African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic

Author(s): G. Ugo Nwokeji

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1, New Perspectives on the Transatlantic
Slave Trade (Jan., 2001), pp. 47-68
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2674418
Accessed: 20-04-2015 18:00 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2674418?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The William and Mary Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

African Conceptions of Gender

and the Slave Traffic
G. Ugo Nwokeji

HE gender and age structureof the transatlanticslave tradeis criticalto

understandingthe development of societies of the Atlantic rim. From
the broad perspectiveof contact between the Old World and the New,
two salient characteristicsof that structurehave emergedfrom the recent literature. First, as is now well known, males predominated in the Atlantic slave
trade,though comparedto other branchesof pre-nineteenth-centurymigration,
both coerced and free, femalesand childrenwere well represented.Second, the
proportion of Africanwomen and children carriedacross the Atlantic was far
from constant or uniform;sex and age ratiosvariedstronglyby region and over
time.1 Attempts to explain these broad patternshave generallyfocused on the
economic functions of slaves on both sides of the Atlantic, but especiallythe
requirementsof the plantation complexes of the Americas, without which a
transatlantic slave trade would not have existed. Even though New World
plantersdemandedmen, they quickly discoveredthat enslavedAfricanwomen
had a high work rate.2Plantersforced black men and women alike to labor in
the fields, and the price differentialbetween males and females was generally
much lower in the Americasthan in Africa.3
T

G. Ugo Nwokeji is a member of the Department of History and the Institute for African
American Studies, University of Connecticut. He is indebted to David Eltis for many incisive
suggestions and to Martin Klein, Robin Law, and Victor Madeira for helpful comments on the
first draft. He also benefited from discussions with Barrington Walker and the feedback from
conference participants,especially Kristin Mann.
1 David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, "Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios in the
TransatlanticSlave Trade, i663-1864," EconomicHistoryReview,46 (1993), 308; Eltis and David
Richardson, "The Structureof the TransatlanticSlave Trade, I595-I867," paper presented at the
Social Science History Meeting, Chicago, 1995.
of AmericanNegro
2 RobertWilliam Fogel and Engerman,Time on the Cross:The Economics
Female Slaves in the
Slavery(Boston, 1974), 75-77; Deborah Gray White, Ar}'it I a Woman?.:
PlantationSouth (New York, I985), 67-68, 98-105; Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels:A Social
Historyof EnslavedBlackWomenin Barbados(London, 1989), 7-23; B. W. Higman, SlavePopulation
in Jamaica,5807-5834 (Cambridge, I976), I94; Michael Craton, SearchingfortheInvisible
and Econoeny
Man: Slavesand PlantationLife in Jamaica(Cambridge,Mass., I978), I42-47; JamesWalvin, Black
Ivory:A HistoryofBritishSlavery(London,i992), ii9-2i; BernardMoitt, "Behindthe SugarFortunes:
Women, Labourand the Developmentof CaribbeanPlantationsduringSlavery,"in SimeonWaliaula
Chiliungu and Sada Niang, eds., AfricanContinuities(Toronto, 1989);Ira Berlin, Many Thousands
Gone:TheFirst TwoCentnriesofSlaveryin NorthAmerica(Cambridge,Mass.,I998), IsI.
3 Eltis and Engerman,"Wasthe SlaveTrade Dominated by Men?"JournalofInterdisciplinary
History,23 (I992), 253.

Williamand Mary Quarterly,3d Series, Volume LVIII, Number

I, January 2ooi

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

48

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

African gender studies have rarely focused on the era of the Atlantic
slave trade.4 Economic historians have generally avoided gender questions,
and historical demographers who address the issue have usually assumed
uniform sex and age ratios for all African regions. To the latter group of
scholars, the main question to be resolvedwas the proportion of men among
those forced to leave Africa.5The few historians who have explored the gender structure of the slave trade see the predominance of males in overseas
export as more a function of supply than of demand. For them, African suppliers of captives channeled women and children away from the Atlantic and
men toward it. Women could be sold for more in domestic African slave
markets, whereas men commanded higher prices in markets supplying the
Atlantic.6 Women thus constituted the large majority of slaves in Africa. A
recent survey of available price data in African regional markets confirms
4 African gender studies were the subject of special issues of 3 major Africanist journals
since the early I970s: Audrey Wipper, ed., The Roles of African Women(CanadianJournal of
African Studies, 6, No. 2 [I972]); Edna G. Bay and Nancy J. Hafkin, eds., Womenin Africa
(AfricanStudiesReview,I8 (I975), published as Womenin Africa:Studiesin Social and Economic
Change(Stanford, Calif., I976); and Shula Marks and RichardRathbone, eds., TheHistoryof the
Family in Africa (Journalof AfricanHistory,24 [I983]). Only the last has contributions (Donald
Crummey, "Family and Property amongst the Amhara Nobility," 207-20,
and Anne Hilton,
"Family and Kinship among the Kongo South of the Zaire River from the Sixteenth to the
Nineteenth Centuries," i89-206)
dealing with the era covered in this paper, and only Hilton's
deals with Atlantic Africa. Most other historical works on this sphere have concentrated on the
i9th-century transition from the Atlantic slave trade to other economic activities, made most
explicit in Richard Roberts, "Women's Work and Women's Property: Household Social
Relations in the Maraka Textile Industry of the Nineteenth Century," Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 26 (I984), 229-50.
See also Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women:
A Modern History, trans. Beth Gillian Raps (Boulder, Colo., I997); Claire C. Robertson and
Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, I983); Robertson, Sharing the
Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (Bloomington, In.,
I984); and Susan M. Martin, Palm Oil and Protest: An Economic History of the Ngwa Region,
South-Eastern Nigeria, I8oo-i98o (Cambridge, i988). Other exceptions include Sandra E.
Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and, Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (Portsmouth, N. H.,
i996); Edna G. Bay, "The Royal Women of Abomey" (Ph. D. diss., Boston University, I977);
Edward A. Alpers, "State, Merchant Capital, and Gender Relations in Southern Mozambique to
the End of the Nineteenth Century: Some Tentative Hypotheses," African Economic History, I3
(I984); and Onaiwu W. Ogbomo, When Men and Women Mattered: A History of Gender Relations
among the Owan of Nigeria (Rochester, N. Y., I997).
5 John Thornton,
"The Slave Trade in Eighteenth-Century
Angola: Effects on
Canadian J. African Studies, I4 (0980),
and "The
Demographic
Structures,"
4I7-28,
Demographic Effect of the Slave Trade on Western Africa Isoo-I8so,"
African Historical
Demography, II, Proceedings of a Seminar held in the Centre of African Studies, University of
Edinburgh, Apr. 24, 25, i98i; Joseph Inikori, "Under-Population in Nineteenth-Century West
Africa," ibid.; Patrick Manning, "The Enslavement of Africans: A Demographic Model,"
Canadian J. African Studies, I5(5985),
499-526, and Slavery and African Life: Occidental,
Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, i990),
6i.
6 Robertson and Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa; Manning, Slavery and African
Life, 42; Paul E. Lovejoy and Richardson, "Competing Markets for Male and Female Slaves:
Prices in the Interior of West Africa, I750-I850,'
International Journal of African Historical
Studies, 28 (99s),
and "The Initial 'Crisis of Adaptation': The Impact of British
26I-93,
in Robin Law, ed., From
Abolition on the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa, i808-i820,"
Slave Trade to "Legitimate" Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West
Africa (Cambridge, I995), 32-56.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

