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ABSTRACT
Between 1807 and 1843, British naval officers liberated more than thirty thousand Africans from slave vessels that embarked enslaved people along the Bight of Biafra. Large ledger books display these Liberated Africans’ names, sexes, ages, and other characteristics. The names, many of which are easily recognizable today, provide clues about individuals pulled into the transatlantic trade and reveal a range of experiences that shaped the lives of Africans in the nineteenth century. Connecting the names to ethnolinguistic homelands helps establish a rough place of origin for more than twelve thousand of the individuals. The data underscore the centrality of Igbo-speakers – the major language in the Bight of Biafra hinterland – to the region’s slave trade. Given the representative nature of the ethnolinguistic makeup of the individuals to the broader slave trade from the Bight of Biafra, we use the intended destinations of the captured vessels as a basis for projecting the size and direction of the transatlantic diaspora of Igbo-speakers. Despite their limited cultural impact on African and African-descended regions in the Americas, large numbers of captives from Igbo-speaking communities were sent to almost every plantation society in the New World in the nineteenth century.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Evsey Domar, ‘The Causes of Slavery and Serfdom: A Hypothesis’, Journal of Economic History 30, no. 1 (1970): 18–32.
2 David Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Migrations from the Old World to the New’, in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
3 Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976). Orlando Patterson’s influential work, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), also embraced this interpretation.
4 For the literature, see Jason J. McDonald, American Ethnic History: Themes and Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), esp. 49–66.
5 See www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates. For Thornton’s position, see his Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 183–92.
6 See the essays in Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (New York: Continuum, 2009); and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen Behrendt and Herbert S. Klein, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). In parallel with Thornton’s emphasis on continuity across the Atlantic, several scholars examined the agricultural practices that enslaved Africans carried with them to American plantations from their homelands, most prominently, Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), which inspired spirited discussion. See David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, ‘Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas’, American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1329–58; and the subsequent American Historical Review ‘Exchange’ in 115, no. 1 (2010): 123–71.
7 Figures calculated from https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database except for Luanda, which draws on Samuël Coghe, ‘The Problem of Freedom in a mid-Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave Society: The Liberated Africans of the Anglo-Portuguese Mixed Commission in Luanda’, Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 3 (2012): 479–500.
8 For the full speech, see www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassfraud.html.
9 Daniel Domingues da Silva et al., ‘The Diaspora of Africans Liberated from Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History 55, no. 3 (2014): 347–69. The Mixed Commission Courts are the focus of Leslie Bethell, ‘The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of African History 7, no. 1 (1966): 79–93.
10 From 2009 until 2019, the African Origins Portal was an independent website. It has more recently been folded into SlaveVoyages, accessible at https://www.slavevoyages.org/past/database, where users can view the full list of Africans liberated from slave vessels and identify the likely ethnolinguistic origins of their names. A detailed description of the process through which the names were made accessible is available in earlier publications. In brief, the complete list of names was recorded and posted online in both text and mp3 formats. After eliminating duplicates and 157 illegible or blank entries, we currently have 64,752 unique names extracted from the registers with embarkation points ranging from Senegal in the north to Mozambique in the southeast. In fact, the number of unique names is certainly much smaller than this. For example, the following unique names in the registers, Ocoronco, Ocoroncoh, Ocorongco, Ocorongcoh, Ocorongkoh, Ocoronko, Ocoronkoe, Ocoronkoh, Ocoronkor, Ocoronquo, Ocoronquoh, Ocorronkoo, Ocorronco, are all contemporary spellings of the common Igbo name ‘Okoronkwo’, shared by thirty two individuals. Over the last quarter century, contributors have linked 34,945 (or 54%) of these to a language. However, 2,009 are associated with more than two languages, and we have accordingly removed these from further analysis. For names that are shared across just two languages, we have elected to divide the identifications equally between the two. Early efforts to assess these data include G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, ‘Characteristics of Captives Leaving the Cameroons for the Americas, 1822–37’, The Journal of African History 43, no. 2 (2002): 191–210; G. Ugo Nwokeji and David Eltis, ‘The Roots of the African Diaspora: Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Names in the Liberated African Registers of Sierra Leone and Havana’, History in Africa, 29 (2002): 365–79; and Philip Misevich, ‘The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast in the Nineteenth Century’, in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 155–75. See also Richard Anderson et al., ‘Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862’, History in Africa 40, no. 1 (2013): 165–91; Daniel B. Domingues da Silva et al., ‘The Transatlantic Muslim Diaspora to Latin America in the Nineteenth Century’, Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 4 (2017): 528–45; and Domingues da Silva et al., ‘The Diaspora’.
