The beauty and the agony of slavery.
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It is to the credit of Donald Duke that in his efforts to establish Calabar as an international tourism destination, he put a lot of emphasis on structurally refurbishing important historical landmarks and sites, as well as adding the horticultural touch, in beautifying them and their surroundings.
As such, Calabar is now green, clean, environmentally-inviting and friendly.
One of the most compelling “must-visit” tourist attractions in Calabar is a stretch along the embankment along the Cross River Marina, now known as the Marina Resort. Strategically situated downhill from the Governor’s Lodge and the first Headquarters of the Nigeria Police, the Marina Resort is a well-tended riverside expanse of land, a flower-garden of sorts, that has accommodation facilities, outdoor restaurant and entertainment facilities and speedboats for hire to cruise along the Cross River-and [on] trips to the Tinapa Free Trade Zone.
In the vicinity of the Marina Resort, also symbolically located on a stretch of the Cross River, is a newly-built, green-roofed bungalow that houses the Calabar Slave Museum.
Sharing blame
Slavery has always been a near-taboo topic of discussion between Africans and Blacks in the Diaspora. In discussions about slavery, inevitably, the issue of sharing blame always arises. Did Africans because of greed, jealousies, stupidity, and or the lure of cheap gin and beads offered by Europeans gladly sell off their own people to a life of humiliation, misery and menial work as plantation workers in the West Indies and the United States of America?
These questions remain unresolved, and programmes from Africans to seek reparation from the West for slavery are viewed by many as a measure of shifting the blame for the human tragedy of slavery. I remember being aghast in the sixties when Sun Ra, an African-American myth-scientist and space music innovator, confronted me with research materials on slavery obtained from the University of Louisiana Archives!
It took the lyrics of a touching song by the Jamaican Reggae group, Burning Spear, themselves descendants of slaves from Africa, to reawaken the pangs of guilt, Africans-particularly West Africans-must endure and live with [the guilt] for their role in the Slave Trade. “Do you remember the days of slavery/When they used and abused us?” the lyrics ask.
And as if in answer, our own reggae star, Ras Kimono, on his 1990 CD, What’s Gwan, and in his song, “Slavery Days,” sings that, “I and I suffer from slavery days”-going on to express the reality that people should “never forget the agony still engraved in our souls.”
Sobering testimony
Reparations efforts aside, there have been efforts by the Nigerian National Museum to set up a Slave Trade Route Project, in collaboration with UNESCO, to commemorate the Abolition of Slavery. Both projects are still on the drawing board.
However, it has taken the efforts of the Cross River State government to permanently bring home the sad memory of our own role as co-conspirators in the saga of man’s inhumanity to his fellow human beings, all in the name of energising the Atlantic Trade.
As we now, as a nation, put a lot of emphasis on the new aspects of human trafficking in our society (again to the Western world and all for purely monetary gains), the Calabar Slave Museum is a sobering testimony of our social history, full of lessons of the worst in human behaviour and a chilling permanent presence documenting gross human abuse.
It is significant that the Slave Museum is located in the same riverside area from where two centuries ago, thousands of slaves were shipped away in bondage to the so-called “New World.”
A guided tour
A fee of N200 gets you into the Marina Resort, and with another N100 you are entitled to a guided tour of the Calabar Slave Museum. Our friendly and informative guide for the day was Mr. Nkanu Eko Effime; and he led us into a room with twenty-five 10-inch’ by 12-inch framed colour pen and ink drawings by Josy Ajiboye (of Daily/Sunday Times cartooning fame) on the walls.
He aptly described the works as an introduction to “what you will have inside.” In sequence, these well-crafted drawings showed how the slaves in neck-chains and in single-files were marched from the hinterlands to the coastal areas (like the very location of the Slave Museum itself); how the slaves, packed like sardines, were crammed in holding ships before sailing.
He described how they were arranged in the ships with their heads opposite one other to avoid conversation between them; how the slaves were examined like animal stock; were auctioned; branded; worked on cotton plantations; slave women working in the fields and slave owners’ households; slave houses where they stayed; slave children; slaves attempting to escape and their other travails.
Then came the main tour of these slave situations captured in murals and life-size sculptures. First, a wood replica of a slave ship with sails and a cut-through section showing two levels of slaves arranged in the dungeons of the 40-foot ship.
Then interactive sessions of slaves in their journey across the seas, their auction sessions; their branding; at work in the plantations; run-away slaves; punishment; slaves in social recreational activities, including the performance of the Ekpe masquerade they had exported to the New World, and finally their freedom.
Slave narrative
These interactive sessions were superb, in that the life-size sculptures of black and white people-the principal characters in the dramas in the journey and lives of the slaves that were depicted by them-were almost real in their artistic reproduction; and recorded voices, supposedly telling the accounts of the events, beautifully captured the ambience and drove home the pain and agony of these dehumanised slaves.
The only apparent weak point in the interactive sessions were the “fake” accents put on by the Nigerian voice-over artists in scenes depicting white characters auctioning; hunting down; punishing slaves and declaring the Abolition of Slaves. Surely it wouldn’t cost that much to have these scripts read by genuine Americans and Englishmen to give the real flavour of the proceedings.
All the same, the tour successfully gives an emotional recall of the deliberate and callous use and abuse of slaves.
There is interesting documentation also on display, like replicas of adverts; Negroes For Sale put up by a John Mitchell on May 19, 1784; a hall of fame showing photographs of Abolitionists like William Wilberforce, John Wesley and the Ibo slave Olaudah Equiano, who eventually bought his freedom and wrote about his life as a slave in 1789.
King Henry of England is featured for his Royal Decree abolishing slavery in England and her colonies on May 1, 1807; and Abraham Lincoln’s hand-written and signed documents abolishing slavery in America on September 22 1862.
The blend of historical hard facts, replicas of artefacts and re-enacted emotional mini-dramas make a visit to the Calabar Slave Museum a learning yet chilling experience in human nature.
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The Book of Louis 