'The King of the Eboes'

People on the island of Jamaica. USC Digital Library.

March 22, 1816. A European's account of a thwarted African uprising in Jamaica.

The two ringleaders of the proposed rebellion at St. Elizabeth's have been condemned, the one to be hanged, the other to be transported. The plot was discovered by the overseer of Lyndhurst Penn (a Frenchman from St. Domingo) observing an uncommon concourse of stranger negroes at a child's funeral, on which occasion a hog was roasted by the father. […] They had elected a King of the Eboes [Igbo], who had two Captains under him;

The Okoli Ijeoma Ada War: Agha Ìbenne

Gịnị mè ndị Ọka jì à sọ ènwè?

Enwe Imoka, the mona, Porto-Novo, Benin. Photo: Okouneva Olga via Wikimedia Commons.

Background

Okoli Ijeoma was a 19th-century merchant warlord of the Aro settlement of Ndikelionwu in today’s Anambra State. He was notorious for his recruitment of the militaristic Ada people of the Cross River area for wars against his enemies or for the services of those who paid him. He was the grandson of Ikelionwu who founded Ndikelionwu in the 18th century.

Igbo Runaways

Igbo 'runaways' in Jamaica on a page of The Royal Gazette, a 19th c. newspaper. Runaways escaped slavery for freedom. This is from a list of those caught c. 1826. These people were born in the Igbo country and taken over the Atlantic to the West Indies. University of Southampton.

John Brown

John Brown (c.1810 – 1876) was born into slavery in Virginia. He said in his life story that his father's father was an Igbo (written Eboe) man stolen from Africa. John Brown’s family was split several times by the time he was ten. He was later sold to people who tortured him for medical experiments, as was often done on many people of African descent. John Brown managed to escape and gain freedom and dictated his life story, published in 1855 as “Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Now in England.”

August 2019 is 400 years since the beginning of the enslavement of Africans in the British Colony of Virginia which later became a US state. Virginia is also noted to have received a large amount of Igbo people during the 18th century.

18th c. Ụ̀banị̀ Ìgbò vocabulary

Ụ̀banị̀ Ìgbò, the Igbo spoken on Bonny Island in today's Rivers State, recorded by the slave trader Captain Hugh Crow from the late 18th century, from "Memoirs of the late Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool."

Bèkê seems to have been recorded here which brings the theory that it originated from the Scottish explorer William Baikie into doubt. Westermann, Smith, Forde (1932). Oxford University Press.

Bonny Island was one of the largest slave ports of the Atlantic slave trade era, especially in the late 18th century. Hugh Crow describes the predominance of Igbo captives on the island, most going to British colonies. "Memoirs..." p. 198.

This led to a large amount of Igbo people in the British Caribbean in particular, in places like Jamaica where this early 19th century description was made. John Stewart (1808). "An Account of Jamaica, and Its Inhabitants." p. 235–236.

Could some of these words have been recorded from some of the ancestors of people now in North America?

Les Békés

A woman from Guadeloupe (apparently en route to Montreal, Canada). Photographed by Augustus Frederick Sherman.

The word for white men in the French-speaking Caribbean island of Martinique and to a certain extent Guadeloupe is Béké presumed to be from bèkée in Igbo meaning the same. These islands were the disembarkation points for many Igbo people during the forced Atlantic migrations from the 16th to 19th century. Igbo is the main component of English Caribbean creoles and, as may be apparent, has influenced French Caribbean creoles.

Some of the Ubani (Bonny) Igbo recorded by slave trader Hugh Crow.

The popular folk etymology of the word bèkée in Igbo says that it was derived from the Scottish explorer William Baikie who had contact with Igbo people, however, what seems to be a word used in the same way as bèkée has been found in the memoirs of Captain Hugh Crow, a slave trader out of Liverpool who had close contacts with the Igbo speaking middlemen of Bonny Island in Rivers State today. His voyages largely took place in the 18th century and he died in 1829, Baikie was born in 1825.

