Badagry is one of the Nigerian towns patronized by tourists from everywhere. AJIBOLA AMZAT visited the tourist town recently. He writes about the three major museums located in the town.

BADAGRY in Lagos state is a tourist town with a frightening past. Several tourist sites that dot the landscape of Badagry are full of relics of slave trade that lasted for centuries. Some of the relics now preserved in the three museums within the town are the attraction that draws tourists from everywhere to Badagry.

There is Seriki Faremi Williams Abass Slave Museum which was declared a national monument in 2003 by the National Commission for Museum and Monument (NCMM), then the Mobee slave Relics Museum and the Badagry Heritage Museum. The first two museums located on Marina road, Boekho Quarters are privately owned while the government of Lagos State owns the third one. Each of these museum houses items such as neck chains, leg manacles, padlocks, water basin, branding knifes and other tools used by slave traders while their business lasted. Images of slaves in different positions of deprivation and punishment adorn the wall of the museums, each having the capacity to take tourists back to the tragic past of Badagry. From this town, millions of natives captured from different parts of Nigerian were sold to the Portuguese and Europeans that came in number between sixteen and eighteen centuries.

Seriki Abass, the man whom the first museum is named after was a local slave merchant who later inherited a barracoon (cell room) from his foreign collaborators. On a good day the small cell, the size of a toilet room are regularly filled with forty slaves at a time. Slaves were kept in this cubicle pending the market day when they would be sold off like heifers to slave merchants from the New World. The merchants came from France, England, Brazil, Spain, Portugal and other places to get their supply.

As explained by the tour officer of the museum, Stephen Olaniyan, slaves traded at Vlekete slave market in Posukoh Quarters  would later be led into this tiny cell room where they would be kept for about three months pending the arrival of ship that would take them to the New World. There were several baracoons then, but only the one belonging to Seriki Abass are still preserved for tourism purpose. It is an irony of history that the burial place of Chief Abass also looks like a baracoon where his slaves were kept.

The other museum, Mobee Original Slave Relics Museum is managed by Mobee family. High Chief Sunbu Mobee, head of  Boekoh Quarters was also major slave dealer. The man was later to play active role in the eradication of slave trade in Badagry. The museum boasts of keeping original relics of the slave trade, and the family is proud to show off their collections to tourists – for a fee. Inside the one-room museum, there were neck chains used to lock a herd of slaves, the padlock used to lock the mouth of troublesome ones, manacles for legs, handcuffs for child slave and the big basin was their drinking container. A small cannon was displayed on the table. According to the tour guide, Ezekiel Viavonu, the cannon was used to announce the arrival of a ship from the high seas and also used to warn natives to stay indoor at night. “Any freeborn caught during the curfew was sold into slavery. That was the law then,” Said Viavonu.

Badagry Heritage Museum is a lot bigger than the other two. The building is the former district office of colonial administrators in Nigeria built in 1863. Lagos State Waterfront and Tourism Development Corporation now manages the museum. Of the three museums, it is the only one that displays written documents about the trans-Atlantic Slave trade that gave Badagry its prominence. Today, the three museums constitute part of the attraction that drives tourist traffic to Badagry.

First pubblished on Guardian Newspaper

2014-02-26