Looking for Transwonderland (8 page)

I just needed to shed my complacency and learn not to get too cosy on the roads. As much as Aunty Janice loved Lagos, she knew it was no one's friend. She furiously recounted her experiences of night-time robberies when the traffic would slow to an ominous halt, and passengers – accustomed to the drill – scrambled to remove the SIM cards from their phones. The robbers would hop on board and demand phones and cash, slapping the passengers until they relinquished the treasures hidden in their hair, their cleavage and their underwear (thieves knew
all
the tricks). The night throbbed with danger, Aunty Janice chided, and she considered me a fool for staying out after dark, using buses and okadas and dangling myself within tantalising reach of trouble.

For once, at least privately, I agreed with her. Lesson learned, I lay down to sleep and vowed to make early starts from then on.

 

Later that week, I went on another trip, this time with Mabel. Around Lagos, I kept seeing people who resembled African Americans from TV and film: that same kissing of teeth, the intriguingly similar speech cadences that emphasised certain syllables, the way when they laughed they clapped their hands and collapsed forwards. Yet the idea that some Americans originated from Nigeria via the slave trade barely crossed my childhood mind, especially when most Americans and West Indians were flocking to Ghana in search of their African roots. The author Maya Angelou was one of many African Americans to spend time in Ghana. During the early 1960s, she worked at the University of Ghana's music department, wrote newspaper articles and plays, and learnt the Fante language. English-speaking and politically stable, Ghana has long been more palatable for foreign visitors, and holds firm at the centre of the slave heritage tourism map. As a travel guidebook author, I too had visited its imposing, white coastal slave fort at Elmina where slaves
were imprisoned before their journey across the ocean. I had also seen forts in Senegal, which for years has successfully portrayed a hut on its Gorée Island as the fulcrum of the transatlantic trade, and stood on the beaches in Benin where slaves left Africa for the last time. But Nigeria, for all its size and history, seemed a rather quiet player in this context, even though our colonial place name made our slavery links clear: Ghana was the Gold Coast, further west was the Ivory Coast, while Nigeria was unequivocally titled the Slave Coast.

Slavery underpinned economic life in the Lagos region for centuries, its human cargo crossing Lagos harbour almost as frequently as today's barrels of oil. Badagry, a former slave port forty-five minutes west of Lagos, was the focal point of this human flesh trade, a conduit for hundreds of thousands of Nigerians who were shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas. I decided to visit Badagry with Mabel on a day trip, curious as to what the Nigerian version of a slave fort looked like.

We boarded a danfo heading west from Satellite Town. These minibuses rarely come to a complete halt when picking up or dropping off passengers – even women with babies strapped to their backs are expected to jump off (‘Sharp, sharp') while the wheels are still moving. One vexed mother, having launched herself and her baby onto the road, gave the conductor a piece of her mind.

‘You're crazy!' she screamed.

‘Your baby is crazy!' he hit back with a breathtaking lack of empathy or logic. Mabel and I were still laughing when the bus got going again.

We travelled along the coast to Badagry, which lies on the Porto Novo Creek, a slither of water that connects Lagos to the next-door Republic of Benin. Badagry was founded in the early fifteenth century, a part of the Yoruba people's Oyo empire. From the early sixteenth century onwards, the town, blessed (or cursed) with a protected harbour, became a transit point for shipping slaves. More
than half a million people were captured in raids from other parts of Nigeria, Benin and Togo, and sent across the Atlantic to the Americas. When the slave trade was banned in the mid-nineteenth century, Badagry became a major exporter of palm oil, and in 1842, the site of Nigeria's first Christian mission. These days, at least in Aunty Janice's eyes, Badagry was a place where lots of witchcraft was ‘cooked'. ‘Don't go there,' she had warned with a wag of her finger.

We arrived at a quiet road next to the gloriously blue lagoon, a steaming, soporific place that languished in sheepish contrast to its inglorious past. Right by the water, where slaves once crossed to board ships, lay a small garden and a 500-year-old cannon holding vigil over the lagoon. A class of young schoolchildren in brilliant pink uniforms bobbed and fidgeted around the garden's tree, like a flock of flamingos. Further back from the water, across the street, the barracoon – the slave prison – still stood, now locked. Slaves were held there before being transported by canoe across the lagoon and put on ships anchored further out in the ocean.

