There appears to be a consensus among scholars that the Igbo occupation of the Niger delta was quite ancient. There was no oral tradition of migration from another region. Their creation myths explain that they came from the earth.¹ Archaeological evidence indicates more ancient human occupation and productive activities in Igboland than scholars have previously believed. A rock shelter at Afikpo revealed Stone Age tools and pottery some 5,000 years old. Yams were grown at least 3,000 years ago. Iron working is ancient, and bronze art is of the highest quality.²

The pioneer Nigerian historian Kenneth Dike convincingly argues that the Igbo were very heavily represented among slaves shipped across the Atlantic from the Bight of Biafra. He cites “scientific research” carried out by Captain John Adams between 1786 and 1800 and published in 1822. Adams wrote, “This place [Bonny] is the wholesale market for slaves, as not fewer than 20,000 are annually sold here; 16,000 of whom are members of one nation, called Heebo [Ibo], so that this single nation ... during the last 20 years [exported no less] than 320,000; and those of the same nation sold at New Calabar [a delta port], probably amounted, in the same period of time, to 50,000 more, making an aggregate amount of 370,000 Heebos. The remaining part of the above 20,000 is composed of the natives of the Brass country ... and also of Ibbibbys [Ibibios] or Quaws.”³

Dike points out an ongoing process of creolization among the peoples living near the Atlantic Coast, which encompassed diverse peoples speaking various languages. He comments:

In the Americas, the Igbo were the least endogamous among African peoples. The proportion of women among them was among the highest, and they married men of a variety of other ethnicities. This pattern of exogamous marriage among Igbo women seems to be true throughout the Americas.⁵ The Igbo, then, were least likely to remain as a separate enclave culture among Africans in the Americas.

In several other respects, the Bight of Biafra contrasts sharply with the coasts of Lower Guinea examined in the previous chapter. In the Bight of Biafra, Muslim influence arrived very late and was of minor importance. Highly centralized states were absent. The political structure was strong but segmented. Loose confederations maintained commercial and religious ties. The prestige of powerful oracles and some armed mercenaries enforced conformity and played an important role in obtaining slaves to ship across the Atlantic. Although large-scale warfare connected with state building was weak, slaves were “produced” through raids among villages, some kidnapping, legal proceedings, and religious rites.⁶

Which ethnicities were shipped out of the Bight of Biafra, when, and in what proportions? This is currently a hotly debated question. Some historians, mainly Americanists, believe that they were heavily Igbo, especially during the eighteenth century. Other historians, mainly Africanists, challenge this conclusion. In southern Nigeria, the denomination “Igbo” came to be associated with slave. The Aro, major slave traders in Igboland, “distinguished themselves from the more traditional Igbo groups. In addition, they strive to maintain ancient kinship, cultural and ethnic relationships with the Efik, Ibibio and Ekoi on the basis of trade, ekpe, inter-marriage and the original ethnic composition ties with various Aro settlements which are still found in these parts of non-Igbo areas.”⁷ But it is possible that some of these patterns have been read too far backward in time. Joseph Inikori remarks:

Americanists, however, cannot help but be impressed by the large numbers of Africans identified or self-identified as Igbo in American documents. We will see that in some times and places Igbo were clearly differentiated from Ibibio, Moko, Calabar, and Bioko, all ethnic designations from the Bight of Biafra. The Igbo “nation” or “casta” appears among several other ethnicities in Alonso de Sandoval’s book dating from 1627. The Igbo were very significant in both numbers and proportions in slave lists created in eight different colonies in North America between 1770 and 1827. One could perhaps argue that “Igbo” was a name imposed by Europeans on Africans. But, as we have seen, Africans often identified their own ethnicities recorded in American documents. C. G. A. Oldendorp, a Moravian missionary who worked in the Danish West Indies in 1767 and 1768, interviewed an African in Pennsylvania who described himself as Igbo.⁹ Deminster, a forty-year-old slave, identified his nation as Igbo when he testified about runaway slaves in Louisiana in 1766. L’Éveillé, a blacksmith, identified his nation as Igbo when he testified during the trial of the Pointe Coupée conspirators seeking to abolish slavery in 1795.

