₦airaland Forum

Please I need a good Samarithan to kindly read the story and break it down for me in one sentence

I’m sure the writer is suffering from an illusion grandeur disorder and made this poo up using history and hearsay , fool. Colonial masters were British and the underboss were kings who are the only ones that authorised people to be sold and got paid in Gin, land and gold. Your nobody grandfather cannot run any parole without the local kings, kings were a big part of that scheme, they were like the government back then of their communities .
Only of course if he was just a wicked kidnapper operating illegally.
You gotta love how some people like to use people and things of sentimental values to masturbate their egos

thesicilian:
Inferiority complex makes you blame yourself even for crimes perpetrated against you by those you feel are superior to you. Did the Africans ever have any choice on the matter of slave trade? Agreed some of our ancestors took an ungodly advantage of the situation, selling out their own kin for personal gains, but what happened to those who tried to resist the British and Portuguese exploitation like King Jaja of Opobo and Oba Ovonramwen of Benin? Were they not still overthrown by the superior fire power of the European military and replaced by those who would dance to their evil tunes?

Of course they had a choice. Even after the slave trade was abolished in the Western world, Africans still cooperated freely with private firms to capture and sell slaves off to South America. That was a choice.

And of course slavery existed before the coming of the white man. That was also a choice.

GreenArrow1:
So the great grandfather could not locate and sell my village so that I'd be born outside of this poo-hole of a country? In the words of Eddie Griffin regarding the slave trade era and the reality now, "It started out bad, but it' small good now (mostly).”

Things are good for black Americans now...but up till the 1980's...it could be bad. And I mean bad .

(Back in 1970's, me dad had a chance to study in US. Stories of violent racisim prevented him from taking up the offer...though he went to the UK instead).

Blacks in America were subject to severe mistreatment. In 1964...a black maid was shot dead while going home from work by a gang of whites. No one has been prosecuted for the crime.

The reason why things have been better for blacks. Civil right fighters...and many of them suffered. MLK was shot dead, another one was shot dead changing the tire in front of his house, some were brutally beaten up (one black civil rights worker was beaten up and as a result was ill for three years), and some even had their neighbourhoods destroyed.

Blacks got the worst in schools, living areas, etc. Segregration, unjust violence, etc.

Things are better (they even elected a black President...and lots of black leaders)...but behind that is a lot of suffering.

As for the slave trade, a high percentage of slaves died before they reached the Americas. And MOST slaves got sent to South America and the Carribean...where life too was no better.(and even today, there is still marked discriminaiton, though things too are improiving).

my great grandpa really fvckup he would have give up and allow slave sellers to capture them... I would by now be a black America or black Australian... what use am I been a Nigerian abeg make them come sell me to New Zealand this Nigeria don tire me under sai Barber terrorist

theoldpretender:
Things are good for black Americans now...but up till the 1980's...it could be bad. And I mean bad .

(Back in 1970's, me dad had a chance to study in US. Stories of violent racisim prevented him from taking up the offer...though he went to the UK instead).

Blacks in America were subject to severe mistreatment. In 1964...a black maid was shot dead while going home from work by a gang of whites. No one has been prosecuted for the crime.

The reason why things have been better for blacks. Civil right fighters...and many of them suffered. MLK was shot dead, another one was shot dead changing the tire in front of his house, some were brutally beaten up (one black civil rights worker was beaten up and as a result was ill for three years), and some even had their neighbourhoods destroyed.

Blacks got the worst in schools, living areas, etc. Segregration, unjust violence, etc.

Things are better (they even elected a black President...and lots of black leaders)...but behind that is a lot of suffering.

As for the slave trade, a high percentage of slaves died before they reached the Americas. And MOST slaves got sent to South America and the Carribean...where life too was no better.(and even today, there is still marked discriminaiton, though things too are improiving).

Yeah, things have got better and will keep improving for the black man in America no matter how rough their past has been. They' expectations fought for change since coming off the slave ships and they' expectations gotten results. Same cannot be said of the black man in Africa nay Nigeria. In Nigeria today, anything, I mean ANYTHING can kill you. Make no mistake about it, this is a shît-hole.

This idiotic attention seeking goat has no idea what she is talking about!
An absolute retard is what this lady is.

I read half someone shud pls gv me a summary, my head is aching seriously

musicwriter:
Whoever wrote this have his her brain damaged. Slavery happened by coercion, kidnapping, war. If your ancestors participated in it that was because he was coerced to do what he didn't like in order to save his kingdom from invasion or to save his business. Our kings were given such conditions- to choose between their lives or be part of slavery. Of course, many chose to die fighting against it.

Anybody who knows this fellow should ask him/her; how many slaves did your ancestor sell before the arrival of the Europeans? To whom?

Anybody interested should see the true history of slavery and slave acquisition in Africa http://www.africason.com/2016/03/the-true-history-of-slavery-and-slave.html

Africans kept slaves long before the whites came in.

One of the earliest archeologic discoveries in Nigeria is the tomb of an Igbo king...who was buried around 900CE. He was buried...with lots of his slaves.

There was also the story of an Igala princess, who sacrified herself by being buried alive...so that her father could win a war...with her slaves.

Selling slaves was just a means of getting revenues to among other things....defend African empires and territories.

(Note...we Africans did not live in nice peaceful territories...we fought wars well well).

We also sold slaves to the Arabs too by the way...and Arabs too led slave raids.

