Resistance: revolt, flight and refusal

Daniel Kloza traces Igbo resistance to Igbo political culture: village democracy, rotating leadership that had to be validated, belief in a personal chi and the competitive ideal of achievement. He admits that this picture is idealized, since it omits slavery and caste within Igboland. The same chapter lists the evidence of resistance.

• Shipboard revolts. In 1750 the Maryland Gazette reported a revolt on a ship from St Kitts in which the crew were killed and the captives asked to be taken to Calabar.
• Running away. Runaway notices show that Igbo women were over-represented among fugitives, according to Gomez and Littlefield, and that planters in South Carolina disliked Igbo captives.
• Mass suicide as return home. In 1803, captives from a ship landed at St Simons Island, Georgia, walked into the water. Tradition says they were Igbo and that they walked home. This is the story of Igbo Landing (see the Resistance chapter).
• Poison and conspiracy. The 1732 poisoning of Ambrose Madison at Montpelier in Virginia (Chambers 2005); the “Ebo Company” in the Denmark Vesey plot, Charleston, 1822 (Kloza says that whether its members were Igbo is “disputable”); and some of the 39 recorded plots in Jamaica, including one in 1815 said to involve about 250 “Ibo”.

Korieh points out a religious reason that may explain suicide. In Igboland suicide was an abomination, but attachment to the land (ala), burial of the umbilical cord in the ancestral land and belief in reincarnation made return through death an “acceptable abomination” for the enslaved. This is an interpretation, not a fact established by the records.