49

this hypothesis.7 The discovery of the high value Africans placed on women
is especially helpful in suggesting that African conceptions of gender helped
shape the structure of the Atlantic slave trade. But this new emphasis on the
ability of Africa to shape the pattern of coerced migration still means that it
is the economic function of slaves and market forces that receives the most
attention. Although social processes are acknowledged, the emphasis remains
on market forces, which crystallized in three overlapping markets-Atlantic,
Saharan, and domestic-and generated significant price differentials.
The few studies to take up interregional variations in the age and sex of
captives follow a similar tack. One view suggests that women were sold in
inland markets because they attracted higher prices there and men were
moved to the coast for the same reason. Women and children were important in overseas markets only where the major provenance areas were near
the coast. Transportation costs are deemed the critical factor in such decisions. If Atlantic markets put a lower value on women and children than on
men, then women and children were not worth moving over long distances
to reach those markets.8 This argument makes sense, but it is more useful for
explaining the differences between inland and coastal markets than between
one part of the coast and another. Coastal regions with nearby provenance
zones still exhibited marked differences in the age and sex patterns of those
sent into the trade. Most strikingly, West Central Africa, the region with the
longest supply lines in Africa, had one of the largest ratios of children entering the trade.
More women entered the transatlantic slave trade at the Bight of Biafra
than at any other coastal region of Africa. There, too, the market approach
dominates attempts to account for this exception. For Joseph Inikori, outside
the impact of
forces-specifically,
planters in the Americas-overwhelmed
trans-Saharan and internal markets. Inikori explains the large proportion of
females leaving the Bight of Biafra by suggesting, first, that African suppliers
moved male captives to ports in adjacent regions where prices were higher,
and, second, that Euro-American buyers were prepared to accept females from
this single region.9 Letters of instruction to Africa-bound supercargoes and
captains lend credence to the view that buyers demanded predominantly men;
sometimes Euro-Americans made favorable comments on Biafran women.10
7 Lovejoy and Richardson, "Competing Marketsfor Male and Female Slaves."
8 Jan Hogendorn, "Economic Modelling of Price Differences in the Slave Trade between
the Central Sudan and the Coast," Slaveryand Abolition, I7, No. 3 (i996), 209-22; Manning,

"LouisianaSlaveryin Atlantic Context: Demography, Economy, and Culture, I720-I850," paper

presented at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, Jan. i0, i998. I am
grateful to ProfessorManning for giving me a copy of his paper.
9 Inikori, "Export versus Domestic Demand: The Determinants of Sex Ratios in the
TransatlanticSlave Trade,"Researchin EconomicHistory,I4 (0992), I34-38, 141-43.
10 John Adams, SketchesTakenduring Ten Voyages
to Africa, Betweenthe Yearsi786 and i8oo
(London, I832), 4I; Hugh Crow, Memoirsof the Late Captain Hugh Crow (London, I830), I98;
Richard Landerand John Lander,Journal of an Expeditionto Explorethe Courseand Termination
of the Niger with a Narrative of a VoyageDown that River to its Termination(New York, I832),
A. G. Leonard, "Notes on a Journey to Bende."Journal of the ManchesterGeographical
2:240-4I;
Society,I4 (1898), 207.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

50

But merchants and planters expressed no consistent preference for Biafran

women, nor did the occasional favorable comment translate into effective
demand. Males usually outnumbered females from the Bight of Biafra, and
after I730, as the region grew in relative importance to the Americas, the
proportion of males increased.
This article does not reject outright the conclusions of any of the recent
work on age and gender in the slave trade. It does, however, attempt to
recast the question of gender by taking into account African factors to
explain not only the overall demographic structure of the trade but also
interregional differences.'1 It draws in particular on the insights of the historian Sandra Greene, even though her work has been chiefly concerned with
the impact of the slave trade on Africa, whereas the present study examines
how African constructions of gender interacted with the Atlantic slave trade.
For the Ewe group on the Gold and Slave Coasts, Greene links demographic
pressures on land arising from conflict with the evolution of a culture of
conspicuous consumption, both of which stemmed ultimately from the slave
trade. She traces the impact of this process on constructions of gender and
gives a central role to ethnicity in her analysis. In short, she recognizes that
gender relations often varied from group to group.'2 Differing conceptions
of gender among African peoples are central to explaining the structure of
the slave trade as well as its impact.
While markets mediate both economic and noneconomic values, economic behavior has many cultural determinants. There are some obvious patterns of behavior in the Bight of Biafra (and no doubt elsewhere) that are
difficult to account for in terms of maximizing profits. It seems unlikely that
economics will explain why the Igbo and Ibibio killed twins, when selling two
or more children would fetch more money than selling one, or why the twin
taboo was deepest in Aro-Chukwu, the headquarters of the commercial Aro.13
Similarly, why did the region 's specialized warriors decapitate men captured
in warfare instead of selling them, especially when Europeans went to the
coast looking first and foremost for men?
1I Significant steps have already been taken in this direction. See Eltis, "Fluctuations in
the Age and Sex Ratios of Slaves in the Nineteenth-Cent Ury Transatlantic Slave Traffic,"
Slaveryand Abolition, 7 (1986), 257-72; Eltis and Engerman, "Was the Slave Trade Dominated
by Men?" 237-57, and "Fluctuations in Sex and Age Ratios," 308-23; Eltis and Richardson,
"West Africa and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: New Evidence of Long-Run Trends," Slavery
and Abolition, i8, No. I I997),
29-33; David Geggus, "Sex Ratio, Age, and Ethnicity in the
Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records," I African Hist., 30
and G. Ugo Nwokeji, "Household and Market Persons: Gender, Deportees, and
(0989) 23-44;
in Deborah Gray White and Mia Bay, eds., Black Atlantic: Race,
Biafran Society, c. I750-I860,"
Nation, and Gender (forthcoming).
12

Greene, Gender,Ethnicity,and Social Change.

13 The taboo against twins in Aro-Chukwu is so strong that it survives to date. For instance,
proper care was taken in February i996 when this writer was on fieldwork to ensure that he was
not a twin before he was admitted to a historical site the Nigerian government had declared a
national monument in I972. The largest Aro diaspora settlement had abandoned this practice by
the I83os; Nwokeji,"'Did We Bring Land with Us from Aro?': The Contradictions of Expansion
among the Aro of Nigeria during the Atlantic Slave Trade" in Lovejoy, ed., Identifying Enslaved

Africans:The "Nigerian"Hinterlandand theAfricanDiaspora(forthcoming).

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

5I

Profit maximization was only one factor that shaped African conceptions of gender. Three slave markets are known to have coexisted in Africa
during the Atlantic slave trade era: the Atlantic, the Saharan,and the domestic. In general, the Saharan market was female oriented, whereas both
females and children predominated in the domestic market. The Atlantic
market concentrated on dealing in males, preferablyadult males. The specific configuration of any of these markets might be expected to have some
impact on the gender structure of the others. In the Bight of Biafra, the
influence of the Saharan market was remote, and the institution of female
slaverywas marginal. Interaction between these two markets might result in
more females leaving the Bight of Biafra than from other regions that were
more susceptible to trans-Saharaninfluences and put a different value on
female labor. This article compares the patterns in the Bight of Biafra with
those in other regions of Atlantic Africa.
The Bight of Biafraextends from the Niger Delta (exclusive of the River
Nun) in modern Nigeria to Cape Lopez in modern Gabon.14The region was
highly decentralizedpolitically. The Nigerian section, which accounts for 90
percent of all captive departuresfrom the Bight of Biafra,was largely homogeneous, with Igbo and Ibibio peoples predominating in much of the region
south of the Benue River-known today as southeastern Nigeria.15 The
Bight of Biafra became a major captive export region only from the I730S
onward. The departuresof captives more than tripled between the end of the
seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth. The traffic closed
down quickly in the i840s, but for most of the preceding century, the Bight
of Biafra had been the second most important region for captives carried to
the Americas (though lagging well behind West Central Africa). The major
slave embarkation ports were Bonny, Old Calabar, and New Calabar, with
the first two probably accounting for nearly four out of every five captives
carriedfrom the region. During the rise to importance of the Biafrantraffic,
Old Calabar, originally the premier departure point, gradually fell behind
Bonny. Captive departures rose from all ports as the trade expanded, but
expansion was principally associated with Bonny and its hinterland due to
14 Major works on the Bight of Biafra include Daryll Forde and G. I. Jones, The Ibo and
fbibio-SpeakingPeoplesof South-EasternNigeria (London, I950); K. Onwuka Dike, Tradeand
Politics in the Niger Delta, i830-i885 (Oxford, I956); G. I. Jones, The TradingStates of the Oil
Rivers (London, i963); Victor C. Uchendu, The Igbo of SoutheastNigeria (New York, i965);
Kannan K. Nair, Politics and Society in South Eastern Nigeria, i84I-o906: A Study of Power,
Diplomacy, and Commercein Old Calabar (London, I972); A.J.H. Latham, Old Calabar,
i600-i89i:
The Impact of the InternationalEconomyupon a TraditionalSociety (Oxford, I973);
Elizabeth Isichei, A Historyof the Igbo People (London, I976); David Northrup, Trade Without
Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-EasternNigeria (Oxford, I978); Adiele
Afigbo, Ropesof Sand: Studiesin Igbo Historyand Culture(Ibadan, i98i); Martin, Palm Oil and
Protest;and Dike and Felicia I. Ekejiuba, TheAro of South-EasternNigeria, i650-I980: A Studyof
in Nigeria (Ibadan, i990).
Socio-EconomicFormationand Transformation
15 A I953 census shows that the Igbo and the Ibibio made up respectively 68.56% and
I0.36% of much of the region south of the Benue River known today as southeastern Nigeria;
"Population Census of Eastern Region of Nigeria I953," International Population Census
Publications,Africa,Nigeria:I950, i952, i953, i957 (Woodbridge, Conn., I981), IS-i6, 36-37.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