There were self-identifications of other ethnicities from the Bight of Biafra. Guela ran away from his master and was recaptured in 1737. He identified his nation as Bioko (native of the island of Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea). He explained that he had run away because his master beat him often and did not give him enough to eat. He had run away once before and came back voluntarily. His ears were cut off, and he was branded on the shoulder. In this case, and others, Africans from the Bight of Biafra were not simply lumped together as Igbo. Some were identified as Ibibio, Moko, Ekoi, Esan/Edoid, Bioko, and Calabar. The well-populated Bamenda grasslands northwest of the slave-trading ports supplied some enslaved Africans who were shipped out directly from the Cameroon River. Estimating the slave trade from the Cameroons poses many difficulties. It appears to have peaked between 1760 and 1776 and was always a tiny fraction of the slave trade from the Bight of Biafra ports. We have not found ethnicities from the Cameroons or the Bamenda grasslands recorded in American documents.¹⁰

It is clear that the vast majority of Africans from southeastern Nigeria and the Bight of Biafra found in American documents were recorded as Igbo. They were a heavy majority during the eighteenth century and a smaller majority during the nineteenth century. If we discuss the Igbo in the United States, the focus of the recently criticized work of Douglas B. Chambers, Michael A. Gomez, and Lorena Walsh, we can affirm the assumption made by those scholars that the Igbo represented a high portion of Africans from the Bight of Biafra. They were reasonably likely to have identified their own ethnicities. They were clustered in the Caribbean as well as in the Chesapeake. Some of the Africans exported from the Bight of Biafra were recorded in American documents as Ijo, Ibibio, Moko, Ekoi, and Bioko, but they were a very small minority before the nineteenth century.¹¹

It is not possible to determine the approximate percentage of Igbo exported from the Bight of Biafra by studying transatlantic slave trade voyages alone or by studying ethnicities recorded in any one colony in the Americas. Since some ethnicities were shipped from more than one coast, descriptions of Africans in American documents can tell us about the proportions of ethnicities recorded among enslaved Africans in particular times and places in the Americas, but they cannot tell us from which coasts they were shipped. Sex ratios among Africans shipped from various coasts cannot be extrapolated to ethnicities presumably shipped from these coasts. Nor can sex ratios among ethnicities recorded in American documents be extrapolated to Africans shipped from a particular coast.¹² But information about ethnicities listed in a significant number of colonies during the same time period is more enlightening. Various ethnicities were exported from the same ports, and their proportions changed over time. Enslaved Africans exported from Bonny were evidently most likely to be Igbo. During the early eighteenth century, Bonny emerged as the major slave trading port on the Bight of Biafra. The latest studies by Lovejoy and Richardson indicate that by about 1730 Bonny already outpaced Old Calabar as a port in the Atlantic slave trade: at least forty years earlier than historians previously estimated. The early predominance of Bonny resulted from its superior financial structures, including the important role of pawnship there. There is a consensus that Bonny shipped mainly Igbo, indicating that Igbo were indeed prominent in the Atlantic slave trade to the Chesapeake as well as elsewhere after the 1720s. Lovejoy and Richardson’s calculations on The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database reveal that for the entire transatlantic slave trade 40.5 percent (n = 1,046) of voyages leaving the Bight of Biafra came from Bonny; 27.0 percent (n = 697) from Old Calabar; and 9.2 percent (n = 238) from Elem Kalabar (New Calabar). These data are likely to be reasonably complete and accurate since they were mainly British voyages. The documents are centrally located in large archives and studied by David Richardson. Lovejoy and Richardson state that voyages from Bonny were most heavily clustered between 1726 and 1820.¹³

