From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930

131 Pages·1996·31.06 MB·English

by  Ibrahim K. Sundiata

From Slaving to
Neoslavery
The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the
Era of Abolition, 1827-1930
Ibrahim Kt:_undiata
The University of Wisconsin Press
CONTENTS
Maps and Figures ix
Preface xi
3
Introduction
Chapter One
The Island Background 9
Indigenous Origins and Society 13
Aborted Slaving 17
Chapter Two
Aborted Antislaving 21
The Genesis of an Antislaving Base 22
Establishment 25
The Question of Impact 27
The Disease Factor 34
· Chapter Three
Spain in the Bight 38
Fernando Po in Antislaving Diplomacy 39
Spain and Rio Muni 45
47
The Development Decade, 1858-1868
The Cubans in Africa 50
Colonial Torpor 54
Chapter Four
Trade and Politics 56
The Colonial Nucleus 56
Company Versus Peasant Development 61
The Inculcation of Values 65
Racism and Competition 68
Chapter Five
74
Islanders and Interlopers
Society and Change 75
"Trading in Boobe" 82
vii
MAPS AND FIGURES
viii Contents
Chapter Six
The Cocoa Economy 90
The Black Planters 92
The Spanish Presence 101
Femandinos: Continuity and Change 111 Maps
The Problematic of Black Enterprise 115
1.1 The Biafran Region 11
Chapter Seven 5.1 Fernando Po in 1841 76
The Search for Labor 119 6.1 Fernando Po Plantation Locations, c. 1913 112
Slavery and Neoslavery 119 10.1 Land Distribution Between Social Categories, 1941 181
Recruitment: Rio Muni 122
Recruitment: Cameroon 124
Recruitment: The Kru 126 Figures
Labor Abuse and the British 130
Labor Abuse and the African Farmers 137 2.1 Slave Ship Captures, 1825-1839 29
Labor Agreements, 1914-1930 140 6.1 Recorded Cocoa Production and Exports, 1899-1930 107
Chapter Eight
Creole Culture and Change 146
The Protestant Paradigm 146
Life-Style 149
Hispanicization 152
Chapter Nine
The Bubi: Acculturation and Resistance 160
The Attack on Tradition 164
The Bubi and the Labor Question 167
Instruments and Elements of Change 172
Epilogue 177
A "Model" Colony 177
The Creation of the "Model" Colony 178
Appendix 187
Notes 190
Bibliography 224
Index 245 ix
PREFACE
This work concerns a portion of Equatorial Guinea, one of the world's most
isolated countries. During my first visit twenty-five years ago, I was placed
under house arrest and my research destroyed.
This book is the reconstruction and fruition of that research. It has
involved travels in Great Britain, Spain, and the United States. Most
rewardingly, it took me back to Equatorial Guinea. Much had changed;
much had not. Access to information was easier. However, many persons
who had been living repositories of history were dead. I mourn their deaths
both as a closing off of historical memory and as the loss of kind and
fascinating interlocutors.
Hopefully this work will justify its long gestation. I wish to thank all of
those colleagues who have made it possible. In Boston Patrick Manning and
David Northrup made excellent suggestions and criticisms. Gwendolyn M.
Hall, a friend and an historian of encyclopedic scope, read the manuscript
early on and made greatly appreciated suggestions. I am also very thankful
for the information and feedback provided by Gervase Clarence-Smith,
Teresa Pereira Rodriguez, Ralph Austen, David Eltis, Cord Jakobeit, Daniel
Headrick, Max Liniger-Goumaz, and Gonzalo Sanz Casas. In Equatorial
Guinea Samuel Ebuka and Trinidad Morgades provided friendship and
orientation, as did the late Constantino Ochaga Nve Bengobesama. My oral
informants, many of whom have now passed on, were exemplars of courage
in the face of adversity. I thank them all, especially the late Abigail Mehile,
Fernanda Broderick and Edward Barleycorn.
There are many scholars whose work has inspired this project, most
notably Jan Vansina. In a different vein, the same could be said of the work
of Philip Curtin, who mentioned the importance of Fernando Po more than
a generation ago. At the level of moral support, this work could not have
XI
xii Preface
been completed without the good wishes and faith of Betsy Elderedge and
David Plank.
