The Persistence of Slavery

An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria

Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781613767740
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite efforts to abolish slavery throughout Africa in the nineteenth century, the coercive labor systems that constitute "modern slavery" have continued to the present day. To understand why, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine explores child trafficking, pawning, and marriages in Nigeria's Bight of Biafra, and the ways in which British colonial authorities and Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, and Ijaw populations mobilized children's labor during the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources that include oral interviews, British and Nigerian archival materials, newspaper holdings, and missionary and anthropological accounts, Chapdelaine argues that slavery's endurance can only be understood when we fully examine "the social economy of a child"—the broader commercial, domestic, and reproductive contexts in which children are economic vehicles. The Persistence of Slavery provides an invaluable investigation into the origins of modern slavery and early efforts to combat it, locating this practice in the political, social, and economic changes that occurred as a result of British colonialism and its lingering effects, which perpetuate child trafficking in Nigeria today.

Chapter 1

Politics, Social Relations, and Trade in the Bight of Biafra

The women and children are employed in collecting palm-oil; the men, in trading to Brass and Eboe, [and] kidnapping their neighbors.

—MacGregor Laird, Scottish trader, 1832

The last century of the transatlantic slave trade saw the normalization of child trafficking as slaving, pawning, kidnapping, and the sale of children escalated. More than any other region, the Bight of Biafra drew significant numbers of children into the slave trade as its inhabitants developed many individual and group methods of seizing children and employing their labor. With no central government to regulate their actions, long-distance traders from throughout Igboland and beyond, local middlemen, women, and children developed human trafficking strategies without drawing much European attention, evading significant opposition from local authorities.1

This chapter surveys the development of British colonial rule in Nigeria and how the advent of colonialism altered local governing bodies, domestic slavery, and economic conditions. The transformation of the local economy into a colonial economy, specifically the transition from the transatlantic slave trade to commercial trade in palm oil products and other agricultural goods, unveils the way in which domestic slavery developed. Conflicting colonial policies about coerced labor, mainly in the canoe house systems (trading centers), attracted international attention, resulting in antislavery critiques about the use of child labor, especially pawns.

Analyzing the history of various forms of child slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic commercial trading systems provides an understanding of Nigerian childhoods during the colonial era and offers an anthropological reckoning of how African traders and families negotiated access to children and their labor in maritime environments. The transition from the transatlantic slave trade to “legitimate commerce” (as described in the introduction) and the implementation of colonial taxation schemes profoundly transformed the deployment of child labor in Southeastern Nigeria. The capital market served the local economic interests of wealthy men and women, leaving the poorest individuals to pawn land or kin.2 As noted in the quotation from Scottish trader MacGregor Laird above, there existed an interconnection between the growing palm oil industry, child labor, and kidnapping.3

Historians have focused on pawnship and the consequences of commercial production as it relates to gender, but other modes of analysis are imperative.4 Chima J. Korieh notes that scholars have focused on how entire societies transformed, as a consequence of commercial developments in the Biafran hinterland, but do not evaluate individual responses to the change. His critique acknowledges that women’s labor increased when commercial activities expanded—a major theme in African colonial scholarship—“but such a narrow assessment ignores the coincident increases in . . . children’s labor inputs as well.”5 The focus of this chapter fills this historical void by mapping out how children’s labor is reimagined and deployed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Early Case Studies

The use of children as pawns, whether as collateral for commercial goods, for monetary loans, or in slaving ventures, has not yet been fully explored by historians of Southeastern Nigeria. There has been little written about economic transactions on which the labor of children was based. Even when there are available sources, there are limitations, such as a lack of firsthand accounts or faulty memories.6 In the paragraphs that follow, the personal histories of Olaudah Equiano (also known as Gustavas Vassa, ca. 1745–97) and Peter (no last name given) help us understand how children became part of West African economic transactions.7 The pattern of relationships and networks that sustained child dealing gives historians insight into the complex and wide-ranging system that enabled the abduction and captivity of freeborn children.