“Calabar” appears occasionally in American documents but its meaning is uncertain. It might refer to Africans shipped from two slave-trading posts: Old Calabar or New Calabar. Or it could mean the Calabar Coast, which would include Bonny and other ports as well. “Calabar” could also have been an ethnic designation. Dike referred to the “Kalabari” during the early nineteenth century as “a Delta people.”¹⁴ Oldendorp interviewed five slaves who described themselves as members of the Kalabari nation. They reported that they lived far up the Calabar River and that the Igbo were a very populous people who were their “neighbors and friends who share the same language with them.”¹⁵ In Cuba, Calabar (given as “Karabalí”) was certainly a broad, coastal designation, not an ethnic one. Among slaves from the Bight of Biafra sold there between 1790 and 1880,93.2 percent (n = 2,943) were listed as Karabalí, 5.8 percent (n = 183) as Bibi (meaning Ibibio), and only percent (n = 32) as Ibo. These few references to specific ethnicities from the Bight of Biafra in Cuban sales documents were almost all from documents found in Santiago de Cuba, where St. Domingue/Haitian slave owners predominated.¹⁶ “Calabar” was not found in documents in St. Domingue. Among Africans from the Bight of Biafra listed on probated estate documents dating from 1721 to 1797, David Geggus found that 90.7 percent (n = 1,129) were listed as Igbo, 6.6 percent (n = 83) as Ibibio/Bibi, and 2.7 percent (n = 33) as Moko and others.¹⁷ There are many listings of Igbo in American documents dating from the eighteenth century. In Louisiana and elsewhere as well, the Ibibio/Moko were heavily male, in contrast to the Igbo who were about half female during the eighteenth century.

Some historians are questioning whether an Igbo identity existed at all before the twentieth century. They cite the work of Sigismund W. Koelle, a minister and linguist who interviewed recaptives from illegal slave trade voyages in Freetown, Sierra Leone, around 1850. They had been landed by British anti-slave trade patrols during the 1820s and 1830s. Although Koelle designated them as Ibo, he did so with a caveat: “Certain natives who have come from the Bight are called Ibos. In speaking to some of them respecting this name, I learned that they never had heard it till they came to Sierra Leone. In their own country they seem to have lost their general national name, like the Akus [Nago/Lucumi/Yoruba], and know only the names of their respective districts or countries. I have retained this name for the language, of which I produce specimens, as it is spoken in five of the said districts or countries.”

Historians of Africa have effectively used Koelle’s remarkable work. He was a careful scholar. He expressed his reservations about the reliability of his informants, pointing out that he interviewed them in English during the early 1850s. Most of them had been recaptured by British anti-slave trade ships and brought to Sierra Leone decades before. Among the six Igbo he interviewed, four had been in Sierra Leone for thirty years, one for twenty-four years, and one for eleven years after he was kidnapped from his home at the age of three. When Koelle wrote that the Igbo he interviewed had “lost their general national name,” he implied that they previously had one.¹⁸

From this single ambiguous statement made late in the slave-trading era, transcendent conclusions have been drawn about all Africans throughout the Americas: for example, that all Africans were so isolated and immobilized that they were unaware that there were other Africans who were different from themselves. Therefore, terms for African ethnicities appearing in American documents arose not in Africa but rather in the Americas after slaves were first exposed to Africans unlike themselves. Maybe they called themselves something else. Maybe they did not fully understand their interrogators, or their interrogators did not fully understand them. Perhaps they could not remember too well. A word is an imperfect representation of reality. Regardless of which word they did or did not use to identify themselves in the past, it did not prevent them from considering themselves an internally related group different from others. In any case, Koelle’s statement should not be extrapolated backward in time and to all African ethnicities. David Northrup has stated: “Some other ‘nations’ in Sierra Leone shared a common language. Speakers of the various dialects of Efik (‘Calabar’ in Sierra Leone), Hausa, Fulbe, Akan (‘Kronmantee’) of the Gold Coast, or Wolof came to use language as a way of distinguishing themselves from other Africans in Sierra Leone, even though no such national consciousness or political unity existed in their homelands.” ¹⁹ This is a very broad generalization indeed. For example, the Wolof lived in developed, hierarchical states for many centuries before the Atlantic slave trade began and certainly identified themselves through common descent, history, law, politics, culture, and religion as well as language.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the designation “Igbo” might have had more shame attached to it than in earlier times, when it was less clearly identified with “slave.” The designation “Igbo” was recognized by Africans as well as by Europeans long before the mid-nineteenth century, including by Alonso de Sandoval in 1627. Sandoval did not discuss either numbers or percentages of African ethnicities arriving in Cartagena de Indias. Some of Sandoval’s information about Africa and African ethnicities was obtained from reports and studies, mainly by Portuguese and Spanish missionaries stationed in Africa. He does not always make clear which Africans he encountered in Cartagena de Indias and which he obtained information about from other sources. Although the vast majority of ethnicities he discussed were probably brought to the Americas, some of them may never have been brought at all. Nor can we assume that each ethnicity he mentioned was brought over in the same proportions. In any case, Sandoval obviously was writing well before any significant number of African slaves arrived anywhere in the British colonies.²⁰

