This piece was written by my brother. I have his permission to share it.



“...dey bring duh Ibos [Igbos] obuh [over] in a slabe [slave] ship, an’ wen dey git yuh [here], dey ain’ lak [like] it, an’ so dey all staht singin an’ deh mahch right down in duh ribbuh [river] tuh mahch back tuh Africa, but dey ain’ able to git deah. Dey gits drown.” – Floyd White, native of St Simon’s Island, Georgia (published in “Drums and Shadows”, 1940)

WRITER’S FORENOTE: Two hundred and ten years ago, a group of men, women and children were forcibly removed from their homes in south-eastern Nigeria, and transported to the New World to work as slaves on the cotton plantations of Georgia. There, on the eastern shores of America, they made a difficult choice. A choice that entailed making the ultimate sacrifice to regain their freedom and preserve their pride as human beings. Today, their story endures – a lasting monument to Liberty, Dignity and Courage, an inspiration to trampled people everywhere, especially people of colour.

May, 1803
Savannah, Georgia

It was six days ago that the slave ship, The Wanderer, entered the port of Savannah. The door of the hold was flung open, and from the bowels of the ship drifted 116 wretched half-naked black bodies. Their collective, sickening stench invaded the air above the deck even before they were seen.
“Filthy n.iggers”, one of the crewmen, a red-bearded fellow called O’Keeffe, mumbled, wrinkling his nose.
“Well, you didn’t mind the stench when you were bedding their wenches, did ya?” the captain’s First Mate, a man called Smitty, said with a yellow-toothed grin. O’Keeffe returned the grin with a wink.
“All right, move those lazy Guinea a.rses! We haven’t got all day now!” he yelled at the timid-eyed dusky captives, raising his whipping rope threateningly. The Africans didn’t understand the man’s words, but they understood the hard tone. And after a couple of months aboard the ship, they understood the whipping rope, too.

They scuttled out of the ship’s hold like frightened rabbits, the heavy chains around their necks and limbs making melancholy music as they clanged against one another and thudded against the wooden deck. Their empty dark eyes told a hundred sad stories.

Uchendu, a tall lean bitter teenage boy, had hardly said a word to his fellow captives since that morning, nearly twenty days ago, when his little sister Elimma had cut through the ship’s netting and flung herself into the sea – ‘the river without shores’.
“I can’t stand it anymore, Uche,” she had told her brother. “They hurt me.” And his brother had understood. Uchendu had mourned his sister for days, bathing his face in tears, and would touch no food. Then the white man with a red beard – O’Keeffe – brought an iron implement, put it in the slave boy’s mouth and forced his jaws wide apart. Another man shoved maize grits and palm oil down his throat.

“I know you Eboe niggers prefer your foul-smelling eddoes and your yams, but while you’re on our ship, you eat what we give you, or I rip your niggerhide from your bones. You hear me, little Guinea boy?”
Each time Uchendu refused touching his food – which was every meal-time – the iron equipment appeared. Now his jaw muscles appeared to have gone lax. His mouth hung helplessly half-open. O’Keeffe’s iron had permanently marred him.
“I don’t know which is more evil – what they did to your jaw or what they did to Uduma’s back,” Hieoma whispered to him in her strange-sounding Isu dialect as they were being driven out of the ship, still in heavy shackles, and into the white people’s town. In more pleasant circumstances, he would have liked Hieoma. She was the only one he would talk to since his sister leapt to her watery death.

Hieoma was no older than him, yet she reminded him of his own mother. Perhaps, it was the maternal way she loved and cared for Nwa Nta, the youngest one among them – a boy barely out of infancy. Or perhaps it was the uncommon strength she possessed. Sometimes, while everyone else pined, she would burst into song. And her songs reminded Uchendu of the songs his mother sang as she tended her fermenting cassava by the rivulet. He wondered what his mother was doing now....

Behind Uchendu and Hieoma walked two young girls manacled together. The shorter of the two girls was called Egele, and she was uncommonly beautiful. Her skin was a clear brazen hue, and her nose stood straight like a maiden spirit’s. The other girl, Akudo, was thin and ungainly, and had the scared eyes of a cornered rodent. Between them they barely had enough cloth to cover one vulva.

There had been a time when they each had a dozen strips of indigo-dyed cotton cloth, as many waistbands of red carnelian beads, and anklets upon anklets of beaten copper. Egele had even owned two ivory bracelets! They were gifts from her suitor Aguoha, a wealthy chief of the Uraata Clan.

Then nine months ago, they were returning from a wedding feast in a nearby village when they walked into an ambush. Their captors tore their finery off them, and marched them on the long torturous path through forest and swamp to the coast town of Bonny. That wedding feast would be their last gay moments. From then on, they would feel only pain – the pain of losing family and playmates; the pain of swollen white manhood thrusting through the tatters of their maidenheads....

