Three-axis vector magnet

Deportees and Society, c. 1740–c. 1850

The rise of the Atlantic slave trade increased not only the number of captives exported to the Americas but also the number who were retained in the region. The increasing importance of slave use in African political economies during the Atlantic slave trade era had implica-tions for the trade in quite material terms: it implied a relaimplica-tionship between indigenous slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, which raises two inversely related central questions about Aro political economy.

Why did the Aro retain people when the trade in people was the basis of their wealth and power? And why did the Aro and other slave-holders sell people when their social organization was based on group expansion?

In the Angolan case, Joseph Miller has asked and persuasively answered the second question. According to him, West-Central African entrepreneurs, who calculated their advantages based on the number of dependents that remained with them and the degree of their depen-dency, became slave traders reluctantly. They released “a portion of their hard-won dependents” to Euro-American slave traders as a last resort in order to acquire the imported goods that were necessary to attract dependents, even if the foreign slave traders came across as agents of a bad spirit and harbingers of death for those they took with them (Miller 1988 :40, 105). Biafran entrepreneurs shared with their West-Central African counterparts a tendency to retain large numbers of dependents, especially from the mid-eighteenth century onward, but unlike the West-Central African entrepreneurs, they neither intended nor hoped to retain all the captives that came into their possession;

instead, the Biafran entrepreneurs – particularly professional Aro and

Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra 118

coastal traders – had by the mid-eighteenth century often come make a sharp distinction between captives they intended to keep and those they intended to sell.

Notwithstanding the existence of specialist slave traders who sought profi t in every transaction, some people were destined for the overseas market, not because of the proceeds that accrued from their sale, but for the simple reason that their natal communities wanted to get rid of them. Thus the trade complied with, not only economic and political imperatives and choices, but also social, cultural, and ideological ones.

The slave question involved the pecuniary choice between selling peo-ple for material proceeds or retaining them for labor purposes; the juridical choice of imposing enslavement or another form of punish-ment; the social and ideological choice of whom to sell and whom to retain; and the cultural choice of which group or gender to incorporate and which to sell. For better or for worse, some indigenous people had the power to make these choices and exercised it over others, leaving an imprint on the composition of the export captives. Slave traders, who were often slave owners as well, mediated these transactions. Just as Euro-American planters gave shopping lists of preferred captives to slavers’ captains, slave owners and prospective slave owners in Biafra had “mental models” of good and bad captives. Slavery’s special func-tion of group expansion makes the Aro case especially provocative.

Local Aro literature and, particularly, the traditions acknowledge that slavers had predetermined destinations for the victims. Equally impor-tant, the circumstances of a captive’s enslavement fi gured prominently in their choices of whom to retain and whom to send into Atlantic slavery.

The circumstances of enslavement have thus far fi gured little into discussions about the structure of the Atlantic slave trade, where any attempts have been made at all to analyze these circumstances. The scholarship has relied almost exclusively on export-captive samples for evidence. The sample most often cited comprises Africans whom the British Anti-Slavery Squadron rescued and resettled in Sierra Leone and who were interviewed by the German-born missionary linguist Sigmund Koelle of the CMS in the late 1840s or early 1850s. As analyzed by his-torian Paul Hair, the overwhelming majority of captives in this sample were enslaved through warfare or kidnapping ¹ . The recently released col-lection of Oldendorp’s diaries suggest that the dynamics had not changed

1 Hair ( 1965 :196–97). The sample is from Koelle (1963).

much since the second half of the eighteenth century (Oldendorp 2000).

Although scholars have relied heavily on the Kolle sample, as they will likely now also rely on the Oldendorp data, both sources actually tell us only about those captives who were exported to the Americas during the respective periods; they do not necessarily offer great insights into the general nature of slaving in Atlantic Africa. To rely on such data in assess-ing the general character of slavassess-ing in Africa is to ignore the bias inherent in them and to assume that hinterland slave users did not discriminate between the people they retained and those they sold away. It is also unclear how much can be extrapolated from the general Atlantic-African information to explain the situation in the Bight of Biafra. We must there-fore analyze these sources in conjunction with the pertinent ethnographic evidence and historical evidence from the Bight of Biafra.

