Equiano on Igbo Warfare (2)
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Equiano On Igbo Warfare (2) By A E Afigbo Department of History and International Relations Eboyi State University Abakaliki – Ebonyi State NIGERIA There is perhaps little doubt that Olaudah Equiano’s auto-biography, The Interesting Narrative,1 was conceived, written, published and distributed as a work of propaganda against the slave trade under which the author had suffered grievously but which he survived, he claimed, because “God is my Salvation,” and which trade at the time was becoming bad news in Western Europe. In the letter with which he forwarded copies of the book to the British Parliament he had made it clear that “the chief design” of the work was “to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen. By the horrors of that trade was I first torn from all the tender connections that were naturally dear to my heart…”2 There is also little doubt that the author was a gifted propagandist as seen, among other things, in the fact that he recognized the need to give his story an enhanced veneer of verisimilitude by situating it in as many relevant contexts as he could command. The first set of contexts dealt with the period of his life before he was swept into the hated cesspool of slavery. These contexts were his village (Essaka); his nation (the Igbo nation), the, at the time much famed and romanticized, Benin Empire; the West African Region which at the time was the leading source of the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean and across the Sahara Desert, and finally the little known African continent whose maps Swift’s geographers studded with images of elephants and giraffes for ‘want’ of towns! The afore-mentioned contexts formed four concentric rings and carried the foundation of the great literary edifice he erected to remind contemporaries and posterity of, as well as shock them with, the horrors of the slave trade. The first chapter of the book is devoted to a “comprehensive” ethnography of the two inner rings – Essaka and Igboland – a very ambitious project if ever there was one. The focus of this paper is on a very small fragment of this ethnography – a fragment that may be said to deal with Igbo warfare in the eighteenth century in some two pages and a third3. It is debatable indeed whether it could be said that Equiano wrote on ‘Igbo warfare’. What he did, to be precise, was to give an account of what he called ‘a battle’ between his community and a rival ‘nameless’ community which he said took place in one of their farmlands and which he said he had had the opportunity to watch from the top of a tree at a safe distance. According to him the battle was the result of a surprise and unprovoked attack on his community by the rival community. Thus on the side of his community there had been no specific preparation for the battle, while on the other side the story was different. They had chosen their time and place. They had prepared and attacked. But just as one swallow does not make a summer, one battle does not constitute a war. However, after the necessarily brief description of the battle he was privileged to watch, Equiano went on to make some general statements about such encounters. In the process he touched upon their causes, the fact of their frequent and regular occurrence, the fact that Igbo communities were always on the alert and ready for war, the fact that each community consisted of a standing militia and the fact that in Igbo culture war was not just for men but also for women - that is was gender- neutral. He also gave a list of Igbo weapons of war. To this extent it could be said that Equiano wrote on Igbo warfare through the back door. Be that as it may, Equiano’s very sketchy account now carries with it an importance, which is probably out of all proportion to its real historical value and that for one obvious reason. In the millennia before 1900 it is the only such account of Igbo warfare written from inside knowledge that is by one who not only described what he saw or heard or both but also was part of the happening. Without doubt a number of European visitors to the Bight of Biafra during the era of the slave trade have left us some tantalizing comments on the Igbo and on ‘war’ amongst them. John Grazilhier (1699), for instance, talked of “the Hackbous Blacks, a people much addicted to war and preying on their neighbours”4. Similarly Hermann Koler (1840) referred to what he called the “warlike nature” of the Igbo which he identified as one of the things about them that “makes a significant impact on their neighbours”.At another point he reported that the Igbo “are warlike, wild and rapacious” and that some of them “are cannibals”5. These statements were all based on hearsay since until very late in the nineteenth century hardly any European went into Igboland to explore it in any formal or significant manner. On this the scholar-administrator, Harry H. Johnston wrote in 1888 as follows: “For about three centuries we have hung about the coasts, and the terror of the climate, the savagery of the natives, and the bitter rivalry among the European traders, have prevented the exploration of the interior so much so that it is amazing to think that we have been acquainted with the Niger Delta for, as I have said, over three centuries and it is only during the present year, that I as the first white man, have explored many of its important rivers for the first time”6. As already implied such penetrations increased after Johnston’s visit until they led, by the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, to the British conquest and occupation of the whole length and breadth of Igboland and the adjoining territories occupied by the Efik, the Ibibio and the Ekoid Bantu peoples. Yet the changed situation did not immediately bring about remarkable improvement in the quality and quantity of the historical and ethnographic information available to the scholar on the state, societies and institutions of these hinterland peoples of the Bight of Biafra. The early military and administrative records compiled by the British concentrated on what the British did but paid little attention to the state of society in which those actions were taking place. Only from about the mid-1920’s, when it came to be fully recognized that more intimate knowledge of these societies could help reduce the problems encountered in their administration, did conscious effort to understand them begin. Even then more attention was paid to their political organization than to their economic, social and cultural organizations. This skewed approach characterized even the much orchestrated intelligence report investigations, which came after the women’s uprising of 1929. The result was that much of what was written on war in Igbo society continued to be based largely on armchair speculation. It was the same with the study of Igbo warfare in the 1956 by the highly rated Dr. M.D.W. Jeffries who gave it out that Igbo weapons of war were made mostly out of wood.7 The situation began to change only from the late 1970’s when those of us in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, introduced the long essay as part of the requirements for the B.A. degree and also instituted a post-graduate programme in history. Both innovations required students benefiting from them to go into the field to collect oral information with which to supplement the written records available to them. Some of the results of this effort, that is the collections of the undergraduates, are included in Professor Elizabeth Isichei’s anthology on the Igbo entitled Igbo Worlds. Now most of the undergraduates, at least in the early years of the programme, were made to write their long essays on topics dealing with the pre-colonial period. It is with the results of these investigations and others related to them that we shall interrogate Olaudah Equiano on his account of Igbo warfare. Our belief is that Igbo society did not undergo any radical socio-political revolution between about 1750 and the colonial century (1860 – 1960) and therefore that we should still have, by the time of these inquiries, in the traditions of the elders survivals of those apparently important features of Igbo warfare highlighted by Equiano in his work.. Igbo Wars: Causation. To Equiano Igbo wars were caused by slave raids which, according to him, were one of the two main methods of recruiting the millions of men and women shipped into slavery across the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Ocean – the second method being by kidnapping. This, he said, was so not only for Igboland but also for all of Africa. “From what I can recollect of these battles”, he claimed, “they appear to have been irruptions of one little state or district on the other, to obtain prisoners or booty. Perhaps they were incited to this by those traders who brought the European goods I mentioned amongst us. Such a mode of obtaining slaves in Africa is common; and I believe more are procured in this way, and by kidnapping, than any other”8 . Equiano was the first to introduce the factor of slave raids as an important one in the explanation of aspects of Igbo history.