#while her eldest brother establishes himself as the british government

[skyriderwednesday]

Hmmm... so if ASiS takes place in 1881, and I've said that Enola was nine the previous year...

Then evidently this version of Holmes and Watson meet when Sherlock is a few days shy of 24.

[abbottikeler]

The Ikelers: A Family Chronicle, 1753-2018 (Part II)

The Second Generation: from Eichler to Ikeler and Agler

    The second generation, Hieronymus’ three sons and the younger Wilhelm, his brother’s only child, naturally divide into two half-generations, since the older boys were born ten years or more before their younger brother and first cousin.  Though all of them must have spoken more fluent English than their parents, the personalities of the older two were primarily influenced by the trauma of displacement from German culture and the even greater trauma of indenture in their childhood, while the younger two grew up free-born, in a rising tide of political rebellion and open warfare.     One sign of the difference is in their choice of wives: the older two married the daughters of fellow German immigrants—in Conrad’s case, a girl with the same Christian name as his uncle’s wife—while the younger boys chose daughters of English settlers.  Moreover, Conrad and the elder Wilhelm reached manhood and sired their first children under relatively secure British rule in 1770, whereas Jerome and his young cousin Wilhelm attained their majority under an entirely new, indigenous government.  The disparity of influences is manifest particularly in the behavior of Wilhelm and his much younger brother Jerome: the former sided with the English during the war and was locally known as “William the Loyalist,” while Jerome caught the nomadic spirit of the restless new nation, migrating briefly to Pennsylvania and then pushing westward into the frontier, eventually settling in what is now Iowa.     Here, another caveat.  Since, of the four children of Hieronymus and his brother Conrad, I am descended from the elder Wilhelm, I have not undertaken any extensive research into the other three lines.  Suffice it to say that since Wilhelm’s elder brother had only daughters, all born in New Jersey with their maiden surname changed to Ikeler, pursuit of his descendants, though difficult, would have to begin there.  The descendants of his cousin Wilhelm (all eight of his children born with the surname Agler) might be more difficult to trace since I can provide no information beyond their names, their dates of birth, and their wives’ names.  Jerome’s descendants, which I’ve included in the accompanying tree down to his grandson James, would probably be the easiest for someone in that branch of the Agler line to research.     Even for Wilhelm’s elder and younger brothers, I have only the sketchiest additional evidence.  Conrad was apparently widowed in New Jersey sometime after the war and, according to Pennsylvania tax records from 1805 and 1808, spent his last years on 100 acres of land offered him by Wilhelm on adjacent land in Columbia County—dying, most probably, at 57 or 58 in 1806.  Jerome also spent some time near his brother Wilhelm in Pennsylvania, where his wife Rebecca gave birth to their first child, Daniel, in 1802.  Shortly thereafter they picked up stakes and traveled further west, settling eventually on the far side of the Mississippi.       To be clear, for the rest of this narrative, I’ll be focusing exclusively on Wilhelm and the direct line of his descendants that leads to my own and my brother’s immediate family.       The most important question to ask about this second generation of German-Americans is why each of the four men, born with the surname “Eichler,” chose to change it, either to “Ikeler” or “Agler.”  The answer to that question lies with Hieronymus’ second son, Wilhelm, and to a lesser extent, Wilhelm’s uncle Conrad.     As early as 1773, Wilhelm, being a second son, moved away from his parents and his elder brother to his own farm in Sussex County, a day’s ride north and closer to Belvidere and the Delaware River.  He appears in a contemporary census as “Wm Ekler,” a resident of Oxford Township.  More important perhaps, he joined a different Lutheran congregation and baptized his remaining children there—in the St. James or Straw Church near modern day Phillipsburg.  Many members of that church, both English and German, were fiercely committed to British rule—a marked difference from the Oldwick congregation whose pastors in the immediate pre-war period agitated openly for the revolutionary cause.  