11 See the essays and literature cited in Toyin Falola and Raphael Chijioke Njoku, eds., Igbo in the Atlantic World: African Origins and Diasporic Destinations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), and in particular Douglas B. Chambers, ‘The Igbo Diaspora in the Era of the Slave Trade’, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ‘The Clustering of Igbo in the Americas: Where, When, How, and Why’ in that volume. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Countrymarks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997) also draw attention to the Igbo diaspora to North America.
12 Aderibigbe Adeyinka Gloria, ‘Functions of Tone: An Overview of Languages in Nigeria’, available online https://www.academia.edu/2215662/Functions_of_Tone_An_Overview_of_Languages_in_Nigeria (accessed June 8, 2023).
13 As generations of historians and linguists have demonstrated, African languages are dynamic and sophisticated. Particularly in West Central Africa, scholars have made significant strides in unpacking the complex historical relationship within and between language clusters. The KongoKing project provides a compelling recent example: http://kongoking.net/index.html. In the absence of additional words, phrases, place names or other information, however, the Liberated Africans registers are most effectively assessed at the broader ethnolinguistic level.
14 David Northrup, ‘Becoming African: Identity Formation among Liberated Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone’, Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 1 (2006): 4–5. More generally, Robin Law, ‘Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: “Lucumi” and “Nago” as Ethnonyms in West Africa’, History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–19.
15 Northrup, ‘Becoming African’, 9–11, esp. Table 1, which lists the many dialects represented among Koelle’s informants. On Koelle more generally, see S.W. Koelle, Polyglotta Africana; or, A Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly Three Hundred Words and Phrases, in More than One Hundred Distinct African Languages (Graz: Verlagsanstalt, 1963), quote on pp. 7–8. For a fine recent analysis of ethnolinguistic labels in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone, see Richard Peter Anderson, Abolition in Sierra Leone: Re-Building Lives and Identities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. chs. 1 and 4. Debates about Igbo people in the Atlantic World have been particularly pronounced, fuelled by disagreements over the relationship between language, culture, and identity. David Northrup argues that Africans – at least those in Lower Guinea – spoke languages that were diverse, challenging the wider sense of unity that underpins Thornton’s assessment. In his more recent work, Thornton seems to have modified his stance. On a parallel track, Douglas Chambers passionately advocates for an increase in the prominence of Igbo people and culture in the Atlantic World. Thornton, Africa and Africans; David Northrup, ‘Igbo and Myth Igbo: Culture and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1600–1850’, Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 3 (2000): 1–20; John Thornton, ‘The Igbo and African Backgrounds of the Slave Cargo of the Henrietta Marie’, in Falola and Njoku, Igbo in the Atlantic World, 99–111. More generally, see Douglas B. Chambers, ‘The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave-Trade: A Rejoinder to Northrup’s “Myth Igbo”’, 21, no. 1 (2002): 101–20.
16 There might be exceptions. Individuals could have been given new names during periods of displacement in Africa. Others surely embraced new names strategically to more fully integrate themselves into host communities as a means of gaining insider status and protection. Yet we have found little evidence of this, even among the many Liberated Africans who provided testimony to Koelle during his research in Freetown. In his careful analysis of Koelle’s data, P.E.H. Hair indicated that more than eighty percent of the 179 former slaves with whom Koelle spoke reached Sierra Leone shortly after enslavement, which would presumably have left little time for acculturation. Of the dozens of formerly enslaved people whom the British government interviewed in the mid-nineteenth century, only one testified to having her name changed. The practice would have been more common than this suggests, but does not appear to have been widespread. P.E.H. Hair, ‘The Enslavement of Koelle’s Informants’, Journal of African History 6, no. 2 (1965): 195–6; Philip Misevich, Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s–1860s (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2019), ch. 5; Sean Kelley, ‘Enslavement in Upper Guinea during the Era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Biographical Perspectives’, African Economic History 48, no. 1 (2020): 46–73.
