How Kalabari Survived the Middle Passage, Built a New Tongue in South America, and Died Waiting for Us to Remember

THE LANGUAGE THAT CROSSED THE OCEAN IN CHAINS

How Kalabari Survived the Middle Passage, Built a New Tongue in South America, and Died Waiting for Us to Remember

By Kio Amachree

Letters from Stockholm

STOCKHOLM — In March 2004, on a remote tributary of the Berbice River in Guyana, South America, a woman of one hundred and three years named Albertha Bell sat for an interview with a team of linguists from the University of the West Indies. When she died the following year, a language died with her. Its speakers had called it simply di lanshi — the language. Linguists call it Berbice Creole Dutch. But strip away the Dutch veneer and what lay beneath was something that should stop every Kalabari man and woman in their tracks. It was us. It was our tongue, carried across the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships three centuries earlier, still speaking.

This is the story of the most extraordinary journey any Nigerian language has ever made. And it is a warning addressed directly to the Kalabari Kingdom today.

A COLONY ON A RIVER, A PEOPLE FROM THE DELTA

In 1627, a Dutch planter named Abraham van Peere of Zeeland founded a private colony called Berbice along a river in what is now Guyana. To work its plantations, the Dutch brought enslaved Africans, and here is the remarkable fact: an unusually concentrated number of them came from one place — the eastern Niger Delta, speakers of Eastern Ijo, above all the Kalabari variety.

Ordinarily, the horror of the slave trade deliberately mixed peoples and shattered languages, so that the enslaved could not conspire in a common tongue. Caribbean creoles are therefore usually thin scatterings of many African languages beneath a European surface. Berbice was different. There, our ancestors were numerous enough, and together enough, to do something almost unheard of. They did not merely leave traces in a new language. They built one third of its foundation.

Roughly a third of the basic vocabulary of Berbice Dutch — including the words for eat, for know, for speak — came from Eastern Ijo, along with most of the productive grammar, with the rest drawn from Dutch and about a tenth from the Arawak language of the indigenous people. Professor Ian Robertson, the Guyanese linguist who discovered the language's last speakers, put it plainly: it contained more than ten times the number of West African derived forms found in any other Caribbean creole language.

Think of what that means. The words a Berbice child used to say I want to eat, the words a mother used to say I know you, the very word for speaking itself — these were Kalabari words, pronounced on a South American river by people who had never seen the Delta, generation after generation, for three hundred years. Even Cuffy, the legendary leader of the great 1763 Berbice slave rebellion, one of the first major uprisings of enslaved people in the Americas and today the national hero of Guyana, would in all probability have spoken this language. When Cuffy rose against the planters, it is likely he gave his orders partly in the tongue of our ancestors.

New Amsterdam, the town at the mouth of the Berbice. Elem Kalabari, the ancient city at the mouth of our own creeks. Two river peoples, one severed from the other by the greatest crime in human history, and yet the cord was never quite cut. Scholars have called it the invisible Atlantic cord. I call it proof of who we are.

THE LONG DYING

The decline began in the eighteenth century as plantation activity shifted downriver and then to the coast, and when the British took over and imported new enslaved people from Barbados, an English based creole rapidly displaced di lanshi. English, as ever, arrived with power and swallowed what it found. The language retreated up the river, surviving in remote settlements around the Wiruni Creek, where Professor Robertson finally found its last speakers in the 1970s — by then not even Africans but Amerindian families who had absorbed it.

The Dutch linguist Silvia Kouwenberg documented the language and published its grammar in 1994, just in time. The last fluent speakers were two cousins, Albertha Bell and Arnold King, who had grown up together after King's parents died in the 1918 flu pandemic that reached even those remote tributaries. Auntie Bertha was interviewed for the last time in March 2004 at the age of one hundred and three, and with her death in 2005 the language was gone; in 2010 it was declared officially extinct.

Three hundred years of survival. Slavery could not kill it. The Dutch could not kill it. Rebellion, flu and empire could not kill it. What killed it, in the end, was the same quiet executioner now at work in Rivers State: the failure to pass the language to the children. The last speakers, Professor Robertson noted with sorrow, did not transmit their knowledge to their families or communities. When the elders died, the silence was total.

THE WARNING WRITTEN IN WATER

Now turn your eyes from the Berbice River to the Sombreiro. The Kalabari language at home — the mother of di lanshi, one of the best documented of all the Ijo languages — is itself classified as endangered, largely because of the massive relocation of our people driven by the oil industry around Port Harcourt. Our children drift to the cities, and in the cities they are schooled in English, shamed out of what the system sneeringly calls vernacular, and raised by parents who mistake amputation for advancement.

Do we understand what we are watching? A language that our ancestors carried through the door of no return, that survived the Middle Passage, that armed a rebellion, that endured three centuries in a foreign hemisphere — that language's own mother is now dying at home, in freedom, among her own children, not from conquest but from neglect. The enslaved Kalabari of Berbice kept our words alive in chains. We, unchained, are letting them go.

WHAT MUST BE DONE

The Kalabari Reboot Programme that I have proposed for our kingdom must place language at its center, and the lesson of Berbice tells us exactly how. First, documentation is not preservation — Kouwenberg's grammar preserved di lanshi on paper, but paper does not speak; only children do. So the priority is intergenerational transmission: Kalabari medium nursery and primary instruction in Buguma, Abonnema, Bakana, Degema and across the kingdom, as Nigeria's own National Policy on Education already promises and never delivers. Second, the chiefs and the canoe houses must make Kalabari the language of ceremony, council and succession without apology. Third, our diaspora — in London, Houston, Stockholm — must build the online teaching platforms our Igbo brothers are already building for their tongue. Fourth, Nigeria and Guyana should jointly memorialize the Berbice connection, for it is a shared heritage of two nations, and Cuffy's monument in Georgetown is, whether Guyana knows it or not, partly a monument to the Kalabari.

Albertha Bell was, in a sense, the last Kalabari speaker of the western hemisphere, though she never saw the Delta and we never knew her name. She held our ancestors' words for one hundred and three years and had no one to give them to. Across the ocean, we still have someone to give them to. Our children are right there. All we have to do is speak.

Kio Amachree is the Founder and President of Worldview International, Stockholm.