The Igbo slave trade
July 18, 2018 2:14 AM   Subscribe

My great-grandfather, the Nigerian slave trader. A New Yorker article by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani in which she reflects on her family's involvement in the African slave trade, and its ramifications today for the descendants of both the slavers and the enslaved.
posted by tavegyl (24 comments total) 41 users marked this as a favorite
 
Well that was a whole bunch of details about current and past Igbo culture which we didn't discuss while reading Chinua Achebe in college. My professor had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Igbo regions of Nigeria but perhaps didn't want to get into that stuff in an introductory course.
posted by XMLicious at 3:41 AM on July 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


I follow some prominent Black female thought leaders on Twitter, and there has been a lot of discussion about this article. I'm not qualified to speak to the Black experience, and I have only listened to the conversation, but if you have time and interest to search for the article references on twitter there are some enlightening conversations happening.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 4:58 AM on July 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


I feel qualified to speak that it must have been horrible to get buried alive because people believed you should serve your owner in the next world
posted by thelonius at 5:28 AM on July 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


great article. The book "homegoing" by yaa gyasi is a fictional account along similar lines. Fantastic read.
posted by danjo at 5:45 AM on July 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


I feel qualified to speak that it must have been horrible to get buried alive because people believed you should serve your owner in the next world

Or to have your head cut off as a show of your owner's religious alliances.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:59 AM on July 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


SecretAgentSockPuppet, if you have the time, drop some links or accounts? I’m not on Twitter because it’s like trying to drink from a firehose, and I’m looking now, but if you know of good follows offhand I’d be grateful. Because holy shit that article.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:09 AM on July 18, 2018 [9 favorites]


Here's a Twitter search for references to the article URL. I can't comment on the discussion after except to say this thread is one of the largest.

One nice thing about Metafilter is we have a great small community. If we have any folks connected with this heritage I would be grateful if you feel up to commenting.

My own history is a long way removed from this story of Nigeria, but FWIW my ancestors were slave owners. They were white people of English heritage, 1860 Texas. I know almost nothing about the one slave I'm sure of except she was 13 and healthy enough to work. I wasn't surprised to learn some of my ancestors were slavers, but I did find it really depressing and a fact I return to frequently. If you're a white American you might be able to find your own family's histories in the slave schedules from 1850 and 1860. Ancestry has a convenient copy but you have to explicitly search them, they don't show up as hints.
posted by Nelson at 7:55 AM on July 18, 2018 [19 favorites]


We learned that one set of my great-grandparents were trying to make Illinois a full slave state. (I'm not sure exactly what part of the complicated history they were activists in, but, it was not the good side.) It's an unpleasant reality to accept.
posted by thelonius at 8:01 AM on July 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


The descendants of slaves as untouchables... such a universal thing. Thanks for the Twitter link, Nelson.
posted by clawsoon at 8:21 AM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Oh my god. I think I've related here about how, when I was a freshman in high school, I went to a debate competition in a very, very, very white town in northern Wisconsin. During the lunch break, a senior white guy came up to me and said that he knew I had some black in me, and he wanted me to know that he thought black people deserved to be slaves. Because we had been too weak to fight white people off, he could never consider black people to be his equals. "How can the conqueror respect the conquered? I'd commit suicide before I'd let anyone enslave me!"

I was angry, but I was also a 4' 7" 14 year old girl; how was I going to clap back to this 6 ft. 18 year old man?

So seeing this in the tyro Twitter thread is making me see red:

Temilade

Replying to @DoubleEph
I am yet to read this but many that were sold were weaklings conquered by war.


I don't even know what to say. Obviously one side loses in a war. Of course there are those who are the captured and enslaved. I'm angry that the inability of my ancestors to defeat their captors means that today, I deserve to be considered lesser than and treated as such by large swathes of people. I'm angry that this hierarchical construct exists—and I'm afraid that it won't ever change.
posted by droplet at 9:09 AM on July 18, 2018 [30 favorites]


I'm descended from slaveholders on both sides. For unrelated genetic reasons, I was always going to be a terminally haunted and deeply guilt-prone person, so that worked out pretty well.

On the whole, my family is wonderful and loving, and if some of them have blind spots, they also have solemnity and silence. But there are some folks that will post day and night on Facebook about loving Jesus who would not stir one inch from a chair to attend a prayer service asking for forgiveness for the sins of our ancestors.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:11 AM on July 18, 2018 [11 favorites]


I always thought our people were poor folks, but it turns out that my mom's side has been here since the 1600s, and in addition to slaveholders and Confederate soldiers, my great-grandmother's parents had slaves as children. (They were born in the 1850s, Granny in 1896.) We also have an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War, then moved to western NC and married not one but four Cherokee women. No word on what happened to his first, European wife.

