Visiting Badagry wasn’t a lighthearted experience. I came here specifically to learn about the town’s history and its role in the slave trade, but actually standing in the places where people had been confined, sold, and transported made the horror much harder to think about in abstract terms.
Something else that surprised me was how much more complicated the history was than I had understood before coming to West Africa. Slavery and the trading of captives had existed within Africa for centuries before Europeans transformed the Atlantic slave trade into an enormous international system supplying forced labor to the Americas. European traders worked with African rulers and merchants who captured, bought, and sold other Africans, while European demand helped expand the trade to a devastating scale. Learning about that local participation didn’t lessen the responsibility of the Europeans who organized and profited from the Atlantic system, but it did challenge the much simpler version of the history I had understood before visiting.
One of the historic places I visited was the First Storey Building in Nigeria. Its foundation was laid in 1842 and the building was completed in 1845 as a mission house during the early spread of Christianity in the region. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who had himself been captured and enslaved as a child before being liberated, became an Anglican bishop and one of the most important figures in the development of Christianity and written Yoruba.
Inside I was shown an old Bible written in Yoruba. Crowther translated the Bible into Yoruba, and seeing it here was another reminder that Badagry’s history extends well beyond the slave trade. The town was also an important point of contact between Africans and Europeans through religion, commerce, and eventually colonial influence.
Old coins and other artifacts helped illustrate the long history of commerce through the region. Eventually, however, one of the most profitable commodities moving through Badagry wasn’t a commodity at all, but human beings.
Badagry became an important port in the transatlantic slave trade. Captives were brought from the interior to the coast and sold through networks involving African traders and European and Brazilian merchants. This painting by a Nigerian artist depicts negotiations taking place during the trade.
I asked the Nigerian showing me around Badagry how people here viewed this part of their history. He explained that it was complicated because local slave traders had also participated in and profited from the trade. That was one of the things that stayed with me most from the visit. The history wasn’t as simple as one group of people arriving and capturing another. There were layers of warfare, kidnapping, local political rivalries, commerce, and foreign demand that ultimately fed people into the Atlantic system.
It was easy to talk about the slave trade in terms of routes, countries, and numbers until seeing images like this. Every person transported through Badagry had a life before being captured—a family, a home, a language, and a future that was taken from them.
I was told that people captured farther inland were brought to the coast and confined while awaiting sale and transportation. I visited one of the barracoons where enslaved people had been imprisoned. People could be packed into extremely small cells with little ventilation while waiting for the next stage of their journey.
Standing there and looking at the amount of space available was horrifying. This wasn’t a reconstruction of some distant idea to me anymore. I was standing where people had actually been held before being sold.
Among the artifacts were chains and restraints associated with the trade. Objects like these were probably the hardest part of visiting Badagry because there was nothing abstract about their purpose.
European goods were exchanged for enslaved people along the West African coast. I was told during my visit that these two cannons had been exchanged for 200 people. Whether every surviving local account can still be independently verified centuries later, the artifacts illustrate the horrifying reality that human lives were assigned values and exchanged for manufactured goods.
Other items on display represented goods used in commerce during this period. Many of the enslaved people who passed through Badagry were eventually transported across the Atlantic, particularly toward Brazil and other parts of the Americas.
By this point in the visit, what affected me wasn’t simply the cruelty of individual objects or places, but the process they represented. People were captured, separated from their homes, confined, negotiated over, sold, and then moved toward the coast one stage at a time.
At the slave port, the route became something I could physically follow. From here, enslaved people were moved across the water toward the barrier island separating Badagry from the Atlantic Ocean. I made the same crossing by motorboat to continue along the historic route.
While I was waiting around the dock, I watched a man slip and fall neck-deep into the water. Under almost any other circumstances it would have been one of those funny little moments I remembered from a trip. I was tempted to take his photograph, but he was already in a bad enough mood!
Once across the water, I continued on foot along the route toward the Atlantic.
The trail across the barrier island is more than a mile long. About halfway along it I came across these small grave mounds. I was told they belonged to people who died while in captivity or during the journey toward the Atlantic. About a dozen were still visible when I visited. After so many generations, it is difficult to know how many others may once have been here.
Along the route is a place commonly called the Attenuation Well or Well of Forgetfulness. According to the tradition I was told, enslaved people were made to drink from the well as part of a ritual intended to make them forget their homeland and their former lives.
I encountered a remarkably similar tradition when I later traveled through Benin. There, I was told that enslaved people were made to circle a tree as part of a ritual of forgetting before being taken away. I can’t know exactly how these traditions changed as the stories were passed down over generations, but hearing versions of them in different places showed how deeply the memory of the slave trade remains embedded along this coast.
Eventually I reached the Point of No Return. The name describes what this place represented for the people forced along the route. Beyond here was the Atlantic. Enslaved people were transferred to ships and transported thousands of miles away, many never seeing Africa again.
For most of us, palm trees and a sandy beach like this would be a beautiful sight. Standing here after following the route gave the scenery an entirely different meaning. For many of the people forced across this island, this coastline was the last view they would ever have of their homeland.
Badagry was one of the most sobering places I visited in West Africa. I left horrified by what had happened here, but also with a much more complicated understanding of the history than I had arrived with. I had always associated African slavery primarily with Europeans arriving on the coast and the transatlantic trade that followed. I hadn’t understood the extent to which slavery and the trading of captives already had histories within Africa, or how local traders, rulers, European merchants, and enormous overseas demand eventually became intertwined.
None of that made what happened here seem less terrible. If anything, following the route from the places where people were confined, past the artifacts used to trade and restrain them, across the water, past the graves, and finally to the Atlantic made the human cost much more difficult to comprehend. Badagry wasn’t an easy place to visit, but I’m glad I came.
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