposing sanctions, boycotting specific
ships, and protecting the interests of traders in their credit arrangements.
As Duke noted, Ekpe could isolate a ship, even if this adversely affected
the interests of other merchants. According to the entry in his diary for 26
October 1786:
…so I hear Egbo [Ekpe] Run and I com to know I walk up to
Egbo Young so wee see Egbo [i.e., the masquerade] com Down
& the Egbo men he say Sam Ambo and Georg Cobham brow
[blow, i.e. “blow Ekpe”] for Captain Fairwether so all us family
Dam angary about brow [blow] that and wee send to call Captin
Fairwether to com ashor and after 3 clock noon wee see Eyo &
Ebetim com Down and Eshen Ambo so the want to Sam &
Georg Cobham for mak the settle with Captin Fairwether.32
24
As the diary makes clear, Ntiero Duke was upset that merchants Sam Ambo
and George Cobham had imposed Ekpe on Captain Fairweather’s ship,
thereby stopping trade, which could only resume once a settlement had
been reached.33 Letters of trade and friendship reveal that credit arrangements were based on personal relationships of long standing.34 Specifically,
efforts were made to reduce the incidence of arbitrary actions in a slaving
atmosphere that was often violent through personal ties between the key
families at Old Calabar and the ship captains and owners of major Bristol
and Liverpool slaving firms. Like the inscribed ivory disks and bells that
have also survived from this period, the letters testify to ongoing linkages
and “trust” in this credit system.35
Despite the importance of personal relationships, the risks of doing
business were so serious that Old Calabar merchants resorted to the
pawning of relatives and dependents to underpin credit arrangements, a
practice that was common on some other parts of the African coast.36 In
effect, people were held as commercial hostages. For example, on 27 June
1785 Ntiero Duke instructed Abasi Cameroon Backsider and “one of his
boys to take pawns to the ship, and I went on board the Cooper [i.e.,
the ship of Capt. Cooper] to give pawns and I gave him some goods and
we drank all day.”37 Pawns were held on board ship at Old Calabar in
lieu of the delivery of slaves to clear the debts arising from the provision
of goods on credit. When slaves were delivered to the ships, the pawns
were released, but should the slaves not be delivered in time, ships could
set sail with the pawns in their stead. Often ships traded pawns against
slaves among themselves to avoid departing with supposedly “free” people
and incurring the potential risks to the maintenance of ongoing, friendly
commercial relations with the local merchants. As a result, there were
considerable efforts to secure the release of pawns.38 In coastal societies
and in the interior, pawns seem often to have been girls or women, but in
the maritime trade, pawns seem largely to have been males.39 The antiquity of the practice of pawning individuals as collateral for debts has not
been established. While Alagoa and Okorobia have speculated that in the
eastern Niger delta “the onset and maturity of the overseas slave trade
probably provided the initial setting for the development of pawnship,” it
is likely that pawning was prevalent in the Niger delta, at Old Calabar, and
in the interior for a long time.
The earliest known evidence of pawning associated with slave exports
from Old Calabar relates to 1763 when the master of a Liverpool brig
reported getting “pledges” out of the “Kings Town [i.e. Old Town] Dukes
and Tom Henshaws [town],” although he was refused “a son for pledge” by
“Robin John Town.”40 Other glimpses of pawnship at Old Calabar in the
25
1760s also involve slave transactions,41 and by the early 1770s, if not earlier,
pawning was widely used to facilitate trade. Thus, John Ashley Hall, a
London captain who traded at Old Calabar in 1772–1773, accepted pawns
as collateral. In response to a question posed by a parliamentary select
committee in 1790, Hall explained that the use of pawns was “the way
the trade is carried on” in the Calabar and Del Rey rivers.42 In June 1785,
for example, Abasi Cameroon Backsider and “one of his boys” were held
as pawns on the Comberbach’s ship.43 The number of pawns deposited by
slave suppliers with individual shipmasters was doubtless negotiable, but
neither the proportion of enslaved Africans shipped to the Americas who
were originally commercial pawns nor the frequency of such shipments
are known. In 1773 Grandy King George of Old Town reported that one
ship had carried away his pawns, including four of his sons.44 In April 1788
Richard Rogers, master of the Pearl, had 60 pawns as well as 50 slaves on
board ship.45 In the same year, the Gascoigne was accused of sailing from
Old Calabar with 120 “Pledges” in a shipment of 540 individuals.46
The incarceration of pawns on board ships not only reduced the amount
of labor available on shore but also raised overheads for Calabar merchants,
who appear to have been responsible for the subsistence of pawns. At the
same time, Bristol and Liverpool merchants who dominated the trade
wanted to obtain slave deliveries as quickly as possible. It was in their interests to obtain a high ratio of pawns to slaves, a tendency that was in turn
balanced by the close ties between British and Calabar merchants that could
reduce the number of pawns required and perhaps even eliminate the need
for their use at all.47 Such conflicts of interest meant that the outcome of
negotiations over pawns is likely to have varied. As pawns were sometimes
kin of the Calabar slave dealers and were presumably also well fed, it was no
doubt anticipated that the number deposited on board ship would be rather
less than the number of slaves that dealers contracted to supply.
According to Richard Rogers, a Bristol trader, a sensible arrangement
was two pawns to three slaves. He claimed that when he could “Gett my
Debts in Such Cytuation,” he could give the dealers just two days to clear
any outstanding debts, and “Should they not pay in that time,” he could
then “Borrow their pawns to sell in the West Indies.”48 The idea that one
might borrow pawns is intriguing since it implies that, even after being
shipped from the coast, they could theoretically still be redeemed. Almost
certainly other masters calculated matters differently from Rogers, but
there are indications that he was not alone in expecting a ratio of two
pawns for three slaves.49 Thus in 1789 Duke Ephraim of Duke Town
complained to James Rogers and Sir James Laroche of Bristol that two
men had been seized illegally. Ephraim complained that he had been a
26
“very good friend” to the ship Jupiter; but even so, its master had sailed
away with two of his canoemen, both of whom were “free men.” Outraged, Duke Ephraim threatened to “make Bristol Ship pay for them two”
unless they were returned by “Any other Ship or himself.”50 Whether the
two canoemen were returned or Duke Ephraim carried out his threat is
unknown, but the fact that those illegally taken worked for Duke Ephraim,
Duke Town’s leading merchant by 1790, is significant. Even when British
merchants dealt regularly with Duke Ephraim, as Rogers and Laroche evidently did, the behavior of their agents in the field could undermine trust.
The premium on pawns probably reflected, among other things, their
healthiness relative to slaves and thus their higher chances of surviving the
middle passage and being sold for a good price in the Americas. As Rogers
succinctly put it in July 1788, he had “some fine fellows On bd. the Pearl &
Pawns Will Live when Slaves is Apt to Dye.”51 Implicit in Rogers’s comments is the assumption that the pawns were equivalent to the young adult
males who were considered the “prime slaves” of the transatlantic market.
Although the number and status of people to be pawned was subject to
negotiation, linking pawnship with credit ensured that the parties to negotiation shared an interest in prompt settlement of contracts. This did not,
however, guarantee that the parties would keep their promises. Keeping
promises was perhaps especially problematical for local merchants who were
dependent on other parties or events outside their control to meet their obligations. Indigenous institutions, of which the Ekpe society was the most
important, played a major part in policing and enforcing contracts.52 Indeed,
Ekpe sometimes ordered Efik traders to “settle” disputes with exporters or to
replace pawns who had absconded from European ships.53
The possibility that pawns might be confiscated provided perhaps the
most powerful single inducement to slave dealers to meet their obligations.
If Ekpe and pawnship arrangements could not assure timely delivery of
slaves, then losses could be reduced through private action. In this respect,
slave trading at Old Calabar in the late eighteenth century was governed
more by private ordering than by legal centralism. A feature of such ordering was the possibility of arbitrary enslavement. While credit was firmly
embedded in social relationships, this tendency toward opportunism
undermined the very embeddedness of the credit mechanisms. The fact
was, if slaves were not delivered as agreed, masters of ships would sail away
with the pawns that traders had lodged with them. In short, there were
other sanctions used against traders who reneged on promises in addition to the judgments of Ekpe. According to one report, pawns were often
“the sons and daughters of traders” and the latter were “always particularly
anxious” about their fate and “seemed much distressed whenever they took
27
up an idea that the ship would sail away with the pawns.”54 Concern over
the fate of their kin was perhaps compounded for slave dealers by the possibility that, as we have seen, pawns might be passed between ships. We do
not know if masters needed approval from local traders for such transfers,
although in local practice, as far as known, such alterations in pawn-creditor arrangements required the approval of close kin. There were instances
when Old Calabar traders sought to protect pawns from enslavement by
“blowing Ekpe” on ship masters who might be tempted to abscond with
them;55 the crew of ships were sometimes seized or “panyarred” to force
the return of pawns.56 This potential for arbitrary action was always just
below the surface. Until pawns were redeemed, British merchants normally regarded them as enslavable by sale in the Americas “if their friends
refuse, or are not able to redeem them.”57 Ship captains were ready to sail
with pawns on board, should conditions warrant the risk.
Commercial pawning, therefore, was apparently governed by a precise
time schedule, unlike domestic pawnship, which could continue indefinitely, even into a subsequent generation, depending upon arrangements.
Often such arrangements, involving women, resulted in marriage contracts
that recognized the continuation of the debt or settled the debt in lieu of
marriage payments. Sometimes, although the justification of such actions
is seldom clear, pawns became slaves.58 Such reduction of commercial hostages being held as pawns to slavery was, therefore, not the only situation
in which the status between slave and pawn became blurred. Moreover,
pawns and therefore debts were transferable between ships, which further
blurred the distinction between slaves and pawns but also facilitated coastal
transactions. In April 1788, when the Pearl had 60 pawns as well as 50
slaves on board ship, Rogers observed that “most of the Pawns [had been]
redeem’d from other Ships.”59 Whether the level of transfers and thus the
commercialization of pawnship were also features of domestic pawnship in
the interior remains uncertain.
Despite personal relationships between British and Old Calabar merchants, and the use of pawns to guarantee goods advanced on “trust,” Old
Calabar steadily lost ground in the slave trade with respect to Bonny, which
is discussed below. Apparently pressures on credit arrangements continued
to plague the trade at Old Calabar, with contestation over the control of
the Ekpe society a factor in local politics, which spilled over into a violent
confrontation between the different wards at Old Calabar. In 1767 British
ship captains in the river, the merchants of Duke Town, and their allies in
Creek Town and Henshaw Town conspired to massacre the leading merchants of one ward, Old Town. Over 300 people were killed or sold into
slavery, thereby temporarily, at least, ending the involvement of Old Town
28
in the slave trade, except as victims. This incident further undermined the
position of Old Calabar.
In the early 1760s Old Town had been the leading trading ward at Old
Calabar. Frustrated by delays in slave deliveries that arose from conflicts
among the commercial wards of Old Calabar, British traders conspired
with merchants from Duke Town to destroy the commercial power of Old
Town, and thereby eliminate Old Town from the slave trade. Reports published in 1790 suggest that the British captains in the river conspired with
Duke Town to fake the mediation of the dispute between the wards. The
conspiracy depended for its success on the belief of “Old Town people” in
“the sincerity of the proposition of the captains to bring about a reconciliation” of the differences between them and their rivals.60 Arguably, therefore,
the relations that British captains had forged with Old Town merchants
before 1767 were perhaps critical in creating the opportunity to entrap
them. With its destruction in 1767, the death of many of its members
and the deportation of many others to the Americas as slaves, including
two sons of the head of Old Town, Old Town ceased to be a major factor
in the export trade, even as a further source of slaves, for at least a decade.
The ascendancy of Duke Town was to persist until the trade’s demise in
the 1840s, but the decline of Old Calabar as a port relative to neighboring
Bonny continued.
Whether the British expected so many Old Town residents to be
slaughtered in 1767 is unknown. It is possible that, just as they deceived
the Old Town merchants, so Duke Town misled their allies about the
intended consequences of the plot. Under the tutelage of Duke Town,
slaving transactions with the British in the lower Cross River appear to
have followed a less violent and more contractual course. The tendency
toward opportunism seems, nevertheless, to have remained a continuing
feature of Anglo-Efik commercial affairs after 1767, thereby undermining
trust and at times souring relations. One problem was that, like their Old
Town predecessors, those who seized control of the trade thereafter sought
whatever conditions were favorable to extract higher duties from European merchants. This opportunism, in turn, created uncertainty for British
traders. Complaints about increases in “coomey” were especially noticeable
in the late 1780s when British trade with Old Calabar reached exceptional
levels.61 For their part, ship captains also behaved at times in ways that
further undermined trust. Particularly damaging was their seizure and
shipment to the Americas of allegedly free persons.
29
The rise of Bonny as the principal slave trade
port
Although located in mangrove swamps infested by mosquitoes and
other disease-carrying insects, and frequently oppressively hot and humid,
Bonny was able to achieve a dominant position in the trade of the Bight
of Biafra because of the quick turn around time for ships that more than
compensated for its reputation as “this horrid hole,” as Jackson referred to
the town in the 1830s.62 At Bonny, there was almost no land available for
farming, although salt continued to be produced and fish was a staple of
local consumption and export into the interior.63 The town, which had an
estimated population of 25,000 in the 1790s, including dependent villages
within a few miles radius of the principal settlement, was almost entirely
focused on trade.64 Despite its unhealthy reputation, Bonny emerged as the
principal port of embarkation of slaves in the Bight of Biafra, outpacing its
competitors at nearby Elem Kalabari to the west and Old Calabar on the
Cross River to the east. We argue that Bonny became the leading Biafran
port in the 1730s, several decades earlier than previously thought, and that
its ascendancy largely accounts for the fact that the Bight of Biafra was a
major source of enslaved Africans for the Americas from that time. Moreover, we suggest that Bonny’s reliance on centralized authority to enforce
credit arrangements proved more effective than the mechanisms adopted
by its closest rival, Old Calabar, where, in the absence of a centralized
political authority, the local institution of pawnship was adapted to underpin credit before 1807. Pawnship was not a factor in credit arrangements
at Bonny. Thereafter, further adaptations of local institutions, notably
the Ekpe society, took place when it became no longer feasible to hold
pawns as collateral for goods advanced on credit.65 In sum, differences in
local political structures and credit protection regimes largely account for
Bonny’s displacement of Old Calabar as the principal slave port of the
Bight of Biafra in the eighteenth century.
As at Old Calabar, Bonny’s economic fortunes revolved around relations with British merchants.66 As at Old Calabar, a small number of
British firms controlled trade at Bonny, with Liverpool houses outnumbering Bristol firms by some margin. For example, in the mid-eighteenth
century, firms involving Thomas Kendall and Arthur and Benjamin
Heywood accounted for over 40 percent of Liverpool ships trading to
Bonny, while toward the end of the century, three firms—William Boats
and John Dawson of Liverpool and James Jones of Bristol—accounted
for over half of all British slave shipments from Bonny.67 The commercial
expertise possessed by such houses in the Bonny trade was central to their
30
success; in some cases it seems to have been passed down though marriage
and other forms of personal association from one generation to another.
On the African side, there was a similar degree of concentration. In 1826
Jackson claimed that there were nearly one hundred “principal Traders” at
Bonny located in the “principalities” that comprised the port.68 It appears,
however, that when Jackson wrote, and earlier, a relatively small group of
merchant houses controlled the slave trade. This pattern is first discernible
in the 1690s.69 Internal rivalry and variations in commercial skills meant
that there was some shifting in the relative standing of different houses
during the following century, with new houses emerging and some older
ones falling into debt, becoming depleted in membership, or even being
absorbed by their rivals, but, as at Old Calabar, a small proportion of the
community at Bonny seems to have retained control of the export slave
trade.70 In 1790 six firms—Trade Boy, Jacques Paul, Faine Bonne [Finebone?], Bonifesse [Boniface?], Affriqua, and Yongue Faubra—supplied all
but 19 of the 228 slaves bought by the ship Guerrier of Nantes, one of the
few French ships to visit Bonny at this time. The “king” and Prince George
supplied the remainder of the slaves sold to this ship.71 Two years later, two
traders, Allison and John Africa, the latter possibly being the Affriqua that
dealt with the Guerrier in 1790, supplied 102 of the 334 slaves purchased
by the Rodney of Bristol, with the remaining 232 slaves being supplied by
a further 26 traders. The latter included King Pepple.72
Another account of slave transactions for the following year, this time
relating to the ship Jupiter, also of Bristol, shows that many of those who
had dealt with the Rodney in 1792 supplied slaves to its fellow Bristol
ship.73 They included Allison and John Africa again, as well as King Pepple
and his sons Prince Will and Prince Frederick. On this occasion, however,
of over 40 suppliers of slaves, the largest were Finebone and Boniface,
houses that seem to have been among the leading suppliers of slaves to the
French ship Guerrier in 1790. Together with “JuJ[u] House”, “JuJ[u] Boy”,
and “King Stu” or “R Stwd” [Royal Steward?], Finebone, and Boniface
supplied 146 of the 368 slaves loaded by the Jupiter. Established firms of
the early 1790s, through inheritance, retained substantial influence over
external trade over two decades later.74
On pawning, James Fraser, a shipmaster claiming to have twenty years’
experience of the slave trade, testified that “to his own knowledge,” human
pawns were used as pledges for credit at Angola and the Windward Coast,
“but seldom at Bonny.”75 Others corroborated Fraser’s views, and in the
admittedly limited number of records so far unearthed on slave transactions at Bonny, no evidence has been found to contradict them. In his
memoirs, Hugh Crow, who regularly visited Bonny before 1807, attests to
31
the honesty of “the more respectable of the Bonnians, among whom I have
on some voyages sold goods on credit to the extent of £600 or £800, for
which, when I reminded them of payment by merely giving them notice
by signal, in the course of three or four days the whole of their debts would
be punctually liquidated.”76 Crow made no reference to pawns. At Bonny,
therefore, credit appears to have been protected in a different way from
Old Calabar. Moreover, relative to its rival, the protection offered at Bonny
to creditors enabled a much larger traffic in slaves to be sustained.
By the end of the eighteenth century, at least, there was local capital
sufficient in part at least to fund slaving activities. Some Bonny merchants
maintained warehouses full of trade goods that appear to have facilitated
trade.77 Hugh Crow observed that on one voyage in the 1790s, “the town
being full of slaves we soon completed our cargo, and after a stay of only
three weeks sailed to the westward.”78 Such local capital was almost certainly protected by internal mechanisms, perhaps involving religion in the
form of juju shrines. Despite the availability of local capital, however, it is
plain that European firms advanced credit to Bonny merchants throughout the history of the port’s involvement in the slave trade. Describing
a voyage to Elem Kalabari and Bonny in 1699, James Barbot reported
that some at “Great Bandy” acted “as factors, or brokers, either for their
own countrymen, or for the Europeans, who are often obliged to trust
them with their goods, to attend the upper markets, and purchase slaves
for them.”79 Other visitors to Bonny, as we have seen, echoed Barbot’s
remarks on the importance of imported credit in lubricating trade during
the following century and a quarter.
British ships trading at Bonny consistently achieved not only higher
loading rates than those visiting the Gold Coast and Angola but also
rates double those achieved at Old Calabar. In addition to the differential
between Bonny and Old Calabar in loading times, ships at Bonny tended
to take in proportionately more healthy adults than those trading in the
Cross River.80 Considering that the number of slaves taken from Bonny
was usually at least twice as great as that from Old Calabar in 1750–1807,
Bonny merchants were clearly more efficient in supplying greater numbers
of slaves than their eastern neighbors. This, in turn, suggests that, other
things being equal, Liverpool traders advancing goods on credit at Bonny
and also at subordinate Elem Kalabari were more likely to obtain a quicker
and possibly more reliable return on their investment than at Old Calabar.
According to Thomas Clarkson, “the regularity of the trade, and the small
space of time in which a cargo may be compleated, are considerations, which
have made these places more resorted to than any other upon the coast.”81
In 1788 James Jones of Bristol claimed that ships trading to Bonny and
32
Elem Kalabari purchased slaves “much quicker than at any other place.”82
The ability to load ships quickly, and therefore reduce the time spent on the
African coast, can be attributed to a number of factors, including the availability of large canoes to ferry goods to and slaves from the interior.
The ability to supply large numbers of slaves in a short period of time
depended upon a system of supply in the interior that was developed by
Aro merchants, whose place of origin was Arochukwu, on the escarpment
overlooking the Cross River on the border between the Igbo and Ibibio.83
The principal route into the interior was the Imo River, which entered the
delta to the east of Bonny in the area inhabited by the Andoni. The major
river ports were at Obete, Ohambele, Azuogu, Akwete, and other towns
in Ndoki, which were connected overland through the Ngwa region to the
fair at Bende in the heart of Igbo country. Bonny had a long association
with Ndoki, even sharing claims of a common origin, which were consolidated through marriage.84 Not all slaves came down the Imo River and
through Ndoki, but many did. Through alliances with Elem Kalabari and
Warri to the west, Bonny merchants also tapped markets from a wider
interior.85 Most of the slaves came from Igbo country to the north, and to
a lesser extent from Ibibio areas. Bonny merchants remained on the river
and did not visit these fairs, whether the one at Bende, inland from the
Imo River, or that at Uburu, the location of a salt lake further north.86 As
Falconbridge observed in the 1780s:
The preparations made at Bonny by the black traders, upon
setting out for the fairs, which are held up the country, are very
considerable. From twenty to thirty canoes, capable of containing thirty or forty negroes each, are assembled for the purpose;
and such goods are put on board them as they expect will be
wanted for the purchase of the number of slaves they intend
to buy. When their loading is completed, they commence their
voyage, with colours flying and musick playing; in about ten or
eleven days, they generally return to Bonny with full cargoes.87
Clarkson learned that merchants went in a “large fleet…into the
inland country, to attend the fairs which are held there. They are mostly
absent about nine days. They return frequently with fifteen hundred or two
thousand slaves at a time, who are thrown on the bottom of the canoes,
their hands and feet being confined in mats, and other ligaments of the
country.”88 Falconbridge learned that the “Slaves are bought by the black
traders at fairs, which are held for that purpose, at the distance of upwards
of two hundred miles from the sea coast; and these fairs are said to be
supplied from an interior part of the country.”89 Elem Kalabari, Bonny,
33
and Andoni were part of a single trading system, operating through the
Rio Real entry to the delta.90 In the eighteenth century this system became
centralized at Bonny, allowing it to benefit from the great expansion in
slave exports from the Bight of Biafra.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Aro had established a series of satellite communities throughout much of Igbo and Ibibio country, stretching south to the banks of the Imo River where Bonny merchants ventured.
Through their monopoly of the slave trade, the Aro became the principal
suppliers of slaves to the coast, including both Bonny and Old Calabar. The
westward expansion of the Aro should be noted, because their communities (a diaspora that arranged trading agreements through blood pacts with
local village “republics”) were the bulking centers for slaves sent to Bonny.
According to Dike and Ekejiuba, many of these centers were established
by the mid-eighteenth century It is probably no coincidence that expansion of slave exports from the Bight of Biafra from the 1730s probably
occurred at the same time as the consolidation of the Aro commercial
diaspora. According to Bonny tradition, the Ibinukpabi shrine (“Long
Juju”) at Arochukwu was consulted before the installation of one of its earliest kings. Apparently the Akpa, the ruling clan at Arochukwu, reserved
for itself the trade with the Rio Real, and hence with Bonny. Reputedly
there was a shrine dedicated to Ibinukpabi at Bonny.91 Neither river-based
trade nor access to the Aro trade diaspora, however, was peculiar to Bonny.
Old Calabar was similarly placed in both respects, yet supplied fewer slaves
and at slower rates than its western rival. Moreover, the canoe system to
which contemporaries drew attention at both places was dependent economically on those using such transport having access to plentiful supplies
of European trade goods on credit. Credit arrangements between British
and local traders at Bonny were a major factor in the port’s capacity to
sustain a higher volume and more efficient system of slave delivery than
at Old Calabar, giving Bonny traders an advantage over their competitors
on the Cross River with Aro merchants. The emergence of Bonny as the
principal slave port in the Bight of Biafra coincided with the westward
expansion of the Aro network, with the Imo River being the main route
between the coast and the interior. Understanding how, institutionally or
politically, credit was safeguarded at Bonny is the key, therefore, to explaining not only the port’s ascendancy in slave exports, but also the shifting
economic geography of slave supply within the Bight of Biafra from the
1730s onward.
Bonny’s success in attracting credit demonstrates that politics and
political institutions influenced commercial performance. Traditions of
origins trace the Ijaw-speaking Ibani (Bonny) to the central delta. They
34
suggest that Bonny was settled before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade; at
least there was a settlement at the eastern mouth of the Rio Real and along
the creeks leading off it into the Andoni country. The people of Bonny
had long-established commercial ties via the Imo River and had interacted
culturally and linguistically with Igbo-speaking Ndoki on the Imo River.
A group of these bilingual Ibani is believed to have moved downstream
and resettled their ancestral “homeland” near or at Bonny as the export
slave trade with the Portuguese began.92 According to Alagoa and Tombo,
the Ibani “have had kings for a long time.” At least before 1700 succession
to office was closely linked to lineage, age, supernatural power, and service
through sacrifice. Amanyanabo (translated in English as “king”) was a military title. The principle of “kingship,” Alagoa and Tombo argue, achieved
its fullest expression during the time of Asimini, who is credited with
receiving the first European traders at Bonny in the sixteenth century.93
Such contact, in turn, is thought to have prompted expansion and change
of the wari, a lineage-centered institution that the Ibani brought with
them when they settled at the mouth of the Rio Real, which was to play
a critical part in the external trade of Bonny after European contact. Well
established there by the end of the seventeenth century, the wari-based
institutions of political and military office could arrange the operation of
the large river canoes.94
At that time, however, Elem Kalabari, situated deeper into the delta
on the western branch of the Rio Real, overshadowed Bonny as a supplier
of slaves for export, despite the latter’s location closer to the sea. What
seems to have constrained Bonny’s emergence as a significant slave port
was restricted access to inland sources of slaves, a problem that its neighbor, Elem Kalabari, had seemingly resolved by success in war with Okrika
in the late seventeenth century.95 Bonny gained access to the mainland
around 1700, after defeating Andoni, located in the delta to the east of
Bonny and where the Imo River joins the delta, and hence a strategic location for access to the interior. Andoni, in alliance with the Kalabari and
Okrika, apparently attempted to prevent Bonny from gaining a foothold
in the slave trade in the 1690s, a time when, because of war in Europe,
there were few ships. As a result of its victory, Bonny secured control of
the route inland via the Imo River, which allowed a connection with the
Aro network.96
For Bonny the repercussions of the Andoni war were far-reaching.
According to G. I. Jones, Bonny survived this period of intense warfare,
because “a much greater degree of centralized authority had to be accepted,
so that the war leaders who became their kings became, temporarily at least,
all-powerful.”97 Alagoa and Fombo suggest that the Andoni war effec35
tively altered the balance of political power at Bonny, in which a financially
pressed and militarily ineffective Awusa (or Halliday) lineage was forced to
yield authority to the Perekule (or Pepples), who held the military title of
amanyanabo. It is alleged that the Perekule wari accumulated great wealth
through trade and hence were well placed to pursue the Andoni war. In
1699 Barbot described Perekule, in this case Awa or William, as a “sharp
blade, and a mighty talking Black” who was “a great war leader.” The recognition of his accession is considered to have been “a turning point in Bonny
dynastic history,” with subsequent succession to the title of amanyanabo,
and hence primacy in political power, being restricted to his descendants.98
The Perekule house subsequently reinforced this concentration of authority through its control of oracles and shrines, over restrictions on sexual
liaisons with strangers, especially Europeans, and over other areas of social
life. Juju shrines also regulated social behavior, including sexual relations
with whites. According to Jackson, writing in 1826, whites were considered “a superior race,” being reverenced “as Jujews,” and mixing of blood
between Africans and whites was outlawed, mulattoes being “instantly
destroyed,” a fate that also befell twins and their mother.99
Tradition suggests, furthermore, that Perekule’s accession triggered
institutional changes that strengthened ideologically the power of the
amanyanabo. Various shrines at Bonny, including the ikuba (or iguana)
shrine, which, together with its house of skulls, were appropriated from
Andoni and fell under Perekule control. The ikuba shrine became associated with protection of trade, supplanting in importance, as noted earlier,
the principal deity of Simingi at Juju Town (or Finama), where pilotage
was arranged. There were also shrines at Ayama, Kalaibiama, and Fibiri,
the latter being consulted on matters relating to canoe house affairs, selection of the king, and expeditions to interior markets.100 The Perekule house
also transformed the operation of lineage houses, shifting the basis of their
leadership from descent to military prowess and economic ability. Perekule
even sanctioned the right of slaves to become heads of houses, some of
which subsequently became highly successful trading units in their own
right and absorbed less successful rivals.101 The connection with the shrine
at Arochukwu consolidated contact with the Aro network. The ibinukpabi oracle is credited with intervening when the source of fresh water
for Bonny began to suffer from silting in the early eighteenth century, the
problem apparently resolved by the sacrifice of a daughter of the amanyanabo.102 In short, after the Andoni war, the “house” evolved into a quasimilitary, commercial unit centered on the canoes that characterized river
craft of the delta, its leadership shaped by merit as much as by ancestry.
The establishment of links with the Aro in the interior enabled Bonny to
36
concentrate political authority and reward meritocracy so that it became
the principal port in the Bight of Biafra in the eighteenth century.
According to Hargreaves, succession to the amanyanabo title was
sometimes contested in the eighteenth century; in fact, there was a shared
monarchy in which all houses claiming descent from the founding settlers were partners in government.103 In particular, the Halliday lineage
was associated with the amanyanabo title.104 This veil of silence over
Bonny’s history is curious considering that the riddle of the Niger was
a prominent subject of debate in nineteenth-century Britain; presumably
British merchants, ship masters, and surgeons might have enquired more
carefully than they appear to have done.105 There is no chronology for the
Perekule house, nor are the exact names of many of its incumbents known.
A close reading of trade accounts, nonetheless, suggests that despite the
possibility that elections were sometimes contested, the amanyanabo, once
selected, was a very powerful, even dominant, figure in regulating external
trade. It also appears from an examination of trading accounts that the
Perekule assumed dynastic control over this position earlier than Hargreaves assumes. In this regard, we agree with Jones and with Alagoa and
Tombo in identifying the consolidation of centralized authority with the
emergence of the Perekule, while accepting the problems of tracking the
chronology of incumbents.
According to Jones, the Perekule house “came into being in the eighteenth century,” while Alagoa and Tombo date the accession of the first
Perekule after 1700.106 In his remarkable account of trade protocols at
Bonny in 1699–1704, however, Barbot reveals that there was a Perekule
already involved in regulating trade relations with Europeans before 1700.
He reported that the ships arriving at Bonny “usually give a salute of three,
five or seven guns, according to the bigness of the ship, to the king of
Bandy,” observing that the local people were “very fond of such civilities”
and that “it contributes much to facilitate the trade.”107 In the conduct of
trade, he wrote that the “king”, who in this case can be identified as Awua
(or William) Perekule, acted in consultation with “the principal natives of
the country” and his brother “Pepprell” in determining the initial terms
upon which slaves might be bought, including exchange rates of trade
goods and customs dues, “none of the natives having dared to come aboard
of us, or sell the least thing, till the king had adjusted the trade with us.”
Only after these negotiations, Barbot continued, did the king order “the
publick cryer to proclaim the permission of trade with us.” Negotiations
with the king, who can be identified as Perekule because of his brother’s
name, and his officials, seem to have taken place at intervals during subsequent trade dealings, such meetings culminating, as Barbot reported of a
37
later voyage to Bonny in 1704, in a gathering at which “we treated the king
and his principal officers, with a goat, a hog, and a barrel of punch.” This,
Barbot observed, was “an advertisement to the Blacks ashore, to pay in to
us what they owe us, or to furnish us with all speed, what slaves and yams
they have contracted to supply us with, else the king compels them to it.”108
Barbot’s account suggests that the amanyanabo—in this case, Awua, or
William—not only profited personally through taxation and other means
from the slave trade but also regulated the terms of trade and, perhaps
most remarkable of all, underwrote and enforced credit arrangements. In
effect, by the time that Barbot visited Bonny, there appears to have been a
ceremony of royalty, a code of ethics, and mechanisms for self-regulation
that, institutionally, provided a firm foundation for international exchange
and credit protection. Moreover, he was not alone at this time in identifying royal authority and power with contractual agreement and enforcement at Bonny. A similar assumption underlay the terms of trade that the
Royal African Company sought to establish with Bonny at the beginning
of the eighteenth century. Anticipating potential problems arising from
credit, the company endeavored to enlist the amanyanabo’s authority to
“oblige” his people “to perform their Contracts and do us Justice and make
us Satisfaction for Damage in delaying us in our Voyage or otherwise
whensoever they do it.”109 Thus, in the eyes of British traders, royal authority and contract enforcement were inextricably linked at Bonny by 1700.
Trade relations at Bonny were not always as orderly as Barbot described
them or as the Royal African Company hoped they might be. Yet, while
the names of individual amanyanabo are not always known, royal influence
over trade, nonetheless, remained clear. In 1755 an English ship drove away
from Bonny a rival French ship, despite efforts by the king to intercede on
behalf of the Frenchman, “afin de lui rendre justice autant qu’il pourrait.”
It was reported, however, that on this occasion the king’s authority “ne
servait de rien,” perhaps because the incident happened offshore.110 The
identity of the English shipmaster involved in this incident is unknown,
but his action may perhaps have been connected with another incident
at Bonny a year later when, according to Captain Baillie of the Liverpool
ship, Carter, “trade was stopt (as it had often been before).” Accompanied
by the masters of three other British vessels, Baillie “marched on shore to
know the reason and applied to the King thrice,” but, according to Baillie’s report, the amanyanabo “constantly ordered himself to be denied, and
wou’d not admit us,” even though “we heard his voice in doors.” Without
a royal audience, trade evidently was impossible. Affronted by the king’s
inaction, the four shipmasters elected to bombard the town, but this
proved counterproductive. One of the ships was lost as a result of “a volley
38
of small arms from the bushes” and “several shot from the town [that] went
through him.” Only when “things [were] made up” did trade re-open, and
even then it was reported “very slow.”111 Trade at Bonny in the mid-1750s,
as in Barbot’s time, depended on royal approval, and Anglo-French rivalry
was not allowed to interfere.
In 1790 James Fraser, who had commanded five voyages to Bonny,
claimed that when candidates for the position of amanyanabo were considered to “be equal,” the man preferred was usually the one “best qualified to govern them with equity, and secure them against the depredations
of their neighbors, and who understands the English language and the
mode of trading with Europeans.”112 Three years later, in April 1793, John
Goodrich, master of a Bristol ship, complained of the slowness of trade
since his arrival there over three months earlier. Goodrich attributed this
directly to the death of the amanyanabo in 1792, reporting that there had
been “but One fare [fair] Since I have been in the River[.] Owing to their
being no King the Trade is much Stagnated here.”113 Goodrich provides
one of the few references to the death of an amanyanabo, but it is clear that
trade did not operate smoothly, if at all, until the period of mourning and
the succession was settled. Trade was not allowed to begin until the amanyanabo had to “break” trade with visiting ships before other trade could
begin.114 Despite the sharp fall in the number of ships leaving Europe
for Africa on the outbreak of war in Europe in 1793, following nearly
unprecedented levels of slave exports in 1792, Bonny experienced a more
severe slump in slave ship arrivals in 1793–1795 than its rival, Old Calabar.
Thereafter, slave exports from Bonny returned to pre-1793 levels, reaching
a new peak in 1800.115 The succession that Goodrich witnessed in April
1793, therefore, seems to have had a real, though short-term, impact on
trade levels at Bonny, underlining the importance of central authority to
the port’s trade performance.
The important role of the amanyanabo was further demonstrated in
the period after Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807. In the mid-1820s
King Opubo Pepple persuaded the master of a French ship to stay at Bonny
rather than proceed to Old Calabar by contracting to supply 230 slaves
within 45 days. At the time this contract was sealed Opubo Pepple had
similar commitments to up to ten other ships.116 Moreover, the amanyanabo was protecting credit in the emergent palm oil trade, when in the
mid-1830s British merchants requested the amanyanabo, William Dappa
Pepple, to cover debts incurred by local oil traders, a request to which the
king acceded, albeit with some reluctance.117 The invocation of central
authority to secure credit and generally regulate trade relations seems to
have transcended both British and French slave trading at Bonny as well
39
as the shift of Britain’s trading interests at the port from slaves to palm
oil. From the arrival of Barbot in 1699 to the accession of William Dappa
Pepple as amanyanabo in the 1830s, therefore, there is consistent, if intermittent and sometimes indirect, evidence that trade and credit protection
at Bonny revolved around centralized authority. This authority was rooted
in tradition, lineage, military prowess, and commercial ability, reinforced by
ceremonial and spiritual practices as well as the regulation of social behavior. At Bonny, we argue, political centralization, with its fiscal and other
privileges, and centering on the cult of royal authority and the unification of
military prowess and commercial skill through the house system, provided a
highly flexible, low-cost method of safeguarding credit, thereby facilitating
expansion of slave trafficking to much higher levels than at rival ports.
The adaptation of pawnship as a means of underpinning credit represented an important innovation in allowing credit expansion at Old
Calabar, but there were costs associated with this system of private ordering.118 Reliance on pawnship could entail protracted and sometimes
unproductive negotiations between borrowers and lenders. It also involved
risks to lenders in terms of absconding pawns and costs to borrowers in
terms of provisioning hostages and loss of potential earnings from them
during their enforced idleness. Disputes relating to pawning arrangements
could provoke violence between European and local traders, which, in the
absence of a mutually accepted arbiter, resulted in some cases in deaths on
one or both sides of the exchange.119 Such costs cannot be precisely quantified, but they were unlikely to be less, and probably higher, than those
associated with centrally enforced contracts, especially where royal power
was absolute, but not used willfully.120 Transaction costs in the slave trade
at Old Calabar were therefore probably higher than at Bonny, thereby
restraining the growth of market activity. It is also clear that pawnship
was usually embedded in social relations and that, from the perspective of
European traders, was likely to function most effectively as a credit protection mechanism if and when borrowers were related to those that they
pawned.121 Asymmetries in information between lenders and borrowers
about the relationship of pawns to borrowers meant that Europeans were
almost certainly unable to enforce this preference, but some pawns were
clearly related to Old Calabar traders. Whether or not pawns were related
to traders, the capacity to expand credit at Old Calabar, nevertheless, clearly
came to depend on local supplies of pawns and the willingness of creditors
to accept those on offer. In this respect, as a device for protecting credit,
pawnship remained rooted in personal relations and trust, and was thus
incompatible with the achievement of levels of slaving activity witnessed
40
at Bonny where less personal, more politically based, contract and credit
enforcement methods seem to have prevailed.
Described in 1826 as a “horrid hole” because of its health risks to visiting Europeans, Bonny emerged as one of the principal venues of slave
trading in Africa during the eighteenth century. Until now, however, its
shadowy history, in which even its king line and political structures remain
murky, has meant that its rise as a slave port has been one of the least understood stories relating to Africa’s involvement in the transatlantic traffic
in slaves. Its history, however, is clearly central to understanding how the
interior dispatched such a large number of enslaved people through virtually two ports: Bonny and Old Calabar. As has been demonstrated, Bonny
outpaced Old Calabar, which was the leading supplier of slaves in the early
eighteenth century, supplying two-thirds of all slaves shipped from the
Bight of Biafra in the century beginning in the 1730s. The expansion in
slave exports in the Atlantic trade during the eighteenth century, when
slave shipments reached a peak, can be largely accounted for with respect
to British slave trading and especially with the Bight of Biafra. British
merchants dominated trade with both ports but clearly favored Bonny.
We have argued that a critical factor in allowing ports to generate slaves
for export was the establishment of credit from European firms. In this
regard the early growth and consolidation of centralized authority, linked
to victory over Andoni in about 1700 and to reform of the traditional
house system, facilitated the emergence at Bonny of a commercial system
that sustained lower costs of doing business and developing mechanisms
of credit protection that allowed its expansion, outpacing its closest rivals.
Bonny capitalized on its victory over Andoni and aggressively pursued
through its trading house system and heavily manned river canoes commercial ties with the inland Aro trading diaspora and its westward expansion in the middle of the eighteenth century. Thus, Bonny’s rise had repercussions for the economic geography of slave supply in the Bight of Biafra
interior. Underpinned by well-protected flows of imported credit, these
links with the Aro network allowed Bonny in turn to gain a reputation for
efficiency in supplying large ships with slaves. In this respect, the story of
slave trading in the Bight of Biafra is consistent with theories of modern
microeconomics that highlight the relationship between centralized state
institutions and market-based levels of economic activity. More specifically,
it underlines the importance of perceptions for economic behavior and the
role of politics and political institutions in shaping creditors’ evaluations
of borrowers’ credit worthiness.122 In doing so, it further reminds us of the
influence of African institutions on the scale and structure of the Atlantic
slave trade, casting new light on the issue of why so many people of Igbo
41
and Ibibio origin were forcibly shipped to the Americas in the century or
so before 1840.
Because Bonny was one of several ports in western Africa through
which very large numbers of enslaved people were dispatched across
the Atlantic, its story has still wider implications. Among other leading
African slave ports, Cabinda, Luanda, and Ouidah accounted for at least as
many, and quite likely more, slave shipments to the Americas as Bonny.123
In addition, other ports supplied slaves in numbers that collectively were
large but individually much smaller than those shipped from Bonny and
the other leading slave ports. As in Europe, slave trading at the Atlantic
coast of Africa was an ubiquitous activity but came to be concentrated at
a small number of ports, one of which was Bonny, and to a lesser extent
Old Calabar. What happened in the Bight of Biafra in 1660–1840 was,
therefore, a microcosm of broader trends in slaving activity around the
Atlantic world in terms of trade concentration. As a result, the history of
Bonny and Old Calabar between 1690 and 1840 provide insights not only
into how other African ports came to dominate local or regional slaving
activities but also into how local adjustment and interaction at different
places on the western coast of Africa characterized economic integration
of the Atlantic world during the slave trade era.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
This chapter integrates several earlier papers. See Paul E. Lovejoy and David
Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,” American Historical Review 104
(1999): 332–355; “Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade 1760–1789,” in
Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, edited by Vincent
Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press,
2001): 85–115; “The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c.
1600–1810,” Journal of African History 41 (2000): 67–89; “Anglo-Efik
Relations and Protection Against Illegal Enslavement at Old Calabar,
1740–1807,” in Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, edited by
Sylviane Diouf (Athens, Ohio, 2003): 101–121; and “‘This Horrid Hole’:
Royal Authority, Commerce and Credit at Bonny, 1690–1840,” Journal of
African History 45 (2004): 363–392.
David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson and Herbert S. Klein,
eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
David Northrup suggests that Elem Kalabari held on to its premier position
for most of the seventeenth century, but also notes that, in terms of competition between Bonny and Elem Kalabari, Bonny was “the dominant port”
42
4.
5.
6.
by the end of the century. Based on the figures produced by Northrup, Old
Calabar was the leading port in the Bight by 1700. See Trade Without Rulers:
Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978): 52–53. John Thornton draws on Dutch and Portuguese
sources related to Elem Kalabari in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
when Elem Kalabari emerged as the principal port in the eastern Niger
delta. See his unpublished paper, “African Background of the Slave Cargo of
the Henrietta Maria.”
In 1762 a report to the Chamber of Commerce of Nantes suggested that
Bonny was part of Elem Kalabari and was “l’endroit don[t] les Anglais tirent
le plus de captifs,” shipping each year some 12,000 slaves in some 30 ships. It
was observed that “il ny a point dendroit ou La traite sois plus faciles et plus
commodes.” Extrait de memoire Lepinay en septembre 1762, C 738, f.76,
Archives Departmentales de Loire Atlantique, Nantes. Liverpool and Bristol
merchants were aware of Bonny’s importance in the slave trade before the
1780s. As noted in 1772, while there were “two Liverpool & 1 Bristol Vessel
at Newtown & 1 Liverpool man at old Town” in Old Calabar in June 1772, in
August “there were thirteen Sail at Bonny giving about £20 Ster[ling] a head
for Slaves.” David Tuohy to John Chilcott, 15 December 1772, 380 TUO
2/1, Tuohy papers, Liverpool Record Office. Similarly, Joseph Banfield, who
was involved in twelve voyages to Africa, mainly from Bristol, noted that on
his voyage to Elem Kalabari in the John in 1771 there were “at that time in
the river 15 sail of vestles and as many more at Bonny.” He also noted that,
as a result, “the natives had rose the Slaves to such an Exorbitant price that
the Vestles in General short of their purchase neare One half ’.” Joseph Banfield mss, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. The traders at Old Calabar
understood the competition presented by Bonny, who, in seeking to attract
Liverpool merchants, claimed that they “have Slaves Same a[s] Bonny or
other place.” Lovejoy and Richardson, “Letters of the Old Calabar Slave
Trade,” 109.
Evidence of Robert Norris, in Report of the Committee of Council on the
African Trade, 1789, House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth
Century, 145 volumes, edited by Sheila Lambert (Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 1975), vol.69, part 1: 47. According to Norris’ figures, at this
time Bonny and Elem Kalabari were the most important single sources of
slaves shipped throughout Atlantic Africa, accounting for just under onefifth of the estimated total shipment of 74,200 slaves a year. Norris claimed
that 38,000 slaves a year were carried away in British ships. In the same
report, another Liverpool trader, James Penny, suggested that shipments
from Bonny and Elem Kalabari totaled 14,000 annually at this time, with
11,000 being carried in British ships and the rest in French.
John Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the
River Congo: With an Appendix Containing an Account of the European Trade
with the West Coast of Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1966 [1823]): 136. These
figures may understate Bonny’s dominance, especially from the 1790s, since
43
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
it appears that by this time Elem Kalabari had lost its status as “an independent state.” According to Adams, its inhabitants were “compelled to take
their merchandize to Bonny for sale, yet are not permitted to have any communication with the shipping.”
Ship Castle day book, AMS/4, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Bonny dealers sometimes traded at other ports. In 1727 Captain White “of
Banny” supplied slaves at Andoni to the Bristol ship Castle.
Lovejoy and Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History,” 338.
Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species,
Particularly the African (London: J. Phillips, 1788).
Matthew, Penny and Norris, Letter from the Delegates from Liverpool, in
Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, vol.69, part 1: 83–84.
See Adams, Remarks, 144. Aye and Law and Mann have concluded that the
report dates to the 1790s when Adams was at Old Calabar, but we think
that the text is unclear and could apply to the period when Adams wrote
his account several years after British abolition in 1807. In any event there
appears to have been a school at Old Calabar at least two decades before the
first missionaries settled. See Efiong U. Aye, Old Calabar Through the Centuries (Calabar: Hope Waddell Press, 1969): 108; and Robin Law and Kristin
Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 56 (1999): 354n70.
Matthew, Penny, and Norris, Letter from the Delegates from Liverpool, in
Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, vol.69, part 1: 83–84.
Account of Henry Nicholls, 1804–05, in Records of the African Association,
1788–1831, edited by Robin Hallett (London and New York: T. Nelson,
1964): 195.
For a picture of a bell that is dated 1799, see the Cumberbeach bell of King
Effiwatt, in Ekei Essien Oku, The Kings and Chiefs of Old Calabar (17851925) (Calabar: Glad Tidings Press, 1989): 8; and Eyo Okon Akak, The
Palestine Origin of the Efiks, vol.3 (Calabar: Akak and Sons, 1986). Also see,
Ronald David Stewart-Brown, Liverpool Ships in the Eighteenth Century:
Including the King’s Ships Built There, with Notes on the Principal Shipwrights
(Liverpool: Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., 1932): 49. Holman reports a bell that
was inscribed: “THE GIFT OF THOMAS JONES OF BRISTOL TO
GRANDY ROBIN JOHN OF OLD TOWN OLD CALABAR 1770.”
See Donald C. Simmons, ed., Holman’s Voyage to Old Calabar (Calabar, 1959
[1828]): 9.
Several ivory discs have survived and are located in the Merseyside Maritime
Museum, Albert Dock, Liverpool; the Fenland Museum, Wisbach; and the
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Letter book of William Earle 1760–1761, Earle papers, Merseyside Maritime Museum Archives, Liverpool.
44
17. Gomer Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque,
with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade (London: W. Heinemann and
Liverpool: E. Howell, 1897): 547.
18. Evidence of William James, in Report of the Lords of Trade on the Slave
Trade (1789) in Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, vol.69, part 1: 49.
19. G. A. Robertson, Notes on Africa; Particularly Those Parts Which are Situated
between Cape Verd and the River Congo (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones,
1819): 313.
20. Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 542–548.
21. Thomas Codd to James Rogers & Co., 11 March 1792, C 107/6, National
Archives [hereafter NA], Kew.
22. C. Daryll Forde, ed., Efik Traders of Old Calabar: Containing the Diary of
Antera Duke, an Efik Slave-trading Chief of the Eighteenth Century, Together
with an Ethnographic Sketch and Notes [hereafter referred to as Ntiero Duke,
Diary] (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall for the International African Institute, 1968): 41–42, 52, 63. A new edition of the diary has been published
since this paper was written: Stephen D. Behrendt, A.J.H. Ltham and David
Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke: An Eighteenth Century African Slave
Trader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
23. Ntiero Duke, Diary, 37.
24. P. E. H. Hair, “Antera Duke of Old Calabar—A Little More about an
African Entrepreneur,” History in Africa 17 (1990): 360.
25. For the names of traders supplying slaves in 1769–1770, see account book
of Dobson, 1769–1790, Christopher Hasell papers, Dalemain, Cumbria.
See also Frances Wilkins, The Hasells of Dalemain: A Cumberland Family
1736–1794 (Kidderminster, UK: Wyre Forest Press, 2003): 41.
26. According to A. J. H. Latham, Ekpe was introduced into Old Calabar in the
middle of the eighteenth century, but based on our reading of the evidence,
this is much too late. See Old Calabar 1600–1891: The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973):
29–30. For a discussion of Ekpe, also see A. E. Afigbo, “Peoples of the Cross
River Valley and Eastern Niger Delta,” in Groundwork in Nigerian History,
edited by Obaro Ikime (Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, Nigeria,
1980): 61; Donald C. Simmons, “An Ethnographic Sketch of the Efik
People,” in Efik Traders edited by Forde, 1–26; U. N. Abalogu, “Ekpe Society
in Arochukwu and Bende,” Nigeria Magazine 126/127 (1978): 78–97; P.
Amaury Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush (New York: Negro Universities
Press, 1972 [1912]): 37–48.
27. For descriptions of the nsibidi script and a discussion of its history and use,
see Elphinstone Dayrell, “Some Nsibidi Signs,” Man 10 (1909): 113–114;
and “Further Notes on ‘Nsibidi Signs with their Meanings from the Ikom
District, Southern Nigeria,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of
Great Britain and Ireland 41 (1911): 521–540, plates lxv–lxvii. See also J. K.
45
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
MacGregor, “Some Notes on Nsibidi,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 39 (1909): 209–219.
See for example, Keith Nicklin, “Skin-Covered Masks of Cameroon,”
African Arts 12 (1979): 54–59, 91; Ikwo A. Ekpo, “Ekpe Costume of the
Cross River,” African Arts 12 (1978): 73–75; Simon Ottenberg and Linda
Knudsen, “Leopard Society Masquerades: Symbolism and Diffusion,”
African Arts 18 (1985): 37–95, 103–104.
Ntiero Duke, Diary, 27.
On 24 December 1786, Ntiero Duke noted in his diary “we have Egbo
Run for abou town and after 7 clock night wee Read Letter com to Willy
Honesty about what Egbo monny the putt for Willy & Tom Curcock 40
men first and 13 men mor for Cobham family in aqua Landing that” (52).
On the Ibinukpabi oracle, see Kenneth Onwuka Dike and Felicia Ekejiuba,
The Aro of South-eastern Nigeria, 1650–1980 (Ibadan: University Press Ltd.,
1990): 249.
Entry for 26 October 1786, Ntiero Duke, Diary, 100.
It appears that before 1807 at least, European merchants were not allowed
to become members of Ekpe and otherwise did not have access to its councils and therefore could not seek redress. By the 1820s, however, European
merchants were allowed to join the highest grades of Ekpe. See Lovejoy
and Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History,” 349, but Latham
speculates that European merchants may have been initiated into Ekpe
earlier; in Old Calabar, 38.
An 1825 letter of credit written by Duke Ephraim to L. Loiseau, captain of
the French slave ship, Le Charles states: “I promest to Capt L. Loiseau, at the
french brig Eugene to dispatch him at his Vessel, from this place for with his
full cargo, at five hundred Slaves in the Current of three Months from Datte.
Calbar July 7th 1825. Duke Ephraim,” quoted in Serge Daget, Répertoire
des Expéditions Négrières Françaises à la traite illégale (1814–1850) (Nantes:
Centre de recherche sur l’histoire du mond atlantique, Université de Nantes:
Comité nantais d’études en sciences humaines, 1988): 380.
On the credit system at Old Calabar, see A. J. H. Latham, “Currency, Credit
and Capitalism on the Cross River in the Pre-Colonial Era,” Journal of
African History 12 (1971): 600–605; and Lovejoy and Richardson, “Trust,
Pawnship and Atlantic History,” 333–355.
Lovejoy and Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History,” 347–349.
Also see Lovejoy and Richardson, “Pawnship in Western Africa.”
Ntiero Duke, Diary, 35.
On 7 July 1785, Ntiero Duke reported that Captain Comberback had “beg
him to stay Little time about want get som prown out so I Did tak 2 Jar
Brandy for I & Esin and I did send Optter antera for Enyong to trad of
slave” (87) that is, he wanted the captain “to stay a little longer … to get some
pawns out” and hence Ntiero Duke had sent an agent “to trade for slaves” to
recover the pawns (35).
46
39. See for example, the various case studies in Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy,
eds., Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1994).
40. Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 533.
41. Evidence of James Morley, in Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, Vol.72:
156.
42. Evidence of John Ashley Hall, in Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, vol.72:
227.
43. Nteiro Duke, Diary, 35.
44. Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 543–544.
45. Richard Rogers to James Rogers, Ship Pearl, Old Calabar, April 1788, C
107/12, NA, Kew.
46. Richard Rogers to James Rogers, 12 April 1788, C 107/12, NA, Kew.
47. On family ties between slave dealers and pawns, see the evidence of John
Ashley Hall, in Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, vol.72: 227.
48. Duke Ephraim to Rogers & LRoach [Laroche], 16 October 1789, C 107/12,
NA, Kew.
49. For instance, James Arnold, in evidence to Parliament in 1790, reported that
the master of the Bristol ship, Ruby, which traded at Bimbia in Cameroons in 1787–1788 had released eleven slaves and some ivory to three local
merchants in order to allow them to redeem pawns from another ship, the
master of which was threatening to sail away with pawns. Arnold reported
that the eleven slaves secured the release of “Six or Seven” of the merchants’
pawns which apparently was a good rate of exchange for Arnold. In Sessional
Papers, edited by Lambert, vol.72: 52.
50. Duke Ephraim to Rogers and LRoach [Laroche], 16 October 1789, C
107/12, NA, Kew.
51. Richard Rogers to James Rogers, 20 July 1788, C 107/13, NA, Kew.
52. Latham, Old Calabar, 28, 38.
53. Ntiero Duke, Diary, 49, 59.
54. Evidence of John Ashley Hall, in Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, Vol.72:
227.
55. Ntiero Duke, Diary, 59–60. According to Donald Simmons to “blow Egbo”
on someone means to suspend all dealings with the person. See his study,
“An Ethnographic Sketch,” 70.
56. Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 543.
57. Evidence of James Fraser, in Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, vol.71: 15.
58. Falola and Lovejoy, Pawnship in Africa, 4.
59. Richard Rogers to James Rogers, Ship Pearl, Old Calabar, April 1788, C
107/12, NA, Kew.
60. In Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, vol.71: 227–229.
47
61. Adams, Remarks, 143; and Hammett Forsyth to James Rogers, 11 June 1792,
C 107/13, NA, Kew.
62. R. M. Jackson, Journal of a Residence in Bonny River on Board the Ship Kingston During the Months of January, February and March 1826 (Letchworth,
1934). 133. Jackson was surgeon on board the Kingston.
63. As Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa has observed, trade between the delta and the interior was long standing; see “Long-Distance Trade and States in the Niger
Delta,” Journal of African History 11 (1970): 319–329.
64. For contemporary descriptions of Bonny town, see Adams, Remarks, 136–
137; and Jackson, Journal of a Residence, 68, 143–144.
65. On Old Calabar, see Lovejoy and Richardson, ”Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History,” 333–355; and ”From Slaves to Palm Oil: Afro-European Commercial Relations in the Bight of Biafra, 1741–1841,” in Maritime Empires:
British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, edited by David
Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge, Suffolk:
Boydell Press, 2004): 13–29.
66. Jackson, Journal of a Residence, 144–145. Referring to Bonny, Jackson suggested in 1826 that “from the middle of the last century to its close, the
English held exclusive possession of its traffic, which consisted entirely of
Slaves.” He drew particular attention to Liverpool traders who were said
to have carried away 15,000 slaves a year from Bonny at the end of the
eighteenth century.
67. For data on Liverpool ships trading to Bonny in 1751–1755, see Eltis et al,
Atlantic Slave Trade Database. For late eighteenth century data, see Stephen
D. Behrendt, “The British Slave Trade, 1785–1807: Volume, Profitability,
and Mortality,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993,
302. Behrendt’s data also show, however, that the spread of firms involved
in British trade to Bonny increased in the decade before abolition in 1807.
Interestingly, around 1790 three firms also dominated British trade to
Bonny’s neighbor, Elem Kalabari, though they were not the same as the ones
that controlled the trade to Bonny. See Behrendt, “Slave Trade,” 301.
68. Jackson, Journal of a Residence, 144; Jackson observed that each of the “principal Traders” at Bonny kept “a large establishment, having at least from five
to ten Wives & perhaps thirty Slaves or more” (148–149).
69. For an earlier description of the principal merchants of Bonny and its component principalities, see P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, eds.,
Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712, 2
vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992) [hereafter Barbot, West Africa], vol.2:
675. According to Barbot, the “Town of Great Bandy” consisted around
1700 of about 300 houses and was “well Peopled with Blacks, who employ
themselves in trade.” Barbot listed several of the leading traders.
70. Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa and Adadonye Fombo, A Chronicle of Grand Bonny
(Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1972): 45–49. On patterns of control at
Old Calabar after 1750, see Lovejoy and Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship and
48
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
Atlantic History.” Although the relative standing of merchant families at
Old Calabar shifted between the 1720s and c.1770, there is evidence of
similar patterns earlier in the century. See Stephen D. Behrendt and Eric J.
Graham, “African Merchants, Notables and the Slave Trade at Old Calabar,
1720: Evidence from the National Archives of Scotland,” History in Africa
30 (2003): 37–61.
Brouillard de traite 1790, 1 J 679, Archive Departementale de la LoireAtlantique, Nantes.
Trade book of an un-named ship [Rodney, 1792, Bristol to Bonny], James
Rogers papers, Chancery Masters’ Exhibits, C 107/15, NA, Kew.
Accounts of the Jupiter, 1792–1793, James Rogers papers, Chancery Masters’
Exhibits, C 107/15, NA, Kew.
Hugh Crow, for example, referred in his account of his last slaving voyage
to Bonny in 1807 to John Africa, who had been to Britain at least once.
Crow claimed that John Africa was nicknamed Billy Pitt by shipmasters on
account of his “political abilities and general acquirements,” which included
“the favour or confidence” of King Pepple. Hugh Crow, Memoirs of the late
Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool, Comprising a Narrative of His Life Together
with Descriptive Sketches of the Western Coast of Africa, Particularly of Bonny,
the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants, the Production of the Soil and the
Trade of the Country to Which Are Added Anecdotes and Observations Illustrative of the Negro Character (London: Frank Cass, 1970 [1830]): 139. The
accounts of a ship that traded at Bonny c.1810 reveal that John Africa, Tom
Allison, Finebones, Jew Jew Boy, and Jew Jew House were involved in trade.
See Brig Stephen trading accounts, papers of John Leigh & Co., C 108/214,
NA, Kew. For a more general listing of the names of the trading houses at
Bonny in the nineteenth century, some of which included names identical
with or similar to those mentioned by European traders in 1790–1793, see
Alagoa and Fombo, Chronicle, 50–66.
Testimony of Fraser, Minutes of Evidence, in Sessional Papers, edited by
Lambert, vol.71: 17.
Crow, Memoirs, 225.
For reports of stocks of trade goods at Bonny, see Adams, Remarks, 139–140;
and Jackson, Journal of a Residence, 74, 143–44.
Crow, Memoirs, 60–61. In 1826 Jackson reported that King Pepple had given
to the king of Warri goods equivalent to three ships’ cargoes for the hand of
his daughter; see Journal of a Residence, 135.
The practice of extending loans to the Bonny king and other local merchants
is also reported by Barbot, West Africa, vol.2: 675, 689.
Children comprised 29 percent of the slaves taken from Old Calabar
between 1730 and 1807 (N = 81 voyages); this was almost exactly double
the ratio of children on ships leaving Bonny in the same period (N = 92
voyages). See Eltis et al., Slave Trade Database. It is difficult to be precise
about how children were defined in eighteenth century voyage records, but
49
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
it seems reasonable to assume an age of 14 years. There were contemporary
suggestions that the health of slaves supplied at Bonny may have been better
than those at Old Calabar, with the result that Bonny slaves were perhaps
more able to survive the Atlantic crossing and even fetch higher prices in the
Americas. One Liverpool firm noted in 1762 that “Callebar is Remarkable
for great Mortality in Slaves.” Crosbies & Trafford & Co. to Ambrose Lace,
14 April 1762, quoted in Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 486. Later, in 1788,
James Jones of Bristol claimed that he “allways declined sending” ships to
Old Calabar and Cameroons “as they are Sickly, and the Slaves inferior to
any other, very Weakly and liable to great Mortality.” ff.154–155, Add. Mss,
38416, British Library. Such views are corroborated to some extent by mortality data for the middle passage. While passage times from Old Calabar
and Bonny to America were not significantly different, ships leaving Old
Calabar in 1730–1807 lost 21.4 percent of slaves shipped (N = 93 voyages)
compared to 15.5 percent on ships leaving Bonny (N = 142 voyages) See
Eltis et al., Slave Trade Database. One merchant noted on 30 July 1774 that
a slave dealer of Kingston, Jamaica, had sold “all his prime Cargoes of Bonny
and Gould Cost Cargoes in Town, and the bite and Calabar Ships he hass
sent to Montegua bay,” the implication being that the latter offered a better
market for poorer quality slaves. John Fletcher to Peleg Clarke, in Elizabeth
Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America
(Washington, DC, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–1935; [1965]),
vol.3: 292.
Clarkson, Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, 31. G. I. Jones noted
that “[Elem] Kalabari and Bonny were in a position to supply slaves more
speedily and in greater numbers than any other Oil River port:. See Oil
Rivers, 46.
ff.154–155, Add. Mss. 38416, British Library. By this time, Jones’ claim was
echoed by others; see Minutes of Evidence to House of Lords on the State
of the Trade to Africa, 1793, in F. W. Torrington, ed., House of Lords Sessional
Papers 1792–93 (Dobbs Ferry, New York, 1975), vol.1: 304.
For a discussion of Aro expansion, see Dike and Ekejiuba, Aro of Southeastern Nigeria, 96, 102, 176–178, 198–202; Northrup, Trade without Rulers,
104–107, 114–145; Jones, Oil Rivers, 69, 70; and G. Ugo Nwokeji, “The
Biafran Frontier: Trade, Slaves and Aro Society, c.1750–1905,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1999, 38–45. Nwokeji argues that “European
trade encouraged Aro forays in the hinterland” but, unlike us, does not link
this to credit arrangements (44).
Alagoa and Fombo, Chronicle, 3.
For a brief discussion of Bonny’s commercial network, see Dike, Trade and
Politics, 41; and Northrup, Trade without Rulers, 129.
For a discussion, see Northrup, Trade without Rulers, 106, 129. Northrup
notes that “the Ngwa-Ndoki area was a major nexus for trade since through
it ran routes from Bende and points north, from Ogua and Owerri, and
50
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
from the Anang country.” The fairs at Bende and Uburu were held every 28
days, alternating at 14 day intervals, and connected with networks of markets
held every four days in rotation. For a discussion of Ndoki-Bonny relations,
see Robin Horton, “Some Fresh Thoughts on Eastern Ijo Origins, Expansions and Migrations,” in The Multi-Disciplinary Approach to African History:
Essays in Honour of Ebiegeri Joe Alagoa, edited by Nkparom C. Ejituwu (Port
Harcourt: University of Port Harcourt Press, 1998): 217–222.
Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
(New York: AMS Press, 1973 [1788]): 16.
Clarkson, Slavery and the Commerce of the Human Species, 31.
According to Falconbridge, the fairs were “held at uncertain periods, but
generally every six weeks, [when] several thousands are frequently exposed to
sale, who had been collected from all parts of the country for a very considerable distance round.” See his memoir, Account of the Slave Trade, 12. Adams
states that he heard that Igbo slaves were purchased at fairs held every five or
six weeks at several villages on the banks and rivers of the interior. Remarks,
129–130. In 1789, James Penny told the Parliamentary enquiry that goods
were carried to inland markets about 80 miles upstream. Report of the African
Trade, part I. Others giving evidence before Parliament in 1788–1790 made
similar comments. In 1826 Jackson described “the Eboe Country” as the
“principal resort for Trade” of Bonny traders. Journal of a Residence, 151.
Thornton, “African Background of Henrietta Maria.”
Dike and Ekejiuba cite an unpublished manuscript by Bonny historian
Adadony Fombo in Aro of South-Eastern Nigeria, 146. See also Alagoa and
Fombo, Chronicle, 6.
Horton, “Some Fresh Thoughts,” 220–222.
Quoted in Alagoa and Tombo, Chronicle, 6.
For case studies, see Falola and Lovejoy, eds., Pawnship in Africa. On his visit
to Bonny in 1699, Barbot was somewhat dismissive of the use of the title
of “king”, noting that, in common with other places in Guinea, Europeans
used the title to refer to the chiefs or captains of the villages near Bonny. He
went on to suggest that they “are at best such kings as the two and thirty that
Joshua defeated at once.” West Africa, vol.2: 701n.
Jones, Oil Rivers, 47.
Alagoa and Tombo, Chronicle, 9; Jones, Oil Rivers, 107–108, 115; and Susan
M. Hargreaves, “The Political Economy of Nineteenth Century Bonny: A
Study of Power, Authority, Legitimacy and Ideology in a Delta Trading
Community, from 1790-1914,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1987, 36–39. Andoni’s subordination to Bonny was institutionalized
through the transfer of its juju, whose totem was the iguana, to Bonny. It is
significant that the power of this shrine, which was not evident to Barbot
when he visited Bonny at the end of the seventeenth century, came to supplant the Simingi juju as the most powerful at Bonny. There is evidence that
Andoni occasionally supplied slaves directly to Europeans in the eighteenth
51
century but such occurrences were rare relative to the trade at Bonny. Thereafter Andoni remained subordinate to Bonny, ultimately ceding its political
autonomy in the 1840s.
97. Jones, Oil Rivers, 47.
98. Alagoa and Tombo, Chronicle, 9–11.
99. Hargreaves, “Political Economy,” 35–39. Also see Jackson, Journal of a Residence, 152.
100. For a description of the visit of the amanyanabo to the various juju houses
and the procession to newly arrived ships, see James Holman, Travels in
Madeira, Sierra Leone, Teneriffe, St. Jago, Cape Coast, Fernando Po, Princess
Island, etc. etc. (Freeport, NY: Book for Libraries Press, 1972 [1834]): 376–
377; Jackson, Journal of a Residence, 73–79; Jones, Oil Rivers, 108–109; and
Hargreaves, “Political Economy,” 165.
101. Perekule’s nomination of the slave, Allison Nwaoju, as alabo is said to have
initiated the right of slaves to become ama-alabo (heads of houses); Hargreaves, “Political Economy,” 46. When this happened is unknown, but
as noted earlier, a trader named Allison, possibly Allison Nwaoju or one
of his descendants, was a major supplier of slaves to ships visiting Bonny
in 1790–1793. Other reforms allegedly introduced by Perekule included
making aspirants to chieftaincy demonstrate “mgbi aki” (military capability,
win a cannon ball). Ibid., 11. Such changes clearly challenged ancestry as a
benchmark for leadership of houses, while reinforcing Perekule’s own status
as amanyanabo.
102. Dike and Ekejiuba, Aro of South-Eastern Nigeria, 146; see also Alagoa and
Fombo, Chronicle, 6.
103. Hargreaves, “Political Economy,” 141–146, 153–155.
104. In his voyages before 1807, Hugh Crow referred to “Pepple and Holliday [i.e.
Halliday],” as being “relations and copartners in the throne.” Memoirs, 217.
It is also clear, however, that Crow saw Pepple as being “superior” to Halliday, maintaining an ascendancy over him “in a high degree.” On another
occasion, when Pepple and Halliday were said to have disagreed, the latter,
being “the weaker party,” is said to have been “obliged to fly with his friends
to Fish Town for protection, and there remain until the dispute was adjusted
by the intervention of the priests” (211). The continuing pretensions of the
Halliday family to authority may have rested on the fact that when Perekule
deposed Awusa, the latter allegedly retained an important item of regalia, an
edu (ivory horn), which in 1972 was said to be still in the custody of the Halliday House. Alagoa and Tombo make some attempt to establish a king list
for Bonny, going back to the sixteenth century, but their chronology before
1800 is contested. Chronicle, 10, and chapters 2–5.
105. On the difficulty of reconstructing Bonny’s history, see Jones, Oil Rivers,
105–112; and Hargreaves, “Political Economy,” 135–172.
106. Jones, Oil Rivers, 43; and Alagoa and Tombo, Chronicle, 11.
107. Barbot, West Africa, vol.I: 675.
52
108. Ibid., emphasis added.
109. Royal African Company to the Great King of Bandie, 15 September 1702,
ff.292–294, T 70/151, NA, Kew.
110. Jean Mettas [edited by Serge Daget], Répertoire des Expéditions Négrières
Françaises au XVIII Siècle (Paris: Société française d’histoire d’Outre-Mer,
1978), vol.1: 421.
111. Baillie to owners of the Carter, 31 January 1757, quoted in Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 481–482.
112. Evidence of James Fraser, in Sessional Papers, edited by Lambert, Vol.71: 16.
Fraser also claimed that “there has been an instance of a king being set up
and supported by the masters of ships laying in the River.”
113. John Goodrich to James Rogers, 9 April 1793, C 107/59, NA, Kew.
Goodrich’s remarks are consistent with suggestions that the “king” of Bonny
died in 1792, though precisely who died and succeeded at this time remains
a matter of debate. Cf. Hargreaves, “Political Economy,” 152.
114. In 1790 Vincent Magouet, master of the French ship Guerrier, was advised
to visit the king and “le presser d’ouvrir la traite, pour pouvoir acheter de
suite ce qui vous est necessaire, pour caser, ne pouvant rien acheter sans que
la traite soit ouverte par le roi.” Observations Utiles sur Bany, 1790, I J 679,
Archive Departementale de la Loire-Atlantique, Nantes. Writing in 1801 to
London merchant Thomas Lumley about fitting out a ship for Bonny, one
Liverpool trader suggested that he was “going to pay King Pepple another
visit.” John Livingstone to Thomas Lumley, 28 March 1801, C 114/2, NA,
Kew. Similarly, in 1820–1821 a French ship was said to have been furnished
with its “Eboe” slaves by “le roi Pepper,” who brought them “de l’interieur
de l’Afrique;” Daget, Répertoire des Expéditions Négrières Françaises a la traite
illégale, 130. A few years later, in December 1825, the master of La Fortunée,
J. J. Gimbert, found “dix batiments qui ave traite avec le Roi a passer chacun a
son tour d’aprês le Reglement etabli par Messieurs les Capitaines que aucun
batiment ne pourre traiter avec le peuple.” Gimbert noted that trade with
other merchants was not allowed until twenty days after arriving at Bonny.
Ibid, 392.
115. In 1792, the number of slaves shipped from Bonny totaled over 12,000, the
second highest annual figure in the period 1783–1807. Numbers shipped
slumped from the 1792 level by some 90 percent during the following three
years, before returning to a new peak in 1800. A similar exercise for Old
Calabar reveals a much shallower fall in shipments of slaves in 1793–1795
from that port than at Bonny. Search using the principal port of slave purchase as Bonny or Old Calabar, and dates of departure from Africa >1782
and <1808, Eltis et al., Slave Trade Database.
116. The king agreed to supply slaves only of “Belle calité,” and to pay a penalty
of 60 slaves should he fail to meet the deadline agreed. Daget, Répertoire des
Expéditions Négrières Françaises à la traite illégale, 380, 392.
117. Hargreaves, “Political Economy,” 218–230.
53
118. Lovejoy and Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History,” 351–352.
119. On tensions at Old Calabar related, among other things, to pawnship, see
Lovejoy and Richardson, “Anglo-Efik Relations,” 101–121. Also see Randy
J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: an Eighteenth-Century Odyssey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004): 10–33.
120. This is an important qualification and there is some evidence of malfeasance
on the part of kings at times. In 1825, for example, King Opubo Pepple
failed to supply within the expected time the number of slaves he promised
to a French captain, but also refused to pay the penalty for failure that the
latter thought they had agreed. The penalty was subsequently renegotiated,
and the captain eventually sailed with 25 slaves more than the 230 stipulated
in his original agreement with the king, so some compensation for delays in
delivering slaves seems to have been paid by the king. Whether the slaves
were of the quality expected is another matter; between 1 May and 17 July
1826, 123 of the 255 slaves shipped died. Daget, Répertoire des Expéditions
Négrières Françaises à la traite illégale, 380, 392–393.
121. Lovejoy and Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History,” 352.
122. On the importance of perceptions, see Douglass C. North and Barry R.
Weingast, “Introduction: Institutional Analysis and Economic History,”
Journal of Economic History 60 (2000): 414–417.
123. For a general overview of African ports involved in the slave trade, see David
Eltis, Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Slave-Trading Ports: Towards
an Atlantic-Wide Perspective,” in Robin Law and Silke Strickrodt, eds.,
Ports of the Slave Trade (Bights of Benin and Biafra) (Stirling: Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, 1999): 12–35.
54
•3•
Before the Middle Passage:
Igbo Slave Journeys to Old
Calabar and Bonny
J. Akuma-Kalu Njoku
Introduction: lessons from folklore
F
olklore provides unique insights into slave journeys on both sides of
the Atlantic before and after the Middle Passage. The folklore of slave
dealings in the Ibinukpabi shrine of the Chukwu oracle (referred to as the
Long Juju by Europeans), located in Okonto Ovia Chukwu (the Evergreen
Forest of God) in Arochukwu, provides a context for examining how Aro
and other traders took their victims from specific locations in the interior to coastal towns of Calabar via Ito (in present-day Cross River State)
and from Itu and Bonny via Ututu, Bende, Uzuaakoli, and Azumini (in
present-day Abia State). This chapter is based on the folklore and historical narratives of hinterland slave routes from Arochukwu to Bonny.
It examines the oral traditions of Igbo experience of that tragic event in
human history, the involvement of the Aro, and historical narratives about
specific houses, markets, caves, and trees in the Igbo cultural landscape.
Fortunately, an established body of scholarship for this region provides
in-depth socioeconomic and political background.1
A folkloristic interpretation of the data provides insight into Igbo
collective memory in historically significant ways. It focuses on the Igbo
people of Abia State for two reasons: (1) the existence of well-known
former slave markets, trades routes, hoarded wealth, and other relics of
the slave trade; and (2) the abundant genres of folklore (proverbs, songs,
local legends, and local beliefs and practices so far unrecorded in print).
My fieldwork centered on focus group interviews that included traditional
rulers, religious practitioners, and chief priests of Ibinukpabi. My upbringing in the household of augurs and priests of Agwu Oracle facilitated
my research with Aro traditional priests and agents of Ibinukpabi in the
ancient temple complex of Arochukwu.
My research in Arochukwu was originally inspired by studies of the folklore of slave journeys on the American side of the Atlantic, especially the oral
traditions and historical narratives of the Underground Railroad. Aspects
of the folklore connected to the Underground Railroad, especially those
relating to traditional coping devices to deal with slavery and the strategies
for the escape to freedom, prompted my curiosity about coping devices
and strategies used in Igbo slave journeys before the Middle Passage.2 For
example, tales of escaping slaves crossing the Ohio River became my cue
to examine legends about Omenuko, Eke Kalu, and Joo Joo [ Jaja]) in Igbo
oral tradition. Omenuko3 was an Aro merchant who fell into the river with
his apprentices and porters when the bridge at the Igwu River broke. They
managed to swim ashore, but their “loads” (baggage) were swept away in
the river. Rather than return home, Omenuko tricked his servants into
continuing their journey to Ndi Mgborogwu in Bende, where he arranged
with his friend Omemgboji to sell some of his remaining porters and
apprentices in the Uzuakoli slave market.
An Ohafia local tradition recounts the experience of Eke Kalu as a
slave and his legendary escape from Arochukwu back to his village in
Elu Ohafia. The expression “Ene ya? Ene ya?” (“Where is he? Where is
he?”) alludes to Eke Kalu’s escape from an Aro slaveholding household.
According to legend, when the Aro realized that Eke Kalu was gone, they
searched throughout the area, asking “Ene ya? Ene ya?”
Other local legends relate the exploits of the slave named Joo Joo who
was sold from one household to another in Azumini until he was eventually sold to the Pepple family in Bonny. This slave became the famous
King Jaja of Opobo. Not only did he become free, but he also became
the leader of his trading house. Later he led fourteen of Bonny’s eighteen
trading houses away to establish the new modernizing state of Opobo,
which became one of the most influential powers in mid-nineteenth-century Niger Delta history. An early casualty of the colonial takeover, he was
56
Before the Middle Passage: Igbo Slave Journeys to Old Calabar and Bonny
arrested and deported to Accra where in 1887 he was tried and sentenced
to exile in St. Vincent in the West Indies.4 Four years later he was permitted to return to West Africa, but he died in Tenerife on the return journey.
The proverb, “Igbachi ivu nwamkpi anaghi egbochi ya ije Agbagwu” (“the
frowning of a he-goat does not prevent him from going to Agbagwu”)
uses the term for goats as a metaphor for slaves on their torturous journey
to the Agbagwu market. It dawned on me that a complex pattern of Igbo
slave journeys could emerge from the study of Igbo folklore and legends.
Although my fieldwork addressed numerous questions, those most pertinent to this study are: What routes did raiders and recruiters use to take
captives from their villages in the interior to hinterland slave markets?
How did they treat the slaves under their control? Apart from the Igwu
River mentioned in the Omenuko legend, what other material objects,
sites, and landmarks marked hinterland slave routes; and what are their
present conditions? Lastly, what oral accounts have survived about such
objects, sites, and landmarks?5
My field research began in Uzuakoli.6 Here I was directed to the Aro
section of town, the Okpo quarter where one of the key markers of the
former slave trade stood, the achi tree in Old Agbagwu Market, a central
location for plotting slave raids and selling slaves. The tree has long surface
roots, one measuring twenty-five feet long. Local legends say that slave
traders leashed their captives as human wares for sale on that root during
the trans-atlantic trade era. Although there has been an attempt to uproot
the achi tree in the name of development, the tree’s mystical qualities have
proved stronger. According to one account, “At the end of the war, they
brought a bulldozer to uproot it. After their day’s job, it rained heavily that
night. When they came back in the morning, the achi was standing again.
Today, we celebrate our Ila Oso Uzuakoli here.” This tree stands about 100
yards from Eke Ukwu Agbagwu, which was the biggest slave market in the
Uzuakoli-Isukwuato area.
Igbo slave dealings and slave journeys from
Arochukwu to Calabar and Bonny
The studies of A. E. Afigbo and G. Ugo Nwokeji document the trading
locations and slave trade routes in southeastern Nigeria. Afigbo identified
four north-south routes of trade that had emerged by 1750.7 Nwokeji suggests that the most spectacular development in eighteenth-century Igboland was the Aro strategy of establishing a chain of settlements virtually
everywhere in the region.8 These settlements were assigned to individual
Aro lineage-groups as spheres of influence, among which were Oguta and
57
the main Igala market at Idah. The Aro were the largest slaveholders as well
as the chief slave traders in the hinterland. By the mid-eighteenth century,
they dominated slave trading activities at Oguta, Idah, Uburu, Bende and
Uzuakoli and other locations that supplied Bonny, which had become the
busiest slave port on the southeastern Nigerian coast. Aro domination of
the slave trade from the interior to the Atlantic coast continued until the
Aro Expedition of 1901–1902, in which the British overthrew Aro power.