52

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Aro incursions into the densely populated central Igboland and establishment there of large dominant diasporasettlements. Centrally located Bonny
attractedthe trade with the Aro network more than any other port, although
the Aro, a rare, if not the only example of a non-Muslim African trade diaspora, were in fact the principal tradersof the hinterland for all ports in the
Bight of Biafra. 16
The Bight of Biafra is of particular interest in understanding African
conceptions of gender. If, in other regions, the Euroamerican drive to secure
men was not wholly successful, it all but broke down in the Bight of Biafra.
In this region, the character of African warfare and the role of women in the
indigenous economy and social institutions shaped the age and gender
structure of the slave trade differently from elsewhere. Key elements in this
process were African conceptions of slavery and the division of labor, reproduction in the context of the lineage, polygyny, and methods of enslavement.
To probe these issues, the new transatlantic slave trade dataset is invaluable. Information on the sex and age composition of captives is available for
630 voyages from the Bight of Biafra, perhaps I5-20
percent of all the slaving voyages that left the region after i650. More important than the size of
the sample, however, is the ability to examine the shares of men, women,
and boys and girls. For all quarters between i65i and i850 for which adequate data are available, ratios of women are higher and those of men lower
than for those leaving other regions of Atlantic Africa. In the second half of
the seventeenth century, when the traffic from the Bight first became significant, females were consistently in the majority. Biafra was the only large
provenance zone in Atlantic Africa, as well as any part of the Old World
from which people sailed for the New, for which this was the case.
Moreover, at this stage very few of the coerced migrants were children, so
the number of women carried into the trade was usually larger than the
number of men. In the early eighteenth century, the female share of coerced
migrants slipped slightly but remained very close to parity for the first quarter-a pattern that continued to distinguish the Bight of Biafra from other
coastal regions supplying captives. Indeed, between I70i and I725, the rest of
Africa was already sending two males to the Americas for every female. In
this period, the proportion of women was 40 percent higher in the Bight of
16 For details see Nwokeji, "BiafranMarkets and Slave: The Aro and the Slave Trade, c.
I750-I890," paper presented at the conference "WestAfrica and the Americas:Repercussionsof

the Slave Trade," Feb. 20-22, 1997, and "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Population Density: A
Historical Demography of the Biafran Hinterland," CanadianJ. African Studies,34 (forthcoming). Let us take as a graphic example, one i82i-i822
voyage in which all the captives were
declared Igbo and, because the vessel embarked at Bonny, presumably mostly central Igbo. The
ship, lAmelie, was captured by the French navy in early i822 off the Martinique coast in the
Caribbean with 2ii (i26 adults and 85 children) surviving captives. All were declared Igbo.
There were i26 adults (6o% of the captives) and 85 children (40% ). While women made up
only 36% of the adult proportion, girls made up 59% of the children. Calculated from Francoise
Thesee, Les Ibo l'Amdlie: Destine'e dune Cargaison de Traite Clandestine a la Martinique,
i822-i838
(Paris, i986), app. For trade diasporas in their various historical settings, see Philip D.
Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, I984).

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

53

Biafra traffic than elsewhere, and the proportion of girls twice as high. The
sample size permits no further comment until after midcentury, by which
time the volume of the Bight of Biafra trade had tripled. As with the rest of
Africa, the share of males in the trade as well as the share of children rose
steadily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the share of females
leaving the Bight of Biafra continued well above that in other regions. If
more than half the deportees in the seventeenth century were female, by the
second half of the eighteenth century, this ratio had fallen to 40 percent, and
to about one-third in the nineteenth century-a ratio attained elsewhere in
Africa a century earlier (see Table I).
The female ratio does, however, disguise a dramatic change in the distribution of women and girls. Whereas women had constituted nearly half of
those forced to leave the Bight of Biafra in the seventeenth century, fewer
than one in six captives leaving Biafran ports in the final quarter century of
the trade (i826-i850)
were adult females. Girls, who had made up less than
i0 percent of females in the Biafran traffic before I700,
came to outnumber
women by the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The proportion of
girls also increased over time in other provenance zones, but women always
remained more numerous than girls outside the Bight of Biafra. Among
males, the percentage of men remained relatively stable before, during, and
after the rapid increase in the trade. It was 46 percent in the seventeenth
century, dipped to just under 40 percent in the eighteenth century, then
recovered to its earlier level after I775 and until i850. Thus, most of the
increasing male ratio in the trade came from increased numbers of boys,
whose share overall doubled during two centuries. Once more this pattern
differentiates the Bight of Biafra from the rest of Africa, where men consistently composed more than half of those entering the trade before i8oo and
where, in the nineteenth century, their ratio slipped somewhat. Boys were
thus proportionately more important in the Bight of Biafra than elsewhere in
sustaining and, indeed, driving upward the high male ratios.
Before examining these intriguing differences between the Bight of
Biafra and other regions, it will be useful to evaluate the differences in these
ratios among ports within the Bight of Biafra. The evidence here is rather
more limited than it is at the regional level. Not only is the sample smaller
(544 voyages for all identified ports), but the distribution over time is
uneven (see Table II). Of the three major ports of Bonny, Old Calabar, and
New Calabar, few observations exist for Bonny before I776. Further, information on New Calabar is totally lacking for I700 to I776 and is meager for
the nineteenth century. A continuous series is thus possible only for Old
Calabar, which overall embarked far fewer captives into the Atlantic trade
than did Bonny. This discrepancy is unfortunate because the dramatic
increase in the volume of the trade from the Bight of Biafra is associated
with the rise of the port of Bonny to predominance. Bonny appears to have
surpassed the other ports in numbers of captives dispatched in the third
quarter of the eighteenth century, and between I776 and i825, it sent
between three and four captives to the Americas for every one who left from

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

54

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Old Calabarand New Calabartogether. Old Calabarrecoveredsomewhat in

relative terms in the last two decades of the trade but did not displace Bonny
as the principal point of embarkation in the Bight of Biafra at any point
after I730 (see Map II).
In the earliest years of significant slave trading in the Niger Delta-Cross
River region, no significant differences occurred in the demographic structures of the traffic from New Calabar and Old Calabar despite the distance
between the two ports and the reputedly different hinterlands on which they
drew. Statistically significant differences among major ports emerge only in
the later period, although there are large gaps in the data for the crucial middle half-century of the eighteenth century when the Bight of Biafra trade was
increasing so rapidly. From I776, the flow of captives from Bonny, by now
the dominant port of departure, had a different mix of sex and age from
those leaving Old Calabar, and New Calabar's profile was closer to that of
the geographically adjacent Bonny than to the more distant Old Calabar.
More females, in particular more women, left Bonny and New Calabar than
left Old Calabar, and among males, the move to more boys, a striking feature of the nineteenth-century trade, was already underway in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. After i8oo, most of the statistically significant
differences between the major ports of Bonny and Old Calabar (once more
the New Calabar data are inadequate) disappear, except for the last quarter
century of the trade, when the age profiles of departing males are differentmore men leaving Bonny and more boys leaving Old Calabar.
In summary, flows of captives leaving the major ports of departure in
the Bight of Biafra generally show little difference in age and sex mix, with
all three ports together (accounting for 85 percent of all departures from the
Bight of Biafra) deviating from other African regions, though the Bight of
Biafra, in common with most other African regions with Atlantic trade, sent
increasing proportions of males and children into the trade over time. To
the extent that there were differences among ports in the Bight of Biafra
(and readers should keep in mind the gaps in the data in the important mideighteenth-century period), they show up in the last quarter of the eighteenth century when the slave trade from the Bight of Biafra was at its peak.
Bonny in these years (and possibly, too, in the preceding two quarters when
data are lacking) sent more females into the trade than did the Cross River
port of Old Calabar.
These developments are best understood arising from the interaction of
indigenous conceptions of gender and the process of Atlantic slave trade.
The gender division of labor is at the core of constructions of gender anywhere. It is in this division that productive roles of gendered persons in freedom and slavery are located. Women likely did have a larger economic role
in sub-Saharan Africa than in most other continental groupings of societies.
In all the varieties of African societies, women 's and men's "spheres" were
separate, but closely interrelated and complementary. Given the male majority among those sent into the slave trade, women probably formed the
majority of many African societies during the era of the overseas slave trade.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

