Free Looking for Transwonderland by Noo Saro-Wiwa Page B

live a life of backbreaking toil and ruthless punishments,
yet they still managed to continue a lineage that produced the cultures of Brazil, the Caribbean and the US. Although Africans have yet to fulfil our potential, we’ve proved our strength at the opposite end of the spectrum by enduring some of the harshest abuses.
    â€˜It’s so nice here,’ Success cooed, stretching her arms as if to embrace the beach. ‘You could come here and write novels and be inspired.’
    The beach was once the venue for the Black Heritage Festival, which the local authorities launched in 2001 to celebrate Nigerian history and its cultural links with the New World. Hundreds of African Americans, Brazilians and Nigerians attended the festival, playing music on the beach and praying. Gathering at the Point of No Return, they danced, re-enacted slave raids and celebrated African culture under the watchful eye of their armed security men (one attendee later told me that the foreigners brought so many gun-toting bodyguards, the beach resembled a war zone).
    Near the coconut grove stood a stone slab engraved with the words BLACK HERITAGE FESTIVAL, 2001 near the top. Space had been left to commemorate the festivals in years to come, but apart from the 2001 engraving, the slab was empty. As with many things in Nigeria, the festival didn’t last. Shegu told us that someone in government jeopardised it by trying to register the festival under his own company in order to make personal profit. In the end, he succeeded only in dismantling the entire project. So now the engraved stone slab, created as a monument to the Black Heritage Festival, looked more like an epitaph to the idea, a celebration of Nigeria’s ineptitude in organising or documenting its culture and history. As with the National Museum, greed and a scarcity of funds and imagination had left a trail of half-baked projects.
    The reporter, Success, couldn’t understand the concept of people gathering on a beach to remember slavery.

    â€˜This Black Heritage Festival,’ she said, taking in the surroundings with confused eyes, ‘. . . so people come to sit here and . . . cry?’ She was drawing on familiar images of tearful American visitors to West African beaches.
    The rest of us fell about laughing.
    â€˜We should be crying and praying for their souls,’ Success implored with a twinkle in her eye.
    Some Americans might have been surprised or appalled by our flippant reaction to the concept of heritage festivals. But Nigerian sadness about the past is expressed differently; it is an all-encompassing emotion that lies beneath the wry jokes and laughter; it doesn’t attach itself to specific places or objects. As we are not descended from slaves, slavery didn’t inspire the same angst in Mabel, Success and Sesi as it does among our American cousins. Mabel envied the lives of African Americans, the source of her beloved hip hop and R’n’B, who lived in a land of milk and honey, as far as she was concerned. I wondered whether she and other Lagosians had time to worry about the slaves’ tortuous boat journeys when every cramped bus ride to work felt like a mini Middle Passage, and people filled Internet cafés to apply for US green cards. Slavery is seemingly another of those traumas that falls within our nation’s high pain threshold. We still don’t fully understand its effects on our society and psyche.
    We returned to Badagry’s waterfront and then Mabel, Success, Sesi and I walked to the first two-storey building built in Nigeria. Constructed in 1845 by a church missionary, it was also the first Nigerian parsonage, and was now a school. The teacher, a charismatically stern man, led us to a room housing the first ever Bible to be translated from English to the Yoruba language.
    Mabel and I stepped back outside and waited for okadas to take us to Badagry’s motor park. ‘These towns . . . they never