On my second visit Chief Oji took my research team to Agbagwu
and led us along the route that leads to Bende via Ozu Item all the way
to Arochukwu. Retracing the Arochukwu slave routes in Ujari, a village
in Arochukwu, usually begins at the House Museum of Okoro Oji where
visitors can see the hoarded wealth of a former large slaveholder. Although
there are several slave routes in the area, the guides prefer to take first-time
visitors along the slave route that leads to Ito; a coastal fishing village in the
Akwa Ibom State. In the nineteenth century, this village was referred to
as Onu Asu Bekee (Bekee’s land). As I studied the historical background
for this chapter, I reasoned that the village name might have originated
in the local word for William Balfour Baikie, the European explorer, and
which was later applied to all Europeans who came after him.9 It was from
Ito that waiting boats took slaves via Itu to the shipping ports in Calabar.
This route is quite a distance and most visitors only travel as far as Iyi Eke
(Python River), which is the cave tunnel of the temple complex that leads
to coastal towns in Akwa Ibom State and, according to one account, to a
major slave market in Uzuakoli. An informant, Oji O. Oji, made it clear
that this is a sacred site that is particularly dangerous in the rainy season:
You see, the people of Amannagwu have maintained the sanctity of Iyi Eke. After the Civil War—yes, in the 1980s, I believe
it was—they appointed Maazi Aniyom as a spiritual leader of
Iyi Eke. Since then, Maazi Aniyom with [his] able assistants
has managed to preserve the sanctity of Iyi Eke. Before the villagers take you to the Iyi Eke cave, you have to perform specified rituals and make sacrifices.10
The Aro established numerous Ekpe cult houses and farm villages in
this area along their trade routes, including Ito in Akwa Ibom; and Ndi
Okereke Abam, Amankwu Ohafia, and Amuro in Imo State. These villages
served as food-producing and rest areas on the trail. There are rich oral traditions about the Arochukwu cave system, which formed an elaborate slave
trade network. According to these accounts, the Iyi Eke cave is one of seven
in the system and is an outlet from a tunnel that originated in the Okonto
Ovia Chukwu (the Evergreen Forest of God). The biggest cave is a temple
58
complex that served as the most secret and sacred center of slaving activities
in the interior of the Bight of Biafra. Many forest trails, footpaths, and a
meandering stream lead from one cave to another until you get to the temple
complex. It took some time before I obtained permission from the Okpomkpo
Aro (the Aro Council of Chiefs) to enter the dark chamber known as Chukwu
Abia Amara Nke Bu Eziokwu (Great Spirit to Which People Come to Know
the Truth) in the Evergreen Forest of God.11 These caves and trails make up
the beginning of the slave journeys from the hinterland to the coastal ports
of Calabar, Bonny, Brass, and sometimes to Lagos and Badagry.
The route from Arochukwu to Bonny is very complex; forest trails,
cave tunnels, and gullies weave in and out of one another from various
parts of the Aro diaspora. The Aro have okpo (an Aro word for a domicile or
autonomous community) throughout the Igboland except for Umunoha.12
While the Aro make homes wherever they go, they never sever ties with
Arochukwu. Even when they claim citizenship of other towns and villages,
they never cease regarding themselves as citizens of the ancient kingdom:
in the Aro mind, the world is Aro territory, but Arochukwu is home. This
is evident in local legends and historical narratives offered by informants.
According His Royal Highness, the Eze Aro:
You find it in many communities in this state. You have okpo
somewhere; you have okpo here. If you watch and count how
many autonomous communities you have in Abia State today,
you will find out that we have over six autonomous communities
that are Aro. If you go to Ngwa, we have Aro Ngwa. If you go
to Umunneochi, we have Aro Ikpa. … If you go to…Aro Ndizuogu, you find out that Aro Ndizuogu is so big now that they
have many autonomous communities, but the village is about
two kilometers from here.… There are still people there who will
tell why and how they left to Aro Ndizuogu: “because of trade.”
We have here Ndi Ike and they have there Ndi Ike Erionwu. …
they have there Aro Ndi Ikerionwu, Aro Ujali, Aro Ndioji, etc.
Aro is widespread. In fact, if you go to Isukwuato, you find out
that almost half [of ] Isukwuato is from Aro… People name their
villages after the places where they left from Aro.
It is clear from the Eze Aro’s narrative that slave trade matters are no
longer secret; nevertheless, access to information about it is not an easy
undertaking. Researchers need the approval of Okpomkpo Aro where
discussions can involve protracted deliberations and knowledge of Aro
communication skills as can be seen from the transcript of my first conversation with Eze Aro:
59
Eze Aro: I wish that I knew that you were coming. I would have
given prior information to each of the groups handling Okoro
Oji, handling Long Juju…there are so many [groups]. And by
tradition, Eze Aro doesn’t step out to any of these places. I only
send for the devotees. If I had given them prior information,
anything you wanted, they will take you there. So, as it is now,
what do you want Eze Aro to do?
Njoku: Actually, this is supposed to be our first, mobilizing
visit,…
Eze Aro: So you do understand what I mean.
Njoku: I fully understand. As a matter of fact, our plan is to
come and tell the Eze about our desire to visit Aro the next
month to conduct the research. That is, if it is all right. Here is a
letter from the honorable commissioner of information, culture
and tourism, indicating that the governor knows about my visit.
Eze Aro: That’s all right, sit down. Many of you may have heard
that Aro has just finished Ikeji Aro. I don’t know if you heard
about it. Aro started the Ikeji on the 9th of September and
ended on the 2nd of this month. Within this period, no judgment, no quarrel, no peace settlement [can] take place. I will
give the timetable of Ikeji Aro. It has just ended. I am sure that
today, those who were not buried during the Ikeji period, which
stretched for about nineteen days, today they are burying their
dead. So there is a series of burials every day. People are trying
to accommodate what we couldn’t do in Ikeji.
So I don’t know if now I send to Ujari to see Ulonta Okoro
Oji. But right now, what I cannot do is send you to the slave
routes. They are there. They are just there. But those who are
to take you there are not present here today. Have you been to
Ogbiti Ijomanta?
I informed the Eze that I had been to the Ogbiti Ijomanta (the House
Museum in Arochukwu) since I had returned to continue my fieldwork.
I explained that I had not come with my team this time because I had to
stop at Akanu Ohafia to visit my family, but I requested permission to
spend more time at the house museum, Ogbiti Ijomanta, Iyi Eke, some
Mgbala Ekpe (Ekpe cult houses), and most importantly, any other place
that the Aro would like to show the world as a part of Aro heritage. Eze
Aro gave a long reply:
60
Enyi m nwoke si na ya si Ohafia? (My friend did you say that you
are from Ohafia?) Ohafia is also a part of Aro. There is no Igbo
community around here that will say that they are different.
However, I am saying that by age and tradition, Aro is unique.
To tell you the truth, there is nothing that you have requested
that is not in Aro. Aro no longer keeps secret anything that you
have requested.
I will help, but as of now, people have to be mobilized to do
so. If I had got this thing [my letter] three days ago, or two days
ago, it would have enabled me to consult with [various people].
There are two ezes who should know about this. If I tell them
about this, they will gather those responsible.
Aro is a unique community. It is an ancient town. …Aro has
been a kingdom… I personally said that Aro is unique of its
age and tradition. Aro has nineteen villages, and these nineteen
villages are almost the whole of Abia State. If you …count how
many autonomous communities we have in Abia State today,
you will find out that we have over six autonomous communities that are Aro. If you go to Ngwa, we have Aro Ngwa. If you
go to Umunneochi, we have Aro Ikpa. And that Aro Ikpa, the
ancestral village is here Utughaugwu. If you go to Ndi Izuogu,
you will find out that Aro Ndizuogu has many autonomous
communities, but it is Aro Ndiziogu. The village is about two
kilometers from here. Amankwu. …they will tell you how and
why they left, because of trade in that place. We have here Ndi
Ike… Aro Ndi Ikerionwu, Aru Ajali, Aro Ndi Oji. So Aro is
widespread. In fact, if you go to Isukwuato, you will find out
that almost half of Isukwuato is Aro. This Agbagwu you are
talking about, people named the places where they settled after
the names of the villages. The stories of how and why they left
are there. … Well Aro is a quite a big place…
Eze Aro then spoke about the House of Okoro Oji and the Long Juju:
…it is there. If you want the routes to the “Long Juju”—it is the
English that named it “Long Juju” Aro do not know [the term]
“Long Juju”—what Aro know is Ibinukpabi and the routes are
there.
What happened was that when the Europeans came here,
after [a] series of war and battles [in 1901 and 1902. They
entered] into Aro, to find out why Aro ticked; they attributed it
to “Long Juju.” They forced their way in. It was a very hard battle.
Their aim was to discover the Ibinukpabi and destroy it because
they knew, or they thought they knew, that Aro power lay in
Ibinukpabi. So when they came, they entered (and destroyed) so
61
many caves in Aro… They did not find the Ibinukpabi, because
the juju is long. After some time, they said, “let’s go back, after
all, the juju is long…So it took the name “Long Juju.”
It is clear from Eze Aro’s account that he has an expansive idea of his
kingdom. Many of the known trading towns in Uzuakoli, Afikpo, Uburu,
and Edda are constituent parts of the Aro kingdom. From the seventeenth
century through the turn of the twentieth century, the people of Arochukwu established trading posts and slave-holding quarters and hamlets
in many towns and villages in Igboland. They also extended the religious
and judicial influence of Chukwu by establishing oracular shrines of Ibinukpabi in their newly established communities. As the subsidiary shrines
of Ibinukpabi in the Aro diaspora gradually became part of the traditional
judicial system of Igboland, the Aro became principal participants in the
economic and religious lives of numerous Igbo communities. They decided
when to take cases from the Aro diaspora to the main oracle in the temple
complex in their ancestral hometown, Arochukwu. There is no doubt that
the temple complex was a slave-dealing location as were other oracle sites
in Igboland.
The slave journey from Arochukwu to Bonny
Arochukwu was a definite starting point of Igbo slave journeys to
Calabar and Bonny. This section is based on oral accounts recorded by my
research team and will detail the trail leading from the temple complex
to Azumini. The first cave outlet on the way to Bonny is located in
Abuma Ututu. It leads to St. Paul’s Junction, formerly known as Ahia Ose
Nwamkpi, in Ututu, and from there to Ahia Afor in Bende, and Eke Ukwu
and Agbagwu in Uzuakoli, the location of the Ozo Nwamkpi, and eventually to Ahia Nwaebule in Azumini. Local tradition confirms that Ahia
Afor was a major slave market. According to one account:
After Omenuko sold his slaves here [Ahia Afor], if there were
[any] left over, he would take [the] remainder to Uzuakoli to
sell in the market there. Also if there were slaves who were sold
there in Uzuakoli, Omenuko would bring them from Uzuakoli
back here to Bende. He would keep them in the ulo isi (cell
houses), which he built in Bende. Then Omenuko would go to
his friend Omemgboji’s house and sleep. From there he would
go back.
62
Although people in Bende do not appear to know where the slaves in
their market came from, they can identify the compound mentioned in the
Omenuko legend. In that location, there is a stump protruding from the
ground.13 This stump and the stone beside it are some the oldest things in
Bende. During traditional celebrations, the elders perform certain rites on
that spot. Other sites associated with Omenuko are the “Ulo Isi” (Blind
House/Dark Room), which Omenuko built and still stands in Agbamuzo,
Bende. This rectangular one-room house has been in Bende from the time
of the slave trade. Omenuko held his slaves there before and after trading
in Afor Market. There is another cell about half a mile away from the
one just described. It is round and has no door; slaves used ladders to
climb in and out of an opening in the roof. Surplus slaves were kept in the
cell houses until they were taken by Omemgboji to Uzuakoli where they
were sold in the Agbagwu market. Many routes led to and from Agbagwu
market. According to tradition, the dealers performed the ritual of idotu
aju, using a specific set of stones, meant to disorient slaves and prevent
their escape.
One of the Uzuakoli trade routes leads from Agbagwu through
Umuahia and Asa to Ahia Nwa Ebule in Azumini, one of the last stops
on the journey to Bonny. At Azumini the slaves boarded canoes bound
for Opobo for onward transmission to Bonny before embarking on the
agonizing journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Oral traditions in Azumini
indicate that many slaves came from further inland. According to one
informant:
The people of Azumini bought many slaves from many different towns. The population of Azumini was made up of many
different groups from the hinterland. Many lived and died as
slaves. What they left behind still exists. Their descendants and
their children’s children became citizens of this land. There was
no time that they went back. They remained here, behind the
Blue River.
Some of those taken to Bonny before leaving for Ala Bekee
were bought from Azumini. Joo Joo [ Jaja] was bought as a slave
here in Azumini. The family who bought Joo Joo is the family
of Kwokwoeze, the founder and owner of this land. Kwokwoeze
is in the hamlet called Mkpumkpu Akanta. Many households
make up the hamlet of Mkpumkpu Akanta, the head of which
is the household of Deede Ulu.
Another informant, Chief Nwagboso, said:
63
What we are narrating now is what everyone knows. As I was
telling you, Joo Joo’s wife even had her own war boats. Together
with Joo Joo’s soldiers they fought that battle until they opened
Opobo [that is they became a kingdom]. Joo Joo came and
recruited some people from Azumini to populate his kingdom.
He came with two boats…
In the course of our interviews, my informants tended to digress to the
traditions relating to King Jaja rather than focus on details concerning
the slave routes themselves. We scheduled a day to retrace the slave routes
in Azumini. Apart from the king himself, all the village chiefs walked us
through all the routes. Of particular importance to us here is the one that
led to Ahia Nwaebule. It was from that market that dealers and agents
took the captives through uzo nkoro (now an overgrown gully) to a dirt
road that leads to a little beach village by the Blue River. These houses may
be the same houses where slaves were quartered before their passage to
Bonny and ultimately to the Americas.
Conclusion
I explored the cultural landscape of Abia State and the Igbo folklore of the slave hinterland slave journeys, paying particular attention to
the many oral traditions connected to markets, trees, and the numerous
trails and trade routes leading to the coast. One important lesson from this
study is that the existing published historical accounts of journeys from
the coastal towns of West African to the coastal towns in the Americas,
though factually accurate, do not provide the complete history; nor do
local oral traditions and historical narratives of the slave journeys beginning in the hinterland and ending at the coast. A more complete history
would complement the oral accounts of the hinterland routes with the
Middle Passage accounts and vice versa. There are at least two Niger Delta
networks related to the Atlantic slave trade. One involves the routes from
villages in the Niger Delta hinterland to the coast; the other network concerns the coastal towns that were the embarkation points for the transatlantic voyage.
Hitherto, we have not learned the ethnographic details of how the
African victims traveled from their villages in the interior to the coast
before their forced Middle Passage journeys. A possible reason for the lack
of published accounts of slave journeys before the Middle Passage may be
the absence of European forts or castles in the Bight of Biafra especially
in the area closest to Igboland, which is known to be the principal source
64
of slaves. So far, little attention has been paid to the material culture of
the Atlantic slave trade, but objects in the cultural landscape and material culture in Abia State have a great capacity to serve as documents for
understanding various aspects of history, the economy, and art. It provides
a rich field for future research.
Notes
1.
The most comprehensive studies of the Aro are Kenneth Onwuka Dike
and Felicia Ekejiuba, The Aro of South-Eastern Nigeria, 1881–1929 (Ibadan:
University Publishing Co., 1990); and G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and
Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. See also Ekejiuba’s earlier publications: “Igba Ndu: An Igbo Mechanism of Social Control and Adjustment,”
African Notes 7 (1972): 9–24; “The Aro System of Trade in the Nineteenth
Century,” Ikenga 1 ( January 1972): 11–26; and “The Aro System of Trade in
the Nineteenth Century. Part 2,” Ikenga 1 ( July 1972): 10–21. Efiong U. Aye
has closely studied the slave trade in the Cross River area; see Old Calabar
through the Centuries (Calabar: Hope Waddell Press, 1969). For accounts of
the region’s precolonial economic and political history, see A. E. Afigbo, The
Igbo and Their Neighbours: Inter-group Relations in Southeastern Nigeria to
1953 (Ibadan: University Press, 1987); Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo
History and Culture (Ibadan: University Press in association with Oxford
University Press, 1981); E. J. Alagoa, “Peoples in the Cross River Valley and
the Eastern Niger Delta,” in Groundwork of Nigerian History edited by O.
Ikime, (Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books for the Historical Society of
Nigeria, 1980): 56-72; J. C. Anene, The International Boundaries of Nigeria,
1885–1960: The Framework of an Emergent African Nation (New York:
Humanities Press, 1970); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); K. O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830–1885 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956);
Rosemary Harris, “The History of Trade at Ikom, Eastern Nigeria,” Africa
42 (1972): 122–139; G. I. Jones, Trading States of the Oil Rivers (London:
International African Institute, 1963), and From Slaves to Palm Oil : Slave
Trade and Palm Oil Trade in the Bight of Biafra (Cambridge: African Studies
Centre, 1989); A. J. H. Latham, Old Calabar 1600–1891: The Impact of the
International Economy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1973); Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,”
American Historical Review 104 (1999): 332–355; Monday Efiong Noah, Old
Calabar: The City States and the Europeans, 1800–1885 (Uyo: Scholars Press
(Nig.) Ltd., 1980); David Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonial
Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Oxford University
65
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Press, 1978); W. I. Ofonagoro, Trade and Imperialism in Southern Nigeria
1881–1929 (New York: Nok Publishers, 1979); and Okon Edet Uya, Old
Calabar Studies: An Overview (Calabar: s.n., 1986?).
Among the most interesting Underground Railroad projects are Maxine F.
Brown, The Role of Free Blacks in Indiana’s Underground Railroad: The Case of
Floyd, Harrison, and Washington Counties (Indianapolis: Indiana Department of
Natural Resources, 2001); Diane Perrine Coon, Southeastern Indiana’s Underground Railroad Routes and Operations: A Project of the State of Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology and
the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service (Louisville, KY: Perrine
Enterprises, 2001); Indiana, Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, Underground Railroad Research in Select Indiana Counties (Indianapolis:
Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, 2003), http://www.statelib.
lib.in.us/www/ihb/ugrr/ugrrbooks.html [accessed 4 March 2006]; and United
States, Department of the Interior, National Park Service, History Office,
Exploring a Common Past: Researching and Interpreting the Underground Railroad (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service,
History Division, 1998).
Pita Nwana, Omenuko (London: Atlantis Press; Umu Ahia: The Methodist
Bookstore, 1935).
For a full biography, see S. J. S. Cookey, King Jaja of the Niger Delta: His
Life and Times, 1821–1891 (London: Nok Publishers, Ltd., 1974). S. O. Jaja,
comp., Opobo since 1870: A Documentary Record (Ibadan: Ibadan University
Press, 1991) provides a selection of documents relating to Jaja’s kingdom
from the colonial takeover to recent times. For historical analyses of Jaja’s
importance in Niger Delta history, see Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger
Delta, chapter 10; Jones, Trading States of the Oil Rivers, 128–132; E. A.
Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914 (London:
Longman, 1966): 75–83; and Michael Crowder, West Africa under Colonial
Rule (London: Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968): 119–121.
Other questions included: Besides the account of Eke Kalu, what other narratives existed concerning the capture, enslavement, and escape of slaves?
What happened to the captives who were not sold into the trans-atlantic
trade for one reason or the other? What happened to local slaves after the
abolition of the trans-atlantic trade? Are there narratives about the exploits
of local slave raiders, recruiters, escorts, and traders in oral traditions? What
part did Igbo people play in the trans-atlantic slave trade and what were
the local traditions of slavery that allowed them to participate on such a
large scale? How did they treat the slaves under their control? These will be
addressed in future work.
I am grateful to Mr. Obiako, who showed me key sites related to the Aro
slave trade and helped me find a research assistant. Mr. Obiako was born in
Uzuakoli where his family has lived for three generations.
Afigbo, The Igbo and Their Neighbours.
66
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Nwokeji, Slave Trade in the Bight of Biafra.
Brian Flett, “Orcadian Explorer Embarked on an African Voyage of Discovery,” The Orcadian, 2 January 2003, http://www.orcadian.co.uk/features/
articles/williambaikie.htm [accessed 4 March 2006. Later Europeans built
beach houses here and the area became known as Government Beach. Apart
from Onu Asu Bekee in Ito where the Iyi Eke cave tunnel leads, there is
another village named Onu Asu Bekee in Ihe Osu to which slave dealers
from Ututu took their chattel. According to Flett, Beke is derived from the
Baikie’s name, which in turn became the word for white man or European.
By extension the local term “ala Beke” referred to Baikie’s country, that is
Great Britain.
My longtime Aro friend, Magnus Ugwu, accompanied me on my fieldwork
trips in Arochukwu.
This temple complex appears to be unique in Igboland, for although every
Igbo village or town has sacred structures, groves, trees, or thickets for tutelary spirits and other divinities, none has any structure for Chukwu (the
Great Spirit), which in Igbo ontology is so incomprehensively huge and
multidimensional that the Igbo cannot even begin to contemplate building
a house for that being.
John Oriji, “The Slave Trade, Warfare and Aro Expansion in the Igbo Hinterland,” Transafrican Journal of History 16 (1987): 151–156.
The tree was cut down to make room for the electric pole that stands beside
the stump.
67
•4•
The Atlantic Slave Trade and
the Ohafia Warrior Tradition:
Global Forces and
Local Histories
John C. McCall
I
n the summer of 1990, on my way to Nigeria, I stopped for several
days in Cambridge to visit the now late G. I. Jones, known as a gifted
ethnographer who specialized in the history of southeastern Nigeria. Jones
was in his nineties and was recovering from a stroke that impaired his
speech. When I explained, however, that I was on my way to Ohafia to
conduct ethnographic research, he overcame this limitation and spoke
eloquently of the Ohafia he remembered from before World War II. Jones
explained that Ohafia people are unique among Igbo because they have
no rites-of-passage for young boys. This was an extraordinary observation
given the ubiquitous character of such ceremonies in the traditions of most
African peoples. Jones went on to note that even the Afikpo, who are close
neighbors of Ohafia and with whom Ohafia share many cultural characteristics, have well developed rites-of-passage for boys, as Ottenberg has
documented in great detail.1
If they ever existed in Ohafia, such typical manhood rites have been
long displaced by the complex of warrior ceremonies that culminate in iri
agha (war dance), a celebration of trophy-heads that, when taken in battle,
signify manly accomplishment. The iri agha continues to play a significant
role in defining Ohafia identity and masculine achievement. The accomplishments now celebrated, however, are college degrees, professional promotions, grand gestures of largesse, and community development. These
are the modern equivalents to “heads.” Iri agha has long interested historians because its performance includes recitation of abu agha (war songs)
that recount events of the past, particularly battles, often in great detail.
Most of the battles fought by Ohafia were waged on behalf of the Aro. It
is difficult to establish when Ohafia began providing military assistance
to the Aro chiefs. While the war dance epics recall many battles, most of
the songs sung today refer to events that occurred late in the nineteenth
century. The shallow time depth of the war epics does not mean, however,
that the warrior tradition was a late occurrence. As Isichei has observed,
“The wars fought in the 1890s were the last of their kind, and thus appear
as unique and unforgettable. Their uniqueness preserves all the attendant
details, like a fly in amber. They are remembered not because they were the
most important wars, but because they were the last.”2
Prior to the colonial period the Aro established settlements over a wide
region of southeastern Nigeria between the Cross River and the Niger.
The original expansion of Aro influence may have been accomplished
with the military support of the Ohafia, or as Afigbo has suggested, it may
have developed slowly by way of trade relationships and other peaceful
means.3 Whatever the case, it is clear that by the beginning of the nineteenth century the Aro were well established and expanding their domain
and their wealth through military operations manned primarily by troops
from Ohafia and their neighbors, the Abam and the Edda.4 During this
period of expansion, the Aro profited greatly from the slave trade. Though
they established no formal dominion in the region, the Aro were powerful,
wealthy, and politically influential. Ohafia people, however, saw little of the
bounty. Their primary interest in the wars was the acquisition of human
heads and the prestige and social power that these heads represented
within Ohafia society. In fact, the term “mercenary” should probably not be
applied to the Ohafia troops: they were soldiers of fame rather than fortune.
Their war songs recall attacks upon villages throughout southeastern
Nigeria. While some of the narratives are clearly mythographic, most seem
to recount a very credible past with defeats as well as victories. The attack
upon Nteje northeast of Onitsha was a bitter loss for Ohafia.5 The village
of Nteje, hammered by repeated attacks by its neighbors at Awjuzu and
earlier raids by the Aro, had become a walled citadel surrounded by watchtowers that proved invincible.6 But the songs also record many victories,
some at villages whose exact location can no longer be determined because
70
The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Ohafia Warrior Tradition
the wars devastated them completely. Ukpati, which was probably north of
present day Enugu, is an example.7 This era of internecine warfare lasted
for centuries. The relentless demand for slaves ultimately dominated the
political economy of the region. For Ohafia, the repercussions of the slave
trade and the incessant warfare it stimulated cut deep into the cultural
fabric. War became the definitive trope of manhood and the primary
carrier of Ohafia identity. Ogba Kalu of Abia Ohafia eloquently expresses
this point: “Whenever [the war dance] is performed, our hearts brim with
joy: because it is the umbilical cord with which we were born. Whenever
we hear its rhythm, our hearts swell with joy: we think of the day of our
birth and cherish the day of our death; we think of the day we shall raise
our heads in pride and rejoice in anticipation of the day we shall grow
rich… So then, we are most happy to see it performed every time.”8
The headhunting motif as a marker of masculine accomplishment is
widespread in Igbo culture. The ikenga figure, which when rendered anthropomorphically often represents a man with a cutlass in his right hand and
a severed head in his left, is a classic example. Afigbo has observed that
another similar form, sporting an elephant tusk, rather than a human
trophy-head, suggests a number of possible interpretations.9 One is that
the tusk bearing ikengas represents an earlier form harkening back to a
time when killing an elephant was the definitive act of male achievement.
Afigbo poses the questions this way: “Which was the original symbol of
achievement and ‘social arrival’ in Igbo society, the human head or the
elephant tusk?”
My response to Afigbo’s inquiry is to note that the head and the
tusk have dual significance. First, as symbols of achievement, they both
signify triumph over formidable opponents: the brave warrior defending
his village from enslavement or conquering the greatest beast of the bush.
But stepping back from raw symbolism, a more historical link appears.
Both head and tusk represent tokens of the Atlantic trade in slaves and
ivory. Their symbolic power was heightened by their inflated economic
value. These symbols of achievement are fluid and multivocal—in those
days trophy-head simulacra stood in to represent a hunter’s victory over
an elephant just as they represent a college degree now. But one might
speculate that the salience of the symbols may have ebbed and flowed historically in tandem with the shifting demand for slaves and ivory abroad.
These highly symbolic tokens—the trophy-head and elephant tusk—have
a long history, as evidenced by their presence among ancestral shrines of
great antiquity. I suggest, however, that their symbolic significance at any
given time was continually mediated by the historical circumstances that
contextualized them.
71
The same was true of the complex set of relations we refer to with the
term “slave.” While the Igbo and their neighbors traditionally had various
social categories that are now glossed as “slave,” many scholars have argued
that indigenous slavery was substantively distinct from the slavery that
Africans were subjected to in the Americas. Some have even suggested
that the Igbo and other African groups did not generally treat slaves as
cruelly as their counterparts in America were treated. But this position
cannot be sustained against ample evidence of the cruel fates of some
slaves in West Africa. Indeed, U. D. Anyanwu suggests that indigenous
slavery itself became more brutal as the Atlantic slave trade developed.10
The fundamental difference was that in West African societies, slaves
were integrated into a system of kin relations. Slaves may have been at the
bottom of the system, but they remained human beings related to others,
slave and non-slave, via ties of kinship. They were never set outside of the
world of human relations to be classified as mere property. In this region,
land itself was more than mere property. The Igbo reckoned ownership
of land and slaves on the basis of kinship. Likewise they organized labor,
trade, and authority through the systems of kinship such that, as G. I. Jones
observed, neither the European notion of “slave” nor that of “freeborn” was
adequate to address the complex systems of obligation and privilege that
obtained.11 It was impossible for anyone, free or slave, to exist outside this
system of kin relations. The European traders, however, did exist beyond
the sphere of the local systems. The external slave trade commodified
human beings in an unprecedented manner with far-reaching historical
consequences.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the vast region east of
Lagos that the British would establish as the Oil Rivers Protectorate was a
dangerous place. Internecine warfare was rife, stimulated to unprecedented
levels by the slave trade and its lucrative demand for captives. In 1807
the British decreed the abolition of slave trading for her subjects. By the
mid-century external demand for slaves was nearly nonexistent; however,
the blockade on the coast had unanticipated consequences in the hinterlands. The slave trade was a centuries old enterprise that had become
such an integral part of the political economy and customary practice of
the region that British suppression failed to eliminate slave acquisition
activities. Reduced external demand produced a glut of slaves on the local
market, depressing prices and greatly expanding the internal market. Thus
the “legitimate” trade in palm oil, which the British hoped to replace the
slave economy, became largely dependent upon slave labor.12 Lowered
slave prices also had other, more macabre consequences.
72
The practice of human sacrifice at burials, traditionally used to honor
kings, became more widely practiced. The greater availability of inexpensive
slaves allowed human sacrifice to become a common occurrence among
secret societies and at the burials of minor chiefs.13 When Ohafia people
recount the stories of “those days,” they tell of the abduction of children
sent to fetch water and the risk of traveling to market in a village where
you were not well known. It was a period of persistent danger and continued ongoing warfare. It is no small irony that the cultural practices the
British colonials piously condemned as barbarous and uncivilized expressions of an African mentality—human sacrifice, headhunting, and slavery
itself—were, to some extent, historical products of the trade in human
beings with Europe.
While colonization marked the end of the slave trade, it also institutionalized the extractive economic principles that drove the slave traffic.
The extraction of minerals and agricultural resources during the colonial
era was undertaken with a continued lack of concern for the development
of local productive economies. I argue that the ongoing economic relationship of the world with Nigeria and, indeed, African nations in general
remains locked in a one-sided extractive arrangement that reproduces in
various forms the structures of exploitation established during the slave
trade era. Today, the Nigerian petroleum industry stands as the historical
consequence of the slave trade. While certainly not its moral equivalent,
the structural and economic parallels are striking. Like the slave trade, the
petroleum industry siphons resources from the region to fuel the economies of the West, and Nigerians have little to show for it but elite tyrants
and internal conflicts.
Achebe’s contention that “the trouble with Nigeria” is a failure of
leadership is now repeated as proverbial wisdom; indeed, it is difficult to
dispute.14 I contend that Nigeria’s leaders face a challenge that goes beyond
the question of their own commitment and moral fiber. The current Nigerian petroleum state is economically independent of the labor and industry
of the Nigerian people. It is neither dependant upon the public nor accountable to it. The customary focus on the corruption of individual leaders or
administrations ultimately diverts attention away form the underlying
structural corruption that consistently undermines every attempt at reform.
I use the phrase “structural corruption” to emphasize that it is a systemic
characteristic that operates independently of the intentions of the human
actors who are its agents. This corrupt structure, a grotesquely bifurcated
economy in which the productive capacities of the people are isolated from
the national wealth, is the most profound and intractable legacy of the
slave trade. Overcoming it will require more than virtuous leadership. It
73
will require a reinvention of the Nigerian economy that makes full use of
the industry and entrepreneurial genius of the Nigerian people. Clearly,
the repercussions of the slave trade in the present day are manifold. I have
argued that global issues, such as Nigeria’s present political and economic
struggles are haunted by structures inherited from this skeleton in history’s
closet. I have also argued that local practices, such as Ohafia’s war dance,
are legacies of the slave era and that they are now used to indigenize and
domesticate the potentially destructive forces of change that now challenge Nigerian ways of life.
Through adaptation of the warrior tradition, the war dance provides
continuity with the past that circumvents the upheavals and social changes
that have characterized the last century by appropriating these new elements. It is an embodiment of Ohafia identity, which when faced with
the transforming influences of consumer culture, religious conversion, and
literacy, refuses to succumb, and instead, incorporates these elements like
so many skulls adorning the shrine of a victorious people. The Ohafia war
dance does more than express or reproduce Ohafia notions of ethnicity,
gender, and history. It structures a lived experience of these and, in doing
so, it becomes the very means of producing them. The Ohafia warrior tradition is a social production as well as a social fact. In Ohafia as elsewhere,
the performance arts embody this constitutive process. They create a nexus
at which the individual and the collective intersect. It is at this nexus of the
part and the whole, the person and society, identity and history, that social
forms emerge and can be transformed. Such a view accounts for that fact
that the war dance has retained currency in Ohafia despite the fact that
head-taking, its putative object, is no longer practiced. The war dance has
proven to be more vital than the practice it originally commemorated—the
act of celebration more definitive than the act celebrated.
Social memory is both tenacious and remarkably plastic. While the
warrior traditions of Ohafia remain a key reference point of Ohafia identity, they have been radically transformed to address the demands of life
in modern Nigeria. While the war dance was originally performed to celebrate success in warfare, it is now danced to celebrate achievement in
education, community development, and industry. Ironically, these are the
very endeavors that I suggest are the key to overcoming the structural corruption that constitute the slave trade’s most devastating legacy.
74
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Simon Ottenberg, Boyhood Rituals in an African Society: An Interpretation
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989).
Elizabeth Isichei, A History of the Igbo People (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1976): 75.
A. E. Afigbo, Ikengas: The State of Our Knowledge (Owerri: Rada Publishing,
1986): 207.
Elizabeth Isichei, The Igbo People and the Europeans: The Genesis of a Relationship–to 1906 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973): 35.
A. O. Arua, A Short History of Ohafia (Enugu: Omnibus Press, 1951): 11–12.
Isichei, History of the Igbo People, 84.
Arua, Short History of Ohafia, 11.
Chukwuma Azuonye, “The Narrative War Songs of the Ojafia Igbo: A Critical Analysis of their Characteristic Features in Relation to their Social Function,” Ph.D. dissertation. University of London, 1974, 96.
Afigbo, Ikengas, 7.
U. D. Anyanwu, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Demographic Configuration of South-Eastern Nigeria,” paper presented at the conference, “Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and
the African Diaspora,” Nike Lake, Enugu, 10–14 July 2000.
G. I. Jones, Trading States of the Oil Rivers (London: International African
Institute, 1963): 58.
A. E. Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo Culture and History (Ibadan: University Press in association with Oxford University Press, 1981): 241.
Ibid., 241–242.
Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1983).
75
•5•
Osu Social Outcasts and the
Ichie P.A. Ezikeojiaku
The Igbo worldview
T
his chapter discusses the changing status of osu (cult slaves) in the
heartland of southeastern Nigeria. This institution is an important
component in Igbo ideology that rests on the belief that there are three
worlds: the world of God and spirits, the world of man, and the world
of fauna and flora, ranked in that sequence. The world of man exists in
between the other two. Man fears the supernatural world because of its
incomprehensibility, yet attempts to comprehend it through reverence and
atonement. This was probably responsible for the foundation of the institution of sacrifice in traditional religion. The spirit world consists of hierarchies with higher and lower degrees of spirits, with God at the apex of
authority. These include the day forces: Eke, Orie, Afo, and Nkwo; the water
deities: Njaba, Imo, Ohiara, Otammiri, Igu, and Nwaorie; and other forces
such as Ogwugwu, Urasi, Ala, Igwe, and Anyanwu. Each deity (minor or
major) has an oracle described as “a special place where a deity is supposed
to give response either through the month of an inspired priest (diviner)
or, by a mysterious voice to an enquirer.”1 Each village area owes allegiance
to a specific set of deities.
The earliest religious practices among the Igbo centered on oracle divination, which is closely related to magic. Clients came from far and wide to
the oracle sites to pay homage, to seek favors, and to settle disputes. Most
communities throughout southeastern Nigeria have public okwu arusi
(shrines) where images of deities molded from clay or carved from wood
are arranged, and where the community offered sacrifice or sought relief in
times of stress. Petitioners brought their personal problems to the oracles,
which were believed to possess the power to examine the impact of the
past on present circumstances and predict future events. Petitioners usually
accepted the advice or judgments of herbalists, diviners, or seers associated
with the oracles. Such oracles as the Agbala of Awka (with its seat at Ezi
Awka), the Igwekala of Umunneoha (with its oracle at Orie Igwe), the
Chukwu of Arochukwu (with its oracle at Eke Aro slave market), the Amadioha of Ozuzu, the Onoje of Aguleri, and the Oshimili at Ahaba acquired
transcommunity reputations.2 At the beginning of the twentieth century
the influence of some oracles was so powerful that the British had to send
military expeditions to destroy them before they could establish effective
colonial administration.
Arochukwku
Of the six major divinities, the Chukwu of Arochukwu was the most
important. Chukwu is seen as the great god, the progenitor of the rest of
the divinities. Communities with local oracles often bypassed their lesser
gods to pay homage to and meet the demands of the Aro deity Ibiniukpabi. The growth in influence of the Arochukwu shrine coincided with the
consolidation and expansion of the Igbo slave trade between the 1720s and
1840s. It enjoyed tremendous patronage across the Arochukwu region and
its hinterland. A network of Igbo slave traders used the widespread awe
of the powers of this oracle to enhance and expand their trading operations after the 1720s. The power of this particular divinity has become an
important theme in Igbo culture.
The Aro confederacy, led by the powerful Eze Aro (king of the Aros),
his subchiefs, and the priests of Ibiniukpabi, was an alliance of strong
kingdoms that shared the same religion and ethnicity. As the confederacy
consolidated its power, Aro merchants left the Cross River port to settle
in hundreds of settlements in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea.
The confederacy controlled the Niger Delta and its political and economic
influence spread beyond the borders of Igboland. Aro slave raiders and
warriors, backed by alliances with Ohafia, Abam, Bende, Abiriba, and
78
Osu Social Outcasts and the Atlantic Slave Trade
Afikpo, engaged in frequent warfare to meet the expanding requirements
of the trans-atlantic and domestic slave trades.
The mode of consultation, the responses to these divinities, the
presentation of cases, and the payment of fees differred only in minute
details. The effect of oracular divination throughout the entire region was
immense. The wide influence of the Arochukwu divinity, combined with
the need to establish closely organized Aro surveillance in the area, led to
the foundation of Aro settlements in many parts of Igboland, namely at
Arondizuogu, Eziama near Uzuakoli, Ndikelionwu between Okigwe and
Akwa, Ndiewu near Ubun, Ujali (Ajali) south of Awka Ozuzu near Etchee,
the Aro quarters of Amokwe Udi and Ibagwa (Nsukka) at the far northern
outpost of the Aro sphere of influence, and other places in the region.
The oracular divination center at Arochukwu and other places were
therefore responsible for the continuation of the slave trade far into the
twentieth century. The oracle could sentence its victims to slavery. Such a
victim was then taken to the coast and sold into slavery to European merchants, thereby depopulating the communities from which such victims
were drawn, and after abolition those who had been sold were marketed
internally. Sometimes a victim who was sentenced to death was instead
smuggled to the coast or otherwise sold and an animal sacrifice made in
stead. Livestock blood was spilled into the stream to make it appear as if
the god had devoured its victim. In 1901 the British dispatched an expeditionary force to destroy the oracle and end its influence in the area.
The osu system
Aro divination led to the emergence of a new class of social outcasts
known as the osu, a term that refers to a person dedicated to an arusi
(deity). Originally, an osu was meant to be a deity’s servitor carrying the
sin of his dedicator.3 There were several ways in which a person might
acquire osu status. First, a family or person might dedicate another family
member or captive to serve in a shrine because of physical or economic
hardship or a personal promise to the deity or atonement for a violation of
the deity’s strictures. Second, a war captive might be dedicated to a deity
as an offering for success in war. Third, a person who had committed a
heinous crime might opt to dedicate themselves to a local deity to escape
execution or sale into slavery. Such a person’s detractors would fear pursuing them for fear of the deity’s retribution. Fourth, the unwitting or accidental infringement of oracular rights or rules might impose osu status on
a person, including sleeping in a shrine overnight, being born in or beside
a shrine,4 and occasionally by fetching water from a stream near a shrine.
79
Once acquired through whatever means, osu status was permanent and
affected all future generations of descendants, and was strictly observed
and maintained. If by social order and reason, it had been agreed that the
osu bloodline stopped after one or two generations, the task of eradication
might have been completed and marriage allowed between a caste member
and a freeborn, but that did not happen.
The osu, described as “cult or religious slaves,” were recognized by
certain distinctive features, including unique marks on parts of their body
(ears, nose, fingers, or arms). Some carried the arusi on their heads. Their
primary duty was to observe the taboos and perform the rituals pertinent
to the deity and shrine to which they had been dedicated. They looked
after and tended the shrine’s cows, goats, sheep, fowls, and other domestic
animals. In the past osu looked like mad men and had a strong body odor.
Generally they were regarded with a mixture of awe and respect as “horrible and holy,” because of their perceived association with the supernatural. They were given names that indicated their untouchable status, such
as Otama, Anwuru, Ebinti, German, Ndi Aka Expe, and Ndi Ruru Aru.
Usually such names were couched in various local circumlocutions and
euphemisms. Nowadays freeborn descendants sometimes use these names
to taunt families who try to remove their osu status.
The establishment of osu settlements in the area was an inevitable
consequence of the oracle system. As servants of all manner of deities
and oracles, osu were regarded as the umu osu arusi (children of the deity)
who must always live within the groves of shrines. They were forbidden
to mingle with or marry amaala (freeborn). All these characteristics of
osu status underline the fact that the origin of the social outcast system
is based not only on the socioreligious theory of the scapegoat but also
on a pro-Aro hereditary theory. Despite the influence of Christianity and
western civilization, the problem of integrating the osu caste into freeborn society met resistance in many twentieth-century communities in
southeastern Nigeria—a living testimony of the tremendous influence of
the oracular divination in the area. Christians have preached against and
stopped twin murder and human sacrifice, but they have made very little
impact on the eradication of the osu caste. It is only right that this practice
be completely obliterated, but an Igbo proverb says, ihe umuaka nuru adighi
anwu aneu (what children have heard is permanently retained in the brain).
The current struggle against osu status
Osu face discrimination in contemporary Igbo society. Although discriminatory practices are less stringent than in the past, those still face dif80
ficulties in taking important titles such as ozo, loolo, and eze; in addressing
a gathering of amaala; in marrying a freeborn spouse; and sometimes in
entering the house of amaala. These days many of the old taboos imposed
on osu have been relaxed: People no longer fear touching the blood of an
osu or refuse to participate in the funeral of an osu. Osu now have the same
burial rites as descendants of freeborn. Although these prohibitions are not
kept as religiously as before, they might still be evoked sometimes when
osu want to participate in community life or exercise political rights. If
an osu is believed to be an upstart or stubborn, he or she might be openly
taunted about their status.
In recent times two fundamental issues have been raised concerning
osu: first, regaining freeborn status; and second, freedom to marry. In Igboland there is no known procedure, as in Muslim societies, for the manumission or total emancipation of slaves. Thus it was impossible for osu to
remove the stigma of being a social outcast through their own efforts.5
Writing in 1937, the colonial administrator and anthropologist C. K. Meek
stated that “To a native, any idea of an osu regaining free-born status by
sacrifice or penalty, fine seems impossible” because Igbo beliefs regarding
osu were based on fear and faith rather than reason.6 In the early 1960s
Igbo anthropologist Victor C. Uchendu reported that popular prejudice
against osu remained strong. Noting that in most Igbo communities there
was no acknowledged intermarriage or willingness to consider it between
freeborn and osu, he declared that “paradoxically, the social disabilities of
the osu were the source of their privileges and legal protection.”7
The movement for the abolition of osu status gathered momentum
in the 1950s. In 1956 a bill was introduced into the Eastern House of
Assembly to abolish osu status. During the bitter debate on the issue, the
Member for Owerri, A. N. Ogbonna, took up the problem of enforcing
this legislation:
If an osu comes to Diaala and says “let me have the privilege
of marrying your daughter” and the Diaala knowing (as he
certainly will know) that he is an osu or a descendant of an
osu, refuses saying, “I am sorry my daughter is not ready for
marriage,” and the following day a Diaala comes along to marry
the same girl and he agrees, will the Diaala be prosecuted in a
court of law? Although the Diaala has not told him that he is an
osu, the latter understands that he is refused marriage because
he is an osu, though he will not tell the public so. Therefore, the
purpose you want this law to survive has been defeated.8
81
The bill was passed into law. The penalty for not obeying its provisions
were fixed at six months imprisonment and/or a fine not exceeding fifty
pounds, but even so, if a freeborn descendant were wealthy enough, the fine
was not that much of a hindrance.
As late as 1983 a Sunday Times journalist reported that “The prejudice
against the osu is sustained by a curious mixture of fear and prudence.”9
Today nearly all the sociocultural sanctions against osu, except the one on
marriage, have relaxed. In most Igbo communities a bull or cow is now
dedicated to a deity instead of a human being; hence we talk about Ehi
Ogwugwu, Ehi Urasi, Ehi Agbara, Ehi Njaba, Eghu Nwaebere, Mkpi
Mmuo, Ehi Udo, Ehi Agwunsi, and so on. Osu can vote and participate
in all levels of politics. They enjoy freedom of movement and can socialize
with freeborn descendants at burial rites, taking titles, property transactions, decision making, social and religious functions, various associations,
and everyday economic life.
Social prejudice against osu has lingered, however, when it comes to
marriage. Although the taboo against sexual relations between osu and
freeborn has relaxed, few intermarriages have taken place between osu and
freeborn. Very few people are prepared to take chances with the future
of their children, not even “liberal” minded freeborn, religious leaders or
political leaders. Although some osu occupy positions of trust and responsibility in public and private sectors, still they hesitate to marry out of their
status group because of the fear of being stigmatized. To remedy this, every
group and member of the society—the church, civil rights associations,
political parties, the elite, and ordinary people—should mount widespread
campaigns against the obnoxious maltreatment of osu and finally put an
end to stigmatization.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
Marius Nkwoh, Igbo Cultural Heritage (Enugu: University Publishing Co.;
Onitsha, Varsity Industrial Press, 1984): 66.
For a comprehensive survey of the osu system, see S. N. Ezeanya, “The Osu
System in Igboland,” Journal of Religion in Africa 1 (1967): 35–45.
I. O. Ume, “The Basis of Inequality in Igbo Society,” paper presented at the
Society for Promoting Igbo Language and Culture (SPILC) Seminar, University of Nigeria (Nsukka), 8–10 September 1983.
Such a child became osu unless the father replaced them with another
human-being.
82
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
G. I. Nwaka, “Legislation and Social Prejudice in Igboland,” paper presented
at the National Conference in Inequality and Social Policy, University of Ife,
19–23 March 1985.
C. K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe: A Study in Indirect Rule
(London: Oxford University Press, 1937): 203–204.
Victor C. Uchendu, The Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1965): 89–90.
Quoted in Geoffrey I. Nwaka, “The Civil Rights Movement in Colonial
Igboland,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18 (1985): 484.
May Ellen Ezekiel, “Report on ‘Osu’ the Untouchable Igbo Caste System,”
Sunday Concord (Lagos), 12 June 1983.
83
•6•
Equiano On Igbo Warfare
A.E. Afigbo
T
here is perhaps little doubt that Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography,
The Interesting Narrative,1 was conceived, written, published and distributed as a work of propaganda against the slave trade under which the
author had suffered grievously but which he survived, he claimed, because
“God is my Salvation,” and which trade at the time was becoming bad news
in Western Europe. In the letter with which he forwarded copies of the
book to the British Parliament he had made it clear that “the chief design”
of the work was to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion
for the miseries which the Slave trade has entailed on my unfortunate
countrymen. By the horrors of that trade was I first torn from all the tender
connections that were naturally dear to my heart.2
There is also little doubt that the author was a gifted propagandist as
seen, among other things, in the fact that he recognized the need to give
his story an enhanced veneer of verisimilitude by situating it in as many
relevant contexts as he could command. The first set of contexts dealt with
the period of his life before he was swept into the hated cesspool of slavery.
These contexts were his village (Essaka); his nation (the Igbo nation), at
the time the much famed and romanticized, Benin Empire; the West
African Region which at the time was the leading source of the slave trade
across the Atlantic Ocean and across the Sahara Desert, and finally the
little known African continent whose maps Swift’s geographers studded
with images of elephants and giraffes for “want” of towns!
The afore-mentioned contexts formed four concentric rings and
carried the foundation of the great literary edifice he erected to remind
contemporaries and posterity of, as well as shock them with, the horrors
of the slave trade. The first chapter of the book is devoted to a “comprehensive” ethnography of the two inner rings – Essaka and Igboland – a
very ambitious project if ever there was one. The focus of this paper is on a
very small fragment of this ethnography – a fragment that may be said to
deal with Igbo warfare in the eighteenth century in some two pages and
a third.3
It is debatable indeed whether it could be said that Equiano wrote
on “Igbo warfare.” What he did, to be precise, was to give an account of
what he called “a battle” between his community and a rival “nameless”
community which he said took place in one of their farmlands and which
he said he had had the opportunity to watch from the top of a tree at a
safe distance. According to him the battle was the result of a surprise and
unprovoked attack on his community by the rival community. Thus on the
side of his community there had been no specific preparation for the battle,
while on the other side the story was different. They had chosen their time
and place. They had prepared and attacked. But just as one swallow does
not make a summer, one battle does not constitute a war.
However, after the necessarily brief description of the battle he was
privileged to watch, Equiano went on to make some general statements
about such encounters. In the process he touched upon their causes, the
fact of their frequent and regular occurrence, the fact that Igbo communities were always on the alert and ready for war, the fact that each community consisted of a standing militia and the fact that in Igbo culture
war was not just for men but also for women, that is, gender-neutral. He
also gave a list of Igbo weapons of war. To this extent it could be said that
Equiano wrote on Igbo warfare through the back door.
Be that as it may, Equiano’s very sketchy account now carries with it
an importance, which is probably out of all proportion to its real historical value and that for one obvious reason. In the millennia before 1900 it
is the only such account of Igbo warfare written from inside knowledge
that is by one who not only described what he saw or heard or both but
also was part of the happening. Without doubt a number of European
visitors to the Bight of Biafra during the era of the slave trade have left
us some tantalizing comments on the Igbo and on “war” amongst them.
John Grazilhier (1699), for instance, talked of “the Hackbous Blacks, a
people much addicted to war and preying on their neighbours.”4 Similarly
Hermann Köler (1840) referred to what he called the “warlike nature” of
the Igbo which he identified as one of the things about them that “makes
86
a significant impact on their neighbours.” At another point he reported
that the Igbo “are warlike, wild and rapacious” and that some of them “are
cannibals.”5
These statements were all based on hearsay since until very late in the
nineteenth century hardly any European went into Igboland to explore
it in any formal or significant manner. On this the scholar-administrator,
Harry H. Johnston wrote in 1888 as follows:
For about three centuries we have hung about the coasts, and
the terror of the climate, the savagery of the natives, and the
bitter rivalry among the European traders, have prevented the
exploration of the interior so much so that it is amazing to think
that we have been acquainted with the Niger Delta for, as I
have said, over three centuries and it is only during the present
year, that I as the first white man, have explored many of its
important rivers for the first time.6
As already implied such penetrations increased after Johnston’s visit
until they led, by the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth
century, to the British conquest and occupation of the whole length and
breadth of Igboland and the adjoining territories occupied by the Efik,
the Ibibio and the Ekoid Bantu peoples. Yet the changed situation did
not immediately bring about remarkable improvement in the quality and
quantity of the historical and ethnographic information available to the
scholar on the state, societies and institutions of these hinterland peoples
of the Bight of Biafra.
The early military and administrative records compiled by the British
concentrated on what the British did but paid little attention to the state
of society in which those actions were taking place. Only from about
the mid-1920’s, when it came to be fully recognized that more intimate
knowledge of these societies could help reduce the problems encountered
in their administration, did conscious effort to understand them begin.
Even then more attention was paid to their political organization than to
their economic, social and cultural organizations. This skewed approach
characterized even the much orchestrated intelligence report investigations, which came after the women’s uprising of 1929. The result was that
much of what was written on war in Igbo society continued to be based
largely on armchair speculation. It was the same with the study of Igbo
warfare in 1956 by the highly rated Dr. M.D.W. Jeffries who gave it out
that Igbo weapons of war were made mostly out of wood.7 The situation
began to change only from the late 1970’s when those of us in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka,
87
introduced the long essay as part of the requirements for the B.A. degree
and also instituted a post-graduate programme in history. Both innovations required students benefiting from them to go into the field to collect
oral information with which to supplement the written records available
to them. Some of the results of this effort, that is the collections of the
undergraduates, are included in Professor Elizabeth Isichei’s anthology on
the Igbo entitled Igbo Worlds. Now most of the undergraduates, at least in
the early years of the programme, were made to write their long essays on
topics dealing with the pre-colonial period. It is with the results of these
investigations and others related to them that we shall interrogate Olaudah
Equiano on his account of Igbo warfare. Our belief is that Igbo society
did not undergo any radical socio-political revolution between about 1750
and the colonial century (1860 – 1960) and therefore that we should still
have, by the time of these inquiries, in the traditions of the elders survivals of those apparently important features of Igbo warfare highlighted by
Equiano in his work.
Igbo Wars: Causation
To Equiano Igbo wars were caused by slave raids which, according to
him, were one of the two main methods of recruiting the millions of men
and women shipped into slavery across the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic
Ocean – the second method being by kidnapping. This, he said, was so not
only for Igboland but also for all of Africa. “From what I can recollect of
these battles,” he claimed, “they appear to have been irruptions of one little
state or district on the other, to obtain prisoners or booty. Perhaps they
were incited to this by those traders who brought the European goods
I mentioned amongst us. Such a mode of obtaining slaves in Africa is
common; and I believe more are procured in this way, and by kidnapping,
than any other.8
Equiano was the first to introduce the factor of slave raids as an important one in the explanation of aspects of Igbo history. For him the raiders
came from within Igbo society. It was a case of the Igbo preying upon
the Igbo. In the course of the first three or four decades of the twentieth
century historians were to resurrect slave raids as an important explanatory
factor in Igbo history. One group said the socio-political fragmentation
of the Igbo was caused by devastating raids for slaves by the Ijo city states
from the south, the Benin Empire from the west and by the Igala and Jukun
states from the north, while another group said that protected as they were
by high forest, the Igbo were spared political and military pressure from
these neighboring imperialistic states and thus had no compelling reason
88
to adopt centralized institutions. In other words, for these historians the
factor of slave raids in Igbo history was an external one.9 Other research
- especially by the present writer, K.O. Dike and P.A. Talbot - has shown
that slave raiding, whether internal or external, was not a factor of any
consequence in Igbo history whether we are thinking of Igbo demographic
history as Equiano did or of the history of Igbo political organization and
population settlement pattern as the later-day historians did.10 On this,
one of my students concluded after a study of warfare in pre-colonial
Ohuhu for his Masters dissertation as follows:
The slave trade was not one of the major causes of wars in precolonial Ohuhu. There were, however, a few instances of disputes that were heightened by tension arising from the capture
and sale by one community, of persons from another.11
To make a long story short, slave raids and slave raiders did not cause
the wars that might have been fought in eighteenth century Igboland nor
would their activities account for any number of slaves recruited from
Igboland and shipped abroad. But for the purpose for which Equiano
wrote his book, it was necessary that the slave trade, slave raids and slave
raiders be implicated in what was believed to be the barbarous state of
Africa that was said to have made the iniquitous slave trade possible.
If slave raiders were not the villains that caused wars in Igbo society,
what or who did or did Igbo society not know wars? Certainly there were
wars and war alarums in Igbo society, but their causes were different from
what Equiano sought to put out either for reasons of propaganda, or
because of eroded memory or because being very young at the time he
was torn from Igbo culture he would not have known of such high state
matters as the anatomy and physiology of war. My own research as well as
the research of my students among the Northern Igbo, the part of Igboland
in which Equiano’s Essaka was situated, produced overwhelming evidence
that Igbo communities did not fight one another on flimsy grounds but
only on such occasions as when they disagreed over serious matters that
could not be settled otherwise than by war. The evidence also showed that
in the overwhelming number of cases such serious disagreements had to
do with conflicting claims to land. It does not require to be stated that
for a predominantly agricultural people with a dense population, like the
Igbo, land was very important – indeed the principal economic asset. Even
within the ward, where the drawing of blood was tabooed, people were
known to have fought and died for a patch of ground not large enough to
take their grave.
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Interview results from three areas which were among those parts of
Igboland wracked by war for much of the second part of the nineteenth
century confirm the submission that land dispute was the principal cause
of war among Igbo communities in the pre-colonial period. Chief Edward
Nnaji of Iji Nike and his council of chiefs attributed the repeated incidence
of war between Nike clan in Enugu and Opi in Nsukka to a land dispute
which proved impossible to settle until the coming of the British early in
the 20th century which led to the imposition of a permanent boundary
between the combatants12. In the Nsukka zone, the area occupied by Ichi,
Ibagwa Ani, Ibagwa Nkwo and Obukpa did not know peace for much
of the second half of the nineteenth century. Again the explanation was
dispute over land. According to the traditions, early arrival in this zone
had enabled Ibagwa Ani to occupy extensive stretches of fertile land generously punctuated with natural springs, a fact that made her the envy of
her neighbours who were not so blessed. Consequently she had on many
occasions to face at the same time invasions by her jealous neighbours from
different directions. Most prominent among these neighbours of Ibagwa
Ani was the Obukpa community that today is the immediate northern
neighbour of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Of her it has been said
that her fierce and warlike nature arose from her belated effort to acquire
cultivable and habitable land from her more favoured neighbours. This
fact, it is claimed, made her an ever-present threat to all the surrounding
villages and village-groups. It has also been said of her that she readily
accepted a call for help from any beleaguered neighbor once the terms of
agreement included her right to occupy any piece of territory captured by
her during the ensuing war.13 It was a similar story in the Eastern Igbo area
particularly in the zone occupied by Okposi and such other communities
as Uburu, Amasiri, Ukawu and Ugwulangwu. Repeatedly the entire zone
was embroiled in war over rival claims to land. One informant blamed the
situation on Okposi’s excessive attachment to land as a result of which the
slightest encroachment from any direction triggered off war. This was why,
he said, there was and there still is boundary dispute between Uburu and
Okposi, between Amasiri and Okposi, between Ugulangwu and Okposi,
between Ukawu and Okposi.14
However, it must be pointed out that much as rival claims to land
may have been the chief culprit in the matter of causes of pre-colonial
Igbo wars, there were other subsidiary factors which at times served as
the occasions for, rather than the actual causes of wars. These included
disruption of trade routes, disruption of markets and rival claims to them,
mistreatment of married daughters dead or alive, the need to protect a
community’s honour and reputation, unfounded rumours and finally, as
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with many other human communities, plain mis-apprehension on the part
of statesmen and politicians.
Militarisation of Igbo Society
Over and over again Equiano gave the impression that Igbo society
was fairly highly militarized. The women were “Amazons” like their sisters
in Dahomey – of this more latter. On page 16-17 he tells the reader that
“All” were trained in the use of some four offensive and one defensive
weapons, which he said constituted the weaponry of the Igbo. This “all”
included women and children. “I was trained up,” he continues, “from my
earliest years in the arts of war: my daily exercise was shooting and throwing javelins and my mother adorned me with emblems after the manner of
our great warriors.”15 On page 17 he asserts: “Our whole district is a kind
of militia.” As mentioned earlier the issue of women as frontline soldiers
like the men will be treated latter in this paper. Igbo society had neither
a professional standing army nor a professional reserve army. Every adult
male was expected to rise in defense of his community each time the need
arose. Also he was expected to teach himself the use of these weapons
just as he had to find the means to equip himself for hunting and warring
– the two engagements calling for the use of the same instruments. The
perimeter walls of Igbo compounds were a far cry from any attempt to
build defensive walls – with some of them being made of mud and wattle,
some only of mud and some even of grass and twigs. They were rarely
higher than four feet. For the rest there were no armament factories and
no community armouries. It was the same Awka, Nkwerre and Abiriba
smiths who made the implements for the pursuit of agriculture and crafts
who made the weapons for individuals, rather than for communities, when
they placed orders for them. There were no formal drill grounds and no
drill sergeants. In most parts of Igboland, including Equiano’s Essaka, the
age grade system was very weakly developed. The section of Igboland to
which all these observations applied is that part which in my delimitation
of Igboland into culture sub-groups I designated Igbo ozo or Igbo echichi.16
In this area Nri influence, which was largely eirenic and abhorred bloodshed, was strongly felt. It was in this Igbo ozo or Igbo echichi segment that
Equiano’s village fell. It is difficult to understand from where Equiano got
the ideas of militarisation that he included in his book as being characteristic of Igbo society.
However, there was another segment of Igbo society, which I have designated Igbo abamaba,17 which has a more pronounced military tradition.
Here you had highly integrated age grades that could be turned into regi91
ments during a war, secret societies and all that idolized the warlike tradition and culture. Earlier scholars – Daryll Forde and G.I. Jones - called
them Eastern and Cross River Igbo. Here you had the clans of the Igbo
whom European ethnographers gave the generic name of Abam believed
to signify professional headhunters – the Abam proper, the Ohafia, the
Edda, the Igbere and related groups. Until recently they were popularly
designated as the mercenary fighters of Igboland. Perhaps Equiano met in
the New World Igbo slaves who came from this area of Igbo society and it
must have been through discussions with them that the idea of militarization of Igbo society got into his head in the first instance. An example is
the idea of Igbo Amazons. “Abam” women never went to war. Thus some
of the features highlighted by Equiano to prove what a military race his
people were would not apply to even this group, the most warlike group in
Igboland. And in any case he was not writing about them. Even though he
did not say so, we believe that the effort was designed to tell his audience
to what extent the slave trade had warped the development of Igbo society,
diverted its energies to the self destructive business of preying upon itself
and therefore deserved to be torn up root and branch.
Was war endemic in Igbo society?
If Equiano did not say so directly, the overall impression he gave
of Igbo society of his time was that war was a frequent, or even an ever
present, social phenomenon. First he deposed that “the common” in which
they exercised their tillage was “often the theatre of war” and that as a
result whenever his people went to their farms they went in a group with
each person armed to the teeth in order to give a good account of himself if
attacked as was often the case. Also Equiano’s people generally slept with
one eye open so that whenever the signal of an attack was given they would
all “rise in arms and rush upon the enemy.” Then there was the fact that
he believed these wars were caused by slave raiding, and that the catching
of slaves by means of slave raids was a prevalent economic activity, meant
that wars and war alarums were always in the air. The reign of uncontrolled
and uncontrollable violence is by definition a feature of a barbarous society.
Living on the slave trade, Igbo society was barbarous and being barbarous
was thus addicted to acts of bloody violence. To Equiano this portrayal of
Igbo society was a powerful reinforcement of the case against the slave
trade, the enemy no. 1 in The Interesting Narrative.
Igbo society in Equiano’s time and for long after went to great lengths
to control the incidence of war and violence if indeed not to abolish them
completely. First there was the myth of blood brotherhood right from the
92
lineage segment to the clan, which was a federation of village-groups or
rather, the micro-polis. Where this covering myth failed to apply, there was
the humanly contrived blood relationship founded on Igba Ndu or Ogbugba
Ndu that was supposed to achieve the same purpose of controlling violence
and bloodshed. Attendance of the same markets also provided another
reason and opportunity for abolishing violence and blood shed amongst the
towns and villages concerned. The question that arises is why this repeated
emphasis on preserving the peace and avoiding conflict among social segments? One answer that suggests itself is that the Igbo were naturally peace
loving. Another is that war and violence between social segments were such
recurring phenomena that statesmen and politicians devoted the major part
of the time they gave to public service to the control of the demon of war
and violence. The fact that most wars were caused by land dispute, as we
have tried to show, made it very likely that below the surface, and indeed
not very deeply below the surface, of relations between neighboring communities that had gone through one or two such disputes, there was always
the possibility of a renewal of conflict. As one informant put it to me, land
is not a consumable commodity that once you get either by conquest or
through the adjudication of intercessors you consume and thus remove
from the world of visible every day reality. On the contrary the land alienated either by conquest or adjudication by third parties is always there. The
result is that any time the losing party passes by the land anger and revenge
would well up in them. It is this kind of feeling that even a minor incident
such as the molestation of women going to or returning from the market
ignites into the major conflagration we refer to as war. Thus technically
Equiano was correct in giving the impression that Igbo society in his time
was one in which war and rumours of war were a constant reality.
Further more there were over three to four hundred of these loose
federations and unions which we refer to as micro-polities or mini-states
in Igboland, all involved in the kind of vague and uncertain inter-group
relationship that then obtained. We can thus suggest that there would
have been no time this very fragile relationship was not breaking down
and leading to varying gradations of inter-group conflict in over two dozen
places or more all over Igboland. In these conflicts, even though the primary
purpose of going to war might not have been the catching of slaves for local
use or for sale abroad or both, captives were nonetheless taken. Some of
these captives found their way to the coast and to the New World as slaves.
When asked how they came to end up as slaves, the reply would be that
they were captured in wars and/or raids. In our view this was probably how
the tradition built up along the coast, for instance, that the hinterland Igbo
of the Bight of Biafra was warlike and maybe blood thirsty and perhaps
93
worse – even cannibals. It was very likely that it was this tradition that
Equiano came across either before he left the Bight of Biafra or in the New
World or both in the Bight of Biafra and the New World and decided to
incorporate in The Interesting Narrative to reinforce the picture he wanted
Europe to see of what harm the slave trade was doing to his kinsmen. Igboland was not one political society and thus war being endemic in it would
not have the same meaning as saying that war was endemic in the Benin
Empire or in the Igala kingdom. With these two states the statement would
suggest the onset of political disintegration while with Igbo society it might
even suggest the onset of wider integration.
Women and War in Igboland
According to Equiano women in Igbo society and culture were frontline participants in wars just like their sisters, the Amazons of Dahomey.
At one point in the book he deposed as follows: “All are taught the use
of weapons. Even our women are warriors, and march boldly out to fight
along with the men.” Reporting on the battle which he said he had the
opportunity to watch in their common he said: “There were many women
as well as men on both sides: among others my mother was there, and
armed with a broad sword.”18 This is clearly one of the elements Equiano
imported into his description of Igbo society from his reading of the
travel literature available on West Africa during his time, more specifically
from his acquaintance with ethnographic information on Dahomey and
her Amazons. G.I. Jones suggested that this information about Essaka’s
women may have been correct because according to him there is information about women from an unnamed and unidentified Isuama community
who became warriors when their men declined so much in numbers that
they could no longer perform their duty of offence and defense. But this
suggestion must be discounted just like Equiano’s claim on this matter for
no concrete information has come up in this matter suggesting that Igbo
women were warriors in the manner claimed by Equiano. Not even in
Igbo folklore and legend does one come across information that supports
Equiano’s story. Indeed Igbo folklore says that Chukwu, the Igbo supreme
God, banned women from war from early in the history of the Igbo world.
According to the story Chukwu was then still experimenting on how to
run the Igbo world. First he allowed women to wage war but found they
were extremely bloodthirsty and considered an encounter a total failure if
even a single member of the opposing forces escaped massacre. In such an
event they would return home in tears. When Chukwu asked the men to
take the place of the women as warriors, the men would come home jubi94
lating, beating their drums and blowing their trumpets, even if they succeeded in killing only one enemy soldier. For this reason Chukwu decreed
that only men should wage war because of their restraint so that mankind
would not be wiped out.
The result is that you do not meet in Igbo traditions any mention of
women playing the role of gallant frontline soldiers. Even the records kept
by the British on the hundreds of battles and skirmishes in which they
conquered the Igbo, you do not come across any mention at any point
of their having encountered Igbo women during the fighting. This invisibility of Igbo women as warriors is satisfactorily explained by a number
of factors. The fact is that as far as war went the Igbo classified the women
along with the children – that is as weak members of the society who
should be protected during wars. Indeed the killing or wounding of
women and children during war was prohibited. Even an “Abam” head
hunter would not take a woman’s head for that would win him no social
uplift back home. To prevent such an unfortunate eventuality, as women
being killed or harmed in war, they were herded together in neighboring
compounds far from the scene of violent conflict, and occasionally guarded
by the age group that had just passed the warrior grade. It should be noted
that the warring parties generally took matters like this into account.
They usually agreed before hand on the location of the battlefield and this
was usually in the farmlands distant from their homes. Another factor is
that the women were expected to support their men folk from their rear
location – cooking food and providing water19 for the fighters as well as
attending to the wounded and helping to move the dead after these have
been brought out from the battlefield by the men. Also women, especially
the category of them known among the Igbo as Umuada, often brought
the battle to an end by physically occupying the battlefield since no one
would be mad enough to hurt them for to hurt nwada (singular of umuada)
was to infringe a very serious taboo which brought upon the unfortunate
offender sever consequences dreaded by all.
Thus what we are saying is that Igbo women were not warriors in the
sense suggested by Equiano. But they had recognized roles in warfare like
the ones already mentioned. Their immunity from attack during a war also
placed them in a good enough position to go and come during a lull in
the fighting, and thus to collect and transmit intelligence. Also if a woman
found herself suddenly involved in a melee, like that described by Equiano,
nothing prevented her from defending herself or her husband or whoever
with what came ready to hand – a hoe, a matchet, a digger, a club and so
on. When I discussed this matter with an elderly woman in the late 1970s
she told me “After all you do not fight with penis but with hands, and
95
women have hands. What a woman will not do and cannot do is to sally
forth from the home, armed to the teeth, to meet enemy warriors.” Nor
is it being suggested that there were not fearless and fearsome women in
Igboland. A good example is the women of Uturu clan, situated just a little
to the northeast of my own village-group, whose profession is the weaving
of mats and who constantly went beyond the frontiers of their clan in
search of raw materials for their craft. As they sallied out each of them
would carry a club some five or six feet long. If they ran into an attack, say
by headhunters or kidnappers, they would promptly throw their loads on
the ground, form a circle round the loads and face the attackers squarely.
Their battle cry usually was: “Let no one run so that if any of us is killed
we will see it happen with our own eyes.” And invariably they prevailed
against their assailants.
Armaments
On this Equiano says: “We have firearms, bows and arrows, broad twoedged swords and javelins; we have shields also which cover a man from head
to foot.” Hermann Köler writing in 1840 from his base in Bonny mentions
three weapons used by the Igbo – “knives, daggers, spears.” Neither of the
two lists is a comprehensive inventory of the weaponry that existed in precolonial Igboland. For something close to that, one would be referred to
chapter 13 of Toyin Falola (ed.) Igbo History and Society: Collected Essays of
Adiele Afigbo which not only attempts a comprehensive inventory but also
a study of their typologies and use along with their role in the evolution
of Igbo society and culture. Similarly each of the two inventories gives us
a picture different from that given by Dr. M.D.W Jeffries, a former colonial and anthropological officer in Southeastern Nigeria, who writing as
a university academic in 1956 gave the totally misleading impression that
pre-colonial Igbo weaponry consisted largely of instruments fashioned out
of wood. Equiano tells us that by mid-eighteenth century the Igbo were
using weapons many of which were of metal.
Concluding Remarks
One important question which arises for us here is whether Equiano’s
inventory is derived from personal observation as a child of eleven years,
that is from what he observed of Igbo warfare before he was kidnapped
and sold into slavery or it is something drawn from his reading of the
general ethnographic literature which became available to him in his later
96
and maturer years in Western society. Unfortunately there is no way of
answering this question with certitude. Another important question is
about the features of Igbo warfare that Equiano omitted in his account in
The Interesting Narrative. War may be defined as what happens from the
time when peace between states or independent communities breaks down
to the time peace is restored either through the intervention of third or
neutral parties or through the exhaustion of the combatants. This interlude
may be short or long depending on how equally or unequally matched the
combatants are and how grave and deep-rooted the causes of the conflict
are. But whether the interlude is short or long the things that happen
within it include a propaganda offensive, the mobilization of each side not
only physically but also morally and psychically, the actual declaration of
war at times after agreement has been reached on codes for the conduct of
the war, the collection of intelligence, the actual taking of the field by the
combatants, the taking of captives, the death of some fighters, the intervention of third parties leading generally to the suspension of fighting and
then to settlement. A near comprehensive treatment of Igbo warfare would
cover all these and perhaps more. Equiano made no attempt to cover all
these matters. But of course Equiano was not writing an academic disquisition on Igbo warfare. His concern was to show by what dastardly
methods the human goods of the infamous triangular trade were obtained.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
The edition used here is the 9th edition printed in Norwich in 1794. This
paper was initially presented at the American Historical Annual Meeting,
New York, January 2-5, 2009, in the panel “Biography and History: The
Debate over Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” and is published here
posthumously, with the permission of his family. This paper should be read in
conjunction with Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies In Igbo History And Culture
(Ibadan, University Press, 1981), chapter 5.
Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, viii.
Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 15-18.
Elizabeth Isichei, Igbo Worlds (London: Macmillan, 1977), 10.
Ibid, 14.
Report on the British Protectorate of the Oil Rivers (Niger Deita) by H.H.
Johnston; Enclosed in Despatch of 1st December 1888 in F.O. 84/1882.
M.D.W. Jeffries, “Igbo Warfare,” Man, 77 (1956).
Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 15-16.
97
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
Toyin Falola, ed., Myth, History and Society: The Collected Works of Adiele
Afigbo (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006); see “War and Historical
Explanation in Eastern Nigeria,”143-160.
Ibid.
S. Emezue, “Warfare In Pre-Colonial Ohuhu” (M.A. Dissertation, University of Nigeria Nsukka, 1983), 129.
Field notes in the custody of the author.
Nsukka field notes in the custody of the author.
I.E. Nwachukwu, “Okposi and Her Neighbours” (B.A. Long Essay, Ebonyi
State University, 2008).
Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 31.
E.A. Afigbo, ed., Groundwork of Igbo History (Lagos: Vista Press, 1992),
chapter 7.
Ibid.
The Interesting Narrative, 16-17.
This role was played by young girls who had not reached the age of menstruation and by those who had attained menopause. In times of war Igbo
warriors were expected to stay away from sex and from anything touched by
menstruating women. This was to conserve their strength and protect their
charms.
98
I G B O D I A S POR A I N
THE AMERICAS
••
•7•
The Anguished Igbo
Response to Enslavement in
the Americas 1
Michael A. Gomez
T
he desire to be made whole is one of the most powerful mechanisms
of motivation known to human kind. In both corporate and individual
history, persons move toward the light of circumstances whereby health
in all of its facets—psychological, social, physical—is maximized. It has
become clear that differences between these aspects of the person are as
much a matter of perception and abstraction as they are lived experience;
that the human condition is best approached as an integrated whole. As
such, it should come as no surprise that the forced geographical dislocation
of persons would result in an all-out search for a return to equilibrium, to
the organization of a social ensemble in which, to the furthest extent possible, wrongs are righted, wounds are healed, and dignity is restored. This
chapter examines the attempts of the Igbo in North America to restore
wholeness to their lives.
Human beings move in streams of relation, wherein persons continuously negotiate agencies, dimensions, and qualities of connection to other
persons and entities inhabiting lands seen and unseen. The capture of Africans in Africa and their subsequent shipment to the Americas amounted
to a quintessential disruption of such negotiations, resulting in the redirection of the tributaries of life, now flowing through bitter waters of dis-
memberment and disease, emptying into seas of indigo, cane, coffee, and
cotton. The overwhelming majority of them, in the range of 90 percent,
would be consumed by the production of sugar throughout the Americas
between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. The apocalypse
had come, as murderous and cataclysmic and altering as any scenario envisioned by prophetic revelation. If not a new heaven, certainly a new earth
was in the making, transforming existence as many would know it on both
sides of the Atlantic.
It must have been quite a spectacle for the creatures of the sea, this
stream of humanity aloft in ships of varying size, surging back and forth.
Had they the capacity, the fish would have held their own conferences
on the significance of such activity, beginning as it did with a trickle and
peaking in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with a flood. At
least 12.5 million Africans were forcibly removed from the continent of
their birth by means of the Atlantic trade between 1500 and 1867. Probably there were many more, for what we know of their quantification has
been driven by mathematical projections informed by the gradual uncovering of shipping and sales data in Europe and the Americas during the last
thirty years. There is every reason to believe that further archival discoveries will come to light resulting in a more intense inquiry into clandestine
trafficking.2 Currently available statistics suggest that the Bight of Biafra
contributed about 12.7 percent of those among the ranks of the natallyalienated and socially dishonored, constituting the major source of African
labor for the British Leeward Islands and, somewhat surprisingly, Jamaica,
otherwise an Akan outpost.3
If we isolate the territory that became the United States from the
preceding discussion, we encounter a subregional pattern of distribution.
In this area, 16.7 percent of all African arrivals originated in the Bight
of Biafra, but they were disproportionately concentrated in the tidewater
region of the Chesapeake, where they constituted 35.5 percent of arrivals
directly from Africa. Remarkably, the Igbo, a group with such profound
impact upon African American society, have received little recognition
in the scholarly literature on North American slavery. The sheer size of
the Igbo contingent to the Chesapeake tidewater is stunning; three out of
every four arrivals from the Bight of Biafra in North America went to the
Chesapeake before 1775. Senegambia, west-central Africa and the Gold
Coast followed in order of descending levels of contribution in the tidewater region, ranging from 24.2 percent to 17.4 percent to 12 percent. The
Bight of Benin ranked last with only 2.5 percent of the total. As Virginia,
Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana were the foundational
colonies after which others patterned themselves, it is instructive to note
102
The Anguished Igbo Response to Enslavement in the Americas
that Africans from the Bight of Biafra were numerically dominant in Virginia and Maryland, whereas they only constituted 8.7 percent of arrivals
in South Carolina and Georgia.
The Bight of Biafra led other West African ports in the eighteenth
century in producing women for the market, and together with the Bight
of Benin and the Gold Coast, tended to send fewer males and fewer children into the trade than did other supply areas. In the nineteenth century,
however, the percentage of women from the Bight of Biafra declined
precipitously, dropping at Bonny, for example, from 40.3 percent in the
eighteenth century to 14.3 percent in the nineteenth. The story is similar at
Calabar, where the percentages declined from 38.6 percent to 16.6 percent.
When compared with Whydah (Ouidah), where the decline was less than
9 percentage points (from 30 to 21.3) and given its eighteenth-century
pattern, the nineteenth century change in sex ratios emanating from the
Bight of Biafra becomes even more significant. Perhaps more dramatic
than the changes in percentage by sex was the rise in the percentage of
children. At Whydah the percentage essentially doubled from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, whereas at Bonny and Calabar there
was at least a fourfold increase in the number of children exported.
While the Igbo/Biafran contribution to the British trade in slaves was
disproportionately high, the demand for them in the New World varied.
In fact, some parts of the North America preferred not to import Igbo
captives. It was Donnan’s view that because Virginian planters were simply
uninterested in the ethnic origins of the Africans, they imported a large
number from the Bight of Biafra, a reflection of the latter’s dominant representation in the British pool as a whole. In contrast, South Carolina
expressed an abiding preference for Senegambians and Gold Coast captives
but were “disdainful” of the Igbo/Biafrans and “short people” in general.
With regard to the latter category, Littlefield explains that Africans who
were “small, slender, weak, and tended toward a yellowish color, were less
desirable. Calabar or Ibo slaves, with whatever justice, seemed to epitomize
these qualities.” Henry Laurens, a leading South Carolinian planter of the
colonial period, wrote that Gambians made the best slaves and should be
recruited, but that there “must not be a Calabar among them.” Those Igbo/
Biafrans who could not be sold in South Carolina, however, were easily
transferable to the markets of Virginia.4
According to Wax, colonial America sought captives primarily from
the Gold Coast and Gambia (in that order), and that South Carolina “had
an intense prejudice against all slaves obtained east of the Gold Coast,
especially those from the Bight of Biafra and Calabar.” Rawley joins the
chorus, stating that South Carolina “strongly disliked” those from “the
103
Bight of Biafra and Calabar,” whereas Chesapeake buyers “accepted” the
Igbo/Biafrans in large numbers. In fact, the divergence between Virginia and South Carolina in their receptivity to the Igbo was such that
the former’s importation of the Igbo before 1775 constituted some 35.5
percent of its total arrivals of African captives, a component that mirrors
the overall British export trade from Africa to the Americas. As such, the
Bight of Biafra is the region from which the largest group of captives came
to Virginia. In contrast, from 1773 to 1807 South Carolina imported only
7.3 percent of its African captive population from the Bight of Biafra, a
very low percentage when it is recalled that South Carolina received some
54.2 percent of the entire African trade to North America before 1808.
While the South Carolinian rejection of the Igbo remains both decisive
and dramatic, the role of the Igbo in North America, given both the size
of Virginia’s slave population and its function as a leading source of slaves
for the domestic slave trade, was clearly critical.5 Speculation over factors
accounting for Virginia’s receptivity to the Igbo ranges from Virginians’
indifference to their belief that those from West Central Africa were physically weaker due to the longer distance in travel to the Chesapeake. Whatever the reasons, Virginia stands in stark contrast to the attitude displayed in
South Carolina. The cause of the latter’s discomfort with and disdain for the
Igbo/Biafrans is rooted in South Carolinian planters’ notion of an essentialized Igbo character, and by no means unique to South Carolinians. Both in
South Carolina and Haiti, slaves from the Niger delta, most of whom were
Igbo shipped from Calabar and Bonny, were considered suicidal. In Jamaica,
Igbo slaves were regarded as manageable but deceitful, while prone to
suicide if mistreated. In sixteenth-century Mexico, the Igbo were described
as “difficult to manage and disposed to committing suicide when subjected
to the slightest punishment or ridicule.” The unfavorable assessment of the
Igbo began even before they landed in the New World and centered upon
their conduct during the Middle Passage, in which, according to Barbot,
they were “very weak and slothful; but cruel and bloody in their temper,
always quarreling, biting and fighting, and sometimes choaking [sic] and
murdering one another, without any mercy, as happened aboard our ship.”
