Legend · c. 1550–1884 · Mixed
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For centuries the Kalabari traded from an island town called Elem Kalabari. Then, in the early 1880s, after years of war with their neighbours and a split inside the royal family, they abandoned it. The towns they built instead are the Kalabari heartland today.
The Kalabari are a branch of the Ijaw, the eastern Ijo, living in the mangrove swamps of what is now Rivers State. Their old state is called Elem Kalabari, which is usually translated as "New Shipping Port". Today its capital is Buguma. But Buguma is not where the story starts, and how the kingdom got there is one of the more surprising chapters in the history of the Delta.
Where the Kalabari first came from depends on who you ask. One tradition says they came from Calabar, far to the east, the town the Europeans called Old Calabar. Historians suspect that story may have been invented in the 1800s, partly because the Efik of Calabar say the name "Calabar" was given to their own town by Europeans. Other traditions say the founders were Ijo settlers from Amafo, on the west bank of the New Calabar River, and that people from other communities joined them there. Both stories are worth knowing; neither should be treated as settled.
What is clear is how they lived. The Kalabari settled on a string of islands among the mangroves, fishing and trading. They carried the produce of the Delta up the New Calabar and Imo rivers and swapped it for food and goods from the hinterland. Early European traders noticed something unusual about them: of all the Delta peoples, the Kalabari alone refused to trade on credit.
They also had a reputation. Their great goddess was Awoamenakaso, mother of all the Kalabari deities, who was said to oppose war and bloodshed. The Kalabari later claimed she was the sister of Britannia, the British goddess who ruled the seas. Because they were seen as civil and generally peaceful, their neighbours called the Kalabari "Englishmen".
That peaceful image sits uneasily beside what came next. Like Bonny, Kalabari grew rich from the Atlantic slave trade.
According to tradition, a ruler named King Owerri Daba brought the slave trade to Kalabari and Bonny, and founded the trading houses of Duke Monmouth and Duke Africa. This happened before 1699, because in that year a European trader, James Barbot, recorded giving presents to Duke Monmouth of Kalabari. The kingdom became a major market of the slave trade, selling mostly people bought from Igboland to the north.
The dynasty that still matters most is the Amachree line. Amachree I, who died around 1800, founded it, and the big trading houses grew during his reign. The goods passing through Kalabari were enslaved people, ivory and palm oil, paid for with cotton cloth, hardware, guns and gunpowder. Salt, made by boiling off seawater, was valuable in the interior.
Wealth brought enemies. In the 1800s Kalabari found itself in the middle of a power struggle across the eastern Delta. It fought Nembe to the west, Bonny to the southeast and Okrika to the northeast. Okrika was the most dangerous rival, because it could cut Kalabari off from the interior. The Kalabari brought their goods down to Elem Ifoko, at the mouth of the New Calabar River, but flatly refused to carry them the extra seven miles to Bonny for the convenience of European traders.
The wars were costly. In July 1863 a feud with the Nembe people of Brass flared up, and Nembe won decisively. By December 1865 Okrika was ambushing Kalabari trading canoes, and Bonny was threatening to join in. The British consul had to step in. When Jaja left Bonny in 1869 to found Opobo, he became Kalabari's ally, and Bonny pushed harder into Kalabari territory to make up for the trade it had lost. In 1873 a "perpetual" peace treaty was signed with Bonny, on the same day as a treaty between two feuding factions inside Kalabari itself. Neither treaty held. In July 1882 the consul had to intervene with Bonny again.
By then the kingdom was fighting itself too. From 1882 to 1884, two branches of the royal family struggled for control. One group, the Barboy or Will Braide faction, had already left the old town and settled at a new place called Bakana in 1881.
The Amachree faction won the struggle. But instead of staying on in their old capital, they left as well. In 1882 they moved to Abonnema, and in 1884 to Buguma, both further inland, away from the old island town. The European traders had to follow their customers, and began sailing up the Sombreiro River to Abonnema to do business.
Think about how big a decision that was. Elem Kalabari had been the centre of a trading state for generations. Its people walked away from it and built new towns, one faction here and another there. The kingdom survived the move. Its government became a council of powerful chiefs and royal princes, headed and overseen by the king.
That is why, if you ask today where Kalabari is, people will point you to Buguma, Abonnema and Bakana, not to the old port that gave the kingdom its name. The Amachree line carried on through the colonial era and into independent Nigeria. The most recent king, Amachree XI, Professor Theophilus Princewill, has died, and a regent oversees the kingdom until a new king is crowned.