“Move along, I say!” O’Keeffe was yelling. “No monkeying around! This is not another tree-swinging day in your goddamned Guinea!”
The 116 slaves were herded into what looked like a very large four-sided hut, some distance away from the waterfront, and promptly locked up. The floor of the ‘hut’ was covered with rotting grass and bovine excrement, but at least it was more spacious than the ship’s hold. It was more airy too. One side of the big ‘hut’ was made entirely of regularly spaced iron bars so that the slaves could see the strange people of the little town of Savannah as they went about their business. And what strange people they were, in their funny clothes and hats! Some of the people were black, like themselves; they appeared to be the servants of the white people. And some of them rode in wheeled boxes drawn by horses.
“What sort of beasts are those!” Hieoma gasped.
“You mean the horses – inyinya?” Aniaso asked her in his genial voice. He was a middle-aged man with a calm face that radiated intelligence. His forehead was etched with deep scarification reaching down almost to the bridge of his nose and the corners of his eyes. Ichi marks, he called them. They were marks of nobility among his Nri people, he had said. Hieoma thought the marks made him look a bit frightful.
“Don’t you have inyinya in your clan?” Aniaso asked.
Hieoma shook her head. “No.”
“Ah! The markets of Igbo Uwenu are filled with them. In some clans, when a man wants to take a title, he goes and buys an inyinya – and they are very expensive.”

Uduma – the burly one with raw whip wales on his back – grunted. “Horses are more common than fodder where I come from,” he said. His dialect was so queer only a few people understood him.
“My father killed fifteen horses when he took his own title! If you go to Edda today, and you hear people speak of Ogbuinya Ekuma Nkama Okpani, know that they speak of my father...”
“It was Edda raiders who attacked my village,” a woman, Mgboli, cut in with a sharp accusing tone. All was silent and awkward after that.

They slept six nights in the big ‘hut’ with iron bars. Then on the seventh day, three white men in dark clothes and long hats came to inspect them. The visitors felt the flesh of Uduma’s arms and ran their fingers over the scars on his back. The pain made him stiffen. They looked at Uchendu’s teeth, and were puzzled by Aniaso’s scarification. One of them seized Hieoma’s breasts, and another one smacked her behind and chuckled at the quivering bottom fat. The one who had smacked Hieoma walked over to Egele and roughly held her face up.
“Fine wench. Was she good when you bedded her, Captain?” he asked with a lewd wink, turning to the fourth white man in the room, Mr Grimsby, captain and owner of The Wanderer. Mr Grimsby kept a straight face.
“You like my merchandise Mr Bickenstein?” Mr Grimsby addressed the most business-like of the three men, a stout monocled man.
“Yes, yes, Captain. However it does state in these papers that these are Eboe Negroes purchased in Bonny on the Bight of Biafra,” Mr Bickenstein said, fixing his monocle in place, and examining the papers in his hands.
“I don’t see how that is a problem, sir.” Mr Grimsby blinked.
“Well, my employers, Messrs Cooper and Spalding, were made to understand these slaves were from the Gambia.”
“Come now, sir! Negroes are Negroes!”
“Everybody in this business knows Eboe Negroes are no good for hard work and are highly suicidal. I’m sure you know that quite well, Captain Grimsby!”
“We-we can come to an agreement, can’t we, Mr Bickenstein?” Grimsby stammered.
“Certainly. I’m knocking twenty percent off the agreed price. Have them washed before delivering them to our vessel. I know niggers smell like pigs, but these ones are worse than festering corpses. ” And he smiled. A yes-I-am-ripping-you-off kind of smile.

Twenty of the captives were immediately picked out and taken out of the ‘hut’. Aniaso and Uduma were among those selected. Egele and Akudo were selected, too. And Uchendu. And the little boy known as Nwa Nta. But Hieoma was not picked.

The boy Nwa Nta clung to Hieoma’s waist and cried. Hieoma was like the mother he had lost; and now they were to be separated. His true mother had been executed for sorcery by the votaries of the god Chukwu Ukpabi, and he was then sold to the water people. The impatient slave drivers clawed the weeping pair apart and hustled Nwa Nta out of the room with the other nineteen. The twenty would never see the others again.

There was a little ship out on the harbour, The Moravia, and it quickly became clear to the twenty that they were going to board it.
“I’m not getting on another white man’s house-canoe!” Uduma roared. “I swear by seven generations of my family and all the war gods of Edda and all the spirits of Enyimu, I’m not!”
“Oi! Don’t hold up the line, Guinea boy!” The undeciphered words were followed by half a dozen lashes to Uduma’s back. The skin broke. Blood coloured his back. But Uduma dug his feet deeper into the sand.
“A bone-headed one, I see”, the man with the lash said. “I’ll tear up your back so badly, you can look through and see your heart, if you don’t get moving now!”
“Uduma”, it was the wise Aniaso. “The ram’s stubbornness can never save it from the butcher’s knife.”
“At least the butcher can say he wrestled with a fellow male!” Uduma countered through clenched teeth, as another shower of lashes rained on his back
“You are a man of courage, Uduma. But the leopard’s stealth is often better than the ram’s head-on charge. The impatient sheep births a weak-skulled lamb.”
“Speak plainly to me, nwichi!” Uduma fired. Aniaso only smiled, and then said, “We will enter the white man’s house-canoe. Then we will make a plan. We will be free again.”

