People · 1785–1788
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One of the very few African voices from inside the Atlantic slave trade is a Calabar merchant's business diary, written in pidgin. It is not a comfortable read.
Historians of the Atlantic slave trade have a frustrating problem. There are mountains of paper from the European side: ship logs, insurance records, merchants' letters, parliamentary inquiries. From the African side, the people who lived in the ports and did business with those ships, there is almost nothing written down at the time. Almost. One of the great exceptions comes from Old Calabar, in what is now Cross River State, and it belongs to a man called Antera Duke.
He was born around 1735 into a prominent Efik family in Duke Town, one of the trading towns on the Calabar River. His family were key players in a network that linked Efik merchants with British slave ships. Living in that world, Antera learned to speak and write pidgin English, the working language of the trade. And for three years, from 1785 to 1788, he kept a diary.
It is a business diary, not a book of feelings. He wrote down what happened day by day: which ship came in, which captain he dined with, which dispute broke out, who died, which funeral was held. He wrote in a mix of pidgin English and African words, the way he actually talked. When you read it, you are hearing a Calabar merchant of the 1780s more or less in his own voice. That's very rare.
I should be honest up front about who he was. Antera Duke was a slave trader, and a successful one. This diary is precious because of where it comes from, and it is hard reading for the same reason.
The diary shows how the business worked from the Calabar end. British captains arrived with goods: cotton cloth, household items, beads, gunpowder, guns and liquor. Efik traders like Antera took these in exchange for captives. They didn't use up all the goods. They kept much of them as capital, then paddled up the Cross River and traded them for more captives inland, whom they brought back down to sell to the next ship. It was a cycle, and Calabar sat at the hinge of it.
Over the three years of the diary, Antera noted twenty ships leaving, all from Liverpool, that he had helped load with captives. He also wrote about social life with the captains. He and other Efik traders dressed like Europeans and entertained them, and he mentions wearing "white man trousers." It's a strange picture: European fashion, pidgin small talk and dinners, all built on buying and selling people.
Sometimes he did the capturing himself. In one entry he settled an old quarrel with a merchant from Bakassi by seizing him, along with two of the man's slaves, and personally delivering all three onto a slave ship. A business dispute ended with a man being shipped across the Atlantic.
Power in Calabar ran through Ekpe, the leopard society. Antera was a member, and Ekpe had a great deal of control over the trade, enforcing debts and keeping order among merchants. The diary also shows the funerals of important men, which in Calabar then included sacrificing enslaved people, who were beheaded so they could go with their master into the spirit world. Antera arranged such funerals. The diary records them in the same flat, everyday tone as a ship arriving.
How does a Calabar merchant's diary survive? Through the people who came to change Calabar. Scottish Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Calabar in the 1840s, and at some point the diary passed into missionary hands and travelled to Scotland. According to the scholars who traced it, it was once found lying in a pile of discarded papers there. In the early twentieth century a missionary copied out long passages from it. The original later went missing, so that copy is what we still have.
That copy was published by the anthropologist Daryll Forde in a book called Efik Traders of Old Calabar, which included an attempt to put Antera's pidgin into standard English. Then, in 2010, Oxford University Press brought out a new edition, edited by Stephen Behrendt, A. J. H. Latham and David Northrup. They set the diary alongside ship records, so readers can check his entries against the Liverpool vessels he names.
Why does it matter today? Because it makes the slave trade impossible to tell as a story about outsiders only. Europeans created the demand and carried people across the ocean. But on the coast, African merchants like Antera Duke ran their side of it as a business, with credit, partners, quarrels and profits. His diary doesn't excuse anyone. It just shows, in a Calabar man's own words, how ordinary that business felt to the people who got rich from it. That might be the most unsettling thing about it.
