How Antera Duke’s Diary Helps Us See One African World

Antera Duke’s diary is powerful because it brings readers into a named African place through the words of someone who lived there. It is also difficult evidence. Antera Duke, whose Efik name was Ntiero Edem Efiom, was an Efik merchant in Duke Town, Old Calabar, and his business included selling human beings into the Atlantic trade.

That double truth is the reason to read the record carefully. It can help us see family power, public authority, language, river travel and trade in the Cross River region. It cannot become the voice of the people sold through that system, and it cannot stand for every African society.

A named place, not a general Africa

The 2010 Oxford edition identifies Antera Duke as a late eighteenth-century Efik merchant at Duke Town, part of Old Calabar in what is now southeastern Nigeria. His surviving diary material covers January 1785 to January 1788. The editors explain that he wrote in trade English and that Efik was his first language.

Those details matter. They move the story away from a vague shoreline and toward a specific African world: Duke Town, the Cross River region, Efik-speaking communities, commercial networks, local officeholders and relationships with British ship captains.

What the diary can show

The diary and the editors’ contextual work make Duke Town visible as a place with institutions and competing authority. The introduction names Duke Ephraim as a town-council leader and spokesman in dealings with outsiders, and identifies Egbo Young Ofiong as a figure of legal authority and a head of the Ekpe society.

The editors also describe merchants moving by foot and canoe through trading and diplomatic relationships, with connections reaching into Ibibio lands and north along the Cross River toward Umon. That picture is not a single route for every person caught in the slave trade. It is a reconstruction of one regional world from the diary, other contemporary sources and later shipping records.

Whose voice survives

Antera’s voice survives because he had power and because later people copied, typed and published part of his record. The people he sold did not receive the same preservation. A historian can learn from Antera’s words while refusing to let his viewpoint become the whole human story.

That is the method this episode asks for: use a surviving African-authored record to recover a particular place, and keep asking whose experience the record lets us follow and whose experience requires other evidence.

How the record reached us

The original diary itself is reported as missing. The 2010 editors describe William Valentine encountering the volume around 1907 and Arthur W. Wilkie copying extensive passages before returning to Calabar. Wilkie’s later typescript and translation helped carry the text forward after the original disappeared during the Second World War years. Daryll Forde’s 1956 edition and the 2010 edition then made the material available to wider readers.

That chain is part of the history. An African writer created the source. Later copying, typing, library preservation and publication shaped what readers can see now. The result is incomplete, mediated and still deeply valuable.

Why this adds to the episode

The episode follows the diary as a way into one African world behind the Atlantic record. This companion story gives readers a slower source method: name the place, identify the writer’s position, separate merchant evidence from captive testimony, and treat preservation as historical work in its own right.

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Published October 10, 2026 · Updated October 10, 2026 · Report a correction