Captured and Sold through Warfare
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Oyo Empire started to decline as a result of Muslim states that had begun to expand their influence north of its territory over the course of the previous century.39 Islam gradually penetrated northern Hausa states and Oyo-controlled Yoruba polities.
Oyo itself relied on slave labor, and most of its slave workforce was composed of Hausa Muslims who came from the northern areas. As one of the main slave-trading states in the Bight of Benin, Oyo was also facing growing external competition from neighboring polities seeking to sell their captives on the coast. These growing conflicts led the polities and peoples under Oyo’s domination, such as Dahomey in the west and the Nupe people in the northeast, to seek their independence and get rid of the heavy tributes imposed on them.In addition, other conflicts complicated this context. From 1812 to 1822, the Owu War opposed Oyo against Yoruba polities such as Owu, Ife, Ijesa, and Ijebu.40 In 1817, a major Muslim slave rebellion erupted in Ilorin, by then the capital of a polity subordinated to Oyo. This context contributed to the spread of more unrest across other neighboring city-states. Exerting their authority over the Hausa at the north, the Muslim Fulani created the Sokoto Caliphate and incorporated Ilorin as an emirate in 1823. As a result, Ilorin expanded its influence over other Yoruba polities in the region. Eventually, Ilorin forces invaded and destroyed Oyo-Ile, Oyo’s capital city. This convergence of internal and external conflicts in Oyo and its environments eventually led to the collapse of the empire in 1837. As a consequence of these wars, which include other conflicts such as the Nupe Wars (1822–56) and an unsuccessful Muslim insurgence in Borgu in 1835, a huge number of prisoners were sold into the Atlantic slave trade.41 These men, women, and children were sent to the Americas, mainly to Brazil and Cuba, where the international slave trade remained in operation until the 1860s.
Already converted to Islam, most of these war captives were Yoruba and Hausa speakers. None of these men and women published autobiographies as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano did. Still, historians have uncovered their stories since the 1960s.In the early 1820s, a Muslim man named Abuncare was captured near Oyo-Ile, the capital of Oyo. Sold to slave traders, he was probably forced onto a ship in the West African port of Lagos (also referred to as Onim) and sent into slavery in Salvador, in the Brazilian province of Bahia, where he was renamed Rufino José Maria.42 Also in Bahia, French naturalist Francis Castelnau interviewed a man named Mohamah (renamed Manuel), who had suffered a similar fate. A Hausa speaker, born in Kano (north of modern Nigeria), he claimed to be a member of the ruler’s military forces. In 1842 or 1843, during a military expedition into Borgu, his regiment was attacked. As he tried to escape, his horse was killed by an arrow, and he was captured. With his arms bound, he was walked to Ilorin, sold into slavery, and then transported to Lagos, where he was placed on a ship to Salvador, Bahia.43
Like Mohamah and Abuncare, many West Africans were captured in wars and sent to Brazil during the first half of the nineteenth century. These Africans and their descendants kept alive the memories of these wars and their subsequent enslavement. In the 1930s, Martiniano Eliseu do Bonfim, a Candomblé priest born in Bahia, gave an extensive interview to American sociologist Donald Pierson, in which he told the story of Majéngbásán, his African-born enslaved mother, whose Brazilian name was Felicidade Silva Paranhos. In his testimony, he identified her as a Yoruba speaker from Ijesa, a polity west of Oyo in present-day southwest Nigeria. According to him, she was captured by Dahomean warriors, sometime between 1814 and 1823, when she was between ten and fifteen years of age, placing her enslavement during the turbulent decade of wars that led to Oyo’s fall.
Where she was captured and later sold is unclear, but in another interview with African American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, Bonfim mentioned that his mother was first brought to Lagos, and then to the port of Badagry, from which she was transported to Brazil.44Other accounts of enslavement in the same region during the wars fought on the eve of Oyo’s collapse were also well documented. Historian Kristin Mann uncovered the stories of three members of the same family captured during the period of the Owu War, between 1817 and 1822. The younger girl, Ayebomi, was sold to a woman in Ijebu, where she lived in slavery for several years and then was redeemed and reunited with her mother in Abeokuta. The other two children, a boy and a girl, were sold into slavery and sent to Brazil. Despite their long Atlantic ordeal, both were able to buy their freedom in Brazil. Shetelu (whose Brazilian name was Francisco Gomes) returned to Lagos in 1844 and Ajatu (whose Brazilian name is recorded as Luisa Ajatu) in 1854.45 Oral tradition also refers to episodes of enslavement during military expeditions led by Dahomey. According to the oral tradition of the Alaketu Candomblé temple in Bahia, one of its putative founders Otampê Ojaró was a member of the royal family of Ketu, captured by Dahomey soldiers when she was a girl.46 Other similar stories also remained alive in collective memory of the descendants of enslaved people in Brazil.