55

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

In one region in Angola, which seems to be the only place where a census
count was taken before the nineteenth century, there were 70.9 male slaves
and 8i.8 free males to every ioo women.17 This pattern may be in part due to
the importance of women in agrarian regimes, in most of which they performed the bulk of labor. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, Benin women were said to "have so much Employment, that they
ought not to sit still." In the same period in Whydah in Dahomey, women
"Till[ed] the Ground, for their Husbands only." In West Central Africa, the
Capuchin priest Denis de Carli reported that, while seventeenth-century
Kongo men served in large armies and carried "great Logs of wood of a Vast
weight," they nevertheless enjoyed considerable leisure time. Women, on the
other hand, worked from morning to evening tilling the ground, sowing all
crops, cultivating, and harvesting in addition to the family and household
duties. The same was true of contemporaneous coastal societies of the Upper
Guinea Coast, a region that also exported small proportions of females,
according to reports written in both halves of the seventeenth century. In
southern Mozambique, men were said to have done next to nothing.'8
Yet do all these indications of the major economic role for women mean
that the cultural determinants of unbalanced sex ratios were the same in all
sub-Saharan societies and remained constant over time?19 For historian
Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, the pattern that held in most of West Africa
was also valid in Niger Delta and Cross River region hinterlands. Among the
Igbo, she claims, "it was women who worked in the fields."20 But if the economic role of women was so large, why were more females sent into the
trade from this region than elsewhere in Atlantic Africa? Interregional differences in the gender division of labor suggest interregional differences in conceptions of gender that may have affected the sex ratios in both the slave
trade and in societies supplying that trade, at least as much as did the
requirements of planters in the Americas.
Enough is known about women's work in the Bight of Biafra to question Coquery-Vidrovitch's observations.21 In this region, both males and
17 Manning, Slaveryand AfricanLife, 42, and "Enslavement of Africans," 5oI. For Angola,
see Thornton, "Demography and History in the Kingdom of Kongo, I550-I750,"
J. African
Hist., I8 (0977), 507-3o, and "Slave Trade in Eighteenth-Century
Angola," esp. 422n; and
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalismand the Angolan Slave Trade, i730-i830
(Madison, i988), I59-67.
18 For Dahomey, see William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of
Guinea . . . (London, I705), 344; for Benin, David Van Nyendael, "A Description of Rio
Formosa, or the River of Benin," ibid., 463; for Kongo, de Carli, "A Voyage to Congo," in
Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill, comps., A Collection of Voyagesand Travels. . . , 4 vols.
(London,

I704)

i:622,

629, 630-3I;

for southern

Mozambique,

Alpers,

"State,

Merchant

Capital,

and Gender Relations," 39-40; and for Upper Guinea Coast, Walter Rodney, A History of the
Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800
(Oxford, 1970), 103, and Thornton, "Sexual Demography: The
Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure," in Robertson and Klein, eds., Women and
Slavery,44, and Africaand Africansin the Making of theAtlantic World,I07.
19 Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change; Hilton, "Family and Kinship among the
Kongo South of the Zaire River," 193; Martin, Palm Oil and Protest, 23.
20 Coquery-Vidrovitch,
African Women, trans. Raps, ii.
21 Felix K. Ekechi, "Aspects of the Palm Oil Trade at Oguta (Eastern Nigeria), 1900-1950,3
African Economic History, IO (0981), 4I; Susan Hargreaves, "The Political Economy of Nineteenth-

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

56

females contributed significantly to agriculture. The hoe per se has never

been, as Coquery-Vidrovitchclaims, principally a women's tool among the
peoples of the Bight of Biafra. Generally, men used the big hoe to till the
ground, and women and children used the small one for weeding.22 The
division of labor was particularlyclear-cut among the two groups that supplied the overwhelming majority of the region's captives-the Igbo and the
Ibibio. Females performed a wide range of tasks, such as weeding and planting vegetables and other crops-pumpkins, maize, okra, beans, pepper, and
cocoyam (taro). Tilling the ground, planting and stemming yam, building,
and climbing trees were exclusively male tasks. Both men and women were
involved in clearing, but it was neverthelessa predominantlymale activity.23
The historical role of men in agriculture in several Igbo communities was
such that women assumed a major role only in the twentieth century.24In
the coastal societies, male slaves dominated the manual labor relating to
trade and did the same when agriculture became important. Most women
performed "non-slave, low-status" domestic, agricultural, and commercial
activities. Captain Hugh Crow, who visited the region regularly from the
late eighteenth century to i807, observed that in Bonny it was the women
who fetched condiments for the kitchens of European ships.25 So unimportant was women's role in agriculture made to seem in the patriarchal
order that even in the second quarter of the twentieth century the missionary G. T. Basden omitted it in his otherwise informative chapter on
"women'swork."26 The major role of males in the agricultureof the Bight of
Biafra and in particular Igbo societies is not replicated in other African
regions that supplied captives to the Americas.
It is not always easy to determine how much of the gender division of
labor antedated the slave trade and shaped its gender structureor how much
of this division was a direct result of the trade. Historian John Thornton
presents a useful model for measuringchange during the Atlantic slave trade.
He assumes that the preponderantly male exports affected the women the
Century Bonny: A Study of Power, Authority, Legitimacy and Ideology in a Delta Trading
(Ph.D. diss., Centre of West African Studies, University of
Community from 1700-1914"
Birmingham, 1987), 94.
22 Sylvia Leith-Ross,African Women(New York, [s939] 1959), 89-92; Forde and Jones, Ibo
and Ibibio-SpeakingPeoplesof South-Eastern
Nigeria, I3, 70; Uchendu, Igboof SoutheastNigeria,24;
Paul Bohannan and LauraBohannan, Tiv Economy(Evanston, Ill, i968), 66; Onwuka N. Njoku,
of IgboHistoiy (Lagos,I99I), I20.
"IgboEconomy and Society,"in Afigbo, ed., Groundwork
23 In the 20th century, these crops included the new varieties of yams, which were considered as inferior: Forde and Jones, Ibo and Ibibio-SpeakingPeoples,I3, 70; M. M. Green, Ibo
VillageAffairs(New York, i964; orig. pub. I947), I70-7I; Uchendu, Igbo of SoutheasternNigeria,
24-25; Chieka Ifemesia, Traditional Humane Living among the Igbo: An Historical Perspective
(Enugu, Nigeria, I979), 62; Nina Emma Mba, Nigerian WomenMobilized (Berkeley, i982),
29-30; T. Uzodinma Nwala, IgboPhilosophy(Lagos, I985), I78.
24 Gloria Chuku, "Women in the Economy of Igboland, I900 to I970: A Survey," African
Econ. Hist., 23 (I995), 39-4I
25 Hargreaves, "Political Economy of Nineteenth-CentuLry Bonny," 95-97 (quotation);
Crow, Memoirs of the Late Captain Hugh Crow, 44; Nair, Politics and Society, 37, 42-43; Latham,