The nature and scope of Aro operations permit the use of evidence from across the region to understand the means of enslavement. In outline, the slave systems of the Aro and coastal city-states were similar, and both differed from the systems found in most parts of the Biafra hinterland.

This distinction has been made clear in the Aro case, where slavery emphasized incorporation based on acculturation and accumulation. “In contrast, Igbo and Ibibio patrilineages and village heads continued to be ascriptively fi lled and were respected not because of achieved position but as the link between the villages and ancestral spirit” (K.O. Dike and Ekejiuba 1990 :209). Nonetheless, the rest of the Igbo and Ibibio groups do not seem to have become signifi cant holders of slaves until after the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century.

Two further reasons justify the emphasis on the Aro and the coastal states instead of other groups in the region. First, slavery existed among the Aro in the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade. Second, the incorpora-tive nature of these systems warranted the careful selection of household persons (domestic slaves), which impinged on the composition of cap-tives for export overseas. The preferences of indigenous slave users and the way modes of enslavement infl uenced these preferences determined the composition of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic and thus throw light on slavery in both regions. As historian Herbert Klein has noted,

“since African slavery was quite dissimilar from the American chattel plantation variety, its demands for slaves were quite distinct as well”

(H. Klein 1978 :241).

It is appropriate to begin by distinguishing between the household and market categories of captives. Understanding the meaning of the term slave in its historical context clarifi es our understanding of why people

Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra 120

wanted to keep enslaved persons in the household. In the postslavery era, this approach also seeks the original meanings of approximate African terms, which seem to have changed, at least in Igboland, from what they were in the days of slavery. Such changes in meaning are common to slavery, not only in Igboland but elsewhere. The metamorphosis of the meaning of slavery in the Western world has infl uenced present-day con-ceptions of slavery as well. In classical Latin, the word was servitus , but because slaves came to be mainly slaves from the Caucasus, the reference metamorphosed to sclavus , or “slave” in English beginning in the ninth century. It was in plantation America during the seventeenth century that the term “slave” came to refer to a person without rights. ² Because of the differences between American plantation slavery and African slavery, on the one hand, and differences between African slave systems on the other, Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers have recommended the use of local ver-nacular terms in characterizing slavery in African societies (Kopytoff and Miers 1977 ). In spite of the heuristic value of this idea, local terms might serve either to obfuscate kinship idioms designed to whitewash slavery or to convey a sense that the master class had more power over slaves than the reality would suggest. In this manner, a local term might func-tion as an ideological tool for controlling the slave populafunc-tion. The Igbo term ohu usually equated with slave, referred to inferiority or inauthentic status. It hardly referred to a person without rights. Yet, postslavery era descendants of the master class have used ohu to mean a person without rights when it has been politically advantageous to do so. How do we fi nd a term that captures a historical relationship?

Choosing a label is complicated, but it does provide an opportunity to offer a much-needed corrective in the conception of ideology of slav-ery in African studies. Anthropologist Jack Goody suggests a distinction between “the label ‘slave’ (or its local equivalent) as a statement of ori-gin and as a statement about present status. … We can best understand the problem if we think of the double meaning that occurs in our use of labels for nationality or classes; sometimes we refer to origin; sometimes to present position, though less confusion arises when we know the con-text” (Goody 1980 :16). In Aro slavery, we have not just double, but triple, meaning – acknowledgment of present reality, denial of present reality, and essentialization of past reality. The term “slave” acknowledges reality when the real slave is referred to as slave; it denies present reality when the slave is glorifi ed as kin; and essentializes past reality when one group