Assuming this is an accurate description, there are several possible explanations for behavior so aberrant as to merit special comment, some having to
do with the slave ship itself, others relating more to conditions in the Bight
of Biafra and its hinterland. My examination of these possibilities elsewhere
reveals that, whether in the slaver or on American soil, the impulse to resist
inspired many of the various responses of the Igbo to enslavement. Of those
responses, suicide is the most striking.6
104
Captives from all over West and West Central Africa no doubt committed suicide in response to enslavement. A forbidden act in Igbo country
and most other parts of Africa, self-destruction became a plausible solution to many transplanted into the hostile world of white “spirits.” It is
intriguing, then, to read that the Igbo were perceived as much more likely
to commit suicide than any other group. Mullin writes that the Igbo
were viewed everywhere as “suicidally despondent.” Phillips records that
whereas Igbo women were industrious, the men were “lazy, despondent
and prone to suicide.” Littlefield summarizes the English depiction of the
Igbo as “melancholy and suicidal, sickly, unattractive, and superstitious.”7
The sources are therefore unanimous in ascribing to the Igbo greater selfdestructive tendencies; such ascriptions demand rational explanation.
However, a prior question must be addressed: Is there any corroborative
evidence for this alleged suicidal proclivity?
Interestingly, there does indeed appear to be potentially corroborative
evidence that more closely associates suicide with the Igbo than with any
other African group. Specifically, the substantiating information is to be
found in folktales of so-called “flying Africans.” It would be appropriate at
this point to initiate a discussion of this genre of folklore for the purpose
of establishing a more credible link between the Igbo and suicide.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews of the 1930s
along the Georgia coast and sea islands uncovered a wealth of information. One theme emerging from those interviews concerns Africans who
could “fly,” a theme particularly curious in that it is rarely mentioned
in the volumes of WPA interviews of former slaves conducted in other
American states. In coastal Georgia, in contrast, it was prominent. In the
extreme northeastern section of Savannah, in a neighborhood called Old
Fort, former slave Jack Wilson had the following to say about the subject:
“Some hab magic powuh wut come tuh um frum way back in Africa. Muh
mothuh use tuh tell me bout slabes jis bring obuh from Africa wut hab duh
supreme magic powuh. Deah wuz a magic pass wud dat dey would pass
tuh udduhs. Ef dey belieb in dis magic, dey could scape an fly back tuh
Africa.” At Tin City, east of Savannah, former bondsman Paul Singleton
told a similar tale: “Muh daddy use tuh tell me all duh time bout folks wut
could fly back tuh Africa. Dey could take wing an jis fly off.” That this was
an important topic is evinced by the numerous times it is mentioned in
the Georgia coastal collection, and by Singleton’s use of the phrase “all duh
time.” Moses Brown, also of Tin City, testified that his “gran use tuh tell
me bout folks flyin back tuh Africa,” as did fellow citizen Emma Monroe:
“Duh ole folks use tuh tell us chillun duh story bout people dat flied off
tuh Africa. I blieb um bout flyin.”8
105
The ability to fly was associated exclusively with native-born Africans,
who were believed to possess supernatural power capable of such a feat.
American-born blacks are never depicted as having this ability or experience, although some may claim to have witnessed related phenomena,
including James Moore of Tin City, who stated “I seen folks disappeah
right fo muh eyes. Jis go right out uh sight. Dey do say dat people brought
frum Africa in slabery times could disappeah an fly right back tuh Africa.
Frum duh tings I see myself I blieb dat dey could do dis.” But others, such
as Old Henry Gamble of Frogtown (on the western edge of Savannah),
depended on childhood stories: “Wen I wuz a boy I heah lots uh stories
bout people flyin. Some folks brung obuh frum Africa could fly off aw
disappeah anytime dey wanted tuh.” This power was not only the exclusive
property of the African-born but also for the express purpose of returning
to Africa (as opposed to flying just to be flying), as Dorothy Johnson of
Springfield (west of Savannah) made clear: “Duh ole folks use tuh tell bout
duh people wut could take wing an fly right back to Africa.” These people
had no trouble accepting the notion that Africans could fly, for Africa was
for them a mystical place and source of great wonder. Thomas Smith of
Yamacraw (in Savannah), in discussing the supernatural exploits of Moses
and Pharaoh and the fact that they took place in Africa, observed the following: “Well, den, duh descendants ub Africans hab duh same gif tuh do
unnatchul ting. Ise heahd duh story uh duh flyin Africans an I sho belieb
it happens.”9
Accounts of flying Africans and the Igbo come together on St. Simons
Island, at a place called Ebo Landing. The account of Ebo Landing is wellknown throughout the coastal area. According to Wallace Quarterman
(born 1844) of Darien, a group of Igbo workers had just received a beating
from an overseer: “‘Anyways, he whip um good an dey gits tuhgedduh an
stick duh hoe in duh fiel an den say ‘quack, quack, quack,’ an dey riz up
in duh sky an tun hesef intuh buzzuds an fly right back tuh Africa.’’10 In
what may have been an allusion to the same event, Priscilla McCullough,
also of Darien and born three years “before freedom” in Sumter, South
Carolina, related the following: “‘Duh slabes wuz out in duh fiel wukin.
All ub a sudden dey git tuhgedduh an staht tuh moob roun in a ring. Roun
dey go fastuhnfastuh. Den one by one dey riz up an take wing an fly lak a
bud.’”11 The association with movement within a ring and the ability to fly
suggests the relationship between African ring ceremonies, the ancestral
abode, and relations with the divine.12 That is, ring ceremonies were very
much used to invoke the presence of both ancestors and deities, and served
as media by which human beings entered into a shared experience with
them. It is instructive, therefore, that a ring ceremony would precede the
106
return flight to Africa, as it was very much concerned with entering an
altered dimension.
The account of Shad Hall of Sapelo Island is very revealing. After
mentioning that Africans knew how to make a hoe work by itself, he
turned his attention to the subject of flying:
Doze folks could fly too. Dey tell me deah’s a lot ub um wut wuz
bring heah an dey ain much good. Duh massuh wuz fixin tuh tie
um up tuh whip um. Dey say, ‘Massah, yuh ain gwine lick me,’
and wid dat dey runs down tuh duh ribbuh. Duh obuhseeuh he
sho tought he ketch um wen dey git tuh duh ribbuh. But fo he
could git tuh um, dey riz up in duh eah an fly away. Dey fly right
back tuh Africa. I tink dat happen on Butler Ilun.13
There are several points to be made concerning this account. First, it is a
reference to a signal event, possibly the story of Ebo Landing. Secondly,
the slaves in the account, presumably Igbo, were experiencing suffering
unusual even for a slave (“dey ain much good”), owing to the Middle
Passage, events leading up to their capture in Africa, or those following
their importation to America. Their condition was such that they were
unproductive, and rather than accept punishment, they chose to fly back to
Africa. Interestingly, they first had to go to the river.
While it is possible to read into this story the influence of Moses and
the parting of the Red Sea, there is something more ominous here. When
asked about Ebo Landing, Floyd White of St. Simons stated that he was
very familiar with the account, but that he knew the Igbo had not flown
back to Africa.14 That is, Floyd White knew what the contemporaries of
these flying Africans also knew, that the Igbo had committed collective
suicide by marching into the river and drowning themselves.15 What the
Jamaican planters had reported as their own experience had apparently
also taken place in Georgia: when pushed to the wall, the Igbo were more
likely than others to commit suicide. Beyond this single, very famous incident of group suicide, there is another account of similar phenomena in
North Carolina. While a specific connection to the Igbo is not established
in the story, such is a possibility, given the earlier discussion:
About the beginning of this century when the large Collins
plantation on Lake Phelps, Washington County, was being
cleared a number of negroes just from Africa were put on the
work. One of the features of the improvement was the digging
of a canal. Many of the Africans succumbed under this work.
When they were disabled they would be left by the bank of
107
the canal, and the next morning the returning gang would find
them dead. They were kept at night in cabins on the shore of
the lake. At night they would begin to sing their native songs,
and in a short while would become so wrought up that, utterly
oblivious to the danger involved, they would grasp their bundles
of personal effects, swing them on their shoulders, and setting
their faces towards Africa, would march down into the water
singing as they marched till recalled to their senses only by the
drowning of some of the party. The owners lost a number of
them this way, and finally had to stop the evening singing. This
incident was related to my informant by the gentleman who was
overseer on this plantation where the incident occurred.16
In addition to the foregoing examples, there remain numerous references to individual flights of the African-born, who from time to time cast
down their hoes and simply “disappeahed”. Some of these stories are probably references to absconding, but the fact that the American-born never
similarly vanish suggests that many of these flights were suicides, and that
the Igbo were disproportionately represented in these tragedies. In any
event, a close link between the Igbo and suicide was clearly established
in the minds of many planters; a self-terminating labor force was clearly
undesirable.
To the degree that it existed, how did the African rationalize such
behavior? To begin, the belief was very strong within the African-based
community that at death, one returned to the land of one’s birth. Thus,
flying via suicide was a sure way, perhaps the only way to get back, at
which point one could be reincarnated and live in the land of family and
relations, far away from the experience called America. Concerning the
African-born, the former slave Charles Ball wrote: “They are universally of
the opinion, and this opinion is founded in their religion, that after death
they shall return to their own country, and rejoin their former companions
and friends, in some happy region, in which they will be provided with
plenty of food, and beautiful women, from the lovely daughters of their
own native land.”17 For the Igbo, then, suicide was perhaps the ultimate
form of resistance, as it contained within it the seed for regeneration and
renewal. The story of Ebo Landing is an attempt to convey this message,
that something more profound than simple suicide had taken place. That
the slave community chose to discuss this decision to die in more euphemistic terms is consistent with a metaphysical perspective.
The Igbo may have indeed chosen the option of resistance by way of
self-destruction more than did members of other ethnicities. It may also be
the case that when they made such a choice, it tended to be dramatic. But
108
of course, suicide was only one form of rebellion. Another was absconding.
On this topic, what is striking about accounts of Igbo runaways is the
frequency with which women are mentioned. In stark contrast to the Akan
and others groups, there are relatively numerous accounts of runaway Igbo
women, so much so that Littlefield comments: “It is remarkable that Ibos
as a group and the Bight of Biafra as an area had a greater proportional
representation of women among runaways than were produced by the
native black populace of South Carolina. In this they differed from all
other African entities.”18 Of course, this could be partially explained by the
higher proportion of Igbo women imported into North America. Given
that North America imported higher percentages of women in general
than did other slaveholding societies, the prominence of Igbo women
requires further examination by way of their background, a subject taken
up elsewhere.
With the exception of the first example, which involves a group of
runaways, all of the English notices concerning individual absconding
Igbo women were found in South Carolina newspapers, which may be the
reason why South Carolinians avoided them. Thomas Lamboll of James
Island, for example, reported the escape of a group of slaves in August
1765, among whom was “one negro slave Ebo wench, named Amoretta.”19
In August 1773 John Champneys placed an ad for a woman named
“Banaba, Of a yellowish Complexion, looks like an Eboe Negroe.”20 The
owner further commented that Banaba was a “remarkable fine Seamstress,”
and expressed concern that she may have been taken away by “evil disposed
white Persons.” In July 1784 among those held at the workhouse was “a
Negroe Wench of the Eboe country, cannot speak English…about 20 or
25 years of age, can’t tell her master’s name or her own name.”21 Then there
is the case of nineteen-year-old Tenah of the “Hebo Country” who had
escaped from Gerald Fitzgibbon in July 1782.22
In August 1779 Jacob W. Harvey placed a notice seeking the whereabouts of a young woman “of the Eboe Country…speaks exceeding good
English, her country Marks on her Forehead, which will not appear
unless closely examined.”23 Edmund Bellinger of Ashley-Ferry reported
in August 1768 the disappearance of “Phillis, of the Ebo country, speaks
good English, and a little upon the yellowish order; she is supposed to be
harboured in or about Charles-Town.”24 In September of the following
year, Joshua Beard sought information on twenty-five-year-old Sue of the
“Eboe country,” who bore a “remarkable scar on her head.”25 Finally, Peter
Guerry of St. Stephen’s Parish took out an ad in December of the same
year for “Becky, of the Ebo country, but looks more like a country born, and
speaks tolerable good English.”26
109
While these notices for the most part concern women who ran away as
individuals, it is also the case that Igbo women ran away in groups. There
are, in fact, sixteen notices in the English newspapers consulted in which
an Igbo woman ran away with at least one other person. This produces a
total of twenty-three notices involving Igbo women, for which the ratio
of group-to-individual escapes is about 2:1. Many of the group escapes
involving Igbo women were actually families on the run. In September
1747, for example, Thomas Chisham of St. Helena Island placed a notice
in the South Carolina Gazette featuring “Cudjo a sensible Coromantee
Negro Fellow, about 45 Years old, stutters, and his wife Dinah, an Ebo
wench that speaks very good English.”27 In March 1748 Patrick Brinnon
discovered that Prince, a twenty-six-year-old “Angola Negro Man” had
escaped with an “Ebo Wench, aged about 19 Years, named Lydia.”28 James
Reid of Ponpon, South Carolina complained that one of his slave families
had been missing for twelve months, consisting of “Ben, Guiney born, with
his wife, named Linda, Ebo born, and her child. They are supposed to be
on Edisto, or some of the small islands near it.”29 Then there was the case
of “Andrew of the Angola Country, and his Wife named Affey, a Callabar,”
who had fled owner John Gaillard in February 1770, and had been missing
for over a year.30 Affey, described as a “tall black Wench” (as opposed to
“short” Andrew), had taken “her” infant child with them.
In some instances, women placed their lives in great peril to keep their
families intact, as was true of Phebe of the “Eboe Country,” described as
speaking “tolerably plain, her Teeth filed.” In June 1777 Phebe escaped
from her owner with her husband Sampson, who was wanted for murder in
North Carolina.31 In other cases, whole extended families sought to escape,
apparently the situation on Mary Thomas’s South Carolina plantation in
January 1781, when Old Rose, a “short black Ebo wench,” decided to take
her son Dick, age twenty-two; her daughters Country Sue and Celia, the
latter age thirty-six; her granddaughter Elsey (Celia’s daughter), age six;
and Cato, “an elderly fellow, of yellow complexion, and husband of the
above Celia, but perhaps changed,” and leave for good. They were accompanied by several others, including the Angolan Kate, “with her country
marks about her face” and Town Sue (as opposed to Country Sue).32
Unlike examples involving Senegambians, this inquiry did not uncover
instances in which women formed exclusive groups and ran away. Rather,
when traveling with others, there was at least one male involved, usually
someone relatively familiar. It can also be stated that in several of the above
examples, specific ethnicities are associated with Igbo women, especially
those allegedly from Angola. An analysis of Igbo men reveals similar associations. Such interactions are important and will be discussed later.
110
The Igbo presence in Louisiana can also be noted from runaway advertisements. Midlo Hall has determined that those from the Bight of Biafra
accounted for 8.6 percent of the slave population between 1720–1820,
a sizeable representation that is reflected in the Louisiana newspapers.33
For example, “un nègre nouveau, nation Ibo” was advertised as a captured
runaway in December 1807; the same person may have been the subject
of a January 1808 notice.34 In October 1806 an unnamed “Négresse” was
advertised for sale in New Orleans, of the “nation Ibo, parlant français et
anglais.”35 Jupiter and Babb, each in their thirties and of the “Macua” and
Igbo nations respectively, were held in the New Orleans workhouse in
January 1809 and were said to both speak “bien français.”36 In contrast,
Susanne, an Igbo also held in the workhouse, may not have been able to
speak French, for she “did not want to say her master’s name.”37 Of these
four Igbo individuals, three were women.
Regarding the Igbo as a whole, there are a total of ninety-six advertisements in both English and French newspapers in which Igbo persons
are clearly identified. Seventy involve men only, with thirty-seven running
away in groups and thirty-four absconding as individuals, a rough equivalence. When European languages are mentioned, thirteen out of thirtythree men, or 39.4 percent, spoke one or more of these languages “tolerably”
or better. This is compared with seven out of ten Igbo women who were
able to do the same. These figures are clearly very crude, but they suggest
that women, at least among the Igbo, were more prone to abscond after
acquiring some proficiency in the dominant language, perhaps viewing it
as a tool necessary to the success of the venture.
Slaveholders could be very attentive to details when it came to describing runaway Igbo men. In June 1735 Peter Roberts of Santee, South
Carolina depicted Primus, an “Ebo Negro Man,” as having a “very yellow
complexion with Scars on each side of his Stomach down his Belly, he is
a little Fellow.”38 George Smith, Jr., of St. Thomas Parish, posted an ad in
July 1778 for the return of “Frank, of the Eboe country…has his country
marks down his wrists, arms and shoulders, his teeth filed sharp…”39 Then
there is the case of Dick, who fled B. Casey of Charleston in July 1804.
He was believed to be “of the Eboe nation, and had his country marks at
the corner of his right and left eyes and another mark just below the pit
of his stomach or thereabouts; he can write a tolerable good hand and
read.… Dick is not a cole (sic) black, but rather of the copper colour.”40
There is also the example of Charlestonian David Saylor, who in July 1785
placed the following ad in the South Carolina Weekly Gazette: “Run away,
and is supposed to be either lurking about town, or between that and the
Quarter-House, a negro man of the Callabar country.”41 The man was
111
about twenty-two years old, “yellowish”, with filed teeth, having “his face
marked with small strokes under each temple, also two scars crossways on
the body, one under each breast.”
Runaway slave advertisements provide little evidence to suggest
any significant correlation between the Igbo and skilled labor in North
America. Other than the aforementioned Banaba, there is only one other
reference to someone who was possibly Igbo and trained in a vocational
capacity. Quamina was characterized in October 1753 as an “Ebo fellow,
by trade a cooper, speaks little or no English, very well known in CharlesTown, where he is supposed to be harboured.”42 Although references to
skilled Igbo persons in the runaway slave ads are few, this should not be
taken to indicate that Igbo were underrepresented in such occupations.
The Igbo were certainly in the ranks of skilled workers in Virginia and
Maryland, but ethnicity was not emphasized in the region; unlike in South
Carolina and Georgia, where Igbo were ill received and numerically few
and hence were not given such jobs.
What emerges from the foregoing discussion of the Igbo is a group of
people who were stigmatized in South Carolina and Georgia, where they
responded to their victimization in very emphatic, decisive and irreversible
ways, and where such victimization probably explains their prominence in
suicide accounts despite their small numbers. In Virginia and Maryland,
on the other hand, there is a relative absence of comparable traditions concerning Igbo behavior and response. Without question, the Igbo, along
with others, resisted their subjugation. However, non-Igbo methods of
resistance did not include, at least not with the same frequency, sensational
acts of self-destruction.
The apparent phenomenon of “Igbo suicide” must be examined within
the context of Igbo history and culture. Elsewhere, I have speculated that
such behavior may have been a result of the intensity of slave trading in the
Bight of Biafra. I have pondered a cultural interpretation that emphasizes
ikenga, the philosophy of individual achievement resulting from negotiations with the divine.43 I suggest that American enslavement represented
the antithesis of what was expected in life as envisioned in Igboland, and
that what was considered unthinkable—suicide—seems to have become
the appropriate antidote to the nightmare of North America. The attribution of “melancholy” to the Igbo may also have arisen in this manner, and
thereby influencing the development of the blues tradition in American
music, whatever other influences also affected that tradition. Perhaps it was
only through suicide that the Igbo idea of “wholeness” could be achieved
under the terrible conditions of slavery. 112
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
An earlier version of this chapter was originally published in Paul E. Lovejoy
and David V. Trotman, eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of the Ethnicity in
the African Diaspora (London: Continuum, 2003), 82-95, and is reprinted
here as revised with the permission of the editors. The present chapter has
been revised to take account of the on-line Slave Voyage Database (www.
slavevoyages.org).
See the following sources: Joseph E. Inikori, “The Known, the Unknown, the
Knowable, and the Unknowable: Evidence and the Evaluation of Evidence
in the Measurement of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” paper presented at
the Conference on Transatlantic Slaving and the African Diaspora, Williamsburg, Virginia, September 1998; David Eltis and David Richardson,
eds., Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Making of the
Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Michael A. Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the
Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998). Probably the most ambitious project concerning the trade is
the W. E. B. DuBois Institute Database of transatlantic slaver voyages, an
aggregate of earlier and additional data sets that attempts to account for
over 27,000 voyages between 1595 and 1867; see David Eltis, Stephen D.
Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Atlantic Slave
Trade: A Database on CD-Rom (Cambridge: University Press, 1999), now
updated as David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen Behrendt and Monolo
Florentino, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org).
Jamaica was certainly the leading single destination for those from Gold
Coast, claiming some 37 percent of all such emigrants, but Gold Coast was
more clearly the leading supplier of captives for Barbados, the Guyanas, and
Surinam. Over 67 percent of all Gold Coast departures landed in anglophone America, with 15 percent destined for Spanish-controlled lands. Gold
Coast supplied nearly 12 percent of the overall trade. Of course, movement
from regions of Africa to American colonies was not consistent and uninterrupted; persons from one region may have been the dominant emigrants
during one phase or century of the trade but not during another. These patterns will have to be carefully investigated, as they directly impinge upon the
nature of cultural and social production in a given locale.
See Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 114–133; Elizabeth Donnan,
“The Slave Trade into South Carolina before the Revolution,” American
Historical Review 33 (1927–1928): 816–817; Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic
Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969): 156–157; Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice
and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981): 8–10.
Darold D. Wax, “Preferences for Slaves in Colonial America,” Journal of
Negro History 58 (1973): 391–394; James Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave
113
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
Trade: A History (New York: Norton, 1981): 334–335; Michael Mullin,
Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South
and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1992): 24; and Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White
Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1987): 5.
Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade
to America (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington D.C.,
1930), vol.2: 15; Philip D. Curtin, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1955):
24; Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper,
1941): 36–37; Mullin, Africa in America, 13–14, 24; Littlefield, Rice and
Slaves, 31–32; and Gonzalo Aguirré Beltrán, La Poblacíon Negra de México:
Estudio Ethnohistórico (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 1972):
186–187.
Mullin, Africa in America, 23–24; Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 11–14; U. B.
Phillips, American Negro Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1969): 43.
Georgia Writers’ Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the
Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1940): 6,
15, 16.
Ibid., 18, 25, 31, 48. For additional references to flying Africans, see 53–54,
74–76, 100, 136–37, 149, 169.
Ibid., 143.
Ibid., 146.
See Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
Black America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Ibid., 160.
Ibid., 175.
In his work on black New Englanders, Black Yankees: The Development of
an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth Century New England (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), William D. Piersen concurs that
suicide by drowning was viewed as a “supernatural method for returning to
Africa” (75).
John S. Bassett, Slavery in the State of North Carolina (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1899): 92–93.
Charles Ball and Fisher of Lewiston, Pennsylvania, Slavery in the United
States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man,
Who Lived Forth Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave
(New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1854]): 219.
Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 143–144.
114
19. Lathan Windley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary
History from the 1730s to 1790 (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood
Press, 1983), vol.3: 254–255.
20. Ibid., vol.3: 328.
21. South-Carolina Gazette and General Advertiser, 20–22 July 1784.
22. Ibid., vol.3: 710.
23. Ibid., vol.3: 372.
24. Ibid., vol.3: 637.
25. Ibid., vol.3: 649.
26. Ibid., vol.3: 651.
27. Ibid., vol.3: 79.
28. Ibid., vol.3: 81.
29. Ibid., vol.3: 185.
30. South Carolina Gazette, 21 March 1771.
31. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol.3: 348–349.
32. Royal Georgia Gazette, 4 January 1781.
33. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas:
Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
34. Moniteur de la Louisiane, 2 December 1807 and 6 January 1808.
35. Ibid., 25 October 1806.
36. Ibid., 14 January 1809.
37. Ibid., 9 April 1808.
38. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol.3: 16.
39. Ibid., vol.3: 538.
40. Carolina Gazette, 13 July 1804.
41. See Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks. The literature includes A. E.
Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture (Ibadan: University Press in association with Oxford University Press, 1981); Afigbo, The
Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929 (New York:
Humanities Press, 1972); Afigbo, “Prolegomena to the Study of the Culture
History of the Igbo-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria,” in West African Culture
Dynamics: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, edited by B. K. Swartz
Jr. and Raymond E. Dumett (The Hague and New York: Mouton, 1980);
Thurstan Shaw, Igbo-Ukwu, 2 vols. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1970); John Nwachimereze Oriji, Traditions of Igbo Origin: A Study of
Pre-Colonial Population Movements in Africa (New York: Peter Lang Publishers, Inc., 1994); Victor Uchendu, The Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965); Ambrose M. Chukwudum, The
Ancient City of Azia: A Typical Ibo Community of Old (Ogba, Ikeja, Nigeria:
John West Publications, 1986); Igwebuike Romeo Okeke, The “Osu” Concept
in Igboland (Enugu: Access Publishers, 1986); John E. Eberegbulam Njoku,
The Igbos of Nigeria: Ancient Rites, Changes, and Survival (Lewiston, NY: E.
115
Mellen Press,1990); C. L. Ejizu, Ofo, Igbo Ritual Symbol (Enugu: Fourth
Dimension Press, 1986); Herbert Cole, Mbari: Art and Life among the Owerri
Igbo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Richard Henderson,
King in Every Man: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha Ibo Society and Culture
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972); John Boston, Ikenga Figures
among the North-West Igbo and Igala (London and Lagos: Ethnograhica in
association with the Federal Department of Antiquities, Nigeria, 1977);
Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); E. J. Alagoa, “The Slave
Trade in Niger Delta Oral Tradition and History,” in Africans in Bondage:
Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade, edited by Paul E. Lovejoy (Madison:
African Studies Program, 1986): 127–136; S. J. S. Cookey, “An Ethnohistorical Reconstruction of Traditional Igbo Society,” in West African Culture
Dynamics, edited by Swartz and Dumett, 327–348; A. J. H. Latham, Old
Calabar, 1600–1891 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); Philip Adigwe
Oguagha and Ikechukwu Okpoko, History and Ethnoarchaeology in Eastern
Nigeria: A Study of Igbo‑Igala Relations with Special Reference to the Anambra
Valley (Oxford: B.A.R., 1984); C. K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian
Tribe: A Study in Indirect Rule (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1937); Simon Ottenberg, Masked Rituals of Afikpo: The Context
of African Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press for the Henry Art
Gallery, 1975); and Ikenna Nzimiro, Studies in Ibo Political Systems (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972).
42. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, vol.3: 124. However, since the
name “Quamina” is Fante, it is very possible that the individual has been
misidentified as Igbo.
43. See Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks. For other works on this subject,
see those listed in fn.41.
116
•8•
Buried Treasure:
Searching with Francisco
Castañeda, Negro Esclavo
Caravali in Nueva Granada
Renée Soulodre-La France
T
he institution of African slavery in the Viceroyalty of New Granada
was as old as the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the area, but
slave importations increased during the eighteenth century as gold mining
in particular regions like the Chocó boomed. This is the story of an individual slave who used every ounce of his considerable capacity to obtain his
freedom. The document upon which this example of slave strategy, ethnicity, and identity is based is drawn from a court case that made its way to
the highest court of appeal in the Audiencia of Santa Fe, the Viceroyalty
of New Granada. The most intriguing issue raised by the document is the
meaning of the term “Caravali”, as it was used by this individual during
the second part of the eighteenth century. Why was this term important
to him? Was it an inherent part of his sense of identity or did he have
other motivations for including it? Another subject raised in this case is
the relevance of the Catholic Saint Anthony and the role that Antonine
devotion played in the lives of slaves in New Granada. To address these
questions we will place the document within its archival context and the
slave’s story within the larger parameters of slavery in Colombia during
this period, and then explore the issues of ethnicity and identity found
within these parameters.
In 1770 the self-identified, black Caravali slave, Francisco Castañeda,
presented his case to the Procurador de Pobres, or public defender of the
poor, in the highest court of the Viceroyalty of New Granada:
I, Francisco Castañeda, black Caravali slave, who belonged to
Felipe Delgado, throw myself at Your Excellency’s feet, with
all the humility that your desires and my state oblige, asking
and supplicating that you, excellent Lord, forgive the defects
of these rough expressions which take such liberties, and listen
with prudent charity and full understanding. The coarse nature
of my relation is due to my lack of understanding and inability
to explain my situation with precise expressions; but my humility yields to allow me to inform Your Excellency of my unhappiness so that I can tell you my sad tale and gain the protection
owed me in justice.1
With these words begins the story of a slave, transported from either
Bonny or Old Calabar in the latter half the eighteenth century, brought
to Cartagena de Indias and sold probably in 1764–1765 in the river port
town of Honda. Honda was the most important port on the Magdalena
River in the Viceroyalty of New Granada (now Colombia). Francisco
Castañeda’s complaint made its way into the highest court of appeal in the
viceroyalty, the Real Audiencia, and it is in the documents from that court,
now housed in the National Archives in Santa Fe de Bogotá, under the
division of Negros y Esclavos of Tolima, Tomo II, fls. 338–346, in the colonial section of the archive, that I encountered this fascinating account. The
documents that make up the collection of Negros y Esclavos are bound in
sixty-three volumes of about 1000 folios each. They are arranged according
to region; for example, Negros y Esclavos of Tolima, Valle del Cauca, and
Magdalena. There is no particular order to the way in which the volumes
are bound and the cases are not bound in chronological order. One might
find a case from 1790 and the next folio might be from the early seventeenth century. Thus it is sometimes difficult to follow the cases even
though these volumes have been well indexed. The cases in this collection
range from civil to criminal suits.
The only theme that unifies the cases is that they deal specifically
with slaves, though in some instances slaves are treated purely as disputed
property. In some cases criminal charges were brought against owners for
the murder of slaves. Others involve suits initiated by slaves against their
masters, either charging them with mistreatment, or suing them for their
118
Buried Treasure
liberty. There are few documentary sources through which we can hear the
voices of the enslaved in colonial Colombia, so this collection is particularly useful. These, along with Inquisition records, which often deal with
the enslaved, provide a rich source of information that aids historians in
their search for information about the identities of these individuals and
groups. Other documentary sources for tracing the enslaved are notarial
records of commercial transactions, wills, or testaments, and ecclesiastical
records of births, baptisms, marriages, and other life events. These records,
however, are more piecemeal, revealing less about specific individuals than
do court cases.
Francisco’s narrative provides us with a wealth of analytical possibilities concerning the reality of the enslaved in colonial Spanish America.
One of the critical themes that can be drawn out of the case is the issue
of ethnic identity that Francisco incorporates into his individual identity.
The focus on ethnicity raises the question of the provenance of slaves in
the New World and naturally leads us into a discussion of the slave trade
and the numbers of slaves brought to particular areas in the Americas from
specific ports in Africa
The setting of this drama was the relatively quiet area of the Spanish
colonies that constituted the Viceroyalty of New Granada in the mideighteenth century. The section of the viceroyalty that comprises the
present-day country of Colombia was the central portion of the colonial
viceroyalty. Slave populations in this area depended on the geographic,
demographic, and economic factors that characterized each region. Thus
by the eighteenth century enslaved and free black populations were concentrated on the coasts and in the gold-mining fields of the Chocó or
the sugar-growing flatlands along the Cauca River valley and along the
banks of the Magdalena River. In the highland plateaus the population
was more heavily indigenous and Spanish. The region where Francisco
lived was the Province of Mariquita, which had been the most important
silver-producing area of the viceroyalty, but whose silver mines were now
in decay. The slave population of the Mariquita Province was not large.
The 1778 census records 4,102 slaves in the province out of a total population of 47,369, slightly more than 8 percent of the population.2 In this
region slaves were assigned a variety of tasks, but the majority of them were
involved in agricultural production and cattle ranching. They also worked
in the silver mines, in domestic service, and in urban areas they were often
hired out or sent out to earn a daily wage as best they could. Thus many
were petty traders or sold foodstuffs on the streets of the regional towns.
While Francisco’s occupation is not disclosed in the documentation, he did
state that his owner had an “estancia de cacagual y platanar.” Thus we can
119
theorize that he was probably an agricultural worker on his owner’s small
property that was devoted to cacao and banana cultivation.
In 1770 Francisco Castañeda dictated a complaint in which he charged
his master, Felipe Delgado, with illegally depriving him of the liberty that
he had justly and fairly earned. He told of being sold to Delgado, who was
also a black man, and of being taken to his new owner’s house. He related
how they had met a Caravali woman along the way, who told them a story
about a treasure reputedly buried nearby. Having searched for the treasure
unsuccessfully, Delgado charged his slave Francisco with the task of finding
it, promising him his freedom if he was successful. Francisco proceeded to
have a mass sung to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of children, but also
famous for his ability to help the faithful find lost articles. Once the saint’s
intervention had been sought, it was only a short time before Francisco
had located the treasure, given it over to his master, requesting his promised freedom. When Delgado denied him his freedom and tried to sell
him, Francisco began the legal process against his master who died during
this period. Undaunted, Francisco continued suing for his freedom against
his new owner, claiming that he should have been freed by Delgado.
The language that Francisco uses in this document is provocative, but
it is also problematic.3 First of all, the driving energy of the entire case is
his unrelenting quest for his carta de libertad (letter of liberty). He mentions the liberty that had been promised him at least nine times in the
narrative and his reiteration of the term has a powerful rhetorical force.
Francisco was conscious of the importance of language and how it was
used. In the initial statement he referred to his inability to manipulate the
language and begged that the reader “forgive the defects of these rough
expressions.” Though disclaiming his rudeness and lack of understanding,
Francisco subsequently filled his narrative with references to Christianity.
He appears to have recognized the importance of legitimizing his story
by setting it within a Christian context and presenting the court with an
irrefutable Christian logic. By referring to how he put the problem of the
lost treasure in the care of Saint Anthony, it was completely within the
realm of the possible that his prayers had been answered and he had found
the buried treasure. Francisco’s use of language and Christian imagery is
blended in the story with his identification as a Caravali slave and his
dependence upon a Caravali kinswoman to move the story along. This juxtaposition is particularly poignant since it provides a space within which
the opposing identities of European/African and slave/master could meet
and transcend the contradictions that separated them. Thus in the person
of Francisco could be found common elements that bridged the gulf that
divided slaves from the rest of colonial society.
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Buried Treasure
As we search for the way that slaves in Colombia constituted their sense
of identity, the ethnic identifiers that occur in the documents provide valuable clues. Francisco’s use of the term Caravali does not appear to have been
a casual reference. We know that as early as the sixteenth century shipments
of slaves included those coming from Calabar.4 There are also references to
Caravalis in New Granada in seventeenth-century slave inventories and
inquisition records, but they became more common in eighteenth-century
New Granada. Their importation reached its peak during the period 1730–
1748.5 Typically when the term Caravali occurs in the Spanish-America
documents from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it does so as
a slave’s last name; however in this case Francisco’s name is completely
Hispanicized. Like many other ethnic terms used in the Americas, it is
difficult to determine exactly what this ethnic identifier meant and why
Francisco used it, not once, but twice, in the document when he stated that
the woman who told them about the treasure was also a Caravali. Considering his obvious familiarity with the Spanish colonial world and his ability to
maneuver through the morass of conflicting jurisdictions, it is noteworthy
that he continued to identify himself with this term.
In one of our earliest seventeenth-century sources, Alonso de Sandoval’s treatise on slaves, the author indicates that the term Caravali could
refer to several different ethnic groups. This is an important issue that
carries powerful theoretical ramifications since the ethnic labels attributed
to slaves, or adopted by them, figured so largely in the sense of identity they
maintained or created for themselves. These labels also came with different
a priori connotations and could have a powerful impact on the nature of
cultural transferals or transformations in the diaspora. From the perspective of the slave-owners there were very practical consequences attached to
the ethnic labels by which slaves were identified, since some ethnic groups
were more highly desired than others in specific areas of the New World.
An important source upon which historians of slavery in Spanish
America have depended for discussions of African ethnicity is the Jesuit
priest Alonso de Sandoval’s De Instauranda Aetheopium Salute: El Mundo
de la Esclavitud Negra en América, written between 1616 and 1623 and first
published in 1627 with the title Natvraleza, Policia Sagrada i Profana, Costvmbres i Ritos, Disciplina i Catechismo Evangelico de Todos Etiopes.6 When
referring to Caravalis, Sandoval is rather ambivalent. As he explains, one
of the problems with discussing the Caravalis is that there were several
ethnic groups referred to as Caravalies, including the Igbo, Moco, and Bila.
although it is difficult to know whether or not this was still the case by the
mid-eighteenth century. 7
121
Another relevant source is Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp’s
History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands
of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John, which is based on a series of interviews with slaves in the West Indies, collected in the eighteenth century.
These indicate that Sandoval’s assessment might not have been accurate.
Oldendorp states that “The Karabari, or Kalabari, are said to live along the
River Kalabar. It may also be that these people were sold for the most part
along this river and have received their name from that fact.” Although
he did not make a distinction between the different types of Caravalis,
he introduces the notion that slaves in the diaspora may have been called
Caravali simply because they had been bought along the Calabar River.8
Oldendorp’s informants then told him that “the Ibo, a numerous people,
are their neighbors and friends: they speak a common language.” Again
this contradicts Sandoval’s statement that the Caravalis Puros could not
understand the Caravalis Particulares under which he lists the Igbo. The
close relationship between the Caravalis and the Igbo is strengthened in
Oldendorp’s description of the “country marks” adopted by the two groups:
“The national marks of the Karabari and Ibo consist of horizontal incision
on the forehead.” While there were some distinguishing characteristics
between the two groups, the similarities were striking enough for him to
categorize them together.9
References to Caravalis occur in various documents from New Granada
during different periods, although their importation became much more
important in the eighteenth century with the shifting patterns of the slave
trade and vagaries of developments both in Africa and in New Granada.
During the eighteenth century the slave trade to the Spanish Americas
was dominated by the asientos (monopolies) granted to the French (1701–
1711) and the English (1713–1748) as well as the various licenses granted
to individual traders until the advent of free trade in the 1780s.10 There
are many references to Caravalis in New Granada during the seventeenth
century, but these are usually included in lists of the various ethnic groups
represented in specific slave gangs. For example, a 1635 Tocaima hacienda
list of slaves included eight Angolas, two Carabalis, two Mitemas (Bantus),
and one without an ethnic designation.11 The most fruitful documents for
tracing ethnic categories in New Granada are often mining records, since
that was the most common slave activity. In a census from the mining
district of Barbacoas in southwest Colombia dating from 1717, out of 566
slaves listed, only thirty-five were designated with ethnic labels, and only
one, Francisco, a sixty-year-old man was called a Caravali.12
In Spanish America slave ethnicity was often transformed into the
slave’s last name. For example, during the eighteenth century in the mining
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Buried Treasure
district of Novita in the Chocó there were fifty-six different African surnames, “most of which appear to be tribal names of slaving stations. Among
the most common names are Mina, Biáfara, Carabalí, Cetre, Lucumí, Arará,
Congo, and Mandinga.”13 Also, in 1628 Anton Carabalí, a fifty-year-old
black man in Cartagena, was accused before the inquisition of sorcery, and
so a translator, the slave Tomé Carabalí, who belonged to the Jesuit college,
was called in to interpret, but Anton spoke so “obscurely” that a second
translator had to be brought in. They finally asked Father Pedro Claver
to come and take Anton’s confession because “he knew how to go about
getting people to tell the truth.”14 We know from these records and from
Sandoval’s treatise that there were certainly Caravalís in New Granada
during the seventeenth century, but their numbers substantially increased
during the eighteenth century as the English traders came to dominate
the transatlantic shipment of Africans. Having examined a wide variety
of sources, Jaime Jaramillo Uribe concluded that those ethnic groups most
frequently present in the documents were: “Mina, Arará, Caravalí, Mandinga, Biáfara, Lucumí, Chala, Chamba, Bran, Popó, Cetre, Angola…”15
Furthermore, he argues that ethnic groupings were important among the
slaves who traditionally organized themselves into cabildos (ethnic groups)
during the carnival in Cartagena. There were cabildos named Caravalí as
well as various other names such as Mandingo and Congo, and in a slave
village near Cartagena there was a dance group named Caravalí.16 This was
also true in Brazil, Venezuela, and Peru where religious brotherhoods of
slaves tended to be organized along African ethnic lines.17
Even though ethnic designations like Caravali may have referred
more accurately to the port of provenance of the Africans, as suggested
by Colombian historian Germán Colmenares, they were important to the
slave traders and Spanish buyers alike since there were different stereotypical characteristics associated with each one.18 Slaves who came from São
Tomé, for example, brought a higher price than those from Angola or the
Congos because it was thought that they worked harder, resisted disease,
were not so weak, and less likely to run away. Notions about African ethnic
characteristics and proclivities were so prevalent that they figured in the
laws issued by the Crown to regulate the slave trade. In 1736 a Real Cedula
allowed the importation of Mina slaves although these had formerly been
banned because of their “natural arrogance, occasioned uprisings and desperation” and because they were “extremely barbarous and did not easily
enter our sacred religion.”19 Preferences for particular ethnic groups persisted for the duration of the slave trade; ethnic prejudices were still evident
as late as the 1770s. For example, in 1777 miners in the Chocó appealed
for “two hundred Negro men and a hundred Negro women every two
123
years, around twenty years of age, to be procured by health and disposition
with the absolute exclusion of Congos and Caravalis.”20 Another example
concerning Caravalies comes from an account that Sandoval took from an
informant who had lived in Africa for several years, who stated that when
young Caravali men had reached maturity, but had not yet paired up with a
woman, they “were given to bestiality.”21 In another source, drawn from the
records of the English South Sea Company, which held the asiento of the
slave trade into Spanish America in 1713–1748, the company stated that
Caravalis were sickly and to nobody’s liking, so it was not worth sending
ships to those ports.22 Notwithstanding these preferences, the supply of
slaves from particular areas was often determined by practical political and
economic matters rather than ideological reasons.
In a more ambiguous assessment, historian Lydia Cabrera cites an
English visitor to Cuba who claimed that the Caravalis there were “very
industrious and avaricious; also choleric and hasty in temper. Most of the
free negroes in the island who are rich belong to this tribe…”23 There were
contradictory opinions about the Caravalis. They were often identified with
the Igbo, who were “considered tractable and hence were highly sought
after by some of the slaveholders in the Americas.”24 John Thornton, in
his seminal work on Africa and the Africans, also depends on Sandoval’s
description and distinction between the pure and particular Caravalis. He
adds that some ethnic groups listed by Sandoval are “recognizably of the
Igbo linguistic group.”25 Citing evidence from French Guiana at the end of
the seventeenth century, Thornton describes a labor force of twenty-eight
slaves on an estate for which comprehensive records are extant. On the
Remie Estate ethnic identity factored largely in Kalabari interaction: “six
Kalabari slaves …formed a tight group [and] went around together and
intermarried.”26
Just as slave-owners recognized the importance of slave ethnicity, historians have also noted that ethnicity could, and did, inform basic choices
throughout the diaspora.27 For example, John Thornton states that “it was
those from Lower Guinea (Yorubas and Kalibaris) who were most prone”
to marriage within the same ethnic group.28 He argues that it is plausible
that the two married Kalabaris in Cayenne might well have been married
before they left Africa, and that they were able to maintain their relationship through their capture, sale, the Middle Passage, and their arrival in
America.29 This suggestion raises the possibility that Francisco Castañeda
might have already known the Caravali woman, who told him about the
treasure, for a long time, even perhaps in Africa. The way the document
reads, time is very compressed and we get the impression that the sequence
of events occurred very rapidly. Thus Francisco describes being sold, going
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Buried Treasure
to his master’s home, returning to Honda, and meeting this woman on
the way, but we have no way of knowing how long this process took, nor
what his relationship to the woman really was. We do know that by 1770
he had labored over four years for Suarez, which sets his sale to Delgado at
least before 1766. The fact that several years had passed since these events
had taken place, and that he had already made his complaint several times,
indicates that he might have honed the story to its final version deleting
incidental details.
We can trace the likelihood of Francisco’s ethnicity by piecing together
information relating to the slave trade and the probability of his port of
embarkation, but there always remains a degree of uncertainty about what
the term Caravali really meant, and especially what it meant to him.30
Recent quantitative research focusing on the slave trade indicates that
“the distribution of peoples from West Africa was far from random.”31
Eltis, Richardson, and Lovejoy base their analysis of the slave trade on
the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,32 which opens tantalizing avenues
into the patterns of that trade. For example, the two ports of Bonny and
Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra concentrated almost ninety percent
of all the departures from that area.33 Furthermore, between 1737 and
1761, 3,420 slaves left Old Calabar in ninety-eight ships, and between
1762 and 1786, 7,720 slaves left Calabar in 218 ships.34 Though there are
many blanks in Francisco’s life, including his age, these two periods probably account for when he was shipped from the Bight of Biafra, so it is
highly likely that he left through Bonny or Old Calabar. This quantitative
research suggests that between the 1740s and 1807 “almost 900,000 slaves
left the Bight of Biafra very largely through Old Calabar and Bonny,”
and that this trade was “almost entirely in the hands of British merchants
before 1807.”35 While inconclusive, figures such as these do allow us to
make informed suggestions about the provenance of slaves who ended up
in New Granada. Another important factor in this “numbers game” is that
the Bight of Biafra shipped many more women than other areas, so that
during the eighteenth century in both Bonny and Calabar close to forty
percent of slaves shipped were women.36 Thus it is very possible that the
Caravali woman Francisco mentions could have been shipped out through
the same port and that he might even have known her in Africa.
Notwithstanding the rationale of the varying patterns in the trade, the
reality of slave existence in the far-reaches of the Spanish Empire often
belie the suggestion that slaves of the same ethnic group could be highly
concentrated in specific parts of the Americas. At the very least, we can
theorize that when slaves of a particular ethnic group found themselves
together in any numbers, they might tend to associate more closely with
125
each other than with those of a different origin. Furthermore, judging
from this document, slave ethnicity continued to be a preoccupation for
the slaves. Four blacks are involved in this story. The three who are slaves—
Francisco, the Caravali woman, and another slave who figures later in the
story, Antonio Mina—are all qualified with an ethnic referent. The other
black, Phelipe Delgado, the owner of Francisco, was probably free, but
Francisco thought it important to mention that he also was black though
it is unknown whether he was born in Africa or America. This raises the
possibility that Francisco believed that his case might be more successfully
argued if the Spanish officials did not identify too closely with his master.
Though the institution of slavery in the Americas very rapidly became
racialized, in eighteenth-century New Granada it appears to have been
organized more loosely, and to some extent, in Francisco’s mind at least, in
terms of ethnicity.37
So it is obvious that Francisco’s African ethnicity, or the label Caravali,
was so important to him that it did not get dropped as an irrelevant detail
might have been, given the reality that he had to tell his story many times
through the years. The ambiguity of the term, especially the way it is presented in this document, is perplexing. First of all, the fact that Francisco
Castañeda has Christian Hispanic first and last names is relatively unusual
in combination with the African designation of Caravali. Typically, a slave
who had been baptized and Hispanicized, one who was considered a ladino,
would have Christian names and would not have been identified with the
African qualifier. Furthermore, even after the initial confusion over the
term Caravali itself, an issue that we cannot really resolve since it means
Francisco might have come from a limited number of ethnic groups that
were shipped out of Elem Kalabari, Bonny, or Old Calabar, there is the
question of how he thought of himself. In the document he projected the
image of a good Christian, without sacrificing his strong sense of African
identity. Was this a strategy that he used to bridge the gap between Africa
and America, or did he reconstitute his identity within the bounds of his
experiences in the Spanish colonies?
He was knowledgeable enough about Christianity to know that one
should pray to Saint Anthony of Padua when searching for lost things. He
constantly referred to the justice that God and his Sainted Mother should
grant him, and he knew that one should have masses of thanksgiving sung.
We might assume that Francisco had picked up on Christian iconography
after being brought to America, and further that he had been in the Americas long enough to become completely immersed in Christianity. Still, it
is impossible to determine how long he had been enslaved, although the
course of his case took several years, and he had another owner before
126
Buried Treasure
being bought by Delgado, so he might well have been in New Granada a
very long time. While he seemed to have known much about the church
and indeed the Spanish legal system; enough to manipulate his pleas for
redress very ably through the quagmire of Spanish-American jurisdictions,
he still seemed naively innocent about other aspects of life in the colonies.
For example, when he described the value of the treasure he had found,
he assumed that it must have been worth about five pesos, because it was
so heavy; however, five pesos was a miniscule amount for such a treasure.
Indeed a slave sent out to earn the “jornal” (daily wage) was expected to
return with one peso. So there appears to have been some remarkable
lapses or gaps in Francisco’s knowledge of the Hispanic American world.
We get one possible answer to the slave’s apparent familiarity with
Christianity from an interesting story related by John Thornton about the
informal effect that Christianity could have upon Africans, even if they
had not been formally converted. Possibly Francisco had already been
exposed to Christianity before ever leaving Africa. Thornton writes about
a Spanish priest who spent over a year in New Calabar (Elem Kalabari) in
the mid-seventeenth century who “was surprised to see a large watercraft
carrying the image of Saint Anthony on its prow, and a lesser statue on
another craft.” The people who had these statues appeared to pay them
some religious respect, and there is evidence that the Portuguese had
been attempting to Christianize the population of New Calabar during
the seventeenth century.38 The coincidence of Francisco’s appeal to Saint
Anthony and the possibility that the people from New Calabar had a long
experience of Saint Anthony is an intriguing one, and we might theorize
that Francisco was already familiar with the powers associated with this
particular saint before ever leaving Africa. If this is the case, then Francisco
might very well have come from New Calabar, which would explain why
he called himself Kalabari in the document.39
Much of the quantitative slave trade evidence from the eighteenth
century, however, suggests that he more likely came out of Old Calabar and
was probably Igbo. Or again, he may have been called Caravali by the slave
traders and perhaps he thought that this was a necessary identifier so that
the Spanish legal system would function for him.40 There is another possibility though, for his story of finding the buried treasure rings strangely
to our modern ears. He may have sought to reinforce its plausibility by
including the term Caravali. Why should the woman he mentioned in the
story have told him about the buried treasure? He may have tried to make
the bit about the Caravali woman sound more probable by expressing their
relationship in terms of ethnic proximity to make his story ring true. It is
doubtful that first generation African slaves would have forgotten their
127
identities, memory, beliefs, and customs from before their enslavement and
transportation. All this cultural and philosophical baggage helped them to
adjust to the situations into which they fell in the Americas.41
There could then be some very practical ethnic slippage caused by the
circumstances of slavery, but also by the expediency of allowing identity
to be reconstituted, transformed, or shifted in specific situations.42 Was
Francisco willing to use his ethnicity as a “mirage” to achieve his goal? Just
as the concept of “‘ethnicity’ should be seen, not as a constant, but as fluid
and subject to constant redefinition…” so is the whole notion of identity
subject to the same type of fluidity.43 The driving force of Francisco’s narrative was his quest for freedom. His demand for his liberty is a unifying
and repetitive theme that shapes his case. Could it be that Francisco was
willing to use any ploy whatsoever in order to win that freedom, and that
he readily adopted the language of different identities so as to achieve that
goal? Francisco Castañeda described himself as a black slave, but he very
carefully distinguished himself from his black owner using an ethnic qualifier. He strengthened his story by including both African and Christian
elements. It is evident in the document that his name was Christian and
European, so he did not retain any African individual identity associated
with that most personal of identifiers: an individual name. If his name
could be changed, why did he insist so much on his ethnicity? Could that
also have been changed or is that where he drew the line in the sand?44 I
have argued elsewhere that identity was subject to shifts as the situations
in which slaves found themselves changed, and indeed it seems that Francisco was willing to blend various elements of his identity when he thought
that such combinations would be more likely to win him his liberty. It is
possible that he used the Caravali label specifically to strengthen his story,
incorporating the help of the Caravali woman in a more natural way.
Francisco’s character comes through the document in rather ambiguous ways. He makes some statements that undermine his knowledge of the
Hispanic world, and yet he projects an image of remarkable craftiness and
innovation. Somehow Francisco had managed to come up with an elaborate scheme to win his freedom. At first it seemed as though he was finally
going to win the day, and that there was a very real possibility that the
justices would find in his favor. Many delays in the case occurred because
of the jurisdictional problems so typical of the Spanish legal system. The
Fiscal of the Real Audiencia (court prosecutor) ordered that the governor
of the province hear the case, and then that all the documents should be
presented and that the heirs of Phelipe Delgado should also be heard. By
August 1773 all the official documentation had been organized and was
sent by Governor Palacios to the audiencia. It looked like Francisco was
128
Buried Treasure
well on the way to being freed, but suddenly everything began to unravel
for him. The fiscal highlighted the falsehoods that had shown up in the
case. The treasure that Francisco supposedly had found through the intervention of Saint Anthony and had given to his master in exchange for his
freedom, had, in fact, been stolen from don Bentura Ygnacio Arisabaleta’s
hacienda by his slave Bonifacio. One can almost hear the amazement of
the officials in the documents as they put the pieces of the puzzle together
and realized that Francisco Castañeda had known about this robbery, and
might even have been in cahoots with Bonifacio. So, Francisco had been
smart enough to recognize that even if he went out and fenced the treasure
he would not have enough to buy his freedom. Most slaves in their prime
cost about 350 pesos during this period, and we should remember that
he believed the treasure to be worth a rather paltry amount. He therefore
devised an elaborate scheme through which he could con his unwitting
master into promising him his freedom if he found the treasure. And
of course, all along he knew exactly where the treasure was hidden. His
ingenuity and daring were startling. The officials who heard the case were
impressed with his audacity and perseverance. Still they quickly reversed
their earlier opinions that Francisco had been unjustly deprived of his
freedom, and found against him. The court was particularly offended by
the bad faith in which Francisco had presented his case, seeking to dupe
everybody involved.
The case of the buried treasure opens many windows onto the ingenuity and desperation that slaves manifested in New Granada during the
eighteenth century. It also gives us access to the language of identity and
Francisco’s recognition that the language of domination and hegemony
could be appropriated by him to help him win his liberty. He was ready to
use any tool he could find to tip the balance in his favor. There are many
contradictions that are difficult to reconcile about this man, the language
he used, and the image he projected; however, the various clues we find in
the court case about his intelligence and innovation lead us to recognize
that he was able to combine his African and American experience in ways
designed to achieve his ultimate goal: his carta de libertad. That was his
quest, and mine is to continue searching for Francisco in the documents
extant in Colombia, but I also hope that this trip to Igboland will enable
me to learn more about his people and the society from which he might
have come as I try to understand the strength that he manifested in his
struggle against his enslavement.
129
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Archivo General de la Nación, Colombia [hereafter AGN], Colonia, Negros
y Esclavos del Tolima, Tomo II, f. 338, 15 November 1770.
Renée Soulodre-La France, “An Ambivalent Embrace. Region and Reform
in New Granada: The Case of Tolima Grande,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1999, 36.
It is problematic because there is always some doubt as to how much filtering occurred when documents such as these were created by a scribe or
notary, and how much was drawn from the individual making the complaint.
How much of the story was purely formulaic and what were Francisco’s own
words? While we cannot be certain about the extent to which these are actually Francisco’s words, the case is rather individual in its use of language.
Based on my experience with these types of documents, it seems to have its
own internal logic and is not dependent upon a strict formula like some of
the legal documents dealing with slaves.
John Thornton, “African Background of the Slave Cargo of the Henrietta
Maria,” draft paper.
Fernando Jurado Noboa, Esclavitud en la Costa Pacifica: Iscuandé, Tumaco,
Barbacoas y Esmeraldas. Siglos XVI al XIX (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala and
Corporación Ecuatoriana de “Amigos de la Genealogía, 1990): 145, 197.
Alonso de Sandoval, De Instauranda Aetheopium Salute: El Mundo de la
Esclavitud Negra en América (Bogotá: Empresa Nacional de Publicaciones,
1956 [1627]).
Ibid., 65, 66, 139. Note that the contention that the Caravalis were cannibals
was denied by slaves interviewed by Oldendorp; see fn.14.
Christian Georg Andreas Oldendorp, C. G. A. Oldendorp’s History of the
Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St.
Croix, and St. John [edited by Johann Jakob Bossardt; translated by. Arnold
R. Highfield and Vladimir Barac] (Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma Publishers,
1987; first published in German, 1770), part I, book III, section IV: 164.
Ibid., 169.
Germán de Granda, “Datos Antroponimicos sobre Negros Esclavos Musulmanes en Nueva Granada,” Thesaurus, Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo,
Tomo 27 (1972): 95.
Nicolás del Castillo Mathieu, Esclavos Negros en Cartagena y sus Aportes
Léxicos (Bogotá: Publicaciones del Instituto Caro y Cuervo, LXII, 1982): 63.
I would like to thank Kris E. Lane for providing me with a copy of Matricula
de las Minas y Negros de Barbacoas, Signaturas 2835–2843, Archivo Central
del Cauca, Popayán, Colombia.
Robert C. West, The Pacific Lowlands of Colombia: A Negroid Area of the
Negroid Tropics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957): 102.
130
Buried Treasure
14. This case is cited in María Cristina Navarrete, Historia Social del Negro en la
Colonia Cartagena, siglo XVII (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 1995): 110–111.
15. Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, “Esclavos y Senores en la Sociedad Colombiana del
Siglo XVIII,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 1 (1963): 42.
16. Ibid., 43.
17. Colin A. Palmer, “From Africa to the Americas: Ethnicity in the Early Black
Communities of the Americas,” Journal of World History 6 (1995): 77.
18. “Aún si la casta no designa con precision una etnia o un grupo lingüístico
sino que más bien indica el Puerto de embarque o una region entera que
se cubre con una denominación desorbitada de su promitivo sentido, estos
apelativos permiten una aproximación al origen africano de los esclavos
traídos a América.” This statement by Germán Colmenares is cited in María
Cristina Navarrete, Historia Social del Negro en la Colonia. Cartagena, Siglo
XVII (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 1995): 48.
19. Cited in Jorge Palacios Preciado, La Trata de Negros por Cartagena de Indias
(Tunja: Ediciones “La Rana y El Aguila,” 1973): 349, 122.
20. Cited in David Pavy, “The Provenance of Colombian Negroes,” Journal of
Negro History 52 (1967): 38.
21. Ibid., 474.
22. Preciado, La Trata de Negras, 317.
23. Cited in Mathieu, Esclavos Negros en Cartagena y Sus Aportes Léxicos, 13–15.
24. Colin A. Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America,
1700–1739 (Urbana, Chicago, & London: University of Illinois Press, 1981): 29.
25. John Thornton, Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,
1400–1800, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 62.
26. Ibid., 197–198. Colin Palmer’s work on slaves in Mexico and their choice of
marriage partners also supports this notion; see “From Africa to the Americas,” 71–78. In an examination of the marriage records of Angolan slaves
in Mexico City between 1590 and 1640, he highlighted the importance of
ethnicity in determining partners.
27. Philip Morgan, “The Cultural Implications,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997):
136, 140. Morgan presents a contradictory perspective. He argues for the
transformation and reconstitution, or even invention of ethnic identities and
cultures, in the diaspora.
28. Thornton, African and the Africans, 201.
29. Ibid., 200.
30. Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson. “Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,
1760–1789,” in African Slave Voices, edited by Vincent Carretta and Philip
Gould (Lexington University of Kentucky Press, 2001): 337–338, 341. For
example, if Francisco was sold in the second half of the eighteenth century,
there is a strong probability that he was carried out of the Bight of Biafra on
a British ship. During the period 1750–1807 only a very few trading houses
131
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
controlled slave exports from Old Calabar. The problem remains that the
source of slaves flowing through the port of Old Calabar could vary.
David Eltis and David Richardson, “The Numbers Game,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997): 8.
David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein,
eds., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Lovejoy and Richardson, “Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,” 3.
David Eltis and David Richardson, “West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave
Trade: New Evidence of Long Trends,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997): 22, 26.
Lovejoy and Richardson, “Letters of the Old Calabar Slave Trade,” 3.
Eltis and Richardson, “West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,”
30–31.
See the discussion of the racialization of slavery in Paul E. Lovejoy and
David Trotman, “Experiencias de Vida y Expectativas: Nociones Africanas
sobre la Esclavitud y la Realidad en América,” in Rutas de la Esclavitud en
África y América Latina, edited by Rina Cáceres, 379-404 (San José, Costa
Rica: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2001). For the introduction
of the Mina slave into the story, see Negros y Esclavos del Tolima, Tomo II,
fs. 244–245r, AGN, Bogotá, Colombia.
Thornton, “African Background,” 6.
Ibid., 12–17. Thornton explains that the most significant source of slaves
for New Calabar was the Igbo-speaking area north of the towns along the
Niger River and its tributaries. He depends heavily upon Olaudah Equiano’s
description of Igboland in the eighteenth century.
Peter Caron, “Of a Nation Which the Others Do Not Understand: Bambara
Slaves and African Ethnicity in Colonial Louisiana, 1718–60,” Slavery and
Abolition 18 (1997): 107.
Douglas Chambers, “My Own Nation: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,” Slavery
and Abolition 18 (1997): 90.
Paul E. Lovejoy, “Identity and the Mirage of Ethnicity: Mahommah Gardo
Baquaqua’s Journey in the Americas,” in African Re-Genesis: Confronting
Social Issues in the Diaspora, edited by J. B. Haviser and K. C. MacDonald,
(London: Cavendish Publishing, 2005): 16.
Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1759: The Impact of the Atlantic
Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991): 50.
Caron, “Of a Nation Which the Others Do Not Understand,” 108; and
Lovejoy, “Identity and the Mirage of Ethnicity,” 14–17. Lovejoy argues that
one of the significant qualifiers that help us understand Baquaqua’s sense
of identity is his name, which retained both his Islamic and ethnic identity.
He suggests that identities adopted or rejected at particular moments had a
degree of expediency associated with them as Baquaqua tried to make the
best of his situation: “His identity in the context of enslavement kept changing, presenting the man in different guises in different situations.”
132
•9•
Ekpe in Cuba:
the Abakuá Secret Society,
Race and Politics
Christine Ayorinde
T
he development of Ekpe/Abakuá as a Cuban institution provides an
interesting case study of how the repercussions of cultural transfers
and interactions resulting from the slave trade are more complex than a
mechanical transmission of specific African cultural forms. Abakuá1 is an
all-male secret society whose members are known as ñáñigos.2 They gather
in a potencia (power), juego (set) or tierra (land), which loosely translates as
“lodge”, analogous to freemasonry. It originated in the Ekpe secret society
that slaves from the Cross River area of present-day Nigeria brought with
them to Cuba in the mid-eighteenth century. The expansion of the slave
trade to the Calabar coast and Efik participation in it created a need for
commercial credit institutions already in use in the Ekpe secret society
at this time. In addition to its religious, judicial, commercial, and social
functions, the Ekpe policed aspects of the slave trade and regulated the
collection of bad debts.3
In Spanish America, slaves from the Cross River region were called
Carabalíes (from Calabar).4 Like other slave trade ethnonyms, the term
Carabalí covered a number of ethnicities, including the Efik, QuaEjagham, Efut, Ibibio, Igbo, and Ijaw.5 Many Carabali came during the
British trade before 1807, but their numbers increased after Cuban-based
Spanish slave traders became the largest group operating in the Bight of
Biafra.6 They introduced the Ekpe society to the island where it became
known as Abakuá. As the only manifestation of this secret society outside
West Africa, it offers an example of the direct transfer of culture, although
the precise details of the process of transmission of Ekpe to Cuba remain
unclear. Ortiz maintains that a group of Efik slaves introduced Abakuá to
Cuba.7 More specifically, Thompson claims that slaves brought to Cuba
in the first four decades of the nineteenth century included members of
the Ejagham male leopard society called Ngbe.8 The presence of Abakuá
demonstrates how an indigenous African institution was transmitted to
the diaspora through contact with Europe.
While it is uncertain when the society may have first reached Cuba,
Abakuá traditions indicate that the first Creole “corporation” of ñáñigos
was formed in 1834 or 1836 under the protection of the cabildo (chapter)
Brícamo Carabalí Appapá Efí in Regla or the cabildo Appapá Efor.9 Three
ramas (branches) of Abakuá still exist today: Efí, Efó (or Efor), and Oru.
These may correspond to the Efik Ekpe, Efut Ekpe, and Qua Ekpe in
Africa.10 Each has its own variant tradition of origin and ritual roles.
Mythology
In Africa, Ekpe (an Efik term meaning “leopard”) was a forest spirit
that was propitiated for the well-being of the community. Thompson suggests that the checkered patterns of the íremes (masquerades)11 and the way
they drag themselves along the floor indicate that the leopard has not been
entirely forgotten in Cuba.12 In essence, the Abakuá myth describes how
the Efor princess Sikán (or Sikaneka) discovered the secret of the sacred
fish Tanze and inadvertently caused its death. Her subsequent sacrifice to
recreate the mystical voice of Tanze is reenacted in the principal ritual of
Abakuá, the Baroko, which is performed when obonekues or abanekues (initiates) are elevated to plazas (ranks) within the society’s hierarchy. Variant
versions of the myth of each rama of Abakuá provide the rationale for the
structure of ritual roles within a potencia. The myth makes a woman the
betrayer of a sacred secret, and for this reason Sikán is sometimes compared to Eve.13 Abakuá is often described as “macho” for two reasons: first,
because it emphasizes hombresía (manliness); and second because both
women and some homosexuals are excluded from membership (though
homosexuals who assume the “male” role are admitted).14 Members are
required to be brave and defiant.
134
Ekpe in Cuba: the Abakuá Secret Society, Race and Politics
Ritual
Each potencia has a fambá (temple), derived from the Efik term
“Efambá” (arena). The major plantes (ceremonies) reenact the mythical
origins of the society and contact the ancestors.15 A potencia has a complex
hierarchy of officers and assistants. These vary according to the rama to
which the potencia belongs. The obones (kings or dignitaries)16 consist of
four major posts: iyamba,17 mokongo, isué, and isunekue, each performing
specific ritual roles: Iyamba brings forth the sacred voice from the ekwe/
ekue drum, played by friction to reproduce the sacred voice of the fish,
and “feeds” it with sacrifices. Isué is in charge of the seseribó, a drum that
represents the calabash of the myth of origin that contained the heads
of the fish and Sikán and is charged with a mix of ingredients of all
things from nature, rather like an nganga (receptacle in which practitioners of palo monte keep sacred objects). The remaining major plazas are:
Ekueñón or Moko (in charge of the ekueñón drum);18 Mpegó (in charge of
the mpegó drum); and (E)Nkríkamo, also known as (O)bonkri (in charge
of the nkríkamo drum). In addition, there are six minor plazas, completing a cast of thirteen characters who, according to the myth, swore an
oath in the first baroko (consecration ceremony). These include Mosongo,
Abasongo, and Nasakó, the wizard in the myth. This plaza is occupied by a
tata-nganga, which underlines the connection between the different AfroCuban practices; in this case, it adds a magical element because of the
association of palo monte with magic or witchcraft.19
The establishment of Abakuá in Cuba
Initially the Carabalí cabildos de nación (ethnic chapters) that perpetuated the traditions of Ekpe were reluctant to admit criollos (Cuban-born
blacks or people of mixed race), but eventually agreed to help them to set
up their own juegos on payment of a fee of 100 pesos.20 The first Creole
juego established in Regla, across the bay from the port of Havana, was
called Acuebutan or Efik Butón.21 Some members were slaves from rich
households in the Belén neighborhood.22 Efik Butón established other
juegos in Regla, Havana, Guanabacoa, Matanzas, and Cárdenas.23
The secret of Abakuá was also enormously attractive to whites, including dissipated young men from the best families of Havana. La Familia
Unzúazu, a novel published in 1901 by the mulatto Senator Martin Morúa
Delgado, focuses on the motivations of the first whites who swore Abakuá,
pointing out that, like the black members, they wanted to be feared and
fearless, characteristics that appealed to young women. The novel describes
135
the case of a slave who becomes a ñáñigo, something he shares with his white
master.24 According to an informant of Cabrera: “You know that …wellheeled whites coveted the secret of the carabalí, and the criollo blacks sold it
to them for a high price. That is what ruined…and saved ñañiguismo!”25 For
example, Andrés Petit, the isué (head) of the Bacocó juego, sold the secret of
Abakuá to a group of whites in 1857 for either 30 ounces of gold (perhaps
a symbolic sum recalling the 30 pieces of silver received by Judas for betraying Christ) or 500 pesos.26 Petit is described as a light-skinned mulatto of
Haitian origin. Apart from being the isué of the Bacocó Efó and a palero
(practitioner of palo monte), he was also a Roman Catholic. He served as
a sacristan of the Church of the Espíritu Santo and belonged to church
associations, including the Tertiary Order of St Francisco. He is also known
as the founder of the Regla Kimbisa del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje.27
In 1863 members of the white juego were sworn in by the Bacocó juego.
It was named Ocobío or Ecobio Efor Mucarará (meaning “white friends
of efor”; the word macarará is derived from the Efik term mbákara (white
man).28 To this day, there is speculation as to why Petit sold the secret of
Abakuá to whites. Some Afro-Cubans still regard him as a traitor, while
others point out that the money was used to free slaves. Indeed, he was
true to the spirit of Abakuá, for in West Africa, European traders had also
joined Ekpe for economic convenience.29 In Cuba, some members hoped
that the admittance of whites would shield Abakuá from persecution by
the authorities if it were no longer a “cosa de negros” (black thing) but a “cosa
de cubanos” (Cuban thing).30 Nevertheless, the sale of the secret to whites
resulted in a schism between the Efik and Efor branches of Abakuá. 31
Members of the Bacocó juego were suspended and punished, and the Efik
juegos refused to initiate whites, but the Efor had black, white, and mixed
race juegos.32 The Efik juegos also denied whites entry to Abakuá functions.
This led to bloody battles between white and black ñáñigos. Some potencias of the Efik rama still do not admit white members and light-skinned
applicants need to prove that they have a black grandparent.33 The entry of
whites into Abakuá made the potencias the first multiethnic associations
in Cuba. Although the authorities often turned a blind eye to the fact that
Africans of different ethnic origins, creoles, and mestizos (people of mixed
descent) were associating in the cabildos, the Abakuá juegos—where whites
not only associated with blacks and mestizos but also were ordered around
by them—was extremely threatening in a slave society.34
Contemporary accounts reflect the anxiety that this caused among
members of the ruling class. In a letter to the artist Victor Patricio de
Landaluze, Enrique Fernández Carrillo wrote, “Ñañiguismo seeks the
degradation of a superior race, in order that inferior races may rise…The
136
ñáñigo aspires to the union of the Caucasian race and the African race, but
in order that the former be absorbed by the latter.”35 All this explains why
Abakuá suffered more repression than other Afro-Cuban associations such
as the cabildos de nación. Negative views of Abakuá also stemmed from
perceptions of it as secretive, self-sufficient, and the fact that its members
put the laws of the juego and loyalty to other ecobios (brothers) before
anything else.36 After the 1868 war the authorities deported ñáñigos along
with insurgents who had been imprisoned. Later the conspirators in the
Oriente independence struggle were sent to penitentiaries in Spain, Fernando Po, and other parts of Africa. In Fernando Po, Abakuá potencias
were also established, incorporating influences from the new locations.37
When the Cubans were released and returned to Cuba between 1878 and
1892, they took back Cubanized “African” institutions as well as “new”
African cultural elements, including songs, legends, and ritual items.38
By the late nineteenth century, the colonial authorities had changed
their policy of encouraging cultural fragmentation among the black population to one that facilitated its assimilation. One reason for the change in
policy was that the ending of the slave trade meant that there were fewer
bozales (African-born blacks). As abolition of slavery appeared inevitable,
there was increasing concern about integrating a former slave population
into the nation. An official document stated that, “with blacks equal to
whites before the law and, like them able to be vote and be eligible for
all public offices, it is more in their interest that the cabildos de negros
should disappear.”39 Some of the Creole elite, aware that independence
from Spain was imminent, stressed the importance of education to prepare
black Cubans for citizenship. According to Enrique Varona, an economist
who was responsible for implementing educational reforms under the first
United States government of intervention (1899–1902):
It is incumbent upon whites in Cuba, in their position as the
leading class, to win blacks over to the guiding principles of
Western culture: its apparel, dances, theatre, music: it is as much
in their [the whites] interest to bring them [the blacks] closer
to the scientific knowledge of natural laws as it is to drive them
away from fetishism.40
This did not so much reflect a sense of altruism but rather fears that
vices associated with blacks would contaminate the rest of the population.
As Varona put it, “The black ñáñigo makes the white ñáñigo.” If racial homogeneity through blanqueamiento (whitening of the population) was not a
feasible option, then cultural homogeneity might at least provide a defense
against the blacks who, at the time, formed a third of the population.
137
Thus the wars of independence against Spain forced the creole elites,
hitherto excluded from political control, to attempt to fuse national and
racial identities. The black and white mambises (troops in the liberation
army) struggled against a common enemy, forging a vision of patriotism
based on ethnic fraternity. Africans and Creole blacks were encouraged to
congregate together in institutions resembling the Spanish casinos (clubs
for white immigrants) that were to replace the cabildos de nación.41 These
were called sociedades de instrucción y recreo (societies for instruction and
recreation) or sociedades de color (associations for people of color). Consequently, the cabildos were subject to increasing control. In 1883 a royal
order stipulated that they renew their licenses annually, and in 1887 a new
law required them to have a white patron and made them subject to the
law of associations. This provided a convenient means to dismantle those
cabildos that failed to meet the legislative requirements and to confiscate
their property.42
Some of the Afro-Cuban elite also campaigned against the cabildos
de nación. In 1892 Juan Gualberto Gomez43 founded the Directorio de las
Sociedades de Color (Directorate of the Societies of Color) to unite the
black societies and incorporate them into the independence struggle. In
1894 he visited the remaining cabildos de nación and encouraged them
to become centers of instruction and mutual aid instead of perpetuating
the traditions of the former African slaves.44 As Gómez opined, “We are
no longer Africans.”45 His newspaper La Fraternidad published an article
entitled “Otra Vez el Ñáñigo” (“The Náñigo Again”) that reported on a
procession through Guanabacoa, during which paraders displayed “their
ridiculous contortions of the most recrudescent savagery.” The writer
lamented the failure of the police to stop it.46 What particularly incensed
him was that black creoles, who had never seen Africa, could mount a
display that worsened the existing negative public image of blacks.
Unlike the cabildos de nación, the Abakuá potencias were never legally
recognized. In 1876 Abakuá was declared illegal and meetings were prohibited. The following year, after a raid during which a large number of
ñáñigos were arrested, Chief of Police Manuel Asencio reported to the
governor-general that they were murderers who participated in bloody bacchanals and that Abakuá was a criminal association that organized against
the white race. The ñáñigos fought back against this campaign of defamation. In 1882 an unpublished pamphlet appeared, defending Abakuá and
explaining the principles governing membership of the society.47
138
The ending of the colony and the republic
Despite the authorities’ attempts at suppression, by the latter half of
the nineteenth century the Abakuá potencias had attracted thousands of
members and may have even outnumbered the cabildos de nación. Potencias were also established in the United States in the nineteenth century
by Afro-Cuban migrant workers in Florida.48 Abakuá was predominantly
an urban phenomenon found principally in the port areas on the west of
the island in Havana, Matanzas, and Cárdenas. This reflected Ekpe origins
in the river and port towns of Old Calabar. As in Africa, there was a link
between membership and economic activity. The potencias went beyond
the cabildos de nación in offering mutual aid. Even before the abolition
of slavery, they operated like trade unions for workers on the docks and in
tobacco factories, markets, and slaughterhouses. Foremen who were Abakuá
members were obliged to give work to their associates. Thus, membership
offered a certain social status, support, and access to jobs. Up until the 1959
revolution membership of a potencia often ensured employment on the
docks. Frequently, the contrastista or capataz (contractor or foreman) who
allocated work for the American shipping lines were Abakuá, so workers
who wanted regular employment sought Abakuá membership.49
In the final war of independence against Spain (1895–1898), the
majority of the revolutionary troops and around 40 percent of the generals
and colonels was Afro-Cuban.50 As on previous occasions, Spain attempted
to create discord among the Cubans by playing on white fears of a race
war. Spanish colonial authorities referred to Afro-Cuban insurgents as
ñáñigos.51 Indeed, the Abakuá potencias apparently played an important
role in the liberation war by establishing communication networks and
convincing maroon communities to provide war materiel and intelligence
to the rebels.52 Many Afro-Cuban officers were freemasons and their
lodges also provided a cover for revolutionary activities.53
In 1898 the United States intervened in the war to protect its investments.54 Despite their role in the victory over Spain, the Cuban combatants were excluded from the peace negotiations and were forced to accept
independence on the terms agreed by a foreign power and their colonial
masters. It was even suggested that Cuba owed its freedom to the U.S.,
which set up a military government to oversee economic reconstruction,
and that the mambises had played a secondary role.55 In this way, Cuba
exchanged dependence on Spain for U.S. political, economic, and cultural
domination. The self-styled superior Anglo-Saxon race looked down on
Cubans of all colors and saw itself as having a civilizing mission. The U.S.
military government attempted to eradicate Afro-Cuban traditions. In
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1900 a Havana ordinance prohibited the use of drums.56 The avenues of
mobility that had previously been opened to the Afro-Cubans were now
blocked. Former slaves were given neither land nor employment with the
result that U.S. policies further exacerbated existing discrimination. In
1902 U.S. troops withdrew after Estrada Palma, the candidate backed by
the Americans, won in the first republican elections.
The Republic of Cuba (1902–1958) oscillated between the suppression and political functionalization of Afro-Cuban cultural and religious
practices. The Bando de Policía of 1913 forbade the use of African instruments and those found during raids were confiscated. The new government launched a campaign against son, a black popular musical genre.
Many son players were also santeros and Abakuá members.57 The most
extreme examples, however, were the antiwitchcraft campaigns. Articles
in the press linked Afro-Cuban religious practices, commonly known as
brujería (witchcraft) with alleged crimes such as the abduction and murder
of white children for ritual purposes. Hitherto, only Abakuá potencias had
experienced persistent official repression, but now all Afro-Cuban religious
and cultural practices were associated with criminality, a view that persists
even today.
The antiwitchcraft campaigns had a political motivation. Once it was
decided to incorporate Africans and their descendants into the vision of
a Cuban nation, their cultural practices became both undesirable and the
source of possible contamination. Even Fernando Ortiz, the first scholar to
acknowledge African influence on national traits was, as Stephan Palmié
notes, “compelled to construe hitherto fairly vague conceptions of cultural
Africanity into a social pathogen, the extirpation of which would form a
precondition for the achievement of Cuban modernity.” The effect of the
press campaigns against brujos (sorcerers) was to link Afro-Cuban cultural
otherness with the murder of children.58
Fears of African barbarism were raised in order to justify the repression of Afro-Cuban aspirations.59 The anti-brujo campaigns surfaced when
Afro-Cubans began to demand their rights as citizens in the early years of
the republic and also in the 1920s and 1930s when large-scale immigration from other Caribbean islands, particularly Jamaica and Haiti, raised
fears that the mestizo Cuban nation would be swamped by the black race.
Another wave occurred in the 1940s when Afro-Cubans pressed for legislation to enforce the clause in the 1940 constitution that prohibited racial
discrimination. These campaigns reinforced apparent cultural distinctions
between black and white Cubans as well as between sections of the AfroCuban population. This presented a dilemma for prominent Afro-Cuban
intellectuals of the period. Some abhorred manifestations of Africanity,
140
but could they now condone a campaign that suppressed the aspirations of
less favored Afro-Cubans?
