Slavery in the world was an absolute evil, and its transatlantic brand has become one of the most visible and contemporary pointers to its gruesome reality. Many things have crossed my mind since I wrote the article for the Nigerian newspaper NEXT on my experience at Badagry examining the slave relics and the role of African (nay, Nigerian) families in the propagation of the trade. One of the pressing ones was whether it was right or moral or fair that descendants of the slave traders were the owners of the many private museums now at Badagry housing the original relics of the horrible time. Unfortunately it is not a slam-dunk open and shut case.

On the one hand is the right of any citizen to make money off of anything as long as it doesn’t pose any harm to the other person. On the other hand is the tug of annoyance in our heads when we realize that every time we pay money to gain access into the private museums, we continue to fund the machinery that once profited at the expense of millions of helpless lives. Then there is the added complexity we find in the need for information from whatever source. The slave trade is a historical fact, and there is so much that needs to be told about it. Generations after us will retain the same level of curiosity as us, if not more, and would ask questions. And who best to answer them than the true descendants of the slavers who know either from word of mouth or from family treasures of relics exactly what went on at the time and the role their families played.

In a normal working society though, one would expect that those artifacts would be in custody of a working government, with sufficient documents and audio-visual materials there detailing all that needs to be told about the period, and the proceeds going to take care of the citizens. Will this, if implemented, violate some principle of “free market” and private ownerships? Maybe. But when descendants of slavers still profit from the trade this indirectly, it rubs the nose of the society in the indignity, and it elevates evil one some level. The Mobee “royal family” of Badagry are an elite family already there. I don’t assume that they need any more of the dirty money that must come from tourists all over the world wanting to know about slavery. How do they even deal with the shame it must bring to ask people to bring their money to see what your ancestors used to enslave others? Have they thought about it, or don’t they care about what their lineage represent in history? I imagine a private concentration camp in Germany – if there was one – being run today by descendants of the racist anti-semitic people and profiting from it, whether or not their descendants still retain the same level of hate for the descendants of the victims. Or descendants of John Wilkes Booth being the ones in charge of the Lincoln Presidenial Museum earning money by showing off a few of the killer’s tools to the world. Something is definitely wrong there.

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“There was a small cannon on the table, another relic from the past. It was used to announce the arrival of a ship from the high seas, and also to announce a curfew in the town. After the sound of the third cannon at night, the curfew began until morning, and any freeborn caught during this time was enslaved. It was the law. “All this town was called the Slave Corridors,” the guide explained. According to a recent article by Henry Gates, most of the slaves from Nigeria were from the Igbo tribe. I could not get a definite answer to my question of just how the slavers got hold of Igbo men and women who lived far off across the Niger and brought them to Badagry and the other slave ports in the country, to be sold off. The most definite response I got was that the slaves were brought from everywhere, and even a resident of the town could be enslaved for walking at the wrong time of the night. To trade, the Europeans rejected the cowrie shells that was currency in Badagry. Instead, they traded by barter. One bottle of whiskey was equal to ten slaves. A big cannon was exchanged for a hundred. On one slave market day in Badagry, up to 300 slaves were sold, we were told. About seventeen thousand were sold per annum.”

Read the rest here. The hard copy of the paper has a very fantastic cover photo of mine. Good job, NEXT.

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But aside from the depressing questions, Badagry is a very very serene town which anyone should be happy to live in. I certainly like the atmosphere of the lagoon front where we had met a middle-aged man quietly nursing a cold bottle of Guiness.

Here are some more photos from the trip. But what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be busy watching the World Cup soccer fiesta in South Africa?

Blogger’s photos by Liz Ughoro.

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We also saw the slave relics, and I got to try on some of the chains and manacles – a very moving experience. Then we saw the Brazilian baracoons where the slaves were kept before being shipped, and we saw the grave sites of the many influential figures in the slave trade. Then we went to the lagoon front and enjoyed the breeze while pondering history.

Enjoy these few pictures from the experience while I write a more detailed  report. I’ll put up more pictures when I have the time.

Photos by Liz Ughoro

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Brown University to Examine Debt to Slave Trade

March 13, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/education/13BROW.html

PROVIDENCE, R.I., – When Ruth J. Simmons became the president of Brown University nearly three years ago, one striking fact could not be overlooked.

A great-granddaughter of slaves, Dr. Simmons was the first African-American president of an Ivy League university. But the 240-year-old university she was chosen to lead had early links to slavery, with major benefactors and officers of it having owned and traded slaves.

“It certainly didn’t escape me, my own past in relationship to that,” Dr. Simmons said. “I sit here in my office beneath the portrait of people who lived at a different time and who saw the ownership of people in a different way. You can’t sit in an office and face that every day unless you really want to know, unless you really want to understand this dichotomy.”

