The Slave Ship (14 page)

Antera Duke was a leading Efik trader at Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra during the late eighteenth century. He lived at Duke Town, about twenty miles from the Calabar River estuary. Over time he prospered and became a member of the local Ekpe (Leopard) Society, which wielded enormous power in the slave trade and the broader affairs of the town. He participated in what he called “plays,” communal occasions of music, singing, and dancing. He arranged funerals, which for men of standing like himself included the ritual sacrifice of slaves, who were decapitated to accompany the master into the spirit world. He settled “bobs” and “palavers,” small disputes and big debates. He even oversaw the burial of a slave-ship captain, Edward Aspinall, “with much ceremony.” He entertained an endless procession of captains in his home, sometimes five or six at a time, drinking
mimbo
(palm wine) and feasting into the late hours of the night. Captains in turn sent their carpenters and joiners to work on his big house.
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Antera Duke listened for the roar of cannon at Seven Fathoms Point, which meant that a slave ship, or its tender, was headed upriver to trade. One “fine morning,” he noted in his diary, “wee have 9 ship in River.” He and other Efik traders “dressed as white men” and routinely went aboard the vessels, drinking tea and conducting business; taking customs and
dashee;
negotiating credit or “trust”; leaving and ransoming pawns; trading for iron bars, coppers, and gunpowder; and selling yams as provisions for the Middle Passage. He sold slaves, and sometimes he caught them himself: “wee & Tom Aqua and John Aqua be join Catch men.” On another occasion he settled an old score with a
Bakassey merchant, seizing him and two of his slaves and personally carrying them aboard a slaver, he noted proudly in his diary. At other times he bought slaves from traders of outlying regions. During the three years he kept his diary (1785-88), he noted the departure of twenty vessels he had helped to “slave.” Every last one of them was from Liverpool. They carried almost seven thousand men, women, and children to New World plantations. He recorded a typical entry on June 27, 1785: “Captin Tatum go way with 395 slaves.”
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The Bight of Biafra stretched along a coastline of mangrove swamp from the Benin River through and across the Niger River delta to the Cross River and beyond in the west. Because of merchants like Antera Duke, it was a major source of slaves and indeed one of the most important to British and American traders by the end of the eighteenth century. The region, consisting of what is, by today’s map, eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon, had no major territorial states. The traffic in slaves was handled by three large, competitive, sometimes warring city-states, which were themselves made up of “canoe houses”: New Calabar (also called Elem Kalabari), Bonny, and Duke’s own Old Calabar. The first two were “monarchies” of sorts, the last more a republic, in which founding Efik families used the Ekpe Society to integrate strangers and slaves into a system of extended fictive kinship and commercial labor. (“Fathers” like Duke incorporated “sons” and “daughters.”) Leaders of the canoe houses grew rich and powerful by dealing with European traders. In so doing they were perhaps more affected by European ways, especially in dress and culture, than were people in any other area of West Africa. Traders like Duke boarded the slave ships dressed in gold-laced hats, waistcoats, and breeches, speaking English and cursing up a storm, and at the end of the day returned to European-style homes.
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The main cultural groups of the Bight of Biafra were the Ibibio, dominant around the port of Andoni, and the more populous and decentralized Igbo, the latter representing a broad geographic culture from which a large majority of the enslaved originated. Other significant groups were the Igala (in the northern interior), the Ijo (along the coast to the west), and the Ogoni (around the Cross River delta). The primary form of social organization of the peoples of the region was the autonomous village. Some class differentiation was known, but local notables were usually first among equals. Slavery was not unknown, but it was mild in nature and limited. Most commoners were yam cultivators. One of the best descriptions of the Igbo way of life has been summed up in the phrase “village democracy.”

