The numbers: Biafra in the slave-trade database

Chima Korieh, using the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (Eltis et al. 1999), counts 941,463 people embarked in the Bight of Biafra, 11.9 per cent of all embarked Africans and 16.6 per cent of those whose region is known. Douglas Chambers estimates about 1.7 million of 11.6 million (1470–1860) from Biafra, about 80 per cent of them Igbo-speaking, mostly on British ships. Daniel Kloza gives 760,242 disembarked from Biafra, nearly a quarter of imports into North America.

Not every ship that left Biafra carried only Igbo. The database records the place of embarkation, not ethnicity, and the “Igbo” label in much of the literature is inferred from the hinterland of the ports (Bonny, Calabar, New Calabar). Korieh notes that the two tables of destinations in his chapter and Kloza’s differ because they query different periods.

Chambers adds that in the first half of the eighteenth century about 57 per cent of the roughly 63,500 Africans landed in the Chesapeake came from Biafra, so that Virginia became a major Igbo destination, with at least 25,000 Igbo between the 1710s and the 1740s. James Rawley, cited by Korieh, puts Biafra at 38 per cent of Virginia’s imports from 1710 to 1760.