Mabel and I inspected the Slave Relic Museum across from the prison building. The museum was owned by local Chief Mobee, descended from the long line of chiefs who had presided over the slave trade since Badagry's founding in 1502. The Mobee family still runs the museum, which – I pedantically remarked to Mabel – makes them profiteers of the slave trade still. Guiding us was Shegu Mobee, the chief 's grandson, a clean-cut, laid-back nineteen-year-old university student. I asked him whether he was embarrassed about his family's past involvement. His dark serene face displayed not a flicker of guilt.

‘Slavery was all over Africa,' he said quietly, pointing to a map and tracing his languid finger north of the Sahara where many sub-Saharans were sent to serve North Africans. That was all he had to say about the subject: slavery was simply a part of life in those days. Between AD 800 and 1900, Muslim empires sought slaves from
sub-Saharan Africa and sent them north, to the Middle East and to the Asian subcontinent. Slavery, although a somewhat inaccurate term, was also common among sub-Saharan Africans. Indentured labourers were put to work in the fields, and paid a tribute to their masters. But they usually weren't the personal property of their masters, and could eventually purchase their freedom.

Badagry's Slave Relic Museum was a tiny, low-ceilinged building with dark concrete walls. On one wall hung the Mobee family tree, stretching back to the sixteenth century. By the opposite wall, various original artefacts of the era were displayed, including a metal neck chain worn by the slaves.

‘Can I touch it?' I asked Shegu.

‘Yes, you can wear it if you want to.' Shegu placed the rusty metal ring around my neck. It bore down so heavily on my shoulders and collar bone that I had to hold it up with my hands to stop it from bruising my flesh. Less than 200 years ago, someone was forced to wear this very chain – without holding it up with their hands – and go about their daily business. Shegu showed me a pair of twin ankle cuffs, designed to be worn by two people simultaneously. Again, I asked if I could try them on. Indulging my masochism, Shegu fixed them around both our ankles. We tried walking together, but the weight of the metal, combined with our lack of coordination, made it too difficult. As he removed the cuffs, I breathed a deep, deep sigh of relief. I felt so incredibly lucky to be born in a prosperous and enlightened era. Discounting family bereavement, I've more or less dodged the bullets of misery and ill health that have rained down on humans throughout history.

Shegu crossed the small room to show me a set of chains worn by disobedient slaves. Connected to the chain was a hook that pierced the slave's toes whenever he or she walked. I didn't fancy trying that one on. Shegu also held up a lip hook, which the slave masters attached to the faces of misbehavers to prevent them from
talking and eating. But by far the most barbaric object was the cone-shaped drinking trough, apparently designed for maximum humiliation. The dehydrated slaves, while handcuffed, would drink from the trough like animals, up to forty of them pushing and jostling for access. As the water level lowered, they had to push their heads deeper into the container. Shegu painted a picture of the rusty, sharp edges cutting their faces and chests, and blood flowing into the water, leaving a salty tinge for the other drinkers.

The sadistic treatment of slaves is an eternal mystery to me. Surely it's in every salesman's interest to keep his merchandise in good condition? Car salesmen keep their vehicles gleaming; goose farmers fatten their fowl; London fruit sellers tell you not to ‘set those grapes down too hard' after you pick them up for inspection. Yet these slave masters routinely beat the strength out of people whose very muscles lay at the core of their commercial value. Even if such treatment were designed to diminish the slaves' spirit and mental strength, there's a fine line between demoralisation and death; those slave masters tripped over that line so often, it seemed to defy business logic. Their profits, though healthy, could have been a lot healthier.

When the slaves were ready to be shipped abroad, they were led out of the barracoon and onto boats that crossed the lagoon to a beach known as the Point of No Return. Shegu, Mabel and I retraced their steps and boarded a motorised canoe at the waterfront. Two others joined us: a young journalist called Success, and her lanky photographer, Sesi, who took a shine to Mabel. The pair were covering Badagry for a news feature.