Once war commenced, perhaps emboldened by an uncle in the British infantry, Wilhelm openly declared himself a loyalist.  Even for a simple citizen farmer like Wilhelm, such a political stance quickly became untenable.  In 1778, the New Jersey revolutionary authorities empowered themselves to seize the property of all loyalists and their dependents, effectively bankrupting them and driving them underground or out of the colony.   In a newspaper notice published on 10 December 1778, “William Eikler” is included in a list of 63 loyalists whose properties are to be seized immediately following the first of March, 1779.  The notice is signed by William Bond and George Warne, Commissioners for the County of Sussex.  At this point in their lives, Wilhelm and his wife, Maria Elisabeth (nee Bengert), had three living children—Andrew, 6; Barnabus, 4; William, 1, and another on the way.       What did they do?  Where did they go?     With currently available information, it’s impossible to settle those questions definitively, but a review of circumstantial evidence suggests the likeliest answers.  Public record of the Wilhelm Eichler family disappears entirely for the next 13 years, returning first with notice of the marriage of Wilhelm’s first and third sons in New Jersey in the early and mid-1790s; then with the marriage of his only daughter, Elizabeth, to William Welliver in Jerseytown, Pennsylvania in 1797; and finally with the reappearance of Wilhelm himself (now William Ikeler) on the list of members of the Derry Episcopal and Lutheran Church in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania in 1798.  Thereafter, until his death in 1808, William and all four of his children appear in numerous tax records and deeds of sale as land owners in Greenwood Township and neighboring Mt. Pleasant, several miles north of Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.       Whatever happened to Wilhelm in the intervening years, it appears his wife and children remained in New Jersey at least until the mid-1790s, probably with Elizabeth’s parents or with Hieronymus and Wilhelm’s older brother, Conrad, on the original family farm.  Wilhelm’s younger brother, uneasy with a sibling declared persona non gratia and an uncle serving in the British army, apparently decided it prudent to reach his majority under the surname “Agler”--quite distinct from the suddenly notorious “Eichler”—an improvisation his young cousin Wilhelm adopted as well.     But what of the fugitive, bankrupt Wilhelm?  There is no evidence he escaped to Canada either during or after the war—only that 19 years after his worldly goods in New Jersey were confiscated he resurfaced as a modest farmer with a local church affiliation not far from Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania in 1798.    Fortunately, there is a weight of circumstantial evidence to suggest a plausible answer to his whereabouts in the interim.  Among his contemporaries in the congregation of the St. James “Straw” Church in New Jersey was one Daniel Welliver, recently returned from three years on the Pennsylvania frontier.  He had ventured into that unsettled territory in 1775 to reconnoiter the land granted his grandfather by William Penn, and deeded to him and his cousin in 1749.  After three years, and much tension with the local native-Americans, he heeded the warning of a friendly tribe to get out before things turned violent.  He returned to New Jersey in 1778. A short time later the Whitmayer family, who had been his near neighbors on the frontier, was indeed attacked, most of them murdered and the rest kidnapped.     Daniel was undaunted, however.  He had been impressed by the fertility of the land, the proximity of fresh creeks for irrigation and fishing, and a large navigable waterway nearby (the upper Susquehanna).  Once a treaty had been negotiated in 1780, pacifying the local native-Americans, he brought his young family back to that promising country some 100 miles west northwest of Sussex County.       Where he and his cousin Adam established their farms came to be known as Jerseytown, since most of those who settled there were his neighbors and friends from the New Jersey colony.  William Baillie, in a recent study of modern day Madison Township, PA, which includes Jerseytown, describes its early inhabitants as a mix of English and Germans, many of them loyalists who were tolerated by their neighbors and felt relatively safe, on the frontier, from pursuit by the revolutionary authorities.       