Nevertheless, some historians have concluded that the Igbo identified only with their regions or villages and had no broader identity before they were brought to the Americas, where the Igbo ethnic identity arose. This shaky conclusion is then extrapolated to all Africans throughout the Americas at all times and places. The Igbo were not as isolated as many historians claim. Their “state” system and social organization did not conform to what Western scholars steeped in broad sociological constructions and delusions of progress have looked for. It was not a weak, highly fragmented system. “Segmented” would be a better word.²¹ Interviews of Igbo at Freetown during the nineteenth century indicate that the “production” of slaves there involved a high level of kidnapping of individuals, condemnation of “criminals” to slavery, and raiding among villages.²² Large-scale warfare in the course of empire building was less common than in some other regions of Africa. But the likelihood that Africans were isolated and immobilized in regions where the transatlantic slave trade was active is slim. Ancient trade routes proliferated throughout Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade began.²³ Extensive trade networks over land, sea, lagoons, and rivers, mutual conquest and empire building, and a normal process of creolization in Africa had long exposed Africans to many peoples besides their own. It is reasonable to generalize Boubacar Barry’s description of the peaceful interactions and inter-penetrations among African ethnicities long before the transatlantic slave trade began. After it began, warfare, capture, and displacement of populations through flight and famine were endemic to the process of “producing” slaves.

Documents generated in the Americas containing ethnicity listings point toward a heavy Igbo majority among those Africans shipped from the Bight of Biafra during the last half of the eighteenth century and a diminishing majority during the nineteenth century. Chambers, Gomez, and Walsh, writing about the African population in the British North American mainland during the eighteenth century, assumed that the vast majority of Africans arriving from the Bight of Biafra were Igbo. The highest estimate of Igbo or Igbospeaking slaves was published by Chambers who claimed that it was “likely or at least possible” that they were 80 percent of the Africans arriving from the Bight of Biafra, although he has recently revised this estimate slightly downward .²⁴

We do not have valid, direct evidence from the British mainland colonies because of the scant attention paid to African ethnicities in English-language documents. If we restrict ourselves to the eighteenth century, the most important time period for the United States, Chambers, Gomez, and Walsh’s assumption of large numbers of Igbo in Virginia is supported by documents created on the American side of the Atlantic, but with some caveats. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database shows that voyages from the Bight of Biafra to Virginia took place early: 84 percent (n = 89) before 1750, 16 percent between 1751 and 1775 (n = 17), and none after that date. But voyages from Bonny where a high proportion of Igbo were exported began earlier than scholars previously believed.

