Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies

Epilogue

219 Epilogue Memory as Resistance Identity and the Contested History of Slavery in Southeastern Nigeria, an Oral History Project Carolyn A. Brown The historiography of Africa has yet to capture the horror and terror that accompanied the African dimension of the slave trade. Within world history it is the narrative of those who became African American slaves that has taken pride of place and come to exemplify a universal chronicle of suffering, pain, and eventual triumph. However, the contemporary political agenda of African descendants within the Americas has led historians to shy away from tackling the complex and contradictory narrative of the circumstances under which these people were enslaved as well as the story of those enslaved Africans who did not end up in the Americas, across the Sahara, or in the Indian Ocean but remained within the continent. In other words, this haunting silence creates a void where the voices and experiences of Africans on the continent should be articulated. Historians are confronted with a number of evidential problems that make it especially dif¤cult to complete the narrative of the trade with the voices of these communities who remained. Nonetheless, the narrative of the trade is incomplete without the presence of these voices. This chapter describes a pilot project that is seeking to document the ways You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. 220 Epilogue that these experiences are remembered by communities in an area that was intensely involved in the slave trade.1 Secondarily, it compares these memories with archival and recent statistical studies of the trade to determine the extent to which oral history can be a useful tool for historical reconstruction. The ¤ndings are not considered to be typical of any general lived experience of slavery on the African continent but merely a partial chronicle of the experience in one speci¤c area of West Africa—the Biafran hinterland. The preliminary ¤ndings of this project give anecdotal veri¤cation of some of the gendered patterns of enslavement for the area. Only in the Bight of Biafra did the number of women enslaved reach near parity with that of men. Southeastern Nigeria and the Slave Trade The interior of the Bight of Biafra is inhabited by the Igbo people and a smaller number of other ethnolinguistic groups. It was one of the most important sources of enslaved Africans sent to the Americas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is estimated that 1.5 million Africans were exported between 1660 and 1841. Although the literature on the impact of the slave trade on Africa has grown over the last twenty years, historians are only beginning to grasp the objective and subjective impact on African societies of the seizure, sale, and abduction of the large numbers of men, women, and children swept into New World slavery. Given the sheer numbers of people taken from the Bight of Biafra, it is no surprise that there was scarcely a village, kin group, or family that did not lose a relative to the trade. Despite the possibilities that this region offers as a site for an in-depth study of the impact of the trade on an African community, we historians have not really begun to document the subjective “costs” of this “loss” or to capture the psychological trauma that it undoubtedly produced throughout the area.2 Between 1740 and 1807 two-thirds of all slaves came from this area. Unlike other areas of the coast, where the numbers of male slaves exported far exceeded that of women, in the Bight of Biafra they reached near parity. We found anecdotal con¤rmation of this fact in our oral history project. The conventional explanation for the lower proportion of women exported from most of the coast is that women captives were retained on the continent and therefore constituted the bulk of slaves held internally by African societies. We have not yet been able to explain this statistical variation. We do not know whether it was caused by demand or supply. We cannot yet determine You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Memory as Resistance 221 whether this disparity was caused by a...