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Endings

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

Through Lagos HarbourThe last view of the slavesSlave Market, BadagryShackles

With our plans to get to the Delta thwarted by circumstances, my ambitions for a grand climax to the trip – the Niger, source to sea – fall flat. Not to be entirely defeated, however, we come up with a plan B – not quite the exclamation mark at the end of the story I’d hoped for, but an ending of sorts.

Lagos is located on a creek that runs parallel to the Atlantic shore – and in some places only separated from the ocean by a narrow sandy bar – to a town about 50km to the west called Badagry. Much like Lokoja further up the Niger, Badagry little more than a small market town now, but it has a long and turbulent history as a slaving port, one that with the abolition of the slave trade approaching its bicentenary is of huge significance.

We secure a motor boat for the afternoon, and speed off across Lagos harbour. This is a vast, sprawling complex covering several square kilometres of towering piles of cargo containers and huge tankers ready to take their loads to distant lands. The enormity of the place really brings home the fact that we’re in the world’s third largest city; it just feels like a powerhouse.

The boat scythes its way through water hibiscus plants that choke the creek and every few minutes catch in the outboard, forcing the skipper to stop and poke around in the engine to unclog the offending weeds.

The landscape here is dominated by palm trees that cluster along the low lying banks to our left and right. Other than these, there’s little to see other than occasional groups of flat-bottomed barges used by young men who scratch out a laborious living by diving to the river bottom to dig up the sand, which they then sell to construction firms. That there isn’t easier work for them is as clear a testament as any to the desperate economic plight of many Nigerians. There’s black gold being sucked out of Nigerian soil only a few hundred kilometres to the west, while these impoverished souls are left to dig around, quite literally, for dirt.

After a couple of hours we make Badagry. Our boat drops us at a surprisingly neat and litter free public garden shaded by palm trees and guarded by two heavy old cannon. This, it turns out, was the point where slaves were taken, manacled to one another in great conga lines of human misery, to waiting ships that then whisked them off to death or a life of toil in the New World.

We hire a guide to show us the relics of Badagry’s heartbreaking history. Our first stop gives us a tantalising connection with the same explorers whose trails we have been following along the Niger. On his first journey to West Africa as servant to another great explorer, Hugh Clapperton, Richard Lander passed through Badagry. He had just witnessed his master’s death in northern Nigeria, and was looking for a boat to take him home.

Encouraged by French and Portugese merchants who despite Britain’s attempts to ban it were still engaged in the slave trade, the king of Badagry tried Lander for being a spy. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. The chosen means of execution was poisoning, and Lander found himself in a position where he had no choice but to swallow a deadly concoction made from the bark of the toxic red water tree.

Somehow, while the potion was taking effect, Lander managed to escape from watching eyes, and was able to make himself sick. This saved his’s life, and instantly he became revered as some kind of white magician who could cheat death. The king set him free, and he lived to see another two expeditions to West Africa and become the first European to reach the river’s mouth from the interior.

The first place our guide takes us to is the same spot where over 150 years ago, Lander was put to death. Somehow appropriately, right next to the strange shrine marking the spot stands a well from which slaves bought in the nearby market were able to drink. Despite the happy outcome events here had for Richard Lander, its gloomy past as a shop floor for human merchandise is overwhelming and we ask our guide to take us on.

The next stop is scarcely more heart-warming – a museum charting Badagry’s history as a slaving port. Fittingly, the museum has no power and thus no lighting or air-conditioning, lending it an air of stuffy oppression that befits the subject matter.

It’s a shocking display of relics, photos, paintings and articles. Apart from the well-known – but always horrendous – diagrams showing how slaves were packed like cattle into ships, the exhibits include barbaric pieces of ironmongery used to punish willful slaves by thrusting a large metal spike through their hands, making any escape all but impossible.

We emerge blinking and dazed from the dingy museum feeling like we’ve just stepped off one of the slaving ships ourselves. It’s hard to imagine that on this breezy, palm-fringed shoreline, millions of human beings were snatched from the lives they knew and traded like farmyard beasts for the good of capitalists thousands of miles away.

As we leave, deep in our own thoughts, our guide asks us if we know of any sources of funding in the UK to help preserve the relics of Badagry’s past. “There’s no money available here,” he says. “We need more to keep this history alive for future generations.”

For the good of humanity, so such a terrible abuse of human being by human being is never allowed to happen again, Badagry’s legacy must be kept intact. It may only be a few small relics in a stuffy museum, or an old well crumbling in a dusty yard, but these are living pieces of a history that must never be allowed to repeat itself.

Metropolis

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

Lagos outskirtsAn artery highway carves through the urban sprawlHarbour from Victoria IslandArt in our hosts' house

After Lokoja, we get as close as we’re going to get to the mouth of the Niger, a town at the very northernmost tip of Delta State called Asaba. Here there’s another monument to Richard Lander, but it’s unimpressive to say the least.

After Asaba we make our final long road journey in Nigeria, a terrifying five-hour game of chicken along jammed up roads full of suicidal Nigerians to Lagos. I formulate a theory in attempting to explain why Nigerians are not just bad drivers, but seem to have no idea or no respect for rules.

The main problem it seems with Nigeria is that for several decades now, corruption has been rife at every level of public administration. Apart from lining the pockets of a lucky few, the effect of this has been a general disintegration of public institutions of all kinds and a consequential erosion of society’s faith in rulers and the rules they put in place to keep the country together. In short, Nigerian society is falling apart, and to my mind the flagrant flouting of road rules is symbolic of this.

Wedged in the bus seat next to the inevitable big fat mumma, I drift off. I awake as Lagos is beginning, but it’s such a vast city that it takes more than half an hour from reaching the suburbs for us to get to our final stop, and even then we’re still only on the edge of town.

A taxi whisks us to our final destination, the home of two Canadian expats we’ve been invited to stay with in an upmarket part of town on one of Lagos’ islands. The ride gives us some insight into what the fearsome Lagos is like – a huge, steamy, dirty ants-nest of a place, crawling with life and seemingly never still for a moment. Today is Sunday, but still the roads are choked with traffic and the air thick with pollution. It could take a long time to get a feeling for this place, but sadly we’ve only got two short days.

The ride takes about 15 minutes, and then we’re out of the mayhem and into the quiet of Victoria Island to a district where ambassadors, businessmen and Nigeria’s trendy set rub shoulders in slick winebars. We’re suddenly removed from the chaos and hubbub of African life as we step in to the air-conditioned comfort of our hosts’ waterside apartment.

“It’s a bubble really,” our host observes, as we take in what to us is now an alien scene, a plush living room with white sofas, TV and coffee table. Compared to what’s just outside these four walls, it’s hard to argue.

Oil on troubled waters

Friday, March 2nd, 2007
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Capital of Nigeria

Thursday, March 1st, 2007
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Echoes from the past

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
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Journey from hell, part 2: into the fire

Saturday, February 10th, 2007
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Dash

Saturday, February 10th, 2007
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Kano

Saturday, February 10th, 2007
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Into Nigeria

Sunday, February 4th, 2007
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Zinder

Saturday, February 3rd, 2007
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