Now, Dr. Simmons, whose office is in a building constructed by laborers who included slaves, has directed Brown to start what its officials say is an unprecedented undertaking for a university: an exploration of reparations for slavery and specifically whether Brown should pay reparations or otherwise make amends for its past.

Dr. Simmons has appointed a Committee on Slavery and Justice, which will spend two years investigating Brown’s historic ties to slavery; arrange seminars, courses and research projects examining the moral, legal and economic complexities of reparations and other means of redressing wrongs; and recommend whether and how the university should take responsibility for its connection to slavery.

Dr. Simmons, one of 12 children of an East Texas tenant farmer and a house cleaner, said she was motivated by a sense that the multifaceted subject of reparations had too often been reduced to simplistic and superficial squabbles.

Brown University’s Debt to Slavery

October 23, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/opinion/23mon3.html?ex=1319256000&en=0246e986680a3947&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

A long-awaited report on Brown University’s 18th-century links to slavery should dispel any lingering smugness among Northerners that slavery was essentially a Southern problem.

The report establishes that Brown did indeed benefit in its early years from money generated by the slave trade and by industries dependent on slavery. It did so in an era when slavery permeated the social and economic life of Rhode Island. Slaves accounted for 10 percent of the state’s population in the mid-18th century, when Brown was founded, and Rhode Island served as a northern hub of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, mounting at least 1,000 voyages that carried more than 100,000 Africans into slavery over the course of a century.

The Brown report is the latest revelation that Northern businesses and institutions benefited from slavery. Countless other institutions might be surprised, and ashamed, if they dug deeply into their pasts as Brown has over the past three years.

The Committee on Slavery and Justice, composed of faculty, students and administrators, found that some 30 members of Brown’s governing board owned or captained slave ships, and donors sometimes contributed slave labor to help in construction. The Brown family owned slaves and engaged in the slave trade, although one family member became a leading abolitionist and had his own brother prosecuted for illegal slave trading. The college did not own or trade slaves.

The hard question is what to do about it. The committee makes sensible recommendations — creating a center for the study of slavery and injustice, rewriting Brown’s history to acknowledge the role of slavery, creating a memorial to the slave trade in Rhode Island, and recruiting more minority students. Other proposals are more problematic. But the value of this exercise was to illuminate a history that had been “largely erased from the collective memory of our university and state.”

Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice

Today.

http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/

In 2003, Brown University President Ruth Simmons appointed a Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice.  The committee, which included faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students, and administrators, was charged to investigate and to prepare a report about the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.  It was also asked to organize public programs that might help the campus and the nation reflect on the meaning of this history in the present, on the complex historical, political, legal, and moral questions posed by any present-day confrontation with past injustice. The Committee presented its final report to President Simmons in October 2006. On February 24, 2007, the Brown Corporation endorsed a set of initiatives in response to the Committee’s report.

ktravula’s comments: Brown has become the first Ivy League institution to come to terms with its slaving past. It is not only commendable, but admirable. I won’t be surprised if it influenced the movement of Professor Chinua Achebe to the old institution to join other members of staff like Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana.

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Amidst food, drinks and plenty discussions about Race and its influence on/relavance to Africa, we spent a work-free day in a certain bliss and plenty talking. The topics we touched included very many issues both trivial and serious, be it the love of Cadillacs, the mapping of Africa, or the food and women of America to how we Africans have so far found the American beauties either in love and friendship. A topical issue that soon drew a longer discussion and participation is one of particular relevance to the many of us at the table. It had to do with why there is as yet no major and detailed academic curriculum in Nigerian schools (from primary to University) about Transatlantic Slavery, its evils, and the roles of 15th and 16th century Africans in sending their fellow countrymen and women into the white man’s boat.

My guess by the way of opinion is that the people in power today in West Africa could only have descended from the slave raiders and slave masters of those times. This is the only explanation I could give to explain why a people so brutally decimated have not retained a strong enough interest in passing down the story of that horrible crime. The prey never got a chance to speak, and so the story of the hunt has always favoured the hunter. I confess that all I know about slavery were not from any class textbooks but from many other secondary sources and my own independent research. Is it that slavery doesn’t matter much as a subject of discussion and research to the people whose ancestors were so badly betrayed? If we couldn’t have done anything about it

then, could we also have failed to grasp the importance of finding out and documenting what truly happened then, tracking if possible the line of people whose ancestors were most involved in the crime? The answer to that, my friends, is still blowing in the wind.

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If you have been reading this blog from the beginning, you would notice that I’ve taken height as my most defining feature in America, and not the colour of my skin. That should be strange to hear for those who expect that I would have spent only a few hours before complaining that someone called me monkey or asked me to show them my tail. Sorry to disappoint you so far. Maybe if I had been posted to a Texas countryside I might have more juicy things to tell. But even then, something in me tells me that we see things only as we are, and not as they are. Racism will not find me here. Finito.