The difference between African and American slavery...slaves in Africa could own land, property and could also becomeintegrated members of the community. But....second class. And they could be freed too.

ERCROSS:
Am I expected to read that lengthy post only to learn about your great a grandfather biography...

Yes na at least you will learn about her Granpa's history, in case who know you could hit Who What To be a Millionaire game

Fear who nor fear igbo people from A/Z no one good na their blood the thing dey

its a good thing that your family accept responsibility for the crime committed and has turn to God for forgiveness and mercy.

GreenArrow1:
Yeah, things have got better and will keep improving for the black man in America no matter how rough their past has been. They' expectations fought for change since coming off the slave ships and they' expectations gotten results. Same cannot be said of the black man in Africa nay Nigeria. In Nigeria today, anything, I mean ANYTHING can kill you. Make no mistake about it, this is a shît-hole.

The black man in North America...the US and Canada ...still does have some issues with racisim (eg racial profiling, bad police treatment, poor schools, etc) but things as I said are better than they were in say the 1930's (when blacks could be lynched for flimsy reasons).

I should add that when I say things are better.....I usually throw in a lot of caveats. But that one na another long tori.

South America and Central America...hmm. In the US...you can see black faces on US TV shows. On telenovelas from South American countries with a large black population...zero (Even PLACES LIKE BRAZIL!)

Magichand:
My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader

Adaobi Tricia NwaubaniJuly 15, 2018 5:00 AM


My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.”

Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage.

My great-grandfather was given the nickname Nwaubani, which means “from the Bonny port region,” because he had the bright skin and healthy appearance associated at the time with people who lived near the coast and had access to rich foreign foods. (This became our family name.) In the late nineteenth century, he carried a slave-trading license from the Royal Niger Company, an English corporation that ruled southern Nigeria. His agents captured slaves across the region and passed them to middlemen, who brought them to the ports of Bonny and Calabar and sold them to white merchants. Slavery had already been abolished in the United States and the United Kingdom, but his slaves were legally shipped to Cuba and Brazil. To win his favor, local leaders gave him their daughters in marriage. (By his death, he had dozens of wives.) His influence drew the attention of colonial officials, who appointed him chief of Umujieze and several other towns. He presided over court cases and set up churches and schools. He built a guesthouse on the land where my parents’ home now stands, and hosted British dignitaries. To inform him of their impending arrival and verify their identities, guests sent him envelopes containing locks of their Caucasian hair.

Funeral rites for a distinguished Igbo man traditionally include the slaying of livestock—usually as many cows as his family can afford. Nwaubani Ogogo was so esteemed that, when he died, a leopard was killed, and six slaves were buried alive with him. My family inherited his canvas shoes, which he wore at a time when few Nigerians owned footwear, and the chains of his slaves, which were so heavy that, as a child, my father could hardly lift them. Throughout my upbringing, my relatives gleefully recounted Nwaubani Ogogo’s exploits. When I was about eight, my father took me to see the row of ugba trees where Nwaubani Ogogo kept his slaves chained up. In the nineteen-sixties, a family friend who taught history at a university in the U.K. saw Nwaubani Ogogo’s name mentioned in a textbook about the slave trade. Even my cousins who lived abroad learned that we had made it into the history books.

Last year, I travelled from Abuja, where I live, to Umujieze for my parents’ forty-sixth wedding anniversary. My father is the oldest man in his generation and the head of our extended family. One morning, a man arrived at our gate from a distant Anglican church that was celebrating its centenary. Its records showed that Nwaubani Ogogo had given an armed escort to the first missionaries in the region—a trio known as the Cookey brothers—to insure their safety. The man invited my father to receive an award for Nwaubani Ogogo’s work spreading the gospel. After the man left, my father sat in his favorite armchair, among a group of his grandchildren, and told stories about Nwaubani Ogogo.

“Are you not ashamed of what he did?” I asked.

“I can never be ashamed of him,” he said, irritated. “Why should I be? His business was legitimate at the time. He was respected by everyone around.” My father is a lawyer and a human-rights activist who has spent much of his life challenging government abuses in southeast Nigeria. He sometimes had to flee our home to avoid being arrested. But his pride in his family was unwavering. “Not everyone could summon the courage to be a slave trader,” he said. “You had to have some boldness in you.”

My father succeeded in transmitting to me not just Nwaubani Ogogo’s stories but also pride in his life. During my school days, if a friend asked the meaning of my surname, I gave her a narrative instead of a translation. But, in the past decade, I’ve felt a growing sense of unease. African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather. I read arguments for paying reparations to the descendants of American slaves and wondered whether someone might soon expect my family to contribute. Other members of my generation felt similarly unsettled. My cousin Chidi, who grew up in England, was twelve years old when he visited Nigeria and asked our uncle the meaning of our surname. He was shocked to learn our family’s history, and has been reluctant to share it with his British friends. My cousin Chioma, a doctor in Lagos, told me that she feels anguished when she watches movies about slavery. “I cry and cry and ask God to forgive our ancestors,” she said.