Old Calabar,9i-96.
26 See Basden, Niger Ibos (London,

[I9381 i966), 325-33.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

57

transatlantic traffic left behind in two major ways. First, they increased the
dependency ratio for all working people. Since these were now mostly
women, the burden of providing subsistence to the dependent population
fell heavily on them. Second, with about 20 percent fewer males to perform
male roles, women had to step into the breach or leave them undone.
Invariably, this situation resulted in lower production and lower quantities
of high-protein food, because women did not take over hunting.27 Thus the
division of labor was altered, and females increasingly assumed tasks and
responsibilities hitherto performed by men.
If Thornton's model holds for regions throughout Atlantic Africa, then
Biafran societies, which sent significantly higher proportions of females and
children overseas and so must have had more balanced population pyramids,
would have escaped some of the ruptures that the model predicts. The
African regions where women have been found to constitute the majority of
the slave populations were also areas where women cost more, performed the
bulk of agricultural labor, and were recognized as doing so. Slavery in those
regions centered on women. The Capuchin missionary Michael Angelo
reports that, in seventeenth-century Kongo, "Young Women [were] of the
same Value as Men."28 Unlike these regions, Biafran slavery did not rest on
women. Most interesting, research on Bonny, the populous Ngwa of southern Igboland, and the Aro, the last of whom controlled the inland trade,
indicates that female slavery for domestic purposes was marginal.29
Recent field work among the Aro in particular supports the marginality
of female slavery. Asked whether men routinely acquired slave women,
respondents indicated that even if a man retained a female trade captive in
his household, the relationship invariably changed to that of husband and
wife. Alternatively, the man might give her to his wife as a slave or to one of
his sons or dependents as a wife. One interviewee reported that, among the
Aro, women were a small part of slaveholding: "There were [women slaves],
but not so many. A female slave would be given to a slave man because a
woman could not establish an ama [lineage]."30 Moreover, one elder noted,
27 Thornton, "Sexual Demography," 4I.
28 Michael Angelo, "Voyage to the Congo," in Collectionof Voyages
and Travels,8:620.
29 For the entire Igbo, see Nwokeji, "The Slave Emancipation Problematic: Igbo Society

and the Colonial Equation," Comp.StudiesSoc. ci Hist., 40 (1998), 325-26;

for the entire Biafra,
Nwokeji, "Household and Market Persons"; for the Aro, Nwokeji, "'Did We Bring Land with
Us from Aro?"' and "The Biafran Frontier: Trade, Slaves, and Aro Society, c. 1750-1905" (Ph.
D. diss., University of Toronto, 1999), 121-25; for southern Igboland, Martin, Palm Oil and
Protest, 25; and for Bonny, Hargreaves, "Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century
Bonny,"
94-97.

30 Ukobasi Kanu-Igbo to author, interview (EnuLguL,

Mar. 7, I996). See also interviews with
Eneanya Akpu (Aro-nde-IzuoguL, Mar. io, i996); Nwankwo Anicho Anyakoha (Aro-Chukwu,
Feb. 24, i996); Michael Sunday Igwe (Aro-nde-IzuLogu, Feb. i8, i996); Kevin Maduadichie
(Aro-nde-Izuogu,
Feb. II, i996); Emmanuel Nwankwo (Aro-nde-IzuLogu, Mar. io, i996);
Clifford Okoli (Aro-nde-Izuogu, Feb. II, 1996); Elizabeth Okoro (Aro-Chukwu, Feb. 25, i996);
Jonathan G. Okoro (Aro-nde-Izuogu, Feb. 4, i996); Jacob 0. Okoro (Aro-ChukwuL, Feb. 24,
i996); Eze Jonas E. Uche (Nde-Uche, Mar. I7, 8996). Transcripts are in possession of the author.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

58

an important reason for the accumulation of male slaves is that they could be
used in fighting wars.31According to another elder, the Aro believed that
Women were difficult. Their mobility was minimal. It was only
practical to buy a woman and she became your wife or that of your
son, or she became a fellow woman's slave. Except if she was sold to
a far away place or overseas,it was not very practical. In certain circumstances, people bought female slaves, but they invariablyended
as wives. I do not think, however, that a person set out to buy a
woman so that she would become his wife. What I am sure of is
that women bought women slaves.32
Whether women were significantly less mobile, the attitude reflected in this
comment seems to have affected the choice of enslavers.Another respondent
explained how slave women became wives: "A man could buy a woman from
the market and bring her home. You know that man-woman matters are
complicated.... If he was the sort that had a soft spot for women, he might
decide to keep her longer and might marryher.... A woman who came as a
slave was effectively the man's wife once she got pregnant and bore children
for him."33 Historian Susan Martin has observed a similar phenomenon with
respect to southern Igboland.34 Female slaves usually belonged to females,
whom feminist anthropologist Ifi Amadiume has misidentified as "female
husbands."35 Although current in present Igboland, this form of slaveryconsidered-as-marriage likely evolved in the twentieth century and incorporates the basic slave/mistress relation of earlier times.36
31
32

Igwe to author, interview.

Anyakoha to author, interview.

33 Igwe to author, interview.

34 Martin, Palm Oil and Protest, 25.
35 Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in African Society
(London, 1987). See also ChukU, "Women in the Economy." Contrary to Amadiume's claim,
many respondents indicated that slave women were eventually labeled "wives"; interviews with
Akpu; Anyakoha; Igwe; Maduadichie; Clifford Okoli; Elizabeth Okoro; Emmanuel Nwankwo;
and with Kanu Nwankwo Igwilo, Aro-nde-IzuogU (Mar. 2, i996); Martina Ike, Enugu (Enugu,
Sept. 20, I995); Aloy Nwankwo (Boston, Dec. i8, i996); Margareth Nwambego Okoli (Aro-ndeIzuogu, Mar. 8, i996); Georgina Umunnakwe (London, July 8-9, I995).
36 The change must be associated with slavers' response to the antislavery effort of the
British colonial administration, which peaked in the I930s. This was when child-dealing, especially in girls, became endemic. Most of the transactions were cloaked as "marriage," confusing
the colonial administrators who came to regard all bridewealth payment as slave-dealing;
Nwokeji, "Slave Emancipation," 337. Buchi Emecheta's novel Slave Girl (London, 1977), 50, 58,
6o-6i, set in the i900S through the i920s, confirms that these marriages were indeed slavery:
"Many of the market women had slaves in great number." The female slaves referred to in the
novel are all owned by mistresses. Even Chiago, who was sold by her father and purchased by
another man, is presented to her buyer's wife. Yet selling girls to mistresses is actually expressed
in terms of "marry[ing] her away." Marriage differed from slavery because, unlike a slave, a
married woman and all of her labor power was not alienated from her lineage; Roberta W.
Kilkenny, "The Slave Mode of Production: Precolonial Dahomey," in Crummey and C. C.
Stuart, eds., Modes of Production in Africa (Beverly Hills, Calif., i981), 158-59. In her important
biography of the wealthy, late i9th-early 20th-century Onitsha market woman Omu Okwei,

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

59

From I775 onward, when the traffic from Biafra peaked, Bonny sent
more females into the trade than did other ports. The rise of Bonny probably
meant that the long-term trend of fewer females entering the trade slowed
down and that more females entered the trade than would have been the case
if Bonny had remained a slave trading backwater. Bonny was the main outlet
for central Igboland. The expansion of the Biafran trade, the rise of the Aro
network, the shift of trade from Old Calabar to Bonny, and changes in gender ratios were correlated developments. In the Bight of Biafra then, unlike
other African regions, pre-existing gender constructions seem to account for
the export of a high proportion of females.
The objective here is to recognize, first, that men played an important
role in agriculture, second, that scholars of the slave trade have given this
male role insufficient attention in the recent literature, and third, that the
gender ideology that emerged in some societies in the Bight of Biafra had
more to do with pre-existing cultural norms (in current jargon, was "constructed") than with the reality of what women could or could not do. On
this last point, initially among the Tiv of the Middle Belt in the hinterland
of the Niger Delta, male and female roles in agriculture were carefully
defined and to a large extent separated. The Tiv explained this division as a
function of physical inequality and the need for females to be modest, even
though the differentials in strength requirements in tasks on either side of
the divide are not obvious and that modesty is culturally determined.37
Cultural, as opposed to biological, factors were important in the allocation of crops and crop tasks in most of Igboland and had important implications for the slave trade. Although yam was the staple food in many societies
bordering on both the Bights of Benin and Biafra up to their respective
Middle Belts, only among the Igbo and the Ibibio of Biafra was it cultivated
exclusively by men and regarded as the king of crops. Among the Igbo and
Ibibio, yam, if available, would be eaten before anything else. Alexander
Falconbridge, who made trips to the Bight of Biafra during the second half
of the eighteenth century as a slaver's surgeon, observed that "Yams are the
favorite food of the Eboe." This preference remained constant into the twentieth century; Basden observes that yam "stands to [the Igbo] as the potato
does to the typical Irishman. A shortage of the yam supply is a cause of genuine distress, for no substitute gives the same sense of satisfaction." More
important, yam provided one of the bases for measuring wealth and had var'adopted' children or chilFelicia EkejiuLbawrites that Okwei "acquired beautiful girls-mostly
dren pawned to her by her debtors"; Ekejiuba, "Omu Okwei, the Merchant Queen of
Ossomani: A Biographical Sketch," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 3 (i967), 633-46.
In i92i, Okwei admitted that one Uyanwa was her slave as Okwei struggled to retain the right
of inheriting the property that Uyanwa's husband, a European United African Company manager to whom Okwei had given her in "marriage," would leave behind; ibid., 637, 643-44. As in
Emecheta's novel, the story revolves around girls. The idea that the "female husband" relationship is an ancient institution seems to have sprung from the unfortunate tendency, noted by
Gloria Chuku, "Women in the Economy," 37, of much existing literature to view Igbo women
as unchanging.
37 Bohannan and Bohannan, Tiv Economy, 66.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