These accounts offer a window through which to see how child traffickers transferred children from one guardian to another and how pawning practices resulted in the enslavement of children. In Equiano’s case, his parents left him and his sister at home alone on the day that kidnappers snatched them. The kidnappers strategically waited until the parents had gone to the farm before enacting their plan. Accompanied by their trafficker, Equiano and his sister traveled all day and took shelter in a small home, stationed along a trade route, where they ate and then slept through the night. In the following days, the child dealer sold Equiano’s sister first and then Equiano, after which various slave dealers continued to buy and sell Equiano over the several days’ journey. At some point Equiano ended up with a chief, who worked as a blacksmith, and while in his care, Equiano labored as an apprentice, working with bellows, as well as a cook’s assistant for about a month. Subsequently, Equiano was sold after the death of the chief’s only child. It is likely that the chief sold Equiano to secure the funds to pay a debt brought on by his daughter’s funeral. Equiano’s personal account depicts a trade network comprised of numerous actors. Some facilitated the actual abduction; others took responsibility for securing a rest house in which they could hide along the route; still others acted as intermediaries when buying and selling the children.8

In another example, Laird recounted the story of an adolescent named Peter, which he documented during his trade ventures in the early nineteenth century. Peter’s father, a well-respected trader who operated along the Niger Delta and the Cameroonian coast and in Fernando Pó, purchased a canoe from a canoe trader. He paid half the cost of the vessel and left his son, Peter, as a pawn to guarantee that he would return and pay the debt. Before Peter’s father returned, Peter’s guardian, the canoe trader, offered him as collateral to a slave trader to whom he promised slaves, and in exchange, the canoe trader received goods and payment in advance. When Peter’s guardian returned with slaves in tow, Peter assisted him in carrying provisions onto the slave ship to prepare for its departure. But before Peter could leave the ship, the slave trader apprehended him, causing the canoe trader great angst.9 Remanded on the ship, young Peter watched as the canoe trader yelled at the slave trader, demanding that Peter be allowed to disembark the vessel, but it was too late. The slave trader who had Peter in his possession sailed off. Peter could not escape, and his guardian could not retrieve him. In that moment, Peter’s status as a pawn switched to that of a slave.10 The slave trader violated the conventions of trade and pawning by kidnapping Peter, whose status as a pawn should have been protected. However, that was not the end of Peter’s story.

A British warship seized the slave trader’s ship on Sierra Leone’s coast, a colony established for liberated slaves, after which one Colonel Nicolls adopted him and enrolled him in school, while the majority of other freed slaves performed hard labor.11 After five years he was able to return to his village and reunite with his mother. By then, he called himself Prince William of Bimbia (Cameroon), which signifies that he had made a name for himself, most likely as a commercial trader. Peter’s story is a reflection of the precarious status of child pawns during the slave trade era.12

Equiano’s and Peter’s stories provide examples of the interdependence of children, security arrangements, and the transatlantic economy, offering historians important clues to understand the vulnerability and economic embeddedness of children. The social economy of the child dictated the circumstances under which a child became a slave or pawn. A fundamental contradiction of pawnship is that the pawn is someone who is both a dependent within a kinship network and part of an economic transaction. Pawnship, as a credit system, relied on the protections that kinship relations provided.13 Kinship also provided a moral code that facilitated community cohesion and linked village inhabitants through social contracts, based on dependencies and protection. Social relationships maintained by trust and mutual responsibilities held these groups together. However, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of these conventions and mores collapsed under the pressure of the transatlantic slave trade and the development of legitimate commercial activities. Pawning underwrote and connected indigenous moneylending agreements to the slave trade, while at the same time making pawns more vulnerable to slavery.14