The Peopling of Ikot Ishie, an Igbo Diasporic Town of Calabar

Photo: "The Calaba and Opobo people at the show, Lagos," 1909 postcard.

[Ikot Ishie, Calabar] was named after Ishie Offiong Okoho, an Igbo ex-slave of Chief Offiong Okoho of Archibong House in Duke Town[.] […] Oral tradition maintains that Ishie, an Igbo slave, was bought as a youth and grew up in his masters' household. He was adopted and acquired the name Offiong Okoho from his master, Chief Offiong Okoho. […] Having served his master faithfully, Ishie Offiong Okoho was manumitted and was allocated the whole expanse of land (consisting of Ikot Ishie area) to live and prosper on his own.

[Apparently, Ishie Offiong Okoho also became a wealthy trader during the slave trade era, obtaining his slaves from the interior of the Igbo area to his domain of Ikot Ishie.]

Photo: "Government Hill from Duketown, Old Calabar," 1903 postcard.

Beside the present Bassey Duke, Bedwell, Chamley and Nelson Mandela axis, Ikot Ishie has the highest concentration of Igbo community in Calabar. [...] [N]inety percent of traders in the Ikot Ishie market are of Igbo extraction, and [speak] Efik [...] though they have not lost contact with their original homeland, the Igbo at Ikot Ishie have been, and will remain, part of Archibong House.

[Edit: Chief Ishie Offiong Okoho apparently died in 1901 according to the recounting of the Ishie House's genealogy in a court case over land disputes in 2000 involving his descendants.]

– Winifred E. Akoda (2005). “The Socio-economic Impact of Stranger Communities in Calabar: A Study of the Igbo and Hausa Since 1900.” In: “History and Citizenship: Essays in Honour of Okon Edet Uya.” University of Calabar Press. pp. 160–161.

The forced human migration is a long and complicated history which can be attributed to the nature of slavery, more like indentured servitude, in the interior of the Bight of Biafra itself which, outside of Atlantic expulsion, resulted in the absorption of servants into a household resulting in a population today that is largely descended from a mixture of both masters and servants. (And this indentured servitude system seems to have survived in the form of houseboys and housegirls today.)

Chi and Equiano

[…] Equiano’s constant references to destiny, providence, and faith fit into the Igbo concept of Chi (a spiritual entity or personal god, often perceived as a person’s double). As the determiner of destiny, a person’s chi acts as the intersecting force that connects the mundane with the spiritual, wherein the core values of Igbo culture – “‘individuality,’ 'achievement,’ a belief in 'destiny’ – are lined to the supreme being and creator 'Chukwu’ or 'Chineke’. [...]

– Chima Jacob Korieh (2009), "Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo world." p. 77.

[Image: The Slave Ship by the British artist Turner, an abolitionist painting which alludes to the particular case of the Zong massacre in November, 1781 when 133 enslaved African people loaded onto the slave ship Zong were thrown overboard, murdered by drowning to save drinking supplies and to eliminate sick slaves that would sell poorly at the destination at Jamaica. The murder by the crew and owners of the ship was in part to receive insurance placed on enslaved Africans. Olaudah Equiano, a prominent abolitionist by then, of Igbo origin, shocked England with his exposé on the slaver Zong whose crew were ultimately ruled against in court. The painting was first exhibited in 1840, well after Olaudah Equiano's passing.]

Thomas Thistlewood’s diary

An entry in Thomas Thistlewood’s diary, a British plantation overseer in Jamaica who eventually became a landowner and owner of enslaved people. Entry Aug. 12, 1776: A Jamaican (British) planters wife seeks “an Ebo girl, about 12 years of age” to be a “sempstress” “with small feet, not bow-legged, nor teeth filed, small hands & long, small taper fingers, &c.”

Image via Beinecke Digital Collections, Yale. Transcription via: Audra A. Diptee (2016). “A Great Many Boys and Girls.” In: Falola, T.; Njoku, R.C. eds. Igbo in the Atlantic World. p. 117.