The British tried to end slavery among the Igbo in the early nineteen-hundreds, though the practice persisted into the nineteen-forties. In the early years of abolition, by British recommendation, masters adopted their freed slaves into their extended families. One of the slaves who joined my family was Nwaokonkwo, a convicted murderer from another village who chose slavery as an alternative to capital punishment and eventually became Nwaubani Ogogo’s most trusted manservant. In the nineteen-forties, after my great-grandfather was long dead, Nwaokonkwo was accused of attempting to poison his heir, Igbokwe, in order to steal a plot of land. My family sentenced him to banishment from the village. When he heard the verdict, he ran down the hill, flung himself on Nwaubani Ogogo’s grave, and wept, saying that my family had once given him refuge and was now casting him out. Eventually, my ancestors allowed him to remain, but instructed all their freed slaves to drop our surname and choose new names. “If they had been behaving better, they would have been accepted,” my father said.

The descendants of freed slaves in southern Nigeria, called ohu, still face significant stigma. Igbo culture forbids them from marrying freeborn people, and denies them traditional leadership titles such as Eze and Ozo. (The osu, an untouchable caste descended from slaves who served at shrines, face even more severe persecution.) My father considers the ohu in our family a thorn in our side, constantly in opposition to our decisions. In the nineteen-eighties, during a land dispute with another family, two ohu families testified against us in court. “They hate us,” my father said. “No matter how much money they have, they still have a slave mentality.” My friend Ugo, whose family had a similar disagreement with its ohu members, told me, “The dissension is coming from all these people with borrowed blood.”

I first became aware of the ohu when I attended boarding school in Owerri. I was interested to discover that another new student’s family came from Umujieze, though she told me that they hardly ever visited home. It seemed, from our conversations, that we might be related—not an unusual discovery in a large family, but exciting nonetheless. When my parents came to visit, I told them about the girl. My father quietly informed me that we were not blood relatives. She was ohu, the granddaughter of Nwaokonkwo.

I’m not sure if this revelation meant much to me at the time. The girl and I remained friendly, though we rarely spoke again about our family. But, in 2000, another friend, named Ugonna, was forbidden from marrying a man she had dated for years because her family found out that he was osu. Afterward, an osu friend named Nonye told me that growing up knowing that her ancestors were slaves was “sort of like having the bogeyman around.” Recently, I spoke to Nwannennaya, a thirty-nine-year-old ohu member of my family. “The way you people behave is as if we are inferior,” she said. Her parents kept their ohu ancestry secret from her until she was seventeen. Although our families were neighbors, she and I rarely interacted. “There was a day you saw me and asked me why I was bleaching my skin,” she said. “I was very happy because you spoke to me. I went to my mother and told her. You and I are sisters. That is how sisters are supposed to behave.”

Modernization is emboldening ohu and freeborn to intermarry, despite the threat of ostracization. “I know communities where people of slave descent have become affluent and have started demanding the right to hold positions,” Professor Okoro told me. “It is creating conflict in many communities.” Last year, in a town in Enugu State, an ohu man was appointed to a traditional leadership position, sparking mass protests. In a nearby village, an ohu man became the top police officer, giving the local ohu enough influence to push for reform. Eventually, they were apportioned a separate section of the community, where they can live according to whatever laws they please, away from the freeborn. “It will probably be a long time before all traces of slavery disappear from the minds of the people,” G. T. Basden, a British missionary, wrote of the Igbo in 1921. “Until the conscience of the people functions, the distinctions between slave and free-born will be maintained.”

Nwaubani Ogogo was believed to have acquired spiritual powers from the shrine of a deity named Njoku, which allowed him to wield influence over white colonists. Among his possessions, which are passed down to the head of the family, was the symbol of his alliance with Njoku: a pot containing a human head. “You had to cut the head straight into the pot while the person was still alive, without it touching the floor,” my father said. “It couldn’t just be anybody’s head. It had to be someone you knew.” In Nwaubani Ogogo’s case, this someone was most likely a slave. When Gilbert, my great-uncle and a previous head of our family, died in 1989, his second wife, Nnenna, a devout Christian, destroyed the pot. Shortly afterward, her children began to die mysterious deaths, one after another. Nnenna contracted a strange ailment and died in 2009. Some relatives began to fear that dark forces had been unleashed.

Last July, my father’s cousin Sunny, a professor of engineering, visited my parents to discuss another concern: a growing enmity in our family. Minor arguments had led relatives to stop speaking to one another. Several had become estranged from the family. “We always have one major disagreement or division or the other,” my father’s cousin Samuel told me. My cousin Ezeugo was not surprised by the worrying trend. “Across Igbo land, wherever there was slave trade with the white people, things never go well,” he said. “They always have problems there. Everybody has noticed it.” My relatives thought that our family’s history was coming back to haunt us.

Prior to colonization, the Igbo believed that spiritual forces controlled events. If enough misfortune piled up, a family might come to believe that it was the victim of an intergenerational curse resulting from the actions of an ancestor. Family members would seek out a juju priest, who would consult a deity, diagnose the root of the curse, and then expel it through a religious ritual. When foreign missionaries arrived, they persuaded the Igbos to embrace Christianity—openly, at least. But belief in ancestral curses has remained, cloaked in Bible passages that refer to God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Many churches now offer services similar to the old rituals, in which a pastor replaces the juju priest and Jesus replaces the pagan god. This way, evil forces can be exposed without Christians engaging in idolatry. Deliverance usually requires a family to pray, fast, and renounce atrocities.