I thank the University of Wisconsin Press, which has seen this long
process to fruition. I am particularly grateful to Raphael Kadushin of the From Slaving to Neoslavery
press and his staff. The manuscript itself was prepared by Susan C. Isaacs,
who saw it go through many changes. G. Patton Wright served as proof-
reader and did an excellent job of picking his way through a welter of
languages and styles. The translations in the work are my own. I thank John
Kraman, my graduate assistant, who was indefatigable. Because of his
efforts and those of my other helpers, any errors of analysis or fact are
entirely my own.
Introduction
In the 1960s Fernando Po (present-day Bioko), an African island larger than
Zanzibar or Mauritius, was a model of colonial development. A plantation
system based on cocoa and coffee cultivation benefited both European capital
and indigenous cash crop farmers. In 1960 exports from Spanish Guinea,
of which Fernando Po was the economic mainstay, were the highest per
capita in Africa ($135). Six years later the colony was the fifth largest
African cocoa producer, after the much larger territories of Ghana, Nigeria,
Ivory Coast, and Cameroon. Literacy was over 80 percent, and per capita
government expenditure was higher for the whole of Spanish Guinea than it
was in Spain itself. 1 · ·
Fernando Po is the largest of a series of islands in the Gulf of Guinea, the
majority of which have been part of the world economy since the fifteenth
century. They gained importance as fifteenth-century European sugar
growing shifted from the Mediterranean to Madeira and then to the West
African coast. As Fernand Braude! noted, "the discovery of the Cape Verde
islands in 1455, and of Fernando Po and Sao Tome in 1471 ... brought
into being a coherent economic zone, based essentially on trade in ivory,
malaguetta [pepper] ... gold dust ... and the slave trade. "2 By the early
sixteenth century Sao Tome was the world's largest sugar plantation
economy. It provided the model for developments in Brazil, the Caribb.ean,
and, ultimately, the American South. 3
3
4 Introduction Introduction 5
Remarkably, Fernando Po stood outside these developments. When up under the Portuguese on the not far distant island of Sao Thome, there is
compared with the other Guinea Islands, it appeared to be a "developmental no reason why, under an energetic Spanish administration, a similar fate
failure." In spite of volcanic soils suitable for plantation agriculture, the should not be in store for Fernando Po." Thirty-one years later a: spokesman
territory entered the world economy only in the late nineteenth century. for the Franco regime expressed a similar hope and, at the same time,
European colonization attempts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth acknowledged the force of the environment: "The Portuguese, blood of our
centuries foundered. The indigenous people, the Bantu-speaking Bubi, blood, bear centuries of adaptation on Sao Tome and Principe, neighbors of
remained unconquered by European imperialism until the opening of the Fernando Po and Annob6n. There is no tabu, nor any racial or climatic
twentieth century. This delay resulted both from their political and cultural impossibility, which, by its existence, would mean our expulsion as a
resistance to colonization and from difficulties created by the physical colonizing country. "8 However, it was only in the post-World War II
environment in which they live. period, when epidemiological impediments had been overcome, that this
On Fernando Po, as elsewhere, ecology played a momentous historical hope became a full reality.
role in determining the fate of European colonizing attempts. For example, Fernando Po's experience speaks to the larger issues of overseas
Walter Rodney has pointed out that sugar plantation agriculture and expansion and the creation of plantation economies in the tropics. The
settlement in Guyana were, in fundamental ways, constrained by the physical island's pre-nineteenth-century history is not the history of alien colonization.
environment.4 Of the Americas in general, Marvin Harris notes that Rather, it is the story of the repulse of that colonization by the indigenes and
demography and epidemiology influence landholding patterns, patterns of the environment. The territory reminds us that ecology is more than just the
racial intermixing, methods of social control, and the general open or closed mise-en-scene of the historical drama; it can, under certain circumstances,
nature of labor systems. 5 Philip Curtin has shown that tracking the determine the pace of the drama's unfolding or, whether the drama will take
movement of European administrators and landowners to the tropics cannot place at all.