At the same time, white political candidates appealed to Afro-Cubans,
who made up one-third of the electorate, by appropriating some of their
cultural forms such as the comparsas (carnival parade groups banned in the
1910s) and religious symbols in rallies.60 The Liberal Party and President
José Miguel Gómez (1909–1913) solicited Afro-Cuban votes by visiting
black organizations, including the Abakuá societies. In the 1930s and
1940s political posters appeared with slogans in Efik.61
Meanwhile, frustration intensified among Afro-Cubans. Many were
veterans of the wars of independence, and they felt that the mainstream
political parties did not represent their interests. This led to the foundation
in 1908 of the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), the first significant
attempt to organize along racial lines in the hemisphere. Its twofold program
to promote Afro-Cuban integration and to end discrimination directly challenged the Liberal Party’s bid for Afro-Cuban votes. The response to the PIC
exposed the divisions within the Afro-Cuban community. The sociedades de
color (associations of colored people), along with Gualberto Gómez and the
Afro-Cuban senator Martin Morúa Delgado, opposed it, claiming that the
1895 revolution had erased racial difference.62 In February 1910 Delgado
presented an amendment to the electoral law that proscribed the formation
of racially exclusive political parties. Despite the fact that the PIC neither
advocated separatism nor prevented whites from joining, it was denounced
as racist and threatening to national unity. The party was declared illegal
under the Morúa Amendment and some members were imprisoned for
allegedly conspiring to establish a black republic.63
In May 1912 an armed protest to re-legalize the party was organized
in Oriente, a province where its support base was strong.64 Before any
protest could take place, however, Liberal President José Miguel Gómez
(1908–1913) sent in troops led by white veterans of the former Liberation
Army. Up to 4,000 blacks were killed in this confrontation.65 The Guerrita
del Doce (Little War of 1912), as the massacre was called by those who
sought to minimize its brutality, also revived persecution of Abakuá in
Havana. Anti-PIC factions represented the massacre as a struggle between
civilization and barbarism. Caricatures depicted PIC members adorned
with the symbols of santería and ñañiguismo. Yet, although the PIC did
not follow the Afro-Cuban elite in attributing Afro-Cuban disadvantage
solely to educational and cultural factors, neither did it privilege AfroCuban culture. On the contrary, the party newspaper Previsión criticized
the brujería campaigns, but also stigmatized African dance and drumming
as barbarisms of bygone days and manifestations of African atavism.66
141
Nevertheless, some PIC members certainly practiced Afro-Cuban traditions. Trial reports in the National Archives (Havana) list Abakuá paraphernalia among items seized from the home of one alleged conspirator.67
Events in 1912 also highlighted the longstanding antagonism between
some black and white Abakuá members. Regla, a town located across the
bay from Havana, had many Abakuá potencies, although the majority of its
population was white. The famous Manuel de Jesús Capaz (or Chuchú),
a contractor and personal friend of President Gómez, was the iyamba of a
white Regla potencia called Enyegueyé Efó. Like many other Abakuá, he
also held civilian political positions; he served first as a town councilor and
then as leader of the Regla Council in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1912 a strike
at the Havana docks was broken by Capaz and the reglanos (workers from
Regla), who used the excuse of the so-called race war to justify crossing
the bay to take work away from black habaneros (workers from Havana).68
Meanwhile, in the 1920s the working class emerged as a political
force. The growing labor movement attracted Afro-Cuban membership
because the bigger unions addressed the black question and appointed
special committees to examine issues relating to it. Many Abakuá worked
as stevedores, but their influence was mainly exerted through members
who occupied positions as union leaders on the various docks. In 1925 the
Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba (CNOC) was founded. One of its
aims was to eliminate distinctions on the basis of race.69 The Communist
Party, also founded that same year, actively recruited black members and
elected some to positions of leadership within the Party.70 Two prominent
Afro-Cuban communists in the 1930s and 1940s with strong Abakuá
connections were Lazaro Peña, the leader of the tobacco workers who
apparently had Abakuá bodyguards, and Aracelio Iglesias, the leader of
the Maritime Workers Union, who was a santero and Abakuá member.71
The 1959 revolution
While clearly symbolizing a break with the past, the Cuban revolution presented itself as the culmination of earlier nationalist struggles. For
the first time, the country was also free from U.S. political, economic, and
cultural domination that had replaced that of Spain after the 1898 war.
In addition to changes to the economic base, the revolution launched an
ideological campaign to uproot old traditions and patterns of conduct and
replace them with attitudes and values reflecting the new reality.72 Che
Guevara proposed the creation of un hombre nuevo (a new Cuban) who
would embody a different set of values. Although the former hegemonic
values were to be replaced by nonclassist, nonracialist ones, affirmative
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action policies were not introduced for fear of divisiveness. The orthodox
Marxist view held that racism would wither away as a result of revolutionary transformations. Afro-Cubans were undoubtedly among the most
disadvantaged sectors of society and thus expected to benefit from revolutionary transformations.
By neglecting to differentiate race as a separate issue from class,
efforts to eliminate racism could not succeed. As before, the discourse of
integrationism stated that Cuba’s racial problem did not exist, but now
it was claimed that the revolution had solved it. This justified suppressing Afro-Cuban participation in black consciousness movements such as
those that had emerged in the U.S. and the Anglophone Caribbean in the
1960s and 1970s. At the same time the Cuban regime made a point of
supporting black movements outside Cuba, and a number of American
black nationalists visited the island. State-sponsored pan-Africanism also
created links with African states then emerging from colonialism. Fidel
Castro frequently alluded to the blood ties that bound many Cubans to the
continent. In a speech in 1975 he defined Cuba as a Latin-African country,
thus acknowledging the mixed origins of most Cubans and its historical
debt to Africa.
Cuban policy now gave greater prominence to Africa. Its revolutionary
cultural policy aimed to produce models that relied less on North American or European traditions. In 1976 the First Communist Party Congress
proposed a critical study of Cuban cultural heritage and recommended
the assimilation of its positive aspects to create a culture enriched by the
best national and universal traditions. It recognized that Cuba had inherited two cultures: the bourgeois culture of the dominant classes and the
hitherto underdeveloped democratic and socialist culture rooted in the
past struggles of the oppressed classes. Henceforth the government would
embrace the former subculture as a progressive and revolutionary culture.73
Initially it appeared that Afro-Cuban religious and cultural practices
would be vindicated.74 While doubts about the political trustworthiness of
Christians had been raised because some churches had sheltered counterrevolutionary activities, Afro-Cuban cults benefited from their association
with the exploited classes and their historical function as cultures of resistance to slavery and colonialism. Furthermore, these practices were not
connected with institutions like the Christian churches, which saw their
spheres of influence restricted and curtailed. Practitioners of Afro-Cuban
religions were perceived as more disposed to the new political ideas and
likely to benefit most from the social transformations of the revolution,
and thus more likely to support it.
143
Likewise, revolutionary policy appeared to vindicate Abakuá. Members
proposed to set up a regulatory base to achieve national consensus on rituals
and to define the role of the Abakuá societies in this important moment of
Cuba’s history. The 1960 National Abakuá Congress was planned to honor
Cuban people and to acknowledge Petit’s role in the ethnic integration of
the religion.75 With the increasing influence of the Soviet Union and the
introduction of scientific atheism from the mid-1960s, however, there was
less tolerance of all religions. Once again, Abakuá faced official disapproval.
While in 1960 it had been hailed as an aspect of Africa’s formidable presence in Cuban nationality, now it was categorized as retrograde, a leftover
from Africa in the times of Vasco de Gama. The practice of initiating boys
into primitive beliefs was discouraged on the grounds that sooner or later
this would lead them into trouble with the law.76
The 1971 congress on education and culture provided the first official
statement on revolutionary religious policy. It examined the influence of a
number of factors on young people and their education. It declared that the
activities of most religious groups did not threaten either the ideological
development of the people or the building of socialism; however, it identified juvenile delinquency as a major problem, a manifestation of social
pathology. It listed the contributing factors as truancy, bad housing, low
family income, broken homes, and significantly, “the incidence of problems
of a religious nature or of religious sects, essentially those originating on
the African continent (ñáñigos or abacuá).”77 It urged the formulation of
policy to inculcate revolutionary consciousness among the youth and to
prevent the transmission of undesirable behavior patterns from one generation to the other.78
Afro-Cuban religious institutions faced other criticisms. It was claimed
that they belittled women by excluding them from important positions
in the hierarchy, conveniently overlooking the traditions of exclusively
male clergy in Christian churches. Palo monte and Abakuá, in particular,
were believed to promote machista (male chauvinist) values. Moreover,
detractors pointed to Abakuá as an instrument of capitalist exploitation
and associated it with republican bosses, who had used Abakuá to control
union leaders and to manipulate workers.79
How influential were Abakuá in modern Cuba? A 1986 study of known
Abakuá members revealed an ongoing link with occupations such as port
work, fishing, construction, transport, and the merchant navy. Of the Abakuá
members surveyed, around forty percent was employed.80 The paucity of
quantitative information for the survey was augmented by the testimonies of
specialists who drew attention to the link between criminality and religious
practices, especially those designated as “syncretic cults.” Police claimed to
144
have witnessed serious crimes committed during Abakuá ceremonies, provoked, as in the colonial period, by rivalry between potencias. This led the
Ministry of the Interior to restrict the celebration of Abakuá ceremonies to
specific dates and to carry out an investigation of those seeking initiation.81
Thus any advantage that Afro-Cuban practices might have gained from the
initial perception that they posed less of a political threat to the regime was
soon outweighed by longstanding prejudices toward them. Scholarship and
official attitudes continued to reflect such prejudices. Once again, practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions were condemned to the criminal underworld
and membership was linked with manifestations of social pathology. All religions, not just the Afro-Cuban forms, were seen as anachronisms, irrelevant
in a modern, revolutionary society.
After the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in the late
1980s, the state became more accommodating to religions of all kinds.
This resulted from dialogue between the party and the representatives of
Christian churches. The loss of support from Eastern Europe led to questioning the role of the state. Since then there has been a visible revival in
religious practice, which is often linked to the diminishing capacity of the
revolution to satisfy the material needs of the people and also to the disorientation caused by various modifications to the revolutionary ideology.
The 1991 Communist Party congress blamed some of Cuba’s problems
on the mechanical copying of the experiences of the socialist countries.
Now the principle of national unity required the party to acknowledge different perspectives and find a way to make them work together. The need
for consensus and tolerance also created conditions for allowing religious
practitioners to enter the party. During the debate over whether religious
believers should be allowed to join the party, exemplary practitioners of
all creeds were named, including Aracelio Iglesias, an Abakuá who was
a militant in the first Cuban Communist Party. Eusebio Leal, the official
historian of Havana asked, “are we to deny [party membership] to my
Abakuá friends in Old Havana who still remember, ancient and venerable,
how in the name of God and in silence they unloaded arms from the La
Coubre?”82 The statutes of the party were modified accordingly.
Recently, the party has reassessed Afro-Cuban religions. Increasingly
the state has demonstrated its preparedness to recognize that Afro-Cuban
religions have positive values that can be used to promote change in
society.83 Perhaps the most important positive feature is the cooperative
tradition of prerevolutionary Cuba that was rooted in Afro-Cuban religions. The Revolution also made use of traditional values like machismo
and bravery as embodied by the Abakuá members, santeros and others
who served with the Cuban forces in Angola.84
145
Since the mid-1990s meetings between the Abakuá hierarchy and
Cuban Communist Party officials have increased. The Buró Abakuá (Abakuá
Association of Cuba) is in the process of obtaining legal recognition. Along
with the Asociación Cultural Yoruba (Yoruba Cultural Association), it is
one of the only two Afro-Cuban religious associations recognized by the
Ministry of Justice. Becoming a registered association brings with it certain
benefits, including permission to buy goods at a lower price than in the
normal state shops and the right to purchase a vehicle. Carlos Samper of the
Office of Religious Affairs of the Communist party’s central committee told
me that, as officially recognized religious associations, the Yoruba Cultural
Association and the Buró Abakuá are intended to be umbrella organizations
representing all those who participate in these practices.85
Conclusion
In the Americas and the Caribbean, cosmologies and worldviews with
African origins have provided cultural solutions to a situation of disempowerment. They provided, and still provide, self-esteem and social solidarity
for Afro-Cubans. Yet despite being relegated to the position of a subculture
until very recently, the specializations of those regarded as socially inferior
have also provided a set of complementary resources available to Cubans of
all colors. After 1959, despite efforts to produce a more inclusive version of
a national culture, the emphasis on revolutionary conformity was accompanied by attempts to enforce an artificial homogeneity. The bid to create
revolutionary art forms had precedents in earlier attempts to demystify or
“refine” cultural expressions, harnessing them to a national agenda. Today
there is a growing awareness that unanimity and synthesis are no longer
requirements for inclusion within the revolutionary project, but that diversity of both cultural resources and sectors exists in society. The centrality of
Afro-Cuban religious and cultural practices is finally being acknowledged,
even by the revolutionary leadership. The íreme, with its identifiable African
antecedents, has now become a symbol of cubanidad (Cuban-ness).
Notes
1
The etymology of Abakuá is uncertain. According to C. Daryll Forde, the
Ejagham are called Abakpa; cited in Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the
Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage,
1984): 228. Tato Quiñones refers to abakwa as the name given by the Efiks
to the Kwa, a group that lived in the Calabar area; see Ecorie Abakuá (La
146
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Habana: Editorial Unión, 1994). Cf. Enrique Sosa Rodriguez, Los Ñáñigos
(La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1982): 120.
Enrique Sosa Rodriguez gives a number of possible etymologies, including
nyan nyan (Efik), to describe the to-and-fro movements of the leopard-man.
See “La Leyenda Ñáñiga en Cuba: Su Valor Documental,” Anales del Caribe
14–15 (1995): 33. Alejandro Rodríguez gives the original Carabalí name as
“Ñanguitua”, see Reseña Histórica de los Ñáñigos de Cuba desde su Creación a la
Fecha (La Habana, 24 July 1881, Fondo Asuntos Políticos), Leg. 76. Exp. 56,
Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana. The term ñáñigo is less commonly used
nowadays as it has acquired pejorative associations.
A. J. H. Latham, Old Calabar 1600–1891: The Impact of the International
Economy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973): 37, 49.
Cuban plantation records show that from 1760–1769, 25 percent of slaves
were designated Carabalí; by the 1810s they had become the largest group in
the sample, see Manuel Moreno Fraginals, “Africans in Cuba: A Quantitative Analysis of the African Population in the Island of Cuba,” Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 197–201.
Lydia Cabrera in El Monte (La Habana: Ed Si-Mar, 1996) lists “abayas,
suamas, eluyos, okankuas, isiekes, efís, áppapas, áppapas grandes (Ekoi) y
áppapas chiquitos (Efik), bibís, brinche, and brícamos.” Israel Moliner gives:
“abaló, abuya, acocuá, apapá, beron, bibí, bríkamo, efik, elugos, ibós, colas,
isueques, biafara and (I)suama.” See his study, “Los Cultos Zoolátricos,” in
Estudios Afro-cubanos, edited by L. Menéndez (La Habana: Universidad
de la Habana, 1990), vol.2: 381–401. The Carabalí had the reputation of
being industrious and avaricious. According to Henri Dumont, they tended
to work on the docks and make large amounts of money. Because of their
wealth, there were more free Carabalíes than any other African ethnic group
in Cuba. See Dumont, “Antropología y Patología Comparada de los Negros
Esclavos. Memoria Inédita Referente a Cuba,” Revista Bimestre Cubana 11
(1915): 15–30, 78–90.
David Eltis and David Richardson, “West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave
Trade: New Evidence of Long-run Trends,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997): 20.
Fernando Ortiz, Hampa Afro-cubana, los Negros Brujos: Apuntes para un
Estudio de Etnología Criminal (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1973 [1916]): 14.
Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 228.
The cabildos de nación were mutual aid societies, civil institutions whose
members were bozales (Africans), both slave and free. The colonial government’s divide-and-rule policy encouraged the maintenance of African ethnic
differences to discourage the slaves from uniting in rebellion. Thus, the
cabildos helped to preserve and revive African cultural and religious practices. Of the twenty-one cabildos in existence in Havana in 1755, five were
Carabalí. Sosa Rodriguez, Los Ñáñigos, 117ff, 190ff; and Cabrera, El Monte,
190ff. Members of these cabildos used to parade through the streets on Three
Kings wearing masquerades made of skins. A mention of Abakuá prior to the
147
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
1830s is found in Franco’s history of the Aponte plot of 1810. This referred
to documents with Abakuá secret signs and to Brigadier Narciso, a Haitian,
who took a secret Abakuá oath to join with Aponte and lead the rebels. Thus
Franco implied that Abakuá was already open to whites and free blacks as
well as slaves. José Luciano Franco, La Conspiración de Aponte (La Habana:
Publicaciones de Archivo Nacional LVIII, 1963): 30.
Kannan K. Nair, Politics and Society in Southeastern Nigeria 1841–1906: A
Study of Power, Diplomacy and Commerce in Old Calabar (London: Frank
Cass, 1972): 14.
These are masquerades that represent the spirits of the ancestors. Since the
demise of the Olokun festivals in Matanzas, they are the only masquerades
remaining in Afro-Cuban ritual. The word íreme originates from the irumu
(leopard-men); see Sosa Rodriguez, Los Ñáñigos, 120. In the past, íremes
were called diablitos (devils) by analogy with the masked devil pranksters
of the Corpus Christi processions in Seville. They were the most visible
African aspect of the processions on the Feast of Three Kings in colonial
Cuba. The Basque artist Victor Patricio de Landaluze (with Antonio Bachiller y Morales) produced a book of lithographs of popular Cuban types of
the 1850s and 1860s; see Tipos y Costumbres de la Isla de Cuba: Collección
de Artículos (Havana: Miguel de Villa, 1881). There are striking similarities
between photographs of masquerades from Calabar and the lithographs of
the íremes. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 260ff.
Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 242.
Latham, Old Calabar, 35; and Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 236, 243. The
sacred fish recalls the Ndem Efik or water god. The sacrifice of Sikán may
have its origin in the custom of sacrificing albino or light-colored girls to this
god. Among the Ejagham, Ngbe is a male society though they believe that
the leopard society was first a women’s society.
Pedro Díaz, “Para Iniciarse en la Sociedad ‘Abakuá’,” in Estudios Afro-cubanos,
edited by L. Menéndez (La Habana: Universidad de Habana, 1990), vol.2:
129–139.
Fernando Ortiz, Estudios Etnosociológicos (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias
Sociales, 1991): 129.
Obong means king in Efik but in the Ekpe secret society it refers to the
dignitaries or the “worshipful master,” by analogy with freemasonry, of each
grade; see Latham, Old Calabar, 39.
Ibid. In Africa, eyamba is the title of the president of Ekpe.
Rosalind Hackett, “Revitalization in African Traditional Religion,” in
African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society, edited by J. K. Olupona
(New York: Paragon House, 1991): 142–143. Cf. the Efik Ekpenyong is one
of the male ndem.
Tata-nganga = “Priest of palo monte.” Palo monte is a religious expression
derived from the Bakongo and related cultures brought to Cuba during the
slave trade.
148
20. Rodríguez, Reseña Histórica de los Ñáñigos de Cuba.
21. Sosa Rodríguez, Los Ñáñigos, 119. From Obutong (Old Town) on the banks
of one of the tributaries of the Cross River in Nigeria.
22. Fernando Ortiz, Los Cabildos y la Fiesta Afrocubanos del Día de Reyes (La
Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1992 [1921]); and Rafael Roche y
Monteagudo, La Policia y sus Misterios; Adicionada con “La Policia Judicial”,
Procedimientos, Formularios, Leyes, Reglamentos, Ordenanzas, y Disposiciones
que Conciernen a los Cuerpos de Seguridad Publica, 2nd ed. (Habana: Imprenta
y Papeleria de Rambla, Bouza y Ca, 1914): 18.
23. Sosa Rodriguez, Los Ñáñigos, 151.
24. Tato Quiñones, Ecorie Abakuá (La Habana: Editorial Unión, 1994): 38–39.
25. Cabrera, El Monte, 193.
26. Sosa Rodriguez, Los Ñáñigos, 141; and Latham, Old Calabar, 36. This
reflected the spirit of Abakuá’s origins as, according to tradition, Esien Ekpe
Oku, Eyamba I, the first president of Ekpe, bought the Ekpe secrets from
Archibong Ekindo of Usak Edet (Bakasi).
27. The Regla Kimbisa was a syncretic invention of the late nineteenth century
in which Petit combined that the most powerful elements of each practice in
Cuba: Catholicism, the regla de ocha, palo, and spiritism. Some regard it as an
effort by Petit to clean up and “elevate” Afro-Cuban practices.
28. Sosa Rodriguez, Los Ñáñigos, 142.
29. Ibid., 311; and Latham, Old Calabar, 49.
30. There was also a potencia in Matanzas, the Fi-Etete-Efi, whose members
were Chinese indentured laborers in Cuba, see Franco, cited in Sosa Rodriguez, Los Ñáñigos, 131.
31. According to Governor Rodríguez, the Carabalíes Apapá had a prohibition
on initiating whites and mulattoes: “These blacks (as always) guided by their
hatred for whites did not want mulattos to enter the Society as they said that
they had blood ties with whites, therefore not having pure blood like the
black man.” See Rodríguez, Reseña Histórica de los Ñáñigos de Cuba.
32. Quiñones, Ecorie Abakuá, 41.
33. Luis Alberto Pedroso, personal communication, Havana, January 1997.
34. It is important to remember the role of African institutions at the time.
Apart from conserving, recreating, and transmitting African cultures, they
were also political organizations for combatting slavery. The cabildos provided a cover for conspiratorial meetings and a structure for organizing
uprisings against the state.
35. Cited in Salvador Bueno (ed.), Costumbristas Cubanos del Siglo XIX (Caracas:
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985): 374.
36. In his novel, Los Crímenes de Concha: Escenas Cubanas (La Habana, Imprenta
de E. L. Casona, 1887), Cuban abolitionist Francisco Calcagno describes
ñáñigo initiation rites and Abakuá as a “black Mafia” and “savage freema-
149
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
sonry” as well as “a leftover from Africa, an incomprehensible urge to go
backwards” (83, 86–87).
Roche y Monteagudo, La Policia y sus Misterios en Cuba, 80–82.
Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–
1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995): 50, 82–85;
José Luciano Franco, “Antecedentes de las Relaciones entre los Pueblos de
Guinea y Cuba,” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 67 (1976): 9–10;
and Fernando Ortiz, Los Bailes y el Teatro de los Negros en el Folklore de Cuba
(La Habana: Editoral de Ciencias Sociales, 1985 [1951]): 441–442.
Sobre la regulación de la situación de los cabildos de negros de África (18791880). Enmienda, cited in Carmen Montejo Arrechea, Sociedades de Instrucción y Recreo de Pardos y Morenos que Existieron en Cuba Colonial: Período
1878–1898 (Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, 1993): 44.
Cited in Elias José Entralgo, La Liberación Étnica Cubana (La Habana:
Imprenta de la Universidad de la Habana, 1953): 172.
Montejo Arrechea, Sociedades de Instrucción y Recreo de Pardos y Morenos, 44.
Ibid., 42–43; and Ortiz, Los Cabildos y la Fiesta Afrocubanos del Día de Reyes, 11.
Juan Gualberto Gómez (1854–1933) was a mulatto, born of slave parents,
and educated in Paris. One of the most outstanding Afro-Cuban intellectuals of his time, he was a journalist and politician, who also acted as the Cuban
representative of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano, founded in the United
States by José Martí in 1892.
Helg, Our Rightful Share, 39; and Montejo Arrechea, Sociedades de Instrucción
y Recreo de Pardos y Morenos, 93.
Oilda Hevia Lanier, El Directorio Central de las Sociedades Negras de Color
1886–1894 (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1996): 15.
Hevia Lanier, El Directorio Central de las Sociedades Negras de Color, 25–27.
Sosa Rodríguez, Los Ñáñigos, 313. 318ff. Governor Rodríguez Arias, who
prohibited the ñáñigo comparsas in 1880, wrote a description of Abakuá
that displays a remarkably detailed knowledge of its history and practice.
There has been speculation that another governor, Rodríguez Batista, may
have been an Abakuá member, and also Chief of Police Trujillo Monagas
and his successor, Roche Monteagudo, see Fernando Ortiz, Los Instrumentos
de la Música Afrocubana (La Habana: Dirección de Cultura del Ministerio de
Educación), vol.4: 82; and vol.5: 205 and Cabrera, El Monte, 193.
George Brandon, “The Dead Sell Memories: An Anthropological Study of
Santería in New York City,” Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1983, 108.
Rafael L. López Valdés, Componentes Africanos en el Etnos Cubano (La
Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985): 158, 167.
Louis Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995): 106.
Helg, Our Rightful Share, 79–81, 90.
Franco, “Antecedentes”, 44.
150
53. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: Or the Pursuit of Freedom (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971): 242; and Helg, Our Rightful Share, 63–64.
54. By 1884 the U.S. received ninety percent of Cuba’s exports and also provided
capital for the sugar, mining, tobacco, and railway industries, see Marifeli
Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course and History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993): 15.
55. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 88ff; and Pérez, Cuba, 178.
56. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 92ff.
57. Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution
in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997):
31, 71, 94ff.
58. Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 30, 211–212.
59. Ernesto Álvarez Chávez, El Crimen de la Niña Cecilia: La Brujería en Cuba
como Fenómeno Social (1902–25) (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales,
1991). See also Álvarez Chavez, 1995; and Helg, Our Rightful Share.
60. Fernando Ortiz observed, “The drum bothers them less when it is a question of courting the lower class for political reasons.” See Ortiz, Los Cabildos
y la Fiesta Afrocubanos del Día de Reyes (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias
Sociales, 1992 [1921]): 22.
61. See appendix in Sosa Rodríguez, Los Ñáñigos.
62. Alejandro De la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race Inequality and Politics in
Twentieth-century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2001): 77, 360 n.100; and Helg, Our Rightful Share, 126, 146.
63. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 172, 178; and Tomás Fernández Robaina, El Negro
en Cuba 1902–1958: Apuntes para la Historia de la Lucha Contra la Discriminación Racial (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1994): 68ff.
64. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 194ff; and Pedro Serviat, El Problema Negro en
Cuba y su Solución Definitiva (La Habana: Ed. Editora Política, 1986): 74ff.
65. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 218; and de la Fuente, Nation for All, 75–76.
66. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 229ff, 147ff.
67. Relación de las piezas de convicción ocupadas en la Causa no 321/910 por
conspiración para la rebelión. Causa 321/910, Audiencia de La Habana
529–1, Juzgado Especial.
68. López Valdés, Componentes Africanos en el Etnos Cubano, 169ff.
69. Thomas, Cuba, 1179; Rosalie Schwartz, “The Displaced and the Disappointed: Cultural Nationalists and Black Activists in Cuba in the 1920s,”
Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at San Diego, 1977, 249; and
Pérez, Cuba, 243.
70. Fernández Robaina, El Negro en Cuba, (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1994): 135ff. Although the Communist Party was the only
Cuban political party to make race central to its platform, it followed the
Communist International’s definition of blacks as a national rather than a
151
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
racial minority. Hence the resolution at the Second Communist Congress
of 1934 proposed a zone of self-determination in Oriente, the region with
the highest proportion of blacks. This area was to be called the franja or faja
negra (black belt). Afro-Cubans rejected the proposal, insisting that they
were Cubans, not foreigners.
Thomas, Cuba, 1122.
Departamento de Orientación Revolucionaria, Partido Comunista de Cuba,
Tésis y Resoluciones. Primer Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba (La
Habana, Partido Comunista de Cuba, 1976): 235.
Partido Comunista, Tésis y Resoluciones, 468ff.
An article in the revolutionary Cuban press declared that “the Cuban
kingdom of the black gods is the final triumph of those blacks who, defeated
and sold, were wrenched from Africa by Spain.” See “Los Dioses Negros de
Africa,” Bohemia 53 (1960): 74.
“Prepárase el Primer Congreso Nacional Abacuá,” La Calle, 20 May 1960, 5.
“Ciencia y Religión, las Llamadas ‘Religiones Populares,’” Militante Comunista, May–June 1968, 45.
A report on the National Congress on Education and Culture, Granma, 1
May 1971, 2–3.
Ibid.
Aníbal Argüelles Mederos and Ileana Hodge Limonta, Los Llamados Cultos
Sincréticos y el Espiritismo: Estudio Monográfico sobre Su Significación Social en
la Sociedad Cubana Contemporánea (La Habana: Editorial Academia, 1991):
117, 205.
Ibid., 158–159.
Ibid., 167.
Partido Comunista de Cuba. Departamento de Orientación Revolucionaria.
IV Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba. Discursos y documentos. (La
Habana: Editora Política, 1992): 97. The La Coubre was a French ship that
carried munitions from Belgium to Cuba in 1960. It exploded in the Havana
docks, killing 75 people and injuring over 300. The explosion was believed to
have been the result of U.S. sabotage.
Ana Celia Perera Pintado, “La Regla Ocha: Sus Valores Religiosos en la
Sociedad Cubana Contemporánea,” paper presented at the Departamento
de Estudios Sociorreligiosos, Centre for Psychological and Sociological
Research, Havana, 1996, 4, 8ff.
Ana Celia Perera Pintado, “Cuba: Valores Religiosos y Cambio Social,”
paper presented at the Departamento de Estudios Sociorreligiosos, Centre
for Psychological and Sociological Research, Havana, 1995.
Interview, Havana, 24 January, 2003.
152
• 10 •
Revisiting the Identity of
Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus
Vassa, the African 1
Vincent Carretta
W
as Olaudah Equiano born in Africa, as he claims in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The
African. Written by Himself?2 First published in London in March 1789, his
autobiography was quickly and widely reviewed, and immediately became
a bestseller; a second edition appeared in 1789, and a ninth, the last published in the binomial author’s lifetime, in 1794. Selling his book primarily
by subscription, which required buyers to pay half the price of the book in
advance, the author controlled the means of production and distribution
of his book, and thus his public identity, even more than most autobiographers. In 1792 the newspapers, The Oracle and The Star, first raised what
I call the Equiano question: was Olaudah Equiano an identity revealed, as
the title of the autobiography implies, or an identity assumed by Gustavus
Vassa around 1789 for rhetorical (and financial) ends? Consequently, any
new information about the author’s life may cast significant light on the
author’s self-creation through the inclusion, exclusion, mis-remembering,
and perhaps even invention of evidence. For example, baptismal, naval,
and other archival records discovered since 1994 enable us to correct the
chronology of the author’s early years in slavery and raise the possibility
that he altered events in his early life for rhetorical purposes. More impor-
tantly, however, new evidence suggests that the author of The Interesting
Narrative may have gone well beyond simply suppressing or manipulating some facts: he may have fashioned, rather than recounted his African
beginnings, in the process hiding his birth in South Carolina.3
In the first known published review of The Interesting Narrative, Mary
Wollstonecraft noted the significance of the author’s nationality. Her comments in the May 1789 issue of The Analytical Review opened with the
observation that “The life of an African, written by himself, is certainly
a curiosity, as it has been a favourite philosophic whim to degrade the
numerous nations, on whom the sun-beams more directly dart, below the
common level of humanity, and hastily to conclude that nature, by making
them inferior to the rest of the human race, designed to stamp them with a
mark of slavery.” In the June 1789 issue of The Monthly Review, the anonymous reviewer of The Interesting Narrative called the book “very seasonable, at a time when negro-slavery is the subject of public investigation;
and it seems calculated to increase the odium that has been excited against
the West-India planters…” For this reviewer, too, the author’s nativity was
of primary significance: “We entertain no doubt of the general authenticity of this very intelligent African’s story…” Although the author of The
Interesting Narrative originally published his book without authenticating
documentation, he added reviews, including this one, and testimonials to
preface each of his subsequent editions.
Proslavery writers also recognized that The Interesting Narrative was
“calculated to increase the odium against the West-India planters” at a time
when parliament was actively considering bills to abolish the slave trade.
Yet, for three years the apologists for slavery left the authority of the work
and the binomial identity of its author unchallenged, watching the book
become a bestseller. The fourth edition alone, published in Dublin in 1791,
sold 1900 copies. On 25 and 27 April 1792, however, while the author was
in Edinburgh revising and promoting what would be the fifth edition of
the Narrative, the question of the author’s true identity was raised in two
London newspapers, The Oracle and The Star. The Oracle reported that “It is
a fact that the Public may depend on, that Gustavus Vassa, who has publicly
asserted that he was kidnapped in Africa, never was upon that Continent,
but was born and bred up in the Danish Island of Santa Cruz, in the West
Indies [now St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands]. Ex hoc uno disce omnes
[that one fact tells all]. What, we will ask any man of plain understanding,
must that cause be, which can lean for support on falsehoods as audaciously propagated as they are easily detected?” Suddenly, both sides of the
author’s binomial Afro-British identity had been challenged. But what was
at stake?
154
Revisiting the Identity of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African
In 1789 the author’s rhetorical ethos—his authority to speak as
a victim and eyewitness of slavery in Africa, the West Indies, North
America, Europe, and the Middle East—was dependent upon the African
nativity he claimed. His autobiography was offered and received as the
first extended account of slavery and the slave trade from a former slave’s
point of view. With the exception of his friend and sometime collaborator
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, who had published his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery in London in 1787, the author of The Interesting Narrative was the first writer of African descent to present his work
as self-authorized, proudly announcing on the title page that the book
was “Written by Himself.” Cugoano and his friend published their works
without any of the authenticating documentation or mediation by white
authorities that prefaces the works of Phillis Wheatley or Ignatius Sancho
or other black writers. Such acts of authentication reassured readers that
the claims of authorship were valid and implied that their words have been
supervised before publication. Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments went
unreviewed and unanswered, and hence his identity and authority went
unchallenged. The claim of authenticity by the author of The Interesting
Narrative, however, was quickly recognized by his readers to be fundamental to the effectiveness of the autobiography as a petition against the
Atlantic slave trade. An African who could write and publish with neither
the help nor the authorization of European intermediaries, and who could
attest from personal experience to the cruelty and inhumanity of the
Middle Passage and slavery, was prima facie evidence against the major
arguments made by contemporary apologists for slavery. Furthermore, the
binomial identity found on the title-page enabled the author to maintain
his British identity, signified by the name Gustavus Vassa given him in
slavery, as well as his newly announced African identity. Following the
author’s usual practice, henceforth in this chapter, I refer to him as Gustavus Vassa, except when he himself writes of his Olaudah Equiano identity.
Ironically, Vassa reverses the traditional rhetorical relationship between
authorizing white and authorized black writers. In his capacity as the victimized African Equiano, his descriptions of his experience of enslavement,
especially of his life in Africa and the horrors of the Middle Passage, serve
to verify and thereby validate much of the evidence conventionally cited
in abolitionist discourse. Vassa’s memory of Africa as a pastoral and idyllic
land corrupted by European contact reinforces a convention frequently
promoted by white abolitionists and disputed by apologists for slavery,
who contended that slavery rescued Africans from a brutal existence and
introduced them to Christianity and civilization.
155
Immediately recognizing the issues at stake in the challenge to his
identity made by The Oracle and The Star, Vassa prefaced the fifth and subsequent editions of his Narrative with a letter addressed “To the Reader”. He
counterattacked the “invidious falsehood [that] appeared in the Oracle…
with a view to hurt my character, and to discredit and prevent the sale of
my Narrative …” Typically, he was as concerned for his pocketbook as he
was for his integrity. Sales depended upon his authority, which derived
from his Afro-British identity. To defend his “character,” Vassa also added
a short list of the names of “those numerous and respectable persons of
character who knew me when I first arrived in England, and could speak
no language but that of Africa.”4 The first of these six names is that of “My
friend Mrs. Baynes, formerly Miss Guerin,”5 the former Mary Guerin, the
younger sister of Maynard and Elizabeth Martha Guerin. Michael Henry
Pascal’s will shows that the Guerins were his cousins.6
From the first edition on, Vassa tells us that he was born Olaudah
Equiano in 1745 in what is now Nigeria. After he “turned the age of eleven”
(46), he writes that he was kidnapped and enslaved by fellow Africans, who
sold him into slavery to Europeans “at the end of six or seven months” (54).
Following an unspecified amount of time waiting off the coast of Africa on
an “African snow”7 (63), his new enslavers transported him to Barbados in
the West Indies, a trip that usually took about two months. Having staid “in
this island for a few days; I believe not above a fortnight,” he was brought
“in a sloop” to Virginia, “up a river a good way from the sea” (62). The voyage
from Barbados to Virginia normally took three to four weeks. Approximately ten months had passed between his first capture in Africa and his
arrival in Virginia, according to his account. In Virginia, Mr. Campbell, a
local planter, bought the young slave. Three months later, Campbell sold
him to Pascal, a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy who had been given
leave to command the Industrious Bee, a commercial vessel. At this point,
Pascal’s new slave, soon renamed Gustavus Vassa, “could smatter a little
imperfect English,” enough “to understand [Pascal] a little” (64). Pascal
intended to give Vassa “for a present to some of his friends in England” (64).
After an unusually long “passage of thirteen weeks” (a transatlantic voyage
from Virginia to England generally took about eight weeks), Vassa arrived
at Falmouth, where, he tells us, he first saw snow. Vassa says that “[i]t was
about the beginning of the spring 1757 when I arrived in England” (67).
According to Vassa’s account, about sixteen months had elapsed between
his initial kidnapping in Africa and his arrival in England. He says that he
spent “some months” (69) more in Guernsey before coming to London and
meeting the Guerins in Westminster, where he was baptized in February
1759. Elizabeth Martha Guerin was Vassa’s godmother.
156
Vassa recognized that his memory of when he first reached England
was not precise: in the first four editions of his Narrative, he opens the
fourth chapter by observing that, at the beginning of 1759, “[i]t was now
between two and three years since I first came to England”; from the fifth
edition (1792) on, he revised this opening to read “between three and four
years” (77), perhaps in response to the challenge to his credibility by The
Oracle and The Star. As an editor of Vassa’s works, I have tried to verify at
least some of the many details and dates found in his Narrative. Because
my research has shown him to be remarkably accurate whenever his information can be tested by external evidence, his mistakes and omissions
become all the more fascinating and possibly therefore more significant.
Admiralty records in the National Archives at Kew, and surviving issues
of The Virginia Gazette lend support to Equiano’s credibility and prove
that he had an extraordinary memory. Having already been on leave from
the Royal Navy for six months, on 4 February 1752 Lieutenant Michael
Henry Pascal successfully petitioned to have his leave extended another
ten months because he “had Now the Command of a Merch[an]t Ship,
In the Virginia Trade.”8 On 5 June 1752 Pascal advertised a reward in The
Virginia Gazette for the return of four men, who had jumped ship from the
Industrious Bee (a total of ten crew members had sailed from London with
him in February 1752).9 The Admiralty Board further extended Pascal’s
leave, so that he might stay in “Virginia in the Merchant’s Service” for
additional twelve-month periods on 1 February 1753, 9 February 1754,
and 30 January 1755.10 However, as we shall see, by the last date Pascal was
already back in England.
Vassa’s comments that while in Virginia on Mr. Campbell’s plantation,
he “was a few weeks weeding grass” before he was “sent for to [Campbell’s]
dwelling house to fan him” (62) suggest that Vassa probably reached Virginia during the summer season (probably 1754). Pascal must have purchased Equiano from Campbell and renamed him Gustavus Vassa in early
September 1754 because on 14 December 1754, about “thirteen weeks”
later, the London newspaper The Public Advertiser reported the arrival of
the “Industrious Bee, [commanded by] Pascall, from [Newfoundland], at
Falmouth.” A stop at Newfoundland on the way from Virginia to avoid
crossing the Atlantic more directly during the hurricane season would
account for the unusually long voyage. Furthermore, surviving meteorological data prove that Equiano would have experienced snow in Falmouth during the winter of 1754–1755. Snow is infrequent enough to
be noteworthy in Cornwall, where imported palm trees thrive in the mild
climate. Analysis of the meteorological records kept by William Borlase,
Rector of Ludgvan, a small village approximately twenty-five miles west
157
of Falmouth, reveals that “[t]aking the winter periods into consideration
1754/55, 1769/70 were the snowiest” years in southern Cornwall during
the period 1753 to 1772.11
Colonial Office records in the British National Archives enable us
to identify with a high degree of probability the vessel that would have
brought Equiano from Africa to Barbados. The same archives allow us
to identify the one that would have brought him from there to Virginia
in mid-1754, if my calculations are accurate and Vassa’s account of his
life before meeting Pascal is true. The Ogden, a ship owned by Thomas
Stevenson and Co., cleared Liverpool, England, on 5 June 1753 to go to
Bonny on the Bight of Biafra, the main source of Igbo slaves in Africa,
seeking 400 slaves. Under James Walker’s command, the Ogden arrived at
Barbados on 9 May 1754, bearing a cargo of 243 enslaved Africans. On 21
May the sloop Nancy, owned by Alexander Watson of Virginia and commanded by Richard Wallis, left Barbados with 31 slaves and brought them
up the York river in Virginia on 13 June.12 Campbell very probably would
have bought Equiano soon thereafter.
The first hard evidence we have of Vassa’s existence is the appearance of his name on 6 August 1755 on the muster list of the Roebuck.13
Not surprisingly, prior to that date no documentary evidence of Vassa’s
existence has been found. The names of Pascal and Vassa’s young friend,
Richard Baker, appear on the muster book of the Roebuck on 18 and 28
June 1755, respectively. The muster and pay books of the Royal Navy are
reliable records of who was on which ships and at what time, whether
members of the crew or not, because the ships’ captains and pursers had to
account for all expenses incurred onboard. Although Baker is listed as Pascal’s servant, Vassa is not. He is identified as one of the eight servants of the
Captain, Matthew Whitwell, probably because, as a lieutenant, Pascal was
officially permitted only one servant. Vassa and/or Pascal may have first
met Whitwell when the latter was also operating in the waters of the coast
of Virginia as captain of His Majesty’s ship Triton. Like Pascal, Whitwell
had to deal with deserters during the early 1750s.14 The Admiralty Board
decided on 1 May 1754 that Whitwell should leave his station at Virginia
and return to England in mid-September 1754.15
September 1754 is two years earlier than the date Vassa offers in the Narrative for his entry into Pascal’s service, and December 1754 is much earlier
than when he places himself in England in the first four editions. Other evidence indicates that he was in England before “spring 1757.” Vassa tells us
that he saw Admiral John Byng during Byng’s trial, which took place aboard
the St. George in Plymouth between 27 December 1756 and 27 January
1757; and he served on the Savage, listed as “Gusta Worcester,” from 12 to
158
21 January 1757.16 Recorders of muster lists often attempted to spell foreignsounding names phonetically, with widely varying degrees of success. Vassa
was discharged from the Savage on 21 January at Deal, where he “remained
some short time” before Pascal ordered him to come to London.
Vassa may not have met the Guerins until February or March 1757,
about three and a half years after he says he had been kidnapped in Africa.
When they met he “could not stand for several months, and…was obliged to
be sent to St. George’s Hospital,” Westminster, where “the doctors wanted to
cut [his] left leg off…apprehending a mortification” (71) from the chilblains
he had probably suffered while serving on the Savage. An inflammation of
the ear, hand, or foot caused by exposure to moist cold, a chilblain in severe
cases could lead to ulceration of the affected extremity. Immediately following his recovery from chilblains, Vassa contracted smallpox, requiring
him to stay additional weeks in the hospital.17 Although we cannot establish exactly when in 1757 Vassa first met the Guerins, he had already been
in English-speaking environments for approximately three years when he
reached Westminster. On 10 November 1757 Vassa (“Vavasa”), fully recovered, joined Pascal aboard the Jason.18 During the next two years, he served
under Pascal mainly at sea aboard the Jason, the Royal George, and the Namur
before returning to London at the beginning of 1759.19
At this point, questions about the place and date of Vassa’s nativity first
arise. The parish register of St. Margaret’s church, Westminster, records the
baptism on 9 February 1759 of “Gustavus Vassa a Black born in Carolina
12 years old,” indicating a birth date of 1746 or 1747. During the eighteenth century, “Carolina” frequently encompassed both North and South
Carolina. Vassa himself may not have been responsible for the information
or misinformation regarding the place and date of his birth recorded at
his baptism, but the correct information was presumably available to the
future Mrs. Baynes, who Vassa later said first knew him as African. The
question of his place and date of birth comes up again in the historical
record. Vassa’s accounts of his voyages and military engagements while
serving Pascal during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1762) are almost all
verifiable and impressively accurate, so much so that he either must have
kept a journal or had a uniquely retentive memory. At a later point in
his recounted life, he tells us that he was keeping a journal during his
voyage to the Arctic. He fails to mention, however, that just before Pascal
reneged on his promise to free Vassa and instead sold him to a slave trader
bound for the West Indies at the end of 1762, “Gustavus Vassan” had been
promoted by Pascal to the rating, or rate, of able seaman. This was the
highest-paid, most skilled, and prestigious position below an officer in the
Navy. As Vassa’s owner, Pascal was, of course, financially interested in his
159
promotion. The salaries of both Pascal and Vassa were sent to the same
agent, and presumably ultimately into Pascal’s pocket.20 Consequently, we
cannot ignore the possibility that Vassa’s promotion may have reflected
Pascal’s self-interest rather than Vassa’s abilities as a seaman.
That Vassa returned to service in the navy after an eleven-year hiatus and
reentered with the same rating he had when he left indicates that Pascal’s
promotion of him was probably prompted by a combination of self-interest
and merit. Vassa tells us that seven years after he bought his freedom in the
West Indies, he joined the expedition led by Captain Constantine Phipps,
later Lord Mulgrave, seeking a northeast passage through the Arctic Ocean
in 1773. Yet in his account of the expedition he omits some information
that greatly complicates the Equiano question. Although Vassa tells us in
the Narrative that he “attended [Doctor Irving] on board the Race Horse,”
Alexander Mair is identified on the muster list as the “Surgeon’s Mate.”
The muster book of the Racehorse records the entry on board on 17 May
of “Gustavus Weston,” identified as an Able Seaman, aged 28, and born in
South Carolina.21 The 23 April–19 May 1773 muster list of the Racehorse
lists him as “Gustavus Feston,” indicating the recorder’s uncertainty about
the spelling and pronunciation of his name.
Gustavus Weston/Feston was certainly Gustavus Vassa. Weston and
Feston are both plausible approximate phonetic spellings of Vassa; the
rating, age, and birthplace are consistent with those of Vassa found in
earlier muster lists, in the Narrative itself, and in the parish register of
St. Margaret’s, Westminster; and Mulgrave was one of the original subscribers to The Interesting Narrative. The recorder of the Racehorse muster
was unlikely to have had either access to or interest in Vassa’s baptismal
record. Since the personal data probably came from Vassa himself, now a
free man, we must ask why, if he had indeed been born Olaudah Equiano
in Africa, he chose to suppress these facts. He was not obliged to do so. He
could have claimed any birthplace he wished. Among the Racehorse’s total
complement of ninety men, most were able seamen. Virtually every place
Vassa had lived or said he had lived was represented among the places of
birth included for his peers. For example, besides the many English, Irish,
and Scottish birthplaces recorded, one man lists London, one Virginia, and
three Philadelphia. Yet Vassa’s choices were not limited to the British isles
or Britain’s colonies. Twelve of the other able seamen were born in various
parts of continental Europe. Nor was there any clear reason for Vassa to
hide an African birth. As we can deduce from the names and places of birth
on the muster list, Vassa was one of at least three black men among the
Able Seamen on the Racehorse. Twenty-two-year-old Richard York (sometimes spelled Yorke on the lists) was born in “Guinea,” and thirty-year-old
160
Jonathan Syfax was born in “Madagascar.”22 The other Royal Naval vessel
on the expedition, the Carcass, which also had a complement of ninety
men, included at least one crewmember of African descent, twenty-threeyear-old Able Seaman Joseph Brown, born in “Madagascar.”
Vassa probably encountered his African-born former shipmate York
a few years later. York was serving under Captain Stair Douglass on the
Squirrel when Vassa sought Douglass’s protection in 1776 to enable him
to return to England.23 In fact, York may well have vouched for Vassa to
Douglass, the former owner of Julius Soubise, friend and correspondent
of Ignatius Sancho. Given Vassa’s apparent freedom to have chosen any
place of birth, his improbable choice of declaring himself an Igbo of the
improbable South Carolina paradoxically increases the probability that it
is true. Why else choose the colony that actively tried to avoid importing
Africans from the Bight of Biafra, in part because of their reputation for
trying to avoid slavery through suicide or flight, rather than, say, Virginia,
which preferred them? An Igbo-descended slave in South Carolina might
well have been sent to Virginia for sale.24
Assuming that the birth date of 1745 he gives in the Narrative is accurate, Vassa must have been younger than he claims when he left Africa,
younger still if he was born in 1746 or 1747, as the ages recorded at his
baptism and on his Arctic voyage suggest. A date of 1745, 1746, or 1747,
however, could only have been approximate for an undocumented birth in
either Africa or South Carolina. Documentary evidence indicates that he
was most probably between seven and nine years of age when Pascal first
met him in Virginia, and thus he would have been between six and eight
years old when he says he was initially kidnapped in Africa. Indeed, Vassa
remarks that he “was not put in fetters” during the Middle Passage because
of his “extreme youth” (58). Phillis Wheatley, who was approximately seven
or eight years old when she was brought from Africa to Boston on 11
July 1761, later pointed out that she remembered nothing of her native
language and little of Africa. In Vassa’s case, a confused memory of childhood events recounted some forty years later may explain the discrepancy between the ages and dates he records in his Narrative and external
documentary evidence. This explanation, however, seems unlikely, given
the extraordinary accuracy of his memory for details that can be checked
against the historical record.
The discrepancy may have been rhetorically motivated. Vassa may have
recognized that the younger he was thought to have been when he left
Africa, the less credible his memories of his homeland would be. Even
if Vassa was “a Black born in Carolina” rather than in Africa, he might
still have spoken “no language but that of Africa” when Pascal first met
161
him. During the first half of the eighteenth century, due to the low rate of
acculturation of slaves born in Lowcountry South Carolina, an African or
creole language, not English, was likely to be such a slave’s first language.25
If he was a native of Carolina, his account of Africa may have been based
on oral history and reading rather than on personal experience. The evidence regarding his place and date of birth is clearly contradictory and will
probably remain tantalizingly so. Wherever and whenever he had been
born, however, by the time he met the Guerins, Vassa should have been
quite proficient in English and thus not restricted to speaking only the
language “of Africa.” There can be no doubt that Vassa manipulated some
of the facts in his autobiography.
Besides the prefatory list of character references that the author added
to the fifth and subsequent editions, what evidence external to the Narrative do we have that the identity of Olaudah Equiano existed before the
name appeared in the first and subsequent editions of Vassa’s book? As far
as I have been able to discover, Vassa only twice used the name Equiano
elsewhere in the published or manuscript writings he produced before,
during, and after the imprints of the Narrative. He identifies himself as
Equiano in his solicitation for subscribers dated November 1788.26 And in
a cosigned letter published on 25 April 1789 in the newspaper The Diary;
Or Woodfall’s Register, writing as one of the “Sons of Africa”, he identifies
himself as “OLAUDAH EQUIANO, or GUSTAVUS VASSA” (344).
Several cosigners, including his friend “OTTOBAH CUGOANO, or
JOHN STUART,” also reclaim African identities that had been erased by
slavery and baptism. In all other cases, however, from the first entries of
his name in the muster lists of ships on which he served during the 1750s,
1760s, and 1770s, to his will drawn up in 1796, he is identified or identifies himself only as Gustavus Vassa. Very rarely was he, to my knowledge,
ever referred to or addressed as Equiano by others in print or manuscript
during his lifetime.27
Although after 1786 Vassa became increasingly well known to both
blacks and whites opposed to the African slave trade, none of them betrays
any familiarity with his identity as Equiano. In his published and unpublished correspondence after 1787, Vassa uses the epithets “the African,”
“the Ethiopian,” and a “Son of Africa” to identify himself, but he uses none
of these in any known work before 1787, including writings reproduced in
his autobiography. One of the leading abolitionists, Granville Sharp, who
knew Vassa personally as early as April 1779, when Vassa gave him one of
his books, refers in his journal on 19 March 1783 to “Gustavus Vassa, a
negro.” Sharp subscribed for two copies of the Narrative. Another leading
abolitionist and friend, James Ramsay, had probably known Vassa since
162
the period when they had both lived in the West Indies. In a manuscript
in the Rhodes House Library, Oxford, probably written in 1788, Ramsay
includes some of the African biographical details that would appear the
following year in Vassa’s Narrative.28 Yet Ramsay, who was also an original subscriber to the Narrative, never refers to Vassa as Equiano, and he
could not have met Vassa in the West Indies before 1763. Hence, Ramsay’s knowledge of Vassa’s early life very likely came from the adult Vassa
himself. From the evidence I have seen, the presence of the name Olaudah
Equiano on the subscription proposal and title page of the Narrative in
1789 must have come as a revelation to friend and foe alike of Gustavus
Vassa. They may have known that he claimed an African birth, but we
have no proof yet that they knew him as Olaudah Equiano before 1788.
As the evidence demonstrates, Vassa had no obvious reason before 1788
to suppress an African identity. Unless we argue that his memory of it was
repressed until then, the new evidence obliges us to at least consider the
possibility that The Interesting Narrative is an even more creative piece of
work than formerly thought.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
An earlier version of this essay appeared as “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” in
Slavery and Abolition 20 (1999); 96–105. We are grateful to the editor for
permission to publish this revised version. The current paper also includes
material published in “Questioning the Identity of Olaudah Equiano or
Gustavus Vassa, the African.” in The Global Eighteenth Century, edited by
Felicity Nussbaum, 226–235. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2003).
All quotations taken from Vincent Carretta, ed., The Interesting Narrative
and Other Writings (New York: Penguin USA, 1995), cited henceforth by
page number parenthetically within the text.
My biographical findings have obvious implications for the issues raised
by the Nigerian critic S. E Ogude about the assumed veracity of Equiano
and his reliability as a historical source on African life. See his study, “Facts
into Fiction: Equiano’s Narrative Reconsidered,” Research in African Literatures 13 (1982): 30–43. Ogude argues that because an eleven-year-old
was very unlikely to have the almost total recall Equiano claims, “Equiano
relied less on the memory of his experience and more on other sources” in
his account of Africa (32). In a second article, “No Roots Here: On the
Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano,” Review of English and Literary Studies
5 (1989): 1–16, Ogude denies that linguistic evidence supports Equiano’s
account. Arguments for Equiano’s memory of Africa have been made by
163
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Catherine Obianju Acholonu, “The Home of Olaudah Equiano—a Linguistic and Anthropological Search,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature
22 (1987): 5–16, and Paul Edwards and Rosalind Shaw, “The Invisible Chi
in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” Journal of Religion in Africa 19 (1989):
146–156. Despite Ogude’s skepticism about Equiano’s veracity, however, he
does not question Vassa/Equiano’s fundamental identity as an African. The
question remains, however, of what details about Africa were available to
him. As my essay demonstrates, the surviving documentary evidence shows
that Equiano’s astounding ability to remember details from his early life, at
least from the time he met Michael Henry Pascal on, is indisputable, but that
when he left Africa, he was probably much younger than eleven years old.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself, 5th ed. (Edinburgh: 1792): 5.
Ibid., 238.
PROB 11/1142, National Archives [hereafter NA], Kew.
A snow was the largest kind of two-masted eighteenth-century sailing vessel.
With square sails on both masts, it was similar to a brig, and used for both
commercial and military service.
ADM 1/2290; 3/62, NA, Kew.
ADM 7/87, NA, Kew.
ADM 3/63, NA, Kew.
J. Oliver, “William Borlase’s Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Meteorology and Climatology,” Annals of Science, 25 (1969): 309. I thank Joanna
Mattingly, assistant curator at the Cornwall Maritime Museum, for bringing
Oliver’s article to my attention.
I am deeply indebted to David Richardson for sharing with me information
from the Slave Voyage Database slave-trade statistics that enabled me to
identify the Ogden as the most probable vessel bearing Equiano from the
Bight of Biafra to Barbados by comparing the Voyage Database with Walter
Minchinton, Celia King, and Peter Waite, eds., Virginia Slave-Trade Statistics 1698–1775 (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1984): 155; and the
information Equiano gives us about his arrival in Virginia. The sloop Nancy,
built in Virginia in 1753, which most likely brought him to Virginia from
Barbados, was not the same slave-trading sloop Nancy, built in Massachusetts Bay in 1762, on which Vassa, then owned by Robert King, sailed under
the command of Thomas Farmer in 1766. See Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–1935), vol.4: 620. I gained
access to some of the relevant National Archives (Kew) records, particularly
CO 28/30 dd 61–dd 76, through the Virginia Colonial Records Project
Database at The Library of Virginia.
ADM 36/6472, NA, Kew.
Virginia Gazette, 9 May, 8 August, and 19 September 1751.
164
15. Whitwell died on 15 February 1789, little more than a month before the
publication of The Interesting Narrative.
16. ADM 36/6573, NA, Kew.
17. Unfortunately, records of regular admissions and releases from St. George’s
Hospital during this period do not exist. I am very grateful to Terry Gould,
archivist at the St. George’s Hospital Library and Archive, for checking the
available records for me.
18. ADM 36/6365, NA, Kew.
19. ADM 36/5743 and 36/6253, NA, Kew.
20. ADM 32/5, NA, Kew.
21. ADM 36/7490, NA, Kew.
22. Although the muster books do not identify crew members by ethnicity, even
if we did not know that Jonathan Syfax was born in Madagascar we could
deduce from his name that he was a person of African descent and probably
a former slave. Slave owners frequently ironically named their slaves after
important classical or modern European figures; e.g., Pompey, Soubise, or
Gustavus Vassa, to emphasize their own power over them. Syphax was a
Numidian hero who fought the Carthaginians, though Vassa’s shipmate may
have been named after the Numidian soldier in Joseph Addison’s tragedy
Cato (1713).
23. ADM 36/9078, NA, Kew.
24. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of
African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998): 114–122, calculates that in the period
1733–1807 only about two percent of South Carolina’s Africans originated
from the Bight of Biafra, as contrasted with Virginia, which imported more
than forty percent of its slaves from that region during the same period.
25. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998): 465.
26. A surviving copy of the subscription proposal for the first edition of The
Interesting Narrative, to which Josiah Wedgwood subscribed, includes a
holograph note to Wedgwood signed “Gustavus Vassa—The African”; see
74/12632, Wedgwood papers, Keele University Library. I am grateful to Dr.
Mark Jones who recently found the proposal among the Wedgwood papers,
and very kindly sent me a photocopy of it.
27. I am very grateful to John Barrell for bringing to my attention one such
example, in William Gifford’s footnote to line 263 of his The Baviad, A Paraphrastic Imitation of the First Satire of Persius (London: R. Faulder, 1791),
a satire on the fashion for silly love poetry exemplified by Robert Merry
(1755–1798) who wrote under the pseudonym “Della Crusca”: “What the
ladies may say to such a swain, I know not; but certainly [Merry] is prone to
run wild, die, &c. &c. Such indeed is the combustible nature of this gentle165
man, that he takes fire at every female signature in the papers: and I remember that when Olaudo [sic] Equiano (who, for a black, is not ill-featured)
tried his hand at a soft sonnet, and by mistake subscribed it Olauda, Mr.
Merry fell so desperately in love with him, and ‘yelled out such syllables of
dolour’ in consequence of it, that ‘the pitiful-hearted’ negro was frightened at
the mischief he had done, and transmitted in all haste the following correction to the editor–‘For Olauda, please to read Olaudo, the black MAN’.”
28. James Ramsay Papers, MSS BRIT EMP.S.2.
166
• 11 •
Autobiography and Memory:
Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah
Equiano, the African 1
Paul E. Lovejoy
Ex hoc uno disce omens – this one fact tells all
The Oracle, 25 April 1792
T
he Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, published in 1789 at the time of
Parliamentary hearings into the slave trade, played a key role in the abolition of the British slave trade. Its author promoted the abolitionist cause
on speaking tours and through political action, and hence was clearly a
strong voice that ultimately was heeded in abolition in 1807, alas a decade
after his death in 1797. 2 The Interesting Narrative went through nine editions by 1794 and, at the time, was perceived as “a principal instrument
in bringing about the motion for a repeal of the Slave-Act,” although in
fact the motion before Parliament was introduced in January 1789 and
the Interesting Narrative was only published in March.3 Nonetheless, the
book was influential in shaping public opinion thereafter and therefore
was important in the ultimate withdrawal of Britain from the slave trade.
It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Olaudah Equiano, alias Gustavus Vassa,
the “African,” has been described as the “the vanguard of the Abolition-
ist movement in England.”4 Certainly his stature, as perceived through
historical hindsight if not always appreciated, was comparable to that of
Ramsay, Sharp, Clarkson and Wilberforce. And with the possible exception of Ottobah Cugoano, there was no other African in London who
commanded such respect as a spokesperson for black people, whether
African born or descendents of those forcibly removed from Africa.
My concern is with the relationship between autobiography and memory,
and I focus specifically on Vassa’s claim that he was an African, born in
the interior of the Bight of Biafra where he only spoke the Igbo language
and where he was exposed to the culture that has come to be recognized as
Igbo.5 Despite the existence of documentation that refutes his claim to an
African birth, it is argued here that circumstantial evidence indicates that
he was born where he said he was, and that in fact The Interesting Narrative
is reasonably accurate in its details, although of course subject to the same
criticisms of selectivity and self-interested distortion that characterize the
genre of autobiography. The existence of records that indicate he was born in
South Carolina has implications for understanding the relationship between
autobiography and memory, and the reasons that individuals remember
what they do and the ways in which memory is confirmed and embellished,
and in this case perhaps distorted for reasons worth considering.
The problem of deciphering the early life of the author of The Interesting Narrative hinges on his name: Equiano or Vassa, what is he to be
called? He says that his African birth name was Olaudah Equiano, with
his slave name being Gustavus Vassa. Here the man is referred to as Vassa,
because that was the name he used himself, as evidenced in his baptism,
his naval records, marriage certificate, and will. The name Equiano will be
reserved for the subject of his autobiography – himself. In the Interesting
Narrative Vassa often reveals what he chose, consciously or unconsciously,
to select from his memory, and there are gaps in information that indicate
some things that he wanted to forget. Where he was born was not one of
these, and he states clearly that he was born in Africa – in “in a charming
fruitful vale, named Essaka.” What is the significance, then, of documentation that says other wise, and why is it relevant where and when he was
born? Where this prominent political activist and intellectual came from
was questioned in his own time, although in that context the charges that
he faked his account of his childhood were clearly fictitious and malicious.
More recently, Vincent Carretta has challenged the authenticity
of Vassa’s account of his childhood, this time based on the discovery of
important documentary evidence that he may have been born in South
Carolina.6 According to Carretta,
168
Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano
Recent biographical discoveries cast doubt on Equiano’s story
of his birth and early years. The available evidence suggests that
the author of The Interesting Narrative may have invented rather
than reclaimed an African identity…. Baptismal and naval
records say that he was born in South Carolina around 1747.
If they are accurate, he invented his African childhood and his
much-quoted account of the Middle Passage on a slave ship.7
The issue is clear: are his descriptions of his experiences of Africa and
the notorious “Middle Passage” fabricated or are they derived from his
personal experience? It might be argued that it doesn’t matter that much in
terms of Vassa’s impact on the abolition movement, which was profound,
because a fictionalized account of his childhood might be just as effective for political purposes to garner support for the abolitionist cause as
an account that was in fact the truth. Carretta has even argued that the
fictitious nature of the first part of The Interesting Narrative is all the more
important, demonstrating Vassa’s great skill as a writer. However, it does
matter whether or not he told the truth, since he has been widely recognized as an African, and his political clout was based on this very detail. As
his critics in The Oracle of 1792 stated clearly, “Ex hoc uno disce omens – this
one fact tells all.”8 That he was a great writer is not in question; where
he was born is the relevant question. The contradictions in the claims of
the various sources are worthy of reflection because of the methodological
issues of how conflicting evidence is assessed.
Vassa’s Interesting Narrative was a powerful influence on public opinion
in his day, and in recent times, the book has been deemed one of the most
significant examples of the surviving memory of the slave trade. According
to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Interesting Narrative “became the prototype
of the nineteenth-century slave narrative.” 9 Despite its inspirational value
before 1807, it has been thought that the book experienced a long period
of relative obscurity after British abolition, and consequently, Vassa’s contribution to the abolition movement has been overlooked and sometimes
trivialized.10 The book was “rediscovered” in 1960, when Thomas Hodgkin
published an excerpt in his collection of sources, Nigerian Perspectives.11
Historians, anthropologists and literary scholars were then quick to note
its importance, relying on The Interesting Narrative for information on mid
eighteenth century life in the interior of the Bight of Biafra.12 In 1967,
the anthropologist G.I. Jones published annotated excerpts on the African
dimension of the account, while Paul Edwards produced the first modern
version of the text. The eminent Nigerian historian, A.E. Afigbo, intended
to publish a critical edition, but the Nigerian Civil War intervened, and
his introductory essay only was published in Ropes of Sand in 1981.13 Some
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scholars have insisted that Vassa’s account is important because there is
virtually no other information on the interior of the Bight of Biafra in the
eighteenth century. This is a pessimistic view of available source material.
Historians have generally relied on Vassa’s account because it is one of the
few readily accessible sources, to be sure, but there is considerably more
information on the Bight of Biafra and its interior than is generally recognized because this region was one of the major sources of enslaved Africans
taken to the Americas, and especially for the British trade.14 Nonetheless,
as Adam Hochschild has noted, since the “rediscovery” of Vassa’s account
in the 1960s, “scholars have valued it as the most extensive account of an
eighteenth-century slave’s life” and the passage from slavery to freedom.15
The Middle Passage imagery derived from Vassa’s account has been
widely cited and reprinted. As Louise Rolingher has argued, “anthropologists and Igbo nationalists have…shown a keen interest in Olaudah and
his narrative, [but] by far the greatest interest has come from scholars of
comparative, English, and American literature, and more recently, those
of cultural studies. Their focus has been…[on] his Narrative as a part of
an American literary genre.”16 Gates has stated that the Interesting Narrative “created the first large audience for any black writer in America,”
and popularity only increased in the last third of the twentieth century.17
As James Walvin has argued, Equiano’s identity in his adult life was with
England and more generally with the British-dominated “Black Atlantic,”
and it would perhaps be more accurate to state that he was the first black
person to command a large audience foremost in Britain and not focus
only on the newly independent United States of America.18
The issue of authenticity was recognized in Vassa’s time. In a letter to
William Hughes, Bath, October 10, 1793, William Langworthy, recommending Vassa and his book, noted that “the simplicity that runs through
his Narrative is singularly beautiful, and that beauty is heightened by the
idea that it is true; this is all that I shall say about this book.”19 The emphasis
on truth was in the original. Langworthy noted “the active part he [Vassa]
took in bringing about the motion for a repeal of the Slave Act, [which]
has given him much celebrity as a public man; and, in all the varied scenes
of chequered life, through which he has passed, his private character and
conduct have been irreproachable.” Vassa was “engaged in so noble a cause
as the freedom and salvation of his enslaved and unenlightened countrymen.” If he was not born in Africa, then he lied, perhaps with noble political motives, but nonetheless propagating a falsehood, since kidnapping and
sale into slavery were the central features of his autobiography, intended
for political reasons to advance the cause of abolition. His book sold well
because he was an “authentic” African.
170
But what is to be believed in The Interesting Narrative? Where he was
born is perhaps the most crucial element in the narrative. The reliance on
memory as portrayed in this autobiography is the issue being addressed
here. What did he remember? What did he forget? What is not clear?
What did he hide? According to his own assessment of his autobiography,
My life and fortune have been extremely chequered, and my
adventures various. Even those I have related are considerably abridged. If any incident in this little work should appear
uninteresting and trifling to most readers, I can only say, as my
excuse for mentioning it, that almost every event of my life
made an impression on my mind, and influenced my conduct.
I early accustomed myself to look at the hand of God in the
minutest occurrence, and to learn from it a lesson of morality
and religion; and in this light every circumstance I have related
was to me of importance.20
His observation certainly extended to the name that he was given, probably with some degree of humility because of its significance, but which he
adopted and exploited for political ends.
He claims that when his master, Michael Henry Pascal, gave him the
name Gustavus Vassa at age 12 while crossing the Atlantic in 1754, he
“refused to be called so.” He apparently had not objected to the names he
had been given earlier – Michael on board the slave ship, and then Jacob
in Virginia – and he could not possibly have known who his namesake
was in 1754, but when he “refused to answer to my new name, which
at first I did, it gained me many a cuff; so at length I submitted, and by
which I have been known ever since.”21 I would suggest that his apparent
reluctance is probably a literary device to make the point that his destiny
was predetermined. The choice of name seems to have been prophetic,
since his namesake was none other than the Swedish national hero, Gustavus Vasa (1496-1560), king of Sweden (1523-60), founder of the modern
Swedish state and the Vasa dynasty.22 Known as Gustavus Eriksson before
his coronation, King Gustavus I was the son of Erik Johansson, a Swedish
senator and nationalist, who was killed in the massacre at Stockholm in
1520, under the orders of King Christian II of Denmark, attempting to
assert his control over Sweden under the Kalmar Union. Gustavus was
imprisoned but escaped to lead the peasants of Dalarna to victory over the
Danes, being elected protector of Sweden in 1521. In 1523 the Riksdag at
Strangnas elected him king, ending the Kalmar Union.
Two centuries later, English playwright Henry Brooke recorded
these heroic deeds in his play, Gustavus Vasa, The Deliverer of his Country,
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published in 1739. The play was banned for political reasons and was not
actually staged in London until 1805, in Covent Garden. However, it was
performed in Dublin in 1742 as The Patriot, and it was republished in
1761, 1778, 1796, and 1797. According to Vincent Carretta, “republication…kept the play and its discourse of political slavery before the British
public.”23 Moreover, the example was also kept before the public because
the reigning king of Sweden from 1771 until his tragic death in 1792 was
the popular Gustavus Vasa III, who was murdered by Count Ankarstrom
at an opera, dying of wounds on March 29, 1792. The tragedy became the
inspiration for Giuseppe Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera. The significance of
the name Gustavus Vassa as an African figured into the London imagination as an image of an African Moses comparable to the Swedish model.
Did Vassa shun his assigned name, and the fate that was bestowed
upon him as a leader of his people in the abolitionist cause? A careful
reading of his protestations confirms the view that opposition to his name
was a literary device, an act of overt modesty, not the reaction of a precocious pre-teen expressing his resistance. He always used the name Gustavus Vassa, even after publication of his Interesting Narrative in which he
popularized his birth name as Equiano, which appears to be derived from
Ekwuno, Ekweano, Ekwoanya, or Ekwealuo, all common Igbo names.24
In the first edition, Vassa stated that he “was obliged to bear the present
name [Vassa], by which I have been known ever since,”25 while in the 9th
edition in 1794, he only stated that it was the “name I have been known
ever since.” According to Carretta,
except for its appearance on the title page, the name Olaudah
Equiano was never used by the author of The Interesting Narrative in either public or private written communication. Whether
in print, unpublished correspondence, or in his will, he always
identified himself as Gustavus Vassa.26
Carretta’s claim requires a slight qualification, which he makes himself.27
He did use his birth name Equiano on other occasions, but apparently
never alone. He identified himself with both names in soliciting subscriptions in November 1788, again in co-signing a letter published 25 April
1789, writing as one of the “Sons of Africa,” and in a letter dated May
14, 1792, Grosvenor Street, to “the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the
Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain.” Otherwise, his marriage
certificate, his will, and the rental agreement for his flat in Plaisterers,” Hall,
near the London City Wall, are all in the name of Vassa, as is virtually all
other documentation.28 Why scholars and the student public have used his
“African” name, rather than the name he actually used, is a subject worthy of
172
reflection. It says more about those who identify with the idea of “Equiano”
than about the life of Vassa. In the case of Vincent Carretta’s biography,
however, it is clear that the title, Equiano, the African, Biography of a Self
Made Man, plays to the idea that Vassa was not born in Africa but created
the story of Equiano and an African birth. Carretta suggests that Vassa was
born in South Carolina and hence was not a native of Igbo land.
Vassa, however, appears to have attached significance to his assigned
name because it drew on public knowledge of the history of his Swedish
namesake. He seems to have interpreted his experiences in the context
of his perception of destiny, which derived from a religious conceptualization based on his childhood acculturation as Igbo. As Paul Edwards
and Rosalind Shaw have demonstrated, the concept of “chi” pervaded Igbo
cosmology and was a factor in the psychology of Vassa.29 As a child, he
would have learned that the relationship of an individual with the supernatural was special, depending upon a personal chi. As he stated in The
Interesting Narrative, “I regard myself as a particular favourite of Heaven,
and acknowledge the mercies of Providence in every occurrence of my
life.”30 His apparent reluctance when named Vassa appears to have been
related to the necessity of accepting his fate. Indeed his comments on his
personal destiny are consistent with this interpretation. On board ship to
England with his new master, Pascal, he noted that he was “still at a loss
to conjecture my destiny.” He wanted to return to Africa, but he came
to accept the fact that he “was reserved for another fate.”31 His recognition of this Igbo philosophical construct must have become more coherent
to Vassa as he grew older and reflected on his life. He was, after all, the
acknowledged leader of the black poor of London and he was determined
to lead his people out of bondage.
The apparent cracks in the Equiano edifice discovered by Vincent Carretta arise from two documents, both of which indicate that he was born
in South Carolina, rather than in West Africa.32 The fact that there are
two independent documents that claim a Carolina birth seems irrefutable
proof that his own story of his youth is fanciful, or this is what Carretta
concludes. The first document is his baptismal record from St. Margaret’s
Church, London, 9 February 1759, and the second is the muster book of
the ship, Racehorse, from the Arctic expedition of Phipps in the summer of
1773. According to Carretta,
…. surprisingly, his baptismal record in 1759 and naval records
from his Arctic voyage in 1773 suggest that he may well have
been born in South Carolina, not Africa. External contradictions are especially intriguing because Equiano’s account of
his life is generally remarkably verifiable when tested against
173
documentary and historical evidence, so much so that deviations from the truth seem more likely to have been the result of
artistic premeditation than absentmindedness. From the available evidence, one could argue that the author of The Interesting
Narrative invented an African identity rather than reclaimed
one.33
The entry in the parish register for St. Margaret’s Church for 9 February 1759 reads: “Gustavus Vassa a Black born in Carolina 12 years old.”34
Besides contradicting Vassa’s autobiography and his claim to an African
birth, this information is at odds with the age he gives for when he was
enslaved (11) and for when he arrived in England (12), which was in
1753-54, a difference of more than four years, and even different from his
original assertion that he first arrived in England in 1757.
In the muster book of the Racehorse, Gustavus Vassa is not listed, but
a Gustavus Weston, identified as a seaman, aged 28, born in South Carolina, is listed. The muster roll confirms that Vassa was on board, which we
already knew from The Interesting Narrative.35 The more important question is what Vassa was doing on board. He was not an “ordinary seaman,” as
listed in the muster roll and noted without comment by Carretta. He was
Dr. Charles Irving’s assistant in his experiments in distilling sea water, the
significance of which is discussed below, as is the identity of Dr. Irving.36
Carretta has attempted to resolve the contradictions in the chronology
of Vassa’s early life by explaining that he was probably born in 1747 rather
than 1745, and in any event was younger when he arrived in England than
what is claimed in The Interesting Narrative. Hence not only where he was
born is contested, but when. According to Carretta,
…assuming that the birth date of 1745 in the Narrative is accurate, Vassa must have been younger than he claims when he left
Africa, younger still if he was born in 1746 or 1747, as the ages
recorded at his baptism and on his Arctic voyage suggest….
The documentary evidence indicates that he was most probably
between seven and nine years of age when Pascal first met him
in Virginia, and thus he would have been between six and eight
years old when he says he was initially kidnapped in Africa.37
If the baptismal record is accurate and he was 12 in February 1759, he
would have been born in 1747, as Carretta concludes, but the evidence of
the Arctic expedition is not the same, as Carretta claims, Vassa testifying
that he was 28 in 1773, suggesting a birth date in 1745, as he states in his
Narrative. In my opinion, Vassa guessed when he was born, based on his
174
own calculations of when he arrived in England and his baptismal date,
1759. In 1773, he thought he was 28, and hence born in 1745, which
makes the evidence of the Arctic muster book consistent with the chronology of his early childhood as he initially published it in the first edition of
The Interesting Narrative. When he was writing in 1788, he thought that it
was “about the beginning of the year 1757 when I arrived in England, and
I was near twelve years of age at the time,” when in fact it was December
1754, a mistake he corrected in a subsequent edition of his Interesting Narrative without changing his estimated date of birth. Hence he estimated
that he was almost 12 when he arrived in England, which is consistent
with his estimate of his age when he was kidnapped, at age 11. He must
have thought he was 14 when he was baptized, not 12, as recorded, because
he thought he had arrived in England in 1757. In fact, he would have been
at least 16, not 12, since he actually arrived in England in December 1754.
But what did Vassa say about his early life, and what was the chronology
of this period? After “he turned the age of eleven” he was kidnapped, and
eventually sold to a British slave ship “at the end of six or seven months,”
eventually reaching Barbados, where he remained only “a few days,…not
above a fortnight,” before being taken to Virginia. In the summer of 1754,
one Mr. Campbell purchased him for his tobacco farm, but three months
later, he sold the boy to Michael Henry Pascal, who at the time was captain
of the merchant ship Industrious Bee, which arrived in England in December 1754. As Carretta has demonstrated, Pascal was in Virginia in 1754,
not in 1756, more than two years earlier than Vassa recounted in the first
editions of the Narrative. Hence, the various editions of The Interesting
Narrative give confusing and contradictory dates for the period 1754-57.
Vassa initially claimed that he had been in England “between two and
three years” before his baptism in 1759, but in the 1792 edition, he revised
this to read “between three and four years,” which is consistent with the
known facts about the date of his arrival in late 1754. The difference in
a couple of years is significant because it affects what Vassa might have
remembered and what he might have fabricated. According to Vassa’s own
chronology, it was about 16 months from the time of his kidnapping until
his arrival in England in mid December 1754, initially spending “some
months” in Guernsey.38
There is no reason to assume that Vassa’s estimated date of birth in
1745 is accurate, or that the date on the baptismal record is correct, which
would indicate that he was born in 1747. The adjustments in Vassa’s recollection of when he first reached London can be explained as the attempt
of the adult Vassa to reconstruct his childhood. While his baptism and
his enlistment on the Arctic expedition are not the only evidence that
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information about his life was sometimes inaccurate, it is another matter
to assume that he consciously misled virtually everyone he knew about his
place of birth. Why not assume that the age he remembered at the time
of his enslavement is approximately correct, as are his recollections of key
events during the Seven Years’ War in 1756-63, and by extension backward, to his purchase by Pascal in 1754? I do not think Carretta is correct
that “if and when he left Africa he was probably much younger than eleven
years old.” If in fact Vassa was born in Africa, there is little reason to doubt
Vassa’s estimate of his age of enslavement at age 11. As a boy, Vassa was
not put in fetters on board the slave ship, suggesting that he was as young
as 11-12. After checking dates in The Interesting Narrative provided by
Vassa, not surprisingly, it can be seen that Vassa was sometimes mistaken.
However, this information does not necessarily mean that he was younger
than he claimed when he entered Pascal’s service, as Carretta has assumed.
The internal evidence suggests that he was using his age of enslavement as a constant in his efforts at chronological reconstruction, not his
date of birth. Thus if he was about eleven when he was enslaved and twelve
when he reached England, it means that he was most likely born in 1742
or 1743, perhaps three years before he reckoned, rather than two years
afterwards, not in 1745 or 1747. The first convincing documentation on
his age and hence date of birth is from 1753-54, when he was enslaved
and taken to Virginia via Barbados, taking an estimated sixteen months to
reach England after being kidnapped. If this had happened at age 11, he
would have been 12 when Pascal bought him, 17 when he was baptized,
and 20 in 1762 when Pascal sold him back to the West Indies after the
end of the Seven Years’ War, 24, when he gained his freedom in 1766, 31
when he was on the Arctic expedition in 1773, 47 when he published the
Interesting Narrative, and 55 when he died in 1797. Accepting his testimony that he was 11 when he was enslaved eliminates Carretta’s critique
of how much a boy of seven or eight could remember. At 11, one does not
usually forget language and by then one has been introduced into many
facets of culture and society, more than at 7 or 8. What Vassa says he
remembers is more consistent with the memory of an 11 year old than
someone younger.39
The methodological issue becomes, then, why it is best to accept his
estimate of how old he was when he was kidnapped, rather than some
other benchmark. Of course this assumes that he was telling the truth that
he was kidnapped, and not inventing a story when in fact he was born
in South Carolina. Memory, autobiography and what actually happened
are not the same, and hence the attempt to chronicle Vassa’s childhood is
indeed fraught with uncertainties and hence subject to interpretation. On
176
the one hand there are two documents that confirm a Carolina birth, and
on the other hand, there is cultural information contained in The Interesting Narrative sufficient to question the veracity of the baptismal record
from St. Margaret’s Church in London and the naval records of the Arctic
expedition, although it cannot be denied that the existence of two independent documents stating a Carolina birth appear to be conclusive proof
that he was not born in Africa.
In my opinion, however, a careful reading of the linguistic, geographical, and cultural details provided by Vassa leaves little doubt that he was
born in Africa, and specifically in Igboland. In methodological terms,
written documentation confronts oral sources and traditions, as related
through the memories of an individual and filtered with acquired information from a variety of sources.
Vassa states that “I was born, in a charming fruitful vale, named Essaka.”