In 2009, the late priest Stephen Njoku wrote a book called “Challenge and Deal with Your Evil Foundations,” in which he argued that some people should change their names to rid themselves of curses. “It’s like building a house,” he told me. “If you don’t get the foundations right, if you used substandard materials or if the stones were not laid properly, the building will inevitably develop cracks and collapse.” A number of Igbo communities with names that extol gory histories have taken new ones. In 1992, people in my home town became concerned about several unexplained deaths of young people. After a period of communal prayer, people gathered in the village hall and voted to discard the community’s historic name, Umuojameze, which means “children of Ojam, the king.” Ojam was a deity whom the townspeople had worshipped before Christianization, and to whom they had made regular human sacrifices. They chose the new name, Umujieze, which means “children who hold the kingship,” to reflect our severance from the atrocities of the past.

My relatives disagreed about the cause of our family’s curse. Most believed that it was because of Nwaubani Ogogo’s slave trading. Some suspected that it was his broken alliance with Njoku. My father thought that it might have resulted from his human sacrifices. Sunny was not sure the family was cursed at all. “If our problems are because of the sins of our fathers, why are the white people making progress despite the sins of their fathers?” he said. Nevertheless, they agreed to hold a deliverance ceremony, and settled on a plan. On three days near the end of January, from 6 a.m. until noon, family members around the world would fast and pray. My father sent out a text message in preparation that included passages from the Bible. He has never been overtly religious, and it amused me to watch him organize a global prayer session. I teased him about the fact that he would have to skip breakfast, which was usually waiting for him at the same time each morning. “I’m a saint,” he declared.

On the first day of the fast, members of my family met in small groups in London, Atlanta, and Johannesburg. Some talked on the phone, and others chatted on social media. Thirty members gathered under a canopy in my parents’ yard. With tears in his eyes, my father explained that, in Nwaubani Ogogo’s day, selling and sacrificing human beings was common practice, but that now we know it to be deeply offensive to God. He thanked God for the honor and prestige bestowed on our family through my great-grandfather, and asked God’s forgiveness for the atrocities he committed. We prayed over a passage that my father texted us from the Book of Psalms:


Who can understand his errors?
Cleanse me from secret faults.
Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins;
Let them not have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless,
And I shall be innocent of great transgression.
During the ceremony, I was overwhelmed with relief. My family was finally taking a step beyond whispering and worrying. Of course, nothing can undo the harm that Nwaubani Ogogo caused. And the ohu, who are not his direct descendants, were not invited to the ceremony; their mistreatment in the region continues. Still, it felt important for my family to publicly denounce its role in the slave trade. “Our family is taking responsibility,” my cousin Chidi, who joined from London, told me. Chioma, who took part in Atlanta, said, “We were trying to make peace and atone for what our ancestors did.”

On the final day, my relatives strolled along a recently tarred stretch of road to our local Anglican church. The church was established in 1904, on land that Nwaubani Ogogo donated. Inside, a priest presided over a two-hour prayer session. At the end, he pronounced blessings on us, and proclaimed a new beginning for the Nwaubani family. After the ceremony, my family members discussed making it a yearly ritual. “This sort of thing opens up the mercy of God,” my mother, Patricia, said. “People did all these evil things but they don’t talk about it. The more people confess and renounce their evil past, the more cleansing will come to the land.”

https://www.google.com.ng/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-great-grandfather-the-nigerian-slave-trader/amp

And somebody brought this nonsense to fp?
Nawao
Anyway to non igbos u can google the "igbo landing"
QED

SmartyPants:
Of course they had a choice. Even after the slave trade was abolished in the Western world, Africans still cooperated freely with private firms to capture and sell slaves off to South America. That was a choice.

And of course slavery existed before the coming of the white man. That was also a choice.

Can you elaborate on that please?

Magichand:
My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader

Adaobi Tricia NwaubaniJuly 15, 2018 5:00 AM


My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.”

Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage.

My great-grandfather was given the nickname Nwaubani, which means “from the Bonny port region,” because he had the bright skin and healthy appearance associated at the time with people who lived near the coast and had access to rich foreign foods. (This became our family name.) In the late nineteenth century, he carried a slave-trading license from the Royal Niger Company, an English corporation that ruled southern Nigeria. His agents captured slaves across the region and passed them to middlemen, who brought them to the ports of Bonny and Calabar and sold them to white merchants. Slavery had already been abolished in the United States and the United Kingdom, but his slaves were legally shipped to Cuba and Brazil. To win his favor, local leaders gave him their daughters in marriage. (By his death, he had dozens of wives.) His influence drew the attention of colonial officials, who appointed him chief of Umujieze and several other towns. He presided over court cases and set up churches and schools. He built a guesthouse on the land where my parents’ home now stands, and hosted British dignitaries. To inform him of their impending arrival and verify their identities, guests sent him envelopes containing locks of their Caucasian hair.

Funeral rites for a distinguished Igbo man traditionally include the slaying of livestock—usually as many cows as his family can afford. Nwaubani Ogogo was so esteemed that, when he died, a leopard was killed, and six slaves were buried alive with him. My family inherited his canvas shoes, which he wore at a time when few Nigerians owned footwear, and the chains of his slaves, which were so heavy that, as a child, my father could hardly lift them. Throughout my upbringing, my relatives gleefully recounted Nwaubani Ogogo’s exploits. When I was about eight, my father took me to see the row of ugba trees where Nwaubani Ogogo kept his slaves chained up. In the nineteen-sixties, a family friend who taught history at a university in the U.K. saw Nwaubani Ogogo’s name mentioned in a textbook about the slave trade. Even my cousins who lived abroad learned that we had made it into the history books.

