Archibong I emerged as king of Duke Town during one of the most unsettled periods in nineteenth-century Old Calabar. His reign, from his formal recognition on 28 May 1849 until his death on 4 February 1852, lasted less than three years, but the events surrounding it reveal a political society undergoing profound change.
Old Calabar was already deeply connected to Atlantic commerce. Powerful Efik trading houses controlled extensive commercial networks, while Ekpe, family authority, kingship and relationships with dependent plantation communities all influenced political life. At the same time, British naval officers, merchants and Christian missionaries were becoming increasingly involved in local affairs.
Archibong’s rise cannot therefore be understood simply as the succession of one monarch by another. Four forces shaped his brief reign: rivalry within Duke Town, commercial wealth, growing British influence and the continuing power of indigenous political institutions.
Archibong I and the 1849 Succession Crisis
The immediate background to Archibong I was the death of King Eyamba V in 1847. For about two years afterwards, Duke Town lacked an undisputed king.
When missionary William Anderson began working at Duke Town in 1849, political authority was shared among three leading figures: Archibong Duke, Mr Young and Duke Ephraim. All three were regarded as claimants to the kingship.
Mr Young was Ekpenyong, a senior and influential figure who appears in European missionary accounts under the English name by which traders and missionaries knew him. Duke Ephraim was another contender. Archibong, meanwhile, possessed substantial commercial wealth and connections to Duke Town’s established ruling family.
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The rivalry between Archibong and Mr Young was already visible before the kingship question was settled.
In April 1849, two men associated with the late King Eyamba fled to the mission compound seeking protection. Archibong had ordered both men to be killed. One had already undergone the poison ordeal, survived it by vomiting the poison and, according to the practice as Anderson understood it, should have been released.
Mr Young assisted their escape and helped direct them towards missionary protection.
Only days later, the tension between Archibong and Mr Young was openly apparent.
The incident demonstrates that their later political arrangement did not emerge from harmony. It was a compromise between two powerful men whose rivalry had already become clear.
British Naval Power Enters the Succession
The decisive intervention came on 28 May 1849.
Lieutenant Selwyn, commander of HMS Teaser, met missionaries and masters of European trading vessels to determine whom British representatives should recognise as successor to Eyamba.
The meeting illustrates how far British influence had grown in Old Calabar even before formal colonial rule.
One proposal was that King Eyo of Creek Town should be consulted. Selwyn rejected the suggestion, maintaining that Duke Town and Creek Town were regarded by the British as separate political states whose kings were independent of one another.
After discussion, Archibong was favoured because of his wealth, extensive trade and connection with Duke Town’s established ruling family.
The shipmasters voted for him.
William Anderson and Samuel Edgerley, the two missionaries present, did not participate in the vote.
Mr Young’s age, influence and political standing could not simply be ignored. The compromise was that he would occupy the position translated in missionary accounts as “premier”.
Archibong and Mr Young were then brought into the schoolroom where the discussions had taken place. Mr Young relinquished his claim to the kingship and accepted the new arrangement.
Archibong was formally recognised as king of Duke Town.
Later that afternoon, he went aboard HMS Teaser and received a twenty-one-gun royal salute. A form of coronation was reported to have taken place that evening.
Archibong’s recognition was therefore shaped by an intersection of Efik succession claims, commercial wealth and British naval power.
Why “King of Duke Town” Matters
Later histories often describe Archibong as Obong of Calabar. In nineteenth-century missionary records, however, he is repeatedly identified more specifically as king of Duke Town.
That distinction matters.
Old Calabar was not a centralised kingdom ruled through one absolute monarch. Duke Town, Creek Town and other political communities possessed their own leadership structures, while authority was also exercised through powerful Houses, Ekpe and commercial networks.
Kingship was important, but it operated within a wider system of competing authorities.
The 1849 succession settlement itself demonstrates this complexity. Archibong became king, but Mr Young retained enough influence to receive a formally acknowledged political position alongside him.