6o

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

ied ritual functions. Women's role in yam cultivation was restrictedto weeding. The so-called subsidiarycrops such as maize, cocoyam, okra, and beans
probably had the potential to surpassthe yam in nutritional yield, but yam
was considered supreme because it was in the male domain. Novelist Chinua
Achebe calls yam "a very exacting king" and writes that "for three or four
moons it demanded hard work and constant attention from cock-crowtill the
chickens went back to roost." Basden furtherassessedthe cost effectivenessof
yam cultivation:
From an agricultural point of view, the yam is a very extravagant
vegetable to grow. Each tuber requires a full square yard of land
which, in itself, is a big demand. For seven or eight months of the
year, regular attention must be given to its care, absorbing much
time and labor. If wages had to be paid, it is doubtful whether a
yam farm would pay its way, let alone yield profit.
Although Basden's observation reveals the fixation the Igbo and the Ibibio
had for the yam, perhaps beyond the point of economic rationality, the crop
did yield reasonableeconomic returns.38
Yam production owed something to women's input, but females occupied a lesser agricultural role in the Bight of Biafra compared to other
African coastal regions. In Biafra, anthropologist Victor Uchendu writes,
"'women'scrops follow the men's." Apart from symbolizing the degradation
of women's role in agriculture,this statement indicates that part of women's
labor (principallyweeding) went to yam production. Women were made to
plant their crops, in Uchendu's words, "between the spaces provided by the
yam hills."39This mentality affected day-to-day decisions and food preference patterns. Because women did not primarily work yam and were not
acknowledged as important in its production, this region's leaders, it would
seem, were more willing to countenance the forced migration of females. By
contrast, in the Gold Coast, Upper Guinea Coast, and West Central Africa,
females were vital to the production of rice or corn, and, as a result, lower
proportions of females were sent into the Atlantic traffic. Interestingly, in
Yorubaland, where men also had a major agricultural role, the proportion of
women sent into the trade is closer to that in the Bight of Biafra than in the
Gold Coast, Upper Guinea Coast, and West Central Africa.40 That the pro38 Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, London, I788), 2I;
Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York, I994; orig. pub. I958), 33-34; Basden, Niger Ibos, 389-90, 394.
39 Uchendu, Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria, 24-25;
Phoebe Ottenberg, "The Changing
Economic Position of Women among the Afikpo Ibo," in William R. Bascom and Melville
Herskovits, eds., Continuity and Change in African Cultures (Chicago, 1959), 207; Ifemesia,
Traditional Humane Living among the Igbo, 62; Amadiume, Male Daughter, Female Husbands,
28-30,
37-38. Among the Owan, northwest of the Igbo, where yam was also gendered, men and
women appeared more powerful in localities where they respectively controlled this crop;
Ogbomo, When Men and Women Mattered, 97.
40 Toyin Falola, The Political Economy of a Pre-Colonial African State: Ibadan, i830-I900
(Ile-Ife, Nigeria, 1984), 54; Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women, trans. Raps, ii. It is important
to note that recent studies of the Yoruba have suggested the fluidity of gender; J. Lorand
Matory, Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

6i

portion of men sent from Yorubaland remained above Biafran levels is possibly owing to other factors, particularly methods of enslavement.
What then was the impact of methods of enslavement on the gender and
age composition of the Atlantic slave trade from the Niger Delta and Cross
River regions? To some extent, enslavement strategies might be expected to
have adjusted to whatever means supplied the market best, but some patterns
in the Bight of Biafra are hard to explain in such terms. People were made
captive through various means: judicial processes, warfare, kidnaping, political disputes, and economic necessity.41 The first three of these accounted for
probably three quarters of the captives.
Warfare was an important source of captives everywhere, but its role
varied from region to region.42 A calculation from a nineteenth-century sample of enslaved Africans liberated from ships bound to the New World suggests that war captives accounted for 34 percent, the largest single category.43
Warriors taken in war were always likely to be exported. Even militarized
states tended to send prisoners of war into the external slave trade. In the
Gold and Slave Coasts, where the evolution of professional armies has been
charted, states also employed raiders by the seventeenth century. William
Bosman reported that "Prisoners and Ornaments of Gold" formed the booty
there. By the eighteenth century, captives became the region's principal
export. Although wars were not necessarily made for capturing people, the
bulk of the captives sold into the Atlantic market were war victims-mostly
combatants in regions that supplied mostly females and children to the
Saharan and domestic markets. The same was true for the Upper Guinea
Coast and eighteenth-century West Central Africa.44
Religion (Minneapolis, I994). Oyeronke Oyewumi has gone as far as denying any notions of the
gender division of labor and suggests that the concept of gender is alien to Yoruba culture. See her
The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis, 1997),
esp. 64-77. Even Jane I. Guyer, "Food, Cocoa, and the Division of Labor by Sex in Two West
African Societies," Comp. Studies Soc, e& Hist., 22 (1980), 362, who deals specifically with gender
division of labor in YoruLbaland,notes in a comparative context that the notion was "phrased inl
terms of pragmatism rather than metaphysics." These are useful pointers. Nevertheless, we must
still come to terms with why one sex was over-represented in some activities and not in others, and
why the sexes were sent into the Atlantic traffic in a significantly unequal distribution.
41 For economic necessity, see John Barbot, A Description of the Coasts of North and South
Guinea . . . (London, 1732), 352, and William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of the
Coast of Guinea, and the Slave Trade (London, [1734] 1971), I59.
42 Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983), 56,
6i, 68-78;
Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History
(Cambridge, 1990),
37-38, ii"; Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic
World, 99, ii0.
43 P.E.H. Hair, "The Enslavement of Koelle's Informants," J. African Hist., 6 (i965),
The sample is culled from S. W. Koelle, Polyglotta Africana (Graz, Aus., [1854] i963).
i96-97.
44 Bosman, New and Accurate Description, i82. For the Gold Coast, see Ray A. Kea,
Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, i882), chap. 4,
and Edward Reynolds, Trade and Economic Change on the Gold Coast, i807-I874
(New York,
in
1974),
9-I5; for the Slave Coast, Law, "Warfare on the West African Slave Coast, i650-I850,"
R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, eds., War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and
and for Upper Guinea Coast, Thornton,
Indigenous Warfare (Santa Fe, N. M., 1992), 103-26;
"Sexual Demography," 42, 45.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