We do not know the coastal origins or ethnicities of new Africans brought to the Chesapeake via the transshipment trade from the Caribbean, or perhaps via slave trade voyages organized and carried out by Chesapeake slave owners or would-be slave owners to buy Africans for their own use, or by pirates. But we do have rich African ethnicity information from documents from eight different colonies in the North American continent. Our most detailed and reliable ethnicity data generated in American documents date from between 1770 and 1827. French-language documents, especially notarial documents from St. Domingue, Guadeloupe, and Louisiana, are particularly rich and detailed about African ethnicities. Lists of slaves in French-language notarial documents list the Northwest Bantu language speakers including the Ibibio and the Moko as well as the Igbo in some detail over time. In Louisiana, the vaguer designation “Calabar” is listed as well. This evidence does not support the likelihood that Northwest Bantu language speakers of Efik dialects, the Ibibio, Moko, and Ijo were numerous in the Americas during the eighteenth century. They establish that the overwhelming majority of Africans living in the lower Niger delta sent to the Americas and recorded over time in surviving and studied American notarial documents were listed as Igbo, even if we exclude Africans listed as Calabar.

Unlike evidence from the African side, these American data collected from notarial documents allow for calculations of ethnic designations recorded over time and place and by gender, as well as much other information about enslaved Africans. For eighteenth-century St. Domingue/Haiti, David Geggus studied nearly 400 probate inventories in documents dating from between 1721 and 1797 that listed over 13,300 Africans. He found that the Igbo listed were 90.7 percent (n = 1,129) of Africans coming from the Bight of Biafra. There were very few, if any, Africans listed as Calabar in Geggus’s sample.²⁵ For Guadeloupe, Nicole Vanony-Frisch studied and databased all extant, legible probate inventories listing slaves between 1770 and 1789. She found that fully 37 percent of all Africans of identified ethnicities were listed as Igbo (n = 248). There were no Calabar listed in her sample. In probate inventories in Louisiana between 1770 and 1789, Africans listed as Igbo were 78.6 percent (n = 81) of all identified Africans from the Bight of Biafra. Louisiana probate documents show that the Northwest Bantu language speakers, Ibibio and Moko, had a very high percentage of males: 88.9 percent. Africans listed as Calabar on Louisiana estate inventories between 1770 and 1789 were 84.6 percent male (n = 11). There was one male listed as Ekoi and another listed as Bioko, both runaways. Numbers for all non-Igbo were very small; those listed as Calabar were probably unlikely to be Igbo at this place and time.

As we have seen, the evidence from the American side of the Atlantic indicates that the proportion of Igbo exported from the Bight of Biafra during the eighteenth century was very high: probably as high as what Chambers, Gomez, and Walsh stated or assumed, even if we draw the very unlikely conclusion that none of the Africans recorded as Calabar in American documents were Igbo. The Ibibio and Moko, the only other numerically significant Africans from the Bight of Biafra found thus far in American documents, were overwhelmingly male. Louisiana documents show that the Igbo had a slight majority of females until 1790, and thereafter a slight majority of males.

Data in both Africa and the Americas indicate a substantially higher proportion of Northwest Bantu language group speakers during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the Igbo remained a majority, which is clearest on the American side in slave registration lists created in the British West Indies in preparation for general emancipation. Among the five islands listing African ethnicity information, four were former French colonies and the other was Trinidad, to which French Creole-speaking masters and slaves had migrated, largely from Martinique. These nineteenth-century British registration lists (1813-27) reflect varying percentages of Igbo in British West Indies islands ranging from a low of 51.8 percent for Trinidad and a high of 72.4 percent for St. Kitts. On all of these lists, the Igbo were a total of 57.9 percent (n = 4,312; t = 7,566) of Africans from the Bight of Biafra region.

Africans described in these British lists were later arrivals than Africans recorded in probate documents. In Louisiana, data from sales documents recording Africans arriving during a comparable period (1790-1820) contrasts with the data from Trinidad but is close to the data from St. Kitts. The proportion of Igbo in these Louisiana documents dropped very slightly from the earlier probate lists: from 78.6 percent to 75 percent. But the sex ratio among slaves listed as Calabar closely tracked the sex ratio among Igbo, which might make this slight drop more apparent than real. The “Calabar” sold after 1789 had a lower percentage of males (48.8 percent) than the Igbo (54.6 percent), while the Northwest Bantu speakers (Ibibio and Moko) continued to have a very high percentage of males (81.5 percent). It is very likely that at least some of these Africans sold as Calabar in Louisiana were indeed Igbo. If we add some of the Calabar to the Igbo, it brings the Igbo to nearly 80 percent of Africans from the Bight of Biafra sold in Louisiana between 1790 and 1820.