Last year, I travelled from Abuja, where I live, to Umujieze for my parents’ forty-sixth wedding anniversary. My father is the oldest man in his generation and the head of our extended family. One morning, a man arrived at our gate from a distant Anglican church that was celebrating its centenary. Its records showed that Nwaubani Ogogo had given an armed escort to the first missionaries in the region—a trio known as the Cookey brothers—to insure their safety. The man invited my father to receive an award for Nwaubani Ogogo’s work spreading the gospel. After the man left, my father sat in his favorite armchair, among a group of his grandchildren, and told stories about Nwaubani Ogogo.

“Are you not ashamed of what he did?” I asked.

“I can never be ashamed of him,” he said, irritated. “Why should I be? His business was legitimate at the time. He was respected by everyone around.” My father is a lawyer and a human-rights activist who has spent much of his life challenging government abuses in southeast Nigeria. He sometimes had to flee our home to avoid being arrested. But his pride in his family was unwavering. “Not everyone could summon the courage to be a slave trader,” he said. “You had to have some boldness in you.”

My father succeeded in transmitting to me not just Nwaubani Ogogo’s stories but also pride in his life. During my school days, if a friend asked the meaning of my surname, I gave her a narrative instead of a translation. But, in the past decade, I’ve felt a growing sense of unease. African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather. I read arguments for paying reparations to the descendants of American slaves and wondered whether someone might soon expect my family to contribute. Other members of my generation felt similarly unsettled. My cousin Chidi, who grew up in England, was twelve years old when he visited Nigeria and asked our uncle the meaning of our surname. He was shocked to learn our family’s history, and has been reluctant to share it with his British friends. My cousin Chioma, a doctor in Lagos, told me that she feels anguished when she watches movies about slavery. “I cry and cry and ask God to forgive our ancestors,” she said.

The British tried to end slavery among the Igbo in the early nineteen-hundreds, though the practice persisted into the nineteen-forties. In the early years of abolition, by British recommendation, masters adopted their freed slaves into their extended families. One of the slaves who joined my family was Nwaokonkwo, a convicted murderer from another village who chose slavery as an alternative to capital punishment and eventually became Nwaubani Ogogo’s most trusted manservant. In the nineteen-forties, after my great-grandfather was long dead, Nwaokonkwo was accused of attempting to poison his heir, Igbokwe, in order to steal a plot of land. My family sentenced him to banishment from the village. When he heard the verdict, he ran down the hill, flung himself on Nwaubani Ogogo’s grave, and wept, saying that my family had once given him refuge and was now casting him out. Eventually, my ancestors allowed him to remain, but instructed all their freed slaves to drop our surname and choose new names. “If they had been behaving better, they would have been accepted,” my father said.

The descendants of freed slaves in southern Nigeria, called ohu, still face significant stigma. Igbo culture forbids them from marrying freeborn people, and denies them traditional leadership titles such as Eze and Ozo. (The osu, an untouchable caste descended from slaves who served at shrines, face even more severe persecution.) My father considers the ohu in our family a thorn in our side, constantly in opposition to our decisions. In the nineteen-eighties, during a land dispute with another family, two ohu families testified against us in court. “They hate us,” my father said. “No matter how much money they have, they still have a slave mentality.” My friend Ugo, whose family had a similar disagreement with its ohu members, told me, “The dissension is coming from all these people with borrowed blood.”

I first became aware of the ohu when I attended boarding school in Owerri. I was interested to discover that another new student’s family came from Umujieze, though she told me that they hardly ever visited home. It seemed, from our conversations, that we might be related—not an unusual discovery in a large family, but exciting nonetheless. When my parents came to visit, I told them about the girl. My father quietly informed me that we were not blood relatives. She was ohu, the granddaughter of Nwaokonkwo.

I’m not sure if this revelation meant much to me at the time. The girl and I remained friendly, though we rarely spoke again about our family. But, in 2000, another friend, named Ugonna, was forbidden from marrying a man she had dated for years because her family found out that he was osu. Afterward, an osu friend named Nonye told me that growing up knowing that her ancestors were slaves was “sort of like having the bogeyman around.” Recently, I spoke to Nwannennaya, a thirty-nine-year-old ohu member of my family. “The way you people behave is as if we are inferior,” she said. Her parents kept their ohu ancestry secret from her until she was seventeen. Although our families were neighbors, she and I rarely interacted. “There was a day you saw me and asked me why I was bleaching my skin,” she said. “I was very happy because you spoke to me. I went to my mother and told her. You and I are sisters. That is how sisters are supposed to behave.”

Modernization is emboldening ohu and freeborn to intermarry, despite the threat of ostracization. “I know communities where people of slave descent have become affluent and have started demanding the right to hold positions,” Professor Okoro told me. “It is creating conflict in many communities.” Last year, in a town in Enugu State, an ohu man was appointed to a traditional leadership position, sparking mass protests. In a nearby village, an ohu man became the top police officer, giving the local ohu enough influence to push for reform. Eventually, they were apportioned a separate section of the community, where they can live according to whatever laws they please, away from the freeborn. “It will probably be a long time before all traces of slavery disappear from the minds of the people,” G. T. Basden, a British missionary, wrote of the Igbo in 1921. “Until the conscience of the people functions, the distinctions between slave and free-born will be maintained.”