The coincidence of Wilhelm’s looming fugitive status in 1779 and Daniel’s fortuitous return to the same congregation with news of a promising new place to settle, suggests an escape to the Pennsylvania frontier may have been discussed between them.  Further, the fact that Daniel married his eldest son, William, to Wilhelm’s only daughter in that very place 18 years later—thus confirming close ties between the men—allows us to posit a likely answer to Wilhelm’s whereabouts during the missing years.     Moreover, if we presume Wilhelm left for what would become Jerseytown either in 1779 or 1780 and worked as a paid laborer on Daniel’s farm until it was safe in the late 1790s to resurface as an independent land owner and acknowledged church member, it would explain a number of puzzling phenomena in the last half of his life.     Question: Why did his wife give birth to no more children after 1779 though she was still in her late twenties when her daughter was born?  Answer: As in the cases of indentured service a generation before, she and her husband were almost certainly apart—she in New Jersey and he in Pennsylvania for a period of at least 15 years.      Q. Why in the late 90s did he belong to a congregation that was a half-day’s buggy ride away from his Greenwood farm?  A. Because it was near Jerseytown where he had been living and working since 1780.     Q.  Why does he resurface as “William Ikeler” in all documents after 1797?  A. Because he wished to evade identification as the loyalist Wilhelm Eichler, but, feeling relatively safe from detection in another state, he also wanted to keep the English pronunciation of his surname as close to the German as possible.     Q. How was it possible for him to afford a 300-acre farm and a large “log house and barn” in Greenwood according to the 1802 tax records?  A. He purchased it with a fraction of his saved wages from working for Daniel Welliver.     Q.  How was it possible for him to own an additional 350 acres and distribute that land among his two married sons, Andrew and William, and his older brother Conrad—according to the 1805 tax records?   A. He purchased that land with “450 pieces of gold or silver” from John Hubley, another Greenwood farmer, on May 15, 1804, according to a deed held by his great grandson, I.B. Ikeler, and published in the Bloomsburg newspaper on December 6, 1908.     Q. But how did he come to have such a store of hard currency?  A. It was probably the remainder of his hoarded, 15-plus years of wages earned on the Welliver farm and earmarked as a nest egg for his wife and children when it was safe for them to join him in Pennsylvania.     Q. What other evidence is there, besides their membership in the same New Jersey church and the marriage of his daughter to Daniel’s son, of a close, mutually beneficial relationship between Wilhelm Eichler and Daniel Welliver?   A. When Wilhelm’s estate was divided in November, 1810, the largest portion of land was given not to his sons or his wife, but to his son-in-law, William Welliver.   Daniel’s son (already with a sizable holding from his own father) received an additional 245 acres of Ikeler land, but the 1811 tax records show Wilhelm’s own dependents got much less:     Andrew (son): 130 acres plus log cabin     Barnabus (son): 35 acres     William (son): 180 acres plus log cabin     Elizabeth (his widow): 60 acres, plus log house and barn A further indication of the tight friendship between the Ikelers and the Wellivers from the 1780s onward is the note, both in the will and the tax records, of their farm properties abutting each other on several sides.     So it seems that like his father, who had to start over twice to establish his independence (from tenant farming in Germany and indentured service in the British colonies), Wilhelm had to make two new beginnings of his own: first as a second son and small farmer in colonial New Jersey, and once again, after financial ruin and years of enforced separation from his wife and family, as a U.S. citizen on the frontier of rural America.       Did he curse the fate that had robbed him of his own land and compelled him for so long to till another man’s fields?  Or did Wilhelm, through those years away from his loved ones, and always fearful of discovery by government agents, steel himself with an old German adage: aller Anfang ist schwer—every beginning is hard?