Very possibly, this is to be identified with Isseke, in Orlu, in central Igboland. As Catherine Obianju Acholonu has argued, numerous cultural and
linguistic similarities between Orlu and Vassa’s description lend support
to this identification.40 It has also been suggested that “Essaka” is to be
identified as Nsukka, in northern Igbo country, again on the basis in the
similarity of names.41 Cultural features, most especially, the use of ichi scarification, the veneration of pythons, the use of anchor-shaped money, and
the practice of celebrating two ceremonies before the yam harvest could
well be based on Vassa’s own memory, probably embellished with information that he learned from other Igbo speakers in London but nonetheless
deriving from his own experience. The cultural features that Vassa recounts
were very probably characteristic of many parts of Igboland in the eighteenth century, although this is based on later information that is being
read backwards in time. Hence any identification should be treated with
caution, but the area of central or northern Igboland seems most likely,
rather than the area west of the Niger that was subject to Benin, despite
Vassa’s initial reference to Benin.42 The identification is uncertain because
Vassa earlier stated, in a letter in June 1788, almost a year before the publication of the Interesting Narrative, his desire “to return to my estate in
Elese, in Africa,” where he would greet the “worthy senators there, as the
Lord liveth, we will have such a libation of pure virgin palm-wine, as shall
make their hearts glad!!!”43 The reference to “Elese” is unclear, but possibly
also refers to “Essaka.”
Vassa described “Essaka” as being “in one of the most remote and
fertile” provinces of the Kingdom of Benin, and identified this province
in the first edition as “Eboe,” a detail deleted in all subsequent editions.
On the basis of the Benin reference, G.I. Jones has suggested “Essaka”
177
was likely to be in northern Ika country, west of the Niger River, although
there is no place there that resembles the name.44 Vassa did not know
the distance between Essaka and the capital of Benin, but on the basis
of his memory, he thought that “our subjection to the king of Benin was
little more than nominal; for every transaction of government, as far as my
slender observation extended, was conducted by chiefs or elders.”45 This
reference to Benin almost certainly was derived from his later knowledge
of Africa, and it is very likely that he was trying to place his home in the
framework of his understanding of African geography. Specifically, he was
influenced by the tracts of the American Quaker, Anthony Benezet, who
wrote about the Kingdom of Benin but had nothing at all to say about
Igboland or its people, although sometimes it is claimed that Benezet
influenced what Vassa wrote about Igbo society and culture.46 Vassa seems
to have transposed what he learned later onto his childhood memory,
since there was almost certainly no connection between his home and the
Kingdom of Benin.
Vassa states that his village relied on a system of government which
he identified as “embrenché.” According to Vassa, “every transaction of the
government...was conducted by chiefs or elders of the place.... My father
was one of those elders or chiefs…, and was styled Embrenché; a term,
as I remember, importing the highest distinction, and signifying in our
language a mark of grandeur.”47 Afigbo equates the term with ndichie or
elders, and which sometimes has the meaning is “ancestors,” and notes
Vassa’s confusion in conflating the term for ritual scarification and elders.48
Similarly, Acholonu considers Vassa’s term a contraction of two terms, igbu
ichi, the scarification given to males on their foreheads, and mgburichi, the
men with such scarification.49 According to Vassa, the men on the governing council had the ichi marking:
This mark is conferred on the person entitled to it, by cutting
the skin across at the top of the forehead, and drawing it down
to the eye-brows; and, while it is in this situation, applying a
warm hand, and rubbing it until it shrinks up into a thick weal
across the lower part of the forehead. Most of the judges and
senators were thus marked; my father had long borne it: I had
seen it conferred on one of my brothers, and I was also destined
to receive it by my parents.50
Vassa had not yet undergone the scarification ceremony because he was
not old enough; it was usually performed at age 13 or 14, as he witnessed
with his older brother.
178
The actual operation was horrendous, and of such severity in its pain
and significance that a boy destined to receive it as a sign of his adulthood and citizenship would undoubtedly be very conscious of when it was
destined to happen. He was kidnapped before this was undertaken, and in
his own estimation, a couple of years before it would have been done; that
is he was about 11, which is what he claims. The significance of this rite of
passage was clear; it meant that he would likely join his father as a member
of the ama ala, the governing council. Whether or not there is a direct
linear connection, according to Acholonu, this association with a tradition
of scarification could mean that Equiano/Vassa came from the Ekwealuo
family of Essike in Orlu, although it is only a possibility.51 Children were
kidnapped, because after a boy received the ichi it was difficult to sell him
into slavery. British slave traders were reluctant to purchase males who had
received this facial marking, although there is no evidence that Vassa had
anyway of knowing about this practice other than from personal experience. The practice was certainly not common knowledge in London or
elsewhere outside of Igboland, except perhaps among slave traders. In the
1790s, slave trader Hugh Crow learned of this scarification, although he
did not use the Igbo term to describe it, but he did note that the men who
had such scarification were called “Breche, signifying gentleman or…, son
of a gentleman,” and hence Vassa’s account is the earliest reference to the
practice and the social and political system that was associated with the
practice.52
In his enslaved sojourn to the Niger delta, Vassa passed through the
hands of a number of merchants and owners. The first whom he identified, and connected with his kidnapping, were “red men” who are to be
equated with the Aro, who dominated the slave trade of the interior of
the Bight of Biafra, supplying slaves to the two principal ports, Bonny
and Old Calabar. Vassa called these people “Oye-Eboe,” that is “onye
Ìgbò,” an Igbo person, most likely the Aro because of their activities and
appearance.53 The term essentially meant “other” people, foreigners. Vassa
described his captors as “stout mahogany-coloured men from the Southwest of us: we call them Oye-Eboe, which term signifies red men living
at a distance,”54 that is “foreigners.” They were often found in the market
trading in “fire-arms, gun-powder, hats, beads, and dried fish.” They traded
in “odoriferous woods and earth, and our salt of wood-ashes,” and “always
carry slaves through our land; but the strictest account is exacted of their
manner of procuring them before they are suffered to pass.” According
to Vassa, “Sometimes indeed we sold slaves to them, but they were only
prisoners of war, or such among us as had been convicted of kidnapping, or
adultery, and some other crimes which we esteemed heinous.” Upon reflec179
tion, Vassa thought that “this practice of kidnapping induces me to think,
that, notwithstanding all our strictness, their principal business among us
was to trepan our people. I remember too they carried great sacks along
with them, which not long after, I had an opportunity of fatally seeing
applied to that infamous purpose.”55 The Aro had developed an elaborate commercial network, including the establishment of satellite towns
and markets that connected with the two principal fairs in the interior at
Bende and Uburu. One of the largest was at Ndizuogu, close to Orlu, and
the network stretched northward to Nsukka and beyond.56 Vassa provides
some of the earliest information on the consolidation of the Aro network
in the interior of the Bight of Biafra, which he believed was connected to
the “south-west” of his home. Vassa’s sense of direction is not always clear,
although he did relate his location to the sun and was attempting to keep
track of where he was in the vain hope of escaping or otherwise returning to him home. The evidence indicates that Vassa remained within Igbo
country, noting dialectical differences but stating that also he understood
what other people said until he reached the Niger delta, apparently at the
town of Tinmah, which is otherwise not identified but seems to refer to
Ibibio near the Niger delta.
After Tinmah, Vassa was among people who no longer spoke a language he could understand, but instead spoke another language, and the
people were also different because they filed their teeth, which he had
not known before, and which suggests that these were Ibibio living inland
from Bonny. He notes that at this place the currency was the “core,” which
has variously been identified as cowrie shells. Indeed Vassa identifies “core”
as “little white shells, the size of the finger nail,” stating that they were
known in Britain as “core.” However, it is more likely that he was referring
to akori, or coral beads that were used as currency on the lower Niger River
and had been exported from the Kingdom of Benin and the Niger delta
westward as far as the Gold Coast since the sixteenth century, at least. It
should be noted that cowries did not circulate as currency in the interior
of the Bight of Biafra, and hence Vassa’s reference to his sale price as being
172 “core,” probably refers to the number of beads, not shells.57
He was taken in large canoes through the delta, which must have
belonged to the merchants of Bonny, although he does not refer to the
port, instead boarding directly a waiting ship, which is consistent with the
way trade operated at Bonny.58 There were twelve ships from the Bight
of Biafra that have been identified as disembarking slaves in Barbados in
1754, but most of the ships either arrived in Barbados too early or too
late in the year to fit Vassa’s description of his time in Barbados and Virginia.59 The most likely ship is the Ogden, a snow from Liverpool owned
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by Thomas Stevenson & Co., which left for Bonny on 5 June 1753, under
the command of Captain James Walker. While intending to purchase
400 slaves, the ship actually arrived in Barbados on 9 May 1754 with 243
enslaved Africans on board.60 Vassa claims he was in Barbados for less
than two weeks before being taken to Virginia, and there is evidence of
a ship that left Barbados shortly thereafter, taking slaves to Virginia for
sale, arriving in June, which accords with Vassa’s claim of being in Virginia
only a few weeks before Pascal bought him from Campbell in the summer
of 1754. On 21 May, the sloop Nancy, owned by Alexander Watson of
Virginia, left Barbados under Richard Wallis for the York River in Virginia
with 31 slaves, arriving there on 13 June.61
Vassa claims that he could speak Igbo, and clearly identifies dialectical
differences in his journey to the coast, which means obviously that this was
his mother tongue. If it was not, where could he have learned Igbo? Vassa
insisted that he only learned English after he reached England. In fact he
must have begun to understand some English in the Atlantic crossing.
When his ship arrived in Barbados, however, it was necessary to employ
interpreters to talk with the slaves on board. These interpreters were “some
old slaves from the land” who told them that they were “to work” and
that they would “see many of our countrymen,” indeed “Africans of all
languages.”62 When he left the slave ship in Barbados, he refered to his
lack of English, noting that he lost “the small comfort I had enjoyed in
conversing with my countrymen; the women too, who used to wash and
take care of me, were all gone different ways, and I never say one of them
afterwards.”63 Hence it can be assumed that his command of English was
minimal at best, and a few weeks in Virginia would hardly have altered this
situation, even though he waited personally on his master when his master
was sick. Indeed, he remarked that in Virginia, “we saw few or none of our
native Africans, and not one soul who could talk to me,” although in fact
there were a substantial number of Igbo speakers in the tidewater region.64
If he had been born in South Carolina, he would have understood
some English at an early age, and could not have made this claim. In
London, Vassa had friends and associates who could attest to the fact that
at first he “could speak no language but that of Africa,” including Mary
Guerin Baynes, the sister of his god-mother, along with “many others of
her friends.”65 He also referred to Captain John Hill, who worked for
the Custom-house in Dublin, Admiral Affleck, Admiral George Balfour
of Portsmouth, Captain Gallia of Greenock, and Mrs. M. Shaw, James
Street, Covent Garden, London, whom he said could testify to the fact
that he only became proficient in English after arriving in London.66 Vassa
claimed that when he sailed with Pascal for England in late 1754 that
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“By this time…I could smatter a little imperfect English…. Some of the
people of the ship used to tell me they were going to carry me back to my
own country, and this made me very happy. I was quite rejoiced at the idea
of going back; and thought if I should get home what wonders I should
have to tell.”67 During the voyage, he became friends with Pascal’s servant,
Dick Baker, the son of the people Pascal stayed with in Virginia; Vassa
noted that “My little friend Dick [Baker] used to be my best interpreter.”68
By the end of 1757, Vassa claimed that he “could now speak English tolerably well, and… perfectly understood every thing that was said.”69
His friends and colleagues thereby testified to the veracity of Vassa’s
claim that he did not speak English, but they could not know if he was
telling the truth about where he was born. However, they could confirm
his claims that he had stated publicly that he had been born in Africa.
Indeed in 1759, the same year he was baptized, according to The Interesting
Narrative, he had “frequently told several people…the story of my being
kidnapped with my sister, and of our being separated.” As improbable as it
may seem, he briefly thought she had been found while he was at Gibraltar
later in 1759, but the young woman in question turned out not to be his
sister.70 In 1779 in a letter to the bishop of London, he described himself
as “a native of Africa,” while he said he was “from Guinea” in the Morning
Herald of London on 29 December 1786.71 When Vassa subscribed to
Carl Bernhard Wadstrom’s, An Essay on Colonization, in 1794, he listed
himself as “Gustavus Vassa, a native of Africa,” and when his wife died
in February 1796, the Cambridge Chronicle and Journal reported on “On
Tuesday died at Soham, after a long illness, which she supported with
Christian fortitude, Mrs. Susannah Vassa, the wife of Gustavus Vassa the
African.”72
Vassa also engaged in comparing the customs of his own people with
others, and these comparisons further refer to his Africanity. He observed
that European did not sell each other,
as we did…and in this I thought they were much happier than
we Africans. I was astonished at the wisdom of the white people
in all things I saw; but was amazed at their not sacrificing, or
making any offerings, and eating with unwashed hands, and
touching the dead. I likewise could not help remarking the particular slenderness of the women, which I did not at first like,
and I thought they were not so modest and shamefaced as the
African women.73
When Vassa was on board the Aetna, he became friends with Daniel
Queen, who taught him to read the Bible, with which Vassa was fascinated
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for reasons that again highlight his interest in understanding his recollections of his country:
I was wonderfully surprised to see the laws and rules of my
country written almost exactly here [in the Bible]; a circumstance which I believe tended to impress our manners and
customs more deeply on my memory. I used to tell him of his
resemblance; and many a time we have sat up the whole night
together at this employment.74
Carretta concludes that these accounts demonstrate that Vassa was
beginning to invent his past, but I would suggest that he was making the
comparisons to comprehend his childhood in Africa and convey meaning
to his readers.75 Vassa also compared the customs of his people with
Jewish traditions and observed the similarity with what he observed in
the Ottoman state. Why his baptism records his birth as South Carolina
when he was telling people otherwise is a puzzle, but the consistency in his
testimony, in my mind, cannot simply be dismissed and certainly reduces
the likelihood of fraud; indeed a close reading of the available texts makes
it most likely that he was born where he says he was. Vassa visited South
Carolina several times in the 1760s, but gives no hint that he had previously been there as a child or that he knew anyone or anything about
the area, which seems an odd omission if he had actually been there as a
boy. Admittedly he could have consciously selected from his memory for
purposes of establishing his African birth, but if he did so he was clever.
The issue, therefore, is whether or not Vassa really was from Igboland,
spoke the language, and otherwise had an understanding of that specific
cultural heritage, at least an understanding of it that can be attributed
to a very bright boy of age 11. And methodologically, that means how
much validity can be placed on his account. In this regard, his relationship
with Dr. Charles Irving is significant. Vassa worked for Dr. Irving several
times, first as a hairdresser in London in 1768, before Irving patented his
apparatus for distilling seawater, then as Irving’s assistant on Constantine
Phipps’ Arctic expedition of 1773, when the device was tested, and finally
as Irving’s overseer of a plantation scheme on the Mosquito Shore in 1776,
which was possible because of the fortune Irving made on his distillation
apparatus. That is, the two men had an intermittent relationship as patron
and client for almost a decade. While Vassa originally was Irving’s barber
in London, Vassa later worked with Irving in turning seawater into drinking water. Why Vassa gave his place of birth on the Arctic expedition as
South Carolina is not known, nor is it clear if Dr. Irving was aware of
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the deception, and if so, why he would have thought that the claim of a
Carolina birth was important at the time.
Despite the documentary evidence from the Arctic expedition, Dr.
Irving must have been convinced of Vassa’s African birth, because three
years later, Irving employed him in his abortive Mosquito Shore venture
of 1776, precisely because of his fluency in Igbo. Vassa’s role in Irving’s
scheme is clear. Irving first went to Jamaica with the intention of buying
newly arrived slaves from West Africa, and for this purpose, Vassa was
to decide who was to be purchased. On January 14, 1776, before leaving
Kingston for the Mosquito Shore, in Vassa’s own words: “I went with the
Doctor on board a Guineaman, to purchase some slaves to carry with us,
and cultivate a plantation; and I chose them all of my own countrymen,”
that is, they were Igbo.76 Irving’s scheme would use slave labor that would
be treated well, be provided with extensive provision grounds, and perhaps
even be encouraged to seek self-redemption, under the tutelage of Vassa.77
The scheme was based on the supposition that Vassa could “recruit” through
purchase sufficient numbers of his own “countrymen,” only twenty-two
years after his own traumatic crossing of the Atlantic in a slave ship. What
were they promised? Vassa interpreted Christian salvation as the road to
emancipation. At one time he had believed that baptism was sufficient for
emancipation, but he was still learning otherwise. Irving wanted to use
Vassa’s ethnicity as a mechanism of social control.
The venture was possible because British ships were trading heavily in
slaves from the Bight of Biafra in the 1770s, among who were many Igbo.78
The slaves whom Irving purchased almost certainly arrived on board the
African Queen, under the command of Captain John Evans, which had
sailed from Bristol on June 8, 1775. The ship, owned by John Anderson,
boarded 336 slaves at Bonny, although only 272 actually reached Jamaica.
The first slaves were sold on January 3, and the ship sold its last slaves on
February 3rd, leaving then for Bristol, which was reached on April 22nd.
There are no other reported ships from the Bight of Biafra trading in
Jamaica in January 1776, although in that year at least six ships brought
slaves from Bonny, buying an estimated 2,169 slaves and delivering 1,756.79
Although there was only one ship at Kingston when Irving and Vassa
arrived in January, they would not have had to wait long for a ship from
the Bight of Biafra, but it is clear that they did not have to wait. Irving’s
scheme to develop plantations, using enslaved labor under conditions that
would lead to the amelioration of their servitude, depended upon Vassa’s
collaboration. After he selected “his own countrymen,” he would manage
Irving’s plantation relying on his fluency in Igbo as the means of communication. This expectation seems to me to be convincing proof that he
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was Igbo. Where other than in Africa would he have had the opportunity
to learn the language? Certainly not in South Carolina, where he allegedly
was born but where there were few Igbo, and he was not in Virginia long
enough to meet other Igbo, even though many were there. In short, Vassa
had had little opportunity to learn Igbo other than in Africa, and he would
have been of little use to Irving if he was not fluent in the language.
Despite the importance of Vassa’s relationship with Irving, it should
be noted that Vassa did get important details about Irving wrong, claiming
that Irving died from eating poisoned fish in Jamaica, presumably in late
1776 or possibly early 1777. In fact Irving was alive and well in 1780-81,
involved in the preparations of the abortive Nicaragua invasion of that year.
Irving recruited a regiment of Miskitu volunteers, and he surveyed the river
that fed the bay at Bluefields to determine a possible alternate route for
invasion and provisioning other than via the Rio San Juan. He apparently
returned to Jamaica, and did not participate in the disastrous invasion.80 He
did not die of poisoned fish but continued to live in Jamaica, apparently
dying there in 1794.81 It is not clear why Vassa was mistaken on this point
given the deep friendship and dependency that had prevailed between the
two men, and the fact that Irving’s partner, Alexander Blair, subscribed to
the first edition of The Interesting Narrative. This lapse in memory is curious,
if not deliberate, although for what reason is unclear – perhaps because
Vassa and Irving had a falling out. Certainly Irving believed Vassa was born
in Africa, or otherwise how would Vassa have had the ability to select his
“own countrymen” for the plantation venture, which was precisely his reason
for his being employed? Vassa’s role in this scheme is important evidence in
support of the fact that he was indeed born in Africa, as he claimed.
Although memories of his youth are cloudy, the reference points are
helpful. The geography of his country has to be deciphered; after all he was
only 11 and passed rapidly from interior to coast, and then to Barbados
and Virginia, and in less than two years was in the midst of the Seven Years’
War and life at sea. He had a number of owners in a short period of time,
including kidnappers, various masters in the interior of the Bight of Biafra,
the captain of the slave ship, the Virginia merchant who bought him in
Barbados, Campbell, who purchased him in Virginia, Henry Pascal, who
owned him for about eight years, and Robert King, allegedly a Quaker from
Philadelphia who operated a business in Montserrat.82 His longest period
of subjugation was to Pascal, for about eight years, and then to his Quaker
owner King for another four years. This history is what Gates has labeled
“the prototype” slave experience, but if anything Vassa’s life as revealed
in The Interesting Narrative is the opposite.83 By comparison with most
enslaved Africans, Vassa had a unique experience that ultimately allowed
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him to secure his own emancipation at a young age, and beyond that, to
achieve leadership in London of a community of upwards of 20,000 blacks,
mostly people of African descent but certainly including many who had
been born in Africa.84
Hence, Vassa was not a typical slave, nor a prime example of the
slave as victim. He was a slave for 12 years after leaving Africa, from age
11-12 if his age at the time of initial enslavement is taken, until he was
24, when he purchased his own freedom in July 1766. He achieved his
freedom despite considerable obstacles that he describes well, but which
on closer examination make his experience the more exceptional, in that
the range of opportunities to earn money must surely have been unique.
He was not a field hand; he was enslaved as a pre-adolescent boy, and was
free by the time he was an adult. His experience is far from that of most
enslaved Africans, particularly if gender and age are taken into account.
It would have been far more likely that Vassa would have ended up in
field labor if what amounted to domestic servitude had not interceded.
He was a servant, the personal attendant of a British naval officer, and in
that capacity, he had privileges and access to opportunities that were not
possible for most slaves. He was baptized at the age of 17, by my calculations; he learned to read and write on ship and then through tutorials in
London. He was allowed to engage in trade on his own account, by which
he earned his freedom seven years after his baptism. It is unlikely that he
could have achieved emancipation if he was as young as Carretta argues –
12 at his baptism – which would suggest that he was only 17 or 18 when
he was earning money to buy himself, and 19 when he was actually freed.
If Carretta is correct, then his experience was most unusual, being that of
an enslaved teenager trading on his on account and successfully so. In my
reckoning, he would have been 24 at the time that he was emancipated,
which in terms of being able to earn his freedom is more plausible.
In his own day, Vassa had to face charges that he fabricated his childhood experiences. His answers to these charges at the time to some extent
anticipate the questions that Carretta has asked about the veracity of his
account of his birth. When he faced similar charges in 1792, it was said
that he had born in the West Indies, not South Carolina. Critics in two
London newspapers, the Oracle and the Star, challenged him; specifically,
the editor of the Oracle (25 April 1792) accused him of deceiving the
public and claimed that he was born in the Danish Caribbean, on the
island of St. Croix.
It is a fact that the Public may depend on, that Gustavus Vasa,
who has publicly asserted that he was kidnapped in Africa,
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never was upon that Continent, but was born and bred up in
the Danish Island of Santa Cruz, in the West Indies…. What,
we will ask any man of plain understanding, must that cause be,
which can lean for support on falsehoods as audaciously propagated as they are easily detected?85
These charges were spurious, with malicious intent. By contrast, Carretta’s claim is based on solid scholarship, but it is still worth considering
how Vassa responded to his contemporary critics because there may be
clues that help to understand the importance of the baptismal certificate in
St. Margaret’s Church and his enlistment record on the Arctic expedition
of 1773. Was Vassa telling the truth about being born in Africa when there
is documentary evidence that suggests otherwise?
The response of his friends and professional associates to accusations
that he was born in the West Indies is instructive, providing some verification of Vassa’s account of his Igbo origins. In a letter to Thomas Hardy, the
founder of the London Corresponding Society, with whom Vassa and his
wife lived in 1792, Vassa wrote, “Sir, I am sorry to tell you that some Rascal
or Rascals have asserted in the news papers viz. Oracle of the 25th. of april,
& the Star. 27th. – that I am a native of a Danish Island, Santa Cruz, in the
Wt. Indias.” He wanted Hardy to get a copy of the Star “& take care of it
till you see or hear from me,” signed “Gustavus Vassa[,] The African.”86 It
is clear that there was considerable gossip that he feared would be reflected
in the sale of his book and thereby inhibit the abolition movement. Indeed
if his kidnapping, sale to the coast, and his rendition of the Middle Passage
were fiction, then Vassa’s credibility would have been completely undermined, as his critics in the Oracle and the Star tried to do. Vassa responded
to these charges on the first page of the 9th edition in 1794:
An invidious falsehood having appeared in the Oracle of the
25th, and the Star of the 27th of April 1792, with a view to hurt
my character, and to discredit and prevent the sale of my Narrative, asserting, that I was born in the Danish island of Santa
Cruz, in the West Indies, it is necessary that, in this edition, I
should take notice thereof, and it is only needful of me to appeal
to those numerous and respectable persons of character who
knew me when I first arrived in England, and could speak no
language but that of Africa.87
This was a worthy response and should be remembered in considering
more recent suspicions of his birth in South Carolina. Vassa never claimed that
the details of the interior of the Bight of Biafra were entirely based on his own
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experiences. He specifically noted that his account was an “imperfect sketch
my memory has furnished me with the manners and customs of a people
among whom I first drew my breath,” and acknowledged that he had gained
information from some of the “numbers of the natives of Eboe” he encountered
in London.88 His discussions in London influenced what he wrote, just as his
quotations from Benezet and other sources did, but the weight of evidence still
indicates that Vassa had first hand knowledge of Africa.
It is possible that the details on the baptismal record expressed the
intentions of his god parents, specifically Elizabeth Guerin, her sister, Mary,
and brother, Maynard, at the time, although later Mary Guerin testified in
support of his claim that he could only speak his African language when he
first came to England. In 1759, as noted above, Vassa was telling a number
of people about the kidnapping of his sister and himself, and he most certainly would have told the Guerins and Pascal, too. It is possible that his
godmother wanted people to think that he was creole born, and not a native
African, because he spoke English so well. Her sister later was willing to
confirm his fluency in his “African” language, that is, Igbo, as proof of his
place of birth, this is a curious contradiction which a focus on the baptismal
record alone overlooks. Are we to believe the testimony of his god-mother
in St. Margaret’s Church at the time of his baptism or her sister’s later testimony confirming his African birth? Vassa’s account of his African origin
stands out as sincere, and he probably was not responsible for what was
entered into the registry at St. Margaret’s Church.89 Mary Guerin’s later
testimony casts serious doubt on the veracity of the baptismal record.
The muster entries for the Racehorse are also difficult to explain. Could
it be that as a freeman and the assistant to the noted Dr. Irving that he
thought that a Carolina birth was more respectable than an African birth
at that point in his life? It would not be surprising that at some time he
thought about his Africanity with respect to issues of British respectability.
Certainly later in life he had resolved this issue and was suitably proud
and public about his African birth. The testimonies of associates and the
patronage of many of the leading intellectuals and religious leaders of his
day speak to the authenticity of Vassa’s many public statements about
his origins. His confession of a Carolina birth in 1773, seven years after
he purchased his own freedom, may have been an exception to his usual
honesty. Why doubt Vassa’s account of his birth rather than what he registered in the muster books? Again, circumstantial evidence, specifically his
association with Dr. Irving who later relied on his knowledge of Igbo in
the Mosquito Shore scheme, raises questions in my mind of the reliability
of the muster books.
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His life-long voyage was providential, or at least it appeared to Vassa
to be so by the time he wrote his autobiography. Many contemporaries,
including leading abolitionists, seem to have thought that Vassa had been
chosen to lead his people out of bondage, a mission which was reflected
in the significance of his name, Gustavus Vassa. The slave boy Olaudah
Equiano was the Moses of his people, not only “his countrymen” but all
Africans, whom at times he came to include in his definition of his people.
His identification with “Africa” implied that he included all of his enslaved
sisters and brothers. As his Swedish namesake led his people out of subjugation under Danish oppression, he would do the same. The parallel with
Moses and the exodus was immediately brought to mind in the irony of
naming a slave after such a hero. Accepting his fate, his chi, he played a major
role in the abolition movement. He was a friend of the great British abolitionist, the Rev. James Ramsay, first in the West Indies, and then again in
London when Ramsay began preaching against slavery on a regular basis.90
He told Granville Sharp of the Zong affair in 1783, in which 132 enslaved
Africans from the Bight of Biafra were thrown overboard alive in order to
collect insurance from the underwriters. The scandal was a major mobilizing influence in the abolitionist movement.91 He was involved in the first
Sierra Leone settlement scheme in 1788, although in the end he became
the spokesman for the grievances and failures of the scheme.92 His image
at this time was as an African, signing with others as the “sons of Africa” in
various letters to newspapers. By the mid 1780s, he was an acknowledged
advocate and one of the principal leaders of the “black poor” of London.93
The baptismal and naval documents raise important issues, especially
since “Equiano” has been claimed as “American” and The Interesting Narrative the archetypal “slave narrative.”94 In fact, Vassa spent only a few months
in Virginia in 1754, and later on ships trading to South Carolina, Georgia
and Philadelphia as a slave, and then as a freeman trading to Georgia and
South Carolina. He visited New York and Philadelphia in the early 1790s,
selling his book, in conditions that were quite different than his earlier
experiences.95 Not only was he a freeman, he was also well known, residing with prominent members of abolitionist circles in both cities. As a
Briton, he displayed a keen interest in science through his friendship with
Dr. Irving, expressed himself musically through his mastery of the French
horn, participated in debating societies, most notably the London Corresponding Society, as one of its first members, and demonstrated his commitment to interracial marriage through his liaison with Susannah Cullen.
Hence the issue is not the validity of autobiography, whether something
is being remembered accurately or being distorted for some purpose of
obfuscation or political intent, but whether or not subsequent generations
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and scholarship choose to interpret ambiguities in a particular fashion.
Vassa was a prominent historical figure, and it matters whether or not he
was telling the truth about his birth.
Autobiography is not an accurate indicator of memory, and memory
is not an exact replica of what actually happened. Autobiography can be
used as a means by which memory can be reconstructed, but to use autobiography as a means of understanding what people remember, and why,
means that the facts being presented in the narrative have to be placed in
context and checked against available documentation. This methodological
issue is directly confronted in examining memories of slavery and abolition in the life of Gustavus Vassa. The challenge is that he may NOT have
been born in Africa, a significant detail that casts a shadow on the veracity
of the eyewitness accounts recorded in his life story. The challenge of The
Oracle that “Ex hoc uno disce omens – this one fact tells all” is appropriate
in considering recent accusations that he falsified his place of birth, even
if for noble political motives. Sometimes documents may suggest that an
individual lied, when in fact that may not have been the case at all.
Vassa seems to have largely withdrawn from public life after 1794,
once the British government moved to suppress the discussion of Parliamentary reform and charged his friend Thomas Hardy and others with
treason. Vassa subsequently appears to have focused on his family. There
were no more editions of his work in his lifetime, suggesting that the
repression and the accusations against his integrity had their effect. His
wife and one of his daughters died, leaving him to raise his other daughter
until he too succumbed on 31 March 1797. At the time of his death, he
was relatively well off, even sub-leasing a flat in Plaisterers’ Hall at London
Wall in the guildhall section of the City and set to inherit land in Cambridgeshire upon the death of his mother-in-law. On his deathbed, several
distinguished individuals visited him, including Granville Sharp, by which
time Vassa had lost his voice.96 He did not live to see the Promised Land
and the delivery of his people from bondage.
Methodologically, the early life history of Gustavus Vassa, when he
had the name Olaudah Equiano, raises interesting questions of verification and context. The existence of two independent written documents
that claim a Carolina birth conflicts with the personal testimony and ultimately oral account of the person whose place of birth is in question. On
the one hand, the baptismal record at St. Margaret’s Church is difficult
to explain, although there is sufficient error in recording Vassa’s name on
the Arctic expedition to raise questions about whether or not anything
recorded for him on that expedition was heard correctly by the person
keeping the muster roll. Nonetheless, the existence of two documents that
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claim a Carolina birth is difficult to reconcile with Vassa’s own account.
However, the veracity of the documents which seem irrefutable is called
into question when placed in context. The contradictory testimony of
Vassa’s god-mother, initially in recording his baptism in 1759, and then
in 1792 her sister verifying that he only knew an “African” tongue when
she first met him, raises questions about the baptismal record but does not
mean that it was mistaken. But did he provide the information for the
record? This is not known, but according to a number of sources, it is clear
that he was not familiar with the English language until after he had been
a slave of Pascal for some time. Only in 1759, at the time of his baptism
was he able to “speak English tolerably well, and I perfectly understood
every thing that was said.” Hence he must have known what was being
entered on his baptismal record. Similarly, he had to have said that he was
born in Carolina on the Arctic expedition; there is no other explanation,
but what is not understood is why he would not say he was born in Africa
at this time , other than the fact that he probably would have been unwise
to have disputed his baptismal record. He clearly told the man he worked
for, Dr. Charles Irving, that he was an African and spoke Igbo, and on the
basis, the Mosquito Shore caper was planned. It is unlikely that Irving
would have otherwise later employed him in a plantation scheme unless he
had a knowledge of Igbo. Hence it is a question of when he told the truth,
whether in his autobiography or at the time of his baptism and trip to
the Arctic. Methodologically, it cannot be assumed that conflicting documentary information is sufficient to deny his African birth, his conscious
development of an Igbo identity, his identification with both an African
community, and ultimately his commitment to a multi-racial society, as
evidenced in his marriage.
The preponderant evidence confirms his African birth, and the documents that claim otherwise have to be interpreted accordingly. What
appears to confirm the place of birth as South Carolina disappears when
the chronology of his Narrative is more carefully deciphered, suggesting
that Vassa was likely two or three years older than he thought, not younger
as Carretta has concluded. When all factors are considered, especially in
consequence of what he reveals about eighteenth-century culture and
society in Igboland, the most reasonable conclusion in assessing whether
or not Vassa was born in Africa or in America is to believe what Vassa
claimed, that he was born in a place called “Essaka.” Hence his account of
his homeland and the terror of the “Middle Passage” should be considered
as being derived from his memory, which he attempted to place in the
context of what was known in Britain about Africa. As in other autobiographical accounts, the account of his childhood was filtered through
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additional information learned later in life and reflections on what he
remembered and how he attempted to understand his early experiences.
That there should be variance in detail between what is stated and what
probably happened is a methodological problem that faces anyone working
with autobiography.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
This chapter was originally published in Slavery and Abolition, 27:3 (2006),
317-347. I wish to thank the editor, Gad Heuman, for permission to reprint
the article here. Several minor corrections have been incorporated, including confusion over Vassa’s relationship with the two Guerin sisters. I have
benefited greatly from the comments of James Walvin, Nath Adediran,
David Richardson, Mariza Soares, Rina Cáceres Gómez, James Sidbury,
Vincent Carretta, and Iheanyi Enwerem, and the assistance of Neil Marshall
and Nadine Hunt. Arthur Torrington has been especially generous in his
comments and discussions. The research was supported by the a grant from
the Faculty of Arts, York University, the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, and the Canada Research Chair in African
Diaspora History.
Gustavus Vassa, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (London, 1789). The edition
used here is Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings
(New York: Penguin Books, Vincent Carretta, ed., 2003), and referred to as
Vassa, The Interesting Narrative, when citing the text itself, and otherwise to
Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, when citing other materials in Carretta’s edition.
The mistaken belief that the publication of the Interesting Narrative preceded
Parliamentary action is attributable to Thomas Digges, a contemporary in
Belfast, as quoted in Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 237. Also see various
testimonials published in Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings,
350-71.
Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 154.
This is not to argue that there was a fully developed consciousness of “Igbo” in
the eighteenth century, or that culture is a static construct. Indeed Vassa’s use
of the expressions “Eboe,” “my countrymen,” and “nation” reveal a complex,
and indeed sophisticated, use of terminology to address issues of identity.
The idea of being Igbo in the eighteenth century is discussed in Northrup,
“Igbo and Myth Igbo,” 1–20; and especially Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation
and Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative.”
See Carretta’s contribution in this volume and also his biography, Equiano,
the African and “Why Equiano Matters.” For earlier discussions of Carretta’s
position, see his “Introduction,” Interesting Narrative and Other Writings;
192
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
“Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” 96-105; and “More New Light on the Identity of
Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa,” 226-35.
Carretta, Equiano, the African, xiv. Also see Carretta, “Why Equiano Matters.”
The Oracle, 25 April, 1792.
Gates, The Classic Slave Narratives, 8.
An obituary for Vassa’s son-in-law, the Reverend Henry Bromley, who died
in February 1878, noted that “he had married Miss Joanna Vassa, a daughter
of the then well-known, and still remembered, Gustavus Vassa, the African.”
The inscription on the grave of Vassa’s daughter, dated March 1857, reads
“Joanna, beloved wife of Henry Bromley, daughter of Gustavus Vassa, the
African.”
Hodgkin, Nigerian Perspectives, 209-21.
See, for example, Northrup, Trade without Rulers, on procurement of slaves,
warfare, kidnapping, pp. 68-70, 76, 90, 166, 168; on political organization,
pp. 90-91; trade, pp. 94, 103, 160, 165, 167, 169-70, 172, 212.
Afigbo, Ropes of Sand, 145-86; Jones, “Olaudah Equiano of the Niger Ibo;”
and Edwards, Equiano’s Travels.
Lovejoy and Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship and Atlantic History;” “ ‘This
Horrid Hole’: Royal Authority, Commerce and Credit at Bonny;” “Letters
of the Old Calabar Slave Trade;” “Slaves to Palm Oil;” and the chapter in this
volume.
Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 369.
Rolingher, “Metaphor of Freedom,” 90.
Gates, Slave Narratives, 8.
Walvin, An African’s Life, xv. Also see Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed
Hydra, 243-46, 335-39.
William Langworthy to William Hughes, Bath, October 10, 1793, originally published in the 1794 edition, and reproduced in Carretta, Interesting
Narrative and Other Writings, 11-12.
Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 289. In anticipating his
critics, he also observed, in the opening sentence of the Interesting Narrative:
“I believe it is difficult for those who publish their own memoirs to escape
the imputation of vanity; it is also their misfortune, that whatever is uncommon is rarely, if ever, believed; and what is obvious we are apt to turn from
with disgust, and to charge the writer with impertinence.”
Vassa, The Interesting Narrative, 64.
Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus.
Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 252.
Acholonu, Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano; and Afigbo, Ropes of Sand, 154.
Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 253.
193
26. Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 253. Usually, he signed
himself as Gustavus Vassa or Vasa, the African, sometimes “an African.”
27. Carretta, Equiano, the African.
28. The plaque for Vassa’s daughter, Anne Maria, was inscribed in July 1797 on
St Andrews Church wall, Chesterton, Cambridge, “Anne Marie, daughter
of Gustavus Vassa, the African.” I wish to thank Arthur Torrington for this
information.
29. Edwards and Shaw, “The Invisible Chi in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,”
146-56.
30. Vassa, Interesting Narrative, 31. Emphasis in the original.
31. Vassa, Interesting Narrative, 64.
32. For the controversy over the place of Vassa’s birth, see Carretta, “Olaudah
Equiano or Gustavus Vassa?” 96-105; and Carretta, “Identity of Olaudah
Equiano or Gustavus Vassa.” For views that he was born in Africa, see Obianuju Acholonu, “Home of Olaudah Equiano,” 5-16; Acholonu, Igbo Roots of
Olaudah Equiano; Afigbo, Ropes of Sand, 145-86; and Gomez, “A Quality of
Anguish,” 82-95. The debate is summarized in Hochschild, Bury the Chains,
369-72.
33. Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, x-xi. Also see Carretta,
“Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa?”
34. Cited in Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 261, n198.
35. See Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 286, n486, citing the
surviving musters for the Racehorse (PRO ADM 36/7490).
36. Dr. Charles Irving was a naval surgeon and inventor. Carretta has mistakenly
credited Dr. Irving with the invention of a marine chair in 1759 that was
designed to compensate for the motion of ships so that telescopes could be
used to calculate celestial measurements. By 1770, he improved an apparatus for distilling seawater and turning it into drinking water. The Royal
Navy began using his desalination process in 1770, and in 1772, Parliament
granted Irving £5,000 for the invention. See the discussion in Carretta,
Equiano, the African, 137, citing Annual Register (1772), 98.
37. Carretta, “Questioning the Identity.”
38. See Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 62-69. The date
appears to be confirmed by Vassa’s reference to his first sight of snow, and
the 1754-55 year was particularly snowy in England. Moreover, the name
“Gust. Vasa” appears on the muster book of the ship Roebuck, on which
Pascal served, on 6 August 1755. See Carretta, “Questioning the Identity.”
39. The most thorough analysis of Vassa’s account taking his age into consideration is to be found in Afigbo, Ropes of Sand, 145-86.
40. On various details, see Acholonu, Igbo Roots of Equiano, although it should
be noted that Acholonu makes errors in quoting from The Interesting Narrative. Moreover, her discussion of generation length, kinship relationships,
194
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
and physical resemblances between portraits of Vassa and individuals who
may be relatives is questionable.
For a discussion, see Afigbo, Ropes of Sand, 152-54.
The suggestion of Isseke was first made by Achebe, “Handicaps of Writing
in a Second Language,” as cited in Afigbo, Ropers of Sand, pp. 153, 184n.,
although Achebe did not explain his selection. The identification has been
argued elaborately, although not always convincingly, by Acholonu; see especially “Home of Olaudah Equiano,” and Acholonu, Igbo Roots of Equiano.
“Letter to the Honourable and Worldly Members of the BRITISH
SENATE,” in The Public Advertiser, 19 June 1788, reprinted in Carretta,
Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 340, and noted in Hochschild, Bury
the Chains, 369.
Ika was nominally subject to the Kingdom of Benin in the mid eighteenth
century, and hence Jones claims that “we can locate his home with some certainty in the northern Ika Ibo region, which is the eastern part of the present
Benin province” ( Jones, “Equiano of the Niger,” 64). Jones also establishes
the place as being in northern Ika because of the method for making palm
wine, where it is made from oil palms, as described by Vassa, while in southern Ika, palm wine was obtained from the raffia palm. However, this distinction in technique applies elsewhere in Igboland and is not peculiar to Ika.
Benezet, Some Historical Account of Guinea. Benezet quoted at length various
European observations of western Africa, but nothing on the interior of the
Bight of Biafra, skipping from the Kingdom of Benin to Kongo and Angola
in his descriptions and reports. He quotes some information on Barbados
that presumably Vassa could have used, but not on his homeland.
Afigbo, Ropes of Sand, 152, 162-63.
Acholonu, Igbo Roots of Equiano; and Acholonu, “Home of Equiano,”
7-8. This identification was also suggested by Edwards, “Embrenché and
Ndichie,” 401-02.
Vassa, Interesting Narrative, 32-33 (emphasis in the original). For illustrations of ichi scarification, see Thomas, Anthropological Report on the IboSpeaking People of Nigeria, Plate XVII; and Adepegba, “Survey of Nigerian
Body Markings.”
Acholonu, “Home of Equiano,” 10-11; also see Acholonu, Igbo Roots of
Equiano.
According to Crow (Memoirs of Hugh Crow, 199-200), who traded to Bonny
in the 1790s, slave traders avoided buying males with ichi scarification:
Of the same tribe and speaking the same language are the Breeches,
so called from the word Breche, signifying gentleman or like
Hidalgo in Spanish, son of a gentleman. As these had seen better
days, and were more liable than their countrymen, who are inclined
195
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
to despond when set on board ship, to take some desperate means
of relieving themselves, and encouraging others to shake off their
bondage, the masters of the slave ships were generally averse to
purchasing them. The Breeches informed us that, in their country,
every seventh child of their class when about six or seven years of
age undergoes the operation, to distinguish his rank, of having the
skin of the forehead brought down from the hair so as to form a
ridge or line from temple to temple. This disfigurement gives them a
very disagreeable appearance, and the custom is chiefly confined to
sons of great men and our author never saw one female so marked.
Also see Edwards, “Embrenché and Ndichie,” 401-02; and Afigbo, Ropes of
Sand, 152.
Williamson and Pearman, Igbo-English Dictionary, 174, 379-80, 391; and
Edwards, “Embrenché and Ndichie,” 401. It has been claimed that Vassa’s
term “Oye-Eboe” is oyìbo (i.e., oìbo´), a Yoruba term for Europeans; see
Chambers, “Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave Trade,” 118.
Chambers draws on an account from 1832; see Laird and Oldfield, Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior of Africa, vol. I, 394. Alexander Byrd
has also discussed this possibility, but he concludes that is more likely that
Vassa was making an attempt at onye Igbo or Igbo person, as accepted here.
According to Byrd, “such a usage aligns with the connotations with which
the term Igbo was freighted in the eighteenth-century Biafran interior;” see
Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation and Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative.”
For the Yoruba term, see Abraham, Dictionary of Modern Yoruba, 459. I wish
to thank Nath Mayo Adediran, Curator, National Museum, Old Residency,
Calabar, Nigeria, for his assistance in clarifying this linguistic interpretation,
which was confirmed by Iheanyi Enwerem, personal communication.
Vassa’s reference (The Interesting Narrative, 37) to “a very lightly coloured
person,” or “red men,” suggests the use of camwood as a cosmetic, which was
rubbed on the body. See Afigbo, Ropes of Sand, 168-69; Jones, Trading States
of the Oil Rivers, 31; and Acholonu, “Home of Equiano,” 9.
On the Aro, see Dike and Ekejiuba, Aro of South-eastern Nigeria 1650-1980,
205-06. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra:
An African Society in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010.
For the interpretation that “core” referred to cowries, see Carretta, Interesting
Narrative and Other Writings, 249; and Carretta, Equiano, the African, 25. For
a discussion of akori beads, which were often yellow or grey, but sometimes
blue; see Ryder, Benin and the Europeans, 37, 55, 56. I wish to thank Olatunji
Ojo for this suggestion.
Lovejoy and Richardson, “ ‘This Horrid Hole’: Royal Authority, Commerce
and Credit at Bonny,” 363-92. Jones suggests that Vassa might have been
sent to Lagos, but this is unlikely for two reasons. Vassa notes that many
196
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
people on his ship spoke his language, i.e., Igbo, which would not have been
the case if the ship had left from Lagos, and second, Lagos was insignificant as a slave exporting port in the 1750s, its ascendancy occurring in the
nineteenth century, not the eighteenth. See Jones, “Olaudah Equiano of the
Niger Ibo,” 69.
It is possible that Vassa left from Old Calabar, rather than Bonny. The Benn
of Liverpool took slaves from Old Calabar to Barbados, arriving, May 29,
1754, but there is no record of a ship that might have taken slaves from
Barbados to Virginia a few weeks later. For records of ships leaving the Bight
of Biafra, see Eltis, Behrendt, Richardson, and Klein, Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade Database.
Eltis, Behrendt, Richardson and Klein, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
Also see Carretta, Equiano, the African, 30-31.
For this reconstruction, see Carretta, “Questioning the Identity,” although
Carretta rejects his own analysis in favor of a South Carolina birth. The chronology of ship movements, however, should be recognized as being consistent with the alleged experience of Vassa in Africa, Barbados and Virginia..
In the original article published in Slavery and Abolition, I incorrectly
identified Mary Guerin as Vassa’s godmother, rather than the sister of her
godmother; for details, see Vincent Carretta, “Response to Paul Lovejoy’s
‘Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the
African’,” Slavery and Abolition, 28:1 (2007).
See Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 238-39. All of the
individuals mentioned subscribed to the 1st edition (Carretta, Interesting
Narrative and Other Writings, 15-28).
Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 79-80.
Cited in Carretta, Equiano, the African, 3.
Cambridge Chronicle and Journal, 20 February 1796, cited in Carretta,
Equiano, the African, 363.
According to Carretta, “Queen played a crucial role in Equiano’s later reconstruction of an African past,” although how this was so is not explained.
Queen did help Vassa with his education, however. See Carretta, Equiano,
the African, 82.
197
76. Vassa adds that some of those who were purchased were “from Libya,”
another interjection that attempted to situate Vassa’s homeland in the larger
context of Africa.
77. According to Vassa (The Interesting Narrative, 106), “I myself… managed an
estate, where, by those [ameliorative] attentions, the negroes were uncommonly cheerful and healthy, and did more work by half than by the common
mode of treatment they usually do.”
78. The presence of Igbo and others from the Bight of Biafra in Central America
is well documented, including references to Ebo, Moco, and Carabali; see
Cáceres Gómez, “On the Frontiers of the African Diaspora in Central
America,” 115-38. Some Igbo reached Spanish America through the asiento,
held by South Sea Company until 1748.
79. The information on the ships carrying slaves to Jamaica from the Bight of
Biafra in 1776 is derived from Eltis, Behrendt, Richardson and Klein, TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database. The African Queen is listed as No. 17866.
80. For references to Irving’s participation in the invasion of Nicaragua in 178081, see Stephen Kemble to General Dalling, Bluefields, 15 November 1780,
CO 137/79 ff 129-32 (PRO); Dalling to George Germain, Jamaica, 28
December 1780, CO 137/79 ff 139-42; Charles Irving to Dalling, Bluefields,
no date [1780], CO 137/79 ff 158-60; Irving to Dalling, 18 February 1781,
CO 137/80 ff 85-86; and Dalling to Despard, Jamaica, 23 April 1781, CO
137/80 ff 157-62. Also see Stephen Kemble, The Kemble Papers (New York,
1884-85), Collections of the New York Historical Society, vol. 17, for various
citations to Irving. Also note a Dr. Irving was a subscriber to the 1st edition
of the Interesting Narrative, although he is listed as living in Lisborn, near
Dublin, and hence is almost certainly not the same person; see Carretta,
Interesting Narrative, 26.
81. John Beaufin Irving, The Book of the Irvings (Dumfries, 1907), 86; and
M.T. Maxwell-Irving, Genealogy of the Irvings of Dumfries and the Irvings
of Gribton (Dumfries, 1994), 3. Since this essay was originally published,
additional information has been located that suggests that Dr. Irving may
have died in Jamaica in 1784. I wish to thank Mark Duffill for his assistance
on this matter.
82. For details on King, see Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 224-25.
83. Gates, Classic Slave Narratives, 8.
84. For Vassa in London, see Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities in the
Era of the Slave Trade, 16-34; and Shyllon, Black People in Britain, 115-66,
although Shyllon’s estimate for the number of blacks in London (40,000)
appears to be too high. I wish to thank Arthur Torrington for this critique.
85. The article also charged that Wilberforce and the Thorntons were “concerned
in settling the island of Bulam in Sugar Plantations; of course their interests
clash with those of the present Planters and hence their clamour against the
Slave Trade.” The Oracle, 25 April, 1792; in Carretta, Interesting Narrative and
Other Writings, 237. For the attack in the Star, see ibid., 238.
198
86. Vassa to Thomas Hardy, Edinburgh, May 28, 1792, Public Record Office,
London, TS 24/12/2, and reprinted in Carretta, Interesting Narrative and
Other Writings, 361-62.
87. The passage was addressed “To the Reader;” see Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 5.
88. Vassa, The Interesting Narrative, 38.
89. Moreover, the entry in the baptismal registry is curious and deviates from
the other entries, which give full name of the child, usually an infant, as
well as the first names of the father and mother, and the date of birth or age
if not an infant. Place of birth is not given for other entries because it was
assumed to be London. Vassa’s entry reads “a Black born in Carolina 12 years
old.” According to Arthur Torrington (personal communication), there are
other entries in the registry for St. Margaret’s that refer to blacks, some of
whom presumably enslaved. Moreover, Ignatius Sancho was married there
and his children baptized at the church. In the original version of this paper,
I mistakenly attributed Mary’s Guerin’s later testimony to her sister.
90. Ramsay, An Inquiry into the Effects of Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade.
For a discussion see Shyllon, James Ramsay, the Unknown Abolitionist.
91. For the Zong affair, see Granville Sharp, “An Account of the Murder of 132
Negro Slaves on board the Ship Zong, or Zung, with some Remarks on the
argument of an eminent Lawyer in defence of that inhuman Transaction”
[British Library, Ms. 1783]; On March 19, 1783, according to Sharp’s diary,
“Gustavus Vasa, a Negro, called on me, with an account of one hundred and
thirty Negroes being thrown alive into the sea, from on board and English
slave ship;” see Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, 236-41. The murders had
been committed in December 1781.
92. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists; Shyllon, Black People in
Britain, 150-58; and Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure.
93. In addition to Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists; and Shyllon,
Black People in Britain, see Gerzina, Black London: Life before Emancipation,
133-64; and Fryer, Staying Power: Black People in Britain since 1504, 191-214.
94. But contrast the approach of Gates and others with that of Edwards and
Walvin, Black Personalities in the Era of the Slave Trade; and Shyllon, Black
People in Britain.
95. See Walvin, An African’s Life; and Shyllon, Black People in Britain.
96. Carretta, Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, 306, citing Granville
Sharp papers, Gloustershire Record Office.
199
A F T E R M AT H O F T H E
T R A N S - AT L A N T I C
S L AV E T R A D E
••
• 12 •
Niger River Trade and the
Interregnum at Aboh,
1844–1862
Femi J. Kolapo
E
uropean merchant activity in Aboh kingdom and its hinterland was an
important factor in the political turmoil that prevented the enthronement of a king in Aboh until eighteen years after the death of Obi Osai in
1844. The suspension of central government and the diffuse political situation affected Aboh’s ability to maintain its position as a middleman-trading
state, manifested by increased hostility to European commercial expansion
and political meddling. The trading state’s decline in the mid-nineteenth
century followed the penetration of European commerce inland beyond
Aboh and the transition from slave to legitimate commerce. This chapter
examines the 1844–1862 interregnum in Aboh in relation to the complex
interaction between internal and external factors in nineteenth-century
Niger River commerce. It argues that the presence of European merchants
in Aboh and its interior disrupted the sociopolitical structure, precipitating
a general economic downturn. Ogedengbe maintains that the system of
direct trade initiated by the Europeans overturned the old pattern of commerce and undermined the traditional power structure of the Niger Valley
port kingdom.1 To what extent, however, did European trade affect Aboh’s
sociopolitical structures and create a situation whereby central political
power could not be reconstituted within the normal structures of state?
The historical literature on nineteenth century Aboh is sparse. K. O.
Dike, C. C. Ifemesia, Philip Oguagha, and A. U. Opoko refer to Aboh’s
importance in the nineteenth-century commerce of the lower Niger;
however, their studies focus on southeastern region as a whole, not just
Aboh.2 More focused works are those of Ogedengbe and Nwaubani.3
Ogedengbe offers a detailed reconstruction of Aboh from its rise as the
dominant economic and political power in the lower Niger region in the
nineteenth century to its fall after the entrenchment of European economic imperialism in the Niger Delta. Obi Osai’s reign (c.1826–1844) was
the apogee of Aboh’s economic and political power. Osai invited European
traders to Aboh, hoping to end its dependence on the mediation of Brass
and other Delta states in overseas trade and to consolidate the kingdom’s
monopoly on trade with the peoples of the lower Niger valley area and its
hinterland. Unfortunately, the Obi’s (king’s) plan was undermined by the
European strategy to bypass indigenous middlemen in reaching the interior sources of trade as they had already accomplished in other Delta states.
The establishment of European trading factories further north destroyed
Aboh’s middleman advantages, transforming this previously thriving
entrepôt into an economic and political backwater. Nwaubani’s study of
nineteenth-century Aboh covers many of the same themes as Ogedengbe;
however, Nwaubani argues that Aboh’s experience with “British capitalism” resulted in the “underdevelopment of a flourishing African political
economy,” a situation that was “symptomatic of the disarticulation of the
middle and lower regions of the Niger.”4
Overall, these two studies examine the course of the slave and legitimate trades and their impact on the rise and fall of Aboh.5 However,
nether study explores the ways in which the export trade in slaves and
palm oil and the import trade in European manufactured goods affected
specific structures of Aboh government and society. Ogedengbe’s narrowly
focused study notes that “although trade and exchange predated the arrival
of Europeans on these shores, the fact seems incontestable that the greater
volume of trade of the European era left a peculiar character on the political and social institutions of the societies affected by it…” 6 This author
builds on the work of Ogedengbe and Nwaubani, reinterpreting their evidence and examining new primary evidence.
The transition from slave trade to legitimate commerce was much less
marked in Aboh than in other coastal states like Bonny or the Yoruba
states. The imposition of the British naval blockade had implications for
Aboh trade, making it more difficult to dispose of slaves via the main Niger
outlet, yet the utility of the creeks still provided important channels to
waiting Brazilian ships. Aboh continued to engage in the production and
204
Niger River Trade and the Interregnum at Aboh, 1844–1862
supply of slaves and palm oil, with the latter increasing in importance.
This was not at first a switch to legitimate commerce from slave trade,
but an expansion of legitimate commerce side by side with the slave trade.
The European-dominated import-export trade in Aboh increased after the
establishment of a factory where European manufactures were exchanged
for palm oil from the surrounding countryside. The comparatively open
trade with “trust-worthy” chiefs or to even anyone with “a pot of oil”
bypassed Aboh’s middleman position.7
The theme of political destabilization or “crisis of adjustment” in the
historiography of the transition from slave to legitimate commerce is
important for understanding Aboh’s decline. The political crisis was not
due to the direct loss of profit by the king or war-men to other classes of
people, but to the inability of any single Aboh princely “house” to install
its candidate on the throne. Thus, Aboh’s political crisis, manifested most
importantly during the interregnum, was more than a struggle between the
king or the ruling class and people of servile origin for profit or the attempt
of conservative forces to outmaneuver the revolutionary class. Rather it was
a conflict among competing traders and the rise of new groups resulting
from the spread of wealth. The crisis was defined by a protracted, turbulent interregnum rather than increased warfare. According to Ogedengbe,
Aboh’s “greatest weakness” was “the prevalence of protracted interregna.”
He concluded, “there are few years in which there are kings than years
during which the throne was vacant.”8 Oral traditions refer to a mandatory
interregnum of three years following an Obi’s death. How far back this
mandatory interregna had been in place before the nineteenth century is
not stated. Given the elective nature of Aboh’s kingship, it is plausible that
interregna were common.
The rise of Aboh as a trading state
Detailed information about the reigns of the kings of Aboh prior to the
nineteenth century is scarce. Tradition associates the kings of Aboh with
particular events and achievements. One was characterized as “exceptionally cruel,” another as “the kindly king,” and yet another as the “good king.”
Some oral traditions preserve mention of notable incidents. For instance,
there was an obi in whose reign Aboh war canoes were said to have gone
up north to assist newly-arrived Onitsha immigrants “in their struggle
with the Oze aborigines of their new settlement area.”9 Obi Okeyea was
said to have “devoted much of his energies to the development of the kingdom’s naval power and trade. He opened negotiations with the Ata of Igala
to allow Aboh traders in his domains.” Luckily oral tradition can often be
205
collaborated by written sources, including correspondence and memoirs of
European traders and Sierra Leonean missionaries. Both oral and written
sources agree on Obi Osai’s power and wealth as well as the economic and
military dominance of his kingdom in the lower Niger. Subsequent rulers,
however, lacked Osai’s diplomatic and bureaucratic skills. Unfortunately
after his death, Aboh’s political dominance evaporated; an eighteen-year
interregnum followed, and the central government went into abeyance.
Obi Osai’s reign demonstrated how economic achievement contributed to political success. Osai became a powerful merchant prince and
maintained an effective monopoly over the port trade of Aboh. He had
warned the Laird and Oldfield traders that he “was the greatest palmoil king, had command of the river [Niger] and would not allow [them]
to pass in the future unless [they] bought and sold with him.”10 King
Boy (Amai Kuno) of Brass confirmed Aboh’s domination of trade to the
European traders. When the latter was asked why he “never spoke to Obie
without going down on his knees, and touching the ground with his head,”
he replied that “King Obie too much palm-oil, King Boy too little.”11 In
1841 the British commissioners of the Niger expedition reported how
impressed they were with Osai’s firm control of trade at Aboh. He invited
the British to trade there so as to break the middleman role of the Brass in
transatlantic trade, thus increasing Aboh’s prosperity.
The preeminent economic position of the obi can be located in export
trade of slaves and palm oil. During the 1830s and 1840s it was reported that
“no one could trade in primary export commodities until the obi, through
his sons or trusted chiefs had completed their business.” Ogedengbe concludes that this “ensured that the king was the wealthiest person in the
kingdom. This economic power, coupled with his ascribed divine right,
enhanced his position vis-à-vis his subjects.”12 While the obi was alive,
there was no record of European travelers and explorers visiting any other
big man except the king. Other houses benefited from the booming trade,
and certain members acquired wealth and influence. The trader William
Cole records the names of a number of wealthy merchants who rose from
servile status to positions of political influence during Osai’s reign.
Obi Osai maintained a strong military force. No town along the Niger
Delta river routes below Aboh was beyond the reach of Aboh’s army. It maintained guardians to exclude foreign intruders or deter would-be breakaway
groups. These policies ensured a stable reign for Osai, but after his death
they constituted a potentially explosive force for his successors, for access to
trade became the prize for which to fight. His death in 1844 provided the
political opportunity for rivalries to play out. Once external rivals had been
eliminated, the free nobility within Aboh could form dissenting factions.
206
The struggle for succession
Competition for power following the deaths of kings in Aboh often
resulted in a struggle among the many sons of the deceased and other
wealthy, powerful members of the umudei (noble families). Accounts of
Osai’s rise to power indicate that he had also weathered strong opposition
from his half-brothers before his installation on the throne. After his death
in 1844, the most wealthy and powerful of his many sons could expect to
compete for the throne along with other important candidates from previous ruling lines. The fiercely partisan character of the pool of candidates
was a baseline for royal conflict.
Obi Osai’s three most successful and powerful sons were Chukwuma,
Aje, and Okeyea (referred to as Akia by Cole). Okeyea appears to have
had no interest in the position, leaving the fray to his two older siblings.
According to Ogedengbe, some sources state that Osai had designated
Chukwuma as his successor, which was contrary to tradition.13 The
strength of Chukwuma’s position is manifest in the fact that he was one of
the signatories to Trotter’s treaty with Aboh.14 Moreover , in 1841 Captain
Allen was given the impression, probably by Ukassa a relative of Osai, from
whom he received a lot of intelligence, that “it is expected that [Obi’s]
eldest son will probably succeed him.”15 It seems that Osai may have also
anticipated the possibility that Chukwuma might be unable to carry the
majority along with him and therefore had strategically positioned his
second son Aje in important state functions, thus building up Aje’s experience, position, and influence. Perhaps this was calculated to improve Aje’s
chances, as Chukwuma was considered to have a weak character.
Sierra Leonean missionaries mentioned Aje’s favored position and
European visitors also noted that he was always present during their
interviews with the obi.16 W. B. Baikie described Aje as very energetic,
possessed of a strong character, with immense presence of mind. He wrote
that Aje was “very superior in appearance to his brother [Chukwuma];
and is said in manner and countenance greatly to resemble his father…
He proved a keen hand, and only parted with his articles at a high price;
he looked to everything himself, saw things handed on board, and the
cowries counted.” 17 Earlier in 1841 Allen described him as “a remarkably
fine young man, nearly six feet in height, well made, and with a pleasing
expression of countenance.” He also observed that Aje’s voice was “unusually strong and sonorous [and that] altogether his appearance was very
commanding.”18 Crowther too noted that “Aje reminded [him] of his
father [Obi Osai], whom he resembled much both in dress and gait, and in
his keenness as a trader.”19 It is therefore not surprising after Osai’s death
207
that “[his] friends were unanimous in their selection of…Aje…acquiesced
in by his less energetic and more peaceful brother Okurobi or Tshukuma” 20
Ten years after Osai’s death, Aje was still considered the most powerful
individual in Aboh. It was then observed that the political climate was in
favor of Aje but “before he could be finally elected, he was expected to pay
several rather heavy sums, which he was now gradually settling.” In 1859
William Cole, Laird’s trading agent in Aboh, still considered him as the
dominant political figure. Nonetheless, he was unable to attain the position
of king, for “although he took the lead in all foreign or warlike affairs, law
and justice were dispensed by a neutral individual not immediately connected with either side.”21
Aje had a powerful opponent in Orisa. As noted by Crowther, “There
is another party besides the line of Obi Osai’s family, which lays claim
to the throne; that is the line of Oshiodapara…the line of Oshiodapara
contended for the throne in favor of one Orise, and demanded that if Obi’s
family would not give place to that of Oshiodapara, whatever they had
paid to Obi as their king should be returned.”22 Although Orisa was a
tenacious contender, little was recorded about him, for most visitors to
Aboh were confined to the “king’s town,” and thus prevented from developing contacts with or knowledge of powerful men in other “towns” or
wards. That Orisa was as popular, rich, influential, and energetic as Aje and
others is indicated by Aje’s failure to override his claim. After Aje’s death
sometime in 1862, Orisa was elected king.23 This two-way division alone,
however, did not define the particular character of the interregnum. It was
also defined by the competition among Chukwuma, Aje, and Okeyea,
further exacerbated by the fact that there was yet another claimant to the
throne from a rival umudei lineage, and he eventually emerged as king.
Contemporary accounts concerning the contest for Aboh throne
between the king’s party and the Oshiodapara line indicated Chukwuma’s
acquiescence to Aje’s stronger political showing. Chukwuma appears to
have held on to his position as co-equal with the major contestants and
as an influential person among the power groups in charge of Aboh. This
came out clearly in his relationship with the European factory of Macgregor Laird. On several occasions Chukwuma used his influence to rein
in his brother from carrying through with hostile acts against Cole and the
factory, including providing security from burglarization and plunder by
Aje’s slaves.24
Moreover, Chukwuma also began to position his son to succeed to the
throne in the future against the interests of his brothers. Aje did the same.
His eldest son was already grown up, had his own household, and was
definitely being groomed as an important Aboh prince. Such open jockey208
ing on behalf of their respective sons naturally generated mistrust between
the two brothers. Chukwuma believed that his son’s life was not secure and
that Aje “would poison him if he had a chance.” He, therefore, hid his son
“in the bush” under the protection of bodyguards. The two brothers dogged
each other’s steps. Cole noted that Chukwuma was a statesman who “in all
public matters…claims precedence, always.”25
The competition between the two had become more open by January
1860 when Chukwuma expressed disapproval of some of Aje’s actions
with regard to the Laird factory, but noted that “we cannot take up arms
against our brother.”26 By October of the same year, Aje was on the verge of
attacking Chukwuma during a quarrel over policy concerning the factory
and its agent.27 By the end of the year the amity between the brothers had
dropped to its lowest level since Osai’s death. Another of Osai’s surviving
sons was Okeyea, whose wealth and commercial acumen had superseded
that of Aje by 1860. 28 Apparently, he was also the least encumbered in
the open contest for the throne of Aboh. Nonetheless, the fact that he
was richer than Aje, Chukwuma, and possibly Orisa, was a complicating political factor for the immediate contenders and electors. Okeyea’s
trading canoes, many of them of enormous size, numbered at least fifty. On
one occasion, his canoes arrived at the beach laden with “a goodly number
of slaves and a vast amount of oil,” which Brass traders eagerly waited to
buy.29 Sometime in early December 1859 Okeyea sold off thirty slaves
at once, upon which a great shout of acclamation broke out throughout
Aboh. It was a major business transaction that reinforced his prestige as
both a dexterous businessman and a major political force in the kingdom,
enabling him to increase his canoe fleet later that year.30 Although Aje did
not match Okeyea’s achievement during the twelve to eighteen months
during which Cole resided in Aboh, he was by no means poor. According
to Baikie, in 1854 Aje owned “four large war-canoes and about 250 slaves,
while Tshukuma has five smaller canoes and about 50 or 60 slaves.”31 Thus,
Okeyea must have been very wealthy and powerful if his other brothers
were considered to be less wealthy than him.
Scathingly Cole described Okeyea as “big a scoundrel as his brother
Ajie,” rich and “dreaded” by the people, and “commercially speaking…more
adapted for the slave Rialto” than for the “seat or station” of a “prince or
tyrant” and from him he [Cole] had “bought as many as twenty puncheons
of oil in the course of an hour.”32 This echoes Crowther’s statement about
Aje five years previously, an indication of their parity in status.33 Aboh
people admired his public activities and wealth; however they still did not
consider him as equal to other chiefs.34
209
In Aboh’s monarchical selection process, “a candidate’s competence
was determined by several factors, among which were the size of his compound and the number of war canoes he commanded.”35 Wealth was a
primary qualification for a claimant to the throne, for his resources were
related to the extension and maintenance of Aboh’s economic and political
dominance in the Niger. In this case neither Aje nor Orisa, the primary
contestants across lineage lines, was as rich as Okeyea, so they had to prove
their competence by other means. While Olise had apparently won the
support of the Aboh king-makers, European visitors regarded Aje as the
ruler. According to Ogedengbe, “Aje who contested the stool with Olise of
Umuojugbali was generally described as the ‘king’ of Aboh by European
visitors in the 1850s [but] is not so regarded by his descendants. It was
conceded by all that Aje was the most powerful figure on the Niger at the
time, but every Aboh regards Olise as the Obi.”36
By 1859 other princes began to revive their claims to the obiship of
Aboh. The trio of Chukwuma, Aje, and Okeyea combined forces to engage
“a revolutionary prince, one Bama Pier, who lives within the precincts of
Abo the less.” A naval engagement was narrowly averted after lengthy
peace negotiations.37 If Cole’s Bama Pier (also referred to as Buma Pere
or Bomar in missionary documents) was the one who eventually became
king in c.1880–1881, this indicates that during the period under examination, he was another player in the volatile political terrain.38 Whatever the
case, Buma Pier of “Lesser Aboh” clearly was a powerful prince, wealthy
enough to put war canoes on the Niger to battle with Chukwuma, Aje, and
Okeyea. It is not clear to which ward he belonged, but we know that it was
neither Obikwu nor Cole’s “greater Aboh.”
With this diverse pool of hostile contestants, the political influence of
the electors must have increased tremendously, much more perhaps than
they might have enjoyed with a king on the Aboh throne. In 1854, when
Rev. Crowther and Dr. Baikie waited on the Isagba, an old umudie officeholder, he querulously inquired whether Chukwuma had not mentioned
his name to the visitors. Apparently this official acted as the regent and
was said to be the “keeper of the suits and other articles used when the
king goes through the ceremonial of being acknowledged as the sovereign
of the nation.” Since there was no king then, he acted “as the president of
Aboh, [and] all important matters [were] referred to him for decision.”39
Clearly, this was an important personage who wielded real political power.
Another person of great political influence in the kingdom was a chief
titled the Oduah. According to Ogedengbe, this title:
210
appears to have been older than the other titles, including
perhaps the obiship…it has well defined functions, and does not
owe its existence to any act of appointment… Like the Obi, the
Oduah had the right to ma ekwe, i.e., issue announcements and
assemble the olinzele to his residence. Decisions reached here
are regarded as valid as those enacted by the Obi and his titled
men. It was he who anointed (ido nzu) and crowns (ikpume okpu)
the Obi. No one could legitimately ascend the throne without
these rituals.
He stood to benefit from a protracted interregnum, and he had considerable decision-making power in the absence of a recognized king.
Moreover, there were sixty electors or king-makers who wielded considerable political influence as individuals without whose support none of the
contestants could ever become king.40 Ogedengbe observes that “the electors
in some cases exerted a powerful influence, and contestants, as in the contest
following the death of Obi Osai I, incurred heavy expenses in trying to woo
their support.”41 Thus central authority during the interregnum was diffused among several competing princes as well as a large number of wealthy
individuals and traditional office-holders. As Crowther concluded in 1857,
“every headman appears to be master in his own quarters.”42
Aboh’s diffuse political arrangement during the period 1844–1862 was
closely connected with the mid-nineteenth century Niger River trade. But
after Osai’s death in 1844 several intervening factors stoked the fire of the
volatile interregnum that followed. These included the onset of princely
competition, the breaking of the monopoly grip by an individual (usually
the king and his household) that was ensured by increased prosperity from
legitimate trading, and the direct presence of European traders on the
Niger River. Aje’s political aspirations suffered most from the impact of
these factors.
European influence
It was unfortunate that the European trade that Obi Osai worked
so hard to advance disrupted the peace of his realm after his death. The
Laird factory may have been established in Aboh as early as 1843, but
was definitely located there by 1854.43 In 1857 Captain Grant was said to
have refused to trade with Aboh, preferring instead to proceed upriver to
Onitsha. He did not give any “trust” (advance of goods in credit as payment
for produce to be procured against its value) to Aje, whom he considered
untrustworthy. Nonetheless, in July or August of 1858 Aje granted a plot
211
of land for a permanent factory structure as well as a significant amount of
assistance in labor and materials.44
The presence of the European trading agent in Aboh became very
important in the configuration of political power and the ideology. He
had separate quarters, servants, helpers, and a store of valuable European
manufactured goods that he gave in “trust” to trading chiefs in Aboh and
elsewhere. The trading agent represented a new and important economic
and political power, with the potential of military support from visiting
naval vessels. Soon his position was rationalized by Aboh religious authorities as semisacrosanct. A local religious official advised Aje that “the gods”
had instructed him that Cole could not be touched within his premises
“but [that] when he is under the canopy of heaven then he is unprotected,
and his life is forfeited.”45
In principle, all Aboh chiefs, princes, and merchants supported trade
expansion. Their identity and position in the state was based on trade and
the wealth and power that it brought. Resident European trading agents
ensured the continuation of economic power, but with so many competing
princes, chiefs, and trading houses, the scene was bound to become confused. Thus when Aje was refused “trust” in 1857, he voiced his objection
and dismay. Like Osai before him, he had wanted to be the sole trustee
of these goods, so the refusal of trust was a blow to his aspirations.46
To worsen the situation, the missionaries had also refused to establish a
mission in Aboh, preferring to go further upriver to Asaba and Onitsha.47
Having given the land on which the Laird factory stood, Aje definitely hoped for preferential treatment and the possibility of monopolizing trade.48 When this did not work out, he became incensed against the
entire trading system. Later, his justification for hostile actions against the
factory was that he neither benefited from it nor was paid for the labor that
he provided for construction of its buildings.49 Conflict between Cole and
Aje increased, eventually leading Cole to refuse favors to Aje like lending
him puncheons for salt storage or allowing him to store his goods in one of
the factory warehouses. The final humiliation for Aje occurred when Cole
refused to allow him to breakfast in the factory on a market day.50
There were several incidents of conflict between Aje and the Laird
factory agent. Two or three times the store was burglarized or otherwise
attacked on Aje’s order, and the eventual sack of the factory was attributed
to Aje.51 However, the agent’s powerful economic and financial influence
ensured the support of a significant group of Aboh chiefs, enabling Cole
to defy Aje in front of his slaves and retinue. Not only did Cole imprison
Aje’s slaves, but he also drew his revolver on Aje, threatening to shoot
him and his slaves. Although several times Aje ordered his slaves to arrest
212
Cole or to shoot him, they could not carry out these orders because of
the military strength of the agent’s supporters.52 Also, the commercial
and financial positions of the chiefs depended on trading with Cole and
his factory. On the other hand, Chukwuma solidified his position as the
protector of the factory and a good friend of Cole, who had interceded on
his behalf in conflicts with Aje.53 In addition, Okeyea also supported Cole
who in return, gave him preferential treatment. Further, he supported the
factory until it became clear that Cole intended to move to Onitsha. On
a number of occasions both Chukwuma and Okeyea shielded Cole from
Aje’s hostility.54
Trade relations with European agents and missionaries often created
opportunities for competition among the brothers for access to “dashes”
and fee payments and for mediating favorable outcomes in Aboh’s power
politics. Crowther reported that “Aje is haughty in character: he despised
Orisa and his party altogether, and behaved in a similar way to his brother
Tshukuma; consequently he is not liked in return.” 55 Aje became irate
when he found out that Chukwuma had received similar presents to
those given him.56 Thus, the presence of the European factory in Aboh
that offered trust and goods to numerous big men meant that the factory
agent’s partiality for one or other chief had important political implications
that complicated and prolonged the interregnum in Aboh. It worsened the
divisiveness of princely politics, raised the ire of Aje and his supporters
against the Laird factory, and gave Aboh a bad name among the European
traders and missionary travelers.
The Europeans’ open disrespect of Aje lowered his prestige among the
people he wished to rule. For example, a free black immigrant carpenter, who worked for the Laird factory, visited Aje and for an unspecified
reason and during an argument, Aje spat in his face. When the carpenter
responded in kind, a fight ensued in which the man was overpowered
by Aje’s followers and was incarcerated, but Aje was forced to free him
after two days for fear that an approaching British gunboat would seek
vengeance.57 It is impossible to conceive of such a situation in the days
before white traders took up residence up river. Indeed, the captivity of the
Lander brothers at Asaba in 1830 and the manner of their redemption by
Osai demonstrates how the carpenter might have fared in earlier times.
European traders took full advantage of the situation to participate in
political intrigue. In the absence of a ruler with the power of monopoly,
the factory agent could give trust to whomever he chose, rather than just to
the ruler. Aje was never in any of the traders’ good books, especially Cole’s.
Even the missionaries who knew him during his years of competition for
the throne rarely spoke to his credit.58 Eventually, Cole refused to extend
213
goods to him on trust.59 Okeyea on the other hand was generally highly
regarded by Cole, for in January 1860 Cole gave him goods in trust worth
a ton of oil. On other occasions, Okeyea even borrowed Cole’s canoe for
his own personal and, most likely, business use.60 Moreover, Cole enjoyed
positive relations with other local traders. He believed that Chukwuma
was the most trustworthy black man he ever met, and on a number of
occasions, rewarded him with gifts of cloths and other sundry goods.
Another trader favored by Cole was the “revolutionary” prince Buma Pere,
who exploited this connection to further his economic position and, ultimately, political influence. But Cole himself was no better than his African
partners. Based on his journal, he was as much a scoundrel as Aje. It is hard
to discern the full extent of his personal culpability for what happened
to him and his factory. Nearly a decade later Crowther referred to “Mr.
McGregor Laird’s Factory at Abo” and the “mischiefs done by his agent
[Cole] with the natives.”61
Economic dependence on European trade eroded the political position of Aje and his rival chiefs. The longer the interregnum lasted, the
more intrigue there was: individual princes and wealthy people enlarged
their political followings, exercised king-like authority in their immediate domain, and contributed to the demise of central authority in Aboh.
Although in his own quarter Aje “was the most influential and troublesome”
leader, he had “no influence whatever” in Orisa’s or any other quarter.62
Varying degrees of social and political change followed European
penetration of the Niger River.63 The people of Aboh did all they could
to retain European trade within their city. Obi Osai’s request that European traders settle and trade in Aboh initiated a process that successfully
broke the middleman position of the Brass. Of course, Brass traders had
openly objected to the establishment of the Laird factory at Aboh; Cole
reported that they “gave vent in various ways to their displeasure.”64 When
the Aboh-based European merchants continued their efforts to get to the
interior sources of supply, the Aboh merchants realized the negative implications for their own middleman position.
During the interregnum, legitimate commerce generally boomed but
did not displace the slave trade. The new trade culminated in the establishment of a trading factory in Aboh and immediately redounded on the
sociopolitical position of the traditional elite. Their loss of middleman
monopoly and profit position represented the economic indices of the
state’s decline. Thus, the presence of the Aboh factory and open access to
local traders destabilized the centralized state and its control of the export
trade. By the 1850s legitimate commerce had begun to undermine the
position of the political elite who had relied on the slave trade. Thus, the
214
interregnum reflected the normal conflicts that followed the ascension of
any new obi, but its longevity reflected new power relationships.65 Political
authority in Aboh might have been directly underpinned by a segmentary
or clannish principle, but other important conditioning factors contributed
significantly to the particular nature of the post-Osai era in Aboh. The
impact of the inland penetration of European trade and its direct disruptive effects in Aboh were critical in the equation.
It is not necessary to look for a class revolution to perceive significant
ways in which nineteenth-century economic changes in the transatlantic
and the Niger River trade affected sociopolitical structures in the Nigerian
area. The example of Aboh shows the type of factional political problems
that could affect state structures as strongly as class problems. The singular
presence of a European agent in an early nineteenth-century middleman
trading state like Aboh catalyzed ongoing economic and political changes,
disrupting configurations that had traditionally held together these structures and facilitated political processes. Thus, while Aboh slid into decline
because its middleman position was destroyed, its leadership structure suffered from the inability of a strong individual capable of overcoming the
disruptive forces of jealousy and lack of vision. No doubt Macgregor Laird
intended his factory to be an instrument of instilling the abolitionist ideals
of commerce, Christianity, and civilization, but the operation of the type
of trade that he brought to Aboh promoted the type of structural political
problems that eventually justified imperialist bombardment, annexation,
and colonization.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
K. O. Ogedengbe, “The Aboh Kingdom of the Lower Niger, c.1650‑1900,”
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1971, 339.
K. O. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta: 1830‑1885 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1956); C. C. Ifemesia, “British Enterprise on the Niger:
1830–1869,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1959; P. A. Oguagha,
“Historical and Traditional Evidence,” in P. A. Oguagha and A. U. Okpoko,
History and Ethnoarcheaology in Eastern Nigeria: A Study of Igbo-Igala Relations with Special Reference to the Anambra Valley (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom;” and Ebere Nwaubani, “The Political Economy
of Aboh, 1830–1857,” African Economic History 27 (1999): 93–116.
Nwaubani, “Political Economy of Aboh,” 110.
Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom,” chapter 7.
215
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
K. Nwachukwu-Ogedengbe, “Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Aboh,”
in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, edited by
Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1977): 140.
William Cole, Life in the Niger, or the Journal of an African Trader (London:
Saunders, Otley, 1862): 144.
Prolonged interregna have been a feature of Aboh politics. In the twentieth
century they occurred in 1910–1916 and 1958–1964 (when Ogedengbe did
his research).
Unless otherwise mentioned, information on early Aboh politics is derived
from Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom,” 88, 213–218, 234–249.
M. Laird and R. A. C. Oldfield, Narrative of an Expedition into the Interior
of Africa by the River Niger in the Steam Vessels Quorra and Alburkah in 1832,
1833 and 1834 (London: R. Bentley, 1837), vol.1: 270.