Looking at the African side, the 1848 census of Freetown, Sierra Leone, reflects the African ethnicities of recaptives brought in by the British anti-slave trade patrols. Among those who arrived from the Bight of Biafra (excluding the 657 Hausa from the totals in order to compare Igbo with their non-Igbo neighbors), we find 60.9 percent (n = 1,231) Igbo, 15.8 percent (n = 319) Efik, and 23.3 percent (n = 470) Moko.²⁶ This census shows a large majority of Igbo. In sum, the evidence presented here indicates a drop in the proportion of Igbo exported during the nineteenth century and a rise in the proportion of males among them. Nevertheless, the Igbo continued to be a substantial majority of enslaved Africans living in the lower Niger delta who were exported to the Americas.

It is a truism in the historical literature that Igbo, especially Igbo males, were not at all appreciated in the Americas, mainly because of their propensity to run away and/or commit suicide. Igbo were, indeed, sometimes described as “refuse slaves” who were purchased in high percentages in Virginia because the poverty of the slave owners left them no alternative.²⁷ But female Igbo were valued as more emotionally stable than the men, physically attractive, and hard workers. If we look closer at marketing patterns and other data, we see a strikingly different image of the Igbo in various regions of the Americas. In some places, they were especially prized. Colin Palmer’s study of the British asiento slave trade to the Spanish colonies (1700-1739) makes it clear that Spanish purchasers, having the advantage of easy access to Mexican silver coins, bought only prime Africans, for whom they paid the highest prices. According to Palmer, “The Ibo ... were considered tractable and hence were highly sought after by some of the slaveholders in America.”²⁸

When Igbo could not be bought to settle a new upland plantation in Jamaica, the manager explained that he did not buy other slaves because the Ibo were “that will answer best there.”²⁹ In 1730, a Barbados merchant complained, “There has not [been] a Cargo of Ebbo slaves sold here [for] a long time and many people are Enquirering [sic] for them.” Daniel Littlefield presents convincing evidence that Igbo women were uniquely valued by British slave traders along the African coast.³⁰

We must be cautious about relying heavily on anecdotal evidence disparaging the Igbo. Most evidence comes from surviving documents written by large planters. Planters operating small units might have been more positive about the Igbo, but they rarely left documentation of their activities and opinions. We need more systematic evidence. Documents in Louisiana, for example, demonstrate a lack of enthusiasm for Igbo slaves. They were underrepresented in Louisiana before 1790, although a high proportion of voyages from the Bight of Biafra arrived in Jamaica and Cuba, both major Caribbean transshipment points for Africans brought to Louisiana during the Spanish period (1770-1803). A slave sale document in Louisiana explained that the seller did not know the nation of the newly arrived African figuring in the transaction, but he guaranteed he was not an Igbo.³¹

It is evident that after the United States took over Louisiana in late 1803, Africans from the Bight of Biafra were being smuggled into Louisiana in large numbers. Between 1804 and 1820, Igbo began to appear in higher proportions among all Africans and became one of the five most frequent ethnicities encountered in documents. Their mean age did not advance significantly over time, although the foreign maritime slave trade to Louisiana was illegal after 1803. They were more heavily male than during the eighteenth century. An insignificant number of Igbo (a total of nine) were listed as children. Although some of these Igbo could have been transshipped from Charleston before 1808, only six documented and databased transatlantic slave trade voyages arrived from the Bight of Biafra on the east coast of the United States (all at Charleston) between 1803 and 1807. On January 1, 1808, the foreign slave trade to the Untied States became illegal. Igbo were obviously among ethnicities actively smuggled into Louisiana as well as into Cuba long after the foreign slave trade was outlawed.³²

Was this relative and absolute growth of the Igbo population in Louisiana because those who purchased them had no choice? The Louisiana Slave Database allows us to compare the prices paid for Africans of various ethnicities, male and female. A mixed picture emerges. The appendix of this book compares slave prices by ethnicity and gender in Louisiana and discusses the comparative reliability of the price date, including the complexities of inflation and the changing value of the variety of currencies in circulation.