Nwaubani Ogogo was believed to have acquired spiritual powers from the shrine of a deity named Njoku, which allowed him to wield influence over white colonists. Among his possessions, which are passed down to the head of the family, was the symbol of his alliance with Njoku: a pot containing a human head. “You had to cut the head straight into the pot while the person was still alive, without it touching the floor,” my father said. “It couldn’t just be anybody’s head. It had to be someone you knew.” In Nwaubani Ogogo’s case, this someone was most likely a slave. When Gilbert, my great-uncle and a previous head of our family, died in 1989, his second wife, Nnenna, a devout Christian, destroyed the pot. Shortly afterward, her children began to die mysterious deaths, one after another. Nnenna contracted a strange ailment and died in 2009. Some relatives began to fear that dark forces had been unleashed.

Last July, my father’s cousin Sunny, a professor of engineering, visited my parents to discuss another concern: a growing enmity in our family. Minor arguments had led relatives to stop speaking to one another. Several had become estranged from the family. “We always have one major disagreement or division or the other,” my father’s cousin Samuel told me. My cousin Ezeugo was not surprised by the worrying trend. “Across Igbo land, wherever there was slave trade with the white people, things never go well,” he said. “They always have problems there. Everybody has noticed it.” My relatives thought that our family’s history was coming back to haunt us.

Prior to colonization, the Igbo believed that spiritual forces controlled events. If enough misfortune piled up, a family might come to believe that it was the victim of an intergenerational curse resulting from the actions of an ancestor. Family members would seek out a juju priest, who would consult a deity, diagnose the root of the curse, and then expel it through a religious ritual. When foreign missionaries arrived, they persuaded the Igbos to embrace Christianity—openly, at least. But belief in ancestral curses has remained, cloaked in Bible passages that refer to God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” Many churches now offer services similar to the old rituals, in which a pastor replaces the juju priest and Jesus replaces the pagan god. This way, evil forces can be exposed without Christians engaging in idolatry. Deliverance usually requires a family to pray, fast, and renounce atrocities.

In 2009, the late priest Stephen Njoku wrote a book called “Challenge and Deal with Your Evil Foundations,” in which he argued that some people should change their names to rid themselves of curses. “It’s like building a house,” he told me. “If you don’t get the foundations right, if you used substandard materials or if the stones were not laid properly, the building will inevitably develop cracks and collapse.” A number of Igbo communities with names that extol gory histories have taken new ones. In 1992, people in my home town became concerned about several unexplained deaths of young people. After a period of communal prayer, people gathered in the village hall and voted to discard the community’s historic name, Umuojameze, which means “children of Ojam, the king.” Ojam was a deity whom the townspeople had worshipped before Christianization, and to whom they had made regular human sacrifices. They chose the new name, Umujieze, which means “children who hold the kingship,” to reflect our severance from the atrocities of the past.

My relatives disagreed about the cause of our family’s curse. Most believed that it was because of Nwaubani Ogogo’s slave trading. Some suspected that it was his broken alliance with Njoku. My father thought that it might have resulted from his human sacrifices. Sunny was not sure the family was cursed at all. “If our problems are because of the sins of our fathers, why are the white people making progress despite the sins of their fathers?” he said. Nevertheless, they agreed to hold a deliverance ceremony, and settled on a plan. On three days near the end of January, from 6 a.m. until noon, family members around the world would fast and pray. My father sent out a text message in preparation that included passages from the Bible. He has never been overtly religious, and it amused me to watch him organize a global prayer session. I teased him about the fact that he would have to skip breakfast, which was usually waiting for him at the same time each morning. “I’m a saint,” he declared.

On the first day of the fast, members of my family met in small groups in London, Atlanta, and Johannesburg. Some talked on the phone, and others chatted on social media. Thirty members gathered under a canopy in my parents’ yard. With tears in his eyes, my father explained that, in Nwaubani Ogogo’s day, selling and sacrificing human beings was common practice, but that now we know it to be deeply offensive to God. He thanked God for the honor and prestige bestowed on our family through my great-grandfather, and asked God’s forgiveness for the atrocities he committed. We prayed over a passage that my father texted us from the Book of Psalms:


Who can understand his errors?
Cleanse me from secret faults.
Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins;
Let them not have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless,
And I shall be innocent of great transgression.
During the ceremony, I was overwhelmed with relief. My family was finally taking a step beyond whispering and worrying. Of course, nothing can undo the harm that Nwaubani Ogogo caused. And the ohu, who are not his direct descendants, were not invited to the ceremony; their mistreatment in the region continues. Still, it felt important for my family to publicly denounce its role in the slave trade. “Our family is taking responsibility,” my cousin Chidi, who joined from London, told me. Chioma, who took part in Atlanta, said, “We were trying to make peace and atone for what our ancestors did.”

On the final day, my relatives strolled along a recently tarred stretch of road to our local Anglican church. The church was established in 1904, on land that Nwaubani Ogogo donated. Inside, a priest presided over a two-hour prayer session. At the end, he pronounced blessings on us, and proclaimed a new beginning for the Nwaubani family. After the ceremony, my family members discussed making it a yearly ritual. “This sort of thing opens up the mercy of God,” my mother, Patricia, said. “People did all these evil things but they don’t talk about it. The more people confess and renounce their evil past, the more cleansing will come to the land.”

https://www.google.com.ng/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-great-grandfather-the-nigerian-slave-trader/amp

If i talk now that Ibo love to stuff their vacuum-filled history with stories lifted from other people history, then mirrored and embellished and polished to make it appear truthful and real......people will say I hate Ibo.

