Badagry: Imagining An Alternate History

Badagry – City of Old, City of the Strong

By Singh Namrata

I’d forgotten my sunglasses in the cab and now the sun was in my eye, sweat rivulets ran from my hair, under my collar and got trapped by the strap of my camera heavily weighing down my neck. My throat was parched and I had been waiting for one of the street hawkers to pass by, but today was not my day. I’d been coming here every day for the last two weeks and the place had been teeming with visitors- foreigners, hordes of school children on excursions and hawkers; hawkers everywhere, but today, there were none. As I was pondering on this and thinking of how I’d have to trek down to the café to satisfy my thirst, I caught a small movement on my side. I turned and saw a petite, hunched over woman offering me what looked like water in a plastic cup. She smiled at me and pointed at the cup, encouraging me to take it. I was confused, did I speak out loud? Or was my thirst visibly written on my face? I felt her touch me, it was cool and I remember thinking it was odd that it should be cool while it was blazing. She shifted her weight to her left foot, and I looked at her properly then. She wore the traditional blouse and wrapper, which was frayed but smelt of soap. Her face had deep lines, the ones of old age and the ones that were carved into her; her lips had a downward turn but she was smiling. Her eyes were buried away in a dozen wrinkles, yet I felt kindness in those eyes. It was this that made me take the cup from her. I gulped down the contents, it tasted sweet, like lime and sugar, and it made me cool on the inside and outside.“What are you looking for?”, her voice was clear and strong, not at all croaky and not as old as the rest of her sounded.

“Excuse me?” What did tourists look for? I didn’t know how to respond to this bold woman and her question unnerved me as though she had read my heart, like she had done to my unspoken thirst.

“I watch you. You come but you don’t look at the building, you don’t look at the well, you don’t look like a tourist. What are you looking for?”

She was right. I’d planned to come to Badagry, take pictures of the first storey building, the slave relics and the lapping waves; I’d planned to take a picture of a half-naked Nigerian boy, posing, hands akimbo, in front of the building, and show everyone when I got back to Australia. But I hadn’t taken a single shot. I wanted more. I wanted to know what it felt like back then in the 15^th century when this remote town was found. I wanted to know what would change if the Europeans had not discovered this town, had not decided these people ought to be sold like animals. My throat was feeling hot again, not from thirst, it hurt when I thought about what had taken place here many years ago.

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“I watched them take my mother, her skin was smooth like ivory and yellow like the unripe pawpaw. Beauty was a desirable thing until it became so undesirable she scratched at that face, her pain made her fingers, claws. I was small then, about this tall” Her hand was at the level of her calf, she looked up and she knew what was in my heart, she knew; I knew she knew and she knew I knew.

“It is a hard thing to snatch a suckling infant from a mother’s breast. I will never forget how she looked that day, blood running from her self-inflicted scratches, mixing with tears while her breasts leaked milk, and the earth swallowed it all. I cried, not because she was going away, we had expected it, you see, the white man wanted her. I cried because her pain gripped my heart, she was in agony and I could never abide that. But they assured me, they told me she would forget when she drunk from the well and went beyond The Point of No Return, over there.” She pointed towards the water, I saw the café and the restaurants and the mini jetty where speedboat drivers tout to tourists, but her eyes bore a different look, of a time long gone, a place different.

“My son, we survive the greatest challenges the gods throw our way. We are not broken, and a new era is here, don’t be sad but take heart, hold onto courage and never let it go.”

I watched her hobble away, and then I turned back; it was time to go home. My thirst has been sated.