So the twenty captives huddled below the decks on The Moravia and plotted in whispers; as though they were afraid the white men on deck could overhear and understand. Because it was a short voyage, the crew hadn’t bothered shackling the slaves to their bedposts; they had only been chained in twos and locked up in the hold.

So when Richard Roswell, the young ship hand, went down into the hold to refill the slaves’ water trough, he was surprised. Some forty black hands grabbed him and threw him on deck. Then the slaves came up after him. Roswell lay on the floor for a while, his blanched face a mask of terror. He finally scrambled to his feet, and scampered off towards the captain’s cabin, screaming on the top of his lungs: “Captain Patterson! Captain Patterson! Mutiny! Mutiny!”

The scream drew Captain Patterson out of a nap. He came out on deck just in time to see the Negroes he was transporting to St Simon’s Island hurling the mast boy and the deck cleaner into the ocean. There was a man lying face down on the deck; he looked like his First Mate. Patterson pulled out his gun. No nigger was going to scare him. They were just a bunch of fainthearts anyway. He fired a shot.
“What in God’s name are you shooting at, Captain Patterson?” It had taken the gun’s loud report to stir Mr Bickenstein from his bed, and he was still rubbing his eyes.
Patterson was already reloading his gun. Bickenstein’s eyes suddenly widened into balls as he realised what was going on.
“Good Lord, is it a mutiny?”
“No, sir. I decided to break my nap and practise my shooting on your wild n.iggers,” came the captain’s sarcastic reply.
“You can’t shoot the cargo! Mr Spalding will be cross!”
“Mr Spalding can take a spit to his stiff Baptist Georgian a.rse! This is my ship!” He fired another shot. A young Negro boy clutched his belly and crumpled to the floor. It was Nwa Nta.
“For God’s sake use a whip! Use a whip, Captain! And where are Braide and Greenstone and Stuart?”
Patterson was not listening; he was reloading his gun. Bickenstein grabbed the gun.
“What are you doing?” Patterson spat.
“Protecting Mr Spalding’s investment! Use a whip, I say!”

They didn’t notice Uduma and Aniaso sneak up behind them, until Uduma dealt Patterson a sharp blow on the head with a wooden pole. He fell to the floor senseless. Aniaso reached down and took the gun. He had owned a flintlock back home, and so he understood its mechanism. Bickenstein backed away hurriedly, and voluntarily dumped his stout frame in the Atlantic.
“That’s the last of them,” said Uduma. “We should throw this one into the waters, too.”
The two men carried the unconscious captain to the ship’s edge and tossed him over. Then they returned to the others. Mgboli was holding the dead Nwa Nta in her arms. They were chained together. No one cried, but they were all cold with grief.
“Can you drive the canoe back to our own land?” Uchendu asked Aniaso – he was after all, the wisest among them. Aniaso smiled and shook his head.
“Ngene and Ogwugwu, and all the water spirits shall guide us. These waters brought us here. These waters shall take us home.”
It was late evening when The Moravia ran aground on an island. The black passengers didn’t know it, but it was the Island of St Simon’s – the same place their buyers had been taking them.
“Do you think maybe this is our land?” Egele asked. It was a joke. No one laughed. But they all went ashore. There was a swamp nearby. They spotted a man standing calf-deep in the stagnant water. A white man. The man had seen their ship run aground, and he was befuddled when he saw there were only blacks aboard.
“Elijah! Would you be kind enough to come out here for a second?” he called out to someone the Africans could not see. A second white man broke out from the surrounding sedge, and the black strangers saw he was huge and muscular. He held a very long gun in his hands.
“No. I’m not getting captured again,” Egele moaned, before turning round and marching towards the sea, dragging Akudo with her. Mgboli followed them, still bearing lifeless little Nwa Nta in her arms. Aniaso stood undecided for a long moment. His eyes reddened, and water pooled in them. He raised his voice and began a chant. Then he too turned and marched towards the sea, still chanting. Uchendu picked up the chant. And soon all nineteen black souls were chanting in unison as they walked into the Atlantic:

Ngene chebe anyi; Ogwugwu chebe anyi
Orimili k’anyi so bia; Orimili k’anyi so ana.

Uchendu thought of Elimma. She died in these waters. Would I see her again? Egele thought of the men who had taken her pride and caused her pain. No more. Mgboli looked across at Uduma. Your people attacked my village. They killed my husband and two sons. They sold me to the slave traders. But you are a good man. The salt water washed Uduma’s back, and he bit his lips to still the rising pain. Father, I failed as a warrior, but I choose death rather than live as a slave – I die with my dignity.
The two white men stood watching them, wondering if it was all a dream. The black figures disappeared beneath the waters, the heavy chains dragging them down to a watery grave. They kept up their chant until seawater filled their bellies and their lungs:

Ngene guide us; Ogwugwu guide us
These waters brought us here; these waters shall take us home.

S ds d end?

I already saw this on Facebook. Seeing it here again, I still think it's brilliant.

Heart rending story. Brought tears to my eyes. White men!!!

Oh Slavery! So heartless!! See what they did to our brothers!

Wow! This should be published. It's that good

Awesome write up. Made me have a deep thought about slavery.