avoid the question of epidemiological costs. 6 The history of the big island in the Bight calls for a broader and deeper
Unfortunately, little discussion has focused on African islands. Yet it is examination of the general role of ecology in intracontinental and interconti-
obvious that these territories, so important from the fifteenth through the nental migration. European plans to employ Asian, Arab, and Afro-
nineteenth centuries, were prime examples of intercontinental migration and Caribbean labor in the Bight were not consistently followed through, in part
epidemiological impact. Fernando Po's history argues against any "teleologi- because of the disease factor. Obviously, this factor is not confined to the
cal" explanation of the movement of capital into new areas. Capital, like Bight of Biafra, although its salience there was greater than elsewhere in
nature, may abhor a vacuum, but it is constrained by material conditions. Africa. In the 1860s, a German anthropologist opined that "in ...
Although some imperialists argued that Fernando Po must be developed Fernando Po and Zanzibar aliens could neither live nor become acclimated,
simply because it was "there," European economic exploitation was whilst the natives enjoy good health. "9 Of course, in the comparative case
restrained by a plethora of environmental factors. Sleeping sickness, of Zanzibar, nineteenth-century immigrants from the Arabian peninsula did,
malaria, and other tropical diseases are still, or have been, present on the over time, become acclimated. However, newcomers from Asia did not
island. It shares with the rest of West and Equatorial Africa the prevalence enter without paying an epidemiological price. 10 As Zanzibar colonial
of falciparum malaria and trypanosomiasis. These diseases, along with medical reports indicate, alien settlement and residence were very much
yellow fever, have had a detectable, but differential impact on settlement. . ilfccted by disease. 11 For instance, hyperendemic malaria had a clearly
Trypanosomiasis was a continuing problem for the African population; ·v isible differential impact on the settlement patterns and viability of various
malaria has been of most concern to would-be European colonizers. groups. Writing of the East African island, Frederick Cooper has
As late as 1910 Sir Harry Johnston remarked that Fernando Po "is one of the role of hegemonic ideology, world markets, and praedial labor
the most beautiful islands in the whole world, yet although it has no great ,.,• ." '"'"'" in molding island plantation systems. 12 To the resistance of labor
tracts of marsh, [it] is nevertheless very unhealthy for Europeans in the coast be added the resistance and interaction of the environment itself.
districts. "7 He estimated that.its undercolonized state would soon pass away: ·After the 1820s permanent alien settlement did, in spite of epidemiological
"Btelna what a successful, healthy, prosperous European colony has grown mpedl:meJilts, become implanted on Fernando Po and increasingly impinged
6 Introduction Introduction 7
on the Bubi. The changes undergone by the islanders in the nineteenth dominant.14 The impact of this "development" on the Bubi was devastating.
century raise a number of broad questions and provide one scenario for In 1912 they numbered only around 6,800 or 54 percent of the population.15
Bantu state-formation. On Fernando Po it is possible to see the forces By 1936 they accounted for only 36 percent of the population.16 Like the
impelling socio-political change, especially those contributing to the rise of Wahadimu on Zanzibar, they had been pushed into a marginal position.
central political institutions. Increased trade, principally in palm oil, and Unlike Zanzibar or the Mascarenes, nineteenth-century Fernando Po was
pressure from outside groups led to the creation of a paramount authority not a classic slave plantation economy managed by non-Africans. Outside
over the more than twenty-five political units on the island. At the same labor and managers both came, in the main, from African societies on the
time, contact with outsiders brought new diseases, followed by precipitous West African coast. A perdurable legacy of the British occupation was the
population decline. creation of an African settler population largely descended from recaptured
In the early nineteenth century the most persistent outsiders were the slaves. By 1830 these mostly Igbo freedpeople and their liberators constituted
British. For the twenty years following 1821 Fernando Po was the cynosure the largest British establishment in the Bights of Benin and Biafra region.
of their interest in Niger Delta region. Some saw it as the future emporium To the original recaptured slaves there were later added immigrants from
of West Africa, the "free" labor antipode of Zanzibar. Britishers as diverse Sierra Leone and elsewhere on the coast. Gradually, they coalesced into a
as the parliamentary abolitionist Thomas Powell Buxton and the proslavery community known as "Fernandino." By the 1840s the settlers were already
geographer James MacQueen proclaimed the island essential to antislaving engaged in the palm oil trade with the Bubi. By the 1880s many were
or to commercial success in Africa. The latter urged his compatriots to prosperous cocoa farmers who employed Mende and Kru migrant labor.