Results for the Igbo are both surprising and anomalous. If Igbo men were despised and Igbo women prized, this is not reflected in prices during the Spanish period in Louisiana, when the mean price of Igbo men was highest among the most numerous ethnicities. The price of Igbo women was only 64 percent of the price of Igbo men, by far the greatest gap between male and female prices for any of these five ethnicities. Curiously, the pattern was entirely reversed during the early U.S. period as Louisiana quickly shifted from a “society with slaves” to a “slave plantation society,” as Ira Berlin phrases it.³³ The mean price of Igbo men fell to last place. The mean price of Igbo women rose to 97.5 percent of that of Igbo men, by far the smallest gap between male and female prices within the same ethnicity during the early U.S. period. This reversal of the price gap between male and female Igbo is even more surprising because the gender price gap increased sharply among all other slaves sold.

The anomalous price trend among enslaved Igbo has several possible explanations. Igbo did not adjust to working in large slave gangs growing sugar or cotton. According to Michael Mullin, South Carolina slave owners considered Igbo unsuitable for rice production.³⁴ This could explain why they were not appreciated in South Carolina, where rice was the major export crop, and were more appreciated in Virginia, where tobacco reigned. During the early U.S. period in Louisiana (1804-20), sugar and cotton plantations displaced the varied indigo, rice, garden crop, tobacco, corn, cattle, meat, leather, naval stores, cypress and other timber production of the Spanish period. These products had usually been produced on small farms with relatively few slaves. The narrowing gap between male and female prices of Igbo in Louisiana might also have stemmed from the slave owners’ growing acquaintance with their strengths and weaknesses, at least from the point of view of the masters. Igbo women were among the two African ethnicities whose women had the highest proportion of surviving children. They mated widely outside the Igbo group. By the early U.S. period, Igbo women without children might have been recent arrivals who had been separated from their children in Africa. Some of them might not have given birth to children in Louisiana as yet. Their buyers might have held out hope for their reproductive future. The other ethnicity with high reproductive results were the Wolof. During the Spanish period, the mean price of Wolof women was higher than that of Wolof men. Wolof women were sought out as mates in colonial Louisiana, where they were considered especially beautiful, intelligent, and elegant. But their relative mean price dropped during the early U.S. period along with that of almost all slave women except for the Igbo. Mandingo women demonstrated relatively low reproductive results. Between the Spanish and the early U.S. periods, Mandingo women dropped from third place to last place in the mean price of women among the most frequent ethnicities. Kongo women were numerous despite high male ratios, but their reproductive results were substantially lower than that calculated for women of any other African ethnicity, possibly because of a high abortion rate among them and/or the impact on their health and reproductive powers of the long trek from interior regions of Africa. The price gap between Kongo men and women diminished slightly from the Spanish to the early U.S. periods.

These price differentials point toward a substantial value placed on the reproductive powers of enslaved women. The price of women plummeted after age thirty-four, while the price of men remained stable until age forty. In regions like the Chesapeake, where natural reproduction of the slave population was a high priority, the Igbo were probably not “refuse” slaves but actually preferred. Because of the independent position and stance of Igbo women in Africa, their willingness to mate outside their ethnicity and to bear and raise children, their identification with small, local places, and their attachment to the land where their first child was born, they were well equipped to establish new communities on small estates where clear hierarchical structures were weak or absent. African Americans are likely to be descended directly from African women via the female line because they have many more white male than white female ancestors. In the United States, African mothers were reasonably likely to be Igbo or Wolof: a thesis that can eventually be tested through DNA studies.

The Igbo and their neighbors, then, have been neglected and unjustifiably depreciated in the historical literature about Africans in the Americas. There is no better way to conclude this chapter than by quoting from Dike: