Olatunji Ojo

SLAVERY, FREEDOM, AND FAILED RANSOM NEGOTIATIONS IN WEST AFRICA, 1730–1900

This article builds upon previous work on the impact of ransoming on processes of captivity, enslavement, and slavery in West Africa. Ransoming is defined as the release of a captive prior to enslavement in exchange for payment. It was a complicated process with no guarantee of success. This article examines the responses of families of captives to the failure of ransom negotiations. The ability to respond to failed ransom negotiations and the type of response chosen was dependent on the political climate and the resources available to those seeking the release of a captive.

The diaspora of Africans liberated from slave ships in the nineteenth century

This article uses the extensive documentation of Africans liberated from slave vessels to explore issues of identity and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It tracks the size, origin, and movement of the Liberated African diaspora, offers a preliminary analysis of the ‘disposal’ of African recaptives in societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and assesses the opportunities Liberated Africans had in shaping their post-disembarkation experiences. While nearly all Liberated Africans were pulled at least partly into the Atlantic wage economy, the article concludes that recaptive communities in Freetown and its hinterland most closely met the aspirations of the Liberated Africans themselves while the fate of recaptives settled in the Americas paralleled those who were enslaved.

'Heepa' (Hail) Òrìşà: The Òrìsà Factor in the Birth of Yoruba Identity

The popularization of Christianity and Islam among Yoruba-speaking slaves in the diaspora is widely seen as the root of Yoruba ethnic consciousness. Returning ex-slaves, Christians, and British colonialists starting in the 1830s, in a form of reversing sail, propagated this identity in the homeland among those who did not cross the Atlantic. This essay suggests that the focus on world religions offers only a partial explanation of the evolution of this consciousness in the homeland. The essay identifies what role orisa worship practice and its conductors played in the birth of Yoruba ethnicity. It argues that as in the diaspora, nineteenth-century homeland Yoruba witnessed substantial population mixture, urbanism and interethnic marriage in ways that transformed orisa from local to regional symbols. Based on the web of links created among the Yoruba, the prescriptions of diasporic Yoruba and their supporters could be understood and accepted by the majority of those left behind because they drew upon existing commonly shared beliefs. Nonetheless, these conditions were not sufficient for the birth of a nation. The nation needs its advocates. Returning Yoruba ex-slaves, aided by the Christian church and European colonialists, reduced Yoruba language into writing and made the text the symbol through which others were persuaded and trained to accept the Yoruba nation. In the diaspora and later the homeland, common language distinguished the Yoruba from their neighbors, especially the multitude of ethnicities that merged into the Nigerian state.

Beyond diversity: women, scarification, and Yoruba identity

On 18 March 1898 Okolu, an Ijesa man, accused Otunba of Italemo ward, Ondo of seizing and enslaving his sister Osun and his niece. Both mother and daughter, enslaved by the Ikale in 1894, had fled from their master in 1895, but as they headed toward Ilesa, the accused seized them. Osun claimed the accused forced her to become his wife, “hoe a farm,” and marked her daughters face with one deep, bold line on each cheek. Otunba denied the slavery charge, claiming he only “rescued [Osun] from Soba who was taking her away [and] took her for wife.” Itoyimaki, a defense witness, supported the claim that Osun was not Otunbas slave. In his decision, Albert Erharhdt, the presiding British Commissioner, freed the captives and ordered the accused to pay a fine of two pounds. In addition to integrating Osun through marriage, the mark conferred on her daughter a standard feature of Ondo identity. Although this case came up late in the nineteenth century, it represents a trend in precolonial Yorubaland whereby marriages and esthetics served the purpose of ethnic incorporation.Studies on the roots of African ethnic identity consciousness have concentrated mostly on the activities of outsiders, usually Euro-American Christian missions, repatriated ex-slaves, and Muslims, whose ideas of nations as geocultural entities were applied to various African groups during the era of the slave trade and, more intensely, under colonialism. For instance, prior to the late nineteenth century, the people now called Yoruba were divided into multiple opposing ethnicities. Ethnic wars displaced millions of people, including about a million Yoruba-speakers deported as slaves to the Americas, Sierra Leone, and the central Sudan, mostly between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Child Slaves in Pre-colonial Nigeria, c.1725–1860

During the eighteenth century, the number of child slaves leaving the ‘Nigerian’ region for the Americas increased and almost doubled after 1820. While the increase reflected shifts in the operations of the Atlantic trade, it also revealed the significance of slavery in pre-colonial Nigerian societies, which historically retained more child slaves than were sold abroad, even when the productivity of some children was uncertain. With a focus on the internal (intra-Nigeria) slave trade, this article examines the attraction of child slaves, their modes of enslavement, treatment and status, and the impact of slavery on children.

