Intercourse and Crosscurrents in the Atlantic World: Calabar-British experience, 17th-20th centuries by David Lishilinimle Imbua (review)

Calabar's history is inextricably intertwined with its geographical position at the interface of the Cross River and the Atlantic Ocean. Facing at once outward towards the oceanic space which became so important for Atlantic Africa from the sixteenth century onwards, and inland towards the river networks which were the main routes of transport at this time, Calabar's was a position of mediation between different worlds. It is for this reason that, as David Lishilinimle Imbua rightly points out in this new book, geography and history are connected subjects for Calabar; for this complex situation explains why cosmopolitan outlooks reached Calabar so precociously.

Imbua's new history of Calabar is based on a thorough reading of published primary sources and extensive oral interviews conducted in Calabar. Intercourse and Crosscurrents in the Atlantic World begins with an analysis of Efik society, and of its religious and social institutions prior to the Atlantic world, looking at the connections between Efik traders and peoples further inland along the Akpayafe, Calabar, Cross and Great Kwa rivers. Chapters follow on 'British trans-Atlantic voyagers' (where the question of the slave trade is analysed), what Imbua calls 'Humanitarian voyages' (where the rise of the missions is the main question), and 'Colony and empire', before the final chapter, 'Not one-way traffic', argues for the mutual importance of this relationship; here, Imbua adds to the growing body of work which reveals the active role of many African peoples in constructing Atlantic histories.

A lecturer at the University of Calabar, Imbua is thoroughly versed in contemporary debates relating to the city's history; yet, as this concluding chapter and the overall argument of the book show, he is also aware of the trends in global academia towards seeing the past in composite terms. By re-examining the way in which Calabar's history has been written, he argues strongly that such ideas are of great relevance here, and that from the eighteenth century at the latest such cross-fertilization of customs and ideas was in evidence in Calabar. This bridging of contemporary debates within Calabar to the current ideas in many circles about the composite way in which the Atlantic world was built, and the important role of Africans in this project, is what is most intellectually exciting about Imbua's book.

There is much to admire, too, in the balanced approach which Imbua takes to his subject. He details the ways in which British slave traders pressurized Calabari authorities to manipulate the judicial system to increase slave exports, but also emphasizes that this trade was of benefit to these authorities too. He describes with great empathy the hardships and difficulties faced by early 'humanitarian' travellers in the nineteenth century, such as the missionaries Hope Waddell and Mary Slessor, but at the same time is extremely critical of the missions' desire to create 'docile and amenable' people in Calabar, ready to comply with colonial authority, and of the failure of missionary education to provide what the Efik wanted in terms of training in technological and commercial know-how.

Such even-handedness lends authority to the central purpose of Imbua's work, which is to contribute to contemporary debates in Calabar as to the history of the region, and what some claim to be the privileged historical position of 'indigenous' Calabaris. The author is at pains to emphasize the way in which Calabar's history has in fact long involved a flexible outlook, with the assimilation of some ideas from outside the region, together with the export of Calabari practices beyond the confines of Efik society at the meeting point of the Cross River and the Atlantic. After the eighteenth century at the latest, Calabar was a site of multiple influences, as evidenced by English architectural ideas and the custom that developed among elite Calabari families of sending their sons to be educated in...