62

After the decline of the overseas slave trade, this outlet was no longer
available. In the Western Sudan, where there was a high incidence of militarist states, conquerorshenceforth massacredthe men they defeated because
they could no longer sell their captives.45In contrast to the Western Sudan,
where the killing of prisoners became widespreadonly following the decline
of the Atlantic slave trade and as a security measure, the characterof Biafran
warfarewas such that the specializedwarriorsof the region focused on headhunting. They cut off heads as a matter of honor, an action that was both
the raisondetre for fighting and an avenue to full citizenship status and prestige in their communities-provided the victims were men. Surviving prisoners tended to be women and children.46That the Upper Guinea Coast,
through which the Western Sudan supplied captives to the Atlantic,
recorded the highest proportion of men and the Bight of Biafra the lowest,
indicates fundamental differences in social processes, including enslavement
mechanisms.The Gold Coast falls between these two regions.
Whereaswarfarein the Bight of Biafrawas biasedagainstthe takingof men
captives, kidnaping tended to focus on children. Kidnappersknew that they
were breaking the law, and the punishment for kidnaping was often harsh.
Victims had to be carriedfar away to preventthem from escapingand to avoid
discovery.Childrenwere easierto captureand confine than adults. Kidnapvictims accountedfor the second largestgroup-30 percent-in the sampleof liberatedAfricansand were probablyeven more importantin the Bight of Biafra.47
In many cases,the meansby which a personbecamecaptivewas more important
than his or her marketvaluein determiningwherethat personwas sold.48
Despite these pressuresleading to the large number of women and children among those forced into the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra, men
were always among the war victims and the kidnaped, and other methods of
enslavement ensured the predominance of males overall. Judicial processes
and, more specifically, political strugglesguaranteedthat men were well represented.49Those sent away on account of rivalry,dissent, or other acts considered deviant were usually men. If the Atlantic slave trade served African
rulers as an avenue for punishing offenders, it also served as a way of getting
45 Klein, "Women in Slavery," 72; Claude Meillassoux, "The Role of Slavery in the
Economic and Social History of Sahelo-SudanicAfrica," in Inikori, ed., ForcedMigration: The
Impactof the ExportSlave Tradeon AfiricanSocieties(New York, i982), 89, 90.
46 Nwokeji, "Household and Market Persons."
47 Edna Bay, Wivesof the Leopard:Gender,Politics,and Culturein the Kingdomof Dahomey
(Charlottesville,i998), io6-07; Snelgrave,New Accountof SomePartsof the Coastof Guinea,37-38.
48 It neverthelessis unlikely that kidnaping was the predominant means of enslavement in
the region as some scholars have maintained. See Isichei, History of the Igbo People, 45-47;
Northrup, Trade Without Rulers, 77-80;
John N. Oriji, "The Slave Trade, Warfare and Aro
Expansion in the Igbo Hinterland," Transafrican Journal of History, i6 (1987),
i6i-63; and
Geggus, "Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity," 40. For examples of kidnaping see Olaudah Equiano,
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano Written by Himself ed. Robert J. Allison
(Boston, I995), and Vernon H. Nelson, ed., "Archibald John Monteith: Native Helper and
Assistant in the Jamaica Mission at New Carmel [1853]," Moravian Historical Society Transactions,
2i

(i966),

29-52.

49 Nwokeji, "Biafran Markets and Slaves," and "Household and Market Persons." The following summary is from Nwokeji, "Household and Market Persons."

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

63

rid of political enemies with little or no cost.50This practice was distinct in

the Bight of Biafra,according to two Liverpool ship's masters,CaptainsJohn
Adams and Hugh Crow, both of whom specialized in the Biafran trade in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They identify a group of
high-born Igbo regularlysent into the overseas traffic, despite a tendency to
revolt and incite revolt and ships' masters'aversion to taking them aboard.51
These would likely have been mostly political deportees.
If the share of females entering the trade in the Bight of Biafra was
apparentlyalways largerthan that of other majorAfrican regions, why did it
decreaseover time? In Niger Delta and Cross River ports, the percentage of
females remained near parity until the first quarterof the eighteenth century,
fell to about 4I percent in the third quarter,when it stabilized, and fell again
in the fourth quarterto just above one-third, a figure that held for as long as
the trade lasted in the nineteenth century. The second-quarter plateau
between these downward shifts coincides with the rise of Bonny to its position as a major departurepoint. The decline in the share of females affected
all African regions, but in the Bight of Biafrait appearsto be associatedwith
anotheraspect of the expansionof the Aro network.As the Aro expandedinto
central Igboland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they
began to draw on women from the Nri-Awka region of central Igboland for
wives. This practiceleft fewer females for the Atlantic traffic.
The central importanceof reproducingthe lineage in most African societies accounts for this behavior.Associationwith large groups of people in the
form of kinship networks conferred a prestige separate from the economic
rewards that the labor of those people generated. Lineages could expand
through the addition of outsidersor through naturalincrease.In most parts of
Atlantic Africa, procreationwas the primarymeans of expansion. In late nineteenth-centuryBenin, the Dutch witness David Van Nyendael observed that
"the fruitful Woman is highly valued, whilst the Barren is despised."52
Similarly,according to Coquery-Vidrovitch,the African "woman'svalue and
status depended first on her fertilityand second on her cooperativeness,initiative, and ability to work."53 Among Igbo women, bearing children was a source
of joy: daughters would strengthen existing ties and create new ones, and sons
would consolidate a woman's place in her husband's lineage. Not having children often led to a miserable life, and Igbo folk tales suggest that infertile
women were mocked. Other patrilineal societies would have replicated this pattern, albeit in varying degrees. A key characteristic of lineage expansion is the
importance attached to sons, especially in patrilineal societies.
50 CuLrtin, Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, ii9, i20, and "The Tropical Atlantic in
the Age of the Slave Trade," in Michael Adas, ed., Islamic and European Expansion: The Forging
ofa Global Order (Philadelphia, I993), I77.
51 Adams, Sketches Taken during Ten Voyages to Africa, VI; Crow, Memoirs of the Late
on the slave coast, see Edna Bay,
Captain Hugh Crow, i99. For a similar phenomenon
"Dahomian Political Exile and the Atlantic Slave Trade," in Lovejoy, Identifying Enslaved
Africans, who finds that Dahomian princes of the Slave Coast utilized deportation to humiliate
defeated rivals-a punishment deemed worse than execution.
52 Van Nyendael, "Description of Rio Formosa," 447, 462, 463.
53 Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women, trans. Raps, i6.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

64

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Although such values are scarcelyunique to the Igbo, the extension of Aro
influence had some exceptional featuresthat have implications for the falling
female ratios in the Bight of Biafra. The Aro network was the only nonMuslim tradediasporaand the only largeAfricanorganizationespousingwhat
Uchendu describes as "big compound" ideals to acquire slaves primarily by
trade.54Military activity was probablyless important a means of getting captives than in other regions.The Aro did not rule directlyover the sourcepopulations, and their influence spread primarily through trade and cultural
prestige, not conquest. They augmented their own population through the
massive incorporation of people as immigrants, refugees, clients, and slaves.
The Aro acquired women principally as wives and overall absorbed more
females from central Igboland than males. The men they did take in-by
whatevermeans-invariably found wives from elsewhere.In other words, for
each new male entrant, there was at least one female entrant as a wife. A prin-

cipal mechanism ensuring this practice was that immigrants, including exslaves, could not normally marry Aro women. Among the rest, they often
chose to marry from their natal homes. In this, they had the encouragement of

Aro men who themselves saw the region as a prime reservoirof wives. The
preferencefor Nri-Awka women derived from the Aro drive to expand business ties and a belief, firmly entrenched by the nineteenth century, that NriAwka women made good wives. In a situation where most marriages
originated from third-party introductions, commercial and nuptial ties reinforced each other. Many Aro from the central Igbo settlements were the sons
or grandsons of Nri-Awka women. It is difficult to find a man who did not
marry from the Nri-Awka region.
The economic realities of Aro expansion and the social and cultural constructs that went with it thus account for at least part of the decrease in the
female export ratio during the apogee of the slave trade. The incidence of
people from this region in export samples varies inversely with Aro incursion
into central Igboland. The Aro preferred Nri-Awka people to other groups
when taking immigrants into their own society.55 The Aro tendency to accumulate women would have contributed to the decline in the ratio of women
leaving the Bight of Biafra. Whereas women made up 46 percent of departures between i65o and I700, they accounted for a mere I5 percent in the last
quarter of the trade. Yet the proportion of girls leaving increased over the
same period, and, while their share of the trade moved erratically, about a
third of that increase occurred in the nineteenth century. Despite the dramatic fall in the portion of women, polygyny-an institution that both fascinated and remained largely beyond the comprehension of European visitors to
Atlantic Africa-does not appear to have been much of a factor either in shaping or being shaped by the demographic composition of the slave trade,
notwithstanding the strong opinions of some modern scholars.56 There is no
54 Uchendu, Igbo of SoutheastNigeria, 54-56.
55 Nwokeji, "Household and Market Persons."
56 CuLrtinhas observed that "polygyny stood out as a special evil" to Europeans of the
Enlightenmentin Image of Africa. BritishIdeasand Actions,i780-i850 (Madison, i964), 252. The
Britishslave traderJohn Hippisley pointed to the genderimbalanceof exportcaptivesand men lost
to wars. But the tendency for the richest men to have many wives "does not prevent the poorest