17 That archival fragments reveal biographical information is central to two prominent digital projects: Freedom Narratives, at York University’s Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and Its Diasporas, https://www.freedomnarratives.org/; and Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade, https://enslaved.org/.
19 While the aspirational goal is to have people who speak every relevant African language assess the names, current contributions have come from a diverse group of participants who live on both sides of the Atlantic and who have not only brought their own knowledge but also consulted with historical and modern publications that list common names associated with language communities across the Bight of Biafra interior. Many, though not all, of our contributors specialize in languages nearer to the coast. This is an obvious bias, but having said that, all contributors, regardless of their background, recognize the preponderance of Igbo names. Contributions to the site were reviewed by specialists in the area to which the name was attached to increase confidence in the identification. The process is built to be fluid given that the origins of names, like other language and cultural practices, can be contested. Many names are multilingual. Others have been connected to different language groups by different contributors. Given the scale of the data and the intense interest in the origins of enslaved people, we would be naïve not to anticipate cases of disagreement. But they have been far less common than we expected. Nevertheless, debates over the origins of African individuals, words, and cultural practices underscore the complexity of attribution and the need for flexibility. Two prominent examples include the contested background activities of Makandal, the resistance leader in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, and the long list of words, proverbs, and stories that Lorenzo Dow Turner collected among the Gullah in coastal Carolina and Georgia the middle third of the twentieth century that have been connected to various African ethnolinguistic groups. Should new evidence emerge that indicates the need to change a name’s language origin, we have the ability to update the Origins website.
20 ‘List of Non-“Chi” Igbo Names’, Nairaland Forum, http://www.nairaland.com/674756/list-non-chi-igbo-names/1 (accessed June 8, 2023).
21 Ebo Ubahakwe, Igbo Names: Their Structure and their Meanings (Ibadan: Daystar Press, 1981), quotes on pp. 1 and 99. This book was part of a series on Nigerian names that Daystar Press began publishing in the 1970s, which also included volumes on Yoruba and Ibibio.
22 G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 104–5.
23 Ife Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 2015), 47–8.
24 A recent random sampling of 965 Igbo personal names found that roughly half included ‘Chi’, ‘Chukwu’, or ‘Chuku’. Hilary I. Okagbue et al., ‘Personal Name in Igbo Culture: A Dataset on Randomly Selected Personal Names and their Statistical Analysis’, Data in Brief 15 (2017): 77.
25 M.C. Onukawa, ‘The Chi Concept in Igbo Gender Naming’, Africa 70, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 107–17.
26 Chukwuman Azuinye, ‘Igbo Names in the Nominal Role of Amelié, An Early 19th Century Slave Ship from Martinique: Reconstructions, Interpretations and Inferences’, Africana Studies Faculty Publication Series, Paper 8 (January 1990), available online https://www.academia.edu/33865186/Igbo_Names_in_the_Nominal_Roll_of_Ameli%C3%A9_An_Early_19th_Century_Slave_Ship_from_Martinique_Chukwuma_Azuonye. These are just a few compelling examples; Azuonye provides more than a hundred others.
27 In most cases, contributors made such connections by indicating the modern states within Nigeria where names from the registers are commonly found. Nigeria’s current states had little relevance to individuals living in the interior of the Bight of Biafra two centuries ago. Our focus is instead on the geographic regions that the modern states represent, rather than with the borders of the states themselves. Such an approach assumes that the use of those names has remained concentrated over time in the same area – in short, that a name used today primarily in northern Igbo-speaking territory would also have been used there historically. This assumption naturally requires a larger theoretical leap than does an attachment to broad ethnolinguistic groups or dialects.
