The Igbo in Haiti

 

The Igbo peoples have left a cultural legacy in Haiti that survives to this day. The Ibo nanchon in Haitian Vodou, for instance, attests to this Igbo legacy. Whilst perusing runaway advertisements, we focused on Ibo captives in Saint Domingue to look for anything distinctive. As we expected, since the French slave traders were usually not bringing many captives from the Bight of Biafra to Saint Domingue, many Igbo slaves in the colony appear to have been smuggled through other colonies. The above case of Marie, for example, illustrates the example of an English-speaking Igbo in Aquin. One wonders if she was brought to Saint Domingue from Jamaica or another British colony in the Antilles. The "Ibos" of Saint Domingue were also briefly described by Descourtilz and a few other writers on the colony's Africans, often noting their propensity for suicide. 

Another trend we noticed with Igbo captives is a certain degree of ambiguity about their precise "national" origin. Some were listed as Bibi, presumably for the Ibibio peoples of southern Nigeria. Francois, the man above, could have been either one or perhaps from another group in southeastern Nigeria. 

Yet again, another runaway slave was seen as either Bibi (Ibibio) or Ibo. 

Some runaway Igbos from other colonies were identified precisely. For example, Margueritte came to the colony from Mississippi. 

Something we have written about elsewhere is the consistent presence of Ibos in colonial Bainet, in the Sud-Est of Haiti. Three newly arrived Ibos absconded from the Chaumeil habitation in Bainet.

Another Ibo, Marie, was identified as an Anglophone person.

Once again, another Ibo, Etienne, spoke English. This one was "owned" by a free black woman.

As for Saint-Emilion, a runaway described above, he was either Ibo or Chauma. We could not identify Chauma at all, but it indicates once again how ambiguous and problematic the "national" labels assigned to Africans in Saint Domingue truly were.

Alexandre, another Ibo maroon, spoke English.

Jean, an Ibo runaway, similarly spoke English.

We found the above case interesting for its description of an Ibo runaway who spoke Nago (Yoruba). Assuming the Ibo identification is accurate, one wonders if he learned "Nago" in West Africa. 

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

"The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. 

I have shared a previous essay on Achebe's masterpiece in the early years of this blog, which can be accessed here for any interested party. It's based on an essay from a World Literature course in my senior year of high school. Emphasizing the obvious tragic hero elements of Okonkwo, the essay, in retrospect, is nothing revelatory or that interesting. However, since I was forced to re-read the text for a current course where I will have an exam on the novel, the obvious gender dynamics of the novel require critical lens. Unfortunately, due to a heavy workload for several classes, I cannot do justice to this novel's intersections of race, gender, and colonialism, but I am sure such analyses have already been completed. Nevertheless, Achebe's brilliantly crafted fiction avoids many of the common tropes of certain manifestations of Afrocentrism, which seem to romanticize pre-colonial Africa. Achebe shows vividly how patriarchal and problematic Ibo society was before colonialism, particularly in the leaving twin infants to die and other seemingly brutal rituals, in addition to extreme patriarchal social organization. His narration also facilitates a novel interspersed with oral tradition, song, and language, representing the continued legacy and relevance of ancient Ibo culture to the present.

Anyway, Achebe's essay on Conrad's Heart of Darkness is also worth reading and writing a post about, but I have not read that novella since high school.