Igbo Landing: Story of 75 brave Igbos that killed themselves by drowning just to escape slavery.
opera.com Apr 25, 2020 10:33 AM
Igbo Landing:

The Igbo is an ethnic group found in the eastern part of present day Nigeria.

They are wide travellers, adventurers, risk takers and highly ambitious. The Igbo man loves his freedom alot and will not have anyone order him around against his wish.

Perhaps, these traits are what culminated to one if the greatest event that happened in the ancient history of the Igbo race.


This story dates back to the early 19th century when slavery was at its peak in Europe and Africa was a slave market.

The Igbos had been captured by European slave masters from Eastern Nigeria and was been transported to Europe through a site at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia.

In May 1803, the Igbo captives had arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship called the WANDERER . They were bought for an average of $100 each by slave buyers, John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on nearby St. Simons Island. The Igbo slaves were chained and packed under a deck of a coastal vessel called the YORK, which would take them to St. Simons.

During this voyage, about 75 Igbo slaves rose up in rebellion, took control of the ship, overpowered and drowned their captors, and in the process caused the grounding of the ship in Dunbar Creek.

After this, the Igbo marched ashore, singing songs of freedom. Then at the leading of their high chief, they marched into the marshy waters of Dunbar Creek, killing themselves.


However, thirteen bodies were recovered, but others remained missing till this day.

The tragic yet heroic death of the Igbo slaves caused a powerful story of resistance as these captives overpowered their captors in a strange land, before committing suicide rather than remain slaves in the New World.

The suicide by the Igbo people was called by many people as the first freedom march in the history of the United States. There are also claims that the surrounding waters in Dunbar Creek where the Igbo people committed suicide in 1803 have been haunted by the souls of the dead Igbo slaves ever since.

The story of Igbo slaves who chosed to die instead of been slaves was finally recorded and told by various oral sources in the 1930s by members of the Federal Writers Project.


While some historians have doubted the Igbo Landing, the accounts Roswell King and others provided at the time were verified by researches carried out in post-1980 which used modern scientific techniques to confirm the factual basis of the longstanding oral accounts.

This brave story is also now part of the curriculum for coastal Georgia schools.

Why then is our government not teaching her people this part of the Igbo history in the schools curriculum?

We should pass this story over to the next generation.

If you are enslaved, you pray to God for a good master not kill yourself. I