African Complicity in the Slave Trades and Its Lingering Effects: Part 3
It should be noted that it is completely erroneous to say that these Igbo victims of slavery were criminals or trouble makers in the society who were sold off on account of their offences and trouble-making or that they were war captives; on the contrary, all the evidence point to kidnapping, betrayals, treachery targeting children and minors as the main source of Igbo slaves. According to Kenneth Dike and Felicia Ekejiuba,
“analysis of figures of slaves sold internally and externally during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows that children between five and eighteen account for over sixty percent of the slaves sold and would seem to confirm that there was large scale kidnapping and selling of children by parents.” And, in respect of the latter,
“parents at times sold children, some of whom they considered precocious or who were abnormal so as to be able to feed the others, buy some luxury goods or get initiated into one of the many local wealth and title societies. … Such slaves were particularly abundant during periods of famine, or the three months between cultivation and harvest of local staples.”
This is a testimony again to the depth of the corrupting influence of the slave trade that Isichei had pointed out, for such children given their age were too young to be regarded as worthless (and/or troublesome, destructive), failures (efulefu or oseaka). Further, approximately five percent of the slaves sold by the Aro slave traders who handled about seventy percent of the trade in Igbo land, were war captives; another ten percent of Aro sales came by way of the judicial pronouncements and punishments meted out by the Aro oracle (known as Chukwu or Ibini Ukpabi) in which the supposed guilty party surreptitiously “disappeared” into slavery.
All these tend to be confirmed by the accounts of some freed Igbo slaves in Freetown interviewed by Sigismund Koelle. Of the five persons he interviewed, one was sold for adultery; another one sold by his relatives, most likely for being troublesome; three were kidnapped (including a case of kidnap by a treacherous friend) and one of the kidnapped was first “stolen as a little boy” from his home in the Isuama area and sold to the Aro and then was sold to the Portuguese at Obane (Bonny) when he was about twenty four years. In these ways and with some variations in other parts of Africa, such as proclivity to unnecessary wars and slave raids, Africa supplied the slave ships of the West.
Thus, this trade apparently marks a failure in agential-reactivity on the part of the African communities concerned, which was rooted in a short radial of reasonability and hence a paucity of objective responsibility which allowed for the total othering and massive exploitation of anyone outside the umunna [micro-state] or such socio-political groupings and, even, of members of the Umunna, at times. And, it should be pointed out that herein lies the responsibility and guilt of not only the active collaborator families and communities in the trade but also, in a sense, African communities collectively for their acquiescence directly and indirectly to the trade, including especially for lending ideological support to the trade.
The perspective that the participation of the African collaborator states, organizations and persons in the slave trade is mostly a choice they made, apart from the examples and arguments above, is reinforced by the choice of the Benin (Bini) Kingdom in southern Nigeria to refrain from the Atlantic slave trade when a ruling Oba banned it around 1550 after the Kingdom had allowed it in the earlier decades; then in 1715, Benin Kingdom returned to the trade stopping again in 1735. However, though Benin refrained from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, her citizens could acquire and retain slaves apparently as much as they pleased. Benin was not against the institution of slavery as such during this period.
It has been argued that Benin withdrew from the trade when she had other means of making wealth and returned to the trade when she found it once more relatively more profitable and advantageous; this does not seem to me to be the basis of the abolition for the first time, and even less so for the second time, given how short the second period lasted; the time is too short for the definitive evaluation of economic conditions and considerations of profitability if these were to be the sole or principal determinants of the decision for or against the trade; nor would she withdraw from the trade if it gave her military advantages given the rise of powerful neighbouring kingdoms such as Oyo and Nupe.
For lack of a system of detailed documentation (in writing or otherwise), we may never be able to know for sure what made the sixteenth century Oba (King) to “make such a decision when other rulers, such as Afonso of Kongo, saw it as a source of advantage.” We may only speculate.
In this regard, Peter Ekeh has argued that “Benin had a strong institution of slavery in its culture and internal social organization. Benin’s abstinence from the evil [Atlantic slave] trade could not fairly be attributed to some humanitarian inhibition on its part”. Benin’s policy, he speculates, may have been informed by the knowledge of the disruptive and other unwholesome effects of the trade in her neighbours, notably Oyo, and also by her need to build her population being a small group that ran a big empire. Nevertheless, I think that the case of Benin might well be located in some ideological basis as the Zulu aversion to the trade is located in the “Nguni tradition”. Naiwu Osahon, a poet and writer of Benin origin, makes the case thus:
“The slave trade was very unpopular with the Edo people. They thought it was silly to sell fellow human beings. Their Obas and nobles were vehemently opposed to the business of slave trade and to the export of the productive fighting male … It was taboo in Edo culture … Alan Ryder, recording the experiences of yet another European merchant, the French trader and Captain called Landolphe, in Benin in February 1778, said, ‘the Ezomo was the richest man in Benin, owning more than 10,000 slaves, none of whom was ever sold.’ The author then commented: ‘His (the Ezomo’s) refusal to sell any of his slaves is also noteworthy for the light it sheds upon the attitude of powerful Edo chiefs towards the slave trade: however numerous they might be, a great man did not sell his slaves.’ Says Edo people: ‘vbo ghi da Oba no na mu ovionren khien?’ Meaning, ‘what need does the Oba want to satisfy by putting out his slave for sale?’”
Further, in Africa there was also some stirring of the conscience against the nefarious trade even amongst groups that had embraced it; some people saw the slave trade for the evil that it was. In Igbo land there is the already mentioned example of Obeledu; and, Isichei also points out that the stirring of the conscience led the pre-colonial Eze Nri, Ewenetem (ca. 1728-1820), to declare, “at the height of the slave trade, ‘that a slave was a human being and to kill one was an abomination’.” This of course is in keeping with the abhorrence of bloodshed in Nri theology and thought after the foundational sacrifices. While this might deter people from killing slaves in Nri communities, it would not prevent other forms of cruelty and dehumanization visited on slaves, let alone the abolition of trading in slaves and the institution of slavery itself. However, we see in this protagonist of Nri philosophy the influence of ideology for the better on human thought and choices.
This Eze Nri followed Nri ideology to the logical limits of its scope of beneficence, showing how we have a choice within the ideology we have accepted; as well as the possibility of expanding the radius of consistency and beneficence of ideologies beyond their apparent limits by innovative interpretations, reinterpretations and accretions, which increase our options and choice in a positive manner.
This axiological reading of African history means that Africans should acknowledge their role and responsibility in participating, expanding and sustaining the slave trade that devastated their continent. With such acknowledgement comes the necessity of purging Africa of its guilt in the affair and making the necessary restitution. This is important because the limitations of agential integrity in Africa due to the weaknesses and failures of agential-reactivity and African cultural firewalls (which have dogged Africa’s encounter with the West and forces of globalization) originated in the choice of ideological orientation and values many African communities made during this period.