Ibid., 97.
Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom,” 318–19.
Ibid., 340.
W. Allen and T. R. H. Thomson, A Narrative of the Expedition sent by Her
Majesty’s Government to the River Niger in 1841 under the Command of
Captain H. D. Trotter (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967),
vol.1: 255, 259, 260.
Allen and Thomson, Narrative, vol.1: 124.
Ibid., vol.1: 205, 209; vol.2: 133, 135.
W. B. Baikie, Narrative of an Exploring Voyage Up the Rivers Kwora and Binue
Commonly Known as the Niger and Tsadda in 1854 (London: Frank Cass,
1966): 304–305.
S. Crowther, Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers, Undertaken by MacGregor Laird, Esq., in Connection with the British Government in
1854 (London: Frank Cass, 1970 [1855]): 185.
Baikie, Narrative, 43.
Ibid.
Crowther, Journal of an Expedition, 16.
S. Crowther (Lagos) to H. Venn, 9 November 1863, C A3/O4a, Letters
& Papers 1857–1863: Rev. Samuel Adjai Crowther, CMS Niger Mission
Papers.
Cole, Life in the Niger, 54, 56,108.
Ibid., 43–44.
Ibid., 56, 58, 90, 113.
W. Baikie (Lokoja) to Lord Russell, 11 October 1860, p.412, FO 2/34,
National Archives [hereafter NA], Kew.
216
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
Cole, Life in the Niger, 36–37.
Ibid., 130–131.
Cole, Life in the Niger, 42.
S. Crowther and J. C. Taylor, The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger. Journals
and Notices of the Native Missionaries Accompanying the Niger Expedition of
1857–1859 (London: Dawsons, 1968, [1859]): 17.
Ibid., 18; and Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom,” 136. Plans for a military expedition against Ossomare had been temporarily suspended in 1857 on the
grounds that Aje’s mother came from there.
Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom,” 213.
Ibid., 146; and Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom,” 371.
Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom,” 136.
Crowther and Taylor, Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, 19.
Nwaubani, “Political Economy of Aboh,” 110; and N. Nzimiro, Studies in
Ibo Political Systems: Chieftaincy and Politics in Four Niger States (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1972): 5. Nwaubani gives the date as 1854
while Nzimiro gives 1843; neither scholar cites any source for his choice.
Entry for 20 July 1858, James Thomas journal (1858–1859); Cole, Life in the
Niger, 104; and Ifemesia, “British Enterprise on the Niger, 1830–1869.”
Crowther and Taylor, Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, 19, 21.
Ibid., 16.
Entry for 20 July, 1858, James Thomas journal (1858–1859).
Ibid., 60, 112.
Ibid., 113–114, 120–21, 154; and W. Baikie to John Russell, no.35, 11
October 1860, FO 2/34, NA, Kew.
Ibid., 56.
Ibid., 192.
Ibid., 17–18.
Ibid., 50.
Ibid., 17–20; and Baikie to Russell 11 October 1860, FO 2/34, NA, Kew.
217
61. Crowther to [W. Africa Company], CA 3/04(a), Letters 1864–1868, CMS
Niger Mission Papers.
62. Crowther and Taylor, Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, 16, 20.
63. K. Dike, Trade and Politics; A. G. Hopkins, “Economic Imperialism in West
Africa: Lagos, 1880–92,” Economic History Review 13 (1972): 580–600; and
Kolapo, “Post-Abolition Niger Commerce.”
64. Cole, Life in the Niger, 35.
65. Ogedengbe, “Aboh Kingdom,” 339–344.
218
• 13 •
Ownership of Slaves
in Nsukka
in the Nineteenth Century
Christian C. Opata and Damian U. Opata
T
he conference on “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Its Aftermath: The
Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora” could be
likened to the proverbial six blind men and the elephant, perhaps because
it has taken so long to publish the proceedings. Even though insights
gained from the proceedings may not represent the whole truth,they did
nevertheless yield a substantial body of important evidence. Slavery existed
in Nsukka before the transatlantic trade, but so far no study has dealt with
the ownership structure of slaves among the Nsukka people.1 This chapter
seeks to fill this gap in scholarship by examining the indigenous ownership
structure of slaves before and after the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing
from a typology based on the human and spiritual ownership of slaves, this
chapter examines the epistemological, economic, and religious aspects of
the institution as well as the spatial positioning of the slaves in the various
communities in which they found themselves.
Nsukka and the slavery institution
The Nsukka senatorial zone of Enugu state, Nigeria, is found within
the rectangle formed by longitudes 6° 55´ and 7° 52´ east and latitudes
6° 23´ and 7° 06´ north with a land area of 3,961 square kilometers.2 It
shares a common boundary with the Igala and the Ekpoto of Idomaland
in Benue state to the north, northeast, and northwest. Nsukka is bounded
by Ebonyi state in the east, the Enugu zone in the south, and Anambra
State in the west.
The institution of the slave trade had a long history among the Nsukka
people. Although it is impossible to pinpoint its social and economic
origins, three main historical periods can be discerned:
1. Ohu tupu oge mgbere anyinya (the slave trade before the advent of
the horse trade)
2. Ohu mgbere anyinya na-unyama (the slave trade during the period
of the horse trade and the long distance trade)
3. Ohu mgbe a nata a nara jere oyibo (the slave trade in which slaves
exchanged owners before they got to the Europeans).3
Local accounts agree to some extent with that of A. J. Shelton, who
observed that in olden times the Igala would take horses down to Nsukka
and sell them to the Igbo in exchange for slaves, who would then be sold
to the river people at Idah, who would in turn take them down to the river
to trade to the Beke (Europeans).4 The era of the pre-Igala horse trade can
be equated to the era before the trans-Saharan trade when the Igala traded
northward.
Ownership before the trans-Saharan trade
In Nsukka, abinitio (slaves) were part of the traditional economy.
Nsukka Igbo generally regarded abinitio as unpaid domestic “servants”
who exchanged their labor in return for maintenance. They were not paid
by their masters although the master shouldered all the problems of slaves
under them and theoretically treated them kindly. During this period slave
ownership was restricted to wealthy, influential farmers and renowned
medical practitioners. They viewed slaves as an integral part of their families, although with restricted rights.
These slaves were usually war captives, pawns used as collateral for
debts, and individuals who had violated social norms. For instance, Igwe
220
Ownership of Slaves in Nsukka in the Nineteenth Century
Nwaoruka of Amelu Village, Lejja, had a male slave sharecropper named
Ezema Ezike. He gave Ezema some yams to plant, but unfortunately,
Ezema decided to consume them rather than to cultivate them. As compensation, he offered to serve Nwaoruka as a slave until the value of the
yams could be repaid. Nwaoruka put Ezema in charge of his large herd
of cows. Ezema showed such great loyalty in this task that his master
rewarded him with four wives, namely, Onyugwu Okoro, Nweze Diugwu,
Nkwo Nwamoke, and Oyinna Ugwuta. Nwaoruka’s kinsmen, however,
reprimanded him, chiding him that is infradig for a slave to have more
wives than his master, which meant that the slave might potentially have
more offspring than the master. Nwaoruka, however, did not agree, since
he believed that the descendants of his slave were his. He then bestowed
freeborn status on Ezema, symbolized by giving his ex-slave ishi nkete (the
three short ribs below the neck) of all the animals used in personal sacrifices by Nwaoruka. To this day, this special portion is meant for the second
eldest person in the village or the clan. This signified that Igwe regarded
his ex-slave as his second-in-command even though he had sons: Ofelu,
Nwaoshiligwe, Ugwuoke, and Ezeagu.
Despite Nwaoruka’s symbolic gesture, however, Ezema did not enjoy
total uhuru (freedom) because he was not paid for his services and he had
no right of land ownership. The parcel of land presently occupied by Ogbu
Nwigwe, one of the descendants of Igwe Nwaoruka by his wife Onyugwu
Agbo, was where Ezema lived.5 During this period, a slave, whatever his
chronological age, was not allowed to assume the position of the eldest
man in the village unless he had gained manumission. Such a situation
gave rise to two villages bearing the same name of Amaukwa in Nsukka
town, one for freeborn and the other for the children of ex-slaves.6
Traditional medical practitioners treated their slaves and pawns more
harshly. Slaves owned by herbalists were sent to the forests or wilderness
to harvest herbs, shrubs, or to kill animals and insects used in preparing
medicine, but they did not instruct slaves in how these things were used.
Some herbalists even sacrificed their slaves to “sanctify” and “upgrade”
their medicine to make them more potent. Nwala Iregbu of Ede Oballa,
Nsukka was famous for such practices. Pawns of herbalists had shorter
terms of service and could regain their freedom more quickly.
Another class of slaves was owned by deities who occupied important positions in the social and religious life of the people. Such Nsukka
deities included Adada Nwabueze of Lejja, Ehuru of Idoha, Duluapata
of Nkpologwu, Api of Opi, Ochegu of Orba, Adoro of Ero, Lolouhere of
Iheaka, Ojiyi of Aku, Ohe and lyiocha of Nsukka, and Ezugwu of Amalla.
These deities were categorized as male and female and they embodied ideals
221
of male patriarchy and femininity. Slaves owned by the spirits were referred
to as ohu mma or osu. They were acquired through communal human levies,
payment of reparations, and restitution. They were kept under the custody
of the chief priest of specific deities and lived in separate settlements from
the rest of the villagers. Decisions on how to dispose of such slaves were
decided by the entire community through a council of elders. Residents
of Obimo town claim that Adada Agabo owned Ugwuanyanwu village.7
Ohu mma or osu could marry, and new female arrivals married male slaves
already in residence.
Ownership during the trans-Saharan trade
era
During the trans-Saharan trade era, the structure of ownership
changed. Outright purchase and perpetual ownership became dominant
trends. How did this come about? The desire to take titles, especially the
ogbuanyinya title, was an important element in bringing about change.
Slaves were used in ceremonies concluding the taking of the ama, oha,
and ozo titles. Often slaves were buried with their masters, who held ozo
titles, to serve them in the world beyond. In the funeral ceremonies of
men bearing the ogbuanyinya title, a horse was used instead of slave after
abolition. In the Nsukka area, the importance of horses can still be seen in
the surname of some families (for example, the Ogbuanya family), in their
use in funeral ceremonies, and the symbolic use of odu anyinya (horsetails)
as status symbols in ceremonies and masquerade displays.
Initially, no one disposed of slaves without the consent of his kinsmen.
If such slaves were used in taking titles, the owner was not obliged to pay
any percentage to the community if he had purchased the slave with his
own resources. If an owner sold a slave, he or she presented one horsetail
to the community. In cases where a slave had been obtained through war,
especially communal war, and then was sold, the owner presented three
horsetails to the community after the sale. For inherited slaves, levies owed
the community differed from place to place according to the status of their
original ownership.
As the ogbuanyinya title became more popular, the practice of giving
some part of the proceeds of sales was jettisoned, aptly put by the adage,
“ala kparu oke efu, n’eri a” (a land that bred a bull should eat it). Thus, ownership implicitly entailed the power of total alienation and lack of freedom of
the slave. The right of a master to dispose of his slave at will was the most
conclusive demonstration of ownership. Upwardly mobile leaders devised
new means to obtain seniority status among titled men in their village or
222
town. One method was to use their farm and domestic slaves as professional human porters, often transforming them into human trade commodities in the process. For example, the influential merchant Igwegbe
Odum, better known locally as the Legendary Omenuko, a sobriquet
meaning “he who provides in the midst of scarcity,” used to hire carriers
to transport his wares to market and then sell them into slavery at the end
of their journey.8 In another case, the duplicitous Mkpume Nwaugwudiekwuma sold his stubborn wife by tricking her into accompanying him on
a long-distance journey ostensibly to buy beads and a horse for her to take
the “ogbuanya” title.9
Another system of ownership devised during this period was investing
in slaves as stock held under joint ownership. The original purchaser or
owner put his slaves in the care of trusted friends who were paid the maintenance costs of the slaves and allowed to use their labor. Such slaves were
often young men who had been bought or women of childbearing age
whose children had been weaned. A male slave was bought in exchange
for one horse, one ndere akaa (bead), and one elephant tusk, but a female
slave was more expensive, selling on average for three beads, one horse, an
elephant tusk, and okpukpu na-ano (four ivory bangles). These slaves could
not own land or livestock. Often they were used for breeding purposes.
A male slave would be married to several female slaves, thus creating a
household for slave procreation. The offspring of such unions was shared
between the slave owner and the slave keeper by a ratio of 3:1. This meant
that for every female slave who gave birth to four children, the slave owner
took the first three while the fourth was given to the keeper. If mixed male
and female children were involved, a different custom applied that was
similar to the current Nsukka practice connected with sharing livestock
like goats or cows. For example, if a female slave gave birth to three male
children and the fourth happened to be a girl, the baby girl was jointly
owned by the owner and the keeper. Offspring of such jointly-owned
females were shared equally. Locally, this type of joint custody is referred
to as ibege (half ownership), while the sharing formula of 3:1 is referred to
as ohurohu (full ownership). Such slaves were not regarded as having equal
status. The slaves of the keepers were accorded less respect than those of
the original purchaser and owner.
Cases involving ownership by more than two people sometimes
occurred when polygamous families inherited slaves. The method for
sharing slaves varied depending on the number of wives and sons of the
deceased. The Eloke family in Ikolo community provides a good example
of this. One of its members, Ikeburuonwu Nwaeloke, had a female slave
who gave birth to three sons. His two wives had three sons. The sons of
223
the slave girl were called “bastards,” but in some parts of Nsukka “bastards”
are accepted as part of the mother’s family and called nwa okwa. The three
sons of the slave girl were shared into two to reflect the number of wives
Ikeburuonwu had. Nwaeloke’s son, Onodugo, was born of one of the wives.
Therefore he inherited one and a half share of the “bastard” sons. Here the
half-share refers to joint ownership between him and his two brothers of
a different mother. Onodugo then married two wives, who bore him nine
children, five girls and four boys (each wife had two sons). When Onodugo
died, his sons shared their father’s slaves, together receiving an ekpa (a
quarter share) of their father’s share from their grandfather or individually
an mpi (an eighth share).10 This type of sharing still survives among the
Nsukka people of Lejja, Ohodo, Ozalla, Obimo, and other places when
herbivorous livestock is shared, especially cows.
The threat of armed conflict influenced changes in ownership rights,
affecting the category of person entitled to own slaves and the category
that could be enslaved. The status of osu, however, remained unchanged,
and slave raiders hesitated to raid their villages for fear of punishment by
the deities that owned them. To ensure that people of the same descent
group did not enslave or sell each other, lineages and friendship groups
entered into igba ndu (pacts). There were four types of pacts. The first was
igba ndu eji obara madu mee, a pact that was concluded by using human
blood. The second was ubu ala, a pact done by performing a ceremony by
putting ash and kola nut within a circle cut on the ground with a knife
while reciting an invocation calling on the gods of the land to bear witness
to the agreement and to make any defaulter as “useless” as ash. The third
was ntikpo mmanya eja ibude, a pact performed by pouring palm wine into a
calabash while reciting terms of the pact over the calabash. Once the terms
were recited, the parties involved jointly smashed the calabash, spilling the
palm wine on the ground, symbolizing the irrevocable nature of the pact
as neither the wine nor the calabash could be recovered. A fourth is ichi oji,
a pact in which a kola nut is broken, after which the eldest party detaches
the “eye” (the radicle of the cotyledon) and then recites the terms of the
pact, after which he throws the “eye” as a libation to the gods invoked. This
fourth pact was restricted to particular clans, villages, or communities.
The era of the transatlantic trade
During the era of the transatlantic trade, the Nsukka area witnessed
tremendous change. Slave ownership continued to fall into the two broad
categories of human and spiritual slavery. Both freeborn or slaves could own
slaves. Meanwhile, the system of joint caretaking of slaves declined, and
224
rather than entrusting slaves to the care of a friend, slave owners retained
slaves to work in their own households or farms. Under this arrangement
the sharing of the children of slaves was done at a ratio of 2:1. The slave
master took the first two shares while the slave-breeding slaves took one;
however this arrangement was very deceptive, as the master owned both
the slave and his share of the slave’s children. The saying “okuko nwata
new na-eju” (the fowl a child owns only in name), refers to this type of
arrangement. Slave owners could dispose of slave children at will without
the consent of their parents.
The term for a slave owned by another slave was “ohu di ohu n’ime,”
literally translated as “a slave within a slave”. The offspring of a slave-owned
slave were shared between the slave-master and his freeborn-master equally
to reduce the agony of the slave-breeders. Slave-owned slaves were regarded
as slaves raised to the “power of two,” while offspring of the slave-owned
slaves were regarded as slaves raised to the “power of three.” The greater the
generational distance of the descendants from their slave-owner forebears,
the lower their social status and the fewer privileges they had.
Why did the slave owners decide to keep their slaves under their personal jurisdiction? As Ugwu Onyishi Nwode Nwaelegere, the son of Obute
Nwasogwa, popularly known as Nwaonyishi because of his longevity, said:
My father told me that be brought them into our house to avoid
extra cost, maximize profit, for if they were kept with Omeeanu
Ogowwoo, he would be sending food to them, whereas their
labour is for Omeanu. Also since traders brought them, sold
and resold [them], and [they] still made profit, it would be more
profitable for those who had access to the Europeans to retain
them.11
Fallout from of this type of arrangement strained relationships between
friends, especially when conflicts arose concerning the sharing of dividends. The keepers argued that the owners placed them on the same level
with the slaves by granting them (the keepers) a share after the owners had
claimed their right to two slaves born of a slave woman.
A second type of enslavement was depriving an individual of his or
her personal freedom by outright intimidation, not through purchase. The
enslavers (or bandits) referred to this in the statement, “ihe eji eri nwa Eze
ego nweme eha,” which translates as “whatever is used to appropriate the
money of the king’s son should have [a] name.” Such enslavers decided
that it was a waste to buy slaves when they could enslave them by force.
One such bandit was Ala Nwanadi of Ogurugu, better known as Akacha
Nwoke, a name that translates as” never exclude men in the scheme of
225
things,” who deliberately waylaid bands of traders with the intent of
enslaving them. He led them to the Omabara (Anambra) River, where
he subdued them, and then ferried them across the river where his men
waited. According to legend, he even attacked his own mother, earning the
nickname Ugwa na-ato nne ya aria, which means “the gangster who stole
his mother’s items.”12
During this period, changes also took place in the osu system. While
the shrines of deities still owned slaves, slave status and rights were
affected. Ownership of this class of slaves remained the exclusive preserve
of the deity and the village concerned. They lived under the control of the
chief priest of the particular deity to whom they had been dedicated in
the village assigned for their use. The wider community regarded them as
lesser breeds. The sale of an osu required consultation among the villagers
who worshipped the deity in question, the chief priest who represented
the deity, and the fortune-tellers. The only freeborn entitled to intervene in
matters connected with osu were the ndi ishi mma (chief priests).13 There
were occasions, however, when freeborn sought protection among the osu.
Persons found guilty of breaking the town taboos or crimes that might be
punishable by execution or enslavement, might flee to an osu village where
they had to live under the same restrictions that applied to osu. Men and
women who took up residence in these villages married osu. Their offspring
were referred to as usu (bats), regarded as half slave and half freeborn.
As slave merchants increased their participation in the transatlantic trade, they introduced another innovation to ensure their security.
They arranged alliances in every community through which their trade
route passed. For example, the merchant Nwanikpa established alliances
along the caravan route to the coast with Ugwuonah Nwaomashi of Ede
Oballa, Ogbuebo Nwasogwa of Opi, Unodiaku Nwaohenyi of Ozalla,
Oko Nwamba of Nike, and Okenyi of Abakalili. When he wanted to
trade slaves to the Igala interior markets, he formed alliances with Asadu
Nwaugwu of Nsukka, Ugwuja Onu of Okpuje, Ayogu, Idu of Itchi, and
Onah Nweze of Unadu.14
Conclusion
By and large, slavery remains a reality in Nsukka specifically and Igboland generally. A descendant of a freeborn person still hesitates to marry
the descendant of a slave. Some villages still do not allow the descendants
of slaves to become the edoga (eldest person) who presides over all village
meetings and shrines of the deities even when such people are qualified by
age. Some villagers still are not represented in the town council of elders.
226
The mentality developed over the years about slavery and its ownership
structure accounts for the continuity of prejudice against the descendants
of slaves. It is high time these notions were discarded. A man is a man for
what he has achieved.
Notes
1. See A. J. Shelton, “Onoja Ogboni: Problems of Indemnification and Historicity in the Oral Traditions of the Igala and Northern Nsukka Igbo of Nigeria,”
Journal of American Folklore 81 (1968): 243–257; A. E. Afigbo, Ropes of Sand:
Studies in Igbo History and Culture (Ibadan: University Press in association
with Oxford University Press, 1981); Elizabeth Isichei, A History of the Igbo
People, (London: Macmillan, 1976); Cletus U. Opata, “Leadership in Nsukka
Senatorial Zone: A Historical Perspective,” in Nsukka Development Challenges, edited by D. U. Opata, J. O. C. Ozioko, and C. S. Eze (Nsukka: Adada
Investment Ltd; 1997): 162–223.
2. Patrick O. Agashi, “Government of Nsukka, 1929–1979,” M.A. thesis,
Department of History, University of Nigeria (Nsukka), 1986.
3. Interview with Igwe Ogbuanyaja, about 98 years old, the Edoga of Amelu
village, Lejja, 12 May 2000.
4. Shelton, “Onoja Obgoni,” 427.
5. Interview with Ogbuanyaja, 12 May 2000.
6. Interview with Paul Omeje, age about 40 years, Nsukka, 16 June 2000. He
took his M.A. degree at the University of Nigeria (Nsukka).
7. Interview with Ugwu Omeje, about 87 years old, a member of the Umuobeke
council of elders, Obimo, 9 May 2000.
8. A. E. Afigbo, “Chief Igwegbe Odum: The Omenuko of History,” Nigerian
Magazine 90 (1966): 222–231.
9. Interview with Onyeugwu Ugwu Nwoko Nwagbowo, about 103 years old,
Ohodo, 18 June 1993.
10. Interview with Ugwokeja Nwauriaga, about 100 years old, Ohebe, 2 June
2000.
11. Interview with Ugwu Onyishi Nwode Nwalegere, about 93 years old, Lejja,
2 June 2000.
12. Interview with George Olidoma, age 64, a retired civil servant, Nsukka, 16
May 2000.
13. Interview with Honorable Chief C. U. Opata, age 64; a retired civil servant
and politician, Nsukka, 18 May 2000.
14. Interview with Nwalegere, 2 June 2000.
227
• 14 •
From Children of Ham to
Agents of Christ:
The Place of Former Slaves in
Christian Evangelism in the
Biafra Hinterland
Nicholas Omenka
W
hen the English merchant John Adams visited Warri in the Biafran
hinterland in 1795, he was informed that in past centuries “several
Black Portuguese missionaries had been at Warri…endeavouring to
convert the natives into Christians.”1 Although this information failed
to mention that the black Portuguese were former slaves, it implicitly
ascribed the transformation of the unfortunate victims of the slave trade
from being the children of Ham to agents of Christ to the pioneering
efforts of Portuguese political and ecclesiastical leaders. Eager to extend
the Christian message to the lands opened to European trade in the fifteenth century, Pope Martin V (1417–1431) and his successors, in one of
the most regrettable mistakes in Christian history, granted the monarchs
of the Iberian peninsula the right to appoint bishops and missionaries
for their newly acquired overseas possessions. By virtue of these padroada
(patronage) accords, the most famous being the 1493 Bull of Demarcation
by the Spanish Pope Alexander VI, Africa and the East Indies fell under
the Portuguese sphere of influence.
Supported by their political leaders, Portuguese priests began missionary activities on the western coast of Africa in the fifteenth century.
The involvement of Africans in that proselytization effort may perhaps
be regarded as the only positive repercussion of the entire slave trade. In
Jesuit quarters, the contention that a fundamental conversion can only be
brought about by transplanting men and women from their natural cultural environment to a Christian-dominated one remains a controversial
proposition.2 There is no doubt, however, that the encounter of Christianity with African culture in modern times was propelled by the slave trade.
This chapter examines the courageous response of enslaved Africans to
the spiritual uplift of their cultural homeland in the Biafran hinterland.
The ambiguity of religion played itself out most prominently in the bizarre
partnership between the slave trade and the missionary movement. The
strange curse on the children of Ham found in Genesis 9:22–27, which
has been aptly described as an irrational biblical myth,3 provided the slaver
and the missionary with the necessary biblical and theological grounding
for their varying relationships with the “accursed” race. Ironically, in the
end it was the former slaves who became the most important agents in the
spiritual transformation of their supposedly “damned” race.
The first cultural interaction between the Portuguese and the indigenous African peoples took place mainly on the offshore islands of Cape
Verde, São Tomé, and Principe. On these Atlantic islands the very first
European colonies in tropical Africa were set up. Their proximity to the
mainland and the fact that they were predominantly uninhabited made
them ideal settlements for a curious collection of Portuguese colonists
who included missionaries, fortune seekers, runaway Castilian Jews, and
deported criminals. Together they dominated a large population of slaves
from the mainland who were employed for a variety of menial jobs in
homes, factories, plantations, ships, and in various church and administrative establishments. The black population of these island settlements
imbibed Portuguese culture and became invaluable to economic and missionary exploitation on the mainland. Acting as scouts and interpreters to
traders and missionaries, they became indispensable agents in the actual
transmission of the Christian message to the local inhabitants.
It was from the island of São Tomé that missionary activities were
carried out in the Biafran Hinterland, especially among the Itsekiri of the
Niger Delta in and around Warri.4 By 1534 the Portuguese crown had
established a bishopric on the island to better serve the spiritual needs
of settler and indigenous communities, but in the seventeenth century
230
From Children of Ham to Agents of Christ
Propaganda Fide created an Apostolic Prefecture of São Tomé whose
jurisdiction included the island of Principe, Bahia, and the kingdoms of
Guinea, Arda, Ayudaa, Benin, Warri, and environs.5 The “Portuguese Black
Missionaries” mentioned in Adams’ report came to Warri mainly from
this important mission centre. Of these peculiar agents of the gospel, F.
E. Forbes wrote that “Instances are constantly occurring, illustrating the
extraordinary capacity of the African mind. The island of St. Thomas sends
forth hundreds of black Roman Catholic priests to many parts of Africa
and these sable fathers assist materially toward the great object: the civilisation of Africa.”6
It is customary to blame the collapse of the Africa mission of the slave
trade era on the failure of church authorities to build up a native clergy in
mission lands. While this may be true to a certain extent, there is ample
evidence to show that the desirability of creating an African indigenous
clergy was not lacking in the mission conception and strategy of both the
state and ecclesiastical authorities. At a very early stage, the Portuguese
began to transport a large number of Africans from the Slave Coast to
Lisbon, so many that by the 1550s about 10 percent of the city’s population was black.7 Many of these former slaves were trained as priests and
brothers and then sent to the various bishoprics created by Portuguese
monarchs in West Africa in line with the padroada accords. Numerous
reports exist in propaganda records of encounters among missionaries,
black priests, and canons of the cathedral chapters of the bishoprics of São
Tomé, Cape Verde, and Luanda.8
After the formation of the Propaganda Fide in 1622 the various
religious congregations involved in missionary activities in Africa began,
albeit lackadaisically, to admit Africans to holy orders. A report from São
Tomé dated 1687 says that Francesco da Monteleone, the island’s indefatigable Capuchin prefect who carried out the longest and most effective
missionary work in Warri, built a convent in São Tomé in which eight religious and seven native novices were resident.9 In the neighboring Kongo
mission, Rome advised the Augustinians in 1625 to admit young people
from the region to the orders so that they could become missionaries to
their people.10 Indeed, it is reported that in 1646 most of the ten priests
left in the kingdom of Kongo were indigenous.11 Given the vastness of the
mission territories and the enormity of the task involved, however, it must
be conceded that the efforts made to build up an indigenous clergy were
grossly inadequate. Nonetheless, the reason for the tragic collapse of the
mission endeavor that spanned more than three hundred years must also
be sought in other factors that range from flawed mission theories and
ideologies to adverse political and economic imperatives.
231
The majority of the Itsekiri priests and brothers trained in the Portuguese islands of São Tomé and Principe were reluctant to work in their
homeland.12 They shared a predilection with the majority of the European
missionaries sent to areas of the West African coast where there was no
sizable European presence. The records of Propaganda Fide are replete
with requests from missionaries designated for São Tomé not to be sent
there for fear of onward dispatch to Benin, Warri, or any of the interior
mission stations. There was more to this aversion to the hinterland than
a natural craving for convenience. During the period under review, two
diametrically opposed mission schools of thought prevailed: one favored
vigorous expansion in the hinterland and the other supported the consolidation of existing missions on the coastal settlements and their immediate
environs.13 Unfortunately for the mission enterprise in the Biafran hinterland, the second school of thought gained the upper hand. The reasons for
this are not hard to find.
The entire missionary enterprise was inextricably tied to the dictates
of the slave trade, especially in the area of transportation. The missionaries
depended on the merchant ships that visited the coastal ports annually.
Mission posts in ports that lost their commercial value had to be abandoned. Logically it was practical to pay more attention to mission undertakings that had a chance of survival; however, the difference between the
two schools of thought reflects the intrinsic contradiction between slavery
and evangelization. More often than not, the noble intention to bring
about a cultural transformation in mission lands gave way to the overriding
intention of the European presence in Africa: to make money. Consequently, Portuguese officials who controlled the coastal cities and trading
posts viewed with displeasure, and oftentimes with suspicion, efforts by
missionaries to bring civilization and enlightenment into the hinterland to
people regarded as “savages who were used to work and to receive blows.”14
Not surprisingly some missionaries shared this view. Alan Ryder concludes
that the priesthood of the coastal cities was “hardly a missionary force,” but
rather “a parochial clergy serving the needs of a Europeanized community
and a native population subject to it.”15 Against this background we can
understand the reluctance of the priests of the Chapter of São Tomé, black
and white, and many missionaries to work in the hinterland.
That Christianity survived in the “Christian Kingdom” of Ode Itsekiri
from its inception at Warri in the 1570s to the beginning of the nineteenth
century is very significant. When the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda
Fide assumed direct control of the missions of West Africa at the beginning
of the seventeenth century following the near collapse of Portuguese ecclesiastical and commercial interests in that region, it discovered that Warri
232
was the only state between Elmina on the Gold Coast and Kongo where
Christianity still had an encouraging remnant.16 Since Portuguese missionaries were often absent from the kingdom for as many as ten years or more,
and since even black priests in São Tomé hesitated to reside in Warri, the
extraordinary success of Christianity among the Itsekiri must be explained
by a factor that historians have neglected: the silent, unrecognized labors
of former slaves who served both the missionaries and the olu’s royal court.
Since these individuals and their activities were rarely mentioned in official
records, their role in the evangelization process remains a matter of conjecture. A good place to begin the search for evidence of the missionary
endeavors of these unsung agents of the Gospel is a letter from the olu of
Warri to the Pope dated 20 November 1652, part of which reads as follows:
Such is my need of disinterested ministers to spread the faith in
my kingdom that it has almost gone to perdition, for it is more
than seven years since a priest has been here, and those who used
to visit came only once a year and remained only so long as the
pinnace from São Thomé was trading here. I wondered that none
came for so long. They tell me that they have no bishop in São
Thomé and so few priests that they are in almost the same straits
as myself. I leave it to Your Holiness to imagine how many are
falling away from the Faith. I am acting as a preacher myself, as
far as I am able, urging my subjects to trust in the mercy of God
that all will soon be set in order. This can only be done, I believe,
by Your Holiness…. Again I beg Your Holiness to send me the
fathers as soon as possible, and, if possible, to instruct the Prefect
of the fathers in Portugal to see that every year some priests are
sent with the ships that come from Lisbon to my kingdom to
trade. I will give them all the help in my power and reliable interpreters [author’s emphasis] so that they may bring my neighbour,
the King of Benin, and others to the faith.17
In the mission parlance of the time, an interpreter was much more than a
person who gave an immediate oral translation of words spoken in another
language. He was also a missionary in every respect because he also acted as
catechist and preacher. To him belonged the essential task of conveying the
content of the Christian doctrine to his people in familiar local concepts.
Very few white missionaries could perform this duty because of the sporadic nature of their journeys to the missions and the brevity of their stay
there. Their primary function was the administration of the sacraments.
Consequently, they resorted to mass baptisms and marriages on a scale that
excluded interior faith experience. One report claimed that a single priest
baptized 16,328 converts in four months.18 The task of making Christians
233
out of the individuals so baptized belonged to the former slaves who were
the first Africans trained in the Christian faith. Not even the olu, who
wrote the letter quoted above, could boast of a similar credential because
his father Domingos I was the first Warri king to receive a sound Christian
education, having been sent to Portugal by his father Sebastian to train as
a priest. He returned to Warri with ten servants, some of whom had been
made Portuguese royal knights. These and hundreds of other former slaves
in the service of the royal court helped to maintain a long tradition of
Christian rulers in the Itsekiri kingdom. Although the olu claimed in his
letter that he acted as a preacher himself, it is unlikely that he performed
that extraneous function regularly for seven years throughout his reign.
We assume that the task of keeping the Christian faith alive during the
long years without priests fell on those who were responsible for bringing
it home in the first place, namely, the former slaves who assisted the early
missionaries as scouts, interpreters, preachers, and servants.
Despite its remarkable success at the olu’s royal court, Christianity did
not have a permanent impact on Itsekiri society or on any other society
of the Niger Delta. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was
obvious that the effort to reintroduce Christianity into Africa after the
tragic demise of the North African church in the seventh century had
come to naught. It needed the fervor and dynamism of the Evangelical
revival and the vigorous missionary movement it inspired to make a new
beginning in the nineteenth century.
Modern missionary involvement with Africa was greatly influenced by
the antislavery movement set in motion by the evangelical humanitarians
in the late eighteenth century. “Liberated” Africans from England, Nova
Scotia, Jamaica, and North America were resettled in Sierra Leone and
Liberia. In addition, freed slaves from Brazil swelled the population of
former slaves on the West African coast. The new black colonists created a
missionary need that determined the raison d’être and focus of the newly
founded missionary societies and associations. The Church Missionary
Society (CMS) began its missionary work in Sierra Leone in 1804. As
many other societies developed a burning desire to join the foreign missions train, the nagging issue of slavery and morality quickly became an
existential problem for some of them. The missionary enterprise from the
fifteenth to eighteenth centuries was essentially a spiritual force and not
a humanitarian one, for the earlier cadre of missionaries was not particularly conscious of the inherent evil of the slave trade and even participated
actively in it on a scale that posed serious concerns for Propaganda Fide.19
In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, humanitarians and evangelicals firmly believed that slave-holders and supporters of slavery should
234
not participate in missionary work among liberated slaves in Africa. This
viewpoint had serious repercussions for some newly founded missionary
societies, especially in the Unites States of America, which at this time was
sharply divided into the antislavery north and the proslavery south. The
Southern Baptist Convention separated from the Triennial Convention of
the General Missionary Convention of the Baptist Denomination when it
was excluded from missionary activity in Liberia. In Britain, the Church of
Scotland also broke off relations with the American Presbyterian Church
for the latter’s continued approbation of slavery.
Of more significance for our study is the effect that the existence of so
many liberated Africans in West Africa had in determining the objectives
of the foreign mission societies. When Evangelical-inspired missionary
societies spoke of “heathen lands,” or highlighted the need for “foreign
missions,” or spoke passionately on the “conversion of the world,” they
usually had the traditional mission lands of India and the Far East in mind.
But the development of freed-slave colonies in West Africa quickly made
that region the primary focus of the missionary endeavors of the societies,
which began to emphasize the spiritual needs of “poor benighted Africans.” Nowhere was this turning point more dramatic than the missionary
plan of Paul Maria Libermann whose Holy Ghost missionary congregation was destined to initiate the evangelization of the vast Biafran hinterland from the Atlantic in the south to the Benue River in north, and from
the Niger River in the west to the Cameroon border in the east. He was
already contemplating a mission to the slaves in the lands of their captivity
when he was approached for help by Edward Barron, the former vicar
general of Philadelphia, who had unsuccessfully tried to carry out mission
work among liberated slaves in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Although his
concern for the slaves remained undiminished, his main focus afterward
changed to Africa, the homeland of the poor slaves.20 “For many centuries,”
he declared, “legions of Apostles have been rushing …to the ends of the
Earth…while at the door steps of Europe millions have been languishing
in ignorance and misery.”21
The choice of Liberia and Sierra Leone as springboards for mission
exploits in the continent served two main practical purposes. In the first
place, it was easier and wiser to recruit volunteers from among the liberated Africans, who had a burning desire to bring the Christian message to
fellow Africans and who were judged better adaptable to a region dubbed
the White Man’s Grave. Secondly, the Evangelical revival had necessitated
a rethinking of the mission mandate to include not only the salvation of
souls, but also the transplantation of the visible church. In other words, the
new missionary movement of the nineteenth century strove to establish
235
churches and schools on a permanent basis to promote cultural transformation leading to the rise of independent local churches that would
produce indigenous clergies that would replace the wandering missionary.22 Liberated Africans held the key to the achievement of this religious
and social transformation. As educated Christians and skilled artisans,
they were looked upon as primary agents in the actualization of the new
union between Christianity and commerce. In pleading his cause before
the Foreign Office for an effective exploration of the interior, McGregor
Laid described the liberated slaves as:
…most efficient agents by whose means new life and energy
and a higher standard of living may be introduced naturally,
unobtrusively, and rapidly into the remotest regions of the interior. To succeed, this return of the civilized African to his native
country, carrying English habits and language with him, must
be spontaneous and self-supporting.23
Although contemporary policy makers looked upon the Niger Expedition of 1841 as a disastrous failure, it greatly enhanced the prospects for the
return of the Liberated Africans to Nigeria who would undertake mission
activities in the Biafran hinterland and other places. Among other things,
it proved that Africans were best suited for missionary exploitation on the
Niger, given the near absence of deaths among their members during the
expedition. On the expedition were two notable CMS members—Samuel
Ajayi Crowther, an ex-slave of Yoruba parentage and a man destined to
lead the future Niger Mission; and Simon Jonas, an Igbo interpreter who
made a lasting impression on the obi and people of Aboh.24 In a pattern
that was consistent in the history of the Christian missions in Nigeria,
liberated slaves took the initiative in founding missions in their homelands. They wrote petitions to church leaders in Europe, North America,
and the various West African colonies; they made financial contributions
toward mission explorations and establishments; and more importantly,
they volunteered as missionaries. The ethnic backgrounds of these Christian ex-slaves greatly influenced the timing and location of the missions.
The very first mission in eastern Nigeria in the postemancipation period
was established at Calabar by the United Presbyterian Secession Church
in 1846. The idea of that mission was first conceived by Efik recaptives in
Jamaica. G. O. M. Tasie believes that the absence of a similar enthusiasm
among Delta people in the diaspora delayed the founding of a similar
mission in the Delta.25 This may be true to a certain degree, but Buxton’s
doctrine of “reach into the interior” was an important determining factor
in the strategy of the various missionary societies of the time. The drive
236
into the interior, however, could not begin until after the Niger expeditions
of the 1850s. Before then the attention of traders and missionaries focused
on Calabar, which had grown steadily in commercial importance since the
1830s because of its specialization in the “legitimate” trade in agricultural
products like palm oil. Emigrants from Sierra Leone and Liberia, many of
them businessmen of Igbo stock, began to settle in Calabar in increasing
numbers. Some of them joined the Presbyterian Church while others held
on to their Anglican and Methodist faith.
The long awaited emigration to the Niger began in 1857, following
the successful foundation of CMS mission posts at Onitsha and Igbebe.
Led by Crowther and the Rev. J. C. Taylor, an Igbo, those pioneer missionaries included twenty-five emigrants from Sierra Leone who served as
schoolmasters and evangelists.26 They played leading roles in the evangelization of Nigeria, especially in Igboland and the entire Biafran hinterland.
In 1864 Crowther’s elevation to the position of bishop in the Anglican
church and leader of an all-African staff on the Niger was a highwater
mark in pioneering the indigenization of Christianity in Africa. What is
of extraordinary significance is the fact that this group consisted of former
slaves, who were supposed to have lost everything, including their dignity
as human beings, but fate turned them into agents of a spiritual and cultural revolution that permanently reshaped the history of Nigeria. The
literary achievements of these “Sierra Leoneans,” especially in the study
of Nigerian languages and the production of vernacular literature, have
been adequately documented.27 Their contribution to the making of the
Nigerian elite and nation building cannot be overemphasized.
The secret to the civilizing force of the Sierra Leonean emigrants and
their recruitment to foreign missions can be found in Fourah Bay College.
Established by the CMS in 1804 to train Liberated Africans as teachers,
catechists, and clergymen, the college quickly attained a reputation as the
powerhouse of West African Protestantism. When Hope Waddell reached
Calabar in 1846, he observed that King Eyo’s son was highly educated
and concluded that the schoolmaster and the carpenter he had brought
with him from Jamaica were not “equal to this young man in writing and
arithmetic.”28 This experience, and the fact that emigrants from the West
Indies were not forthcoming, influenced his decision to recruit teachers
and artisans from Sierra Leone. He established the Hope Waddell Training Institute, modeled on Fourah Bay College, in Calabar. The generation
of educated Nigerians produced by both institutions spearheaded the drive
toward self-rule in Nigeria, both in the state and in the Church.
The Catholic mission had a unique experience with former slaves in
eastern Nigeria. When the first Catholic missionaries arrived at Onitsha
237
in 1885, they had to buy, house, and feed their first adherents. This contrasted sharply with the experience in Lagos where a Catholic mission had
been started in 1868 to minister to a fairly large number of former slaves
from Brazil who were already practicing Catholics. Onitsha had no such
emigrants. Although many Sierra Leoneans resided there, they usually
belonged to Protestant denominations. The Catholic authorities therefore
resorted to a common missionary method at the time known as the “slave
method.” This involved the practice of freeing slaves by purchase and confining them in quasi-Christian ghettos, where they were systematically
instructed in the tenets of the Christian faith. It was considered to be an
appropriate missionary strategy for Africa, where slavery had made deep
inroads in the social lives of the indigenous populations. Catholic charitable organizations like the Holy Childhood, the Anti-Slavery Society,
and the Association for the Propagation of the Faith were the principal
donors for ransoming slaves. Each year some 20,000 French francs were
contributed to the Onitsha mission for this purpose.29
Onitsha was an ideal place to experiment with the slave method of
evangelization. Writing to Propaganda Fide in 1912, Father Joseph Shanahan recalled the encounter of the pioneer missionaries with the grim
reality of slavery in the Biafran hinterland:
On the sandbank before our eyes, in Onitsha, slaves were once
publicly marketed, and our Fathers redeemed them daily to
the extent their meagre resources permitted. Soon hundreds
of these unfortunates were living in the Mission, and it was
no small task to feed, clothe and house them; no easy task to
dress their hideous wounds and gradually to instruct them and
change them to a Christian way of life.30
In purchasing slaves, preference was always given to children, who became
pupils in the first Catholic schools in the town. The availability of such children became an indispensable factor in the work of Catholic evangelization.
In 1899 Father Pawlas supported his plans to found a mission at Brass with
the argument that a large number of slaves was readily available there.31 In
fact, dependence on slaves had become so absolute that in 1888 the French
missionaries expressed deep concern when Major MacDonald, a British
administrator, forbade the sale of slaves at Onitsha.32 When Father LeónAlexander Lejeune became prefect of the mission in 1900, he took stock
of the progress made and concluded that the exclusive choice of slaves as
Catholic converts might result in unsavory consequences for the developing
church in eastern Nigeria. Going through the list of candidates for baptism
in 1902, he discovered in Onitsha alone five hundred such slave converts.
238
“[A] good harvest,” he remarked, “but the free-born, the chiefs, the ruling
class if you will, where are they?”33 In his opinion, the freeborn and the upper
class of society looked down on an institution that gave refuge to “their
outcast, their criminals, and the accursed of their gods.” Moreover, he noted
that the Onitsha ruling class was “entirely Protestant,” and wondered why
his predecessors had not tried to change the status quo.34
Two important factors accounted for the perceived Protestant ascendancy in Onitsha and indeed in the rest of eastern Nigeria during this
period. First, Protestant missions were operated exclusively by educated
Liberated Africans whose very persons embodied the wishes and aspirations of the ruling class for their children and wards. Second, the Protestant missions were often established with the invitation and collaboration
of powerful rulers, especially in Calabar and the Delta city states, who
undertook the financing of the education of their subjects and the upkeep
of the missions.35 Consequently, the schools and missions so founded and
funded perforce contained more members of the ruling class and freeborn than the lower caste. The anomaly observed by Father Lejeune with
reference to the Catholic missions was the direct result of the financial
constraint placed on them by the decision of the overseas authorities to use
donations from funding agencies for the purchase of slaves. By 1905 the
two main eastern Nigerian Catholic missions at Onitsha and Calabar had
memberships consisting of “some ordinary Christians and many slaves.”36
Many of the ransomed slaves had been captured from places as far away as
the Benue, Chad, and Nupe regions and brought to Onitsha where they
had no cultural or ancestral connection with the people. Clearly, no permanent and influential Christian community could be built up by such a
group that was loathed and despised by the larger indigenous community.
Against this background Lejeune strove to replace the slave method
of evangelization with the school apostolate. The first measure he took
as prefect was to order the fathers not to buy any more slaves and not to
accept, even in his absence, refugees and orphans. Then he required all
the inmates of the charity homes and schools to work for their upkeep at
various construction sites. His report on these drastic measures shows that
he was well aware of the effects of his action:
It is a pity, a great pity; it hurts me to see…these human debris,
bending over the axe in the heat of the sun…But what else can
one do?…It was necessary to come to [these severe measures] in
order to be able to meet all our expenses. Besides, one may add
that nothing is more important than to inculcate in the young
Africans a sense of labour.37
239
Unfortunately, the authorities in Rome did not agree with his policy and
continued to believe firmly that the practice of ransoming slaves would
ultimately eradicate the slave trade. Lejeune, for his part, was not convinced that one could possibly end the slave trade simply by buying off
the slaves. The readiness of the Catholic mission to buy slaves, he argued,
encouraged the dealers to ensure a regular supply of their human commodity. “My opinion,” he wrote, “and the opinion of our Superior General
and of many African Bishops is that slavery shall never be abolished by
buying slaves, but by evangelization properly so-called.”38 As a result of his
intensive but short-lived campaign to win support for his conception of
“evangelization properly so called,” he developed the educational theories
that his successor, Bishop Shanahan, so effectively executed.
Between 1903 and 1905 Lejeune was forced to pay attention to the
slave method of evangelization following an invitation from Lord Lugard
to found a freed slaves’ home at Dekina. For both leaders, the Dekina
project represented a fundamental shift in policy. Lejeune’s willingness to
found freed slaves homes in the north, a method of evangelization he had
despised and fought against in the south, was informed by what he saw as
a rare opportunity for a concerted action by church and state against Islam,
which he regarded as one of the three most dangerous threats to Catholicism in Africa; the other two were Protestantism and fetishism. While
Christian missions in eastern Nigeria did not have to deal directly with
Muslims, they lived in constant fear of Muslim infiltration. For example,
in 1901 Father Lejeune reported that the Muslims had come as near as
Asaba and he feared that Onitsha and its neighbors might be “infected”.39
By joining the government campaign against the slave raiders through the
establishment of Christian missions along the Benue river, he hoped to
contribute to the destruction of Muslim trade and thereby prevent Islam
from spreading southwards.40
For the first time, Lugard was forced to moderate his government’s
policy of noninterference with Islam if he wanted to secure the assistance
of the Christian missions in his efforts to settle the slaves freed under the
Slavery Proclamation of 1900.41 His change of mind surprised Lejeune,
for the prefect had not forgotten Lugard’s persecution of the Catholics
in Uganda. “How is it possible,” he wondered, “that he, the arch-enemy
of the Catholics in the past, is now procuring for us every possible facility for the foundation of Missions on the Niger and Benue? This is certainly a divine mystery.”42 There is no doubt, however, that in 1903 Lugard
urgently needed the assistance of missionaries in his fight against Hausa
slave raiders among the Igala tribes of Bassa and Okpoto.
240
The freed slaves’ home at Dekina had a checkered existence. Destroyed
by fire in 1904, it had to be abandoned altogether the following year. Two
factors were chiefly responsible for the failure of the project: Muslim hostility and the pro-Islamic politics of the northern Nigerian government.
Having made the promise to send freed slaves to the slave homes, Lugard
afterwards realized the grave danger inherent in the destruction of the
Muslim economy that was based on slave labor. Consequently, he slowly
and tactfully returned to his “noninterference” policy, a move that inhibited
government action against the slave raiders.43 Lejeune complained bitterly
in January 1905 that the administration’s pro-Islamic politics jeopardized
the success of the Dekina mission.44 His fears were not unfounded, for as
early as January 1905 only eight freed slaves resided in the Dekina settlement although it had accommodation and facilities for sixty children. He
promised to send a carpenter from Onitsha to the slave home “should the
Government supply us with sufficient number of slaves—say from 50 to 60
to give occupation to the men in charge.”45 Eventually, the slave home was
abandoned after it became clear that the northern Nigerian administration
had broken its pledge to support it.
It is not certain who took the final decision to abandon the slave
home, but since Lejeune was already in France by August 1905, when
the establishment folded, presumably Shanahan made the decision. He
had been the superior of the Dekina mission from 1903 to 1905. His personal experience of Muslim hostility must have made a lasting impression,
for he never resumed the missionary quest in the Benue region during
his long term of office as head of the prefecture. He concluded that the
slave method of evangelization was dead, and devoted all his energy to
the promotion of school evangelism. Refusing to succumb to intense pressure from the authorities in Rome, he regarded his educational program in
eastern Nigeria as one great struggle against slavery.46
In the immediate postemancipation era, former slaves were an integral
part of the missionary movement. They held the key to the successful and
complimentary union between Christianity, commerce, and civilization—a
reality that was recognized and effectively utilized by the missionary heads
as well as by commercial and colonial agents throughout the Biafran hinterland. Toward the end of the 1890s Sierra Leonean and other recaptives
were gradually replaced by indigenous Africans as catechists, linguists,
preachers, interpreters, and teachers. They were the immediate pupils of
the Liberated Africans who, through their work and achievements, successfully debunked the theory that a fundamental conversion could result
from transplanting men and women from their natural cultural environment to a Christian-dominated one.
241
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Quoted in A. F. C. Ryder, “Precursors,” in Varieties of Christian Experience in
Nigeria, edited by Elizabeth Isichei (London: Macmillan, 1982): 22.
See A. F. C. Ryder, “Portuguese Missions in Western Africa,” Tarikh 3
(1969): 13.
Alphonse Quenum, Les Églises chrétiennes et la traite altlantique du XVe au
XIXe siècle (Paris: Karthala, 1993): 25.
The different names of Warri in various state and church records include:
Oere, Overe, Overi, Ovveri, Ouveiro, Hoere, Iwere, and Luere.
See Scritture Riferite Nei Congressi, vol. III, Africa e Congo, f.78–79, Archives
of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide [hereafter SCPF], Rome.
Quoted in Elizabeth Isichei, “An Obscure Man: Pa Antonio in Lagos
(c.1800–c.1880),” in Varieties of Christian Experience in Nigeria, edited by
Isichei (London: Macmillan, 1982): 28.
Peter Clarke, West Africa and Christianity (London: Edward Arnold, 1986):
7.
See for instance Scritture Riferite nei Congressi, vol. II: f. 33–34, f. 77–78,
SCPF, Rome.
Fr. Michel-Angelo da Rivoli, “Report on the Mission of São Thomé,” 27
April, 1687, quoted in Edouard de Jonghe and Th. Simar, Archives Congolaises (Brussels: Vromant 1919), vol.1: 117.
Laurenz Kilger, “Die Missionen im Kongoreich mit seinen Nachbarlaendern
nach den ersten Propagandamaterialien,” Zeitschrift fuer Missionswissenschaft
20 (1930): 107.
Ibid., 109.
Ryder, “Precursors,” 20.
See Jonghe and Simar, Archives Congolaises, 159.
Quoted from Scritture Riferite nei Congressi, vol. I, f. 132–135, SCPF,
Rome; excerpt in Jonghe and Simar, Archives Congolaises, 76.
Ryder, “Portuguese Missions,” 5.
A. F. C. Ryder, “Missionary Activities in the Kingdom of Warri to the Early
Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 2 (1960): 9.
Quoted in Ryder, “Missionary Activities,” 12.
Kilger, “Die Missionen im Kongoreich,” 114.
Ibid., 116; and Ryder, “Missionary Activity,” 4.
Christy Burke, Morality and Mission: Francis Libermann and Slavery, 1840–
1850 (Nairobi: Pauline Publications, 1998): 38.
Quoted in Lambert Dohmen, “Missionsstrategische Gedanken des Ehrw. P.
Libermann,” Zeitschrift fuer Missionswissenschaft 36 (1952): 153.
242
22. For more on the rethinking of missionary motives, see Nicholas Omenka,
The School in the Service of Evangelization: The Catholic Educational Impact in
Eastern Nigeria, 1886–1950 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989): 1–7.
23. “Laird to Lord Clarendon,” 5 March 1855, quoted in J. F. A. Ajayi, Christian
Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891 (London: Longman, 1965): 42.
24. Excerpt from Schoen and Crowther, in Thomas Hodgkin, ed. and comp.,
Nigerian Perspectives: An Historical Anthropology (London: Oxford University Press, 1960): 243.
25. G. O. M. Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise in the Niger Delta, 1864–1918
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978): 10–17.
26. Ajayi, Christian Missions, 43.
27. See for instance, P. E. H. Hair, “Niger Languages and Sierra Leonean Missionary Linguists, 1840–1930,” Bulletin of the Society for African Church
History 2 (1966): 127–138; and The Early Study of Nigerian Languages: Essays
and Bibliographies (Cambridge: The University Press, 1967).
28. Quoted in Ajayi, Christian Missions, 46.
29. Lejeune to Superior General, Onitsha, 20 October 1903, 192/B/III, Archives
of the Spiritans [hereafter ASP], Paris.
30. Shanahan to Cardinal Gotti, 1 September 1912, quoted in J. Jordan, Bishop
Shanahan of Southern Nigeria (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1949): 89.
31. Cf. R. Pawlas to Prefect of Propanganda Fide, Onitsha, 8 August 1899, N.S.
R141/1899, vol.168, SCPF, Rome.
32. “Cette décision nous empêchera déormais de racheter des esclaves, comme
nous l’avons fait jusquà présent. Mais le bon Dieu nous envoie de temps à
autre de petits enfants soit orphelins, soit voués à la mort…,” Bulletin de la
Congregation des Pères du Saint-Esprit 15 (1889–1891): 540.
33. A report by Lejeune, Onitsha, 1902, 191/B/II, ASP, Paris.
34. Ibid.
35. See Tasie, Christian Missionary Enterprise, 28–82.
36. Jordan, Bishop Shanahan. 29.
37. Bulletin de la Congregation des Pères du Saint-Esprit 21 (1901–1902): 511f.
See also Lejeune to LeRoy, Onitsha, 23 January 1901, 192/B/II, ASP, Paris.
38. Lejeune to Cardinal Ledochowski. 191/B/III, ASP, Paris.
39. See report by Lejeune, Onitsha, 1901, 191/A/II, ASP, Paris.
40. Cf. Lejeune to Cardinal Gotti, Onitsha, 1 October 1902, 812r, N.S.
R.141/1902, vol.237, SCPF, Rome.
41. See G. O. Olusanya, “The Freed Slaves’ Homes: An Unknown Aspect of
Northern Nigerian Social History,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria
3 (1966): 523–538.
42. Lejeune to Cardinal Gotti, Onitsha, 19 August 1902, N.S. R.141/1902, vol.
237, SCPF, Rome.
243
43. See “Les officiers ont l’ ordre de ne pas s’opposer encore à la traites,” 812v–
813r, N.S. R.141/1902, vol. 237, SCPF, Rome.
44. Cf. Lejeune to Superior General, 6 January 1905, 192/B/IV, ASP, Paris.
45. Lejeune to Lugard, Bassa, 15 January 1905, 192/B/IV, ASP, Paris.
46. See Jordan, Bishop Shanahan, 89–94.
244
• 15 •
Semantic Implications of
“Ohu” and “Amadi” in the
Aftermath of Slavery in Nkanu
and Ezeagu
Nneka Nora Osakwe
T
his chapter examines some of the semantic implications of the use of
the terms “ohu” and “amadi” in Nkanu and Ezeagu in northern Igboland. In discussing semantics my attention is focused on meanings and
interpretations given to ohu and amadi over time by various groups, first
by historians and other writers, and second by descendants in freeborn
and former slave communities interviewed for this study. In unraveling
the various meanings of ohu, I interpret the denotative and connotative
meanings of ohu and amadi. Denotative meaning is the conceptual or
surface meaning of these expressions, which is the dictionary meaning.
Connotative meaning is the communicative value of these expressions,
which includes additional meanings and implications over and above the
surface meaning. This semantic analysis examines perceptions of these
concepts, thus enabling us to understand these identities as they still linger
in our communities today. It will also reveal variant definitions of the ohu
concept and provide a better understanding of the lingering economic,
sociocultural, and political tensions between descendants of former slaves
and the freeborn in these two communities.
Two basic approaches were used in gathering information for this
work: a review of the literature to determine how these terms have been
used and compared these views with what ohu and amadi descendants
have to say in Nkanu and Ezeagu. I interviewed six men and four women;
all between 85 and 93 years old.
Meaning of ohu and amadi in the historical
literature
What are the meanings of ohu and amadi as found in historical literature? F. Chidozie Ogbalu, J. U. Tagbo Nzeako, and Tony Ubesie agree that
an ohu is a slave bought with money, who is expected to render services
to his master.1 Mbah explains that within the framework of the traditional belief system, ohu was the equivalent of an anya-efu (a domestic
slave) who was treated as property or a possession without the natural
rights of a free man or woman.2 Ohu, he further notes, were owned by the
amadi (plural amadu), together with their belongings, children inclusive. In
describing ohu, Igwebyuje Romeo Okeke refers to Lady Kathleen Simon’s
definition in a 1925 submission to the League of Nations in which she
states that “the person affected is no longer a freeman or freewoman, but
just property.”3 M. I. Finley observed that a slave is not legally a person,
but an outsider, someone reduced from a person to “a thing” that can be
owned. The two expressions that distinguish the relationship between the
ohu and the amadi are “servitude” and “subjugation” of the former to the
latter. Comrade Ibani defines an ohu as a person bought, sold, captured,
or “dashed” (given) to serve another person.4 He explains that such a slave
could be “got as spoils of war, theft, or merchandise.” He further states
that an ohu might initially be a freeborn who was transformed into a slave
because of the penury of their parents or weakness of mind and nerves.
Historians Carolyn Brown and Geoffrey I. Nwaka hold similar views about
the definition of ohu.5 The common thread running through these definitions is that an ohu is a person without freedom: he or she serves another,
having been bought, stolen, kidnapped, or captured as spoils of war.
The ohu must be distinguished from the osu, who belongs to a caste
system practiced in some parts of Igboland. While slavery, as meant by
the term “ohu,” is a universal concept involving the sale of a person into
servitude, but the osu caste system is restricted in area and involves voluntary or involuntary dedication of an individual to a local arusi (deity).6
A person who commits an abomination punishable by death might take
refuge with the village arusi to forestall an intended punishment. Such
refuge implied total submission of the person who would henceforth be
246
Semantic Implications of “Ohu” and “Amadi”
regarded as the child of the arusi and thus untouchable or outcast. Once
this voluntary dedication is done, the person so affected becomes free from
arrest or killing. From then on the descendants of persons so dedicated
will also be regarded as umu arusi or umu osu (children of the gods). In
some Igbo communities the villagers might decide that a person’s crime
required him or her to be dedicated to their local shrine, thus “sacrificing” the person and his or her descendants to the local deity. Some deities
were believed to require periodic appeasement or sacrifice. In the absence
of criminal offenders, the community might buy a slave and dedicate it
to the deity. Uchendu describes such a person as a “cult slave” who had
been dedicated to serve the dedicator’s deity.7 Although a person might
voluntarily become osu, their descendants had no such choice and were
thereafter regarded as social pariahs with no social rights.
As social outcasts, osu could not mingle or intermarry with freeborn.
While an osu could marry on his or her own account within the osu group, an
ohu could not. In the case of a female osu, the brideprice was only receivable
by an osu of her household. An informant from Amansiodo, Ogbe-Ezeagu
Local Government Area (LGA), Enugu State, explained that to be an osu
was worse than to be an ohu: “People can live in the same house with an ohu
but they cannot do so with an osu.8 An osu was completely excommunicated
and isolated from the villagers. People feared, respected, and shunned the osu
because of their supernatural association with the deity.9
In some Igbo communities, the ohu system of slavery rather than the
osu caste system thrived. This is the case at Nkanu where the villagers
acknowledge the existence of ohu among them. More than ten elderly
informants interviewed in other villages declared that they did not have an
osu system, but they did have a very strong ohu system. At Nkanu, the ohu
is an obia (stranger or foreigner). He or she is “nwadibem” (“my servant”).
In his history of the village, Enechukwu additionally identified the ohu as
amuhu and anya-efu or anya-ekwu (translated as “empty-look”).10 These
synonymous Igbo expressions used in regard to ohu reveal their derogatory
intent and suppressive purpose in a community.
An amadi, on the contrary, is a freeborn. Enechukwu identifies the term
as a borrowed word from the Aro and explained that this word can be translated and equated with the term “nnanwem” (“my master”). Folklorist Kalu
Njoku has given a different explanation of this concept. He explains that
the word ámádí, as pronounced in Nkanu and Ezeagu, is actually “ámādí”
or “ámādù.” These expressions, according to him, embody the two units
of meaning contained in ámádí. “Ámá” means family land and “dì” or “dù”
means “is present” or “is existing.” Thus amadi (or amadu) denotes that there
is family land in existence, so a person referred to as amadi is a person who is
247
assured full occupancy and identity with family land or land belonging to the
clan. An ohu does not have this association with the clan’s land.
Meaning of ohu and amadi to descendants of
freeborn and former slaves
Descendants of former ohu and amadi in Nkanu and Ezeagu were
interviewed to find out their definitions of these two concepts. While my
focus was Nkanu, it was necessary to find out if people outside Nkanu
held a similar understanding of the two concepts. Because of its historical
lineage with Nkanu, Ezeagu was chosen. According to tradition, Ezeagu
was the brother of Nkanu who settled on distant farmland and became the
“king of distant farmland.”11
Ozalla, a freeborn person from Nkanu-Amaechi, Akagbe Ugwu,
described ohu as “nwadibem” (“my servant,” or literally, “a child in my
house”) while he defined amadi as “nnanwem” (“my master”). Nwankwo
Orji, a 93-year-old male informant explained that ohu was defined as a
possession owned by someone. Ohu were bought and owned by rich people
in the community and worked for their owners. He explained that male
slaves were bought from outside and used for burial ceremonies as sacrifices. People did not use their domestic slaves for burial ceremonies unless
their owners disliked them. Further, he explained that female slaves were
not used for such ceremonies.12 Madam Nnamani, an 85-year-old female
respondent from Amechi Nkanu, explained that the term ohu referred to
someone owned by another person. They could be sold any time to the Aro
or Agbaja or used for anything. They were expected to serve their master(s)
diligently. Other Nkanu freeborn informants confirmed that the ohu were
obia or persons sold by their parents because of poverty. They did not enjoy
the privileges and freedom enjoyed by the amadi.13 For example, ohu did
not sit with amadi or dance with them at social gatherings. They did not
participate in the famous Ikpa and Igede dances. Ohu were characterized by their shyness and inability to look straight into people’s faces.14
Freeborn informants from Nkanu explained that they can still identify the
descendants of ohu and are still very careful in not associating with them;
they know all the villages and clans connected with former ohu.
Ezeagu informants acknowledged that there were ohu in their community. In the past very rich people owned ohu. The Ndiohu were slaves
bought from the Aro, who were prominent slave merchants. Ozo Onuama
Obudialo, an 85-year-old herbalist at Amansiodo, Ezeagu, testified that his
father talked of the Aro as being next to the Europeans in wisdom. They
lived with the Ezeagu people during the slave trade period and traded with
248
Chief Onyeama at a slave depot at Eke. Ndiohu were usually bought, but
at times they were kidnapped.15
Ohu is no longer a recognized concept in Ezeagu. Obudialo, and
another informant from Ezeagu, Akuinyi Hampo, explained that it is now
against the law to identify anybody as ohu and that the term has dropped
out of use. They stated that the abolition laws were strictly implemented in
their place, and people were totally discouraged from identifying anyone
as ohu. It was, and still is, a crime to refer to people as descendants of ohu.
Consequently, now no one can openly identify any family as descendants
of ohu or amadi. Everyone is seen as equal. Informants from former ohu
communities defined the ohu as ogbenye (the poor). They explained that
ohu were unfortunate children who were disadvantaged by poor inheritance and sold into slavery. Mrs. Mary Ebien said that her grandfather
had believed that both ohu and amadi were originally born of the same
ancestral parent, Ogwugwu, who had several sons.16
Ohu descendants do not identify themselves as obia or foreigners.
They claim to be part of Nkanu, and believe that it is unjust for anyone to
think of them as outsiders, as descendants of people brought from outside
the village or kidnapped as slaves. They explained that their ancestors left
Amechi, Nkanu, because they could no longer endure the humiliation of
seeing their children and daughters forcibly taken away from them and sold
into slavery. They told stories of how the amadi and ohu were of the same
ogwugwu (ancestral parents). They see the amadi as their ancestral relations
who decided to enslave and discriminate against their poor siblings because
of their unfortunate situation of being poor orphans or without parents.
They described how their ancestral parents had been constantly raided in
the past, and how they became the main source of Nkanu slaves to the Aro.17
Semantic implications of ohu
By implication the term ohu means someone who was economically,
politically, socially, and culturally deprived. They were not entitled to any
piece of land, and since land was the economic mainstay of the people, this
meant that they were permanently impoverished. So no matter how hard the
ohu worked to improve their economic situation, their masters eventually
inherited whatever riches they acquired. Ohu could not transfer their wealth
to their descendants. Their master or the master’s children automatically
inherited the ohu’s property at death, thus economically disabling ohu children and their descendants. Psychologically, therefore, the people identified
as ohu were not motivated to improve themselves because they had little
incentive to do so. In addition, the ohu could not aspire to a political post
249
or lead a communal meeting. They could not take ozo titles nor could they
associate with high-ranking title holders in the village.18 Politically the ohu
did not have any power and had no say about how they were led.
This inequality extended to social life. Although ohu were allowed to
marry, the quality of their marriage depended on their rapport with their
master. It was usually the amadi’s responsibility to provide their slave with
a spouse, but the spouse had to be a fellow ohu who could be sold at any
time. Further, an ohu with a daughter of marriageable age did not have a
say in choosing his daughter’s husband, if at all she was allowed to marry.
The dowry paid on a slave’s daughter went to the slave owner not the slave
father. It was considered an nsolala (abomination) for an amadi to marry
a slave. Ohu were not allowed to participate in certain social events. For
example, Nkanu slaves could not participate in the prestigious Igede dance,
considered the exclusive preserve of the amadi.
From the existing scholarship and the interviews conducted for this
study, we can summarize that the term ohu refers to a person bought or
kidnapped for service or forcibly enslaved because they were poor. Such
a person was deprived of political, economic, social, and cultural rights,
that is to say, they were considered to have no human rights. By contrast,
the term amadi refers to a person with all the rights and privileges denied
the ohu. The general literal meaning of ohu and amadi were confirmed by
informants from freeborn communities in Nkanu and Ezeagu. The conceptual/denotative or surface meaning of ohu from all the sources, with
the exception of the former slave communities are summarized in Figure 1,
and the Igbo denotative synonyms of ohu (slave) are presented in Figure 2.
Additional meanings evoked by the term ohu are summarized in Figure 3.
Figure 1 | Conceptual/denotative meaning of ohu
Person as property/instrument
of another
Person bound
to serve
Person born of a slave to
serve others, descendants
of slaves
“Ohu”
Slave
Slave - born
250
Person kidnapped for service
Person kidnapped
and sold for service
Person bought from the
Aro for service
Figure 2 | Igbo denotative synonyms of ohu (slave)
odenigbo
obia (foreigner)
“Ohu”
Slave
nwa di bem
anya efu (anya ekwu)
amuhu
oru
Figure 3 | Semantic connotations of ohu
Person inferior to
free-born in
a community
Person kidnapped
& sold for service
Person who cannot
marry freeborn
Person constantly
discriminated against
Person used/killed for
burial rites of wealthy men
Person deprived
of his/her
natural rights Person who cannot partake
as human
in Igede dances
Person who cannot interact freely in
trade and politics with a freeforn
“Ohu”
Slave
Person sold in
exchange for food
Person denied right
to land and property
Person married out in exchange
for money or commodities
Person purchased
from the Aro
Person captured in war
Person very docile,
and incourageable
Person who cannot
take chieftaincy titles
Person forced into Person unable to look unto
another person’s eyes
slavery because
of unfortunate parentage
Postslavery ohu and amadi identifications in
Nkanu and Enugu States
Today former slave communities are not as economically developed
as freeborn communities. A tour of different communities reveals visible
differences in the level of economic development. This situation can be
251
associated with the long-term discrimination against ohu land ownership.
It can also be attributed to psychological factors. After the imposition of
colonial rule, most slave descendants preferred to settle in cities. Those
who have become wealthy do not like coming back to their communities because of the discrimination and unhappiness that awaits them, so
they rarely return to help in the development effort of their home villages.
Even though the ohu/amadi divide is presumed to have ended, there still
is talk concerning “who is who?” and “who came from where?” The slave
descendants have only slowly begun to gain the confidence and motivation
required for better economic development.
In the social and cultural spheres, descendants of ohu still suffer much
humiliation. They do not socialize freely with descendants of amadi. They
still cannot easily marry the descendants of amadi; the unwritten taboo
about intermarriage between the two groups continues to be observed. If
couples defy this convention, they meet many difficulties and are often
reminded of the long lasting implications of their decision. In response, ohu
descendants have established their own social organization, which allow
them to take leadership titles, but these only apply in their own villages.
Moreover, attempts to honor descendants of ohu with traditional titles
are protested by amadi. For example, when a former governor of Enugu
State wanted to confer a traditional title on a professor of nuclear physics,
who comes from Oruku in Nkanu but resides in the United States, amadi
protested the award on the grounds that the professor’s origins were ohu.
The amadi succeeded in stopping the ceremony. The crisis arising from this
incident still lingers, and some villages have been forced to relocate as a
result.
The ohu/amadi dichotomy is still observed in the political life of the
people. Very prominent political posts are still mostly occupied by the
descendants from the amadi communities. People from former ohu communities rarely get elected to important political office, and in the event
that they are elected or appointed to such offices, they are usually removed
under some sort of false pretence. A good example can be drawn from an
incident that took place in the 1990s during the administration of one of
the military governors in Enugu state. Another example involves a prominent lawyer who was appointed as the caretaker chairman of a community
in Unugu South Local Government Area. Amechi and Obeagu townspeople protested this appointment, contending that the hometown of the
appointed lawyer was not within the local government area of his appointment. The true reason, however, was that the lawyer so appointed was of
ohu origin.19 Currently, the political reality is that most of the prominent
political figures from Nkanu are descendants of amadi. Politicians of ohu
252
origin shy away from seeking sensitive political posts. In Enugu State,
where the ohu/amadi syndrome appears to be particularly pronounced,
most prominent state politicians are descendants of amadi.
The ohu/amadi dichotomy: quest for conflict
resolution
The ohu/amadi divide has created an unfriendly atmosphere. The
former ohu communities reinforce the stereotyped attitudes of the amadi.
Psychologically, vengeance and animosity have persisted among the people,
sometimes leading to open conflict and violence. Former ohu communities are very conscious that an increase of the amadi communities might
result in even greater conflict, and vice versa. The challenge today is to
create a climate for the resolution of crisis. In recording history, we should
endeavor to deemphasize information that serves to heighten enmity, animosity, social conflict, and crisis. In historical studies, names of towns and
people are mentioned without much sensitivity to their association with
ohu and amadi. More care should be taken when naming and renaming
have negative identifications that might lead to hatred, vengeance, discrimination, and destruction in the next generation. We should endeavor
to resolve past conflicts by removing from our minds what Ken Keyes has
described as the “self-versus-others” perception. Such identification creates
a jungle of our civilized lives by continuing our “us versus-them” mental
habits.20 Thus the invention of various separatist political and cultural
groups associated with amadi and ohu only heightens antagonism and
animosity in Nkanu and other places. Such bodies as the Mmadu Bu Ofu
Movement and Odebigbo Welfare Association among ohu descendants
and the Nkanu Patriotic League and Ikenga Oforbuike Club among the
amadi descendants have only fueled the crisis.
So far Christianity and the abolition of slavery have not altered negative attitudes toward the descendants of ohu families and communities in
Nkanu. Anayo Enechukwa has suggested that the elders of the former ohu
communities in Nkanu should sit together and negotiate with the elders
of the amadi for some sort of isu-o.fo. (cultural cleansing rites) that would
bring relief from the past ohu burden and prejudice. Such a ceremony, he
believes, should be done simultaneously throughout Nkanu in the presence
of the traditional rulers, the leaders of thought, and the elders.21
It is important for the parties involved to embrace the qualities of love,
fairness, and justice in dealing with each other. The two groups should see
each other as an extensions of the other. They should recognize that negative naming and identification do not guarantee a peaceful life, which is
253
everyone’s entitlement. Jan Pettman of the Australian National University
Peace Research Center maintains that freedom, justice, and equality are
essential ideas for overcoming social conflict.22 If these ideas were adopted,
political, economic, and cultural conflicts would end, thus assuring certain
basic rights for all citizens and institutionalizing agreed principles. The
process of implementing is through proper education, the gateway to total
awareness.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
F. Chidozie Ogbalu, Igbo Institutions and Customs (Onitsha: University Publishing Company, 197?); Tony Ubesie, Odinala Ndi Igbo (Ibadan: Oxford
University Press, 1978); and J. U. Tagbo Nzeako, Omenala ndi Igbo (Ikeja:
Longman, 1972).
Sam Mbah, A History of Ugbawka (from Pre-colonial Times to the Present)
(Enugu: Reynolds Publishers, 1997): 4.
Cited in Igwebuike Romeo Okeke, The Osu Concept in Igbo Land: A Study of
the Types of Slavery in Igbo-speaking Areas of Nigeria (Enugu: Access Publishers, 1986): 79.
Comrade Ibani, Nike—Yesterday and Today (A Fulcrum of Nike History)
(Enugu: Ibanit Communications and Personal Services, 1997).
Carolyn A Brown, “Testing the Boundaries of Marginality: TwentiethCentury Slavery and Emancipation Struggles in Nkanu, Northern Igboland,
1920–29,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 52; and Geoffrey I. Nwaka,
“The Civil Rights Movement in Colonial Igboland,” International Journal of
African Historical Studies 18 (1985): 473–485.
Ibid; and Okeke, Osu Concept, 28.
Victor C. Uchendu, The Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1965): 89.
Interview with Obudialo Ozo Onuama, an 85-year-old herbalist, Amansiodo, Oghe-Ezeagu Local Government Area, 22 June 2000.
Okeke, Osu Concept, 186.
Anayo Enechukwu, History of Nkanu (Enugu: Kaufhof Publisher, 1993):
447.
Richard Okafor, Ezeagu Atilogwu: The Legendary Igbo Troupe (Enugu: New
Generation Books, 1998): 1.
Interview with Orji Egbo Nwankwo, 93 years old, Umunankwo, Amechi, 20
June 2000.
Interview with Madam Nnamani, 85 years old, Akegbe Ugwu, Nkanu, 21
June 2000.
254
14. Interviews with Madam Ebien, 86 years old, Akegbe Ugwu, Nkanu, 21 June
2000; Ichie Ugbohia Okoh, 86 years old, a farmer, Ugbawka, Nkanu, 10
December 1992; Mrs. Mary Ebiem, 87 years old, Ugwuaji, Nkanu, 26 June
2000; and Madam Akuinyi Hampo, 84 years old, Amansiodo, Ezeagu, 22
June 2000.
15. Interview with Ozo Onuama, Obudialo, Amansiodo, Oghe-Ezeagu Local
Government Area, 22 June 2000.
16. Interview with Mrs. Ebiem.
17. Interviews with informants from former slave communities in Nkanu and
Ezeagu.
18. Ibid.
19. Information from Anayo Enechukwu, a writer and political aspirant who has
contested the chairmanship of one of the local government areas in Enugu
State.
20. Ken Keyes, The Hundredth Monkey (Coos Bay, OR: Vision Books, 1982).
21. Enechukwu, History of Nkanu, 462.
22. Jan Pettman, Why Oppose Racism? (Canberra: Research School of Pacific
Studies, Australian National University, 1986).
255
• 16 •
Contestation and Identity
Transformation
under Colonialism:
Emancipation Struggles in
South Nkanu, Nigeria,
1920–1935
Carolyn A. Brown
I
n October 1922, Nwatu Nsi, an amadi (freeborn) of Akpugo, was
attacked and murdered by a group of fellow amadi. He had gone to a
village with court messengers to serve a warrant against a powerful freeborn family following their attack on his home and their seizure of some
of his property. In the polarized villages of the area Nwatu had committed
the unpardonable offense of supporting the cause of the ohu (slaveborn)
who had become increasingly belligerent in their resistance to those traditional depredations that defined the system of slavery in this area of
Igboland. The messengers were routed, Nwatu was beaten, and was last
seen alive being directed through the bush by members of the Umuechiezi
kindred, the relatives of the prosperous amadi warrant chief, Chief Nweke
Obodo of Akpugo. His mother and a brother were also killed when they
went looking for him several days later. These three deaths occurred in the
midst of intense civil war and pitched battles between the ohu and their
owners. These battles, which may have begun much earlier, appear to have
been a significant factor in forging a new social identity in the context of
an evolving colonial state. As a community the ohu remained a formidable
group throughout the colonial period, mobilizing whenever discrimination
and oppression resurfaced. The volume of petitions, counter petitions, and
court cases brought by awbia, what was in fact a new identity to counteract
the discrimination against ohu, testify to their solidarity against the persistent heritage of slavery.
We know little about Nwatu and the ideologies that underlay his decision to risk his life, but his behavior suggests the rather huge gaps in what
we, as historians, understand about African political ideologies and notions
of social justice in the early years of colonial rule. For the state the incidents in South Nkanu were the final straw in the escalating violence that
occurred immediately after World War I. No longer able to pretend that
a mere edict making slavery illegal would resolve the problem of slavery
in Igboland, colonial officials dispatched a military patrol to enforce the
law. From December 1922, within a month after Nwatu’s death, political
officers began a tour of South Nkanu that lasted until early February 1923.
A contingent of fifty police charged to arrest wrongdoers, to make it clear
that government was serious about emancipation, and to suppress what
was, in essence, a violent civil war. Although the British had supposedly
occupied the Nkanu area since the first decade of the twentieth century,
the incident demonstrates that the British had failed to comprehend the
nuances and complexities of indigenous slavery or the reasons why slaves
so adamantly resisted the institution. As far as the British were concerned,
the restrictions of local slavery were an “insignificant inconvenience.”
After World War I, the ohu became aggressive, restless, and vocal
in challenging their treatment by freeborn in their villages. The pivotal
factor behind this new belligerence was their conscription to work on the
construction of the railway and the newly opened government colliery.
Already the imposition of British colonial rule had cracked the foundations of customary law, rupturing authoritarian systems such as slavery.
Industrialization was changing rural Igbo society, introducing new rights,
possibilities, and contradictions. Rural Igbo men worked as wage laborers
and quickly realized the power inherent in controlling their wages. Slave
men had the right to take advantage of opportunities opened in the market
economy and to invest wages in commercial farming to feed industrial
workers and residents in the new city of Enugu. Suddenly slaves refused
to work for owners and to turn over their wages to their erstwhile owners.
They demanded the same rights as the freeborn to unconditional access to
258
Contestati on and Identity Transformation under Colonialism
land. They blocked freeborn from seizing their children to work as servants
and sacrificing their women at the funerals of wealthy men. They objected
to customary rituals of subordination such as giving the freeborn the first
portion of a sacrificial animal. Finally, realizing the negotiated nature of
“freedom,” they attempted to leverage their claims to social mobility by
demanding the right to marry freeborn women.
In many respects these conflict were being waged to define “freedom”,
a concept that was culturally, historically, and gender specific. Women and
men participated in the struggle in different ways. The bruising conflict was
between two sets of masculine norms: one for the amadi, the freeborn slaveowning section of society; the other for the ohu, previously defined and constrained by the amadi. Now ohu men were staking a claim to freeborn rights,
while the freeborn tried desperately to preserve their privileges and the
power they held over ohu kindred and families. Although the initiative and
the law were on the ohu side, no amount of colonial force could effectively
eliminate subtle forms of discrimination, which have persisted to this day.
