![]() I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.” “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. ![]() My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. ![]() My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. ![]() My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. ![]()
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