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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. Pp. xxiv, 279. $85.00.

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.116.3.911

1937-5239

James H. Sweet,

African history and culture analysis

For years, historians have recognized the importance of the Bight of Biafra as one of the principal export regions of the transatlantic slave trade. Around one in six Africans arriving in the Americas came from the region, most delineated as “Igbo.” As early as the eighteenth century, readers across the Atlantic world became familiar with “Eboe” through the narrative efforts of Olaudah Equiano. Despite the obvious relevance of the region to broader currents in Atlantic history, the Bight of Biafra remains perhaps the least-studied and least-understood region of Atlantic Africa during the era of the slave trade. G. Ugo Nwokeji's study draws on a wide range of sources—oral traditions, lexicostatistics, genealogies, and archival data—to construct one of the most comprehensive histories of the Biafran slave trade yet written. One of Nwokeji's strengths is his ability to tease historical change out of limited and uneven sources, providing us with a convincing chronology of early regional history. At the core of his story is the rise of Aro. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the state sponsored the establishment of trade communities outside the immediate homeland at Arochukwu. The Aro king governed these early settlements indirectly through the appointment of trade consuls (Mazi). By the 1740s, as Atlantic demand for slaves increased, Aro incursions into the Igbo heartland expanded exponentially. Unlike the earlier period of state-sponsored settlement, private individuals conducted this phase of expansion, their allegiances to Arochukwu facilitated by lineage representation on the Aro central council (Okpankpo), widespread belief in the power of the Aro oracle, Ibiniukpabi, and the spread of the Ekpe trade confraternity. According to Nwokeji, these transformations in local sociocultural institutions explain as much about the sudden rise in slaving as European demand.