[96thdayofrage]

My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.”

Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage.

My great-grandfather was given the nickname Nwaubani, which means “from the Bonny port region,” because he had the bright skin and healthy appearance associated at the time with people who lived near the coast and had access to rich foreign foods. (This became our family name.) In the late nineteenth century, he carried a slave-trading license from the Royal Niger Company, an English corporation that ruled southern Nigeria. His agents captured slaves across the region and passed them to middlemen, who brought them to the ports of Bonny and Calabar and sold them to white merchants. Slavery had already been abolished in the United States and the United Kingdom, but his slaves were legally shipped to Cuba and Brazil. To win his favor, local leaders gave him their daughters in marriage. (By his death, he had dozens of wives.) His influence drew the attention of colonial officials, who appointed him chief of Umujieze and several other towns. He presided over court cases and set up churches and schools. He built a guesthouse on the land where my parents’ home now stands, and hosted British dignitaries. To inform him of their impending arrival and verify their identities, guests sent him envelopes containing locks of their Caucasian hair.

Funeral rites for a distinguished Igbo man traditionally include the slaying of livestock—usually as many cows as his family can afford. Nwaubani Ogogo was so esteemed that, when he died, a leopard was killed, and six slaves were buried alive with him. My family inherited his canvas shoes, which he wore at a time when few Nigerians owned footwear, and the chains of his slaves, which were so heavy that, as a child, my father could hardly lift them. Throughout my upbringing, my relatives gleefully recounted Nwaubani Ogogo’s exploits. When I was about eight, my father took me to see the row of ugba trees where Nwaubani Ogogo kept his slaves chained up. In the nineteen-sixties, a family friend who taught history at a university in the U.K. saw Nwaubani Ogogo’s name mentioned in a textbook about the slave trade. Even my cousins who lived abroad learned that we had made it into the history books.

Last year, I travelled from Abuja, where I live, to Umujieze for my parents’ forty-sixth wedding anniversary. My father is the oldest man in his generation and the head of our extended family. One morning, a man arrived at our gate from a distant Anglican church that was celebrating its centenary. Its records showed that Nwaubani Ogogo had given an armed escort to the first missionaries in the region—a trio known as the Cookey brothers—to insure their safety. The man invited my father to receive an award for Nwaubani Ogogo’s work spreading the gospel. After the man left, my father sat in his favorite armchair, among a group of his grandchildren, and told stories about Nwaubani Ogogo.

“Are you not ashamed of what he did?” I asked.

“I can never be ashamed of him,” he said, irritated. “Why should I be? His business was legitimate at the time. He was respected by everyone around.” My father is a lawyer and a human-rights activist who has spent much of his life challenging government abuses in southeast Nigeria. He sometimes had to flee our home to avoid being arrested. But his pride in his family was unwavering. “Not everyone could summon the courage to be a slave trader,” he said. “You had to have some boldness in you.”

My father succeeded in transmitting to me not just Nwaubani Ogogo’s stories but also pride in his life. During my school days, if a friend asked the meaning of my surname, I gave her a narrative instead of a translation. But, in the past decade, I’ve felt a growing sense of unease. African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather. I read arguments for paying reparations to the descendants of American slaves and wondered whether someone might soon expect my family to contribute. Other members of my generation felt similarly unsettled. My cousin Chidi, who grew up in England, was twelve years old when he visited Nigeria and asked our uncle the meaning of our surname. He was shocked to learn our family’s history, and has been reluctant to share it with his British friends. My cousin Chioma, a doctor in Lagos, told me that she feels anguished when she watches movies about slavery. “I cry and cry and ask God to forgive our ancestors,” she said.

The British tried to end slavery among the Igbo in the early nineteen-hundreds, though the practice persisted into the nineteen-forties. In the early years of abolition, by British recommendation, masters adopted their freed slaves into their extended families. One of the slaves who joined my family was Nwaokonkwo, a convicted murderer from another village who chose slavery as an alternative to capital punishment and eventually became Nwaubani Ogogo’s most trusted manservant. In the nineteen-forties, after my great-grandfather was long dead, Nwaokonkwo was accused of attempting to poison his heir, Igbokwe, in order to steal a plot of land. My family sentenced him to banishment from the village. When he heard the verdict, he ran down the hill, flung himself on Nwaubani Ogogo’s grave, and wept, saying that my family had once given him refuge and was now casting him out. Eventually, my ancestors allowed him to remain, but instructed all their freed slaves to drop our surname and choose new names. “If they had been behaving better, they would have been accepted,” my father said.

The descendants of freed slaves in southern Nigeria, called ohu, still face significant stigma. Igbo culture forbids them from marrying freeborn people, and denies them traditional leadership titles such as Eze and Ozo. (The osu, an untouchable caste descended from slaves who served at shrines, face even more severe persecution.) My father considers the ohu in our family a thorn in our side, constantly in opposition to our decisions. In the nineteen-eighties, during a land dispute with another family, two ohu families testified against us in court. “They hate us,” my father said. “No matter how much money they have, they still have a slave mentality.” My friend Ugo, whose family had a similar disagreement with its ohu members, told me, “The dissension is coming from all these people with borrowed blood.”