However, I do want to share some interesting thoughts of mine, and a few instances that has made me reconsider American racism and my reaction to it.

On Sunday while at the Inn at Providence when the good woman at the desk called the Cadillac driver to please speed down to pick me up to the airport, I confess now to having assumed that the driver of the Cadillac was a black man. I feel terribly ashamed to admit this, but I did. And when she called me up from my laptop five minutes later to tell me that he was here, and I saw him, the “oh!” that instantly escaped my throat was not just to wonder at the speed with which he had arrived, but to recognize my own wrong and shameful racial profiling. I mean, how could I?

Now yesterday afternoon, I had a somewhat shocking but enlightening experience. While sitting peacefully in the campus computer lab, checking my emails in relative anonymity, a beautiful African American woman who was two seats away from me had logged out of her computer, and was checking out my African jacket.
“What do you call that?” She asked.
“This is called Aso Oke,” I replied. “It’s a special kind of fabric.”
“Are you from Africa?” She asked again, and I took my face off the computer screen to look at her.
“Yes.” I replied. “I’m from Nigeria.”
“I ask because I’ve been doing some studies on the original Hebrew tribes, and their dispersal. I know that the high priests of those times wore some special clothes to distinguish them from the other Israelites.”
“Really? That’s nice.” I said, since I didn’t know where she was going with it.
“Do you know that the original Israelites were black?”
I didn’t know that, even though I have heard some conspiracy theories, and I said so.
“They were black,” she continued, “And when Israel was invaded by the Romans in the …th Century, the true original Israelites were dispersed to parts of West Africa where they all settled and formed a new country. They took with them their fabrics, and that’s probably why you have these kinds of fabric in Nigeria, Ghana, Congo and many other African countries today.”

Jew me

She let that sink in, and she continued. Even before she did so, I was already trying to make the connection between the famous Yoruba’s Oduduwa/Oranmiyan myth and how it relates with the Hebrew story. Oduduwa was said to have come from “the East”/Mecca, and that could as well have been Israel. The staff of Oranmiyan in Ile Ife till today still has on it letters of Hebrew that spells “Oranmiyan”.
“Are you familiar with the story of Noah’s sons?” she asked.
“Yes, a little,” I replied. “Shem, Ham and Japheth?”
“Yea.” She said. We were initially thought to have descended from Ham. Now I’m discovering evidence to prove that it is not true.”
“Really?” I said, now giving her my full attention. I could always browse later.
“In those days, being white was a disease. It was from Leprosy, and whoever was afflicted was cast out of the society. The normal people were the black, and the white were the diseased. We don’t hear much about this today because the world has been whitewashed and the truth has been suppressed. And the truth is that we were the original chosen tribes, and the white-skinned people were the cursed, forbidden ones.”

This was something I totally disagree with, for many scientific and logical reasons. As convincing as the argument sounded at the begining, I found that she had deviated much, and was now trying to take me into a deep place I didn’t want to go. Moreso, nothing she said could explain melanin and the influence of weather on skin colouring. I chose not to ask her these since I now really wanted her to be done, and gone. She didn’t look like someone ready to drop her convictions. And as I looked around the open-ended computer room to find that we were the only person in there. I felt uncomfortable, especially as she had now began to lower her voice when another student came in and took position in the corner nearest to the door. That one was a Caucasian.

“I’ve been researching this for about nine months,” she continued “And I have discovered so many interesting truths about us as a race, and about how the white man has tried for centuries to subdue us with slavery, colonialism and whitewashing. I’ve also been learning from those who have been studying this for many years.”

“Are you a student of History?” I asked.
“No, but I take very strong interest in it. I spoke to God to show me why we are so hated in the world today, and he is taking me through all of this to show them to me.” She replied. “My research is based on Historic, Archeological and Biblical findings.”
“That’s very interesting,” I said. “Thank you for sharing this with me.”
“You’re welcome.” She said, as she stood up to go. “Who knows, you may be an African Hebrew.”
I laughed. Then stopped. “Who knows?” I replied. “It’s nice meeting you.”
“Same here.” She said, and left.

When I think about it, the only problem that I can see from becoming an African Jew is that I would now be open to attack from two rather than one angle. I mean, the Jews already have their own problems in the world, right? And so do the Africans. Why would I chose to double my jeopardy just for the sake of acquiring a new identity? No, I think I’ll stick with just being African for now. That’s enough. Walking back home as I passed by the beautiful scenery of the Cougar Lake, I thought about this and many more issues, and wondered aloud just how many more such self-discoveries await me in this land of the free.

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