Performing Ogaranya: Kalu Ezelu Uwaoma, Male Slavery, and Freedom Politics in Southeastern Nigeria, c. 1860–1940

Abstract

Abstract Kalu Uwaoma’s social mobility from slave to slaver, warrant chief, Presbyterian elder, and British knight between 1865 and 1940 provides a subaltern view of enslavement and the attainment of freedom in the Bight of Biafra. In securing freedom without legal manumission, Kalu harnessed the muscles of emerging colonialism, Western education, and Christian modernity as well as local configurations of power and masculinity. This study restores Kalu to historical memory by drawing attention to his autobiography, one of two known personal narratives of pre-twentieth- century Igbo-Africans. Kalu’s biography was an argument against re-enslavement, a social projection of his freedom, and a rebellious manipulation of a new form of masculinity known as ogaranya (wealth-power), which signaled the masculinization of wealth and the emergence of men as arbiters of more powerful political institutions.