Historians’ debates: what “Igbo” can and cannot mean

Korieh’s chapter summarizes the major debate on African continuities. E. Franklin Frazier (1939) and Sidney Mintz and Richard Price (1976) argued that the slave trade destroyed most African institutions and that new cultures were created in the Americas. Melville Herskovits (The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941) stressed survival. A middle path, followed by Lovejoy, Thornton, Gomez, Morgan, Hall and Chambers, looks for regional and ethnic origins and asks what particular groups could carry with them.

For the Igbo this raises three problems. First, the evidence for ethnicity is thin: most records give a port or a vague label such as “Eboe”. Second, the Igbo had no single religion with pan-Igbo deities, unlike the Yoruba pantheon, with exceptions such as Kamalu at Ozuzu and the Ibini Ukpabi oracle of Arochukwu. Third, studies of resistance can drift into stereotype. Korieh, Kloza and Chambers all remind readers that planters’ opinions about “Ibos” are a source on planters.

• Gomez (1998), Hall (2005) and Chambers (1997) are good places to start for the American record.
• Lovejoy and Trotman (2003) and Morgan (1997) frame the debate between survival and creation.
• Byrd (2006) and Lovejoy (2006) bring the discussion back to Equiano’s own words.