In this chapter, I argue that these incidents provide important indicators of the new identities and social strata forged in the violence and the
contradictions of this period. At the same time new solidarities emerged
that breached the cardinal slave–freeborn cleavage of rural society. Paradoxically, these appeared to have been stimulated by the commonalities
of repression unleashed by the “liberating” influences of “free” or “capitalist” labor on the one hand and by new forms of authoritarianism, what
Mamdani refers to as “decentralized despotism,” on the other.1 The conflicts initiated by ohu communities throughout South Nkanu in the early
twenties demonstrate the ways that subaltern groups used the colonial
system to eliminate customary oppression even when the colonial political
system itself may have deepened their subordination in other ways. This
analysis uses the conflicts and the subsequent civil war between amadi
and ohu as a lens through which to identify the elements of an emergent
identity, far more consonant with the realities of the new colonial society.
It surveys those factors that contextualized the numerous expressions of
unrest as well as political manipulation by the slave populations in many of
the village groups in South Nkanu clan areas.
Additionally, if we view this conflict from the perspective of gender
we get closer to understanding the violence of the conflict, an unusual violence for a slave community seeking to remain in, rather than to migrate
from, the site of their oppression. However, we have focused on the most
obvious challenges to gender—those of slave men against the prerogatives
of freeborn men. In this particular story women appear in the background,
as the source of kinship linkages that became the foundation for networks
259
of slaves reaching across natal village groups and as victims of freeborn violence. Their story requires additional oral history, as their voices and experiences are largely silent in the available archival sources and oral histories.
My interest in this community has evolved from my position as a
labor historian, examining the coexistence of old and new labor systems. I
am especially intrigued by the role that wage labor, with all its ideological
apparatus, has played in stimulating challenges to the institution of slavery
itself. A closer examination of the grievances and strategies suggests that
these struggles were far more than a struggle to be “free labor.” They were
indeed struggles to establish the ohu household as a unit of production and
social reproduction. In the new political context, what would be the position of this group in the region’s economy? How would they participate
in the new colonial economy? Could they be petty commodity producers
linked to the burgeoning food market of Enugu and the government colliery and railway or could they be working men free to enter Enugu and
work in whatever capacity they wished without harassment. These options
were at the heart of these struggles.
The foundations of solidarity: Colonial
chiefs, forced labor and accumulation
South Nkanu is a cluster of twelve village-groups2 located from ten
to twenty miles south of Enugu in eastern Nigeria. It includes the village-groups of Akpugo, Agbani, Ihuokpara, Amagunze, Akegbe, Ozalla,
Ugbawka, Nomeh, Nara, Amurri, Nkerefi, and Mburubu, each composed
of smaller villages or quarters. In 1921 the clan occupied some sixteen
hundred square miles with an estimated population of 220,000.3 Many
South Nkanu village-groups were small but some, such as Akpugo, had
22,000 inhabitants and a population density of 550 per square mile. There
were slaves in all village-groups, but Akpugo-Agbani and Ugbawka had
the highest concentrations, with more than fifty percent of the residents.4
Located in the northernmost sector of the intricate Aro slave-trading
system, this area had a long history of involvement in the Atlantic slave
trade.5 Slaves from this area were found in the population of recaptured
slaves brought to Sierra Leone in the mid-nineteenth century. They featured
as informants in Sigmund Koelle’s Polyglotta Africana (1854) as well as in
Arturo Sandoval’s survey (1627) of slaves in seventeenth century Peru.6 The
wealth generated by the slave trade laid the foundation for the palm oil trade,
for those at the pinnacle of rural status groups gradually incorporated slave
laborers in their household productive units. The ownership of hundreds of
slaves and tens of wives and children became the way that wealthy men dis260
played and wielded their economic and political power. Men aspired to head
a “Big Compound,” a large, extended family of many wives, children, and
subordinates, both slave and free, an aspiration that slave men themselves
sought to emulate.7 By the time the British entered South Nkanu in 1909,
Igbo society was far from being an egalitarian classless community.
The form of slavery practiced in Nkanu was particularly severe and
intransigent. Slave status was permanent, inherited, and without provision
for emancipation and marriage into the amadi community.8 Nkanu slaves
were forced to work for their masters, were deprived of official political participation, were used as “enforcers” by powerful slaveholding families, and
were subjected to severe spiritual taboos. They led a precarious existence in
the villages where they might be sold or kidnapped, perhaps even sacrificed
at funerals. The rigidity of Nkanu slavery suggests a complexity and variation in Igbo slavery not recognized in most scholarly studies of the area.9
Some scholars claim that Igbo slaves possessed the “right” to a family life or
that second generation slaves could not be sold. Nwachukwu-Ogbedegbe,
however, has shown that in Aboh, slaves did not actually have the power to
enforce any of their “rights.”10 Additionally, some scholars of Igbo slavery
fail to distinguish between the “ideologies” of slavery, often articulated by the
slave owners. and the “lived reality” of slavery as experienced by the slaves.11
Slavery here, as elsewhere, was a contentious institution whose nature, at any
given moment, reflected the relative power of the “owner” and the “slave.”
Early colonial governing and economic policies destabilized the institution of slavery. Between 1912 and 1920 two policies of crucial importance to the foundation of colonial governance and economy sharpened
the contradictions within an already contentious system: first, the appointment of wealthy Ogaranyan12 slave owners as warrant chiefs, and secondly,
the use of these chiefs to obtain forced laborers for the colliery and railway.
These twin processes—both of crucial importance to the “opening” of
southeastern Nigeria to the “world market”—drew in thousands of slave
and freeborn men. They quickly realized the advantages inherent in the
new emporium of opportunities for personal enrichment, but the government and other employers paid the wages earned by their slave conscripts
to their owners. Freeborn laborers might also find that their wages were
paid to the labor recruiters. Moreover, powerful men like Chiefs Chukwuani of Ozalla, Onyeama of Eke, and Ani Chikiri of Nara governed the
labor camps, a function that further enhanced their wealth-generating
opportunities through contracts for both feeding and supplying workers.
Created in a period of unbridled brutality, the new system violated the
moral economy of slavery in many respects, enlarging the parameters of
owners’ privileges over their subordinates. For example, the deployment of
261
slave men miles from home to work on the railway strained the productivity of the household. To slave men this intensified exploitation proved to
be intolerable. Nevertheless, even though forced labor was repressive, it
was also instructive, acquainting men accustomed to extortion and unpaid
services with the concept of wage labor, though initially under conditions of coercion. Mazi Anyionovo Nwodo, an elder of Uhuona Ugbawka,
described his personal epiphany, which appears to have been common
pattern:
I was among those sent by the chief to work in the construction
of railway line from Otakpa, now in Imo State... Chief Agunweru Mba was our chief and via his agents, he appointed those
both Amadu (sic) and awbia [who] were to be sent out to work
either the coal mine or at the railway construction. All payment
...at the coal mine or railway construction was directed to the
chief. We were left with nothing but at a later date, the chief
started giving us small amount of what each of us realized. This
was after we had realized from the Europeans that we were paid
for the job we had been doing for long.13
The state’s dependence on local elites and acceptance of racial ideologies about African unsuitability for wage labor led colonial officials to
turn a “blind eye” to the intricate exactions of the chiefs. They nonetheless
touted forced labor as a way of introducing “free labor” and eliminating
slavery. They considered these new forms of super-exploitation as part of
the “civilizing” mission; however ideologically they were trapped in their
own fears of African “unruliness” and “unpredictability.” Most Nigerian
officials and Colonial Office policy makers feared the development of a
“detribalized” African proletariat and saw African workers as basically
peasants accustomed to forms of authoritarian abuse that “civilized” Westerners deemed intolerable.14 They tolerated similar abuses by the chiefs
who recruited for the coal mines. In 1919 a petitioner, who was forced
to work at the new coal mines, complained about Chief Nweke Obodo,
who would later be implicated in Nwatu’s death. Anyionovo described his
personal progression from forced labor to a waged job in Enugu:
Sometime ago he told the...Owa people to collect 200 pounds to
let them off doing government work. Some in rods and some in
silver was collected and given to him. Since 5 years ago we have
been...turning up at Iva Valley and Nweke takes the money we
use to go by turns to work by companies for 3 months stretch.
I have had no pay.15
262
South Nkanu experienced the inaugural years of colonial rule as
trauma. The brutality of conquest, the imposition of autocratic chiefs, the
insatiable demand for labor for railway construction, the mines, and the
establishment of the city of Enugu, tore at the fabric of rural life. In the
resulting turmoil many subaltern groups—the slaves and the poor—realized that the legitimacy of many oppressive institutions had been undermined. Slavery could not escape the transformation of rural social relations
made possible under such disruptive conditions. Sensing that political and
economic elites were loosing power, the slave community seized the available opportunity to challenge their position within South Nkanu society.
The first sign of rural crisis was the Udi uprising in the fall of 1914,
which coincided with the British campaign in German Cameroon. Events
suggested solidarity between slaveborn and the free poor. It involved the
very villages in Udi district in which the conflict simmered between slaves
and freeborn. The people of Akpugo, Akegbe, Amagunze, and Amurri—
all South Nkanu village-groups—deposed authoritarian chiefs, sacked
the native courts, and attacked railway survey parties. They killed several
workers and seriously threatened the railway and colliery. While we have
little specific evidence of the role played by slaves they could not have
ignored this demonstration of the vulnerability of colonial chiefs. Clearly
the ability of the colonial state to protect abusive chiefs was tenuous.
Urbanization posed an additional challenge to rural slavery. The city of
Enugu represented a “free” space, an urban setting in which the invented
“customary” prerogatives of chiefs were difficult to enforce, an environment
in which a runaway could easily “disappear.” Even when the city was just
a series of labor camps, rural discontents, both slave and free, found refuge
there. The city presented the possibility of earning a wage paid in the new
currency. It offered “freedom” beyond the reach of authoritarian chiefs.
As Anyionovo Nwodo noted, “because of the chief ’s action we deemed
it unnecessary not to be obligatory to the chief. In the circumstance, we
started looking for our own greener pastures for personally paid jobs and
the most possible area to look for jobs was in Enugu.”16
Possibilities of new freedoms:
Wages, urbanization and reconfigurations of
gendered status
Despite the constrictions on the “free” character of wage labor, wages
themselves became a source of conflict for both freeborn owners and
slaves. All owners were not necessarily paid labor recruiters. Those who
263
were forced to supply slave laborers to paramount chiefs felt deprived of
their labor service. While often cheated of recruitment fees, they nevertheless felt entitled to a portion of the wages earned by their ohu. Other slave
owners, aware of the revenue generating possibilities of supplying food for
Enugu, tried to increase the number of days that ohu worked on their land.
Customarily a slave worked half of the week farming on his owner’s land
and the rest of the week on land allocated for his personal use.
The potential of commercial agriculture, however, was not lost on
the ohu themselves. They began to sense that they could now challenge
the ideologies used to justify slavery. Their most important demand—for
unconditional rights to land—struck at the very heart of the ideology of
slavery and implied a fundamental transformation of rural social relations.
In the Igbo conception of slavery, amadi believed that, as strangers, ohu
access to land must be compensated by farm labor. Now ohu countered
that even if their ancestors had come “from the Aro,”17 their five to six
generations of forced servitude had earned 18 them the same rights to land
as original inhabitants. This was an alternative interpretation of Igbo land
tenure and the amadi recognized it as such. Other ohu went even further
and rewrote history; they claimed that their ancestors, like the amadi,
were original occupants of the land, who had fallen into servitude through
economic hardship.19 Both positions showed that the earlier ideological
underpinnings of slavery had eroded substantively.
Wages strengthened the determination of ohu men to renegotiate their
status in the village in ways that imitated the gendered norms of masculinity in rural society. This encouraged them to demand the right to negotiate
their own marriages. In the village all “socially mature men” had to marry, a
process in which a man secured the right to the labor of wife and children
after the payment of the bride price. But with slaves, the usual system was
for the amadi to provide wives for his male slaves. This negated slave men’s
rights, violated the marriage traditions of freeborn families, and left slave
fathers with a dubious claim to their children. Thus it was customary for
slave owners to take ohu children as domestic servants in their homes,
giving priority to their own labor requirements over those of the biological
father. At best the integrity of the slave household was tenuous.
Some ohu militants went even further, and demanded the right to
marry freeborn women, a right acknowledged in slavery systems in other
parts of Igboland but not recognized in South Nkanu. Ohu men who
married free women by payment of bride price were better placed to
manipulate customary law despite their own status as property. Such marriages, which linked freeborn kindred with that of a slave, strengthened
the ability of slave husbands to contest their owners’ rights to violate their
264
households. While these marriages could not secure full freedom for slaves,
they enhanced their ability to negotiate customary law. The interwar period
presented an especially auspicious moment for ohu to challenge the amadi
because the colonial authorities imposed a new legal code that, in fact,
contested indigenous legal systems, introducing enormous possibilities for
change. Slaves and other discontented groups seized the opportunity to
renegotiate their status and rights.
For Nkanu ohu, slavery meant much more than an exploitative labor
system. Ohu status included a plethora of restrictions that limited their
inclusion in the spiritual and political life of the village-group, and graphically signified their subordination. “Equality” in Igbo villages meant the
ability to participate in the full range of spiritual and political practices
that reproduced the community, symbolized by ritual practices. Belief
systems intertwined with governing processes and political institutions.
Exclusion from any part of the process pushed a man to the margins of
village society. Even if slave men could afford to pay membership fees, they
were prohibited from joining the highest ranks of title societies to which
most influential men in the village belonged.20 They could neither dance
the prestigious Ubo dance21 nor beat the Egede drum22 at funerals. Slave
men had to give their masters the first and largest portion of any animal
sacrifice. For all slave men, and particularly for those who acquired wealth
from trade or wage labor, these prohibitions were especially intolerable,
for these prevented them from validation as men of wealth within their
community. These myriad social restrictions—not just exploitative labor
requirements—was what constituted slavery. But to colonial officials who
saw Igbo slavery only in its economic or secular role, these were meaningless eccentricities of a “primitive” culture.
“We are not ohu but awbia”:
Securing the social space for a new identity
By the time of the Nkanu patrol in late 1922, the various ohu communities were well on the way to creating a new collective identity forged in
conflicts with their former owners. They anticipated the rights and privileges of a new future. Large in number and positioned within the most
dynamic sectors of the capitalist economy—the new industries (railroad
and coal mines) and commercial agriculture supplying Enugu—they accurately assessed their power to disrupt a fragile colonial peace. They could
condition their acceptance of colonial rule upon their inclusion in the new
governing structures and access to economic opportunities. The vulnerable colonial state could ill afford to ignore so significant a population. If
265
the colonial state wanted to secure its foundation, it had to deal with ohu
priorities and aspirations as well as those of the amadi.
Slavery was deeply rooted in the identity of the amadi community in
South Nkanu. Their status and wealth rested in part on ohu inequality.
The amadi believed that it was an abomination for slaves to participate as
equals in the social, political, and economic life of the villages. The British
tried to muddle through the slavery morass. First they proposed a redemption payment of twelve shillings per adult to exempt a slave from farmwork, paid to owners as a form of “rent” that guaranteed use of farm and
household land. Neither worked, for the amadi argued that “slavery was
forever.” They retaliated by allocating land to their former slaves that was
infertile, devoid of water resources, or very far from the household.
Each successive slave demand pushed even harder against the sensitivities of the freeborn community and elicited further resistance. The state,
however, was still too new and insufficiently legitimate, to ignore those
demands which attacked the very foundation of local government: the
native courts. The courts, which were the pillars of indirect rule, became
instruments of ohu exploitation by the freeborn political elite. Resisting the arbitrary exactions of abusive court officials, the ohu demanded
the appointment of their own men to sit on the native courts. They then
threatened to boycott the courts, and successfully forced the state to end
amadi monopoly in the courts. Predictably, such appointments led to an
amadi counter boycott; however, the colonial authorities would not acquiesce because to nullify the ohu appointments implied a tacit acceptance of
slavery. They resolved the crisis by setting up an innovative rotating court
schedule in which ohu judges never sat in majority.
Moreover, the ohu secured state support in abolishing the use of the
term “ohu” to designate them and their community, but their struggles
were not as effective in securing political and social equality. By the end
of the 1920s they appeared reconciled to the fact that the amadi community would never totally accept them. Rather than continue fighting to be
designated as freeborn, they appropriated a new name, Ndi awbia or Obia,
meaning “those from elsewhere,” and secured state support for this designation as an official social category.23 Moreover they succeeded in getting
the government to declare the use of the term “ohu” a criminal offense.
Correctly recognizing that their equality would not be readily accepted,
they forged an even stronger political constituency, leading one district
officer to comment:
The slave born who have become sophisticated enough to assert
their freedom, will probably soon usurp the landowners rights
266
entirely as in fact they are now doing at Ugbawka. Knowing
that they can never be as one of the freeborn, and that they are
all, so to speak, in the same boat, they are inclined to act “en
masse” and are consequently a source of trouble to government.
There was of course a class-consciousness before the rent system
was started, but I submit that the indefinite payment of rent
by one class to another is more likely to perpetuate this feeling
than otherwise.24
Another victory followed in the next decade. The economic pressures
of the depression brought a new wave of conflict that drew in areas, such
as Nara, that had been relatively tranquil in the twenties. In 1934 the freeborn evicted the awbia from their village, creating a landless population
within a community with a tradition of protest. Reluctantly, the state was
forced to negotiate with freeborn villages to secure space for the awbia.
By 1938 there were three official villages for awbia—Uma Amechi, Ugwu
Aji and Akwuke—and several all-awbia sectors of others, such as the
Isigwe area of Ugbawka. Although only a minority of the total community
moved to the new villages, these communities stood as powerful symbols
of awbia resistance and political power. Never given sufficient household
and farming lands, these villages stand today as poverty-stricken enclaves
in contrast to the adjacent freeborn villages. Akwuke briefly experienced
development in the 1950s, when a coal mine opened nearby offering lucrative posts to their men. But today, with the eclipse of the coal industry
by oil, it too has become alarmingly poor. Nonetheless, given the high
population density in Nkanu, the fact that awbia were given any land at all
represented a partial victory.
The struggle of ohu and awbia in the early twentieth century contributed in significant ways to the social history of colonialism. First, the
struggle demonstrated that subordinate groups often recognized the vulnerabilities of the early colonial state and developed strategies to manipulate the state in their fight for more autonomy. Confronting marginality in
rural life, ohu and awbia used new modalities as a basis for affiliation that
went beyond the village-group. In Igbo society, which is characterized by a
high degree of political fragmentation, cross-clan alliances among lineages
offered a highly effective means to negotiate a new social status. The ohu
began their revolt as a group whose subordination was rooted in the social
relations of the past and emerged from the conflict as awbia, a new, somewhat less persecuted group. In creating this new identity they adapted an
old term, awbia (stranger), as a new social category so as not to reflect the
status hierarchies of the old society.
267
Secondly, the murder of Nwatu and his family in 1922 suggests that
the slave/freeborn dichotomy was being overlaid by an emergent social
hierarchy. Consequently, colonial rule with its economic shifts and transformative judicial/political system, stimulated new types of alliances,
forming a new context for social polarization. Wealthy men could use the
state to intensify their power, but they did so at considerable risk to their
own position and to the fragile legitimacy of the colonial state. These tensions threatened those whose privileged status had emerged during the
era of the Atlantic slave trade and further deepened by the expansion of
internal slavery that had accompanied the palm oil trade. Thus integration
into the world market transformed status hierarchies, and perhaps even
social classes.
Thirdly, the ohu/awbia protest also demonstrated that new definitions of “freedom” incorporated the right to participate in “old” definitions
of masculinity. In “creating themselves” slave men and women used the
most “modern” tools to assert “traditional” rights. Wages earned in the new
industrial economy, income from food production and processing for the
urban market of Enugu, new trades and occupations, mission education,
and ideas of equality promoted by missionaries, all encouraged former
slaves to demand validation as men in the cultural idiom and politics of
the community. A gendered analysis of their grievances, and the practices
that they would and would not tolerate gives us a window into the complex
nature in which “men” and “women” exist in precapitalist societies. It
paints a far more textured picture of the process of African emancipation
than is usually found in the literature on the end of slavery. In this narrative slave men appear not as kinless subordinates, but as dynamic social
beings pushing to become patriarchs establishing lineages, accumulating
wealth, and participating in the fullest sense in all the sacerdotal systems
of rural political life. In these respects the Nkanu conflicts constitute what
Nwaka has called the “civil rights movement in Igboland.”25 Although the
struggles of the interwar years remain a bittersweet memory in the awbia
community, the struggle for civil rights continues. Now the word awbia is
a somewhat less pejorative word for ohu, but the vestiges of discrimination remain and, in some cases, are being strengthened. Current struggles
by awbia communities in the Nike area to secure local government status
independent of the “freeborn” villages have been violent, reminiscent of the
earlier period.26 The current expansion of Enugu into their lands has radically inflated the price of their land; however, awbia are not free to alienate
it without the consent of the local government dominated by freeborn.
They continue to struggle.
268
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy
of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). For a more
detailed discussion of the impact of wage labor on emancipation struggles
see Carolyn A. Brown, “We Were All Slaves”: African Miners, Culture, and
Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann;
Oxford, James Currey; and Cape Town: David Philip, 2003), chapter 2.
A village-group is a cluster of villages which claim to be related to a common
ancestor. Each kinship group within a specific village holds similarly claims
to a common ancestor descended from this ancestor.
Onitsha Province Annual Report for January 1921 to 31 March 1921, CSE
2/14/11, National Archives of Nigeria, Enugu [hereafter NAE].
S. P. L. Beaumont, Intelligence report on the Nara village group of the Nkanu
clan, Udi division, 1934, OP917, NAE.
Kenneth Onwuka Dike and Felicia Ifeoma Ekejiuba, The Aro of South-Eastern Nigeria, 1881–1929 (Ibadan: University Publishing Co., 1990).
Sigismund W. Koelle, Polyglotta Africana; or, A Comparative Vocabulary of
Nearly Three Hundred Words and Phrases, in More than One Hundred Distinct
African Languages (London: Church Missionary House, 1854); and Alonso
de Sandoval, De Instauranda Aetheopium Salute: El Mundo de la Esclavitud
Negra en América (Bogotá: Empresa Nacional de Publicaciones, 1956); first
published as Natvraleza, Policia Sagrada i Profana, Costvmbres i Ritos, Disciplina i Catechismo Evangelico de Todos Etiopes (Sevilla: Francisco de Lira, 1627).
In some areas ohu themselves owned other ohu. This was the case in Ihuopkara, a village group in South Nkanu where both slave and freeborn were
itinerant “native” doctors, a lucrative profession.
Despite its flexibility, slavery in central Igboland excluded slave descendants
from certain Rituals. District Officer [hereafter DO] Okigwi to resident
[hereafter Res.] Owerri, 5 April 1922, OW/301/1922; DO Degema to Res.
Owerri, 10 April 1922; DO Aba to Res. Owerri, 19 April 1922; DO Owerri
to Res. Owerri, 21 April 1922; Secretary, Southern Provinces [hereafter
SSP] to Res. Owerri, 1 May 1922, NAE.
The complexity of this variation has been given further evidence in a series of
video-taped interviews in Enugu, Imo, and Anambra States on the slave trade.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture [hereafter SCRBC]
of the New York Public Library, the History Department and Center for
African Studies Center, Rutgers University and the UNESCO/York University Nigerian Hinterland project launched a pilot project, “Memory and
the Slave Trade,” which has interviewed informants in selected villages about
the intricacies and historical development of slavery and the slave trade.
Video-taped interviews and transcripts will be deposited with the NAE, the
269
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
SCRBC, and the libraries of Rutgers University and the Harriet Tubman
Institute, York University.
Ogedengbe K. Nwachukwu, “Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Aboh
(Nigeria),” in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
edited by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977): 133–154.
For example, this seems to be the weakness of Victor Uchendu’s treatment of
slavery in his anthropological study, The Igbo of Southeast Nigeria (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965).
This term has varying definitions among the village-groups of the area, but
in most cases it is actually a class term, signifying the wealthy merchant
capitalist class whose origins were rooted in the slave trade and who were
further strengthened by the palm oil trades.
Interview with Mazi Anyionovo Nwodo, Uhuona, Ugbawka, 18 August 1988.
The best review of these ideologies is Frederick Cooper, Decolonialization
and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 2.
Petition against the conduct of Chief Ezeokoli and Onyeama, NAE.
Interview with Mazi Anyionovo Nwodo.
This referred to the key slave dealers in the area, the Aro people, who established an intricate supply network that lasted through the early twentieth
century. K. O. Dike and Felicia Ekejiuba’s study, The Aro of South-Eastern
Nigeria, is the most important account on the Aro role in the slave trade.
This concept of having “earned” a right may be a societal reflection of the
economic practices of industrial capitalism and wage labor.
Memorandum by W. H. Cooke, 18 October 1921, OW301/1922, NAE. The
latter claim challenged Igbo land law that gave “outsiders” access to land
after paying a to token or market rent.
Title societies were graded organizations that required payment of expensive
fees both for admission and ascent. The upper ranks were often considered
to have sacred powers and these men, Ozo, were a protected and privileged
group within Igbo society.
This was also a dance performed by men of relatively high status.
Interview with Victor Uke , research assistant, Enugu, Nigeria, 5 July 1989.
The Egede dance is performed by this title society that includes community
elders. It is the highest band used at funerals. They sacrifice cows, horses,
goats, etc. The dance usually lasts four days. Ohu could not dance the same
day as the amadi.
DO Enugu to Res. Onitsha, 7 March 1925, OP82/1924, NAE.
Res. to SSP, confidential, 26 November 1923, OP 268/1921, NAE.
Geoffrey I. Nwaka, “The Civil Rights Movement in Colonial Igboland,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 18 (1985): 473–485.
See chapter by Harniet-Sievers in this volume.
270
CON T E M POR A RY
M E M OR I E S O F
E N S L AV E M E N T
••
• 17 •
Aro Ikeji Festival –
Historical Consciousness and
Negotiated Identities
Eli Bentor
N
ot long after I first arrived at Arochukwu in 1988, I had a conversation
with the then Eze Elect and now the Eze Aro, H.R.H. Mazi Ogbonnaya Okoro. During that meeting, I asked him to tell me the history of
Arochukwu. His response was both puzzling and illuminating:
There is currently a ban on telling history. Because of some
troubles that we have here, we cannot tell the history of Aro. At
any rate, one person alone cannot tell the history of Aro. To tell
you the history of Aro, I must call on all the members representing the various sections of Aro. However, the Ikeji festival that
we are about to celebrate serves as a reminder of Aro history.
Every day of the Ikeji represents an event. The addition of all
these events creates the history of Aro. The observance of these
things reminds you of history. Ikeji is an instrument to create
awareness among all Aro people, including the diaspora, of their
identity as Aro and of Arochukwu as the ancestral home. You
will be here for our Ikeji festival. You could observe, and from it,
you can learn the history of Aro.
I found two elements in his statement very intriguing. If history is a
collection of stories about the past, why is there a need for a ban on telling
history? How can it be enforced? Even more interesting was his suggestion
that the New Yam festival, known in Arochukwu as Ikeji, is a reenactment
of Aro history.
Adhering to his advice, I followed closely the progress of the festival. I
also conducted interviews with many people from different walks of life at
Arochukwu. They gave me much information, often of a conflicting nature.
Yet, I believe that I finally understand the statement of the Eze Aro. In my
earlier research I had focused on the role of masks in the continuous reinterpretation of Aro history. This chapter focuses on the structure of the festival.
I argue that it is directly related to its potential to renegotiate history. For
the Aro people, history is not only a body of knowledge about the past, but
a living force, constantly reinterpreted and renegotiated to answer the needs
of the present. The celebration of the annual festival is the chief occasion
for these negotiations. Of course, a common argument is that “all history is
contemporary history” and that the past is reinterpreted by each generation
of historians and by each constituency according to current and particular
interests. What I intend to demonstrate here is that the rules of negotiating
this history and the criteria for the validity of one version or another are
specific to the historical circumstances of the Aro involvement in the slave
trade and their unique role in southeastern Nigerian history.1
Throughout West Africa, annual festivals provide an arena for the
renewal of bonds that ties communities together.2 These ties are primarily
expressed through sharing a piece of land used for cultivation. In many
Igbo communities, the chief event is a harvest festival known as a New
Yam festival celebrated when a new crop of yams, the staple food, is ready.3
This marks a transition from a period of relative scarcity of food to a period
of abundance. Among the Igbo people, refraining from eating new yams
is customary until a sacrifice is made. This transition is accompanied by
festivities and masked performances.4
Like their fellow Igbo to the north, the Aro people celebrate a new
yam festival called Ikeji, an elaborate affair lasting twenty-five days.5 The
Aro Ikeji festival differs from other new yam celebrations in the region. To
understand the way Aro people perceive their annual festival, we have to
understand their history. In turn, an understanding of the festival sheds light
on the way historical experience continues to shape Aro realities. There are
many significant disputes about Aro history, but there is agreement on the
broad lines of the Aro tradition of origin.6 It is important not to assume
that those elements of the oral tradition that are shared by all are necessarily factual, while those that are debated are doubtful. Often those shared
274
Aro Ikeji Festival –Historical Consciousness and Negotiated Identities
Figure 18.1 |
Nkuma Asaa Shrine to Osim at Amaikpe Square, Arochukwu
elements are those that are less important to current affairs. However, as a
student of the Ikeji festival, I am less interested in uncovering an objective
and singular history. Instead, I focus on the rules and forces that shape the
interpretation of history in and through the festival. As such, the shared
aspects of Aro history form the background for acting out current disputes
275
Map 18.1 |
Southeastern Nigeria indicating main areas of Aro settlements and
Aro trade routes
and conflicts. Briefly, the Aro people are the result of the mingling of several
different ethnic elements. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a
time of population movements throughout the region. The triangular area
north of the confluence of the Cross River and Enyong Creek is the borderline between Igbo-, Ibibio-, and Efik-speaking people of the Cross River
(Map 18.1). According to oral traditions collected by previous scholars and
276
myself, the region was originally inhabited by a mysterious group of people
called Losi who had an oracle of local importance. Gradually, Ibibio people
from the south moved into this area and dominated it.
Later, small groups of Igbo moved into the area. At first the newcomers acknowledged the position of the Ibibio as the landowners, but as their
numbers grew, the Igbo began to agitate for a more dominant position. To
help overcome their Ibibio overlords, the Igbo called in Nnachi, a traveling
medicine man from Edda to the north. As a medicine man, Nnachi was
expected to use supernatural means to drive away the Ibibio. When he
realized that he needed more physical support, Nnachi engaged the help
of a warrior group from across the Cross River. At Arochukwu this warrior
group, led by two brothers, Osim and Akuma, was known as the Akpa,
which is a much disputed term used to designate different groups in the
Cross River area. Different versions point to the Akpa warrior’s original
home anywhere from just north of Calabar to the Ikom area in the upper
reaches of the Cross River.
The war brought together the first two groups that make up Arochukwu
today: the descendants of Nnachi (Oke Nnachi) and Akuma (Ibom Isi).
A third section of Arochukwu is Eze Agwu. There are different versions of
their origin. One version is that they are remnants of the Ibibio who had
lived in the area before the war and were allowed to remain, but another
version holds that they are the descendants of the earliest Igbo settlers
who called in the other groups. These different versions have been a source
of long-standing disputes regarding the relative status of the constituting
groups of Arochukwu.
A war against the Ibibio broke out. Osim and Akuma led the Akpa
warriors. During a battle, Osim was wounded and was carried to Amaikpe,
the area that is today the communal square of all the Aro. There, his blood
fell on several stones that are today a shrine to Osim, symbolizing the
establishment of Arochukwu (Figure 18.1). He died of his wounds and his
body was buried at the future site of Oror village, the current residence of
the Eze Aro. A sacred old Ofo tree marks his burial place (Figure 18.2).
The Akpa warriors were reluctant to return to their Cross River community
and incur the wrath of Osim’s father because of the death of his son. Thus
they decided to settle at Arochukwu. They probably realized the potential
of the area and decided to join the emergent community.
A fourth group, Umunna Okwara Agwu, is of Igbo origin. They came
to weave magical war caps for the warriors and opted to stay. I will return
to their story later as the conflict about their status illustrates the dynamics
of Aro history. Additional groups and individuals joined Aro during or
soon after the war.
277
Figure 18.2 |
Ancestral Sacrifice During Annual Ikeji Festival, Ujari Village,
Arochukwu
The Aro people maintain the separate identity of each section. The
memory of the war became a charter on which hinges much of later Aro
history and social relations. The relative status of each group is inferred
from its role in the war and the circumstances of their incorporation into
the community. The Aro took advantage of their diversity and turned it
into a source of power. They developed the local oracle into a center of religious authority throughout southeastern Nigeria known as the Ibinukpabi.
Using their existing connections throughout the region they established a
formidable network consisting of agents of the oracle and traders, dominating trade in the interior.7 When slaves became the lucrative commodity, the Aro specialized in slave dealing. They “recruited” slaves throughout
much of Igboland and the upper Cross River area, exchanging them for
imported goods with coastal communities, including Bonny and Calabar.
The Aro fashioned their version of the Ikeji festival as an arena for
playing out their complex identity. Although they never abandoned
farming, it is not their primary occupation. Thus, the celebration of the
harvest of a new crop of yam is of secondary importance.8 Among the Igbo
people, the main event in New Yam festivals is a sacrifice to a feminine
earth deity known as Ani or Ala as well as to the male spirit of the yam
(ji) known variably as Nkamalu-ji, Ahiajoku, Ahum-ji or Ifejiokwu. The
278
Figure 18.3 | Brass rod currency
sacrifice underlines the farmers’ attachment to land and agriculture. The
Igbo idea of tradition and culture is intimately connected to this allegiance
to the land. The Igbo words for culture and tradition are óménàla (deeds of
the earth or customs rooted in the ground) or òdìnàla (laws of the land).9
This etymology is not unique to the Igbo language; the common roots of
the English words “culture” and “cultivation,”10 or the Semitic stem “raboh”
(culture, fertility, fecundity) point to a widespread nexus.
As traders, the Aro replaced the sacrifice to the spirit of the yam with a
sacrifice to inyamavia (the “spirit of the market”). Inyamavia shrines are made
from thin brass rods, the currency of the precolonial Cross River trading
system (Figure 18.3). The sacrifice is not directed toward an earth goddess
or a yam deity, but to the ancestors. The issue of human sacrifice at the Ikeji
is highly controversial and sensitive and no conclusive evidence exists that
it ever took place. Hubert F. Mathews, a British government anthropologist
who visited Arochukwu during the 1927 Ikeji, suspected that human sacrifice was taking place.11 Whether it did or did not occur, it is significant that
one Aro person explained it to me not in terms of the taking of human life as
the ultimate form of sacrifice, but as sacrificing the chief trading commodity:
“Just as the Igbo sacrifice yam, we sacrificed slaves.”
On the day of the sacrifice, each family head sacrifices to his ancestor
(Figure 18.2). He then takes part of the sacrifice to the head of the family
to whom he owes his relation to the Aro people.12 This relation is known
as ihù, a complex term often translated as “respect.” Because many people
joined Aro as slaves or dependents, they owe allegiance to their masters,
279
Figure 18.4 |
Ofo Ukwu (Grand Ofo) marking the burial of Osim, Oror Village,
Arochukwu
the amadi or freeborn Aro. Here I use the Igbo word ohu for slaves or
dependents in the way that the Aro of today use it, which is not the way
that historians of the transatlantic slave trade use it.13 Through the act of
showing ìhù (íbú ìhù), each family marks its position in relationship to
the rest of the Aro people. This practice highlights the major difference
between the Aro and their neighbors. Instead of perceiving their community through its attachment to a particular tract of land, the Aro see the
history that brought them together as the basis of their communal bond.14
This has major implications for the specific type of historical consciousness
dominating Aro public discourse.
With the demise of the slave trade, the Aro converted their existing
oracular and established channels of slave recruitment into an extensive
network of settlements over much of southeastern Nigeria geared to the
commodity trade, especially in palm oil. As these settlements were primarily farming communities, Ikeji in Aro settlements show a partial return to
an agriculturally-based celebration with some ambiguity as to the object
280
Figure 18.5 |
Awada Aro at Ugwuakuma – The burial place of Akuma and site of
the culminating event on Avo Ndulata Nwékpé
of sacrifice. It serves to underline the complexity of Aro identity at the
settlements where communities strive to maintain their links with the Aro
and distinguish themselves from their neighbors while also integrating
themselves into the local economy and culture.15
In Arochukwu, through a series of prescribed events, each day of the
Ikeji festival underlines a feature of the historical bond that brought the
Aro together. It also provides the arena for playing out conflicts according
to accepted rules. I will briefly sketch the events of the first days of the Ikeji
festival focusing on the way each event provides an arena for dramatizing
and negotiating history. The Ikeji at Arochukwu begins on Avo Mgbape
Awada, the day of opening the awada. Awadas are family shrines at the
center of each compound housing the inyamavia. Most awadas are single
room structures. During the year they are kept closed, but on this day the
doors and windows are opened and will remain so throughout the Ikeji.
This marks the symbolic beginning of the festival.
An awada of great historical importance is the burial place of Akuma,
the leader of the Akpa warriors in the village of Ugwuakuma (the hill
of Akuma) (Figure 18.5). Avo Okpo Na-Azacha Awada (the day Okpo
sweeps the awada) occurs four days (an Igbo week) after opening the
awada. On that day, the shrines are swept clean by those who are considered
281
Map 18.2 | Villages of Arochukwu Town
the slaves or dependents of the awada’s owners. Okpo was a dependent of
Akuma; his descendants live in the nearby village of Agbagwu and come to
clean their master’s shrine on that day. In a similar way, the dependents of
other sections’ heads sweep the awada of their masters. This act underlines
relations of dependency and respect within each section.
The original political division of the Aro retained the primary segments through a division into nine main branches called otusi. At first,
the Akpa and their leader Akuma held political leadership. As warriors,
they had the means of coercion at their disposal. Later, when the Aro
had secured their place in the region, military power was less important
and leadership passed on to the descendants of Nnachi, the Igbo medicine
man. The current Eze Aro is a direct descendant of Nnachi. Over time,
the political system changed. The main division is no longer based on the
otusi system but on the nineteen villages of Arochukwu (Map 18.2). There
is only partial correspondence between otusi and village compositions. The
process that led to this transition is not entirely clear. It was finally confirmed, not without difficulties, with the formal reorganization of the Aro
Clan Council in 1947.16 Although today an individual Aro’s primary association is with his or her village, the Ikeji festival evokes, asserts, and, when
necessary, redraws the ancient dividing lines based on the otusi system.
Four days after sweeping the awadas is Avo Ndulata Nwékpé, the Afo
day in which a spirit called Nwékpé comes down. In many ways it is the
282
Figure 18.6 |
Eze Aro signals departure of procession from Oror to Awada Aro,
Ikeji 2005
most significant day of the festival, yet only a fraction of the residents
of Arochukwu is involved in it. The àmádí or freeborn Aro family heads
assemble in their compounds and then walk in processions according to a
pattern that reflects the relationship of each family, kindred, and section to
each other—in effect retracing their history by foot. I was repeatedly told
that if I could map out the complete pattern followed on that day, I would
figure out the history of Aro.
The various compounds meet at the awadas of nine otusi and then
proceed to gather at the awada of the four main sections. The Akpa section
(Ibom Isii) gathers at the shrine of Akuma, the warrior founder. The different Igbo and Ibibio elements meet at the shrine of each section where
they bless a yam from the last year’s harvest. They then make their way to
Oror village, the center of Oke Nnachi. Each segment brings a yam from
the previous season to the central Oke Nnachi awada at Oror. When they
have all gathered at Oror, the Eze Aro gives a signal (Figure 18.6). A long
procession, led by four men carrying yams on their heads, then makes its
way to meet the Akpa at the shrine of Akuma.17
283
The origins of the events of the day are grounded in the Aro tradition
of origin. The Akpa warriors came from an area east of the Cross River
where the environment is different from that of both the Igbo and the
Ibibio. Yam is not the primary food in that area. As a result, the Akpa were
not familiar with the elaborate practices involving yam cultivation, including the prohibition on eating yams before the celebration of the New Yam
festival. When the yam supply of their leader Akuma dwindled, he wished
to consume the new season’s yams. The rest of the Aro people are of Igbo
and Ibibio origin, and thus practice the prohibition on eating new yams
before the sacrifice. They implored Akuma to refrain from eating new yams
for a few more days. Led by their leader Nnachi, they took four yams
from the previous harvest and gave them to Akuma so that he could eat
them during the seven days that remained until the day of sacrifice when
new yams can be consumed. By accepting these yams Akuma accepted
the restriction on eating new yams and joined the Igbo and Ibibio yamcomplex. This enabled his section to become part of the cultural matrix of
an emerging Aro society. This was a milestone in Aro history. It established
a common ground for the Aro to function as a group. The elaborate procedure followed on Avo Ndulata Nwékpé day is a ritualized reenactment
of carrying the yams to Akuma’s compound. It revalidates the charter that
holds the different Aro sections together.
The Igbo and Ibibio sections arrive at the shrine of Akuma and are
invited in by the Akpa. The four young yam carriers enter the room, hand
over the yams, and retreat to an outer room. The heads of the nine otusi
(known as eze otusi) sit according to otusi hierarchy. Each of them performs
a sacrifice at the awada. After the sacrifice, each states, “Igbo ma Osim” (“the
Igbo (people) know Osim”), thus confirming the pact between Nnachi,
the Igbo medicine man, and the Akpa warriors who were led by Osim.18
By using this greeting, the descendants of Nnachi reciprocate Akuma’s
gesture of delaying the eating of new yams by acknowledging the decisive
contribution of the Akpa as warriors.19
After pouring a libation the elders in the inner room sit down to
perform Ìtú Èyè, the ritualized telling of the history of Aro.20 The ritualized context is not a mere recitation; it is rather an opportunity to readjust
the history to reflect shifting power relations. It is essential to arrive at an
agreed version of Aro history for the festival to continue. This underlines
the importance of historical consciousness in the forming of Aro identity.
When the telling of history is complete, the time is close to midnight
and everything is ready to bring down Nwékpé. The exact nature of the act
of “bringing down Nwékpé” (Ndulata Nwékpé) is shrouded in mystery.
It is the descent of a spirit to mark the acceptance by the ancestors of the
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consensus of Aro history reached by the Eze Otusi. Without such ancestral consent, Ikeji could not proceed. Nwékpé is associated with a form of
masquerade. The Aro people share the widespread belief that masks are
reincarnations of spirits. In the Igbo language mmánwu (mask) is mmúo
(spirit) incarnate.21 In most cases, masks take a tangible form by wearing
costumes. Bringing down Nwékpé on that day is an abstract act that does
not appear in the form of a masquerader. It is the ultimate type of masking,
a conceptual one.22 The arrival of Nwékpé is celebrated by playing a particular rhythm on a large slit ìkóró drum placed next to the awada. This
is then echoed by beating drums throughout Arochukwu signaling the
beginning of the public part of the festival.23
A participant in the secret ceremony described the essence of the day’s
events as follows: “If we have not brought down Nwékpé, there will be no
Ikeji.” This means that participants must follow all the previously described
procedures and meet all conditions to make the celebration possible. All
family heads must gather at their centers and follow specific routes to their
sectional center and then proceed to the shrine of Akuma where the Otusi
elders need to agree on a version of history.
So far, I have described the proceedings as prescriptive—as a routine
that has to be followed according to a well-established set of rules.
However, things can and often do go wrong and it takes a genuine effort
to ensure success. To illustrate this I will briefly describe two recent cases
that threatened Ikeji.
As described above, the rest of the Aro people consider the Eze Agwu
section of Aro as the descendants of the vanquished Ibibio whom they
allowed to stay after the war. Until recently, they sent their Eze Otusi as a
representative to the Ugwuakuma shrine, but that representative could not
wear the special cap worn by the other elders that signifies an autonomous
status. The leaders of Eze Agwu claimed that they never agreed to that
and flooded the colonial authorities with petitions demanding a change of
status. They based their demand on a claim that they are not the remnants
of defeated enemies but the descendants of those who invited the other
elements to fight the mysterious Losi who were the original landowners.
Thus they claim to be the initiators of the war which places them at the
head of the hierarchy. Their persistence appeals to the colonial authorities
(and later the state authorities) did not bear fruit until 1986 when influential members of their section succeeded in convincing the ailing traditional
ruler of Aro to allow their representatives to wear the cap at the shrine for
the first time. This established their independent status and was perceived
by them as a correction of a historical error although other Aro people saw
it as the manipulation of a traditional ruler weakened by age.
285
The Eze Agwu success prompted another section of Aro to demand a
change of status. To understand their claim, we need to return to the Ibibio
war. During the war, Okwara Agwu, an Igbo man, was brought to weave
special war caps that gave magical protection to the Akpa warriors. Eventually he received land from Eze Agwu and became his “dependent.”To explain
how this status occurred, members of the Eze Agwu section maintain that
Okwara Agwu saw the daughter of Eze Agwu naked, an abominable act
punishable by death. Okwara Agwu pleaded with Eze Agwu to save his
life. Eze Agwu relented and gave his daughter to Okwara Agwu as a wife.
This version explains Okwara Agwu’s dependency on Eze Agwu. Thus the
route his descendants took to the shrine of Akuma, goes from their own
center to the center of Eze Agwu to the Nnachi center at the Eze Aro palace
and finally to the shrine of Akuma at Ugwuakuma. Following the death
of the Eze Aro in 1987, Umunna Okwara Agwu wished to establish their
autonomy from Eze Agwu, and during the 1988 Ikeji festival some of them
attempted to carry their yams directly to Oror. They failed because several
of Umunna Okwara Agwu took the older route. This enabled Eze Agwu
to claim that the yams presented by the dissenting group were unnecessary
and they rejected them. It was clear to all who were present that accepting
their yam would establish a new status for their section. Since then they have
continued to try to affect this change; the issue remains a source of much
anguish among Umunna Okwara Agwu people.
During the Avo Ndulata Nwékpé day of the 1988 Ikeji, there was
much excitement at Arochukwu. All were concerned with the question
of whose yam would be accepted. Many people waited outside the Oke
Nnachi awada at Oror where the different groups gathered before ascending to Ugwuakuma. Inside, the elders engaged in a long debate on whose
yam to accept while outside the tension mounted. Thus there was no sense
of repetition of an age-old tradition, but rather a sense of reshaping the
basis of the Aro social structure.
The Avo Ndulata Nwékpé day is an embodiment of the spirit of mutual
accommodation between the different sections. Akuma agreed to wait
before eating new yams and in exchange the rest of Aro came to his place
to bring down Nwékpé. Thus the proceedings highlight the charter that
sustains Aro as a group. The possibility that Ikeji might not be celebrated
generates anxiety, for the Aro believe that havoc and misfortune will occur
if the ceremonies fail to take place. Each year brings new challenges and
unless the different Aro segments can reach an agreement, the historical
bonds that hold them together could dissolve.
To conclude, I have attempted to sketch some aspects of the Ikeji festival to highlight the role of the festival as the creation of history. The Aro
286
experience led to a transformation of an agricultural festival to a festival
that celebrates history. The Aro Ikeji festival continuously challenges the
basis of community survival. The corporate bonds that allow the community to exist are the result of a charter among its constituent groups . The
terms of the charter are derived from the ability to renegotiate those terms
by rearranging the building blocks of history. This is not done by attempting to enforce a singular version of history but in the spirit of “unity in
diversity.” The key to Aro power lies in this spirit.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
A. Appadurai, “The Past as a Scarce Resource,” Man n.s. 16, 1981: 210–219.
D. G. Coursey and C. K. Coursey, “The New Yam Festival of West Africa,”
Anthropos 66 (1971): 444–484.
Thanks to its greater yield, cassava has gradually replaced yam as the main
staple food in the region; however, yam retains its role as the main “cultural food.” Don C. Ohadike, “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918–19 and
the Spread of Cassava Cultivation on the Lower Niger: A Study in Historical Linkages,” Journal of African History 22 (1981): 379–391; and Susan M.
Martin, “Gender and Innovation: Farming, Cooking and Palm Processing
in the Ngwa Region, South-Eastern Nigeria, 1900–1930,” Journal of African
History 25 (1984): 411–427.
J. N. Ibe, “The New Yam Festival in Mbaise Division,” B.Ed. thesis, Faculty
of Education, University of Ibadan, 1975; and P. N. O. Ejiofor, “New Yam
Festival in Anambra State,” Ugo 1, No. 5 (1985): 30–37.
E. O. Arua, “Yam Ceremonies and the Value of Ohafia Culture,” Africa 51
(1981): 694–705; and H. F. Mathews, Report on the Sacrifices at the Feast
of New Yams as Performed among the Edda Tribe and, Other Customs in
Vogue, 1927 OKIDIST 4/9/70, National Archives of Nigeria, Enugu [hereafter NAE].
I have heard the Aro tradition of origin from many Aro persons, each time with
some significant variations. Aro history was first written down in connection
with a land dispute in 1915 by the district officer of Aro District. See Report
on Proceedings and Arbitration in Land Case, CALPROF 5/6/39, NAE.
The Aro traditions have been republished and studied many times afterwards
by administrators and colonial anthropologists. For example, see the numerous reports of government anthropologist H. F. Mathews and the intelligence
reports of colonial officer T. M. Shankland in the files of the National Archives
of Nigeria at Enugu and Rhodes House at Oxford. See T. M. Shankland,
Intelligence Report on the Aro Clan, Arochuku District, AD 635, ARODIV
3/1/55, NAE. The most important recent accounts are Kenneth Onwuka Dike
and Felicia Ifeoma Ekejiuba, The Aro of South-eastern Nigeria, 1650–1980: A
287
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Study of Socio-economic Formation and Transformation in Nigeria (Ibadan:
Ibadan University Press, 1990); and Ekejiuba, “Tradition and Transition in
Eastern Nigeria 1775–1975: A Paradigm of Socio-economic Change, Ph.D.
dissertation, Harvard University, 1976. J. O. Ijoma, ed., Arochukwu: History and
Culture (Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1986) presents a symposium of studies
on various aspects of Aro society. Other historical studies include G. I. Jones,
“Who are the Aro?” Nigerian Field 8, No. 3 (1939): 100–103; and A. E. Afigbo,
“The Aro of Southeastern Nigeria: A Socio-historical Analysis of Legends of
Their Origin,” African Notes 6, No. 2 (1971): 31–46.
G. I. Jones, From Slaves to Palm Oil: Slave Trade and Palm Oil Trade in the
Bight of Biafra (Cambridge: African Studies Centre, 1989), 34–36.
Hubert F. Mathews, Second Report on Aro: Supplementing the Discussion of Aro Origin, etc, 1927, 19 November 1927, 10–11, File No. 81/27,
OKIDISK 4/7/70, NAE.
E. I. Ifesieh, “Ritual Symbolism in Igbo Traditional Religion (A Survey
through Religion and Cultural Analysis),” Africana Marburgensia 19 (1986):
53–54.
R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, Croom
Helm, 1976), 76–82.
H. F. Mathews, confidential memo, Discussion of Aro Origins and the
Basis of the Widespread Aro Influence, 7 November 1927, paragraph 12,
ARODIV 30/1/15, NAE. Mathews arrived at this conclusion on the basis
of his encounter with the Eze Otusi of Ugwuakuma whom he found passive
and uncommunicative. He concluded that the reason was that the eze could
not be installed in his role because the necessary human sacrifice had not
taken place. Mathews included this claim in a confidential section of his
report and suggested that should the Eze Otusi be installed, there should be
an inquiry of the circumstances. I met the last two Eze Otusi of Ugwuakuma
and found them similarly uncommunicative; however, the reason for this was
that, while freeborn Aro men recognized them as the highest-ranking ritual
chiefs of Arochukwu, they nonetheless had no real power and most Aro
people do not even know of their existence. Mathews’ argument is without
merit concerning human sacrifice during Ikeji.
Felicia Ifeoma Ekejiuba, “Ritual Address in Aro Sacrifice: A Preliminary
Analysis of Aro Religious Ritual and Belief System,” Ikorok 1 (1971): 33–47.
Felicia Ekejiuba in “Tradition and Transition in Eastern Nigeria,” suggests
the term clientele instead of slavery; however, Aro people today prefer the
English word “slave”.
J. S. Harris, “Human Relationship to the Land in Southern Nigeria,” Rural
Sociology 7 (1942): 90–92.
Eli Bentor, “Aro Ikeji Festival: Toward a Historical Interpretation of a Masquerade Festival,” Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1995, chapter 6.
288
16. Memorandum from resident, Calabar Province, to district officer, Arochukwu, Reorganization of Aro Clan Council, February 18 1947, File No.
502/66, ARODIV 19/1/87, NAE.
17. Hubert F. Mathews, Second Report on Aro: Supplementing the Discussion
of Aro Origin, etc., 19 November 1927, p.11, File No. 81/27, OKIDISK
4/7/70, NAE.
18. Ugwuakuma Elders, Petition to the District Officer, Arochukwu, 4 August
1922, p.5, ARODIV 20/1/1, NAE.
19. Like all non-àmádí persons, non-Aro people are not allowed to enter
Akuma’s awada at Ugwuakuma. Thus, I was never allowed to witness the
event of that day inside the shrine. Twice (1988 and 2005) I was allowed to
stand at a certain distance while the ceremony took place. I have also interviewed many people who have taken part in the proceedings. H.F. Mathews,
who conducted research on the Aro people in 1927–1928, was present at
the awada at Ugwuakuma during Avo Ndulata Nwékpé of the 1927 Ikeji.
His “Second Report on Aro” contains the only written description. My own
observations and interviews confirm many of his; however, there are several
issues that I felt were too sensitive to inquire about.
20. Dike and Ekejiuba, The Aro of South-eastern Nigeria, 19–20.
21. H. M. Cole and C. C. Aniakor, Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos (Los
Angeles, Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 1984), 113.
22. Mathews, Second Report; In his description of the day’s events Mathews
wrote, “In the former days also one of their member used to dress up in a
peculiar manner and [be] concealed during the ceremony… he was called
“Nwa-ekpo” (Child of Ekpo)…(The Ekpo society is a powerful body in
Ibibio and Ekoi). Then after the nine senior men had sacrificed…the Nwaekpo would come out and perform a dance, after which all would disperse.”
This seems to suggest that at some point a masquerader actually appeared
to mark the arrival of Nwékpé. However as Mathews states that the practice was moribund by 1927 and my inquiries were answered by an emphatic
denial, I believe that he may have confused the idea of a mask as spirit with
its appearance. He also confuses between three different masking genres;
that of the Ibibio Ekpo society, the Cross River leopard society Èkpè and the
southeast Igbo age-grade related Ékpé (see K. Nicklin and J. Salmons, “On
Ekkpe, Ekpe, Ekpo, Ogbom,” African Arts 15, No. 4 (1982): 78–79 and Cole
and Aniakor, Igbo Arts, 176-182).
23. Ugwuakuma Elders, Petition to the district officer, Arochukwu, 4 August
1922, p.3, NAE.
289
• 18 •
Precolonial Slave
Relationships in
Contemporary Local Politics
at Nike
Axel Harneit-Sievers
N
ike, a village group or “confederation” in northern Igboland, formed an
important node in the southeastern Nigerian slave trading network.
After the end of the transatlantic trade, the local slave population was settled
in territorially separate villages on the northern and eastern fringes of Nike.
Today, about a century after the abolition of slavery in Nigeria, issues related
to former slave/master relationships continue to be important in Nike
society and politics. This chapter traces the development of relationships
between amadi (freeborn) and ohu (slaveborn) communities in Nike through
the twentieth century. On the one hand, ohu communities have secured their
economic independence from the amadi by gaining early access to formal
education and establishing effective rights to the land where they have
settled. On the other hand, ohu communities continue to belong to the most
underdeveloped areas in Nike, standing outside of Enugu urbanization that
has affected parts of Nike territory since the colonial period. The memory
of former slave/master relationships is preserved in certain cultural symbols.
Politically, a powerful traditional ruler from Iji, the very village of the former
slave traders, has dominated Nike for many years. This chapter analyses
modes of domination, suppression, and resistance that appear in contemporary Nike politics. It argues that issues of former slave/master relationships
are expressed as peculiar local adaptations of the Nigerian federal political
system, especially in contests about the creation of further local government
areas (LGAs) and autonomous communities.
There are no more slaves today. Slavery, defined as the ownership of a
human being by another person who has extensive rights over the former,
has not only been legally abolished everywhere in the world. With exceptions, it has also disappeared in most places, except for a few instances,
such as those in Mauritania and Sudan.2 This study, however, shows that
remnants of former master/slave relationships have survived in some places
in a multitude of forms, and they affect perceptions and self-perceptions of
former slaves and masters and their descendants. They influence everyday
relationships and interaction. They are reproduced by symbolic cultural
practices, by narrating, and writing down knowledge about the past. Remnants of former master/slave relationships also have had repercussions in
contemporary local politics; at times in silent, hidden ways, at others in
openly conflictive or even violent forms.
The persistence of those remnants of slavery, of course, should not be
misconstrued to mean that slavery persists. It does not imply a de facto
reappearance in a different form, as implied in the term “neoslavery” used
by Sundiata.3 Nor does it refer to slavery in a figurative or colloquial sense,
as in the colloquial usage “working like a slave.” Instead, I propose to use
the term “postslavery” to describe the condition in which slavery has been
effectively abolished—legally, and also as a practice of exploitation—but
in which the slavery past plays a noticeable role in contemporary social
relationships. The analogy to the term “postcolonial” is intended. The term
“postslavery” has both temporal and logical dimensions. It denotes a period
that starts with slave emancipation, but does not necessarily have a welldefined end. At the same time, it implies that there is something in the
postslavery condition that is based in, and caused by, the slavery past.
In this study I examine the history of slavery and the postslavery
condition in one particular village group or “clan” in northern Igboland:
Nike, Enugu East LGA, Enugu State. First, I give an overview of the Nike
setting and what may be called the mainstream version of Nike history.
Second, I explore the colonial period when slave emancipation took place,
new forms of labor regimes emerged, and the process of urbanization
affected parts of Nike. Third, I analyze postcolonial local conditions and
politics in Nike through the first years of the twenty-first century, relating
local conflicts, many of which have a postslavery dimension, to the more
general patterns prevalent within the Nigerian political system.
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P recolonial Slave Relationships in Contemporary Local Politics at Nike
Map 19.1 | Nike and surrounding area
Nike: The setting
Nike consists of a group of twenty-three villages in northern Igboland, covering a comparatively large territory with a much lower population density than most of the region. It extends from central urban Enugu
about twenty kilometers north and east into the savanna. Nike is sometimes called a “clan”; however, no claims to a common ancestry of the vil293
lages are made. More appropriately, however, Nike has been described as
a “confederation” formed by migrations from various areas for purposes of
military defense.4
In precolonial times, the deity Anike Nwauwa, with its shrine at
Onyohu, constituted a major integrating force among all the Nike villages.5 Anike Nwauwa is an earth goddess, who served as a symbol of
unity and operated as an oracle that advised Nike people when to go to
war. With the emergence of the modern state and the expansion of Christianity, Anike has lost much of these political roles; however, the shrine
continues to be important for individual worshippers. It also serves as a
relevant voice (and legitimizing function) in local political affairs, such as
the conflict surrounding the 1999 succession to Nike chieftaincy, which is
discussed below.6
Like other communities in Enugu State, especially the Nkanu clan,
Nike society is characterized by the fundamental social divide between
amadi and ohu or awbia.7 In contrast to most other Nkanu communities,
however, neither group resides close to the other, but instead form separate
villages in Nike.8 Today, Nike villages are usually grouped as follows:
1. Nike-Uno, comprising Ibagwa and Iji as the senior and most
populous villages, plus a number of smaller villages, all of which
are amadi.9
2. Mbulu-Owehe (as a group sometimes not separated clearly from
Nike-Uno), which is largely amadi. Among them, however, is the
village of Onyohu, which consists partly of ohu, most noticeably
the atama (chief priest) of the Anike Nwauwa shrine. Nike-Uno
and Mbulu Owehe form the central and western parts, up to the
foot of the Udi escarpment, of Nike.
3. Ogui (Oguiyi), an amadi village on the southernmost area of
Nike, with a somewhat separate identity because it has been part
of urban Enugu and has had its own chieftaincy institution since
the colonial period;
4. Mbulu-Ujodo, a group of ohu communities on the eastern fringe
of Nike, with Akpuoga being the largest;10
5. Mbulu-Iyiukwu, a group of ohu communities on the northern
and northeastern fringe of Nike, with Ugwogo the largest among
them.11
According to the 1991 census, Nike had a population of 34,500.12 By
2000 the population may have been close to 45,000. In the early 1950s the
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census gave the number of Nike inhabitants as close to 9,000, with more
than 60 percent of the population in the ohu villages.13 At that time, the
largest ohu villages, Ugwogo and Akpuoga, had higher population figures
than the largest amadi villages, Ibagwa and Iji. The relative shares of the
population groups do not seem to have decisively changed since then.
Precolonial Nike: Slavery and history
Nike has attracted a good deal of attention by researchers into its
history by both foreign academics and local nonprofessional historians.
About half a century ago, the British social anthropologist Robin Horton
conducted his first Nigerian field research in Nike. His 1954 study on
the “system of slavery in a Northern Ibo village group” presents a detailed
account of the history of Nike, as told then, and his account still represents a mainstream version of Nike history.14 In the mid-1960s Israeli
geographer David Grossman did his Ph.D. research about the practice
of migratory tenant farming in Nike that includes some information on
history, especially changing land rights.15 Jude O. Nnamani, a community
bank manager and local historian, published a booklet about the history
of colonial and postcolonial chieftaincy in Nike in the mid-1980s, and
more recently, a full-length book about Nike history and customs.16 Anayo
Enechukwu, a writer and publisher who operates the Enugu Historical
Documentation Bureau, has an extensive description of Nike history in
his History of Nkanu.17 Jerry Ibani, also a writer and an aspiring young
local politician, published an imaginative history of Nike with a focus on
Ogui.18 Chief Denis A. Ugwueze, president of Nike-Uno customary court,
recently produced a pamphlet on local traditions.19
This concentration of publications on and within a single community
is remarkable even within the context of Igboland where nonacademic
authors have published a considerable number of local histories, usually
about their communities of origin, in order to place them on the map of
the wider world, to stress the particular of the local vis-à-vis Igbo ethnicity and the Nigerian state, and to (re)construct and (re)present them and
their traditions in “modern” forms.20 The authors of these works follow
different personal and political agendas; however, none of their publications has been directly sponsored by clearly identifiable personal or political interest.21 Their books and pamphlets differ in details, largely gloss over
potentially conflictive issues, such as amadi/ohu issues, which are usually
mentioned in rather evasive forms, and avoid any debate. Besides these
works, local historical storytelling continues to be popular.
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According to the mainstream version of history, the Nike area constituted a relatively lightly-settled frontier zone into which settlers migrated
from various directions.22 Details of such migration movements, as told in
oral traditions and published local histories, are debated. Some accounts
say that Ibagwa, the most “senior“ (that is, first) of the Nike villages, came
from Igalaland. Iji has connections to the Abakaliki area and to Arochukwu. Amorji, on the other hand, claims to be autochthonous. Nike
formed an important nodal point in the trading network of the Bight of
Biafra hinterland, linking the east-west route between Idah on the Niger
and the Cross Rivers with the southern route to Bende. These trade routes
still existed in the early twentieth century.23 Much of the trade along these
routes included slaves. The Nike-Uno communities, especially Ibagwa,
acquired more slaves from the densely populated areas of Abadja (on the
Udi plateau, west of Nike), and by subduing villages in the area.
Thus, military conquest of entire villages was one way in which the ohu
communities existing in Nike today came into being. Another way was
the relegation of surplus slaves to ohu status after the transatlantic slave
trade ended in the mid-nineteenth century. The large Nike amadi villages
of Ibagwa, Iji, and Amorji settled considerable numbers of their slaves in
outlying areas of the respective amadi village land on the northern and
eastern fringes of Nike territory, so that few ohu remain in the amadi villages today.24 This was done to create military outposts where guards could
be stationed against surprise attacks, and possibly also to avoid conflict and
confrontation between the large number of slaves and the freeborn living
in the same community.
The latter reason may seem like hindsight. In many communities of
Nkanu, serious conflict erupted between amadi and ohu living side by side
in the same or nearby villages during the colonial period and continuing to
the present day.25 In contrast, the situation in Nike has been relatively free
of violent confrontation between groups. Territorial separation has clearly
played a role in keeping the peace. It is difficult to say if this was a conscious strategy of de-escalation from the beginning, as Nike people argue
today. At any rate, Nike’s internal structure developed because of the relative abundance of land available for separate slave settlements—a rather
exceptional condition in Igboland. However, Nike is not a singular case, for
a somewhat parallel pattern of territorial separation (although involving a
much smaller proportion of population in the outlying villages) also exists
in Ishiagu, Ivo LGA, Ebonyi State.26 There may be more cases elsewhere.
While the broad lines of the story behind the process by which the
Nike ohu villages emerged are beyond dispute, the details are much less
clear and continue to be debated locally. The links between particular ohu
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communities and their amadi “parent” villages are well remembered. One
contentious issue, however, is the question of whether a particular village
had already existed in the area before an amadi village subjugated it by
military conquest and forced it to become an ohu community, or if it had
been established by settling slaves. The difference is crucial in local forms
of self-definition today. A village that consists of descendants of slaves
who had originally been bought or captured “one by one” as individuals
cannot claim to have original kinship ties among its members; relationships are defined through the links to former masters. Thus, a population
that was at a later stage settled on amadi land by order of the slave masters
carries a more severe stigma today than a village whose ancestors were the
autochthonous inhabitants or first settlers on the land. If the village was
militarily overwhelmed in a later phase of its history and forced into ohu
status, it neither lost its special connection to the land nor its own kinship
system. This latter situation carries a less severe stigma, because the inferior
status is a matter of political repression (which can be fought by political
means, see below) rather than a fundamental alienation from kinship, land,
and history.
Ugwogo, the largest of the Nike ohu communities, is a case in point.
According to mainstream Nike history, the founders of Ugwogo were slaves
who were settled—or, as Nnamani states in an opaque way, “migrated”—
from Ibagwa.27 This version is supported by the fact that kindred names in
Ugwogo are the same as in Ibagwa (unusual even in the context of Nike
ohu villages). Ugwogo history, however, as told by its current traditional
ruler, does not simply deny the problematic status of the community, but
explains origins differently.28 According to this version, Ugwogo people
had a common migration history, arriving in the seventeenth century from
a place called Uburu and becoming the “first settlers” in Nike. They fought
wars against invaders, but were later subdued by the people of Iji, who had
acquired firearms through the Atlantic trade.29 A popular local version of
the history of Agbogazi, an ohu community a few kilometers away from
Ugwogo, follows a similar line.30 Such versions of history that stress an
original autochthonous status exist in some, but not all, Nike ohu villages.
The connection to Iji (or to Amorji, in a few cases) remains largely undisputed today in the Mbulu Ujodo group of villages.31
While there are good reasons to view the Ugwogo version previously
mentioned as a recent invention, in principle it seems impossible today to
trace a factually correct version of the history of origin of Nike ohu villages
because of the noticeable feedback that published histories (academic and
nonacademic) have had on oral historical narratives in the area.32 On all
sides historical accounts relevant to this issue have become highly politi297
cized. Rather than searching for a definitive “factually correct” version of
the past, the historian may have to be content with acknowledging that
oral narratives are highly malleable. Historians must try to understand
meaning and function within the context in which narratives have been,
and continue to be, produced. From this perspective, the conflicting versions of the history of Nike ohu villages represent an evolving process
of emancipation of former slave groups from their former masters. One
aspect of this emancipation is through historical storytelling. Contestation
about local history is part of the postslavery condition in Nike.
Colonial Nike:
Labor, land rights, and urbanization
Slaves in precolonial Nike had been the property of amadi individuals
and lineages. The amadi used slave labor principally in agriculture. Residing
on outlying land of amadi villages, ohu villages had no land rights of their
own. Supernatural sanctions involving land and agricultural cycles linked
both sides.33 Details about the degree of economic and other forms of
exploitation of slaves in precolonial Nike are difficult to establish; however,
it is clear that slaves were dependent on, and subordinate to, Nike amadi
in a comprehensive way. Colonialism changed much of this, but in slow,
sometimes subtle ways.
The first contacts of Nike communities with European colonizers
date back to 1909 or 1910, but a more permanent form of colonial rule
began only after a major military expedition in 1919 and the appointment of Ugwu Nwani as warrant chief. Despite Nike’s proximity to Enugu,
the “coal city,” the rapidly developing center of the mining industry and
later capital of the Eastern Region, most of Nike remained a backwater
area. Nike’s wealth in precolonial terms—the abundance and fertility
of its lands—made it much less necessary, or attractive, to seek the new
opportunities offered by colonialism. Relatively few Nike people went to
school, especially among the amadi who are said to have sent the children
of ohu to school, rather than their own.34 Few, if any, Nike people worked
in the Enugu colliery. The amadi seem to have made no attempts to force
ohu to work in the mines or to expropriate their wages, unlike the case of
Nkanu communities east and southeast of Nike where such practices led
to revolts.35 The majority of the mine labor force came from the Udi area
further west, pressured (even sometimes coerced) by their chiefs, especially
Onyeama Eke.36
Looking at developments under colonialism, there is a marked contrast
between Nike and the Anambra region of the Onitsha hinterland, and
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the central and southern areas of Igboland. Here the Christian missionary
presence was felt much earlier, and many communities embraced Christianity with considerable zeal. Mission schools produced a large number of
educated young Igbo men who, by the 1940s and 1950s, constituted a large
proportion of the employees of the colonial state and European commercial enterprises. Population pressure in these densely settled areas created
numerous migrants, who as workers, artisans, traders, and civil servants
moved into the urban centers of the region and other parts of Nigeria,
especially Lagos and Kano. This migration contributed to the widely held
image of Igbo society as mobile, dynamic, success-oriented, and responsive
to change (as presented, for example, by Victor Uchendu).37 However, few
of these socioeconomic factors played a marked role in Nike society during
colonialism. A good indicator of this relative underdevelopment was the
absence of a town union, which became the most important form of selfinstitutionalization of the modern Igbo community elsewhere after the
1940s.38 No such town union developed in Nike until recently.
With the establishment of colonial rule in Igboland, slavery was
abolished, although instances of kidnapping and trade in human beings
occurred well into the 1920s and even later.39 Thus, Nike ohu became legally
free, and Nike amadi over time lost the power to force the ohu to work
their lands for them or to pay tribute; however, this did not result in the
impoverishment of Nike amadi. The availability of surplus land allowed
them to establish alternatives to working their land themselves. The process
must have been gradual. Although no information is available for the first
decades of the twentieth century, there may well have been periods of crisis
for the amadi villages, but the transformation seems to have proceeded
rather successfully. Earlier studies of Nike allow a few glimpses of the
process. By the early 1950s a system of hired labor was well-established.
Migrants from the densely populated Nsukka, Awgu, and Abakaliki areas
did most of the farmwork. For Nike amadi at this time, as Horton has
noted, doing“farmwork” entailed sitting beneath a shady tree and shouting
an occasional word of encouragement to a toiling hired laborer between sips
of palm wine. By then hired labor had replaced slave labor for a long time,
“since the advent of Government.”40 In the mid-1960s Grossman observed
a system of tenant farming operating in Nike, with a majority of tenants
coming from Ezeagu, east of Enugu. Despite the different terminologies
employed, the systems described by Horton and Grossman were possibly
similar in practice, because both of them involved the temporary lease of
land or economic trees, mainly palm trees for palm wine tapping, to people
from outside Nike. Comparison between the two studies also shows that
fluctuation in the origin of laborers/tenants was high. Both studies noted
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a large population of laborers and tenants; Grossman counted 160 tenant
camps populated by about 4,700 adult males.41 Today, tenancy arrangements
do not seem to play so dominant a role, probably due to the general decline
of agriculture. But hired labor for farmwork is still important in Nike amadi
villages. In short, Nike amadi could afford to live on rents derived from their
ownership of large tracts of fertile land; so they did not have much incentive
to move into other forms of (self )employment that became so important
elsewhere in colonial Igbo society.
Thus, wage labor and tenancy arrangements replaced slave labor in
Nike under colonial rule. Colonial rule terminated the use of Nike ohu
as agricultural laborers for and by their masters, and thus ended direct
forms of ohu economic exploitation. In fact, ohu villages became successful
farming communities. In this regard, they were more successful than their
former masters. Horton ascribed this to their labor ethic, which made them
work more extensively and do without large amounts of hired labor, thus
achieving higher incomes for themselves.42 Their success in agriculture has
continued. Today, Ugwogo with its large market for agricultural products
and firewood is frequently called the “breadbasket of Enugu.”
The termination of direct forms of economic exploitation of ohu under
colonial rule, however, did not necessarily imply an end to other aspects of
their lower status. For example, in the 1920s amadi still used ohu villages as
places to quarantine people with infectious diseases.43 British indirect rule
policies reinforced the secondary status of Nike ohu communities in the
institutions of African political representation. They produced subchiefs
under the warrant chief system, which was dominated by amadi chiefs,
and a few members in the ishi ani system of representation by village and
lineage elders that replaced the warrant chief system after 1934.44 Thus,
ohu remained under the supremacy of amadi chiefs and elders, and paid
taxes through them.45
Another conflictive issue between ohu and amadi villages was that of
land ownership. Available sources do not provide information about the
exact time when inhabitants of ohu villages stopped giving labor services
or other forms of tribute to the amadi villages as the original owners of
the land on which the ohu villagers had settled. This may have happened
gradually over several decades. While the right of ohu communities to
the land on which they were residing was uncontested by the early 1950s,
their rights to the surrounding land (areas more than about one mile away
from the village) could still be disputed. Grossman reported one raid by
Ibagwa men “against one of their Ohu villages that refused to pay tribute
to them…as late as 1950.”46 For the same period, Horton did not note
any restriction of ownership of ohu land (not even of areas further away
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from the villages), as long as the issue was solely about working the land
for one’s own use.47 He saw the main problem in the rents collected for
tenancy arrangements on such land, as the amadi still claimed the right
to lease land and to receive the proceeds in the early 1950s.48 Tenancy
arrangements in the 1960s led to some conflict with land owners and to
land disputes between various Nike communities. Not only did these cases
involve constellations of amadi against ohu villages, but also villages exclusively belonging to one of the two groups.49 Today ohu communities seem
to have successfully acquired the right to receive the proceeds from land
leases. Even if at times the amadi criticize this development, there seems
little they can do about it. One court case between Ibagwa and Ugwogo
has been ongoing since 1986.50
The urbanization of Enugu has decisively influenced the history of some
Nike communities since the colonial period. Until the 1950s this process
affected only the southernmost Nike village, Ogui. Founded in 1914–1915,
the acquisition of land for Enugu was based on a number of dubious treaties
made in 1917 with men from Ngwo and other communities on the escarpment. Ownership of the land on the plain on which Enugu was built was
disputed between Ngwo and Ogui for decades, even beyond a court judgement in 1943 that settled the matter in favor of Ogui-Nike. Large parts of
Enugu area became crown land, controlled by the colonial town planning
authorities who could impose their development schemes against payment
of some compensation for economically viable assets (trees and buildings)
on the land taken.51 The area of Ogui village itself was not crown land, so
the indigenes kept control over construction. By the 1950s and 1960s town
planning authorities regarded this area, called Ogui Overside, as the worst
slum in town, home of prostitution and crime.52
Over the years, Ogui residents must have made some gains from the
compensation payments, even though today many residents and external
observers have the impression that Ogui lost much of its land to the government without adequate compensation and without having the chance
to make much productive use of the compensation actually received. For
example, the fate of compensation paid by the government in the early
1960s to acquire Independence Layout, a large prestigious residential area
designed for top civil servants and expatriates, is symptomatic. The original
compensation of £21,000 was only partially paid out, and a further compensation in plots, allotted to the community after the Civil War, trickled
away due to fraud and legal squabbles. According to Ogui’s traditional
ruler, whatever sums were paid to the community, amadi and ohu adult
males within Ogui received shares of the same size. 53
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While Ogui may perhaps be viewed as the loser in Enugu’s urbanization process, the picture is very different for Iji, especially Iji-Umuenwene.
Iji came under the trajectory of Enugu urbanization much later than
Ogui, not before the 1950s. By then the era of “private layouts” had begun.
Instead of the government surveying an area, land owners in a community
started to invest the money for a survey and demarcation of plots, to apply
for official recognition to make the land an “approved layout,” and sell (or
rather give on long-term lease) the plots themselves, allowing substantially
higher profits than from government compensation payments. As a rule,
government could not acquire an approved layout. Ogui seems to have pioneered this practice with Ogui New Layout in the 1950s, but Iji developed
on a larger scale since the 1960s, starting with New Heaven and extending into Abakpa. Actual figures and details about this process are almost
impossible to obtain, but there is widespread consensus in Nike that in
the long run Iji was much more successful than Ogui in exploiting these
opportunities. Since the 1960s or 1970s funds generated from land leases
have been productively reinvested in real estate. Funds generated from
leases of private (family) lands usually accrued to the respective owners,
while those generated from communal lands have been administered by
a board of trustees (in Iji-Umuenwene) or a power of attorney (in other
Nike communities), respectively, for sharing and for communal projects.
The traditional ruler of the community usually received a share of any land
transaction.54 The 1976 Land Use Decree that invested land ownership all
over Nigeria in the government does not seem to have effectively inhibited
these forms of private and communal forms of land lease and sale.55
Private layouts exist in some of Nike’s ohu communities as well. The
amadi no longer seriously contest the right of ohu to lease land this way.
Because of its favorable geographical location, Iji, a community that stood
at the core of the precolonial slave-trading network in Nike, turned out to
be the major winner of the commercial opportunities offered by urbanization. Urbanization arrived on Iji land at just the right time, around
independence, when government could not continue to disregard indigenous land rights as had been done during the colonial period. In a way,
Iji amadi were able to expand the landlord tradition, that is, having large
tracts of land available and letting others work it for them, while enjoying the rents, well into the era of urbanization. Most ohu communities,
except possibly those around the airport and industrial areas of Emene,
are situated at some distance from Enugu, so no comparable opportunities
for urbanization seem possible in the foreseeable future. This also applies
to those amadi communities situated at a greater distance from Enugu,
notably Ibagwa. The current distribution of wealth and political power
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generated from land leases in Nike cannot be attributed to the amadi/ohu
divide; however, it may be too simple to view this trend as purely a matter
of historiogeographical coincidence. Iji’s long-established traditions and
know-how in commercial matters may well have been crucial elements for
the village to profit from this opportunity. From this perspective, Iji may
be counted among the few cases where an African precolonial elite successfully secured its overall dominance and relative prosperity through the
colonial period beyond the turn of the twenty-first century.
Postslavery in Nike society and politics since
the 1970s
Reminiscences of precolonial slavery in Nike today take various forms.
The slavery past is sometimes openly, sometimes in more hidden ways,
mentioned in oral and written versions of local history by local and external historians. Thus, the memory of slavery is kept alive explicitly, for better
or worse, and there is no indication that the slavery past can be “forgotten”.
Beyond this, the slavery past is also alive in a number of cultural practices
that are acted out, rules that are adhered to, and symbols that are generally
observed and acknowledged. In everyday life or at special occasions, these
practices produce and reproduce the social stigmatization attached to the
status of a person or community considered to be descended from slaves.
Thus, the postslavery condition is an ongoing process.
In this regard, a number of indicators and issues are commonly mentioned. There is virtually no intermarriage between Nike amadi and ohu.
Educated people in Nike today usually agree that origin should not play a
role in marriage decisions, but in reality it often does. This affects formally
accepted “traditional marriages” within the community, which all over Igboland are usually contracted only after extensive investigations by the families
involved into the family backgrounds of the partners. Of course, the reality
of personal relationships, especially in the urban context, may be different.56
Certain aspects of local culture, which serve as symbols of Nike identity, are reserved for amadi, most prominently the performance of the igede
drum and dance during funeral celebrations, although this is sometimes
contested. Since the 1940s the ohu community at Ugwogo has performed
its own igede, which Ibagwa amadi consider as an incomplete imitation, and
the latter try to avoid attending such performances. Other cultural symbols,
however, are shared by all Nike, most importantly the igoji (yam) title.57
As a confederation of communities with different backgrounds, some
Nike villages have cultural institutions and symbols peculiar to them.58 Both
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amadi and ohu communities have acquired particular masquerades from elsewhere, and attempts by one community to get those of another one have at
times led to “masquerade wars.”59 In some instances, ohu communities seem
to have acquired institutions and symbols that stress their independence of
the amadi. For example, Nike titles in general are not regarded as ozo, but
today Ugwogo people call their titles ozo,60 implying that they are freeborn
despite the fact that in Igboland slaves may may not take ozo titles. Of all
the Nike amadi communities, only Iji has the Ekpe dance and the Okonko
night masquerade. Obviously, these institutions are related to, though not
identical with, institutions with the same names that spread from the Cross
River area into southern Igboland during the time of the slave trade. There,
membership of the Okonko secret society functioned as a kind of “passport”
to enable safe travel and trading. The society also fulfilled, and to some extent
continues to do so, judicial functions on the local level. In Iji, the existence of
Ekpe reconfirms the village’s historical links to the Arochukwu slave trade.
