Slavery and outcast status within Igboland

Slavery was not only an external trade. Several authors in Korieh (2009) discuss categories inside Igbo society. The dictionary entries give the language of this world: ohu (Owerri) or oru (Onitsha), slave, hostage or domestic dependant; osu, a person consecrated to a shrine or deity, hence of a caste; and akankolo, a cult slave in West Igbo (Echeruo).

Dorothy Ukaegbu, citing Robin Horton’s study of the ohu system in a northern Igbo village-group (1954), notes that the household slave could marry a master’s daughter and that the status was not always permanent. By contrast the osu status was inherited and carried exclusion from titles, intermarriage and honours. Ogbo Ugwuanyi uses it as an example of difference constructed inside a single people, and Kalu calls the stigma “indelible”.

Pawning, the pledge of a person to secure a debt, was also known. Kalu describes the case of Ucheya Aju of Okoko Item, pawned by his brother to an Arochukwu trader and sold to a Bonny man who renamed him Emmanuel Hart; he later led a revival in Item. Douglas Chambers describes how in Obe, Nkanu (Enugu State) the descendants of slaves, called ohu, grew from 2–3 per cent of the village in the 1950s to a quarter or third by 2000, and formally ceased to be treated as property only in 1988.

Igbo ama eze

Echeruo’s dictionary glosses this as “the Igbo do not recognise (absolute) kingship”.