Calabar: History
=== Seaport, slave trade ===
When Portuguese explorers in the 15th century reached this part of the Guinea coast, they called the tribes of the area "Calabar". These historic inhabitants were Quas, Efuts, and Efiks. Efik people migrated from the area of the Niger River to the shores of Calabar. They were fleeing civil war with their kindred and the Ibibio people.
Since the 16th century, Calabar has served as an international seaport, exporting such goods as palm oil. During the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, it became a major port for shipment of African slaves to the Americas. The Spanish maintain the Calabar designation.
Tribes around that region were taken in as slaves for slave trade. Such tribes included the Igbo tribes (communities) who lived around that region at the time. Those minority tribes were subject to slave raids by more powerful tribes or ethnic groups in the region.
From 1725 until 1750, roughly 17,000 enslaved Africans were sold from Calabar to European slave traders; from 1772 to 1775, the number soared to more than 62,000. Old Calabar (Duke Town) and Creek Town, 16 kilometres (10 mi) northeast, were crucial towns in the trade of slaves in that era.
In 1807, Great Britain abolished the slave trade. In 1815 HMS Comus, as part of the British blockade of Africa, sailed into Duke Town, where she captured seven Spanish and Portuguese slave ships.
John Jea, an enslaved African American, came from the area. He later became a writer. A small mulatto community of merchants was located here that had links to missionary and other merchant colonies in Igboland, Lagos, and across the Atlantic.
In 1846, Scottish Presbyterians established a mission station in Calabar. Among the missionaries, Hope Waddell, who worked in Calabar from 1845 to 1858, and Mary Slessor, who evangelized Christianity in Calabar from 1876 to 1915, worked to improve treatment by and among the native peoples. They influenced many Efik people to convert to Christianity.
They tried to change or abolish the following traditional practices:
Killing newborn twins,
Human sacrifice at the death of village elders (to provide servants for them in the afterlife),
"Judgment of God", in which suspects in crime were poisoned, and convicted if they fell ill or died
They founded a school to provide secondary education to Africans. They also worked to protect water supplies and limit mosquitoes to contain yellow fever epidemics.
Waddell and Slessor are still honoured in Calabar today; streets and squares in the city were named for them.
On 10 September 1884, Queen Victoria signed a treaty of protection with the king and chiefs of Akwa Akpa, known to Europeans as Old Calabar—then the official title to distinguish it from New Calabar to the east. This enabled the United Kingdom to exercise control over the entire territory around Calabar, including Bakassi. Calabar was the headquarter of the European administration in the Niger Delta until 1906 when the seat of government was moved to Lagos.
Calabar developed earlier, albeit less vigorously than Lagos, with which it is sometimes compared because of some parallels. Calabar has the following achievements: …