Today, however, Agbogazi performs the Ekpe, one of two ohu communities
in Nike (Emene is the other one) that does so.61
Besides these institutionalized forms of maintaining and acting out
the amadi/ohu divide in Nike, a psychological dimension seems to be
involved as well. People from ohu communities often appear restrained
when interacting with amadi. The latter can easily insult them with a question as simple as “who are you?” that implies that the awareness of an
individual’s social background will be enough to reproduce the social order.
Besides these sociocultural dimensions of the postslavery condition
in Nike, the social divide between amadi and ohu also forms a constant
undercurrent in Nike local politics. The issue should not be exaggerated by
isolating and taking it out of context, because other themes—poverty and
underdevelopment, intracommunity competition, and sociocultural identity—play as important a role in Nike local politics as the amadi/ohu issue.
In various ways, however, this peculiar divide has played a role in defining
local power relationships. It has influenced the forms and contents of local
self-organization, and it has shaped the ways in which the structures and
institutions “offered” by the Nigerian political and administrative system
operate in the Nike environment.
Compared to many other areas in Igboland, Nike is a relatively underdeveloped area today. The state of its infrastructure provides a convenient
marker of this point. For example, many Igbo communities in the Anambra
area, and other parts of central and southern Igboland, have acquired water
and electricity supply between the 1950s and the 1970s, often through community self-help projects that were supported by the regional governments
of the day. Until 1999 the electricity supply in Nike did not extend further
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than the city limits of urban Enugu. Alongside the pot-holed road to Ibagwa
that starts immediately north of the Nike Lake Resort Hotel junction there
were electricity poles, but no wires on them. Soon after taking over in May
1999, the new civilian administration under Governor Chimaroke Nnamani
extended the infrastructure necessary for electricity supply at least to places
like Amorji and Ibagwa. But there was still no electricity in the MbuluIyiukwu communities of Nike some kilometers further north.62 Water supply
in these communities was critical at times, as only a few boreholes existed
(and these were recent); people had to fetch water from streams that tend
to fall dry during the dry season. The general poverty of Nike, as compared
to other areas of Igboland, was also expressed in the simplicity of buildings,
even when taking into account the widely-held self-perception that Nike
people do not tend to display wealth by erecting impressive structures.
Like many other areas of northern Igboland, a variety of factors accounts
for Nike underdevelopment. The relatively late arrival and adaptation of
modern education is one of them. A second factor is the regional political
dominance of the more developed communities in the west, for example
Onitsha and Nnewi, in the context of the old Anambra state since the mid1970s. This has led to demands for the establishment of separate states that
were fulfilled by the creation of Enugu and Ebonyi States in 1991 and 1996,
respectively.63 Underdevelopment, however, cannot be attributed to such
external factors alone, but has also to be considered as a result of local power
relations and a political framework that has inhibited development.
For decades, local politics in Nike has been dominated by a single
powerful traditional ruler, Igwe Edward Nnaji (1918–24 December 1998)
from Iji-Umuenwene, and his family.64 Nnaji started his career from an
unspectacular background, with little formal education, as a member of
the tax collection committee and village representative in the ishi ani in
the late 1930s.65 In 1957, when the Eastern Region government asked
communities to appoint chiefs to represent them in the Eastern House of
Chiefs, Nnaji was named rather than Isaac Mbah from Ibagwa, despite the
latter’s seniority.66 Nnaji’s rise to prominence was due to a combination of
factors: his personal political acumen, growing wealth from land leases, and
his position as a traditional ruler. It is difficult to say which of these factors
actually was the foundation of his career. The post-Civil War policy of creating traditional rulers throughout the Igbo-speaking areas strengthened
his position, and by the 1990s he was regarded as one of the most powerful
chiefs in the east. As the patron of the Enugu State Council of Traditional
Rulers, his influence reached far beyond Nike.67
Nnaji’s influence extended into the formal political setup of Nike. Two
of his sons served as local government chairmen. Critics have called Nike
305
politics a Nnaji family affair. On the one hand, even his political adversaries
describe some aspects of Edward Nnaji’s grip on Nike affairs as positive.
He was an integrative character, trying to appease opponents, avoiding
open confrontation to the point of evasiveness, and making sure that peace
prevailed in Nike. On the other hand, his advancing age, lack of formal
education, and conservative outlook are frequently cited as being responsible for Nike’s relative underdevelopment. His detractors claim that he was
neither interested in nor properly understood the importance of infrastructural development and general modernization of the community. Soon after
his death in December 1998, struggles for succession started, even before
the end of the official one-year period of mourning that is supposed to be
observed after the death of an important Nike person. His son Julius Nnaji
made a successful bid to become Nike’s next igwe, but his appointment has
been hotly contested. Court disputes continued even after the Enugu State
government recognized him as traditional ruler in 2001.68
As regards internal power relations, especially the amadi/ohu divide
in Nike, Edward Nnaji represented the continuity of amadi domination,
even though chiefs of ohu communities were represented in his traditional
“cabinet.” But his rule also represented Iji’s domination of all Nike amadi
and ohu communities.69 In this context, since the 1980s the creation of
further autonomous communities emerged as an issue of growing importance in Nike politics, because many people viewed the creation of new
administrative units as an opportunity to break the patterns of dominance.
To understand the relevance of this issue, some general remarks on the
modes of operation of the Nigerian political system may be appropriate.
The Nigerian federal system, operating since 1967, has had a tendency toward fragmentation, resulting in a continuing division of existing
political and administrative units into smaller ones. The process of fragmentation can be observed on all levels. The number of states increased
from twelve in 1967 to thirty-six in 2000. The number of LGAs more
than doubled between 1976 and 1999. Similar increases occurred in the
number of autonomous communities, each headed by a traditional ruler,
which form a kind of “fourth tier” of the federal system that is particular
to the Igbo-speaking areas. The ongoing fragmentation process arises from
the financial logic of the federal system as well as from pressures from
below. On the one hand, fragmentation makes sense in financial terms. The
established mechanisms of sharing the proceeds from Nigeria’s oil production—revenue allocation—put a premium on the creation of new units.
Since sharing is largely done on the basis of equality among the units, two
successor units taken together will receive more than its parent unit had
received before the split.70 On the other hand, every existing administra306
tive unit tends to have a majority dominating it, and a minority that feels
marginalized in terms of access to funds and jobs. This minority presses
for secession, that is the creation of its own unit. In principle, the same
mechanisms operate on all levels of the federal hierarchy: states, LGAs,
and (in the Igbo-speaking states) autonomous communities.
The creation of more LGAs and autonomous communities in the Igbospeaking states of southeastern Nigeria reflects not only financial considerations but also local political competition. Local elites generally subscribe
to the view that creating a new LGA or a new autonomous community
provides access to political office as well as development by increasing the
amount of federally-distributed funds, autonomy in using them, and raising
government awareness of a locality for the establishment of governmentsponsored projects. For this reason, many village groups in Enugu State
have split into numerous autonomous communities. A single LGA may
contain a dozen or more of them today, each of them headed by an igwe. By
2000 there were about one thousand of these local government units.
Within this setting, the situation in Nike was peculiar, despite pressures that emerged for the creation of further autonomous communities
since at least the late 1980s. With one exception, noted below, Nike has
remained a single autonomous community, comprising an entire LGA,
the largest autonomous community in Enugu State. For many years,
Igwe Edward Nnaji managed to keep Nike together as a single administrative unit.71 Even in Nike, however, pressures for the creation of more
federal units came from two sides. First, there was a younger generation of
politically interested and influential people in various Nike communities,
including Iji itself, which subscribed to the argument that the creation of
more autonomous communities could promote development. Their influence, however, failed to persuade Nnaji to change his mind in this matter.
Second, and more importantly, pressures for the creation of more units
came from those communities that felt marginalized in the current Nike
political and administrative setup, particularly among the ohu communities of Mbulu-Iyiukwu, Mbulu-Ujodo, and Ibagwa. In 1989 the largest
of all Nike communities, Ugwogo, actually achieved the status of an
officially-recognized autonomous community under Igwe Linus Ekete, its
traditional ruler. Thus, Ugwogo became the first ohu community in Nike
to gain autonomy, a measure that in the particular context of Nike politics,
carries connotations of ex-slave emancipation. The politics behind Ugwogo’s recognition as an autonomous community provides a good example of
the volatility of politics in Nigeria, and the role of political opportunism,
patronage, and the personality factor therein.72 Since then, pressures to
create more autonomous communities have continued. In early 1999 more
307
were established by the outgoing military administration, but the elected
civilian administration that took over in May 1999 cancelled their creation. Nevertheless, the debate continues, and future recognition of more
autonomous communities seems to be just a matter of time.
The amadi/ohu divide in Nike also played a role in the creation of
Enugu East LGA in 1996. Until that time, Nike was part of Enugu North
LGA, together with Nkanu. In 1995–1996 leaders from Mbulu-Iyiukwu
and Mbulu-Ujodo approached the panel set up by the state government to
receive applications for the creation of new LGAs. Although they succeeded
in securing the creation of a new LGA, their request to get its headquarters
placed at Ugwogo was turned down in favor of Nkwo, at the heart of NikeUno, after the personal intervention in Abuja by Edward Nnaji who had
originally opposed the proposal to create a new LGA.73 The location of the
LGA headquarters was not only symbolically important, but also became
relevant with regard to the extension of infrastructure, such as electricity
supply. A remarkable aspect of the current composition of Enugu East LGA
(comprising Nike villages as well as the Abakpa quarters of urban Enugu) is
the numerical dominance of local councillors from the rural areas.
In the name of “development” and “autonomy,” struggles for territorial
and administrative restructuring were being fought all over Nigeria. They
constituted aspects of the country’s federal order and the distributive logic
of its rent-based political and economic system. The Nike example shows
how the mechanisms offered in a standardized form by the Nigerian political system were locally interpreted, appropriated, and applied, according
to local circumstances, conflicts, and sociopolitical setting. In Nike’s case,
as in other northern Igbo communities, the social divide created by the
slavery past constitutes an important undercurrent in these political moves.
Finally, and beyond the issues of local administrative structures, the
amadi/ohu divide also has repercussions in local forms of self-organisation.
It has already been mentioned that Nike was a late-comer as regards the formation of a town development union. Today, most villages and village groups
within Nike have such development unions, but separately. It has been hard
to form a union that encompasses all of Nike. Sometime after the Civil War,
a cultural organization called “Ndu” was created but did not remain active
for long. In 1986 the Nike Town Union was set up, but did not become
representative of the entire community. Despite its name and its claims to
the contrary, the Nike Town Union had virtually no representation from the
ohu communities of Mbulu-Iyiukwu and Mbulu-Ujodo. This situation contributed to the crisis arising around Christmas 1999, when the town union
called, for the first time in many years, for a “general return” (an obligatory
meeting of all Nike indigenes) “abroad” and “at home,” to launch a develop308
ment project, as many communities in Igboland do on a regular basis. On the
eve of the planned meeting, the chairman of the Mbulu-Ujodo Town Union
successfully filed a court injunction against it, arguing, among other things,
that the union, despite its name, was not representative of the entire group
of Nike communities, and was thus not entitled to hold a “general return.”74
The meeting did not hold, and in spring 2000, the matter was still in court.
This incident shows how the amadi/ohu divide in Nike has pervaded the
most modern form of local political and social self-organization that Igbo
society has produced, and which, by its own standards, should help the town
“to get up.”75 In this sense, the divide continued to be a factor impeding Nike
development.76
Conclusion: Postslavery in perspective
This study has traced the development of relationships between amadi
and ohu communities in Nike, Enugu East LGA. A review of interpretations and reinterpretations of the precolonial slavery past shows that, even
though the broad lines of the emergence of the slavery system in Nike are
clear, conflicting historical narratives make it virtually impossible today
to establish detailed “factual” historical evidence. Ohu communities prefer
certain versions because they carry a higher emancipatory potential, but
they are not necessarily wrong in a factual sense. The broad lines of the
amadi/ohu relationship in Nike has changed in significant ways over the
twentieth century. Ohu forced labor for amadi was replaced by wage labor
and a tenant farmer system, and thus direct economic exploitation of ohu
disappeared. Over decades ohu communities were able to secure full rights
of land ownership that became practically undisputed by amadi. Since the
colonial period, urbanization has affected parts of Nike in very unequal
ways. Ironically, Iji, the community within Nike that was the core of the
precolonial slave-trading network, seems to have received the most advantages from the urbanization process since the 1960s.
The repercussions of the slavery past continue to affect Nike society
and politics. The memory of former slave/master relationships is preserved
in certain everyday practices, cultural symbols, and institutions, some of
which are currently contested by the ohu. The amadi/ohu divide also forms
a persistent undercurrent in local politics. In the Nike context, it has made
the typical modern forms of development-oriented sociopolitical organization employed in other Igbo communities rather ineffective. Political
conditions in Nike are strongly defined by the dominance of Iji and the
Nnaji family. Using the mechanisms of administrative restructuring provided by the Nigerian federal political system, ohu communities have over
309
time tried to achieve a measure of autonomy from Iji and amadi domination, but with limited success.
I have introduced the term “the postslavery condition” to describe the
various social, political, and cultural repercussions of precolonial slavery
relationships that still resonate in contemporary African society. In Nike
the postslavery condition is characterized by the absence of manifest
exploitative relationships between former masters and their former slaves.
Both sides are economically independent of each other, have equitable
rights to land, and their economic interests rarely conflict directly. The
most obvious economic inequalities among Nike communities do not
result from the slavery past but from differentials created by the Enugu
urbanization process. These differentials have supported amadi political
hegemony in Iji, and political maneuvers by ohu villages to gain the status
of separate autonomous communities may still be regarded as moves of
resistance and emancipation long after slavery has been legally abolished.
Nike amadi and ohu communities have been territorially separate for a
long time, resulting in a limited degree of everyday interaction and conflict.
Nike has been a comparatively peaceful place. The situation is very different
in neighboring Nkanu East LGA, where a series of violent clashes between
ohu and amadi erupted in the 1990s. As a result of these events, Umuode
ohu became refugees in Nike (Akpuoga), hoping to get land there, but by
2002 the problem remained unsolved.77 The postslavery condition in Nike
and neighboring Nkanu is different from that in central and southern Igboland, where the clear-cut division between amadi and ohu does not exist.
There, as Don Ohadike has shown, precolonial commercial entrepreneurs,
who had relied heavily on slave labor, lost their position and were replaced
by new types of entrepreneurs during the colonial period, a marked contrast
to the elite continuity observed in Nike.78 Even within a limited and supposedly ethnically homogenous area such as Igboland, experiences of the end of
slavery and of the postslavery condition have differed widely.79
The experience of postslavery outside of Igboland is even more diverse.
In some African societies with elaborate precolonial state structures, slaves
freed themselves and ran away soon after colonial occupation, sometimes
even against the policies of colonial governments, which wanted to stablize
the labor supply and agricultural production.80 Thus, in some cases, slaves
simply “disappeared” as an identifiable social group. In other places, as
Ann O’Hear has showed for Ilorin in northern Yorubaland, former slaves
were transformed into a local peasant underclass.81 Their political behavior
(electoral patterns and protests) can be linked to their status as descendants
of slaves. In general, the massive economic transformations African societies underwent during the colonial and postcolonial periods have made the
310
most manifest forms of continuing exploitation of former slaves or their
descendants unviable.82 This is even true in the case of Mauritania where
slavery has existed until recently.83 But even if we assume that economic
exploitation of descendants of slaves has ended in general, their social stigmatization has not, at least in those cases where slave descendants continue
to exist as an identifiable group.
Indeed, descendants of slaves may find themselves in the dilemma
that faces any group of freed or manumitted slaves. Basically, two strategic alternatives are available to them. They can try to escape discrimination
and become “normal” by making the rest of the world forget their former
status; however, they can only do this by adapting to the rules and values of
their former masters, which can often place them in subordinate positions
to their former masters. Alternatively, former slaves and their descendants
may organize themselves separately, thus gaining collective strength and
challenging their former masters. This option, however, implies that they
will remain clearly identifiable with continuing public awareness of their
former status. Such emergent group identities aid the redefinition of status,
accompanied by rewriting history, as has apparently happened in the case of
some Nike ohu communities, or a separate communal, ethnic, or religious
identity is established.84 The only way out of this dilemma is the exit option,
usually available only for individuals or small groups: out-migration, going
to a different town, or to a foreign country. A successful individual may draw
many advantages from this strategy of disappearance, but the price (the
loss of roots and connections) may be high. The elements of the postslavery problem identified in this essay—the continuing social stigmatization
of slave descendants, a certain degree of socioeconomic disadvantage, the
attempts at symbolic and political emancipation, and autonomy —may serve
as a typology for the further analysis of case studies to be done elsewhere.
Notes
1.
2.
This study is a revised section of a chapter from my book, Constructions of
Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State in the Twentieth Century
(Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006).
In recent years, trafficking of human beings, usually children or young men
and women, along the West African coast have attracted increasing attention. They are sometimes described as a modern form of slave trade. (For
more information cf. http://www.antislavery.org). These cases are extreme
forms of apprenticeship or temporary migrant labor arrangements, and they
comprise sometimes involuntary and extremely harsh conditions of labor.
However, in contrast to precolonial slavery discussed in this essay, no concept
311
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
of ownership of a person (unrestricted in time, including the right of resale)
is involved here. See also, Urs Peter Ruf, Ending Slavery. Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 1999).
Ibrahim K. Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and
Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827–1930 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1996).
Jude O. Nnamani, The Legend of a Volitional Confederation (Enugu: Snaap
Press, 1999): 38–40, 113–115; and Comrade Ibani, Nike—Yesterday and
Today (A Fulcrum of Nike History) (Enugu: Ibanit Communications and Personal Services, 1997): 49–59. In precolonial days, Nike fought a number of
wars with neighboring towns (village groups), such as Okpatu, Ngwo, and
Ekpurfu. At the same time, Nike formed an umu ugwunye (alliance) with
Affa and Egede to whom no blood relationship is claimed.
W. R. G. Horton,“The Ohu System of Slavery in a Northern Ibo Village
Group,” Africa 24 (1954): 311–336.
Interview with Sunday Ani, Atama (chief priest) Anike, 15 February 2000.
For an overview of Igbo slavery, see Victor Uchendu, “Slaves and Slavery in
Igboland, Nigeria,” in Slavery in Africa. Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press 1977): 121–132. The category “ohu” denotes slaves who were
bought, or acquired by warfare, and had been the property of individuals and
families. Today, the term “ohu” also refers to descendants of such slaves as
individuals or entire communities, but is is used with reservation, and many
speakers prefer not to use it at all. To avoid using the term with its insulting connotations, many speak of “strangers” or “secondary settlers.” In some
areas, this terminology may also denote groups with lesser claims to being the
“original sons of the soil,” but in the case of Nike, it obfuscates the slavery past.
The category “ohu” has to be distinguished from that of osu (cult slaves), that is,
individuals who had been dedicated (or had dedicated themselves) to a deity
and shrine. Thus, they belonged to the deity. They were not anybody’s property
and they could not be bought or sold or even injured. Thus, osu were “free” as
regards human society; but at the same time they were also outcasts, could
not intermarry, and were subject to many taboos. Osu status was (and still is)
transmitted to the offspring. It is sometimes described as a “caste;” it could
(and probably still can) be acquired, but it was (and still is) virtually impossible
to leave it. While the osu concept is a common phenomenon in central and
southern Igboland, it does not exist in Nike.
This system of grouping of Nike communities seems to have developed since
the 1970s, for Horton does not mention it in his study, “The Ohu System,”
nor does David Grossman in “The Roots of the Practice of Migratory Tenant
Farming in Eastern Nigeria,” Journal of Developing Areas 6 (1972): 163–184.
The term “amadi village” implies that the majority of villagers is considered
to be amadi, but a few ohu may reside there are as well. Nike ohu villages,
however, do not seem to have a sizable population of amadi, although they
312
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
may include strangers from outside of Nike who have been absorbed over
time.
The status of Emene as part of Mbulu-Ujodo is disputed. Its population consists only partly of ohu while other sections of the population are “strangers,”
that is later migrants who prefer not to be associated with the Mbulu-Ujodo
ohu.
Horton,“The Ohu System,” 313. Nneke-Uno has a special status within the
Mbulu-Iyiukwu group, insofar as this ohu community had no historical connection to the Anike Nwauwa shrine, but practiced the Odo cult common
among the adjacent communities further in the north. According to Horton,
the Nneke-Uno people originally were slaves of Nneke, later taken over by
Ibagwa-Nike.
This figure was supplied by the National Population Commission (Nigeria),
and it excludes the urbanized areas in Ogui and probably parts of Iji. A
further breakdown of figures for the constituent villages of Nike was unavailable.
Horton, “The Ohu System,” 325. Horton’s data seem to exclude Emene.
Ibid.
Grossman,“Roots of the Practice of Migratory Tenant Farming,” 163–184.
Jude O. Nnamani, Nike Chieftaincy 1919–1985 (Enugu: Government Press,
c.1986); and Legend of a Volitional Confederation.
Anayo Enechukwu, History of Nkanu (Enugu: Kaufhof Publisher, 1993):
94–102.
Ibani, Nike—Yesterday and Today.
Denis Aniji Ugwueze, A Short History of Nike (Enugu: Snaap Press, 1999).
Axel Harneit-Sievers,“Igbo Local Histories: Constructing Community in
Southeastern Nigeria,” in A Place in the World. New Local Historiographies
from Africa and South Asia edited by Axel Harneit-Sievers (Leiden: Brill,
2002): 31–63.
Reuben Chidobi, A Legend of Our Time. The Biography of His Royal Highness
Igwe Edward A. Nnaji (Enugu: Jemezie, 1996): 17–42. This biography also
includes an account of Nike history and traditions.
What I call the “mainstream” version has been most elaborately described,
especially with regard to the slavery issue, by Horton in “The Ohu System”
(313). This version was corroborated by amadi and ohu sources. The main
line is confirmed (or, at least, not negated) by virtually all other published
histories which differ, however, in some details that are important in the
context of this essay. Horton’s main informant in the early 1950s was Chief
Isaac Mbah of Ibagwa whom I also interviewed for this study. Isaac Mbah
presents a consistent version of Nike history.
Ibid., 311–312.
313
24. Grossman, “Roots of the Practice of Migratory Tenant Farming, 175. A few
ohu villages were founded after 1930. Similar processes took place (and continue to do so) in other areas of Nkanu.
25. Cf. Carolyn Brown, “Testing the Boundaries of Marginality: TwentiethCentury Slavery and Emancipation Struggles in Nkanu, Northern Igboland,
1920–29,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 51–80.
26. Cf. H. Waddington, Intelligence Report, Ishiagu, 1931, AFDIST 20.1.21,
National Archives of Nigeria, Enugu [hereafter NAE]. Joseph Chukwuemeka Chukwu recalls a similar story of military outpost formation in the
case of Obinagu and some other hamlets in Ishiagu. I am grateful to him
for drawing my attention to this case. See his study, “Some Aspects of the
Economic Activities in Ishiagu up to 1960,” B.A. honors essay, Department
of History, University of Nigeria (Nsukka), 1984.
27. Nnamani, Legend of a Volitional Confederation, 34.
28. For a detailed analysis, see Axel Harneit-Sievers, “Igbo ‘Traditional Rulers’.
Chieftaincy and the State in Southeastern Nigeria,” Afrika Spectrum 33 (1998):
57–79. The title of traditional ruler is officially recognized in Igboland by the
state government. Current legislation defining roles and rules of appointment
of traditional rulers has evolved since the late 1970s. Traditional rulers head
autonomous communities. They are regarded as guardians of local custom and
tradition, and as arbiters in cases of local conflict. At the same time, they form
an interface between the local community and the government, and in this
function have gained increasing political relevance under the military regimes
of the 1980s and 1990s. The term traditional ruler is employed here purely in
the legal and institutional sense. In reality, most Igbo traditional rulers are not
“traditional” because few Igbo communities had kings in precolonial days, and
further because there is little continuity even from the warrant chiefs of the
early colonial period. Moreover, they do not “rule” in a formal sense, since the
law does not give them executive functions in local government administration. Still, they can be powerful, as the Nike case shows.
29. Interview with Igwe Linus Ekete, Ugwogo, Enugu East LGA, 5 January
1999. See also his unpublished manuscript about Ugwogo history,“The
Legend of Yester-Years. The History of Ugwogo,” typescript, January 1999.
Horton does not mention any such version for Ugwogo in his 1954 study
and in a discussion I had with him in January 2000 in Port Harcourt, he was
surprised to hear about it. He conceded that he may have under-represented
ohu versions of history in his study half a century ago. Grossman mentions
a reference made in a local district court file of 1963 according to which
Ugwogo people were said to come from Uburu, which was a major slave
market; see “Roots of the Practice of Migratory Tenant Farming,” 174 n.37
30. Interview with Chief E. S. N. Edeoga, Agbogazi, Nike, Enugu East LGA,
18 January 1999. For Agbogazi, see Horton, “The Ohu System,” 314–315.
31. See Nnamani, Legend of a Volitional Confederation, 34–38; confirmed by Gab
Chiene, interview, Mbulu-Ujodo, 17 January 2000.
314
32. Colonial intelligence reports of the 1930s provide hardly any information
on this issue that could be used in order to cross-check today’s versions of
history, besides stating that at that time numerous contradicting accounts
already existed. See for example, H. J. S. Clark, Intelligence Report on the
North Nkanu Villages of Enugu Division, ONPROF 8.1.3569 OP 343,
NAE.
33. Horton, “The Ohu System,” 327–328.
34. I have no data about school attendance during the colonial period; thus, this
statement and much of the following is largely based on informants’ perceptions, as expressed in the interviews conducted for this study.
35. P.E.H. Hair, “A Study on Enugu,” unpublished typescript, NAE library,
1954: 136 n.1; and Brown,“Testing the Boundaries of Marginality.”
36. Hair, “Study on Enugu,” 135–136.
37. Uchendu, “Slaves and Slavery in Igboland.”
38. Cf. Audrey C. Smock, Ibo Politics. The Role of Ethnic Unions in Eastern Nigeria
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
39. Cf. Conf C 4/45, AFDIST 6.6.5; and OW 301/1922, RIVPROF 8.10.244,
NAE.
41. Grossman, “Roots of the Practice of Migratory Tenant Farming,” 168–69,
176–179. He concluded from this figure the number of tenants (including their families) to be about as high as the entire Nike population, which
appears to be exaggerated because tenants would probably not have lived
there with their families.
43. Interview with Isaac Mbah, Ibagwa, 12 February 2000. When Mbah, born
about 1916, became sick from yaws at the age of five, he was sent to Ugwogo
for over a year. The practice seems to have died off when inoculation against
yaws became widespread some years later.
44. Nnamani, Nike Chieftaincy, 31–36.
45. According to Isaac Mbah, interview, Ibagwa, 5 January 1999.
46. Grossman, “Roots of the Practice of Migratory Tenant Farming,” 175–176.
47. Horton, “The Ohu System,” 325–26, 333–34. Horton also noted that the
area of land available per inhabitant in ohu villages was somewhat lower than
in amadi villages, but did not give this matter much importance because the
overall amount of land available to be shared still much exceeded the area
that an individual could farm.
48. Ibid., 333–334. Horton recommended that government should encourage
the outright purchase of the land for a lump sum by the ohu communities.
Such purchase, however, never took place.
49. Grossman, “Roots of the Practice of Migratory Tenant Farming,” 170, 178.
50. Interview with Isaac Mbah, Ibagwa, 5 January 1999.
315
51. According to Hair’s study of Enukgu, Nike ceded land to the crown in the
1920s. For an area on which the house of the lieutenant-governor was to
be built, the government offered to pay £230, but the village group council
refused payment and gave the land for free, allegedly because it would have
been against custom to exchange land against money: “the crops on the
whole of the Nike land would ever after fail” (56). Whether this was more
than a convenient argument for the colonial administration cannot be said
with confidence.
52. Ibid., 53–61. See also Prince of Peace Volunteers, “Enugu Township. A
Social Survey. Discovering the Meaning of Servanthood in an African City,”
typescript (1966): 33–34, located in NAE library.
53. Interviews with Igwe Tony Ojukwu, Ogui, 25 January 1999 and 19 January
2000.
54. Interviews with Charles Ifenze, Iji-Umuenwene, 24 December 1998; and
Denis A. Ugwueze, Iji-Umuchigbo, 17 February 2000.
55. Interview with Matthew A. Offiah, a retired civil servant at the Ministry of
Lands and Surveys, Enugu, 9 February 2000.
56. Isaac Mbah, interview, Ibagwa, 5 January 1999. According to Mbah, Ugwogo
men have in the past petitioned for the right to marry Ibagwa women, and
have even brought this issue to the traditional ruler, but without any definitive success.
57. Ibid.
58. Nneke-Uno, for example, performs the odo masquerade, which points to the
community’s links to the Udi and Nsukka areas.
59. Nnamani, Legend of a Volitional Confederation, 107–112.
60. Interviews with Igwe Linus Ekete, Ugwogo, 17 December 1998 and 5
January 1999; and A. E. Afigbo,“Igbo Cultural Sub-Areas: Their Rise and
Development,” in A. E. Afigbo, ed., Groundwork of Igbo History (Lagos: Vista
Books, 1992): 154. Ozo titles are widespread in northern and northwestern
Igboland, and Afigbo uses the term for any type of traditional title acquired
on merit by paying considerable sums of money to the community and other
holders of the same time (in contrast to the model of the secret society, most
prominently Okonko). Ugwogo ozo title holders wear the rope around the
ankle, as is usual in other communities with ozo titles, although not in the
rest of Nike. For an early and somewhat paradigmatic description of ozo
titles, see G. T. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria, an Account of the Curious
& Interesting Habits, Customs, & Beliefs of a Little Known African People by
One Who Has for Many Years Lived Amongst Them on Close & Intimate Terms
(Onitsha: University Publishing Co., 1982 [1921]): 257, 261–264.
61. Interview with Igwe E. S. N. Edeoga, Agbogazi, 18 January 1999; cf. Ibani,
Nike—Yesterday and Today, 62.
62. Earlier schemes to establish power-generating plants in various Nike villages have failed due to corruption and inefficiency in the local government
administration.
316
63. Dons Eze, Sam Mbah, and Okey Ezea, The Wawa Struggle. A History of Factional Dissension in Igboland (Enugu: Delta, 1999).
64. The following analysis excludes Ogui, which has had a political and administrative history separate from the rest of Nike since the colonial period.
65. See Chidobi, Legend of Our Time.
66. Ibid., 53; and interview with Isaac Mbah, Ibagwa, 5 January 1999. Nnaji’s
prominence seems to have developed after the early 1950s. Horton does not
mention him in his study.
67. Harneit-Sievers,“Igbo ‘Traditional Rulers.’”
68. This account of Nike politics, and of opinions about Igwe Edward Nnaji is
based on extensive interviews with politicians and observers from all sides of
Nike. I wish to express my gratitude to Fortunatus Okworka, cultural officer
at the Enugu State Ministry of Culture and Information, who has since
late 1998 made contacts, asked questions, provided interpretations, and has
helped me to get an understanding of Nike affairs.
69. The main contestant of Iji domination continues to be Ibagwa, still regarding
itself as the more “senior” village in Nike. Challenges to Julius Nnaji’s bid to
the Igwe-ship came mostly from Ibagwa.
70. The literature on Nigeria’s federal system is extensive, and includes Paul
A. Beckett, and Crawford Young (eds.), Dilemmas of Democracy in Nigeria
(Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997); Toyin Falola,“The
End of Slavery among the Yoruba,” in Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa,
edited by Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein, 232–249 (London: Frank
Cass, 1999); and Tom Forrest, Politics and Economic Development in Nigeria
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995). For the issue of revenue allocation and its
fiscal effects, see Akanmu Adebayo, Embattled Federalism. History of Revenue
Allocation in Nigeria 1946–1990 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993); and for a
study containing recent data, see Gini A. Mbanefoh and Festus O. Egwikhide, “Revenue Allocation in Nigeria: Derivation Principle Revisited,” in
Federalism and Politics Restructuring in Nigeria, edited by ‘Kunle Amuwo,
Adigun Agbaje, Rotimi Suberu, and Georges Hérault, 213–231 (Ibadan:
Spectrum/Institut Francais de Recherche en Afrique, 1998). The principle
of equality in revenue sharing among the units is most marked on the local
government level. This has led to a large number of new LGAs being created
by state governments (without authorization by the federal government)
since 1999. Of course, the mechanism described here amounts to a zero-sum
game, since the overall amount of revenue to be shared remains the same.
Even within this limit, however, it is attractive for individual units to split up.
71. Sentimental reasons—the wish not to see “his kingdom” being dissolved—
seem to have played a role.
72. Ugwogo first lobbied for “autonomous community” status together with the
other Mbulu-Iyiukwu communities, but later went alone, possibly as a result
of struggles for supremacy within the group of villages. Ugwogo’s recognition apparently depended on the fact that the then military governor of
317
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
Enugu State had, as a schoolboy, been taught by a teacher from Ugwogo who
approached him on this matter while in office.
Interviews with Julius Nnaji, Iji, 16 December 1998; and Linus Ekete,
Ugwogo, 17 December 1998.
Interview with Gab Chiene, Mbulu-Ujodo, 17 January 2000. Other issues
also played a role in the court injunction, among them obviously the fear that
the meeting might be used as a platform against Julius Nnaji’s bid for the
position of the traditional ruler.
Victor Uchendu, The Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria (New York: Holt Rinehart
& Winston, 1965), 34.
According to a widely held opinion, economically successful citizens of ohu
communities do not reinvest in their home communities in the same way
as is common in other areas of Igboland. This may be an additional factor
contributing to Nike underdevelopment in general, and to the underdevelopment of local sociopolitical self-organization (in the form of the town
union) in particular. I have not been able to check, however, whether this
behavior conforms to a general pattern.
Cf. “Slavery in Igboland”, Newswatch, 10 January 2000, 23–26; and “Moves
to Stop Slavery in Igboland”, Newswatch, 7 February 2000, 16–17. The
Newswatch articles erroneously speak of osu rather than ohu.
Don Ohadike, “‘When the Slaves Left, the Owners Wept’: Entrepreneurs
and Emancipation among the Igbo People,” in Slavery and Colonial Rule in
Africa, edited by Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999): 189–207.
G. Ugo Nwokeji,“The Slave Emancipation Problematic: Igbo Society and
the Colonial Equation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998):
318–355.
Suzanne Miers and Martin A. Klein,“Introduction.” in Slavery and Colonial
Rule in Africa, edited by Miers and Klein (London and Portland, OR: Frank
Cass 1999): 1–15.
Ann O’Hear, Power Relations in Nigeria. Ilorin Slaves and their Their Successors (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997).
Toyin Falola,“The End of Slavery among the Yoruba,” in Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa, edited by Miers and Klein (London and Portland, OR:
Frank Cass, 1999): 232–249.
Ruf, Ending Slavery. Hierarchy, Dependency and Gender in Central Mauritania.
For a study of slave descendants in certain possession cults in Sudan, see G.
P. Makris,“Slavery, Possession and History: The Construction of the Self
among Slave Descendants in the Sudan,” Africa 66 (1996): 159–182.
318
• 19 •
The Stigmatization of
Descendants of Slaves in
Igboland
Paul Obi-Ani
T
his chapter locates the beginning of the stigmatization of slave
descendents in southeastern Nigeria to their assertion of freedom
when British invaders crushed their masters in a ruthless war of conquest
in the early twentieth century and imposed colonial rule. British conquest
of the Igbo hinterland was protracted as the British met stiff opposition
from every village group. Each community had to be subdued separately,
even after the British overran Arochukwu in 1901–1902. The British
believed that the Arochukwu held the key to Igbo resistance, but despite
their victory, progress in subjugating the entire Igbo people was slow.
The conquest was marked by great loss of life, the sacking of many
villages, and general impoverishment through the destruction of crops and
markets. The sociopolitical organization of the Igbo was torn apart and
foreign institutions like warrant chiefs, native courts, and native treasuries
were imposed on the people. Masters and servants had to comply with
forced labor requirements in railway construction and the coal mine industry at Enugu. The Igbo ruling elite was shocked and humiliated by this
social upheaval. Their attempt to retain authority within their community
was rejected by their former slaves who openly defied them. In their new
workplaces and in interaction with missionaries in Enugu and beyond,
they became familiar with idea of emancipation and liberty. Once they
realized that their masters no longer possessed the instruments of coercion
and oppression, they seized the opportunity for freedom and vengeance. In
the ensuing battle for supremacy, law and order suffered, the seed of social
antagonism was sown, and the polarization of Igbo society between amadi
(freeborn) and ohu (slaves) intensified.
In southern Nigeria the abolition of domestic slavery was sudden,
autocratic, and somewhat vague. There was no consultation with the slave
owners on the modalities of abolition, whether compensation would be
paid, and the status of liberated slaves in their communities was not clear.
The colonial masters did little to educate the people on the gains of the liberation of their slaves or their reintegration into the larger society. Rather
than solving the problem of slavery in Igboland, the British compounded
it, setting two classes of people at war out of ignorance. In the ensuing
conflict, the British acted as umpires of questionable morals. While they
insisted that freedom must be extended to the domestic slaves, they denied
the fruits of freedom to the freeborn.
A good case study of the unfolding scenario is the Nkanu Igbo group
of villages, which straddles Enugu township to the south and is traversed
by the eastern railway line. The Nkanu people were among the last Igbo
groups conquered by the British. Like their neighbors, the former political
class was frustrated in its effort to rebuild the shattered society because the
ohu refused to render traditional slave services to their former masters. The
1916 decree abolishing the status of slavery in southern Nigeria further
reinforced their new position.1 At first the Nkanu elite believed this was a
temporary setback and expected the usual obedience from their slaves, but
soon they realized they no longer had this authority.
The former Nkanu slaves found a leader and spokesman in Avu
Nwede Ani of Ihuokpara, who became the warrant chief of the town.
He mobilized people of slave ancestry from Ihuokpara, Oruku, and other
Nkanu communities not to take orders from the freeborn and admonished them to hold firmly to their newfound freedom. The freeborn in
Nkanu and Oruku in particular were distraught by this development, for it
meant the loss of their investment in slavery. At Oruku the people moved
quickly to counter its implementation by raising a large sum of money to
try to restore the status quo ante. Warrant Chief Nnamene Ani Nwogbu
was mandated to use the money to lobby the paramount chief of Nkanu,
Chukwuani Nwangwu of Ozalla, to pressure the colonial authority to
rescind or shelve implementation of abolition in Nkanu. On his way to
the paramount chief of Nkanu, the warrant chief of Oruku, was accompanied by his headman Ede Nwangene, a former slave who absconded to
320
The Stigmatization of Descendants of Slaves in Igboland
Ihuokpara where he alerted Chief Avu Nwede Ani of the plot to truncate
the abolition of slavery in Nkanu. Ani quickly went to Udi to inform the
district officer about political developments in Oruku. The district officer
hastened to Oruku and sternly rebuked the town leaders, compelling the
amadi and ohu to embrace each other publicly as a mark of peaceful coexistence; however, their truce proved to be temporary. Soon the ex-slaves
defied their former masters and united in common cause against them.2
In precolonial Nkanu, the ohu were obliged to work for their masters
for at least two of the four Igbo week days in return for the privilege of a
plot of land to use for farming. After the establishment of colonial rule in
Enugu, many male ex-slaves were recruited as laborers in the railway and
colliery camps. Their masters expected to receive the wages of their exslaves in accordance with customary practices; however by the 1920s the
ex-slaves had begun to refuse to comply with this traditional obligation to
their amadi overlords. Carolyn A. Brown describes the general insurrection
of 1922–1923 in which ex-slaves asserted their right to personal liberty:
At the core of the revolt were three issues: the integrity of the
slave family, freedom from the abduction and sacrifice of their
women and children; their unconditional rights to land without
labor obligations to the freeborn; and their freedom to dispose
of their own labor-power and the products of their labor without
having to work for the freeborn or give them a portion of their
crops and crafts.3
After efforts failed to compel the ohu to render the traditional services,
the amadi took steps to evict them from their compounds and withdraw
the use of land given them. The ex-slaves, faced with the prospect of being
turned into vagrants, resisted their ejection orders. In the process, both sides
used excessive force, including murder, confiscation of property, and child
abduction.4 Mayhem and turmoil followed, threatening to disrupt social
cohesion. Between 1921 and 1923 Nkanu witnessed the total breakdown
of law and order. The course of action taken by the freeborn to recover
their land rights seemed legitimate, for the ex-slaves had refused to fulfill
the terms of their tenancy agreement. The amadi realized that the loss of
ohu labor not only threatened their livelihood but also their sociopolitical
status. The amadi felt betrayed by the ohu who had taken advantage of
their difficulties.
Many factors account for the ex-slave revolt in Nkanu in 1921–1923.
First, the highhandedness of the warrant chiefs aroused popular disaffection and disenchantment among the villagers in general and the ohu in
particular. The ohu refused to obey orders emanating from an amadi, even
321
if he exercised legitimate authority as a warrant chief. Second, in the colliery camps the ohu had picked up ideas from their fellow workers and the
missionaries that they were entitled to absolute freedom with all property
rights.5 It was this mistaken belief concerning the extent of their property
rights that emboldened them to renounce all lawful obligations to their
hereditary overlords and led to extremely unruly behavior.
Ex-warrant Chief Ede Anyi Chikili of Nara lamented the “intolerable insolence,” impudence, and violent behavior of ex-slaves toward their
former masters. Another issue that exacerbated the ohu revolt was their
attempted usurpation of traditional prerogatives exclusively reserved for
the freeborn, including killing horses in funeral rites, title-taking ceremonies, and dancing to the prestigious Igede music. According to Brown, in
precolonial Nkanu:
Slaves had to give masters the first and largest portion of any
animal sacrifice. Even if they could afford to pay the membership fees they could not join the highest ranks of title societies to
which most influential men in the village belonged. They could
not dance the prestigious Ubo dance, or beat the Egede (Igede)
drum at funerals. For all slaves, and particularly for those who
acquired wealth from trade or wage labor, these prohibitions
were especially intolerable because they prevented them from
being validated as men of wealth within their community. These
restrictions were slavery.6
The attempt by the ohu to gain full privileges and rights in Nkanu communities further estranged them from the amadi, who believed themselves
to be the custodians of local culture and traditions.
Ohu resistance continued even after the colonial administration
devised an arrangement whereby the ohu paid a redemption fee of twelveshillings to their former masters, which entitled them to a share of the
land that they had previously cultivated. The ohu still refused to cooperate
despite the fact that the British administrators did not accept their position. Lord Frederick Lugard observed in Political Memoranda that “though
a slave has the right to assert freedom, he has no right to refuse work while
continuing to live at his master’s expense.”7 His memorandum on slavery
made it clear that an ex-slave could be punished if he persisted in refusing
to render service equivalent to the benefits he enjoyed. It was against this
backdrop that the crisis escalated.
On 16 February 1923 a military patrol began operations in Nkanu to
quell the revolt. In the southern provinces, Lieutenant-Governor Colonel
Harry Claude Moorhouse instructed the patrol to restore law and order, to
322
arrest those wanted for various offences, and to restore the authority of the
native courts in the Nkanu area. The patrol occupied the area for six months
and thoroughly devastated Nkanu, burning many homes and forcibly requisitioning food. Many people were killed. In an attempt to establish fair
representation of all interest groups in various Nkanu communities, the
political officer in charge of the military patrol, Captain A. G. J. Owen,
compounded issues in Akpugo when he appointed seven ohu chiefs to
the nine-member native court; only two members were amadi. The amadi
deprecated Owen’s action. Led by Chief Chukwuani of Ozalla, the Nkanu
chiefs drafted a petition in which they stressed that at no point in the existence of Nkanu had a slave presided over the affairs of the freeborn. On 23
December 1924 Moorhouse appeased the anger of the freeborn when he
directed that the chiefs should sit at the native court on the basis of three
amadi chiefs to one ohu chief. Even then, the amadi still considered it a
gratuitous insult for ohu to be rubbing shoulders with them.8
Despite the pacification of the military patrol, the cold war existing
between amadi and ohu in Nkanu continued unabated. There were sporadic riots and violent confrontations between the two groups in several
communities. At Uma (Amechi) Awkunanaw a riot broke out in 1924
between the two groups. Again in 1927 further disturbances erupted in
the community prompting police intervention. After these bloody feuds,
it became clear that the amadi and ohu were irreconcilable and that peace
could only reign in the community if the two groups lived apart. In January
1928 the Uma (Amechi) Awkunanaw people allocated land at Ugwuaji as
a separate abode for the ex-slaves from their town.9
In 1936 the defiance campaign of ex-slaves reached a crisis point in
Akegbe Ugwu when the ohu refused to pay taxes to amadi tax collectors. In
the ensuing confrontation, the amadi ransacked ohu houses and abducted
six of their children. Later four of the six alleged kidnapped ohu children
were released unharmed. It is possible that the ohu exaggerated their losses
in the conflict so that the colonial authority, which sympathized with them
as underdogs, would take drastic action against the amadi. Several amadi of
Akegbe Ugwu were subsequently arrested and arraigned before the assistant judge of the Supreme Court at Enugu. Nine were found guilty and
received stiff sentences of seven years imprisonment with hard labor.10
This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. In 1937 the
amadi of Akegbe Ugwu resolved to get rid of the ex-slaves in their midst
and volunteered a large expanse of farmland known as Agu Akegbe (now
Akwuke) for ohu resettlement. Another ex-slave colony was established
at Isiogbor Nara the following year. Thus the cumulative effects of social
discord and ohu antagonism led to their being permanently branded as
323
“untouchables” by their former masters. In their pursuit of freedom the
ohu developed a mentality in which they construed every move made by
the amadi as detrimental to their newfound liberty. The amadi in turn
viewed the ohu as the dregs of society and were determined to contain
their confrontational attitude and brashness. This prejudice has continued
to the present day.
It is unfortunate that the major impediment to the integration of slave
descendants in Nkanu derives from their own actions. According to Igwe
Jeremiah Onovoh, the political pursuit of ex-slave descendants has kept the
flame of “their social disabilities burning for the selfish gain of a minority
among them.” The ohu elite believe strongly that they can get meaty political appointments by highlighting or remembering past deprivations.11
They founded the Nkanu Odenigbo Welfare Association (NOWA) as a
pressure group to gain political leverage over the freeborn. NOWA has
since established international branches through which it seeks external
funding to consolidate group interests and promote development at home.
To counter NOWA activities, the freeborn formed the Association of
Nkanu Indigenes (ANI), which has not been nearly as effective in developing group identity or political campaigns. In the opinion of Igwe Onovoh,
the monster of social segregation and communal conflict would decline
if the government enacted legislation disbanding organizations based on
social stratification. The current situation has deepened social cleavages
because the descendants of ex-slaves are in a position to discriminate
against freeborn. Meanwhile, the ohu have exacerbated the situation by
victimizing the freeborn majority and forming political alliances beyond
Enugu State rather than support freeborn Nkanu aspirants to win state
political office.
Another area of contention is chieftaincy. In most Igbo communities,
the position of traditional ruler is not hereditary. It is often bestowed on
the wealthiest man in a community, although wealth is not necessarily
the main benchmark for becoming a traditional ruler. Other considerations include family background, commitment to communal activities,
a principled character, and an equitable nature. Generally people of slave
ancestry are excluded as candidates for chieftaincy positions. Although the
descendants of slaves are a minority in most communities in Nkanu and
other parts of Igboland, they constitute a vocal minority. There have been
cases where they have set up a pretender to the community stool, which
might not even be vacant. There is, however, growing opinion that traditional chieftaincy institutions should be rotated between amadi and ohu
descendants as a means of assuaging the frustrations felt by the descendants of ex-slaves.
324
The inability of ex-slave descendants to ascend to the community stool
has given rise to their demands for separate autonomous communities.
But separatism stigmatizes the entire community and creates greater social
isolation. For example, ex-slave descendants in the Umuode quarter of the
Oruku community in Nkanu have been agitating to create an autonomous
community in which they can select an absentee “traditional ruler.”12
Some ex-slaves descendants have been expelled from the Oruku community after outbreaks of violence and are now refugees at Akpuoga-Nike.
What is needed is a strategy to end social stigmatization and isolation
and promote integration. The Umuode people should ask the people of
Akwuke, Ugwuaji, and Isiogbor Nara—ex-slave enclaves created by the
British—whether such autonomy has been a blessing or a curse. So far steps taken to abolish or erase the stigma of slave descent have
been superficial, half-hearted, and hypocritical. There has not been any
mass education on the principles of the rights of man as espoused by the
French Revolution of 1789. Moreover, our failure to treat one another as
equals has caused us unnecessary strife and diverted our energy from economic development. People who cry against marginalization by different
ethnic groups in Nigeria should not treat their own brothers and sisters as
second-class citizens. Those who have suffered stigmatization in the past
must learn to forgive and not carry vengeance too far. An orchestrated
publicity campaign directed toward achieving these aims would promote
social equality.13
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Alphonsus Ogbonnia Njoku, “The British Conquest and Colonisation of Udi
Division, 1908–1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nigeria (Nsukka),
1996.
Ibid., 165–168.
Carolyn A. Brown, “Testing the Boundaries of Marginality. Twentieth
Century Slavery and Emancipation Struggle in Nkanu, 1920–29,” Journal of
African History 37 (1996): 52.
Ibid.; and Njoku, “British Conquest,” 173.
Njoku, “British Conquest,” 175–176.
Brown, “Testing the Boundaries,” 60.
Lord Frederick Lugard, Political Memoranda, Revision of Instructions to
Political Officers on Subjects Chiefly Political and Administrative, 1913–1918
(London: Frank Cass, 1970; reprint of 3rd ed., London, 1919).
Njoku, “British Conquest,” 187–188, 205.
Ibid., 375.
325
10. Ibid., 379.
11. Interview with Igwe Jeremiah Onovoh (traditional ruler of Akegbe Ugwu),
Umuokwu, Akegbe Ugwu, 17 June 2000.
12. Tobs Agbaegbu, “Moves to Stop Slavery in Igboland,” Newswatch Online, 12
February 2000, 17.
13. Igwebyuje Romeo Okeke, The ‘Osu’ Concept in Igbo Land: A Study of the Types
of Slavery in Igbo-speaking Areas of Nigeria (Enugu, Access Publishers, 1986):
112.
326
• 20 •
“Those Ibos! Jus’ Upped and
Walked Away”: The Story of
the Slaves at Ibo Landing as
Transcendent Ritual
Abena P. A. Busia
T
his study considers the remarkable accuracy of African American cultural memory. For me, the verifiable accuracy of African American
cultural memory can be confirmed, sometimes almost casually, by listening
to colleagues in a manner that often is quite exhilarating. In teaching the
works I am about to discuss, I have never concerned myself with their
origins as “historical fact.” I went to the Enugu conference to speak about
African American cultural memory as it has been preserved for us in the
form of the contemporary novel. Whether or not those memories had their
origins in any verifiable historical moment was certainly of less importance
than the existence and deployment of those “memories”. In our discussions
U. D. Anyanwu stressed that there are always two issues at stake: the action
of history and the narration of history.1 Here I am primarily concerned
with the question of narration, so it was to me significant that what struck
me on opening day was the potential chronological accuracy of the action
of history memorialized in the story I was there to discuss.
This chapter concerns a story, familiar to African Americans, of slaves
at “Ibo Landing” who immediately on disembarking on Tatem Island off
the shores of South Carolina at a place known today after their action. The
story recounts that they took one look at the place, turned around, and
walked on water back to Africa. This story has been preserved through
several generations, with one version written down in its entirety as a
complete tale-within-a-tale in Paule Marshall’s novel Praise Song for the
Widow, published in 1983, and subsequently retold in a central moment
of Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust, a decade later.2
There are many places in the Georgia Sea Islands named Ibo Landing,
though the most pervasive claim for the primary location seems to be on
St. Simmons Island. It appears that this story does indeed memorialize an
event, which some have traced back to 1822, when a boatload of Africans,
immediately on disembarking, turned around and walked on the water,
headed back for Africa (see Michael Gomez’s chapter for more about such
collective and individual suicides). It was the combination of historically
verifiable factors embedded in this story that struck me while listening to
the historians on the opening day.
Novels of folk memory
African American folk memory is replete with tales about Africans
who outwitted the stringencies of a history of slavery. The majority of these
tales come down to us in two forms, tales of Africans who could fly and
the story of the Ibos who could walk on water. Before I speak of Paule
Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, the novel that contains the story that is
my main concern, I would like first to speak of two other novels that form
part of a vast array of works by African American writers that form the
context in which Marshal’s novel belongs and makes meaning. In African
American literature there is a vast body of literature that makes reference to African-born or “salt water” Africans whose mores and customs
survive, and more particularly, represent an alternate means of existence,
an alternate epistemology, to that provided by the dominant ideologies of
Western Europe that shaped the making of the New World. Such novels
include David Bradley’s The Channeysville Incident,3 and perhaps the most
internationally well-known of them all, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.4
In these novels, and the oral traditions on which they are based, the most
salient gift these Africans have is that they could either fly or walk on
water, representing the intrinsic worth of their cultural origins.
Song of Solomon is the story of a young man growing up in the Chicago
of the 1950s and 1960s, who does not really know his worth, or more significantly, the worth of his people. He is called Milkman Dead, and the
work traces his journey from the north, back south, reversing the journey of
328
“Those Ibos! Jus’ Upped and Walked Away”
his father and grandfather, men in search of freedom and liberty, to bring
him back to the point of familial origins in Shalimar, Virginia. In the end
this reverse slave journey becomes a journey of reconnection, during which
he discovers the meaning of the slaves’ journey. As is part of the verifiable
historical record, he discovers that their names had been changed, their
properties stolen, and other injuries added to the initial misappropriation of
their bodies. Yet, what he truly discovers is that the most important thing
that has been misappropriated is the sense of being, and of being whole.
This sense is restored through song. In this novel Morrison has preserved intact the verses and chorus from a children’s ring game. The verse
of the song begins with the words “Jake, the only son of Solomon, whirled
about and kissed the sun.” It then goes through a litany of other names of
women who were left behind when Solomon kissed the sun. Then there
is a chorus that sounds like a nonsense rhyme, and in the ring game the
children play, it is those words they sing as one by one they disappear from
the ring. The rhyme goes like this:
Come booba yalle, come booba tambee,
Come konka yalle, come konka tambee.5
I mention this game at length because about a decade ago, I came
across a book entitled The Bantu Speaking Heritage of The United States in
which the researcher had tried to hunt down the origins of a number of
American place names, nonsense rhymes, words, and so on that might
have their roots in Bantu languages.6 Indeed she had managed to trace a
number of them back to the Congo, including, much to my amazement,
this seeming nonsense rhyme from the children’s game in Morrison’s novel.
I was completely awed to discover that what Morrison had recorded, and
her culture preserved, was not nonsense but an almost intact Ba-Kongo
proverb:
Ku mbuba yandi, ku mbumba ntambe,
Ku nkonku yandi, ku nkonku nyambe.
freely translated as:
He is tricky so I will win by being tricky, too!
He asks clever questions, so I will win by using clever questions,
too.
This proverb is absolutely chilling in the accuracy of its meaning for the
occasion presented in the tale.
329
In the folktale, and repeated in the novel, the children sing this chorus
as they chant the names of the people who could fly to indicate when
it is their turn to do so. The game has its origin in a story of slaves who
were oppressed and wanted to make their escape. They had among them
an old, African-born wise man, who kept advising them that it was not
yet the time to escape. Finally, when their suffering had increased to a
truly intolerable point, he gave them the go-ahead, and the magic words
that would enable them to fly back to Africa. Those words are the “kum
kumba yalee” of the nonsense rhyme.7 Only, as the researcher found, it is
not nonsense. Though the centuries had elided a vowel here and dropped a
consonant there, it was still perfectly recognizable two hundred or so years
later as that particular, absolutely appropriate, proverb. I am sure you can
appreciate how awesome that is, that after several hundred years, a saying
that is said under very tricky circumstances, trying to outwit and escape the
overseer, can be preserved with recognizable accuracy in such apposite circumstances. That is the point I wish to stress here, the correlation between
folk memory and historical verifiability.
Bradley’s novel, The Chaneysville Incident, does something a little different. Also a meditation on lost histories, it takes on a very specific event
that is not only memorialized in folk tradition, it is “historicized” through
documentary evidence and material culture in the form of particular graves,
arranged in a particular, peculiar formation at a particular site. Bradley’s novel,
at this point, is hard to summarize, but I shall attempt to do so. The novel
is about literal and metaphorical hunting, and that hunting is also a metaphor for historical investigation and cultural understanding. The premise of
the argument is that the official histories are inadequate for “tracking” the
history of Africans in America. To trace the history of an unrecorded people,
it is necessary to take everything into account, from social mores and material culture to environmental geography and the weather.
Bradley’s novel is structured around a hunt for meaning represented
by a search for an understanding of a particular set of graves, still extant
in a graveyard in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. What is significant about
the graves is threefold: their location, their number, and possibly their
spatial arrangement. Their location is just north of the Mason-Dixon line,
adjacent to, but not in, the cemetery of the white (former slave holding)
family, and the fact that there are thirteen graves. Legend has it that the
dozen gravestones marked the final resting place of a group of runaway
slaves who, when quarried by slave catchers, chose to die rather than be
returned to slavery. What is at issue, for David Bradley the author, for John
Washington the narrator, for us as readers, and for the African American
community at-large, is the meaning of these deaths.
330
John Washington, the central character and narrator of the story, is a
professional historian. His father had been an enigmatic figure and, among
other things, an amateur historian. On the death of Old Jack, his father’s
best friend and his own surrogate father, John returns to the place of his
childhood to resume the search, abandoned decades before, of the mystery
of his father’s death. His father had walked out of the house one day with a
shotgun, decades after he had given up the hunting that had sustained him
in his youth, and dies. Whether the death was a clumsy hunting accident,
an inexplicable suicide, or a murder made to look like suicide, had haunted
his son ever since. On this occasion, John realizes that his father too had
been a historian, as well as a hunter, and had been hunting his own father,
an abolitionist who had worked with the Underground Railroad. What
Washington discovers is the mystery of the graves.
This novel is thus important to my concerns for a number of reasons.
Apart from being a novel about history, or more accurately, competing
historiographies, its entire meaning rests upon our recognition of a very
profound competing epistemology. The important factor for this work is
the one that governs Praisesong: that the dead do not leave, but live on and
can also guide you; and that people do not die, they pass on, go home to
their village, “go home to Guinea.”
As a context for a parallel reading of Praisesong, there are four salient
factors of The Channeysville Incident we need to bear in mind: that it is
about history and more particularly, historiography; that the meaning of
the text depends upon our understanding of the meaning of the deaths of
the 12 + 1 slaves; that certain sacrifices or propitiations can only be done
by descendants; and that therefore the significance of the ending must be
seen in conjunction with the explanation of the graves. To summarize the
meaning of death in the original African communities of the fifteenth to
eighteenth centuries, or even today, would be complex. However, to outline
an epistemology in whose context we can read the works in question is
necessary and possible. For what is at issue is the enduring, continuing
living spirit of the departed. If you accept, as the slaves’ worldview suggests,
that the cessation of the body does not mean the end of existence, then this
opens up a very different interpretation for the meaning of all that voluntary dying among the slaves, especially of those deaths in collective action.
The epistemological reading that governs Channeysville suggests that
death in the manner chosen was not defeat, but defiance. The slaves in
flight chose the option of a different pathway, once the obvious visible one
in front of them was blocked. This is emphasized by the existence of the
thirteenth grave on which Moses Washington shot himself. Moses Wash-
331
ington was looking for his own grandfather, C. K. Washington, and in the
novel the historical evidence leads him to those thirteen graves:
We were halfway up the slope when she caught her foot and
stumbled. As I helped her up I saw that she had stumbled on
another marker. It was like the others, the same size and shape,
and it had nothing written on it, but it was not in the pattern at
all, it was above it, closer to the southeast corner of the Iiames
family plot, almost exactly where he would have been when he
killed himself. “Somebody marked his death,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, and went on, not wanting to tell her it wasn’t a
death that somebody had marked, it was only a grave” (381).
For Moses, and for his son John, that thirteenth grave is evidence of the
place where C. K. Washington died. For Moses on a hunting trip in search
of that man, that is where he must be to continue the journey, tracking
him through another life. His body fell there, but he did not die; somebody
gave him a grave, but it did not mark his death:
“He wasn’t looking for a grave,” I said. “He was looking for a
man. That’s what he was looking for all along: a man. He knew
when he came here that C. K. Washington was dead; if he wasn’t
he would have been a hundred years old. So he was looking for
his grave or a skeleton or whatever the same way a hunter looks
for a hoof print, or bedding grounds, or signs of feedings or
droppings—it was a spoor. And when he found it he did what
any good woodsman would do: he put himself into the mind of
the game and headed off after it.”
Now although the words and rituals that govern The Channeysville Incident
are from a very generalized Africa, and those that govern Song of Solomon
from a memory of the Bight of Benin, Praisesong for the Widow is very
specifically memorializing the Bight of Biafra. Yet what governs their
meaning is the same idea of the continuity of life, and what governs their
existence, is the way in which they give new form to the texts of an enduring collective spirit.
Ibo Landing, Tatem, South Carolina
Let us consider the story of the slaves at what is now called Ibo
Landing. The way Marshall presents the story, the narrator is the central
character of the novel, the widow Avatara Johnson, and she is recollecting
332
the circumstances under which she heard the story, every summer of her
childhood, from her Great-Aunt Cuney:
“It was here that they brought ’em. They taken ’em out of the
boats right here where we’s standing. Nobody remembers how
many of ’em it was, but they was a good few ’cording to my
gran’ who was little girl no bigger than you when it happened.
The small boats was drawed up here and the ship they had just
come from was out in the deep water. Great big ol’ ship with
sails. And the minute those Ibos was brought on shore they just
stopped, my gran’ said, and taken a look around. A good long
look. Not saying a word. Just studying the place real good. Just
taking their time and studying on it.”
“And they seen things that day you and me don’t have the
power to see. ’Cause those pure-born Africans was peoples my
gran’ said could see in more ways than one. The kind can tell you
’bout things happened long before they was born and things to
come long after they’s dead. Well, they seen everything that was
to happen ’round here that day. The slavery time and the war my
gran’ always talked about, the ’mancipation and everything after
that right on up to the hard times today. Those Ibos didn’t miss
a thing. Even seen you and me standing here talking bout ’em.
And when they got through sizing up the place real good and
seen what was to come, they turned, my gran’ said, and looked
at the white folks what brought ’em here. Took their time again
and gived them the same long hard look. Tell you the truth, I
don’t know how those white folks stood it. I know I wouldn’t
have wanted ’em looking at me that way. And when they got
through studying ’em, when they knew just from looking at ’em
how those folks was gonna do, do you know what the Ibos did?
Do you?”
“I do.” (It wasn’t meant for her to answer but she always did
anyway.) “Want me to finish telling you bout ’em? I know the
story good as you.” (Which was true. Back home after only
her first summer in Tatem she had recounted the whole thing
almost word for word to her three brothers, complete with the
old woman’s inflections and gestures.)
“They just turned,” my gran’ said, “all of ’em”—she would have
ignored the interruption as usual; wouldn’t even have heard it
over the voice that possessed her—“and walked on back down
to the edge of the river here. Every las’ man, woman and chile.
And they wasn’t taking they time no more. They had seen what
they had seen and those Ibos was stepping! And they didn’t
bother getting back into the small boats drawed up here—boats
take too much time. They just kept walking right on out over
333
the river. Now you wouldna thought they’d of got very far seeing
as it was water they was walking on. Besides they had all that
iron on ’em. Iron on they ankles and they wrists and fastened
’round they necks like a dog collar. ’Nuff iron to sink an army.
And chains hooking up the iron. But chains didn’t stop those
Ibos none. Neither iron.” The way my gran’ tol’ it (other folks
in Tatem said it wasn’t so and that she was crazy but she never
paid ’em no mind) ’cording to her they just kept on walking like
the water was solid ground. Left the white folks standin’ back
here with their mouth hung open and they taken off down the
river on foot. Stepping. And when they got to where the ship
was they didn’t so much as give it a look. Just walked on past
it. Didn’t want nothing to do with that ol’ ship. They feets was
gonna take ’em wherever they was going that day. And they
was singing by then, so my gran’ said. When they realized there
wasn’t nothing between them and home but some water and
that wasn’t giving ’em no trouble they got so tickled they started
in to singing. You cold hear ’em clear across Tatem ’cording to
her. They sounded like they was having such a good time my
’gran declared she just picked herself up and took of after ’em. In
her mind, her body she always usta say might be in Tatem but
her mind was long gone with the Ibos (32–40).
Although I have considered the meaning of the tale, I had never
thought to really place the event of the tale in terms of an historical event
in chronological time. I had assumed there must have been an originary
event, but was more interested in my literature courses for the metaphorical issues, and the significance of memory it represents, rather than finding
other sources for its verification. After the opening session of the conference, however, I went through an exercise. The story is set in the early
1980s when a young widow in her sixties is recalling hearing the story
from her father’s great-aunt about this miraculous event witnessed by that
aunt’s grandmother. We know from the internal evidence of the story that
the woman who witnessed the event was around seven years old when it
happened. If we count back the generations of the story, allowing either
twenty or thirty years for each generation we get very interesting results,
different, but both in their different ways, relevant. In the first instance,
allowing thirty years, we get the possibility of a woman born around in
1795, who witnessed this event sometime around 1807, who would have
been in her sixties at the time of emancipation, old enough to share those
stories with a granddaughter too young to have her own memory of the
civil war. We also know that they are off-loading African-born slaves on
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Tatem Island, just across from Beaufort on the South Carolina Tidewater,
which would place the event before the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
As Richardson and Lovejoy (see their chapter in this volume) have
indicated, this period would indeed have been the high point of Igbo
shipments from the Bight of Biafra, with possible links of some of those
ships to the Carolina Tidewater. What struck me was that in the story the
Africans are specifically remembered as Ibos, in that time and at that place.
It made me want to run out and research the possibility of factual history
as the event basis to this story, find the ship, and locate other evidence. So
far the only thing we have for sure is a specific port of disembarkation, but
I am now determined to search that database to see if there is anything
further that would lead me to more details about the story; however, this
method of dating is at best very creative. I am for a start, starting from a
work of fiction, which though it records the story faithfully, throws some
doubt on the number of intervening generations.
Nonetheless, if Cuney is the father’s aunt and not his great-aunt, or
if we use twenty rather than thirty years to figure the generations, we still
arrive at a woman born in approximately 1815, placing the event a decade
and a half later, in the 1820s. This would mean that the Africans would
not have come directly from the Bight of Biafra, but a way-station in the
Caribbean, or that they were being illegally imported as late as the 1820s,
which is not beyond the bounds of possibility, but would make the official
records less reliable or helpful. In this chapter what is at issue for me are
not the facts of the event, but the meaning of its narration and the reason
for its memorial as narration. The results of my limited fact hunt have been
fascinating so far. I do not believe, in the end, it is necessary to be able
to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that this is a story that happened in
such and such a place at such and such a time. Nonetheless, that the story
brings Igbos to this particular place, during this general time period, is
fascinating. Yet, although the dates and incidents are convincing enough
and certainly plausible, what matters more for me is the fact that this story
is claimed by so many people in so many places around these locales. It is
the communal meaning of the story, therefore, that is of significance.
There are several things about that tale I would like to highlight. I am
specifically concerned about the way the event is remembered, the meaning
of the perpetuation of the memory, not so much the existence of the facts,
but what you do with the meaning of their existence. In the first place,
there is the question of ritual. In the lead-up to the telling of this tale,
Marshall makes it clear that the whole process of the telling of the story is
a form of ritual acculturation. In work I have previously done on this novel,
I make the case that all things—the ritual of dress, the selection of the
335
same path past the same people and objects every week, and the repetition
of the same words—acts as mnemonic devices, a little like the training of a
griot.8 The essential point in the memory of this event is almost sacred, and
comes to stand as a metaphor for cultural survival in a hostile New World.
Further, at the heart of many of these memories is an act of collective “death”: traditionally eighteen graves in the story of the Ibo Landing
slaves, and thirteen in the Bedford cemetery. It is not a solitary, isolated act
of despair but a collective, public act of defiance. This is made most clear
by Great-Aunt Cuney’s response to the child’s question, “but how come
they didn’t drown?” In the reference to Jesus walking on the water, though
skeptics may resist the literal import, there is no gainsaying the metaphorical meaning of faith and transcendence. There can be no question that
slaves died in their thousands and millions, some involuntarily during the
Middle Passage, some by their own hands after arrival on the shores of the
New World: In the words of Old Jack, the storyteller in The Channeysville
Incident:
Some say they give up. Some say they quit. White folks say
it mostly, though I’ve heard some colored say it too. Bunch a
sorry niggers, they say, too scared to fight, too scared to run, too
scared to face slav’ry, too scared even to kill their own selves;
couldn’t even get away that way, lessen a white man done it for
’em. An’ maybe that’s the truth of it, though it seems to me you
don’t want to be judgin’ folks too quick, or too hard. Maybe you
can do it if you’re white, but it strikes me a colored man oughta
understand what it coulda been like, white folks all round you,
an’ no place to turn. But judgin’ don’t matter when you get to
the bottom of it, on accounta don’t nobody know what happened down there in the South County, or when, or even ’xactly
where. I doubt the killin’ part of it myself. On accounta they
ain’t dead. They’re still here. Still runnin’ from them dogs an’
whatnot. I know, on accounta I heard ’em. I ain’t never heard
’em that often—maybe five, six times in ma whole life. Funny
times. I never heard ’em anytime when there wasn’t snow on
the ground, for instance. An’ I ain’t never heard ’em when I was
listenin’ for ’em special. Now I think on it, I only ever heard ’em
when I was on the trail a somethin’ else, an’ I’d be listenin’ for
whatever I was after, jest settin’ there lettin’ the sound come to
me, ’an then I’d hear ’em. Wouldn’t be no big noise. Wouldn’t be
nothin’ like them sounds them dumb-butted white folks, don’t
know a ghost from a bed sheet, is all the time tellin’ you ghosts
make. On accounta they ain’t ghosts; they ain’t dead. They’re
336
jest runnin’ along. An’ the sound you hear is the sound of ’em
pantin’.9
As Njoku reminds us in his chapter, the truth in oral history does not always
lie in the accuracy of its factual accounts (see chapter in this volume). The
question is one of the meaning of those gestures, the meaning of all that
so-called dying. What do all these stories collectively mean? Why have
they been preserved for us? Why are they deemed so valuable that they are
repeated, overtly and covertly, in contemporary form from novels to films?
All three novels I have mentioned, and many other works like them,
are concerned both with cultural memory, and with the transcendent efficacy of cultural memory. In the end it matters not so much whether Guitar
and Milkman live or die at the end of Song of Solomon, what matters more
is that they learned what Solomon knew, “if you surrender to the air, you
could ride it.” These works are concerned with “a way to keep their memories alive,” but not simply for the sake of remembering. More important
is what those stories validate; not only resistance, though this is vital, but
more vitally the validation of another way to be, and to be human still.
There are many forms of resistance and revolt. What the story of the slaves
at Ibo Landing suggests is a refusal to accept an epistemology that accepts
control of the body as an acknowledgment of authority, including control
of the spirit. What is claimed is not an act of despair, but an act of collective self-assertion. This act is only meaningful, however, if you accept the
larger context the slaves are claiming: that the world is a continuum of the
living, the ancestors, and the yet to be born; that those ancestors can guide
us, and in extremis, claim us; that what happens to the body does not limit
what happens to the spirit; and that the collective spirit is eternally strong.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
U. D. Anyanwu, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Demographic Configuration of South-Eastern Nigeria,” paper presented at the conference, “Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and
the African Diaspora,” Nike Lake, Enugu, 10–14 July 2000.
Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (New York, Plume Books, 1983);
and Julie Dash (director), Daughters of the Dust, 1991.
David Bradley, The Channeysville Incident (New York, Harper & Row, 1990).
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973).
Citations from Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Plume Books,
1987): 264, 303.
337
6.
7.
8.
9.
Winifred Kellersberger Vass, The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States
(Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, UCLA, 1979): 71.
Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (New York:
Alfred Knopf, 1985): 166–173.
Abena P. A. Busia, “What Is Your Nation? Reconnecting Africa and Her
Diaspora through Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow,” in Changing
Our Own Words, edited by Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1989): 196–211.
Bradley, Channeysville, 63.
338
• Notes on Contributors •
ADIELE AFIGBO (1937-2009) was a pioneer in the study of Nigerian
history, and particularly the history of the Igbo peoples. His many publications emphasized pre-colonial and colonial history. He published The
Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria 1891-1929 (London:
Longman, 1972), Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture (Ibadan:
University Press 1981); The Igbo and Their Neighbours: Inter-group Relations
In Southeastern Nigeria to 1953 (Ibadan: University Press, 1987); Groundwork of Igbo History (Lagos: Vista Books Limited, 1992); Image of the
Igbo (Lagos: Vista Books, 1992); and The Abolition of the Slave Trade in
Southeastern Nigeria 1885-1950 (Rochester NY: University of Rochester
Press, 2006).
CHRISTINE AYORINDE is the author of Afro-Cuban Religiosity,
Revolution, and National Identity (2004). Her publications also include;
“Santería in Cuba: tradition and transformation,” in The Yoruba Diaspora
in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola & Matt Childs (2005); and “AfroCuban culture: within or outside of the nation?” in Contesting Freedom:
Control and Resistance in the Century after Emancipation in the Caribbean,
ed. Gad Heuman & David Trotman (2005). She has also translated Salvador Bueno’s collection, Cuban Legends (2007). She received her PhD from
the Centre of West African Studies at the University of Birmingham.
ELI BENTOR is Associate Professor of art history at Appalachian State
University. He has studied the art, culture, and history of the Aro people
of southeastern Nigeria for the last twenty years. His Ph.D. dissertation,
“Aro Ikeji Festival: Toward a Historical Interpretation of a Masquerade
Festival” (Indiana University, 1995) is being revised for publication.
CAROLYN A. BROWN is Associate Professor of history and former
Director of the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University. Her book,
“We Were All Slaves”: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu
Government Colliery (2003), explores rural protest in southeastern Nigeria
in the confrontation with the legacies of slavery in Nigerian society . She is
a Senior Editor of International Labor and Working Class History.
ABENA P.A. BUSIA is Associate Professor in the Departments of English
and Women’s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers University. She lectures and
publishes extensively on Black Literature and curriculum transformation
for race and gender. Her edited works include Theorizing Black Feminisms
with Stanlie James, and Beyond Survival: African Literature & the Search for
New Life, with Kofi Anyidoho and Anne Adams. She also co-directs, with
Tuzyline Jita Allan, and Florence Howe of the Feminist Press, “Women
Writing Africa,” a multi-volume project of cultural reconstruction. Her
poems have been anthologized on three continents and her Testimonies of
Exile (1990) published by Africa World Press.
VINCENT CARRETTA is Professor and former Chair of the Department of English, University of Maryland. His publications include Equiano,
the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005) and scholarly editions of
Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and other writings (2003), Phillis
Wheatley, Complete Writings (2001), Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts
and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings (1999), Letters of
the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (1998), Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century
(2004), and, with Ty M. Reese, The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the
First African Anglican Missionary.
ICHIE P.A. EZIKEOJIAKU is Lecturer, Faculty of Humanities, Imo
State University and author of “Classification of Igbo ‘orature’,” Nigeria
Magazine (1985) and “Poetry in ‘afa’.” Nigeria Magazine (1987).
MICHAEL GOMEZ, Professor, and formerly Chair, Department of
History, New York University. Founding Director of the Association for
the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), his recent publications include Black Crescent: African Muslims in the Americas (2005),
Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (2005), Diasporic Africa:
A Reader (2006). Currently he is President of the International Scientific
Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, Secteur du Culture.
340
AXEL HARNEIT-SIEVERS is a historian of Africa who has worked
at various universities and research institutions in Germany, among them
the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin (1993-2001). From
2002-06, he was based in Lagos, as director of the Nigeria Office of the
Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF), a political foundation affiliated to the
Green Party in Germany. Since 2007, he heads HBF’s Regional Office
for East Africa and the Horn of Africa in Nairobi, Kenya. He has published Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian State
in the Twentieth Century (2005), and with Dirk Spilker, has edited Somalia:
Current Conflicts and New Chances for State Building (2008).
FEMI J. KOLAPO is Associate Professor of African History at the
University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He was previously on the staff
of the History Department of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. In addition to articles in journals and chapters in books on the history
of Africa, slavery, the slave trade, and abolition, he is co-editor with C.
J. Korieh of The Aftermath of Slavery: Transitions and Transformations in
Southeastern Nigeria.(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007) and, with
Kwabena Akurang Parry, African Agency and European Colonialism: Latitudes of Negotiation and Containment (University Press of America, 2007).
His Teaching with Accents: Challenges of Expatriate and Immigrant Scholarship, also an edited volume, is forthcoming with Cambria Press.
PAUL E. LOVEJOY is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of
History, York University, and holds the Canada Research Chair in African
Diaspora History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Director
of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations
of African Peoples, a member of the UNESCO “Slave Route” Project, and
has previously been Research Professor, Wilberforce Institute for the study
of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), University of Hull (UK). His recent
publications include Slavery, Commerce and Production in West Africa: Slave
Society in the Sokoto Caliphate (Africa World Press, 2005) and Ecology and
Ethnography of Muslim Trade in West Africa (African World Press, 2005)
He is Editor of the Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora with
Africa World Press.
JOHN C. McCALL is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale. He has conducted research in Nigeria since
1989. He is author of Dancing Histories: Heuristic Ethnography with the
Ohafia Igbo (University of Michigan Press, 2000), and numerous articles on
341
the ethnology and history of southeastern Nigeria. Since 2000, McCall’s
work has focused on the recent florescence of popular video movie production in Nigeria. He is currently completing a book entitled: Why Nollywood
Matters: Understanding Africa’s Informal Movie Industry.
J. AKUMA-KALU NJOKU is Associate Professor in the Department of
Folk Studies and Anthropology, Western Kentucky University. He teaches
courses on Peoples and Cultures of Africa, African American Folklore and
Folklife, and Cultural Diversity in the United States and has compiled a
photographic exhibit on the slave routes of the interior of the Bight of
Biafra (http://www.wku.edu/~johnston.njoku/intro). Dr. Njoku received
his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1992.
PAUL OBI-ANI is Senior Lecturer, University of Nigeria at Nsukka and
author of Post-Civil War Social Reconstruction of Igboland: 1970-1983.
NICHOLAS OMENKA is Associate Professor of Church History in
the Department of Religious Studies, Abia State University, Uturu, and
an ordained priest in the Catholic Church of Nigeria. He has conducted
research on the role of the Catholic Church in the development of vernacular literature in Nigeria and is author of The School in the Service of
Evangelization: The Catholic Educational Impact in Eastern Nigeria (1989).
CHRISTIAN C. OPATA is Lecturer in the Department of History and
International Studies,University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His reasearch interests focus on Igbo and African studies.
DAMIAN U. OPATA is Professor in the Department of English and
Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and currently is the head
of Department. He is espcially interested in Igbo history and philosphy.
NNEKA NORA OSAKWE is Assistant Professor of English at Albany
State University, Georgia, and previously Senior Lecturer, Nnamdi Azikiwe
University, Awka. She has been a research fellow of the American Association of University Women (Clemson University) and a Study Fellow
of the British Council. Her teaching, research interests, and publications
encompass communication skills and pedagogy, ethnography (literary and
historical narratives), children’s rights, children’s literature, gender issues,
and internationalizing the curriculum.
342
DAVID RICHARDSON, BA (Hons), MA, Manchester, is Director of
the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipations
(WISE) and Professor of Economic History in the Department of History,
University of Hull. He has been formerly Ford Foundation Senior Visiting
Scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard
University (1987-8) and Post-doctoral Associate, Gilder-Lehrman Center
for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University (2004).
He serves on the editorial board of Slavery and Abolition and currently sits
on the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO “Slave Route”
Project. Among his scholarly contributions, he has been involved in generating the online slave voyage database with David Eltis and other scholars.
RENÉE SOULODRE-LA FRANCE is Associate Professor and Chair,
Department of History, King’s University College at the University of
Western Ontario. Her research focuses upon colonial Colombia and deals
specifically with the cultural practices of Africans and their descendents
and the indigenous groups and Europeans with whom they interacted
during the 17th and 18th centuries. Her current project is an examination
of religious brotherhoods founded by Africans in Nueva Granada. She has
published Relaciones ambiguas; el Tolima Grande y el imperio (Bogota: Instituto Colombiano de Antropologia y Historia, ICANH, Santafe de Bogotá,
2004), and with José C. Curto, she has edited Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005)
343
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