Niger River Project

Another hot, sweaty ride from Jebba brings us to about 300km south to Lokoja. Like Jebba, Lokoja isn’t much of a place, bigger, but just as decrepit. However, its location on the confluence of the Niger and Benue, one of the larger Niger tributaries, means it has a history that belies what’s on show today.

The town’s strategic location made it a perfect base for the increasingly penetrative forays of British merchants. In fact, after acting as home for Baikie during his years in Nigeria, the town became the headquarters of the Royal Niger Company, which until 1897 ran a virtual monopoly on the trade of palm oil on the lower Niger. Then, when the Company was decommissioned in 1897 and British colonial rule first came into being, Lokoja found itself the capital of Northern Nigeria and home to Britain’s High Commission.

Shortly after her coronation in 1952, Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Nigeria to survey the relics of the British empire. What she’d have seen then would doubtless have been in far better nick than it is today, but, if you’re prepared to look for it, Lokoja still has hidden away a wealth of treasures from its rich history as a major colonial outpost. It’s to squirrel out some of these that we’ve made the trip.

On our first morning in Lokoja, we strike gold without even trying when we pull back the curtains of our hotel room and are confronted by one of the first things we’d hoped to find. A squat, unimportant looking building across the yard from our room has a small sign above the door, that says, ‘The first prison in Northern Nigeria’. This is exactly what it was – the first prison established by the British to punish miscreant locals. It’s used as the hotel’s laundry room today, and is nothing much to look at, but as with all these crumbling relics, it requires a bit of imagination to fully appreciate their significance.

Buoyed by our success without even having tried looking, we strike out to find the former residence of Sir Frederick Lugard, Britain’s first commissioner of Nigeria. We have only one rather badly drawn map of the town, which shows our hotel to be within a stone’s throw of the residence, but it soon turns out the map illustrator in our guidebook has got it hopelessly wrong.

We wander aimlessly around in the gathering mid-morning heat, but we’re getting nowhere. A couple of people we ask send us back in the direction we’ve come, to Government House, the local administrative headquarters. Lugard’s residence is in the compound of this, they tell us.

We talk to the guards at the gate of Government House. Yes it’s here, they reply, but you can’t come in now. You’ll have to come back this evening when business has closed for the day.

Dispirited and frustrated we trudge back to the hotel. It’s then we notice there’s actually a tourist office located within the hotel. A tourist office. In Nigeria! This is like finding a pub in Mecca!

The friendly boss of the office confirms that, yes, Lugard’s residence is in the Government House, and that to persuade the guards to let us see it we’ll probably have to part with a hefty bribe. “But there’s plenty more to see in Lokoja if you’re looking for history,” he continues. “For a small fee, I can show you around. You won’t find any of it on your own.”

Not for the first time on this trip, we find ourselves in a position where ‘yes’ is the only real answer. If we don’t, we’ll probably spend the day walking around town trying to find what’s probably tucked well away. Better to shell out than spend getting hot and cross because we can’t find anything.

Later that afternoon, we’re met by our guide and a taxi we’ve chartered for a couple of hours. We set off on a whistle-stop tour of colonial Lokoja. First, we head up the hill behind the town to the vantage point where Lugard used to come after his day’s work to survey activity on the river. Then it’s back down the hill to the Lokoja Club, the haunt where expats would come for a whisky and soda and a game of billiards. Amazingly, the original table is still there, as is the – now very dusty – library, whose books don’t look like they’ve been touched for years.

Scruffy Lokoja proves to be a trove of hidden treasures. In one derelict courtyard, our guide shows us the first bank in northern Nigeria, a small stone box of a building that still contains the same metal safebox used to stash what was then the currency in West Africa, the cowrie shell. Around the corner from this is the European cemetery, now choked with litter, but with its many gravestones still a poignant reminder of the human cost of colonialism. More moving still is the so-called Iron of Liberty, the point where freed slaves walked through a gateway in a symbolic demonstration of their liberty.

But perhaps the most striking of Lokoja’s relics of empire is also its least impressive. By the side of a busy main street, so insignificant you could easily walk past it without noticing, is a small stone obelisk marking the spot where, in 1897, the flag of the decommissioned Royal Niger Company was lowered and the Union Jack raised. It was here, over 100 years ago, that one era of African history ended and another quite different one began. Whether they liked it or not, it was here that Nigerians found themselves with a new master – the British.

Tags: Bank, colonialism, cowrie shells, Lokoja, Lokoja Club, Lugard, Nigeria, Okra, Royal Niger Company, Travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.