‘My own nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora

Abstract

When Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745-97) was taken on board the slave ship that carried him out of the Bight of Biafra he feared for his life. Everything he saw that day seemed to confirm these initial fears that the whites (whom he suspected were evil spirits) had acquired him in order to eat him or perhaps to sacrifice him to their gods. Equiano also saw, however, other people 'of my own nation' on board which, as he later remembered, 'in a small degree gave ease to my mind'. These people, whom he recognized as fellow 'natives of Eboe', or 'Eboan Africans', or simply 'my countrymen', told the young boy what little they knew: that 'we were to be carried to these white people's country to work for them'; that this country was a far distant one; that they had their own women there; and that the whites used 'some spell or magic they put in the water when they liked, in order to stop the vessel'.1