Calabar

A region and a city in southwestern Nigeria, Calabar served as an important center for the slave TRADE.

Located on the coast with navigable rivers and lagoons nearby, Calabar had an optimal setting for development as a trading center. Europeans established a port at Calabar as early as the 15th century to take advantage of its links to trans-Saharan trade routes and its potential as a major transatlantic trading center. Calabar was the closest European trade center to Cameroon, which, by the 16th century, was a major source for slaves being shipped to the Americas. Although their time in Calabar was limited, slaves being shipped to the Americas integrated some of the region s cultural and social traditions into their own lives. The inspiration for Cuba’s Abakuas—all-male secret societies—came from the leopard societies of Calabar. Organizations of accomplished, respected men who adopted the leopard as a symbol of their masculinity and based on a mystical tradition, the leopard societies created spiritual alliances among their members. In their American emanations these organizations helped maintain a vital link to the slaves’ African heritage.

Further reading: “Abakuas,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, eds., Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 2; Eric Young, “Cameroon,” in Appiah and Gates, Jr., eds., Africana, 353-357; Ralph A. Austen and Jonathan Derrick, Middlemen of the Cameroons Rivers: The Duala and Their Hinterland c. 1600-ca.1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); T. Eyongetah and R. Brain, A History of the Cameroon (London: Longman Group, 1974).

—Lisa M. Brady