A rejoinder, by Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine

I extend my appreciation to Femi J. Kolapo for reviewing my book The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria. I believe it is worth addressing some of its most critical elements. Foremost is the claim that my book ‘implies’ ‘that many Nigerian parents bred children' for ‘the possibility of becoming rich’. I did not make such a claim, instead demonstrating that parents valued children (2, 94, 96) and that pawning a child produced ‘great sadness’ (93). I wrote that, ‘The strategy to ensure economic survival necessitating the release of at least one daughter through pawning did not negate the emotive connection the parents had with the child’ (93–4). Although I do note that some nefarious family members took advantage of child trafficking schemes for selfish reasons (e.g. obtaining funds for a bride price) my primary argument was that insolvent families used pawning as one way to improve their dire situation ‘as a last resort’ (122).

Kolapo also takes issue with my claim that losing children gave women reason to protest. He points me to the works of Marc Matera, Misty L. Bastian, Susan Kingsley Kent, David Pratten, and Chimah Korieh. First, my analysis adds ‘another layer to existing histories’ (16, 110) citing reasons for the uprising, in addition to concerns about ‘taxes, decreased export prices, and increased import costs’ (23). Second, numerous citations to Matera, Bastian, and Kingsley Kent are included in the book, showing agreement with my claim that Nigerians ‘experienced economic hardships amid the political disorder unleashed by colonial policies’ (107).Footnote ¹ They note that pawning helped pay taxes and that women's contribution to their husbands’ and sons’ tax payments influenced their participation in the Women's War.Footnote ² Second, like Pratten, Chapter Two shows how the value of manilla and silver was ‘linked to the growth and fall of the export palm oil trade’ (47, 51, 62–4). I cite Ben Naanen, the source that Pratten cites, and argue that the influx of British sterling ‘negatively affected family economies’ (47), and local market traders, who were generally women (64).Footnote ³ Perhaps I should have noted Korieh's study of women and palm production during the 1920s, which shows that taxation ‘forced upon the Igbo peasantry a burden their subsistence economy could not bear’, a similar sentiment shared by the women who described the loss of their children during the Inquiry.Footnote ⁴ Like me, Korieh explains that people pawned children to meet tax debts. However, Korieh does not cite the numerous women's testimonies explaining this as a reason for their frustration.

Kolapo's other critiques were not within the purview of my study, which emphasized the distress felt by Igbo women whose children were often lost from them forever. Given the weakness of early colonial archives it is impossible to know with accuracy the quantitative or qualitative dimensions of children at work. What my research relies upon is the experience of women who resented the loss of their children and mourned the emotional cost of the colonial economy.

A response, by Femi J. Kolapo

Professor Chapdelaine objected to my conclusion that her book implied that some Nigerian parents bred children for economic gain. At the draft stage, the journal editor also commented that this was ‘likely to be very, very controversial’. My response was that Chapdelaine's ‘analysis implies this summation’ and that ‘I expect that she would disagree with my reading’. Rather than a direct claim by Chapdelaine, this was my reading of her analysis ‘taken to its extreme’, as I clearly stated. Her analysis of the ‘social economy of the child’ in the study encloses a spectrum of probabilities that include the two extremes of parents breeding children for economic purposes and criminals stealing children to sell.

My interpretation lay, in the first place, on Chapdelaine's use of oral informants’ recollections and colonial officers’ opinions, reports, and charges of rampant, rather than incidental, child trafficking. These accounts spanned the entire period she investigated, no less than three generations. The second basis is her reiteration that such rampant acts of child trafficking occurred notwithstanding parental sorrow and love for children given up (5, 88, 93–4). I don't see how the frequency of child pawning, kidnapping, and child sale, including of babies, which Chapdelaine suggests characterized the society during this period, can be divorced from ‘birthing’ of these children, since parents were likely aware that such acts were possible, if the need arose. Indeed, in many places these outcomes were sanctioned by enabling rituals. All this fits with Chapdelaine's observation that children in these communities had an ‘intrinsic value’ that made them into a ‘fundamental element of economic activities’ (94). I would argue that a child's economic potential — ‘once married or offered as a pawn’ (88) — was already anticipated at birth.

Concerning Chapdelaine's second objection, my dispute was not exactly with her ‘claim that losing children gave women reason to protest’. Rather, I disputed the definitive claim that ‘continual loss of children provoked the women to rise up’ (108, 126). My point is that the centrality of this element to the outbreak of the Women's War is undercut by available evidence, including by David Pratten, in which it was proven that that there were communities whose women did not participate in the war despite having experienced rampant child loss.Footnote ⁵ I argue that it was the onset of colonial taxation coinciding with the crushing economic effects of the introduction of the sterling and the depreciation of the local currency that prompted most women to rise, especially in Calabar and Owerri provinces. Where these conditions were different, women did not participate in the war.