With monuments and any other nods to slave owners being struck down by race and justice advocates all over the world, one Black journalist is asking readers to be more forgiving of her ancestor who was a Nigerian slave trader.
In an article published by BBC News, Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani wants modern day people to view her Igbo great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, with graceful lens.
She argued Oriaku – who she said captured and sold slaves in then Calabar and Bonny (now Nigeria) – shouldn’t be held to the same standards as European and American slave traders.
“Nwaubani Ogogo lived in a time when the fittest survived and the bravest excelled. The concept of ‘all men are created equal’ was completely alien to traditional religion and law in his society,” Nwaubani wrote. “t would be unfair to judge a 19th Century man by 21st Century principles.”
To do so would cause many who are revered throughout history across the African Diaspora to be defiled, she further stated.
“Assessing the people of Africa’s past by today’s standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains, denying us the right to fully celebrate anyone who was not influenced by Western ideology,” Nwaubani continued.
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For Oriaku and his peers, slave-trading was a way of life they were born into, Nwaubani said of her great-grandfather. She also drew upon an argument that many scholars, including writer Dwayne Wong, have which states in pre-colonial Africa, slaves were not treated as brutally as in America’s chattel system.
“Igbo slave traders like my great-grandfather did not suffer any crisis of social acceptance or legality. They did not need any religious or scientific justifications for their actions. They were simply living the life into which they were raised,” she wrote. “That was all they knew. … Buying and selling of human beings among the Igbo had been going on long before the Europeans arrived. People became slaves as punishment for crime, payment for debts, or prisoners of war.”
Due to his ability to obtain a slave-trading license from the Royal Niger Company and the rare incident in which Oriaku convinced abolitionists to apologize and return his slaves and other goods (which were seized once slavery was outlawed by the British), her grandfather continued to rise to prominence.
Eventually he garnered the respect of both locals and colonizers and served as a representative for the British government, collecting taxes, presiding over cases and supplying laborers, land and protection for various churches, schools, etc.
“My great-grandfather was renowned for his business prowess, outstanding boldness, strong leadership, vast influence, immense contributions to society, and advancement of Christianity,” Nwaubani wrote.
