Antera Duke was a merchant prince of the Efik, a leader of Duke Town, and between 1785 and 1788 he kept a diary in the trade English of the coast. It is, as far as anyone knows, the only surviving day-by-day account written by any slave trader on any continent, and it reads exactly like what it is, a businessman’s diary. Before the auction room in Richmond, before the cane piece in Barbados, before even the ship, what was the business? But the diary of Antera Duke will not let me stand there comfortably, and it should not let you. The buyers kept books, the sellers kept books, nobody in this story is safely somebody else.