2 Curtin ( 1971a :81–82; 1990 :29); Davidson ( 1971 :61–62).

labels as slaves people of slave origin who are no longer slaves. Because colonial reports tended to focus on the slave – versus-free differentiation, modern scholars of slavery in Africa have tended to dismiss the contrary indications that are found in the oral traditions as strands of apologist ideology. Ironically, however, those who stress the prevalence of a more rigid regimen claim that colonial reports whitewashed slavery and uti-lized information that was collected when the institution was already in decline. This view that the ideology of slavery promotes the kinship idiom is one-sided; the ideology of slavery does more than simply give a benign veneer to a harsh system, by, for example, attempting to essentialize slav-ery where masters’ control over slaves was tenuous or where slavslav-ery had effectively ended. When early ethnographers and modern scholars talk about a “slave” owning a slave, they may actually be referring to a former slave owning a slave. A broader view of ideology allows us to transcend the mainstream ideology of slavery, which essentializes slavery with regard to people who were no longer slaves. Contrary to the prevailing tendency in African studies to see only the side of dominant ideology that expressed the kinship idiom that was used to whitewash slavery, charter groups often denied kinship and free status to previously enslaved groups, after they had earned full citizenship status, or after the charter groups had lost their ability to enforce the servile subordination of the ex-slaves. Rather than simply deemphasizing the oppressive character of slavery, colonial reports sometimes also ignored or understated “the degree of assimilation which wealth or the kinship idiom could produce” (Northrup 1981 :118–19).

The key parameters that fi gured in the consideration of who became a household or a market person throw light on indigenous slavery and its relationship with the overseas human traffi c.

Household and Market Types

A “person of the household” meant more than simply a person of the house or a house slave or domestic slave. The household was the unit of production and the locus of exchange and trade. It incorporated the nuclear family, the polygynous family, and other persons or families, who could be slaves, refugees, long-term guests, or clients. Most importantly, a person of the household did not need to live within the spatial confi nes of the household. He or she could live in separate or outlying compounds within the same community or away in noncontiguous settlements or distant diaspora communities. A rite of passage marked the conversion of an outsider – including a slave – into a person of the household. The

Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra 122

cornerstone of this ritual was an invocation for the multiplication of household members. By contrast, market persons were treated like com-modities or, otherwise, as something that must be dispensed with. In spite of his more favorable placing, a person of the household could be killed or, as more often happened, resold if he was lazy, rebellious, or committed any malfeasance, according to accounts of nineteenth-century Aro and coastal city-states (Uku 1993 :19, Waddell 1970 :318–21). Novelist Buchi Emecheta’s lucid portrayal of early-twentieth-century Igbo slavery – that the best chance for a person of the household was to be “docile and trouble-free” – also refl ected the nineteenth-century situation (Emecheta 1977 :63). A household person that satisfi ed these conditions was not sold merely because the price was right. It was in the interest of the master or mistress to treat the household person humanely. Oppressed slaves often ran to other masters, usually in rival communities, who were glad to have them. This kind of situation routinely “produced winners and losers of people” (Martina Ike 1996b ). Rather than maximizing profi ts, the sale of a household person served immediate needs – when it happened at all. As will be clarifi ed in the following pages of this chapter, the nature of these transactions warranted that buyers understood both the circumstances leading to a sale and the attributes of individual captives. These circum-stances and attributes modulated an indigenous user’s choice to retain a particular person or sell him into Atlantic slavery. Decisions about cap-tives’ fates were often a function of established criteria, principally the captives’ skills, region of origin, and means of enslavement.

Preferences 1: Skills

The incorporation of skilled outsiders was important in Aro society.

There is some evidence that the Aro began to do this during their for-mation in the early seventeenth century. Other Igbo evidence shows the continuing importance of craftsmen. Oral traditions inform us that the upper Imo River Aro settlement Arondizuogu harbored skilled dissidents from non-Aro societies and other skilled immigrants during the eigh-teenth and nineeigh-teenth centuries. ³ One of my Arondizuogu respondents, in 1996, referred to such acquisitions and showed me some apparently slave-produced archaic works of art, including a special war drum called

3 See Dike and Ekejiuba ( 1990 :58; 73), C. Iroh ( 1991 ); O. Mgbemena ( 1991 ); Okorie ( 1991 ); O. Udensi ( 1991 ); T.O. Okereke ( 1996 ); J.E. Uche ( 1996 ) for the Aro, and Equiano ( 1995 :42–43) and Uchendu ( 1977 :123) for Igboland.

