Graduate Student Spotlight: Ezi Ogbuli
Graduate Student Spotlight: Ezi Ogbuli
My name is Ezi Ogbuli and I am a first-year PhD student in African History. My research explores the legal and social history of late nineteenth-century Onitsha, a town in what is today southeastern Nigeria, where I am currently investigating the death of a young slave girl named Amé.
In November 1876, Amé was brought to Onitsha to be sold as a slave. Once there, she had a fateful encounter with W. F. John, an employee of the Church Missionary Society (CMS). John purchased Amé’s freedom, an action known in this context as “redemption,” and Amé began to live at the mission under John’s and his wife’s authority. The CMS had been operating in Onitsha since 1857 and was working to abolish slavery and the slave trade, while also promising to encourage commerce in the town. Living with the missionaries, Amé seemed to have escaped enslavement and abuse. She acquired a new home, an education, and useful skills in domestic work. Ten months later, however, she was dead.
Amé’s life and death may be interesting to us as historians, but her story was unlikely to have raised eyebrows among British officials. In nineteenth-century West Africa, slave dealing and domestic slavery were open secrets and actively practiced, even by British subjects. Slave life was hard and deaths were common. Moreover, Onitsha was outside of British jurisdiction. All these facts suggest that Amé’s death would not have made it into the colonial record. In fact, however, the case led to two court proceedings that created extensive documentation.
The question I set out to answer in my research is why? I argue that Amé’s case was important because of what it represented: the lawlessness of British subjects. In British anti slave-trade law, there was no legal distinction between redemption and slave dealing, so what the missionaries did was not legal. In addition, while redemption meant that Amé was freed from slavery, it also meant that she was bound to W. F. John until she paid off her debt, mostly through labor. She was free but not free. In Igbo society, this situation was called pawnship, or debt servitude, and it was a formalized contractual agreement between pawn and creditor. Once the debt was paid, the pawn was freed from obligation. However, redemption among the CMS had no such formalities, and servitude was more-or-less permanent. Amé endured abuse by the missionaries and tried to escape her situation; her last attempt happened just two weeks before her death.
Before they learned of Amé’s case, British officials had little sense of what was happening on the ground with missionaries and traders in Onitsha. Many believed it was primarily the African peoples who posed a threat to British life and property. While some had feared that British subjects might go wild and commit offenses, they had more faith in the civility of British subjects than in African natives. Amé’s case made British officials fully aware of the criminality and lawlessness of their subjects. Fearing that mistreatment of people like Amé would cause African natives to ignore British authority, the government got involved. The resulting records give us a glimpse of the social, political, and gender context of nineteenth-century Onitsha through the lived experience of redeemed slaves. We also get to see British legal wrangling, the limitations of British imperial control, and the expansion of its jurisdiction.
My task now is to bring this narrative to life — and to be honest, it's very complicated. For example, two court proceedings happened several years apart, in 1877 and 1882, and the records include an abundance of witness testimony from other redeemed slaves, freeborn Onitsha natives, missionaries, and colonial officials. The testimony suggests that there are multiple dimensions of power to account for, and then there’s the need to consider the archive itself as a colonial structure with its own biases, omissions, and potential mistranslations. Reconstructing Amé’s life will require patience, persistence, and creativity, but the opportunity to tell her story is worth it.