Calabar, Efik state of
Substate | Defunct
1625 CE to 1884 CE
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The other major slave-exporting state is a loose confederation under the leadership of the Aro, an Igbo clan of mixed Igbo and Ibibio origins, whose home is on the escarpment between the central Igbo districts and the Cross River.
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the Aro build a complex network of alliances and treaties with many of the Igbo clans.
They serve as arbiters in villages throughout Igboland, and their famous oracle at Arochukwu, located in a thickly wooded gorge, is widely regarded as a court of appeal for many kinds of disputes.
By custom the Aro are sacrosanct and are allowed to travel anywhere with their goods without fear of attack.
Alliances with certain Igbo clans who act as mercenaries for the Aro guarantee their safety.
As oracle priests, they also receive slaves in payment of fines or dedicated to the gods by their masters as scapegoats for their own transgressions.
These slaves thereby become the property of the Aro priests, who are at liberty to sell them.
Besides their religious influence, the Aro establish their ascendancy through a combination of commercial acumen and diplomatic skill.
Their commercial empire is based on a set of twenty-four-day fairs and periodic markets that dot the interior.
Resident Aro dominate these markets and collect slaves for export.
They have a virtual monopoly of the slave trade after the collapse of Oyo in the 1820s.
Villages suspected of violating treaties with the Aro are subject to devastating raids that not only produce slaves for export but also maintain Aro influence.
The Aro have treaties with the coastal ports—especially Calabar, Bonny, and Elem Kalabari—from which slaves are exported.
The people of Calabar are Efik, a subsection of Ibibio, whereas Bonny and Elem Kalabari are Ijaw towns.
The Ijaw, who occupy the tidal area in proximity to the Igbo, had wrested a frugal living from the sale of dried fish and sea salt to the inland communities for centuries before the rise of the slave trade.
Traditionally, they had lived in federated groups of villages with the head of the ranking village presiding over general assemblies attended by all the males.
During the heyday of the slave trade in the eighteenth century, the major Ijaw villages grow into cities of five thousand to ten thousand inhabitants ruled by local strongmen allied with the Aro.
Their economies are based on the facilities they offer to slave traders.
They are entrepreneurial communities, receiving slaves from the Aro for resale to European agents.
Personal wealth rather than status within a lineage group is the basis for political power and social status.
Government typically is conducted by councils composed of leading merchants and headed by an amanyanabo (chief executive), an office that in time becomes hereditary.
The area that is to become Nigeria is far from a unified country by the end of the eighteenth century.
Furthermore, the orientation of the north and the south is entirely different.
The savanna states of Hausaland and Borno have experienced a difficult century of political insecurity and ecological disaster but otherwise continue in a centuries-long tradition of slow political and economic change that is similar to other parts of the savanna.
The southern areas near the coast, by contrast, have been swept up in the transatlantic slave trade.
Political and economic change has been rapid and dramatic.
By 1800 Oyo governs much of southwestern Nigeria and neighboring parts of the modern Republic of Benin, whereas the Aro have consolidated southeastern Nigeria into a confederation that dominates that region.
The Oyo and the Aro confederations are major trading partners of the slave traders from Europe and North America.
Two unrelated developments that are to have a major influence on virtually all of the area that is now Nigeria ushers in a period of radical change in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
First, between 1804 and 1808, the Islamic holy war of Usman dan Fodio establishes the Sokoto Caliphate, which not only expands to become the largest empire in Africa since the fall of Songhai but also has a profound influence on much of Muslim Africa to the west and to the east.
Second, in 1807 Britain declares the transatlantic slave trade to be illegal, an action that occurs at a time when Britain is responsible for shipping more slaves to the Americas than any other country.
Although the transatlantic slave trade will not end until the 1860s, it is gradually replaced by other commodities, especially palm oil; the shift in trade has serious economic and political consequences in the interior, which leads to increasing British intervention in the affairs of Yorubaland and the Niger Delta.
The rise of the Sokoto Caliphate and the economic and political adjustment in the south strongly shape the course of the colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century.
Many Muslim scholars and teachers had become disenchanted by the late eighteenth century with the insecurity that characterizes the Hausa states and Borno.
Some clerics (mallams) continue to reside at the courts of the Hausa states and Borno, but others, who join the Qadiriyah brotherhood, begin to think about a revolution that will overthrow existing authorities.