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

GENDER AND THE SLAVETRAFFIC

65

evidence in the Bight of Biafraof a rising incidence of polygyny during or after

the expansion of captive departuresfrom the region. The one qualificationto
this assessmentis the rise of what historian NakanyikeMusisi in another context calls "elite polygyny"-defined as marryingmore than four wives-in the
mid-nineteenth century, by which time the palm oil trade had become more
valuable than the slave trade.57In the slave trade era, dramatic examples of
polygyny tend to come from the Slave Coast and West CentralAfrica rather
than from the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast. Bosman reported that in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Gold Coast men
"content[ed]themselveswith one, two, three, and the most considerableMen,
with eight, ten or twenty Wives," while men in the Bight of Benin port town
of Whydah had "forty or fifty, and their chief Captains three or four
Hundred, some one Thousand, and the King betwixt four and five
Thousand."Joseph Miller documents that "the numbers of young wives surrounding older males . . . astonishedvisitors to the interiorof Angola"in West
Central Africa.58This difference between the Bight of Biafra and the Gold
Coast on the one hand and the Slave Coast and West Central Africa on the
other could be either cause or effect of the higher proportions of females
among the captivessent from these regions.
The sex ratio does not, however, appearto be the principalfactor driving
polygyny. In one region in Kongo (West CentralAfrica), for instance, a baptismal registerfor the yearsI774 and I775 revealsthat only fifty-four (io.6 percent) of the 507 families recorded were polygynous. Among this polygynous
group, perhapsforty-six(9.2 percent of the whole register)had only two wives.
Only one man, described as "the lord of the area,"had as many as four. As
John Thornton notes, "the majority of marriageswere monogamous."59 His
conclusion accordswith conditions in the Bight of Biafrabeyond the trading
states. Yet, while West Central Africa sent into the Atlantic slave trade the
lowest proportionof femalesafter the Upper Guinea Coast, the Bight of Biafra
sent the highest. This comparisonsuggests that polygyny was not universalin
Africa and that men marriedwomen, not simply becauseof the abundanceof
women, but becausemen needed women's labor and reproductiveresources.
In the final decadesof the slave trade from the Bight of Biafra,the declining female ratio was reinforcedby a change in the economic role of women in
the Niger Delta and Cross River areas. Palm oil production became a major
activity in the region. Becausepalm oil was a labor-intensiveindustryin which
from havingone or two.... The numberof women must, therefore,exceed that of men"in On the
Populousness
of Africa(London, 1764), i4-i6, i6n. For a modern opinion that the tradeencouraged
polygynysee Manning, Slaveiyand AfricanLife, 42, and "Enslavementof Africans,"501, 503.
57 Musisi, "Women, 'Elite Polygyny,' and Buganda State Formation," Signs, i6, (is9i),
757-86; Nwokeji, "BiafranFrontier,"chap. 6.
58 Bosman, New and AccurateDescriptionof the Coastof Guinea,344. The importanceof sex
ratios in polygyny is well recognized by modern scholars, for example, Manning, Slaveryand
African Life, 42, and "Enslavement of Africans," 50I, 503; Miller, Way of Death, i63; and
Thornton, "SlaveTrade in Eighteenth-CenturyAngola,"425.
59 Thornton, "An Eighteenth-CenturyBaptismalRegisterand the Demographic History of
ManguLenzo,"in Christopher Fyfe and David MacMaster, eds., African Historical Demography
(proceedingsof a seminarheld in the Center of AfricanStudies, Universityof Edinburgh,Apr. 29,
30,

1977),

411-12.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

66

WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

the Aro had a major role (though less so than the slave trade) and because
by the late i830s the value of palm oil exports surpassed those of captives
sent to the Americas, the pressures on the Aro to hold women at home are
evident. Less easy is a quantitativeassessmentof this effect.
African conceptions of gender shaped the sex and age structure of the
overseasslave trade. These constructs emerged from factors altogether more
profound than the merely economic. The unusual Bight of Biafransex ratio is
perhaps best explained by the cultural determinantsof the male and female
roles in agricultureand by enslavementmethods in an environmentof decentralizedpolitical power. The convergenceof these factors, together with marginal contact with Saharanmarkets,resultedin large numbersof women being
sent into the overseas trade. The only other area with a gender division of
labor similar to that of Biafrawas the Yorubaregion in the Bight of Benin. It
recordeda lower percentageof female departures,which may be attributedto
two causes. First, unlike in Biafra,Yorubamen did not play a major role in
agriculture,at least to the extent of reservingfor themselvesthe cultivation of
the most significant crops. Second, warfarewas a more important means of
procuring captives in Yorubaland,especially during the nineteenth century.
For the gradualdecreasein female ratios over time, the peculiarnature of Aro
expansion and the associateddrive to incorporatenew members into the lineage appear to be important in the Bight of Biafra.The Atlantic slave trade
intensified gender inequality everywhere,a development that also created a
wider role for women (and thereforean increaseddemand for women in the
domestic economies) so that this process may have been self-correctingin the
long run.
It is not the intention here to ignore the economic impulse, or indeed the
economic basis of African slaving, but, as anthropologist Peter Gose notes,
culture is played out in the understanding and practice of the economic
process.60In this respect,there is no contradictionbetween the demand conditions and prices in Africa encouraging the expansion of trade, on the one
hand, and cultural elements shaping the categoriesof export captives, on the
other. These are complementary,not contradictory,variables.Two implications may be drawn from this interplay of supply and demand (broadly
defined). First, whereasslaversdecided on whom they sold, they directedtheir
captives to the best available markets. Second, demand from the Americas
affected the composition of export captives but so also did supply conditions
in Africa. Without Euro-Americandemand for captives, many fewer persons
would have been kidnaped, captured in war, or fallen victim to judicial
processes. Such captives were procured in response to demand. But the
processes by which people became captive took form in the framework of
African culture and political economy, touching on the general division of
labor, slavery,the lineage principle,and changingideas about gender.
60 Gose, Deathly Watersand
HunggyMountains:AgrarianRitual and ClassFormationin an
Andean Town (Toronto, 1994), xii.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TABLE I
WOMEN,

GIRLS, MEN,

AND

Boys LEAVING

THE BIGHT OF BIAFRA AND ALL

SELECTED QUARTERS,

1651-1675
1676-1700
1701-1725
1751-1775
1776-1800
1801-1825
1826-1850
1651-1850

i65I-I850

(IN PERCENTS)

Women
Biafra All OtherRegions

Girls
Me
Biafra All OtherRegions Biafra All O

46.2
47.7
38.1
24.2
32.9
20.7
15.4
29.5

4.1
3.4
10.2
16.9
9.7
15.0
18.8
12.0

39.4
35.4
27.6
26.6
26.8
19.2
17.2
26.4

2.2
3.7
5.6
10.8
7.2
9.0
14.9
8.2

41.0
42.5
38
41.5
47.5
49.6
45.3
45.3

The quarter 1726-I750

is omitted for lack of data. For a full presentation of the data for i65I-I850,
cance, see http://www.wm.edu/oieahc.
Rows do not always total i00 percent owing to varying sample sizes
Source: Calculated from David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein,
CD-ROM (Cambridge, i999), with additional data supplied by the authors.

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

TABLE II
WOMEN,

MEN,

Boys,

AND GIRLS LEAVING MAJOR EMBARKATION POINT

SELECTED QUARTERS, i65I-I850

Women
Bonny!
Old Calabar
New Calabar
1651-1675
1676-1700
1776-1800
1801-1825
1826-1850
1651-1850

46.3
45.4
37.8
21.3
13.7
31.2

45.7
50.5
30.7
19.7
15.9
30.9

(IN PERCENTS

Girls
M
Bonny!
Old Calabar Bonny!
New Calabar
New Calabar
4.2
3.9
8.2
17.9
17.8
11.0

3.7
3.2
10.5
13.4
19.2
12.4

39.2
44.2
46.8
49.6
51.3
47.3

The quarters 1701-I725, I7z6-I750, and I75I-I775 are omitted for lack of data. For a full presentation
sures of variance and tests of significance, see http://www.wm.edu/oieahc.
Rows do not always total ioo p
graphic group.
Source: Calculated from Eltis et al., eds., Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, with additional data s

This content downloaded from 200.130.19.155 on Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:00:05 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions