14 · Explore
The Igbo in the Atlantic world
The Bight of Biafra sent nearly a million people across the Atlantic, most of them Igbo-speaking. Their story is told here with the numbers, the evidence and the doubts.
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The Igbo were among the largest groups of Africans carried across the Atlantic. The chapters of Korieh (2009) by Korieh himself, Chambers, Chukwu and Kloza explain who they were, what they became and how historians know.
The topic is full of estimates and inference. The pages mark where a claim is documented and where it is an interpretation.
In this chapter
01The numbers: Biafra in the slave-trade database
941,463 embarked, and where they went.
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02Becoming Igbo: ethnicity in motion
Igbo as a name learned abroad: Koelle, Baikie, Gomez.
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03Resistance: revolt, flight and refusal
Ships, runaways, poison and the Igbo Landing.
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04Cultural memory: food, masks and words
Yams, masks and proverbs: what travelled, and what we can prove.
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05The burden of beauty: Igbo women in the Atlantic
The “burden of beauty” and strategic reproduction.
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06Historians’ debates: what “Igbo” can and cannot mean
Survival or creation: the historians’ quarrel.
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