Can you all see the lies in this girl's story about her grandfather and their society?

ELKHALIFAISIS:
my great grandpa really fvckup he would have give up and allow slave sellers to capture them... I would by now be a black America or black Australian... what use am I been a Nigerian abeg make them come sell me to New Zealand this Nigeria don tire me under sai Barber terrorist

If your great grandad had been caught as a slave...God forbid

1.You might have not existed because he would have died in the ship enroute to the Americas.

2.Most slaves ended up in what is now South America. Millions did end up in North America.

3.If your grandad ended up in South America...chances are you would be living in a favella...where life is just as cheap as it is in Nigeria (Police brutality, violent drug gangs, etc).

4.If your grandad ended up in US or Canada....good. You have a high chance of living in a violent, drug ridden, gang ridden neighbourhood. And most blacks are victims of crime...commited by other blacks.

5.There is also a chance you might end up living in a higher level of life...if your ancestor got educated...or played sports brilliantly..

6.Is it worth allowing your ancestors suffer years of discrimination, often violent, just so that you can call yourself an American.

7. Black slaves were never sent to Australia. (The black Australian or Aboriginie is the original owner of that land. There are Africans there...but those are recent legal immigrants. Plus, Australia had a No Black Immigrant policy till 1968).

8. ThaNK God your ancestors were not sent to Argentina...to be used as cannon fodder in the wars of independence that wracked Argentina in the 19th century. Most blacks died in those wars...that, and massive whites only immigration, is why Argentina has less than 100000 black people.(once upon a time it was half the populaiton).

This is a long and very interesting read. I went 85% through it and booked it for later reading.

flyca:
Africans were the ones that went to villages and farms to capture fellow Africans and sold to white people! For money and for fame!

Blame Africans for slavery. The white men were simply merchants!

Great oral traditon by the way, and great article too.

Good point...but it should be noted that most every human culture and race from the dawn of time practiced slavery.

Beware, all sorts of organizations: far-right groups, political groups, interests groups, Revisionists and so on are utilizing Bots and other means to spread misinformation, sow unrest and cause conflict all over the world. At its original inception, when being sold to congress, being able to sell ideas to the third world was an Internet selling point.

theoldpretender:
Africans kept slaves long before the whites came in.

One of the earliest archeologic discoveries in Nigeria is the tomb of an Igbo king...who was buried around 900CE. He was buried...with lots of his slaves.

There was also the story of an Igala princess, who sacrified herself by being buried alive...so that her father could win a war...with her slaves.

Selling slaves was just a means of getting revenues to among other things....defend African empires and territories.

(Note...we Africans did not live in nice peaceful territories...we fought wars well well).

We also sold slaves to the Arabs too by the way...and Arabs too led slave raids.

The difference between African and American slavery...slaves in Africa could own land, property and could also become integrated members of the community. But....second class. And they could be freed too.

If someone ''could own land, property and could also become integrated members of the community'' then he/she wasn't a slave in the same way we have come to know slavery. In Africa, till today, there exists what we call apprenticeship, whereby people serve under a master, and this's an old practice. It is not called slavery.

Yes, there were captives held as prisoners of war and probably looked down upon in society, but that was all there's to that. They were not ''traded'' as commodity from a seller to a buyer.

Its interesting you mentioned Arabs. Both the Arabs and Europeans brought these practices to us when our lands were invaded. There were no ''buying and selling'' of human beings among Africans before the arrival of either the Arabs or Europeans. The slavery I am talking about is buying and selling of human beings before the arrival of the Arabs and Europeans. That's what I want to know. How did Africans buy and sell slaves before the arrival of the Arabs and Europeans? To whom did we sell the slaves to? That's what I want to know.

thesicilian:
Can you elaborate on that please?

Across Africa slavery was already being practiced in various forms.

The article in the OP speaks about it in paragraph 2 :

Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life.

And here are some other articles:

http://www.discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/people-involved/enslaved-people/enslaved-africans/africa-slavery/

https://research.cornell.edu/news-features/curious-history-slavery-west-africa

A lot of people argue that traditional African Slavery was milder and had room for more altruism. However, all slavery involves the same basic abbrogation of a person's will and what we understand today, as human rights.

And after all the prayers, apologise to the osu, treat them like brothers, intermarry and relate well with them, if not all your fasting and prayers na wash! Na waste of time and energy.

Reading this piece and the dodgy comments from those I suppose to be teenagers and have no love for educating themselves makes me sad.
I do not blame you but the government who hasn't taken education seriously enough to input History as a compulsory course in our curriculum.
The writer has addressed serious socio political issues that your small heads cannot comprehend.
For those who have visited the Badagry Slave route her Grand father is synonymous to Seriki Williams.
History is the study of the past which enables us to understand the present and project into the future.
In the words of Robert Nesta Marley AKA Bob Marley - If you know your history then you would know where you coking from! [color=#990000][/color]

Your great grandfather were cowards. Just like every other black person

Wen will sum1 finish reading this one.

royalamour:
Her great grand father was extremely wicked.
He had the heart to sell his own people for money and they gave him a chieftancy title for that?