I first became aware of the ohu when I attended boarding school in Owerri. I was interested to discover that another new student’s family came from Umujieze, though she told me that they hardly ever visited home. It seemed, from our conversations, that we might be related—not an unusual discovery in a large family, but exciting nonetheless. When my parents came to visit, I told them about the girl. My father quietly informed me that we were not blood relatives. She was ohu, the granddaughter of Nwaokonkwo.

[algeroth]

My parents’ home, in Umujieze, Nigeria, stands on a hilly plot that has been in our family for more than a hundred years. Traditionally, the Igbo people bury their dead among the living, and the ideal resting place for a man and his wives is on the premises of their home. My grandfather Erasmus, the first black manager of a Bata shoe factory in Aba, is buried under what is now the visitors’ living room. My grandmother Helen, who helped establish a local church, is buried near the study. My umbilical cord is buried on the grounds, as are those of my four siblings. My eldest brother, Nnamdi, was born while my parents were studying in England, in the early nineteen-seventies; my father, Chukwuma, preserved the dried umbilical cord and, eighteen months later, brought it home to bury it by the front gate. Down the hill, near the river, in an area now overrun by bush, is the grave of my most celebrated ancestor: my great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku. Nwaubani Ogogo was a slave trader who gained power and wealth by selling other Africans across the Atlantic. “He was a renowned trader,” my father told me proudly. “He dealt in palm produce and human beings.”

Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage.

My great-grandfather was given the nickname Nwaubani, which means “from the Bonny port region,” because he had the bright skin and healthy appearance associated at the time with people who lived near the coast and had access to rich foreign foods. (This became our family name.) In the late nineteenth century, he carried a slave-trading license from the Royal Niger Company, an English corporation that ruled southern Nigeria. His agents captured slaves across the region and passed them to middlemen, who brought them to the ports of Bonny and Calabar and sold them to white merchants. Slavery had already been abolished in the United States and the United Kingdom, but his slaves were legally shipped to Cuba and Brazil. To win his favor, local leaders gave him their daughters in marriage. (By his death, he had dozens of wives.) His influence drew the attention of colonial officials, who appointed him chief of Umujieze and several other towns. He presided over court cases and set up churches and schools. He built a guesthouse on the land where my parents’ home now stands, and hosted British dignitaries. To inform him of their impending arrival and verify their identities, guests sent him envelopes containing locks of their Caucasian hair.

Funeral rites for a distinguished Igbo man traditionally include the slaying of livestock—usually as many cows as his family can afford. Nwaubani Ogogo was so esteemed that, when he died, a leopard was killed, and six slaves were buried alive with him. My family inherited his canvas shoes, which he wore at a time when few Nigerians owned footwear, and the chains of his slaves, which were so heavy that, as a child, my father could hardly lift them. Throughout my upbringing, my relatives gleefully recounted Nwaubani Ogogo’s exploits. When I was about eight, my father took me to see the row of ugba trees where Nwaubani Ogogo kept his slaves chained up. In the nineteen-sixties, a family friend who taught history at a university in the U.K. saw Nwaubani Ogogo’s name mentioned in a textbook about the slave trade. Even my cousins who lived abroad learned that we had made it into the history books.

Last year, I travelled from Abuja, where I live, to Umujieze for my parents’ forty-sixth wedding anniversary. My father is the oldest man in his generation and the head of our extended family. One morning, a man arrived at our gate from a distant Anglican church that was celebrating its centenary. Its records showed that Nwaubani Ogogo had given an armed escort to the first missionaries in the region—a trio known as the Cookey brothers—to insure their safety. The man invited my father to receive an award for Nwaubani Ogogo’s work spreading the gospel. After the man left, my father sat in his favorite armchair, among a group of his grandchildren, and told stories about Nwaubani Ogogo.

“Are you not ashamed of what he did?” I asked.

“I can never be ashamed of him,” he said, irritated. “Why should I be? His business was legitimate at the time. He was respected by everyone around.” My father is a lawyer and a human-rights activist who has spent much of his life challenging government abuses in southeast Nigeria. He sometimes had to flee our home to avoid being arrested. But his pride in his family was unwavering. “Not everyone could summon the courage to be a slave trader,” he said. “You had to have some boldness in you.”