"Plant the British standard on the Island of Socotra [in the Indian Fernando Po, against all expectations and stereotypes showed "that," in the·
Ocean]-and upon the Island of Fernando Po-and inland upon the banks of words of Christopher Fyfe, "given suitable conditions, [Western-educated
the Niger, and then we may say Asia and Africa-for all their productions Africans] could prosper in agriculture. "17 The island was a magnet for
and wants-are under our control." 13 The development of a British persons seeking an outlet for their capital or enterprise. Many succeeded in
antislaving base in the years from 1827 to 1835 was the partial fruition of activities they found difficult or closed in British West Africa.
this idea. The Buxton-inspired Niger expedition of 1841 used the island as Using Fernando Po as an example, Richard Burton asked in the 1860s
the launch site for a grand, but unsuccessful, attempt at the "civilization" of whether or not the world had "been sufficiently cleared to dispense with
the African interior. A few years later the island was the focus of a forced labor. "18 Indeed, greater inputs of coerced labor and capital would
Jamaican colonization scheme, and in the earlY. 1850s Edward Jones, an have been needed to exploit the island as successfully as nineteenth-century
African-American missionary from South Carolina, envisioned it as the Silo Tome, Principe, or Zanzibar. As it was, labor tended to shift, over
gateway for evangelization of the region east of the Niger Delta. time, toward "conditions analogous to slavery." Given the difficulty of
Before and after the British, other Europeans also attempted to settle on procuring willing wage labor, employers tried to bind workers to the island.
Fernando Po. Spain laid claim to the island in 1778, but an attempt to Recently Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts have observed that "slavery in
establish a slaving base ended in failure in 1781. For most of the early Africa sometimes ended suddenly, causing widespread disruption, and
nineteenth century there was no Spanish representative, and Madrid thought sometimes petered out with apparently minimal repercussions. "19 In the case
of selling the island to Britain. A spasm of colonial activity occurred in the of Fernando Po, coerced labor linked to traditional slaving networks petered
1860s when Fernando Po received approximately six hundred Cuban out with maximal repercussions. Wage labor has been present since the
immigrants as part of an unsuccessful colonization scheme. After 1868 early nineteenth century, but has failed to overcome the objective circum-
Spain kept its claim, but maintained only a minimal administration. stances which led to attempts to tie workers to plantations. The failure of
Metropolitan interest increased again in the twentieth century, and the Bubi Fernando Po and its neighbors to produce a self-replicating population
were brought under Spanish control in 1904. In the following decade created policies which made the distinction between slave and contract
. metropolitan· planters and commercial interests entered the colony in worker at times no more than nominal. One outcome of this situation was
increasing numbers. Cocoa and coffee production increased over 100 per- a "slavery" scandal in 1929. On the largest of the Guinea Islands the lack
cent between 1910 and 1925, and by 1930 Europeans were economically of a labor catchment area and a precipitous population decline raised, and
8 Introduction
continue to raise, serious problems for those intending to impose the
Chapter 1
plantation model.
We must avoid seeing "slavery," in and of itself, as necessarily incompat-
ible with European imperialism in all areas of Africa after the Scramble. On
The Island Background
the contrary, in the Gulf of Guinea, the triumph of British-imposed abolition
and emancipation coincided with the increasing exploitation of the worker
and the tying of the laborer to the plantation. The development of various
forms of forced labor and slavery was not linear, but fluctuated with the
intensity of economic activity. The introduction of coffee and cocoa
increased the value of bound workers and emphasized their role as producers
rather than as dependents. Far from collapsing, traditional slaving networks
interdigitated with the new traffic in "contract laborers." And, it must be
remembered, these plantation economies were, or were to become, among
the most productive in colonial Africa.
Jan Vansina notes that "the establishment of the English at Clarence on
Bioko in 1827, and of the French on the Gabon Estuary in 1839 ...
launched a direct assault on the western Bantu worldview. "1 This is the
history of that first assault and its agents, African and European. It is a
story of settlement and labor. What began in the 1820s was finally to result
in the marginalization of Fernando Po's indigenous population and the
creation of a plantation economy dependent on numbers of imported African
laborers.
