By Alkasim Abdulkadir
The serene city of Calabar is famous for its Calabar
Carnival, described as Africa’s largest street party. At the same time,
it is also famous for its idyllic setting and ease of life. But tucked
away in the city is the Calabar Slave Museum, a treasure trove of
antiquities and knowledge located at the sprawling leisure complex of
Marina Resort. As a tribute to the tragic history of the transatlantic slave trade, the Cross River State government built the slave museum to immortalise those who were forcibly abducted and sold into slavery. The museum reconstructs the history and the travails of this period, showing the enterprise of the slave trade where about 700,000 slaves were shipped from the coast of Calabar between 1690 and 1807. The prosperous trade was carried out by European slave traders, indigenous slave merchants and other collaborators.
No visitor can step into the museum without feeling pangs of anguish associated with stolen liberty. Visitors cross the threshold of a turbulent history as echoes of horrors known and unknown are brought to life.
Guests
who visit the museum in groups are asked to walk inside in single file,
to recreate the way the slaves were forced to move, manacled in chains,
to “their destinations of no return”.According to the museum guide, the slaves were exchanged for items such as guns, rum and mirrors. Sometimes these items would be exchanged for ten human beings.
Another chamber in the building contains the slave-masters’ pen and mark rods, which were used for stamping identification symbols on the slaves. Some of these artefacts were acquired from families whose ancestors had been slave owners.
There are paintings and murals of slave-masters flogging would-be escapees; some with dogs, used by merchants and middlemen to hunt down slaves. Another painting depicts slaves in several thought-provoking postures, exhausted and shackled while labouring on plantations.
The works of art are provocative, the type that make goose pimples appear on one’s body. The museum guide says that some tourists get emotional as soon as their gaze falls on some of the exhibits. The onlookers’ emotions often morph into tears on seeing depictions of the bestial treatment of their forebears on display.
A look at some of the artefacts shows the inhumanity of the slave trade – men neatly arranged like stacks of firewood, chained together in such a way as to make it impossible for them to communicate with one another.
The concept behind the museum is to provide a realistic sense of the dark days of the slave trade and it succeeds by showing the ugly side of the meaninglessness of life, with dying slaves isolated from the healthy and some being thrown overboard.
The main ethnic group forcibly taken into slavery and shipped out of Calabar was the Ndi-Igbo people, who today occupy the south-eastern corner of Nigeria. One of these people is said to be the slave-turned-preacher John Jea, whose 1811 autobiography was rediscovered in 1983.
In one of the chambers inside the building, a couple of statues stand in solemn manner, as if aware of the tragedy and sombre nature of their surroundings. Here, the visitor and student of history finds respite upon seeing the statue of William Wilberforce, who fought for the abolition of the slave trade, and who was friends with John Newton, the former slave-ship captain who became an Anglican Minister – someone who later regretted his slave-trading years out of Calabar.
There is also a statue of Rev. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a former slave who became the first African Anglican bishop in Nigeria. Crowther’s grandson, Herbert Macaulay, became an active member of Nigeria’s movement for self-rule, pioneering partisan politics with the formation of NCNC (National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons).
Calabar’s slave museum is an enduring tribute to the hundreds of thousands of people shackled in agony and shipped away to far-away lands, never to see their homeland again.
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