The transatlantic Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the nineteenth century

Abstract Since the 16th century, African Muslims figured prominently among the slave population of the Americas. While the number of Muslims pulled into the trade has always been a matter of speculation, lists of Africans rescued from slave ships provide us with some clues about the size and direction of the Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the 19th century. Based on an analysis of tens of thousands of names recorded in these lists, this essay argues that the majority of Muslim captives leaving Africa departed from Upper Guinea and suggests that Cuba was the center of the forced Muslim diaspora in the Americas. It traces the transatlantic links that connected particular regions of embarkation in Africa to their counterparts in Latin America and considers the implications of those connections for religious and cultural change within 19th-century slave populations. The essay challenges in important ways the colonial/postcolonial divide in Latin American history and uses Islam to pose important questions about the dynamics of social change across slave societies.

‘LUCUMÍ’, ‘TERRANOVA’, AND THE ORIGINS OF THE YORUBA NATION

The etymology of ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Terranova’, ethnonyms used to describe Yoruba-speaking people during the Atlantic slave trade, helps to reconceptualize the origins of a Yoruba nation. While there is general agreement that ‘Lucumi’ refers to the Yoruba in diaspora, the origin of the term remains unclear. We argue ‘Lucumi’ was first used in the Benin kingdom as early as the fifteenth century, as revealed through the presence of Olukumi communities involved in chalk production. The Benin and Portuguese slave trade extended the use of ‘Lucumi’ to the Americas. As this trade deteriorated by 1550, ‘Terranova’ referred to slaves captured west of Benins area of influence, hence ‘new land’. By the eighteenth century, ‘Nago’ had replaced ‘Lucumi’, while the ‘Slave Coast’ had substituted ‘Terranova’ as terms of reference. This etymology confirms the collective identification of ‘Yoruba’ and helps trace the evolution of a transnational identity.

The Nigeria-Biafra War: genocide and the politics of memory

Volunteers pay organisations to mediate opportunities for them to help Africans and experience a foreign culture. The chapter nicely elaborates the paradox, that this help is different from what local people actually think would help them. Marijke Steegstra explores the awarding of honorary titles of development queens and chiefs to foreigners by Ghanaian local chiefs for their engagement in developing the area. The author argues that the foreigners enjoy the costly ceremony but often misunderstand its objectives and remain in the chief’s installation bubble, whereas the Ghanaian chiefs who are in control of the procedure aim at committing them to long-term friendship, hoping for more gifts and development. Wanjohi Kobicho studies romance tourism and the sex trade in Kenya. As the tourist industry is largely organised by foreign companies, young local women and men are only left with informal business and sex trade. Their activities produce diverging opinions between youth and their elders, and also between the local youth and the tourists who are “physically in the host culture but socially outside” (281). Lucy McCombes pushes these reflections still further when she analyses the Gambian love bubble. She contrasts prostitution with the romance and company that the youth offer to tourists, which is not only about sex and economic gain but more complex and open, as long-term relationships might also emerge. Finally, in her afterword, Annelou Ypeij compares the African tourism encounter and its consequences with that of the Inca Trail in Peru. This valuable book is written in an accessible style and provides exciting insights. It highlights the important role that imagination plays in the encounters and (mis) understandings of people from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. It clarifies that not only the West has its imaginings of Africa (untamed wilderness, dangerous animals, authentic inhabitants) but that local people equally have stereotypical ideas about the tourists and have a stake in the tourism industry. The concept of the bubble helps to explain why these mutual imaginings, both projected onto “the other”, remain so meaningful and long lasting. Most of the chapters provide an excellent analysis of the complexity of these encounters from multiple perspectives and refrain from simplifying dichotomies and moralising tones. The introduction could have gained from being a bit more focused and nuanced, but the further one reads, the more the arguments gain critical weight and detail the complexity of the entanglements between the different stakeholders in Africa’s tourism ventures.

“Shaving of a woman's head”: Isinmo and the Igbo women's war on forced marriages in Southern Nigeria 1900–1936

How, when and to whom should a woman marry, what constitutes marriage and what rights has a woman to influence the selection of her spouse? These and other questions were subjects of intense contestation between young men and women and their parents, on one hand, and, on the other, between commoners and members of the traditional elite in the Western Igbo district of Igbuzo in Southern Nigeria during the early twentieth century. Disputes over marriage rites centred on the politics of isinmo or the shaving of a womans head. Isinmo gave the “barber” exclusive and inalienable rights to the woman. Yet, in what amounted to reversal of tradition, women seeking to end or reduce parental and patriarchal control appropriated some the rituals of isinmo to contest its use and efficacy in the hands of its erstwhile beneficiaries.