1699 Map of New Calabar

1699 map in French of the New Calabar River, a major centre of the slave trade. The map locates the “Ville du Nouveau Kalabar” (New Calabar or Elem Kalabari), “Ville de Bandi” (Ubani > Bonny), and "Ville de Doni" (Andoni), and some other places. Via slavevoyages.org

Mgburuichi - Bruchee - Breechee

An mgburuichi, an Igbo person with ichi marks associated with Nri. Northcote Thomas, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. Igbo people were the largest group among people who had escaped enslavement on plantations in Jamaica, mgburuichi were known as 'Bruchee.'

"They were respected throughout Igboland. We have facial marks (ichi) that distinguish us from other Igbo people, and this served as a passport, enabling us to travel unharmed at a time when human beings were essential commodities. People with ichi marks were regarded as Nri men, and were not enslaved. It was probably because of this that some parts of Igboland started to wear ichi."

A 'runaway' advertisement from Jamaica, requesting the capture of escaped enslaved people for a reward in return, noted is an "Eboe man, with the Breeche cut on his forehead," this is an mgburuichi, an Igbo man with ichi marks likely from today's Anambra State. From a compilation of 18th century advertisements for escaped enslaved people in Jamaica. There are over 100 Igbo (Eboe) people listed.

The fact that Igbo "Breechee" show up in Jamaica among runaways from 1777-1793 is significant. It is a concrete sign that the trans-Atlantic slave trade had reached all the way to the Nri heartland in the Anambra valley of northern Igboland, and that by the 1770s (if not earlier) the social violence wrought by slaving and the agawhu (merchant-warlords) was violating even the ancient sacred authority—and the personal safety—of titled "Nri men," who no longer were preserved from capture or kidnapping and enslavement.

– Douglas B. Chambers. "The Igbo Diaspora in the Era of the Slave Trade."

The Account of the Phoenix, A Slave Ship Stopped by Africans from Trading in the Bonny River, 1757

“Paquito de Cabo Verdo Portuguese Slave Brig captured by the Boats of HMS Scout on the 11th Jany 1837 in the Bonny River. She had mounted 2 18 Prs with a Crew of 35 men and 576 slaves on board.” – National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

“Captain Bailie, commander of the slave-ship Carter, writing to his owners in Liverpool from the River Bonny, Africa, on January 31st, 1757, reveals the method sometimes resorted to by slave-captains to compel the native chiefs to trade with them. He says:—

"We arrived here the 6th of December, and found the Hector, with about 100 slaves on board, also the Marquis of Lothian, of Bristol, Capt. Jones (by whom I now write), who was half slaved, and then paying 50 Barrs, notwithstanding he had been there 3 months before our arrival. I have only yet purchased 15 slaves at 30 and 35 Barrs; but as soon as the bearer sails, I propose giving more; for at present there is a dozen of our people sick, besides the two mates, some of whom are very bad, and I have been for these last 8 days in a strong fever, and frequently insensible. Yesterday morning I buried Thomas Hodge, and on the 13th James Barton. Capt. Nobler of the Phoenix arrived here the 3d, and on the 19th our trade was stopt (as it had often been before) ; upon which we all marched on shore to know the reason and applied to the King thrice, though he constantly ordered himself to be denied, and wou’d not admit us. However, we heard his voice in doors, and as he used us so ill, we went on board, and determined (after having held a Council), to fire upon the town next morning, which we accordingly did, in order to bring them to reason, but found that our shot had little effect from the river, upon which we agreed that the Phoenix and the Hector shou’d go into the Creek, it being nigher the town, whilst Captain Jones and I fired from the river. The Phoenix being the head-most vessel went in, and the Hector followed about a cable’s length astern. The Phoenix had scarce entered the Creek before they received a volley of small arms from the bushes, which were about 20 yards distant from the ship, and at the same time several shot from the town went through him, upon which they came to anchor, and plied their carriage guns for some time ; but finding there was no possibility of standing the decks, or saving the ship, he struck his colours, but that did not avail, for they kept a continued fire upon him, both of great and small arms. His people were thrown into the utmost confusion, some went down below, whilst others jumpt into the yaul which lay under the ship’s quarter, who (on seeing a number of canoes coming down to board them) desired Capt. Nobler to come down to them, which he at last did, as he found the vessel in such a shattered condition, and that it was impossible for him to get her out of the Creek before the next ebb tide, in case he cou’d keep the canoes from boarding him. With much difficulty they got on board the Hector, but not without receiving a number of shot into the boat. The natives soon after boarded the Phoenix, cut her cables, and let her drive opposite the town, when they began to cut her up, and get out her loading, which they accomplished in a very short time. But at night in drawing off some brandy, they set her on fire, by which accident a great many of them perished in the flames. The Phoenix’s hands are distributed amongst the other three ships, and all things are made up, and trade open, but very slow, and provisions scarce and dear.” The Marquis of Lothian was afterwards taken and carried into Martinico.“