My father succeeded in transmitting to me not just Nwaubani Ogogo’s stories but also pride in his life. During my school days, if a friend asked the meaning of my surname, I gave her a narrative instead of a translation. But, in the past decade, I’ve felt a growing sense of unease. African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather. I read arguments for paying reparations to the descendants of American slaves and wondered whether someone might soon expect my family to contribute. Other members of my generation felt similarly unsettled. My cousin Chidi, who grew up in England, was twelve years old when he visited Nigeria and asked our uncle the meaning of our surname. He was shocked to learn our family’s history, and has been reluctant to share it with his British friends. My cousin Chioma, a doctor in Lagos, told me that she feels anguished when she watches movies about slavery. “I cry and cry and ask God to forgive our ancestors,” she said.

The British tried to end slavery among the Igbo in the early nineteen-hundreds, though the practice persisted into the nineteen-forties. In the early years of abolition, by British recommendation, masters adopted their freed slaves into their extended families. One of the slaves who joined my family was Nwaokonkwo, a convicted murderer from another village who chose slavery as an alternative to capital punishment and eventually became Nwaubani Ogogo’s most trusted manservant. In the nineteen-forties, after my great-grandfather was long dead, Nwaokonkwo was accused of attempting to poison his heir, Igbokwe, in order to steal a plot of land. My family sentenced him to banishment from the village. When he heard the verdict, he ran down the hill, flung himself on Nwaubani Ogogo’s grave, and wept, saying that my family had once given him refuge and was now casting him out. Eventually, my ancestors allowed him to remain, but instructed all their freed slaves to drop our surname and choose new names. “If they had been behaving better, they would have been accepted,” my father said.

The descendants of freed slaves in southern Nigeria, called ohu, still face significant stigma. Igbo culture forbids them from marrying freeborn people, and denies them traditional leadership titles such as Eze and Ozo. (The osu, an untouchable caste descended from slaves who served at shrines, face even more severe persecution.) My father considers the ohu in our family a thorn in our side, constantly in opposition to our decisions. In the nineteen-eighties, during a land dispute with another family, two ohu families testified against us in court. “They hate us,” my father said. “No matter how much money they have, they still have a slave mentality.” My friend Ugo, whose family had a similar disagreement with its ohu members, told me, “The dissension is coming from all these people with borrowed blood.”

I first became aware of the ohu when I attended boarding school in Owerri. I was interested to discover that another new student’s family came from Umujieze, though she told me that they hardly ever visited home. It seemed, from our conversations, that we might be related—not an unusual discovery in a large family, but exciting nonetheless. When my parents came to visit, I told them about the girl. My father quietly informed me that we were not blood relatives. She was ohu, the granddaughter of Nwaokonkwo.

I’m not sure if this revelation meant much to me at the time. The girl and I remained friendly, though we rarely spoke again about our family. But, in 2000, another friend, named Ugonna, was forbidden from marrying a man she had dated for years because her family found out that he was osu. Afterward, an osufriend named Nonye told me that growing up knowing that her ancestors were slaves was “sort of like having the bogeyman around.” Recently, I spoke to Nwannennaya, a thirty-nine-year-old ohu member of my family. “The way you people behave is as if we are inferior,” she said. Her parents kept their ohuancestry secret from her until she was seventeen. Although our families were neighbors, she and I rarely interacted. “There was a day you saw me and asked me why I was bleaching my skin,” she said. “I was very happy because you spoke to me. I went to my mother and told her. You and I are sisters. That is how sisters are supposed to behave.”

Modernization is emboldening ohu and freeborn to intermarry, despite the threat of ostracization. “I know communities where people of slave descent have become affluent and have started demanding the right to hold positions,” Professor Okoro told me. “It is creating conflict in many communities.” Last year, in a town in Enugu State, an ohu man was appointed to a traditional leadership position, sparking mass protests. In a nearby village, an ohu man became the top police officer, giving the local ohu enough influence to push for reform. Eventually, they were apportioned a separate section of the community, where they can live according to whatever laws they please, away from the freeborn. “It will probably be a long time before all traces of slavery disappear from the minds of the people,” G. T. Basden, a British missionary, wrote of the Igbo in 1921. “Until the conscience of the people functions, the distinctions between slave and free-born will be maintained.”