# FROM CAPTIVES TO HEROES  
Liberated Africans in Calabar, 1850-1920<br>David Lishilinimle Imbua  
Calabar was a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade on the West African coast. Indeed, 3,000 to 5,000 enslaved persons were exported annually at the height of the trade and it ranked fifth in total exports of the enslaved, behind Luanda and Benguela in Angola, Bonny in Nigeria and Ouidah in Benin (Behrendt et al., 2010, pp. 48, 56). Merchants in Liverpool, Bristol and, to a lesser extent, London provided the bulk of the credit advances fostering the increase in slave ships from Calabar in the eighteenth century (Lovejoy and Richardson, 1999, p. 338); and even the local population had grown dependent: 'the prosperity of Efik villages and lineage groups rose and fell in tandem with British slaving ports and merchant partnerships' (Behrendt and Graham, 2003, p. 54). As the slave trade was the mainstay of Calabar's economy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Calabar elites made every effort to circumvent British abolitionist legislation: in 1805, a Calabar chief and slave trader named Egbo Young Eyamba threatened to kill the British explorer Henry Nicholls if he said he was a supporter of William Wilberforce (Hallet, 1964, p. 198). Owing to the Calabar elites' uncooperative attitude towards the abolition movement, 162 cargoes of captives left port between October 1820 and July 1821 (Latham, 1973, p. 20). However, the presence of British anti-slavery squadrons, which caught several ships loaded with captives leaving port from Calabar between 1830 and 1840, made the slave trade more  
risky and less profitable (Latham, 1973, p. 22), which more or less compelled the kings of Calabar to sign antislave-trade treaties with the Royal Navy, on 6 December 1841. Those treaties virtually brought the slave trade at Calabar to an end, and when a French slaver, backed by a gunboat, subsequently tried to force the Efik to supply him with slaves in 1842, they steadfastly refused (Latham, 1973, p. 22).