Between this and the rash of white women calling 911 on black people for being black in their vicinity, I'm appalled by my people, ancestors or no. I also know how much I have benefited by their sins.
posted by corvikate at 9:46 AM on July 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


That's a terrific piece, thank you for posting it.
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:28 AM on July 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Ancestry taught me the patently obvious fact that if you have one white ancestor from the south, you pretty well are going to have slaveholders in your lineage. You can see in their wills, even for the clearly dirt poor ones, where they leave their one or two slaves to their kids, along with the pots and pans and fire irons - how could so many people think that way, for so long, and so recently? Like Nelson - it was more than a little upsetting and unsettling. After DNA testing I was notified of a number of DNA matches with black people (you can put your picture on your profile) and several people have reached out to see if I know how we are connected...awkward conversation ensues...not least because the culprit is way more than likely one or several of too many white "gentlemen"/rapists to even figure it out.
posted by sophrontic at 12:36 PM on July 18, 2018 [9 favorites]


even for the clearly dirt poor ones, where they leave their one or two slaves to their kids

This claim surprises me, as pretty much all scholarship I’ve read on enslavement in the antebellum south suggests that it took considerable wealth to purchase enslaved persons. I’d appreciate any citations you could provide!
posted by mylittlepoppet at 3:04 PM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


For those who read French, here's a fascinating paper from Yaya Sy, a Senegalese anthropologist: L'esclavage chez les Soninkés : du village à Paris (Slavery among the Soninke: from the village to Paris). The Soninke society used to be highly stratified and included a large and complex strata of slaves. While slavery was formally abolished by the French colonizers in the early 1900s (see this book for details), it persisted up to the 1950s, and the remnants of the slave system accompanied the Soninke migrants who moved to France at that time. For instance, in the "foyers" (the special housings provided for groups of migrant workers), Soninke people from slave origin (komo) did the kitchen chores for the other Soninke, up to the mid-70s when a group of young komo decided they would no longer do it. Sy's paper describes in detail the complicated system that regulated the lives of the descendants of slaves (still called "slaves" even though they're no longer actual slaves), particularly in terms of marriage, burial, worship and property, both in Africa (Mali, Senegal, Mauritania) and in France. He tells of a "Romeo and Juliet" story between an "noble" girl and a "little slave" boy that escalated in a whole intercontinental "war" involving nobles and slaves, young and old, in France and Mauritania.

According to Sy, the situation was changing in the late 1990s, as Soninke villages were now dependent from the money sent back by Soninke expats... who are mostly from slave families (and that's a lot of money). In the mid-2000, at least, the consensus in the French-based Soninke diaspora was that the old ways belonged to the past, though intermarriage between people of komo descent and people from higher castes could still be tricky (see also this memoir).
posted by elgilito at 4:29 PM on July 18, 2018 [10 favorites]


mylittlepoppet for starters check out Poor White Slave ownership and My master and Miss … warn’t nothing but poor white trash’: poor white slaveholders and their slaves in the antebellum South.
posted by adamvasco at 7:19 PM on July 18, 2018 [9 favorites]


Ancestry taught me the patently obvious fact that if you have one white ancestor from the south, you pretty well are going to have slaveholders in your lineage.

Slavery was widespread enough in time and space that most people everywhere will have multiple slaveholding ancestors. Only people with ancestors exclusively from hunter gatherer societies are likely to be free of that.
posted by atrazine at 5:44 AM on July 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


It can be a little different as you get closer in time, though. I knew that some of my colonial-era ancestors had owned slaves, but I finally got through a dead end and found that my great-great-grandfather had taken part of his inheritance in slaves. I've met people who likely knew him when they were children. The connection is much stronger.
posted by tavella at 9:52 AM on July 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


Another reason for so many slaveholding ancestors - and this comes up in the article, too - is that slaveholders tended to have more children, and more food/less death for their children, and bigger inheritances for their children. If slave mothers are forced to wet-nurse the slaveholder's children instead of their own - a pretty common practise - it's literal milk out of the mouths of slave babies and into the mouths of slaveholder babies.
posted by clawsoon at 1:33 PM on July 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


I had to go back and check the CliffsNotes on Things Fall Apart. It requires some reading between the lines, but the plot point that
Because [main character] Okonkwo is a leader of his community, he is asked to care for a young boy named Ikemefuna, who is given to the village as a peace offering by neighboring Mbaino to avoid war with Umuofia
is a backhanded way of identifying Ikemefuna as an unwilling acquisition. He's a calm, admirable kid, but he's not blood-related and he's not there of his own free will. His status as a slave is pretty indirectly gleaned from the text-- we didn't discuss that particular angle in our class reading either-- but I'm going to try to shift over into my own incomplete thoughts from here anyway.

Okay.

I think that more people need to recognize that SLAVERY IS UNIVERSALLY DEHUMANIZING.

Sorry for the bold allcaps, but this article and the attendant thread have left me with the distinct feeling that very many people do NOT consider this an axiomatic truth. Maybe it's an easier and/or more natural premise for African Americans to accept? But while so many people rush to acknowledge the damage that slavery inflicts upon the enslaved (or absolutely refuse to do so, as droplet's anecdote shows*), it seems to me that many people tend to completely miss the self-damage of an enslaver's outlook, and fail to see how that damage can linger for generations.

