This volume is based on a remarkable diary kept by the Efik merchant Antera Duke between 1785 and 1788. Antera lived and traded in Duke Town, in the Cross River region of Old Calabar, and wrote and spoke Pidgin English. The diary is, today, the lengthiest surviving African text from the area's precolonial period. It was penned during the apex of regional trade, when about 15,000 slaves, along with yams, ivory, palm oil, dyewood, and pepper, were boarded on Atlantic vessels.

The diary has a fascinating history. Antera's grandson probably gave it to Scottish missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century. It was sent to Europe and kept by the Free Church of Scotland. It eventually ended up ‘in a pile of rubbish’, where a clerk discovered it, later loaning it to Arthur W. Wilke, who was on furlough from his mission in Duke Town. Before returning to Nigeria in 1908, Wilke transcribed extensive passages and gave the diary back to the Church. Unfortunately, the original cannot be located today, although Wilke's transcriptions survive. Late in his life, Wilke translated his transcriptions into English, wrote an introduction, and sought publication. His work was presented to Daryll Forde at the International African Institute in London, who, together with G. I. Jones and Donald C. Simmons, revised and annotated it for a 1956 book published by Oxford University Press.

In this new edition, Behrendt, Latham, and Northrup, apply their considerable knowledge of West Africa and draw on a wealth of published and secondary sources to produce a gem of a book. In Part I, Antera's life is placed in context through five original and detailed chapters. These explain the volume of the slave trade to and from Efik towns and examine the area's produce trade, which was critical for its economic success. Neighboring areas were thought to have healthier slaves, but Efik communities offered a greater range of non-slave-trade items. The editors also use contemporary accounts and ethnographic data to determine from where those traded through the area originated.

Part II reproduces what survives of the diary. Even-numbered pages contain the original Pidgin (as transcribed by Wilke). Odd-numbered pages carry English translations. Through extensive footnotes, Behrendt, Latham, and Northrup provide background about the people, places, events, and rituals about which Antera wrote.

For me, what is most striking about the diary is not the way in which Antera describes the operations of the slave trade, although that is certainly present. In a long series of passages, he details how he hands over pawns as collateral for goods, which captains he trades with, and what prices he gets for his captives. But what stands out is that Antera takes time to note the mundane – the weather, the food, and his own feelings about a great variety of things. ‘At 6 a.m., at Aqua Landing, a fine morning’, he states, in just the manner I might use to describe a day in my town. Of course, Duke Town was not just any town, and Antera, we learn, was doing more than enjoying a sunrise. He was on his way to a palaver house where all Ekpe men ‘came down … and joined together to put money for 20 men’. Those men would be traded to a European captain for goods. Months later, Antera penned a description of an equally ordinary morning – this one rainy – when he invited ‘all the captains to come ashore’ and drink palm wine ‘all day’. As night fell, a goat was killed and music played. In November 1785, Antera took time to write about his interactions with a captain on another ‘fine morning’. Then he penned in Pidgin that his ‘dear wife Awa Ofiong’ had not fetched water from the spring, as she was expected to. Awa's actions sparked Antera's mother to ‘put in her word’. Awa was, he said, ‘rude to my mother, so I was damn more angry about that’. In other passages, Antera describes his dress, sorrow about the death of relatives, acts of retaliation against family members who wronged him, and illnesses.

What we learn from Antera's diary is more than how he negotiated a position between black sellers and white buyers of slaves and produce. His writings reveal how life for those trading humans was full of the same joys and pleasures, tragedies and pains that people everywhere have felt throughout history. For this reason, I found The Diary of Antera Duke to be important and unsettling. It provides a unique, firsthand perspective of the Atlantic slave trade, and is a book to which I will return frequently.