'My Nigerian great-grandfather sold slaves'

My great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings.

"He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him," my father told me.

Nwaubani Ogogo's slaves were sold through the ports of Calabar and Bonny in the south of what is today known as Nigeria.

People from ethnic groups along the coast, such as the Efik and Ijaw, usually acted as stevedores for the white merchants and as middlemen for Igbo traders like my great-grandfather.

Assessing the people of Africa's past by today's standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains, denying us the right to fully celebrate anyone who was not influenced by Western ideology.

Igbo slave traders like my great-grandfather did not suffer any crisis of social acceptance or legality. They did not need any religious or scientific justifications for their actions. They were simply living the life into which they were raised.

Black sub-Saharan Africans who ended up in bondage almost invariably had been sold into slavery in the first place by fellow black sub-Saharan Africans.

Statistically, black freedmen in the southern states were more likely to keep slaves than freeborn white men were (by some accounts, as much as 5x as likely).

Black African Joseph Cinqué’s real-life adventures were the subject of the tear-jerking anti-slavery Stephen Spielberg film, Amistad, about African slaves on a ship to America staging a mutiny.

The film correctly depicts how Cinqué eventually was released from captivity in America and repatriated to Sierra Leone. What it leaves out is that when he got home to Africa, he himself became a slave trader.

Kenyan tribes were famous for this. Including Obama's father's tribe. They collected them for this guy who became fabulously wealthy from the trade.

Ending the trade was one of the reasons that the Brits colonized Kenya. But it really didn't end there because the neighboring German colonial administrators were willing to turn a blind eye in exchange for a cut of the proceeds.

Guess where most of the slaves went in those days? If you said the Muslim world, then go to the head of the class. Because, see, they weren't really trading slaves, they were practicing the proselytizing part of their religion.

The evil practice didn't finally end until the early 1920s when a certain Secretary of State for the Colonies made it a priority. This is why Obama's tribe hated that man with a purple passion because with no more lucrative slave trade, they had to retreat to the Kenyan highlands to herd livestock for a living.

Who can name that man?

Just consulted my notes... My recollection of 90% mortality rates on inland to coastal West African trade is way high, although at the height of the 17th/early 18th century trade there were some places and times when the numbers peaked that high. An 18th and another early 19th century contemporaneous estimate put the pre-coastal mortality at 50%

Regardless, the inland African slave trade was as horrific or more than any other aspect of overall slave trade. Here from David Livingstone on the brutality of the inland / Arab slave trade in the 1870s:

In less than I take to talk about it, these unfortunate creatures — 84 of them, wended their way into the village where we were. Some of them, the eldest, were women from 20 to 22 years of age, and there were youths from 18 to 19, but the large majority was made up of boys and girls from 7 years to 14 or 15 years of age.

A more terrible scene than these men, women and children, I do not think I ever came across. To say that they were emaciated would not give you an idea of what human beings can undergo under certain circumstances. Each of them had his neck in a large forked stick, weighing from 30 to 40 pounds, and five or six feet long, cut with a fork at the end of it where the branches of a tree spread out. The women were tethered with bark thongs, which are, of all things, the most cruel to be tied with. Of course they are soft and supple when first stripped off the trees, but a few hours in the sun make them about as hard as the iron round packing-cases. The little children were fastened by thongs to their mothers. As we passed along the path which these slaves had travelled, I was shown a spot in the bushes where a poor woman the day before, unable to keep on the march, and likely to hinder it, was cut down by the axe of one of these slave drivers. We went on further and were shown a p lace where a child lay. It had been recently born, and its mother was unable to carry it from debility and exhaustion; so the slave trader had taken this little infant by its feet and dashed its brains out against one of the trees and thrown it in there.

Thus, women slaves in the Arab world were often turned into concubines living in harems, and rarely as wives, their children becoming free. A large number of male slaves and young boys were castrated and turned into eunuchs who kept watch over the harems. Castration was a particularly brutal operation with a survival rate of only 10%.

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