The European word “premier” should not be confused with a modern prime minister operating under a parliamentary constitution. It was a term used by missionaries to describe a local political relationship in language familiar to European readers.
Archibong’s kingship was consequently powerful but not absolute.
Archibong and Mr Young After the Settlement
Recognition did not eliminate the underlying rivalry.
Only three days after the May 1849 settlement, Mr Young appeared dissatisfied with the arrangement. He suggested that Archibong might be king in dealings with Europeans while he himself remained king among the local population.
Anderson encouraged him to remain on good terms with Archibong and to continue advising the younger ruler.
Archibong governed within the institutions and customs of nineteenth-century Old Calabar while facing increasing pressure from missionaries seeking religious and social change.
Missionaries strongly opposed several practices they encountered, including human sacrifice, the poison-bean ordeal and other forms of judicial or ritual punishment. Their activities increasingly brought them into disputes involving rulers, chiefs and powerful families.
The resulting encounters provide an unusually detailed picture of the political tensions surrounding Archibong’s reign.
The Final Illness of Archibong I
By the beginning of 1852, Archibong’s health had become a serious concern.
William Anderson returned to Calabar on 9 January 1852 after an absence and found the king apparently in comparatively good spirits. Archibong had, however, suffered serious illness during the previous year and may not have completely recovered.
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On the evening of 31 January 1852, Anderson and fellow missionary Hugh Goldie visited Archibong and found him seriously ill. He had been suffering from fever for three or four days.
His condition worsened.
Archibong’s mother, Obuma, came from the plantation and remained near him. Indigenous healing and ritual practices were carried out around the sick ruler while Anderson and Goldie continued their visits.
By Tuesday his condition was deteriorating rapidly.
At about noon on Wednesday, 4 February 1852, Archibong died.
His death brought his short reign to an abrupt end and immediately created another struggle over authority in Duke Town.
Obuma and the Esere Crisis
Archibong’s mother became one of the central figures in the events that followed.
Obuma brought four people connected with the family, one man and three women, before Mr Young and accused them of causing her son’s death through ifot, a concept commonly rendered in missionary accounts as witchcraft.
They were subjected to the esere poison-bean ordeal.
All four died.
Several of Archibong’s wives were subsequently required to undergo the same ordeal, and most of those who swallowed the poison reportedly died.
The crisis then expanded far beyond Archibong’s immediate household.
Large groups of armed men began entering Duke Town from plantation settlements. Their declared purpose was to discover who had caused the king’s death.
Obuma was reported to have called plantation forces into Duke Town and offered rewards connected with attempts to identify members of the Young family as responsible for Archibong’s death.
The situation quickly became politically explosive. An accusation of supernatural responsibility could lead directly to a potentially fatal poison ordeal, while the death of the king had left Duke Town without stable leadership.
More Than 1,000 Armed Men Gather in Duke Town
The confrontation reached an extraordinary scale.
At a major meeting in the marketplace, between 1,000 and 1,200 armed plantation men were estimated to have gathered, together with another 200 or 300 spectators.
William Anderson and Hugh Goldie attended the gathering and witnessed four women taking the poison bean. Two were later reported dead, while two expelled the poison and survived.
Duke Town was effectively without settled leadership. Archibong was dead, Mr Young had fled, and no universally acknowledged political head had emerged.
The missionaries appealed to King Eyo of Creek Town for assistance.
Representatives sent from Creek Town initially failed to bring the crisis under control. King Eyo then came personally to Duke Town.
His intervention succeeded.
An agreement was reached that there would be no further poison ordeals and that the plantation forces would leave the town.
The exact number of people killed during the crisis could not be firmly established, but contemporary estimates placed the number at approximately twenty to twenty-five deaths connected with the esere episode.
Political Rivalry, Witchcraft Accusations and Power
The events following Archibong’s death were more than a religious or ritual episode.
Witchcraft accusations in nineteenth-century Old Calabar could become closely connected with economic competition, family relationships and struggles over political authority.