I was struck by the main article's notable indifference toward the actual descendants of the enslaved, even as Nwaubani writes about her own family's worldwide self-concerned pray-a-thon: "And the ohu, who are not [my ancestor's] direct descendants, were not invited to the ceremony; their mistreatment in the region continues. Still, it felt important for my family to publicly denounce its role in the slave trade."

(Faith without works is dead essay-worthy, apparently. Maybe Nigerians cordon off the idea of reparations as thoroughly as Americans do.)

Her detachment from her relative's victims, in the past and the present, reminded me of the last thread about slavery I remember reading here: My Family's Slave, about an American who took his relative's ashes back to her native Philippines after she'd spent the majority of her life enslaved in the United States, and then was surprised to discover that her family was sad-- "I hadn’t expected this kind of grief. [...] I was so fascinated that I barely noticed the tears running down my own face."

Slavery warps enslavers, and it can also do so to their supposedly free, "masterful" descendants. Frederick Douglass spent multiple autobiographies harping on this, and I doubt I can make the point more effectively than he did, but just for the record the authors of these articles leave me gobsmacked at their unacknowledged sociopathy. It's right there! How can they not see it?

(In Mother Night Kurt Vonnegut introduces the concept of the "cuckoo clock in Hell"-- the idea is that most people aren't "completely crazy," but some of them have critical mental gears filed off such that, with the proper stimulus, their ability to reason... hits a bare spot. THAT'S how they don't see it. But I digress.)

Just like Things Fall Apart exposes Okonkwo's "strong man" character as degraded and false through the way he fails Ikemefuna, people's modern-day reactions to slavery and its legacy are leaving me really leery about their base assumptions. I can totally understand your feelings, Countess Elena, corvikate; I'm not trying to call you two out specifically; but for me "white guilt" is basically "not-even-wrong" territory. If you see slavery as universally debilitating, instead of a zero-sum game with winners and losers, then there's no need for anyone alive today to walk around on eggshells. We've all been equally degraded by its legacy, right? The United States specifically outlawed bills of attainder, but, possibly because of the legacy of slavery and its (mis)perception, it seems like lots of people just don't accept that as anything more than a polite fiction. And if that's the case, we're all in much more trouble than I had thought.

My point is that I think we need to actively reshape peoples' attitudes about slavery, and help them understand the full nature of its legacy. We don't need people actively thinking like George W. Bush-- that dictatorship slavery is all right as long as they're the dictators slavers. It's a really deep-seated problem, but we need to be able to face up to it-- otherwise it'll remain Martin Luther King Jr's metaphorical "boil that can never be cured."

*This whole topic is one that I generally never want to bring up around white people anyway, because it immediately falls into predicable channels much like droplet describes. Is "everyone else was doing it" really supposed to be the defense of the world's self-proclaimed bastion of freedom? That line wouldn't get me into an R-rated movie with my friends when I was an eighth grader!
Well, somewhere in Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice he writes something like "Competition is the law of the jungle while cooperation is the law of civilization." It's my go-to quote when dopes like droplet describes try to argue that enslaving others is a hallmark of higher humanity. Those people also tend to conveniently forget how deeply paranoid and fearful the system of U.S. slavery was. Even the strongest people have to sleep. (On that note, I'll stop rambling now.)
posted by tyro urge at 10:42 PM on August 16, 2018 [9 favorites]


From Gimlet Media's The Nod podcast last year:Covers the story of one woman and more broadly of her family who kept on good terms, over the generations, with the descendants of the family who held their ancestors as slaves before the Civil War.
posted by XMLicious at 8:05 AM on August 17, 2018


tyro_urge, I remember making a similar argument when people tried to legitimize torture after we were revealed to be torturing people: it’s not just what we do to them, it’s what it does to us. But in the same way that I wouldn’t tell someone my country had actually tortured that what we did to them degraded me as much as them, I don’t think you will find a well-meaning white American who would ever say this:
We've all been equally degraded by its legacy, right?
with respect to slavery in America, and I think there are really good reasons for that, not least of which is that it would, uh, not be well received. Like it’s possible that the reason you’ve never heard a white person say that is because it’s absolutely not safe (or appropriate) for a white person to say that.

I think the degradation and inhumanity of those who enslave others, or otherwise treat people like things, is vital to acknowledge. But in this country, today, I don’t know how you do that without furthering the system of inequalities and privileges that already exist.

But it is true. When your worldview allows for you to treat people like things, it bleeds into everything. It makes monsters of us, big and small.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:47 AM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Also, that should have said “emotionally safe.” I’m in the middle of a separate discussion about trauma and relationships (“does it feel safe?”) and that’s the add on extension my brain was working with.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:35 AM on August 17, 2018


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