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credit https://web.archive.org/web/20220307162206/https://salvage.zone/the-flatness-of-blackness-afro-pessimism-and-the-erasure-of-anti-colonial-thought/ . In Nigeria, the country with the world’s largest Black population, the ‘afterlife of slavery’ takes on a completely different meaning than in the US. While slavery had existed in Igbo society before colonisation, it accelerated with the increasing demand for slaves on the other side of the Atlantic. When slavery was officially abolished in many parts of the West, Adiele Afigbo writes in The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885–1950, Igbo slave markets were flooded with ohu and osu slaves, whose descendants to this day retain the stigma of their ancestors – they cannot intermarry with freeborn and are excluded from important community organisations. In a recent New Yorker article Nigerian novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani argues that:

Igbo discrimination is not based on race, and there are no visual markers to differentiate slave descendants from freeborn. Instead, it trades on cultural beliefs about lineage and spirituality.

Discrimination of slave descendants is thus based on their role as outsiders, since the ohu have never really lost their outsider status in a society where community ties are extremely important. Afigbo’s periodisation also points to another important aspect of slavery in Nigeria: it was only officially abolished by the British in the early 1900s but continued informally for at least another forty to fifty years. What this means is that we cannot understand slavery in Nigeria within the Igbo system with reference to an African-American concept of race, conditioned entirely by the experiences of US chattel slavery. For the descendants of ohu slaves, the afterlife of slavery is not characterised by the condition of the Black/Slave but rather by something quite different. In this case, the equation of the Black/Slave with the African does not hold.