Before the third decade of the nineteenth century, Fernando Po, unlike its
neighbors, was largely unknown to outsiders. The largest Guinea Island is
forty-four miles long from northeast to southwest and measures twenty-two
miles across. At its nearest point, the island lies approximately twenty miles
from the African mainland. Its mountainous relief is formidable. In
essence, Fernando Po is the steep peak of a submerged volcano. The group
of islands to which it belongs is basaltic and rests on a seabed platform.
Over time the platform has sunk, causing the islands to dip to the southwest.
This slippage is evident on Fernando Po, where the southern coast drops
abruptly into the sea. The island was, at one time, a peninsula of the
mountainous and volcanic Cameroon region. At some distant time, during
a seismic disturbance, the ocean broke in and separated the island from the
mainland. A continuous submerged ledge, about thirty miles in breadth and
lying at a depth of from 200 to 290 feet, connects the island with the
9
10 The Island Background The lslan.d Background 11
mainland. On either side of this ledge the ocean suddenly increases to a away, Principe has a rugged coastline. The northern portion of the island
depth of six thousand feet. Between Sao Tome and Principe and the is relatively flat. Again, like Fernando Po and Sao Tome, the southern
southern end of Fernando Po, the depths range from nine to ten thousand portion is craggy. Principe's highest elevation is the Pico de Principe at
feet.2 3,110 feet.
Fernando Po's highest peak, an extinct volcanic crater known as the Pico The groundwork for European plantation agriculture in the Guinea Islands
de Basile (formerly Pico de Santa Isabel), reaches 9,480 feet. The second was laid when the Portuguese arrived on Sao Tome in 1470. Within a
most prominent is the Pico de Moka, or Biao. The third is the Grand
Caldera, the semicircular remnant of an extinct volcano. Out of this last
peak flows the Thdela River, the largest watercourse in the southern part of
Nigeria
the island. In the south also lies the crater lake Moka (previously Lake
Loreto), some five thousand feet above sea level. To the north of this lake,
along the mountainous ridge of the island, are other smaller crater lakes.
Cameroon
Its rugged topography deprives Fernando Po of much easily cultivable
land. Arable terrain lies around the perimeter in a band around four miles
. wide and at an average height of sixteen hundred feet above sea level. The
use of small rivers and creeks is inhibited by wet and dry seasons. Normally
watercourses flow only during the wet season from April to October. All
the Guinea Islands are pluvial and have average yearly temperatures of 80°F.
From July to September the weather is drier.
Fernando Po's interior was once heavily forested, and there are still areas
of virgin forest. Vegetation varies greatly because of differences in altitude.
Flora is mixed; at least 826 plant species exist. The island contains
subalpine heaths, monsoon forests, subtropical forests, as well as tropical
lowlands in the north. There is a marked similarity between the flora of
Cameroon and that of Fernando Po. At the same time, climate and
vegetation differ greatly from those of southeastern Nigeria. There are
mangroves on Fernando Po, but they do not compare with the dense growths
of continental wetlands. In coastal areas, there are coconut groves on the
landward sides of beaches. The oil palm (Elaeis guineesis) grows in coastal
regions and has been of major historical significance.
Fernando Po's neighbors, Sao Tome and Principe, are located about 275
French Congo
and 125 miles, respectively, off the northern coast of Gabon (see Map 1.1).
In spite of their relatively small size, they have been historically very
significant and present a striking contrast to Fernando Po's comparative
obscurity. The geography of the three islands, however, is quite similar. Map 1.1. The Biafran Region
The two smaller islands have a total area of 372 square miles; Sao Tome is SOURCE: Billy Gene Hahs, "Spain and the Scramble for Africa: The 'Africanistas' and the
thirty miles long and twenty miles across. The 6,640-foot Pico de Sao Tome Gulf of Guinea" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1980), p. 4.
is the highest point on the two islands; in addition, there are ten other
elevations over 3,500 feet. Principe is about ten miles from northeast to
southwest, and five miles across. Like Sao Tome, which is ninety miles