To what end was the church he built?

Idiot!

Even the Bible had this to say about slavery

Can we also say God is also wicked

lympy:
Reading this piece and the dodgy comments from those I suppose to be teenagers and have no love for educating themselves makes me sad.
I do not blame you but the government who hasn't taken education seriously enough to input History as a compulsory course in our curriculum.
The writer has addressed serious socio political issues that your small heads cannot comprehend.
For those who have visited the Badagry Slave route her Grand father is synonymous to Seriki Williams.
History is the study of the past which enables us to understand the present and project into the future.
In the words of Robert Nesta Marley AKA Bob Marley - If you know your history then you would know where you coking from! [color=#990000][/color]

The younger generation was denied the opportunity to learn history. It's the reason why many don't know much about their roots and can't learn from it to make their future better. If they had a good understanding of the past, we won't have so many of them seeking short cuts to success. Trekking across the Sahara and further risking their lives on a rubber boat on the Mediterranean Sea will not be first priolite if they had a good grasp of history. It's just so sad. The government messed up on a key aspects of education. A nation without a history hardly moves forward. ..nothing to reflect on and learn from.

Thanks to the writer and OP for another perspective on slavery. It reminds me of the stories of Ajayi Crowther, Oluaidah Equiano (not sure of the spelling) et al.

musicwriter:
Whoever wrote this have his/her brain damaged. Slavery happened by coercion, kidnapping, fraud, war. If your ancestors participated in it that was because he was coerced to do what he didn't like in order to save his kingdom from invasion or to save his business. Our kings were given such conditions- to choose between their lives or be part of slavery. Of course, many chose to die fighting against it. Queen Nzinga of Namibia comes to mind. This leader fought the Portuguese to standstill and refused to surrender her domain to slavery. It was only after her defeat that they had their way.

Anybody who knows this fellow should ask him/her; how many slaves did your ancestor sell before the arrival of the Europeans? To whom?

Anybody interested should see the true history of slavery and slave acquisition in Africa http://www.africason.com/2016/03/the-true-history-of-slavery-and-slave.html

"Brain Damage"... Your very choice of words expose the bile in you. Ok now let me add some good old sense to your deranged thinking!

A lion does not pity a goat, when he wants to eat... A human does not spare the chicken when hungry! That's the beauty of nature! Don't be weak, or you will pay the price dearly!
.
.
.

The white man owes no apologies for dominating, enslaving and coercing you to do their economic bidding! They where clearly superior and if your lazy, unitintlligent, tree worshipping ancestors did what they were supposed to do, history would be different!

But noooo, they did nothing, and even today their children are still doing nothing!

Blacks were backwards and useless in ancient times, couldn't read, write, build anything meaningful!... Sadly enough they are still very useless today! Look at the whole of black Africa! a disgrace to the international community, corruption, diseases always blaming and begging people!

The black man owes himself some good dose of self respect, man up and be serious! No body owes you nothing! Lead well, study hard and build cities, technologies to dominate others!

Lack of creative ability led her to write this nonsense in the New Yorker. Yes, there were instances like this. But involvement of foreigners fueled transatlantic slave trade. Many many cultures in the world buried their dead with slaves. Even South America had slaves who were buried with monarchs and they did a lot of head hunting. So don’t go on New Yorker to write patronizing articles which in the long run racists are looking for to justify their actions and absolve their ancestors who preyed on old practices guided by rules.

Whites injected materialism into the process and made it absolutely foul. Africans never ever treated their slaves like animals till the whites taught them how to treat their slaves like animals. Those heavy chains and weapons of torture were not forged by Africans but by White people. Slaves were like indentured servants who reintegrated into society mostly. Most of the slaves captured when the greed got High were regular people trying to go about their daily lives! Also the Africans did not have an idea of the fate that was meted out to the salves sold. It was absolutely horrendous and most of them died in transit. Had they known, things may just have been different.

musicwriter:
If someone ''could own land, property and could also become integrated members of the community'' then he/she wasn't a slave in the same way we have come to know slavery. In Africa, till today, there exists what we call apprenticeship, whereby people serve under a master, and this's an old practice. It is not called slavery.

Yes, there were captives held as prisoners of war and probably looked down upon in society, but that was all there's to that. They were not ''traded'' as commodity from a seller to a buyer.

Its interesting you mentioned Arabs. Both the Arabs and Europeans brought these practices to us when our lands were invaded. There were no ''buying and selling'' of human beings among Africans before the arrival of either the Arabs or Europeans. The slavery I am talking about is buying and selling of human beings before the arrival of the Arabs and Europeans. That's what I want to know. How did Africans buy and sell slaves before the arrival of the Arabs and Europeans? To whom did we sell the slaves to? That's what I want to know.

Quickly answering....Africans did buy and sell slaves to themselves. Slaves were war captives, or even people expelled from their communities.
The Europeans and Arabs were just another market.

To use a "poor' example....a certain Nigerian was kidnapped in the late 19th century...from what is now Kogi state,and sold off somewhere to an 'owner' in what is NOW oyo state. He was a slave for 20 years, before he got free, converted to Chirstianity., and returned home to preach to his people. (He eventually went on to work with..not for... a white missionary as a preacher ).

On a side note...we did have some forms of currency before the Europeans....gold, manillas,cowries, etc.

Slavery is still happening in Libya