A few minutes later, the five of us climbed out of the boat onto empty, grassy land on the other side of the water.

‘They should build a bridge across this lagoon,' I commented.

‘If they built a bridge, people would come and build houses here,' Sesi replied. The land had a tranquil, bucolic atmosphere, its tall grass munched by a scattered herd of cows. About a kilometre
and a half ahead of us, a coconut tree grove rose from the soil. Shegu assured me that the Point of No Return beach from which the slaves departed was behind the trees, but I couldn't envisage it, not when I couldn't smell or see the ocean. As we walked under the raging sun, our laughter dwindled rapidly into grimaces and grunts, the stroll slowing to a pained stagger. Sandy soil swallowed my shoes with every step I took; Success struggled to move along in her tight skirt and corporate stilettos. ‘See your shoes!' Sesi teased, as her heels sank into the sand.

Designated slaves walked this very route in bare feet under the same merciless sun, weighed down by neck and ankle chains and handcuffs. The thought of it ought to have put my suffering into perspective, but it didn't. I felt I was slowly dying.

Shegu led us away from the main path towards a rusty old well. He told us it was once filled with a liquid that the slaves were forced to drink. It made them delirious and therefore easier to load onto the ship. ‘When they drank it,' Shegu said, perhaps metaphorically, ‘they did not know who they were. They forgot their past.'

‘They forgot so they can go to America and do their rap.' Mabel smiled enviously. Her mind was firmly in the present, not the past.

The five of us approached the coconut grove, the sea breeze cooling our faces. We emerged from the trees onto a wide, empty beach: the Point of No Return. Palm trees rocked in the wind against the gentle roar of the green-blue waves. Here, the slaves boarded a small schooner and were taken to a ship anchored further out at sea. My mind's eye pictured them chained to the deck on their backs for months on end, squirming in tides of faeces, urine, menses, vomit and brine as the boat rocked along the Atlantic waves. On the other side, I imagined them getting washed down, branded with hot irons and displayed for sale at the slave market where – for one time only – their humanity and personalities were acknowledged: ‘
hardworking wench
'; ‘
insolent and untrustworthy young man
'. Survivors of this process went on to live a life of backbreaking toil and ruthless punishments,
yet they still managed to continue a lineage that produced the cultures of Brazil, the Caribbean and the US. Although Africans have yet to fulfil our potential, we've proved our strength at the opposite end of the spectrum by enduring some of the harshest abuses.

‘It's so nice here,' Success cooed, stretching her arms as if to embrace the beach. ‘You could come here and write novels and be inspired.'

The beach was once the venue for the Black Heritage Festival, which the local authorities launched in 2001 to celebrate Nigerian history and its cultural links with the New World. Hundreds of African Americans, Brazilians and Nigerians attended the festival, playing music on the beach and praying. Gathering at the Point of No Return, they danced, re-enacted slave raids and celebrated African culture under the watchful eye of their armed security men (one attendee later told me that the foreigners brought so many gun-toting bodyguards, the beach resembled a war zone).

Near the coconut grove stood a stone slab engraved with the words BLACK HERITAGE FESTIVAL, 2001 near the top. Space had been left to commemorate the festivals in years to come, but apart from the 2001 engraving, the slab was empty. As with many things in Nigeria, the festival didn't last. Shegu told us that someone in government jeopardised it by trying to register the festival under his own company in order to make personal profit. In the end, he succeeded only in dismantling the entire project. So now the engraved stone slab, created as a monument to the Black Heritage Festival, looked more like an epitaph to the idea, a celebration of Nigeria's ineptitude in organising or documenting its culture and history. As with the National Museum, greed and a scarcity of funds and imagination had left a trail of half-baked projects.

The reporter, Success, couldn't understand the concept of people gathering on a beach to remember slavery.

‘This Black Heritage Festival,' she said, taking in the surroundings with confused eyes, ‘. . . so people come to sit here and . . . cry?' She was drawing on familiar images of tearful American visitors to West African beaches.