— Gomer Williams (1897). History of the Liverpool privateers and letters of marque with an account of the Liverpool slave trade. pp. 481–482.

The Origin of Red Bones

Creole Boy with a Moth, 1835, by Julien Hudson (American, 1811–1844); oil on canvas; 29 x 23 inches.

‘Red Bone’, referring to an ethnic group in Louisiana and a black American term for people with fair skin, has strong ties to peoples in what is now eastern Nigeria. Originating from 18th century chattel slavery in the West Indies, the term ‘red bone’ takes from the creole term ‘red Ibo’ referring to fairer skinned black people. The term derived from observations of fair skin among some members of the Igbo ethnic group (and some other peoples lumped in from eastern Nigeria) whose numbers in slavery ratcheted up in the 18th century due to internal conflict in Igboland. European slavers and plantation owners often made observations and generalisations about various ethnic groups since different Africans were targeted for their knowledge, education and skills; a hefty amount of stereotyping and dehumanising was subsequently placed on various ethnic groups found in large numbers in slavery. One recurrent observation was the relatively higher prevalence of fair skinned people from the Igbo area, known then in the Atlantic as the ‘Eboe Country’. The fairer skin was demonised by planters as ‘sickly’ and the Igbo were characterised as weak because of this. This also meant their ‘price’ dropped and poorer planters in places like Virginia took many Igbo leading to a saturation of Igbo people there. The disdain, however, may have been fuelled somewhat by the fact that enslaved Igbo people weren’t unknown for their defiance of slavery, immortalised in the folktale of Ebo landing; they were also involved in a number of slave revolts all over the Caribbean, including in Haiti.

Ultimately, this characteristic was taken in as a negative one and the term ‘red’ was combined with ‘Ibo’ (Igbo) as a pejorative used by black people in the British West Indies for people who were black but with fair skin as opposed to mixed people who were just ‘red’ or ‘brown’ thus suggesting a hierarchy of phenotypes and hair types. Some creole linguists trace the term to Louisiana where it was heard as ‘reddy bone’, leading to the understanding of the term as ‘red bone’ with a less negative connotation as it is still used in AAVE today.

The term red bone is interesting as it seems to be a word that’s linked to a particular experience of an ethnic group in slavery. The word itself carries a lot of historical weight in terms of what it meant for one group of Africans in that era. (Kniffen, Gregory and Stokes 1987; Don C. Marler 1997, 2000; Winer (2009). Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago. pg. 754.; [Louisiana, Where Music is King, PBS.])

Virginia Gazette (Purdie & Dixon), Williamsburg, September 3, 1772

WILLIAMSBURG, September 3, 1772. COMMITTED to James City Prison, on Monday the 31st of last Month, a Negro Fellow who says he is the Property of Colonel Cary of Hampton, and that he belongs to a Quarter in Albemarle; his Name is JOE, is an Ibo Negro, about fifty Years of Age, five Feet nine or ten Inches high, with three Scars on the right Side of his Face, the middle One the largest, and has on a Crocus Shirt and Trousers, and Negro Cotton Waistcoat. JOHN CONNELLY.

— John Connelly

Location: Williamsburg, Virginia | Date: September 3, 1772 | Credit: John Connelly