Another Internet Anthropologist Thread lol - Here's an interesting one for my historians:

Equatorial Guinea (EG) is one of my favorite countries, particularly because I speak Spanish and they sound like Spanish Nigerians (especially the guineanos on Bioko Island).

While I know Nigerians have been migrating to Bioko for a while, I have always felt the Bubi language sounded similar to both Igbo and Ijaw. The fact that there's a subgroup of Bóbë who call themselves "Baney" really piqued my interest. I wondered if they could be related to the Ibani? They're even located on the North side of Bioko closest to Bonny, Nigeria. The spelling definitely isn't indigenous or Spanish and looks like a corruption of Bonny—done so that it's pronounced the same way in Spanish. I was curious.

Language: As usual, I did some digging. The only free Bubi-English dictionary I could find was a very limited one published in 1881 by an Igbo/English man (William Barleycorn). The other is just an online Bubi-Spanish wordlist. I found some similarities with Ijaw and Igbo, but not too many. Bubi does have noun classes though. Perhaps, like Swahili, noun classes change the word to an unrecognizable form? Overall, it wasn't too convincing:

Kalabari: bebo = people / Bubi: bobe = people
Kalabari: inei = mine / Bubi: 'Ne = mine
Kalabari: inye / Bubi: inye = me or you
Igbo: ke? = How?/ Bubi: ke? = How?
Igbo: ncha = white / Bubi: nchwa = white ant
Igbo: rie = eat / Bubi: ri = eat
Kalabari: nyingi = mother/ Igbo= nne/ Bubi: ñye
Kalabari: obori = goat / Bubi: mbori = goat

Genealogy: I then looked into genealogy. I already knew my mtDNA haplogroup is most common in Southeast Africa. I also noticed there was a significant portion on the coast of Angola. (I deduced that my Ijaw ancestors probably migrated there from the Great Lakes area about 400+ years ago). I found my unique haplogroup among a few of the people in a research study of the Bóbë on Bioko. Interestingly, researchers placed their origins in Angola, which is where I deduced my Ijaw ancestors settled for a short time before moving to the Niger Delta. This was a strange placement considering Cameroon, Nigeria, and Gabon are closer to Bioko. My guess is that they went by relative frequency of the haplogroup in their dataset at the time?

Oral history: As a disclaimer, I got this from LipstickAlley from someone who claims to be Bubi. It may or may not be accurate:

"The ethnic oral history states that the Bubi descend from intertribal slavery, coming from several ethnic groups that existed along the African coast thousands of years ago.

Intertribal slavery of that time allowed the conquered tribe to exist freely, in their own villages and with their own families intact, minus their rulers and their families who were often killed...I've read that the Bubi population once numbered in the millions (3-6 million) - living in total geographic isolation until the Portuguese arrived. They fought off European penetration until around the beginning of the 1800s.

I've been told that one of the former enslaving tribes that the Bubi ancestors escaped from was the Igbo [sounds like the Ijaws] Note: the Igbo were targeted in the beginning of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade by the Portuguese and other neighboring ethnic groups (Brass Island, Igbo Landing), then later targeted other groups and engaged in TAST profiteering [yeah, definitely Ijaws lol]...European colonization made the Bubi vulnerable to the tribes their ancestors escaped from. I believe that the history of the intertribal slave origin of Bubi people had been well-known among other west-central African tribes."

"According to legend when another tribe, more warring and more numerous, invaded the Bubi's beach homeland, forcing them into hard labor and slavery. They must have stared with longing across the water at those peaceful, mysterious peaks nearly 100 miles away that began to hold the promise of peace and freedom. The chiefs of the sub-tribes decided that they needed to flee the country and cross the seas to a new land named Fernando Po, which is now Bioko Island...The Bubi, as shore-dwelling, fishing people, probably had [more]canoe-engineering knowledge than most African people. But when a plan for escape began to develop, they knew it would take the largest trees of the mainland forest to make the strongest canoes for their bold, desperate plan -- which was to leave, not all at once, but by sub-tribes, under cover of darkness over a period of several months, and flee to that distant land."

This is pretty interesting. The tribe she describes definitely sounds Ijaw (people usually assume it's Igbos—we intermix after all). I don't know any other tribes that engaged in slavery in that region besides Aros, but they were in the hinterlands and supplied Ijaws with enslaved people for resale. There's strong indication that Ijaws weren't the original inhabitants of the Niger Delta in the Holocene period. I think Ijaws definitely would have been war-like enough to conquer a peaceful people like the Bóbë when we came to the Niger Delta. We also had the canoeing and fishing knowledge to survive the conditions there. Perhaps the Bóbë were the original inhabitants?!

Overall, there's not enough info for any of this to be convincing, but it was an interesting thought. I definitely need to visit Equatorial Guinea one of these days!

Below: Baney (Bube) chief wearing a similar Ijaw hat.