The principal element in Calabar's external interactions was commerce. Prior to the arrival of the liberated Africans, the European supercargoes had exploited local merchants and taken over the trade in the Calabar area, fixing the prices of both imported goods and African produce, determining whether the quality was good or bad and, in the process, reducing the African middlemen to the position of observers. All that changed with the relentless struggle of the liberated Africans against the practice of fixing low prices for the African produce and charging exorbitant prices for European goods. The Calabar palm oil traders profited from the new regime in that they were given higher prices for the oil than the miserable rates that the supercargoes - the European palm oil traders - would have paid (Nair, 1972, p. 117). Moreover, the liberated Africans of Calabar 'consistently encouraged the chiefs and other African merchants of note to send their palm produce directly to England, where it would fetch a higher price' (Ume, 1980, p. 96).  
Realizing that the liberated Africans were liberating them from exploitation, the Calabar merchants quickly turned their backs on the supercargoes. King Eyo personally refused to honour the 'trust' that he had accepted from the supercargoes and sold his oil instead to the liberated Africans. ${ }^{2}$ Infuriated by the tensions caused by that development, the supercargoes viewed the liberated Africans with intense hostility, branding them 'interlopers' - intruders and illegal traders - and asserting their claim to the oil for which they had paid trust, demanding that it not be sold to any other buyers. The Calabar merchants encouraged liberated Africans to undermine the unjust trust system and buy  
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[^0]:    1 As told to author by the elder Efiong U. Aye, aged over 96 years, in an oral interview conducted at 11 Ikot Effanga Road, Calabar, on 13 April 2011.