Niger River Project

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.

Before the River Niger ends its long journey to the Atlantic, it splits up and runs like spreading veins through a vast swampy delta. Having followed the river all the way from its first foray into the world in Guinea, it’s in the Delta at one of the river’s many mouths into the sea that we’d hoped to bring our journey to an end. For reasons beyond our control, it seems we’re going to be out of luck.

Readers with a little knowledge of current affairs will probably know that the Niger Delta is and has been for a few years an international security hotspot. The Delta has always been a hotbed of international trade, first for slave merchants, then, under the Brits, for palm oil, then, more recently, for oil of a different kind – the black stuff.

Sadly, the discovery of black gold in the Delta, and its exploitation largely by big foreign multinationals, has driven the region to the brink of anarchy. It’s a familiar story: valuable commodity is discovered in impoverished area, large foreign company with the resources and wherewithal to extract moves in and begins doing so, locals get shafted. It was the same in the days of palm oil trading, when the Brits ran their monopoly in the Delta and on the Lower Niger with a rod of iron, and it’s exactly the same today.

To be fair, the oil companies are not fully to blame. By all accounts, most of them are ploughing fairly large sums of money into the communities from which they are taking the oil. What’s exacerbating the problem are the corrupt local politicians and officials who are taking large kickbacks, and siphoning off money that should be going to the Delta’s poor. Whatever the full story, though, the result is the same: Westerners are getting kidnapped and even killed in the Delta, and today the region is a simmering pressure-cooker of discontent that for people with white skin is best avoided.

Despite all the Delta’s well publicised problems, we still want to get there, and since before arriving in the country I’ve been talking with a contact who says he can help us in our mission. He’s a British expat working in community development and conservation all across Nigeria, but crucially he’s involved in a project in a village called Akassa, right on one of the Niger’s many mouths. Although there are security risks in the Delta, Phil seems confident that he can get us to the end and back safely.

In the end, it’s timing that lets us down. One of Phil’s people who he’s sent on our behalf to one of the local Delta officials to seek permission for our visit reports back that we couldn’t have picked a worse time. Local authorities we’re told are in the middle of sensitive negotiations with kidnappers to secure the release of ten Chinese hostages. The last thing they want is two more white guys coming into the area and potentially stirring up an already volatile situation.

Disappointing though it is, in some ways I’m relieved. The prospect of getting safely in and out of Port Harcourt, the great oil city and epicentre for much of the Delta’s strife, not to mention the boat ride through the region’s lawless swamps to Akassa, seemed remote. To have the decision of whether or not to go for it taken out of our hands makes our failure in reaching our ultimate goal easier to stomach.