In The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra, Joseph Godlewski discusses the transformations in the architecture, spatial organization, and material culture of the peoples of the historic Biafra region of what is now southeastern Nigeria. For the author, the threads that connect the past and present in Calabar and Biafra are rooted in that region’s global encounter beginning in the sixteenth century at the inception of the transatlantic slave trade. These commercial and cultural encounters with global capitalism accordingly transformed the region’s spatial and architectural history. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the slave trade transitioned into a boisterous British-dominated era of abolition, legitimate commerce, Christian missionization, and eventually colonial rule. In these political and economic transformations, the Èfik acted as middlemen and, together with their interior collaborators, actively facilitated the slave trade and, subsequently, the palm oil trade.
Rather than simply casting these Biafra communities as passive...
University of California Press