The burden of beauty: Igbo women in the Atlantic

Douglas Chambers’s chapter asks why European observers wrote that Igbo men made “bad” slaves but that Igbo women were hard-working and beautiful. He calls this reputation the “burden of beauty”, a product of the male gaze of planters, with possible links to the “Jezebel” stereotype of the American South.

Chambers also proposes the idea of “gyneological revolt”: the strategic choice to bear children as a form of resistance to marginalization. In the Chesapeake the slave population grew from 26,500 in 1720 to 60,000 in 1740 and 140,000 in 1760, just when imports from Biafra were at their peak. Chambers asks whether Igbo belief in reincarnation, which turns each birth into a question of who is being reborn, played a role. In Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, records show Igbo women with the highest birth rates.

Bodies were also marked by culture. Country marks (scarification, tattoos, filed teeth) were signs of beauty and status at home but made Africans stand out in Virginia, as runaway advertisements show.