28 The SlaveVoyages Estimates page suggests that 326,663 people were carried off from the Bight of Biafra in these years. See http://www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/eTaGykAP eTaGykAP.
30 P.E.H. Hair, ‘Ethnolinguistic Continuity on the Guinea Coast’, The Journal of African History 8, no. 2 (1967): 247–68.
31 Herbert Igboanusi, ‘Is Igbo an endangered Language?’ Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 25, no. 4 (2008): 443–52.
32 Not all Liberated Africans with, say, Igbo names would necessarily have come from core areas where Igbo was spoken, but we suspect the vast majority did.
33 On the re-enslavement of Liberated Africans, see Misevich, Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce, ch. 5.
34 The likeliest explanation is that some names are coincidentally shared by African communities separated by considerable distances.
35 Thomas Astley, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, 4 vols (London: Printed for Thomas Astley, 1745–1747), 3: 109.
36 Nicholas Radburn, Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of Britain’s Slave Trade, 1701–1807 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), ch. 1; and the many references to canoes in Stephen D. Behrendt, A.J.H. Latham, and David A. Northrup, The Diary of Antera Duke, an Eighteenth-Century African Slave Trader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For a fuller description of the Cameroon group of languages, see Nwokeji and Eltis, ‘Characteristics of Captives’, 191–210. On the Aro, see Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture.
37 David Northrup, Trade without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 61.
38 Michael Mason, ‘Population Density and “Slave Raiding”: The Case of the Middle Belt of Nigeria’, Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 551; and idem, ‘Population and Slave Raiding – a Reply’, The Journal of African History 12, no. 2 (1971): 324.
39 For estimates from the whole Bight of Biafra region, see http://www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/2HRtKs3l. These are adjusted by the ratio of actual departures from the eight ports to total departures derived from the SlaveVoyages database.
41 Efik-Ibibio is a language cluster, rather than a language. Ibibio is one of three most commonly spoken, along with Anang and Efik. Because they share many names, they are grouped together here as a single language or perhaps, more accurately, as a single cultural group.
42 Thus, for example, an Igbo group of males aged 23–40 were 0.23 in. taller than all the non-Igbo in the same age category combined, a difference nevertheless large enough to allow some implications for nutritional status.
43 http://slavevoyages.org/voyages/Wuqzb8fX. The mortality rate used in the calculations in this paper is somewhat lower – at 13.9% – because our sample includes voyages that disembarked in Sierra Leone and therefore never completed the transatlantic passage.
44 Sierra Leone is not included in this procedure because we have a record of every vessel and the people on board that arrived at Freetown from the Bight of Biafra and thus an estimate is not required. See https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/ujNjbljH.
45 Adiele E. Afigbo, ‘Prolegomena to the Study of the Culture History of the Igbo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria’, in Ibo Language and Culture, ed. F. Chidozie Ògbalu and E. Nolue Emenanjo (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1975), 28–53; Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture, 41–5; Falola and Njoku, Igbo in the Atlantic World; Douglas B. Chambers, Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005).
46 Walter C. Rucker, Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture and Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 7.
47 See most recently Anderson, Abolition in Sierra Leone, 127–66, 227–8.
48 Respectively, Oxford University Press, 1978; and University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
49 On the nutritional status of captives leaving the Bight of Biafra, for example, see David Eltis, ‘Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas: Heights of Africans, 1819–1839’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12, no. 3 (1982): 453–75.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David Eltis
David Eltis is in the Department of History, University of British Columbia, Buchanan Tower, Room 1297, 1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada, [email protected]
Philip Misevich
Philip Misevich is in the History Department, St. John’s University, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Jamaica, NY 11439, USA, [email protected]
G. Ugo Nwokeji
G. Ugo Nwokeji is in the Department of African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 660 Social Sciences Building, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA, [email protected]
Adenike Ogunkoya
Adenike Ogunkoya is an Independent Scholar, London, United Kingdom, [email protected]