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Various quotes discussing the Igbo and resistance during the era of enslavement.
“During the first wave of the incursion, the Aro deployed the Abam to kidnap Ebiri people, forcing them to flee from their original homeland in Oroni to a new location presently called Eke-Igbere. The flight of the Emir might have helped them become more vigilant in safeguarding their new settlement. They mobilized and armed their warriors, who patrolled their community regularly. It is then not surprising that when the Abam mounted their second raid against Eke-Ebiri, which took the form of a full-scale military invasion, they were routed and forced to retreat. The heroism the Emir displayed during the invasion is remembered in local folklore, and they have continued to proudly preserve their collective identity by calling their town Igbo Erughi (“the town the Aro could not reach/capture”), which was anglicized as Igbere during the colonial period.
-John N. Oriji, “Igboland, Slavery, and the Drums of War and Heroism” in Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, edited by Sylviane A. Diouf“For the United States, one may also estimate that today something like 60 percent of all black Americans (who number some 40 million people) have at least one genealogical ancestor who was in fact Igbo.”
-Douglas B. Chambers, The Igbo Diaspora in the Era of the Slave Trade“Wherever enslaved Igbo found themselves in the Americas, whether on small tobacco farms in marginal colonies like Virginia or on the teeming sugar plantations of Jamaica, they forged cultures of resistance. In fact throughout the Atlantic world Igbo gained a well-deserved reputations as ‘bad slaves.'”
-Douglas B. Chambers, The Igbo Diaspora in the Era of the Slave Trade“The Middle Passage did not strip Angolans, Biafrans, or other Africans of their combat traditions. Rather, they carried this valuable legacy with them in their minds and bodies. Not only did they keep hope of a return journey alive in their souls; they also remembered the martial traditions that could be called upon in times of need. In places where the trade tended to settle large numbers of Biafrans together in a region, Biafran-derived war dances and closed societies continued to act as vehicles for paramilitary actions in the Americas. These traditions can be seen in the Abakuá societies of Cuba and the ‘Igbo’ war dance, which was taken as a call for rebellion, performed in early nineteenth-century Trinidad. Similarly, as John Thornton has shown, elements of the Angolans’ military heritage appear to have reverberated throughout the Americas, including war dances and military patterns that were evidenced in numerous rebellions from the Stono Rebellion to the Haitian Revolution.”
-T.J. Desch Obi, Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art in the Atlantic World
