07/29/2026
Calabar as a Slave Trading Port
Along the Cross River in what is now Cross River State sits Calabar, a town whose name is inseparable from one of the darkest chapters in Atlantic history. Settled in the early 1600s by the Efik people, Calabar grew from a fishing and farming community into one of the busiest export points of the transatlantic slave trade.
How it grew into a trading hub
The Efik settled along the river and built their position around geography rather than force alone. Old Calabar operated as a river port network, not an open beach market, which gave it something rarer, storage, negotiation, and coordination. Several Efik settlements, Duke Town, Creek Town, and Henshaw Town, sat close together and were loosely bound into what Europeans called Old Calabar, giving the area a level of organization other coastal trading points lacked.
Trade before it was only slaves
Calabar's economy wasn't built purely on human trafficking. Fish, cassava, bananas, and palm produce moved through the port for European manufactured goods long before and alongside the slave trade, and after the trade in people declined, the same palm oil and palm kernel trade the Efik had already built simply took over as the main export.
The merchant houses and the Ekpe society
Trade in Old Calabar was run through organized Efik merchant houses, not loose trading groups. These houses controlled who got access to commerce, negotiated directly with European ship captains, and enforced agreements through local authority and custom, backed by the Ekpe secret society, which held real judicial and political power over the settlements. Leading figures like Duke Ephraim and Eyo Honesty II acted as the middlemen of the entire system, balancing cooperation with European traders against the interests of their own communities.
Where the captives came from
Old Calabar was mainly an export point rather than a capture point. Most of the people funneled through it were drawn from inland regions across the Bight of Biafra hinterland, brought to the river port through a chain of markets and brokers rather than seized locally. Warfare, raiding, kidnapping, and local judicial punishment all fed people into this pipeline, mostly Igbo and Ibibio speaking captives moving toward the coast for export to the Americas.
A firsthand record
Some of the clearest documentation of this era survives in the diary of Antera Duke, an Efik merchant active in the late 1700s, who recorded personal and business dealings, including negotiations with British ship captains and the customary payments made to local rulers for the right to trade.
What followed
By the late 1700s, Bonny, further along the Niger Delta coast, had actually overtaken Calabar as the primary slave port of the Bight of Biafra. Calabar's economy shifted decisively toward palm oil in the 1800s, and later became a center of missionary education, home to some of Nigeria's earliest Western schools. The Efik merchant houses and the Ekpe society that once organized the slave trade didn't disappear with it, they adapted, carrying their authority and institutions into the palm oil era and beyond.
