Born in Blackness by Howard W. French

Author:Howard W. French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2021-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

27

THE WAGES OF RESISTANCE

TWO MORE STOPS LIE ahead for us on this excursion eastward along the coast of western Africa, as we follow the Portuguese path of discovery during their historic navigational breakthroughs in the fifteenth century, and the spreading tentacles of the Atlantic slave trade. In retracing this route, our priority has been to convey the complexity and localized variety in patterns and practices in the commerce in human beings between Europeans and Africans, before turning our attention to its devastating consequences.

Like the other places we have spoken about in detail, the Bight of Biafra also became a high-volume source of slaves, and yet with characteristics that set it apart from the Slave and Gold Coasts. Some readers will recall Biafra from the name of the secessionist war from Nigeria in the late 1960s, one of the most terrible conflicts the continent saw in that era. This region, which stretches eastward from the Niger River delta in modern Nigeria to the thick forests of Gabon, situated to the south along the continent’s long torso, would become one of the three leading sources of slaves sent across the Atlantic, accounting for roughly 1.6 million people in the three hundred years after 1550. The numbers of captives it generated would be especially high in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The Bight of Biafra merits close examination in part because it lacked a deep history of powerful state formation and of empire and yet still proved capable of generating large numbers of slaves into the Atlantic market. This was achieved in good measure as a result of warfare between a confederation known as the Aro and a proliferation of smaller groups in a politically fragmented landscape. This region delivered its initial burst of slaves to the European market in the 1640s, probably as a result of localized war, before slowing in the latter decades of that century. The trade then picked up dramatically in the 1740s as the Aro expanded throughout the ethnically Igbo hinterland, to the west and northwest. In doing so it created some of the busiest slave markets on the continent—places with surviving names like Bonny, New Calabar, and Old Calabar, all in southeast Nigeria.

The Bight of Biafra was remarkable for other reasons beyond its political makeup. Unlike the Slave Coast and the Gold Coast, at no time did Europeans attempt to establish forts or even permanent trading bases in this region. The region also supplied large numbers of captives into the trade despite the strongly negative views that European slavers unfairly held of its people, as explained below. This must be read as a reflection of the exploding demand in the Americas for bonded Africans in the eighteenth century. Finally, in a business that placed a big premium on males, this region also stood out for the unusually high ratio of female slaves it sold. As it packed off more and more women to the West Indies and Virginia, it surpassed the Gold Coast in volume and nearly approached the levels of exports of the Slave Coast.

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