Important footnotes as we start a New Year All Black People Are Still Graphically, Medically and Hexadecimally haunted by Imaginary Scars from the Slave Trade Era — it’s a white wash folks!
Important footnotes as we start a New Year All Black People Are Still Graphically, Medically and Hexadecimally haunted by Imaginary Scars from the Slave Trade Era
Special Report By Ben Edokpayi ©
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Calabar, the CIA and the Scars of the Slave Trade
#TheGreatestCIAHoaxEver #OvonramwhenNogbaisi We all know that the hateful association between Blacks and monkeys or apes was yet another way that the antebellum South justified slavery. I am now seeing that pattern becoming the norm in the state of California and elsewhere with Donald Trump’s offensive Shithole comments, which is why I think this article I wrote in 2015 is relevant in one of the most contentious, Xenophobic and racially divisive eras in America’s modern history. It seems reflections from Calabar have now become part of this covert script for reasons Washington DC can not explain.
By Ben Edokpayi ©
Calabar — As we stood inside a hall at the Manchester Grand Hyatt hotel in San Diego, the anticipation in the eyes of Les Payne, a former editor at New York Newsday, was quite evident as Gina Paige, co-founder of ancestry.org, waited to announce the origin of Payne’s African ancestors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Payne
Payne, a co-founder of the National Association of Black Journalists in the 60’s, was one of several African-Americans at the 2010 NABJ conference in San Diego, who had volunteered to have their roots traced through DNA samples.
Other volunteers at the interactive session in 2010 included journalist Jacquie Reed and prominent Chicago Democrat Bobby Rush.
When Payne (who was a mentor at Newsday for Pulitzer prize winning editor Dele Olojede, a prominent Nigerian journalist) was told that his DNA sample proved his ancestors were from the Mafa tribe from the Nigeria/Cameroon border area, he later told me “maybe someday I will get to visit there.”
I don’t know if the Pulitzer-prize winning African American did visit, but one place I’d recommend for him to include in his itinerary, anytime he does, would be the museum in Calabar, which has some of the best archives of the trans-Atlantic slave trade I have seen anywhere. I discovered this sordid reminder of the world’s painful past during a recent visit to Calabar which is also where the Benin Monarch Ovoramwhen Nogbaisi was exiled by the British in the early twentieth century after his rule from 1888–1897.
When tourists want to recapture the dark era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade the focus is often on Goree Island in Senegal and the Gold Coast region in Ghana. Goree island’s “Point of No Return” is so popular that it was among the stops for President Obama during an official tour of Africa a few years ago. But further inland on the West African coast are locations in the Bight of Benin and Biafra, where 42 percent of the more than 2.5 million who were traded as human commodity (between the late 15th century when the first African slaves were spotted in Lisbon and the abolition of slavery in the early 19th century) were captured.
Archives at the Calabar museum, interestingly show that the city played a pivotal role in the middle passage beginning from 1493 when Diego San a Portuguese navigator berthed at the estuary, signaling the beginning of an era that led to not only Portuguese vessels but additionally Dutch, French, German and English vessels “responding to the International demand for slave labor.” The Old Calabar area is also known to have appeared, as early as the 17th century, in Dutch maps as Rio Del Rey, a name they branded the Cross River.
One interesting discovery for me at the Calabar museum was the fact that as early as 1472 a Portuguese ship captained by Ray De Sonesta was known to have anchored at the Benin River, which is about the same time that Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to discover the Americas.
You would have to be cold-blooded not to be soberly impacted by the images, artifacts and accounts of trade ship captains, missionaries and colonial administrators in the two-story national museum overlooking the Calabar river, which complements the Slave History Museum, a few miles down the road.
In addition to human commodities the ships sought gold, ivory, pepper and gum. In exchange, they gave the natives cloth, beads, trinkets, copper, hardware and brass bracelets (manilas), arms and cowrie shells.
At the entrance to the Calabar national museum one documentation that instantly captures the imagination is this log by Alistair Macmillan that tells the odyssey of the millions of slaves taken from Africa: “Hunted in his native forests like a savage beast of prey … with his wives and children, bound with chains and led away. Amid the curses of his captors and the blows of knotted whips. To the distant, sobbing oceans and holds of filthy ships.”
Across the hall is another poignant reminder; an ad taken from an American newspaper in 1784. The placement captioned “Negroes for Sale” tells interested buyers of “A Cargo of very fine stout men and women in good order and fit for immediate service, just imported from the windward coast of Africa in the ship of two brothers” The ad goes on to inform that the conditions for sale “are one half cash or produce, the other half payable the first of January next, giving bond of security if required.”
In another log from 1680 by a ship captain, the complicity of the natives in the middle passage is detailed. “All that vast number of slaves which the Calabar blacks sell to all the European nations are not their prisoners of war. The greatest part of them being brought to these people from their inland neighbors,” notes a slave trader named Bardot.
In fact throughout the first floor of the building are solemn reminders of a difficult past segmented in a floor lay out that threads through the eras of slave trade; oil trade; British penetration and expansion in West Africa, The scramble for Africa; the evolution of Nigeria’s currencies, The Red Gold of Southern Nigeria and the Berlin Conference in 1884.
The Calabar museum is also renowned for being one of the best repositories of the works of Mary Slessor; the English lady who arrived the area in 1875 to establish churches and schools, but who is best remembered for protecting twin moms as well as rescuing twins and orphans from certain deaths, as was customary in that area in those days. In fact when Queen Elizabeth first visited Nigeria in 1956, she made sure she included the burial site of Slessor near Calabar, where she laid a wreath in her honor.
With the vast amount of links to the past in its collection it’s amazing that the museums in Calabar does not attract more visitors than they currently do. When I visited the National museum, its adjoining library (which has a very rich collection) had only received one visitor throughout the month of January. You wonder if it’s a subconscious effort by the people not to connect with the past.
One would have also expected the national museum to play a significant role in last year’s Centennial celebration in Nigeria; perhaps as a signpost that we should never allow this sad aspect of our collective past to weigh down on our future.
Edokpayi, a resident of Fairfield, is a former news editor of The Vacaville Reporter and state of California employee under three governors. Currently he writes for the Dixon Tribune. A Prescient Piece on Pele is his latest work of art.
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