The expanding commercial economy had enabled successful merchants to accumulate wealth, dependants and influence. This could create tensions between economic power and older systems of status based upon age, family position and lineage.
At the highest political level, accusations of witchcraft could become entangled with elections and succession struggles.
The crisis of 1852 therefore belonged to a political world in which religion, kinship, trade, social hierarchy and succession could not easily be separated.
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The armed plantation groups involved in the crisis have sometimes been described as the “Blood Men”. Their actions included loyalty to Archibong’s family, fear of sacrifice, resistance to established authorities and involvement in political rivalries.
Their mobilisation cannot be reduced to a single motive.
The Broader Meaning of Archibong’s Reign
Archibong’s reign was brief, yet it occurred at a turning point in the history of Old Calabar.
British officials did not yet govern Duke Town as a colony. Indigenous political institutions remained central to everyday authority.
Nevertheless, British power was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Royal Navy officers could intervene in succession disputes. European merchants possessed enough influence to participate in political consultations. Missionaries created spaces of asylum and challenged established practices. British treaties and commercial interests were steadily becoming part of the political calculations of local rulers.
Archibong’s recognition in 1849 captured that changing balance.
He became king through a process rooted in local political claims and family connections, yet British naval officers and merchants played a direct role in determining whom they would recognise.
His rule therefore belonged to a transitional generation of rulers who still exercised authority through indigenous Efik political institutions but increasingly had to negotiate with expanding European commercial and diplomatic power.
Conclusion
Archibong I became king of Duke Town on 28 May 1849 after a prolonged succession struggle involving Archibong Duke, Mr Young and Duke Ephraim.
His recognition brought together four powerful forces reshaping Old Calabar: lineage politics, commercial wealth, British intervention and indigenous institutions of authority.
The political settlement gave Archibong the kingship while recognising Mr Young as an influential political counterpart. It did not remove the tensions between them.
Less than three years later, Archibong died on 4 February 1852, following several days of serious fever. His death triggered accusations of supernatural responsibility, fatal esere ordeals and the mobilisation of more than a thousand armed plantation men.
Obuma, Archibong’s mother, stood at the centre of the crisis, while members of the Young family became targets of accusation. King Eyo of Creek Town eventually intervened and helped end the poison ordeals and disperse the armed forces.
Archibong’s short reign therefore reveals far more than the biography of a young ruler. It exposes the complicated political structure of Old Calabar at a moment when indigenous authority, Atlantic commerce and British power were becoming increasingly intertwined.
Author’s Note
Archibong I’s story demonstrates why nineteenth-century Old Calabar cannot be understood through the image of a single all-powerful monarch. Kingship existed alongside powerful families, Ekpe, merchant wealth and neighbouring political centres, while British naval officers, traders and missionaries were beginning to influence decisions once governed principally within indigenous institutions. Archibong’s rise in 1849 and the crisis following his death in 1852 reveal a society negotiating both internal struggles for authority and the growing pressure of Atlantic political and commercial change.
References
Marwick, William. William and Louisa Anderson: A Record of Their Life and Work in Jamaica and Old Calabar. Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1897.
Waddell, Hope Masterton. Twenty-Nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work and Adventure, 1829–1858. London and New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1863.
Goldie, Hugh. Calabar and Its Mission. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1890.
Latham, A. J. H. “Witchcraft Accusations and Economic Tension in Pre-Colonial Old Calabar.” The Journal of African History, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1972, pp. 249–260.
Nair, Kannan K. Politics and Society in South Eastern Nigeria, 1841–1906: A Study of Power, Diplomacy and Commerce in Old Calabar. London: Frank Cass, 1972.
Oku, Ekei Essien. The Kings & Chiefs of Old Calabar (1785–1925). Calabar: Glad Tidings Press Ltd., 1989.
Röschenthaler, Ute. “The Blood Men of Old Calabar: A Slave Revolt of the Nineteenth Century?” In Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene and Martin A. Klein, eds., African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 445–465.