Ikperikpe and some religious icons dating to about the mid-nineteenth century (Igwilo 1996a , 1996b ). Another source of information indicating the deliberate retention of skilled captives comes from the home of the nineteenth-century Arochukwu merchant-warrior Okoroji, which has been a Nigerian national monument since 1972. The custodian of this structure, Emmanuel Okoroji, a descendant of the merchant warrior and Eze-Ogo (king) of the Ujari lineage-group in Arochukwu told me in 1996 that one of the platforms in the building was used for questioning new captives about their occupation (Okoroji 1996 ). If, for instance, a cap-tive was a skilled or talented hunter, he was retained and given a gun and shown a gaming domain. The animal skulls contributed by the enslaved hunters hung from the building’s ceiling in neat symmetries, according to animal species. This fi nding parallels an account from Dahomey wherein, as in the Aro case, the direct evidence comes from the nineteenth cen-tury, but family genealogies suggest that the phenomenon of slave dealers retaining captives who were highly skilled in craft or specially talented in artistic performance goes back further – to the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade. The families concerned retained their skills and peculiar dance forms into the twentieth century (see Adandé 1997 ). Given the tendency of the African slave-owning elites to retain skilled artisans and talented artists, it is plausible that a greater proportion of these categories of cap-tives were retained than were exported, at least in the bight of Biafra and Dahomey.

Preferences 2: Regional

Region played no less a role than skills in determining the fate of a captive. Based on positive stereotypes, indigenous slave holders pre-ferred captives from certain sections of the region to others. Again, the evidence of this is clearest among the Aro. For reasons explicated in Chapter 4 , the Aro had an ongoing interest in cultivating persons from the Nri-Awka region. This means that even when every other factor that could determine the fate of a captive was taken into consider-ation, a captive from outside the Nri-Awka region was more likely to end in the market than an Nri-Awka counterpart. Aro preference for Nri-Awka people went beyond captives. In fact, the Aro, especially the diaspora in central Igboland, incorporated huge numbers of Nri-Awka people as refugees and voluntary immigrant[s], and seldom incorporated non-Nri-Awka for these purposes. This process gained momentum in the mid-eighteenth century, following the foundation of the major

Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra 124

Aro settlements in central Igboland at the southeastern edge of the Nri-Awka region.

An analysis of the regional patterns of the Aro incorporation of outsiders and the sub-ethnic composition of the captives exported to the Americas indicate that Aro preferences affected the composition of cap-tives exported from the Bight of Biafra. Such an indication emerges from a detailed study of the sub-ethnic composition of the Aro diaspora within the Bight of Biafra. The Aro preference for Nri-Awka seems to have been established early in the history of the Aro diaspora settlements of central Igboland. Of the three principal dependents of Izuogu, the founder of Arondizuogu, only one, Iheme, came from the Nri-Awka region. By con-trast, the Nri-Awka group provided the progenitors of virtually all the later lineage-groups formed from about 1770 onward – seven out of nine, or 78 percent ( Table 4.2 ). Even when incorporated groups did not origi-nate in the Nri-Awka area, they followed the tradition of acquiring peo-ple from Nri-Awka region as slaves, clients, wives, and guest immigrants.

This was also true of other Aro settlements in the vicinity of the Nri-Awka region, whether their founders were originally Aro or non-Aro. It is therefore not accurate to suggest, as has been done recently, that the Aro took care to incorporate slaves from faraway areas rather than areas in close proximity. ⁴ While it was essential to enslave deportees, such as

This was also true of other Aro settlements in the vicinity of the Nri-Awka region, whether their founders were originally Aro or non-Aro. It is therefore not accurate to suggest, as has been done recently, that the Aro took care to incorporate slaves from faraway areas rather than areas in close proximity. ⁴ While it was essential to enslave deportees, such as