The Biafran Hinterland and the Aro

The Biafran hinterland’s physical geography and ecology shaped the political, social, religious, and economic systems that affected the vulnerability of children. The area consisted of three main environmental regions: the northern grasslands, the fertile palm belt, and the salt marshes on the coast. Each had its own geography resulting in specific forms of economic specialization. In the north (approximately 140 miles from the coast), the environment encompasses savanna-like grasslands and has lower rainfall than the areas to the south. John Oriji argues that Abam warriors (Aro slaving partners) operated in the north as it was a key source area for slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as into the first half of the twentieth century. Igbo-speaking peoples and their neighbors lived in densely populated villages, some approximating one thousand people per square mile, with many perched on infertile, eroded escarpments where they could barely eke out a living by farming. Although this offered some protection from slavers, the land was not sufficient to support all inhabitants. Some village members from different clans felt compelled to sell a child to secure the means to feed those remaining. Near them, in the more fertile valley, prosperous farmers called Nkanu allied with the Aro slave traders. The land in the north yielded yams, cassava, corn, and beans. To the southeast, near Enyong Creek, inhabitants successfully grew oil palms, bananas, and cassava. In the south, inhabitants also farmed a variety of vegetables, oil palms, corn, and bananas. They were willing buyers of their less fortunate neighbors’ children, whom they used to tend their fields or sold to slave traders headed for the coast.15

The Igbo, Aro (Igbo subgroup), Ibibio, Ijaw (Ijo), and Efik lived in the area that extended from the Niger Delta to Cameroon (from the Niger River in the west to the Cross River in the east) and dwelled in communities that were often democratic, overseen by senior men and women whose membership in secret societies committed them to appeasing deities. Very few acted as aristocratic rulers. Rather, each village group self-governed their communities through the creation of specialized entities. It was an area that is fragmented into many small villages, with no history of a precolonial empire or powerful indigenous state as was the case with the Oyo Empire of the Yoruba in Western Nigeria.16 Internal trade systems, which date back to the Neolithic era, linked these distinct cultural groups. This “primordial trade” lasted for centuries and saw the exchange of foodstuffs, handiwork goods, and other items. The internal trade in goods continued as the transatlantic slave trade surged. Adiele E. Afigbo argues that initially “elite members of the community” throughout the region dominated the internal and foreign slave trade, not solely the Aro. The Aro, Awka, Nkwerre, Abiriba, and Umunoha competed for authority before the transatlantic slave trade until the Aro captured the oracle, Ibini Ukpabi (meaning “drum of the Creator God,” see chapter 2), from their Benue-Congo rivals. It was not until the seizure of the all-important oracle that the Aro began to dominate the internal and external trade in men, women, and children.17

The Aro established their capital and spiritual home in Arochukwu, near the Cross River where they housed the Ibini Ukpabi mystic shrine.18 As a ruling society that was both feared and respected, other Igbo groups looked to the Aro for advice and to settle disputes. As it pertained to Aro trade activities and their travel throughout the region, many in Igboland considered the Aro “God men” and afforded them protection as they developed a complex trade system in the Biafran hinterland. To support their trade ventures, the Aro controlled key markets, dispensing fellow Aro and other business associates to form villages intermittently along trade routes.19 Marrying women in each of the satellite villages was especially useful because it, too, expanded and maintained Aro influence in the region.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Aro acted as the premier group of agents who organized and executed slave transactions, which led to the sale of thousands of Africans at the coast.20 They secured slaves from the interior whom they filtered through the network of public markets, private compounds, and satellite villages. As chief perpetrators in child dealing, the Aro became synonymous with “constant warfare and kidnapping,” and by 1900 they had established a trade diaspora of more than 150 settlements across 80,000 square miles of the Bight of Biafra.21

Because the Aro targeted women and children, communities developed practices whereby they would hide. One Igbo resident stated, “I noticed that every large tree in a prominent position had a recently-erected wooden platform in the topmost forks, which were to serve in case of an Ada attack; a point of vantage for shooting, and also a refuge for property, women and children.” Although individuals throughout the region worked together to avoid capture, many could not escape the demand for slaves. Danger of enslavement increased with the development of plantations in the New World, resulting in Aro refinement and expansion of their trading networks.22 The geographic nature of the region proved ideal for Aro slaving activities.

The Niger, Cross River, Benue River, and Bight of Biafra coast served as natural boundaries for the Aro trading diaspora. This is significant because the relationships and trade routes developed for the capture, transport, and sale of men, women, and children during the transatlantic slave trade provided the infrastru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index