Trade routes: Aro, Ubani and the hinterland

Igboland was the hinterland of the Atlantic trade of the Bight of Biafra. Raphael Njoku and Ogbu Kalu, in Korieh (2009), describe a commercial network in which the Aro of Arochukwu and the middlemen of the coastal city of Ubani (Bonny) moved people and goods between the interior and the ports. Njoku says the Atlantic slave trade reached the Igbo interior in the seventeenth century, an assertion he does not support in detail.

Markets and routes were protected by rules rather than by a state: caravans with escorts, patrons’ protection fees, passwords of secret societies and tolls for the young men who cleared and patrolled the roads. Itinerant ritual specialists, such as Nri priests and diviners, travelled unmolested. David Northrup’s phrase Trade without Rulers, quoted by Njoku, summarizes the system.

Local specialists traded their skills: the smiths of Awka, Nkwerre and Abiriba, and weavers of Akwete cloth, who exchanged cloth for fish, crayfish and iron bars. Akwete’s cloth exports declined from the third quarter of the nineteenth century because of competition from Manchester imports, a point Njoku draws from Talbot.

When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery did not disappear. Kalu cites Afigbo and Ohadike: the middlemen ignored the new policy, and slave prices on the Lower Niger fell after 1840. The Aro system shifted toward palm oil and kernels.

The Aro expedition’s real aim was to break the Aro trade monopoly rather than to promote missionary influence.

Colonel Moorhouse, as quoted in Njoku (Korieh 2009, p. 169)