The landmass along the Bight of Biafra was densely populated on the coast and for hundreds of miles inland. The Igbo in particular had experienced intensive population growth in the seventeenth century, partly because of productive yam cultivation. Coastal and riverine peoples tended to fish. Rivers broad and deep penetrated far into the interior, which made canoes central to travel, communication, and the movement of the enslaved. The regions surrounding the Niger, Benue, and Cross rivers represented the main catchment area for captives, although some were also brought westward from the Cameroon Highlands. Most of the enslaved were taken in small raids, as large-scale wars were uncommon in the region. By the middle of the eighteenth century, much of the slaving and internal shipment was handled by a relatively new cultural group, the Aro, who used their access to European firearms and other manufactures to build a trading network that linked the canoe houses to the interior. In the course of the eighteenth century, especially after the 1730s, the traders of the Bight of Biafra exported more than a million people, mostly Igbo, 86 percent of the total in British and American vessels. Many went to Virginia between 1730 and 1770, the majority to the British West Indies.
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According to their own origin story, the Bobangi began as fishermen, branching off from other groups along the Ubangi River in the Kongo region of West-Central Africa. Over time they occupied higher ground and expanded into agriculture (plantains and especially cassava) and limited manufacturing, and from there to local and regional waterborne trade. Yet they remained primarily fishermen until the eighteenth century, when they began to trade in slaves. They sent captives southwest by canoe to Malebo Pool, a major nexus for trade to the coast, where the slave ships lay at anchor like hungry beasts with empty bellies. The Bobangi made a distinction between two types of slaves they traded: A
montamba
was a person sold by his or her kin group, usually after conviction for a crime or in some cases because of famine or economic hardship. Second and perhaps more numerous as the eighteenth century progressed was the
montange,
a person made a slave in one of three ways—by formal warfare, an informal raid, or kidnapping. As prices for slaves went up, Bobangi merchants gathered more and more captives and began to march them overland by several routes to the coast, to Loango, Boma, and Ambriz. These middleman traders rose to regional prominence and ended up supplying a substantial minority of the slaves traded out of Loango in the eighteenth century. Their language became the trading lingua franca up and down the Ubangi River and its numerous tributaries.
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West-Central Africa consisted of a vast expanse of coast with two main slaving regions, Kongo and Angola, and within them hundreds of cultural groups. It was one of the most important regions of trade as the eighteenth century wore on, and it became the single most significant in the 1790s. Slave ships called with increasing frequency along a coastline of some twelve hundred miles, beginning around the island of Fernando Po and extending southward to Benguela and Cape Negro. By today’s map the area begins in Cameroon and extends southward to include Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, a small coastal bit of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most of Angola. West-Central Africa was historically a place of Portuguese colonization and influence, both on the coast and deep inland. In the seventeenth century, the influence included a mass conversion to Christianity in the kingdom of Kongo, one of the main client states in the slave trade. British and American traders began to make inroads, with lasting success, in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The main engine of enslavement in the region was the expansion of the Lunda Empire in the interior of Angola. Most of the enslaved were
captured in wars of conquest, after formal battle and in quick-strike raids. A substantial number of slaves came as tribute the Lunda collected from the various groups and states they ruled. The Lunda deployed a highly effective administrative system and used middle-size intermediary states such as Kasanje and Matamba to facilitate the movement of their slaves to the ships on the coast. Other active parties in West-Central Africa’s far-reaching human commerce, in addition to the Bobangi, were Vili merchants, who in the seventeenth century linked the northern inland regions to the Kongo coast. Southern states such as Humbe and Ovimbundu also served as middlemen in an extensive, lucrative trade.

West-Central Africa was an area of extraordinary cultural diversity and dozens of languages, although all of them were Bantu in origin, and this would serve as a commonality for the peoples in diaspora. Political organization also spanned a broad spectrum, ranging from small autonomous villages to huge kingdoms, most important the Kongo, Loango, and Tio, and the Portuguese colonial state based in Luanda.The lifeways of the commoners who were most likely to be enslaved varied by ecological zone. Those from the coast, rivers, and swamps necessarily made their livings by water, usually fishing, while those from the forest and savanna zones tended to combine farming, usually the domain of women, and hunting, done by the men. Many communities were organized along matrilineal lines. Because of the frequency of warfare, many of the men had military experience of one kind or another. As the tentacles of the slave trade grew, many communities stratified internally, and
kumu,
“big men,” emerged to facilitate the commerce. The main ports of the region, from north to south, were Loango, Cabinda, Ambriz, Luanda, and Benguela, the last built by the Portuguese for the slave trade. Between 1700 and 1807, traders funneled a million souls through Loango and growing numbers after 1750 to Molembo and Cabinda, the Kongo estuary ports. In the eighteenth century alone, more than 2.7 million slaves were delivered. They constituted 38 percent of the century’s total, making West-Central Africa the most important region of the slave trade by a considerable margin.
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As the summaries of the six main slaving regions suggest, most people who found themselves on slave ships did so in the aftermath of war, especially during historic moments when one or another group, the Fon or the Asante, for example, was extending its political dominance over its neighbors. What one observer called the “eternal wars” among smaller groups were another major source of slaves. Like the conflict between the Gola and the Ibau, these wars had their own geopolitical logic and causes, and were not always influenced by the slave trade. Indeed, as slave-trade merchant and historian Robert Norris noted, wars had gone on in Africa long before the arrival of the Europeans, with the same causes that motivated conflict in all times and places: “Ambition, Avarice, Resentment, &c.” Advocates and opponents of the slave trade agreed that war was a major source of slaves in West Africa.
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Yet they disagreed vehemently about what constituted a war. Most advocates of the trade agreed that “war” was simply whatever African traders said it was. But they had to admit that the term covered a multitude of activities. “Depredations . . . are denominated wars!” exclaimed a Liverpool trader in 1784. John Matthews, a fierce defender of human commerce, noted that in Sierra Leone every “petty quarrel” was called a war. Sea surgeon John Atkins observed that war in West Africa was just another name for “robbery of inland, defenceless creatures.” Those opposed to the trade went even further, insisting that “wars” were nothing more than “pyratical expeditions,” and they even found a witness to prove it: British seaman Isaac Parker had participated in such marauding raids out of New Town in Old Calabar in the 1760s. Abolitionists contended that what was called “war” was for the most part simply kidnapping. Moreover, “wars” often commenced when a slave ship appeared on the coast, whereupon the local traders (with the help—and guns—of the slave-ship captain) would equip war parties (usually canoes) to head inland to wage war and gather slaves, who would then be sold to the captain who had helped to finance the expedition in the first place. Otherwise, as one African explained to a member of a slaving crew, “Suppose ship no come, massa, no takee slavee.” War was a euphemism for the organized theft of human beings.
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