agulion:
Pls can anybody help and educate and school me into the above topic. Because they way the names of people from that state sound used to comfuse me.

The Slave Ship Manuelita and the Story of a Yoruba Community, 1833-1834

The rise of the Lagos slave port in the 1790s drew Yorubaland intimately into the slave trade. It spread the frontiers of slave raiding and violence further into the interior. Warfare and slave raids and the attendant movement of populations had far-reaching consequences on the Yoruba country. Slave trading and violence were mutually reinforcing. Demand for slaves heightened interstate rivalries and warfare, fractured states, weakened civilian chiefs, boosted soldiering, and pitted military officers against their civilian counterparts. Slaving operations also led to a culture of conspicuous consumption among Yoruba freebooters, heightened ethnic and social tension, encouraged large scale enslavement, and put intense pressures on resources by displaced populations. Ecomosho, the homeland identified by the 477 recaptives taken from the Manuelita, was one of the communities affected by these disruptions.


Socio-political developments in the hinterland underpinned why Lagos emerged as a major trade port. The outbreak of an Islamic revolution in the Central Sudan in the late eighteenth century revived debates about slavery and slaving operations in the ‘Nigerian’ hinterland. The debate focused on the legality of slavery, who could be enslaved or not and when enslavement was justifiable. Of special interest were slaves whose captivity coincided with the increased wave of Islamic revival in Africa. The supply of these slaves did not come out of Oyo’s expansion into central Sudan but as a result of internal wars among the various Hausa states. The number of slaves, obviously in thousands, so affected the Muslim community that the sale of Muslim slaves to “Yoruba infidels” became one of the impulses for the southward extension of the Sokoto jihad (1804–1830s). Muslim leaders defined and propagated laws regulating who could be enslaved and why. They condemned the enslavement of Muslims and their sale to and service under Yoruba/Orisa and Euro-Christian slaveholders (Fisher, 1988; Lovejoy, 2000; Lofkrantz, 2011; Lofkrantz and Ojo, 2012.).

A war led by Usman dan Fodio broke out in 1804 after decades of intense social tensions in Hausaland resulting from the enslavement of freeborn Muslims, which Fodio and his followers considered illegal under Islamic law. Over the next two decades the war spread throughout the Central Sudan, producing thousands of slaves annually many of whom were sold through Yorubaland and by Yoruba merchants into the Atlantic trade (Arnett, 1922: 16; Adamu, 1979; Lovejoy, 1994). Biographies of Central Sudanese slaves collected in Brazil and Africa between 1819 and 1850 by José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, a Portuguese naturalist and politician, Menèzes de Drummond and Francis de Castelnau both French scholars and politicians, as well German linguist, Sigismund Koelle, all highlight the role of the jihad as a cause of enslavement. These narratives provide the names, age, sex, modes of enslavement, slave route from the interior to the coast, religion and in some cases path to freedom of the slaves. Bernard was a Hausa trader from Gobir kidnapped while traveling to a salt market near the desert and moved to the coast. His route passed through Gobir, Yauri, Nupe (Rabah?), Yerabah (Old Oyo), Fugah (Ilorin), and Aianschi (Ajase Ipo) to Ijebu. Finally, he was sold to a Portuguese trader at Agaey (Ijaye, a lagoon port). The journey took five and a half months’ journey with allowance to rest for only one day a week, and sometimes less (Drummond, 1826: 290-324; Castelnau, 1851: 5-48; Koelle, 1854a: 8-18)

By instituting wedges between ‘outsiders’ or non-kin who could be enslaved and protected ‘kin’ or ‘insiders’ slavery espoused ‘otherness’ and identity profiling. To enslave an ‘insider’ was illegal. The enslaveable were people whose cultural and physiological markers such as body marks, names, faith, and ethnicity or political loyalties differed from the enslaver (Law, 2003; Lovejoy, 2000; Curto, 2003; Thornton, 2010; and Ojo, 2013). During the eighteenth century, a popular idea among the Oyo was that their Ijesa neighbors to the southeast were “strange people of bad repute…with a language somewhat difficult and liable to suspicion” emblematized group profiling.10 To this effect, they corrupted Ijesa to ije orisa (food for the gods) and hunted them for slaves. With no consensus on the meaning of Yoruba identity or citizenship rights and no state capable of maintaining order, the period 1790-1840 was marked by incessant violence which fed slaves into the Atlantic trade.

Not every slave imported into Yorubaland entered the Atlantic trade. Those left behind were employed as soldiers, farmers, manufacturers, physicians, and horse-keepers. Therefore, Hausa slaves awaiting shipment or sale further south were found scattered in towns along major trade routes connecting the Central Sudan to Lagos and other ports in the Bight of Benin. Hausa slaves had some unique features. Most professed Islam, a faith that gave them an ideological justification against enslavement. Such captives viewed their enslavement as unlawful, especially when held by non-Muslims. This created conflicts between Hausa slaves and their Yoruba owners. As Jennifer Lofkrantz and Paul Lovejoy note Muslim merchants in West Africa could have sold more slaves into the Atlantic market but they did not because of state restrictions to selling slaves to Europeans/Christians. Hence, most slaves in the Atlantic trade came from non-Muslim states while enslaved Muslims were either sold locally or into the Saharan trade (Lofkrantz and Lovejoy, 2015).

[b]In 1817, one such ideological conflict in Yorubaland developed into an open revolt. An Ilorin-based party led by the army chief, Afonja, and supported by Muslim preachers staged a military coup. They attacked the capital, Old Oyo, seized control of military camps in the northern and eastern parts of the kingdom and declared Ilorin an independent state. To cause more chaos in the kingdom, the rebels vowed to welcome anyone who would fight against the capital. The plot worked. Over the next few years many slaves, including Hausa slaves, who as cavalry men constituted the best fighting unit in Oyo, deserted, many fleeing with their horses. From Ilorin, Afonja’s forces began a piecemeal conquest of Oyo kingdom and other Yoruba-speaking states. By 1830, most Oyo towns had fallen, many of its people enslaved, and the survivors taking refuge among the southern Yoruba states of Egba and Ife.11 The linkage between political violence in Yorubaland and the rise of the port of Lagos is evident in Samuel Johnson’s remark that, “confiscation and slavery for the slightest offence became matters of daily occurrence” (Johnson, 1921: 188).[/b]