Prominent among these radical mallams is Usman dan Fodio, who, with his brother and son, attracts a following among the clerical class.
Many of his supporters are Fulani, and because of his ethnicity he is able to appeal to all Fulani, particularly the clan leaders and wealthy cattle owners whose clients and dependents provide most of the troops in the jihad that begins in Gobir in 1804.
Not all mallams are Fulani, however.
The cleric whose actions actually start the jihad, Abd as Salam, is Hausa; Jibril, one of Usman dan Fodio's teachers and the first cleric to issue a call for jihad two decades earlier, is Tuareg.
Nonetheless, by the time the Hausa states are overthrown in 1808, the prominent leaders are all Fulani.
Simultaneous uprisings confirm the existence of a vast underground of Muslim revolutionaries throughout the Hausa states and Borno.
By 1808 the Hausa states have been conquered, although the ruling dynasties retreat to the frontiers and build walled cities that remain independent.
The more important of these independent cities includes Abuja, where the ousted Zaria Dynasty flees; Argungu in the north, the new home of the Kebbi rulers; and Maradi in present-day Niger, the retreat of the Katsina Dynasty.
The reason, primarily, is that another cleric, Al Kanemi, fashions a strong resistance that eventually forces those Fulani in Borno to retreat west and south.
In the end, Al Kanemi overthrows the centuries-old Sayfawa Dynasty of Borno and establishes his own lineage as the new ruling house.
The caliphate is a loose confederation of emirates that recognizes the suzerainty of the commander of the faithful, the sultan.
When Usman dan Fodio dies in 1817, he is succeeded by his son, Muhammad Bello.
A dispute between Bello and his uncle, Abdullahi, results in a nominal division of the caliphate into eastern and western divisions, although the supreme authority of Bello as caliph is upheld.
The division is institutionalized through the creation of a twin capital at Gwandu, which is responsible for the western emirates as far as modern Burkina Faso—formerly Upper Volta—and initially as far west as Massina in modern Mali.
As events turn out, the eastern emirates are more numerous and larger than the western ones, which reinforces the primacy of the caliph at Sokoto.
There will be thirty emirates and the capital district of Sokoto—which itself is a large and populous territory although not technically an emirate—by the middle of the nineteenth century in what is today Nigeria.
All the important Hausa emirates, including Kano, the wealthiest and most populous, are directly under Sokoto.
Adamawa, which had been established by Fulani forced to evacuate Borno, is geographically the biggest, stretching far to the south and east of its capital at Yola into modern Cameroon.
Ilorin, which becomes part of the caliphate in the 1830s, is initially the headquarters of the Oyo cavalry that had provided the backbone of the king's power.
An attempted coup d'etat by the general of the cavalry in 1817 had backfired when the cavalry itself revolted and pledged its allegiance to the Sokoto Caliphate.
The cavalry is largely composed of Muslim slaves from farther north, and they see in the jihad a justification for rebellion.
In the 1820s, Oyo had been torn asunder, and the defeated king and the warlords of the Oyo Mesi had retreated south to form new cities, including Ibadan, where they carry on their resistance to the Sokoto caliphate and fight among themselves as well.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Sokoto Caliphate will be at its greatest extent, it will stretch fifteen hundred kilometers from Dori in modern Burkina Faso to southern Adamawa in Cameroon and include Nupe lands, Ilorin in northern Yorubaland, and much of the Benue River valley.
In addition, Usman dan Fodio's jihad had provided the inspiration for a series of related holy wars in other parts of the savanna and Sahel far beyond Nigeria's borders that lead to the foundation of Islamic states in Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, and Sudan.
An analogy has been drawn between Usman dan Fodio's jihad and the French Revolution in terms of its widespread impact.
Just as the French Revolution affects the course of European history in the nineteenth century, the Sokoto jihad affects the course of history throughout the savanna from Senegal to the Red Sea.
New centers of power—Ibadan, Abeokuta, Owo, and Warri—contest control of the trade routes and seek access to fresh supplies of slaves, which are important to repopulate the turbulent countryside.
At this time, the British withdraw from the slave trade and begin to blockade the coast.
The blockade requires some adjustments in the slave trade along the lagoons that stretch outward from Lagos, whereas the domestic market for slaves to be used as farm laborers and as porters to carry commodities to market easily absorbs the many captives that are a product of these wars.