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Indigenous Written Sources for the History of Bonny*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Susan M. Hargreaves
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Extract

It is well known that indigenous contemporary written documentation exists for the precolonial and early colonial history of some of the coastal societies of South-Eastern Nigeria. The best known example is Old Calabar, for which there exists most notably the diary of Antera Duke, covering the years 1785-88, a document brought from Old Calabar to Britain already during the nineteenth century. More recently John Latham has discovered additional material of a similar character still preserved locally in Old Calabar, principally the Black Davis House Book (containing material dating from the 1830s onwards), the papers of Coco Bassey (including diaries covering the years 1878-89), and the papers of E. O. Offiong (comprising trade ledgers, court records, and letter books relating to the period 1885-1907). In the Niger Delta S. J. S. Cookey, for his biography of King Jaja of Opobo, was able to use contemporary documents in Jaja's own papers, including correspondence from the late 1860s onwards. In the case of the neighboring community of Bonny (from which Jaja seceded to found Opobo after a civil war in 1869), while earlier historians have alluded to the existence of indigenous written documentation, they have done so only in very general terms and without any indication of the quantity or nature of this material.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 16 , 1989 , pp. 185 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1989

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Footnotes

*

My thanks to Alistair Alexander and Robin Law for their assistance in preparing this article for publication.

References

Notes

1. “The Diary of Antera Duke,” in Forde, Daryll, Efik Traders of Old Calabar (London, 1956).Google Scholar The original text of this diary was apparently destroyed in wartime bombing, but extensive extracts made by the Rev. Dr. A. W. Wilkie survive. Texts of two other early Old Calabar documents are preserved in contemporary European published sources: see Robertson, G. A., Notes on Africa (London, 1819), 313–18 (extracts from a manuscript by Chief Eyo Honesty I)Google Scholar; and Waddell, Hope Masterton, Twenty-nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa (London, 1863), 279 (extract of journal of Mr. Young, brother and secretary of King Eyamba V, 1834).Google Scholar

2. Latham, A. J. H., Old Calabar, 1600-1891, (Oxford, 1973), esp. 167.Google Scholar See also the verbatim citations of extracts from the Black Davis House Book (ibid., 88,100) and Coco Bassey's Diary (ibid., 83). The Coco Bassey and Offiong papers were also used by Nair, Kannan K., Politics and Society in South-Eastern Nigeria, 1841-1906 (London, 1972), 302.Google Scholar

3. Cookey, S. J. S., King Jaja of the Niger Delta (New York, 1974), esp. 181.Google Scholar Cookey also made use of the papers of Chief George Cookey Gam (d. 1945), which are said to include some contemporary documents from Jaja's time, and the Chief's manuscript “History of Bonny and Opobo,” which incorporates verbatim quotations of contemporary correspondence of the 1880s. The Jaja papers were formerly held in the Department of History of the University of Ibadan, but have since been lost. The Cookey Gam papers are in the possession of S. J. S. Cookey himself.

4. Dike, K. O., Trade and Politics in the Niger Dela, 1830-1855 (Oxford, 1956), 225.Google Scholar In practice Dike appears in general not to have used these documents directly, but to have tapped them indirectly through the medium of the Bonny local historian, Adadonye Fombo. The other early study of Bonny history by Jones, G. I., Trading States of the Oil Rivers (London, 1963)Google Scholar, made no use of or reference to local manuscript sources.

5. Alagoa, E. J. and Fombo, A., A Chronicle of Grand Bonny (Ibadan, 1972), ix.Google Scholar Fombo's manuscript is in the Africana collection at the University of Ibadan library. My own impression from comparing the material which I was able to consult in Bonny, is that Fombo utilized principally the records of King George Pepple (in the Amanyana-bo's Records) and the Allison House Records, whose contents are described in detail here.

6. Hargreaves, Susan M., “The Political Economy of Nineteenth Century Bonny: A Study of Power, Authority, Legitimacy and Ideology in a Delta Trading Community from 1790-1914” (Ph.D., University of Birmingham, 1987).Google Scholar

7. Given the great quantity of the documents preserved in Bonny, any potential researcher would be well advised to organize access to photocopying facilities locally. In addition to the Westminster Dredger Company, the Shell-BP Company in Bonny also possessed photocopying facilities at the time of my visits in 1980, but refused to grant me use of them.

8. Ferdinand Fitzgerald was also Editor of the African Times, which frequently reported extensively on Bonny affairs, especially in the period from 1871 to 1873.

9. George's correspondence with Horton relates to the 1870s, after the publication of West African Countries and Peoples (1868), the Bonny material in which seems to be taken only from published sources. Horton's interest in Bonny affairs appears not to be documented in other sources: there is no allusion to it, for example, in the biography by Fyfe, Christopher, Africanus Horton, 1835-1883 (London, 1972).Google Scholar

10. For these events see Jones, , Trading States, 150–55.Google Scholar