Excuse me, please, but I need a moment of pidgin.
Na wah oh! E be like say ndi-Arochukwu don vex well well. Them say "all the Akata dey go Ghana, dey take their dollar go Ghana, say na slavery history tour". We, nko? We no get slavery? We get am plenty. I beg bring your dollar come make slavery tour". Ah beg. Dis one don pass man.
I read it in Naija
Blog:
The Nigerian Tourist Development Commission's website has a page on an hypothetical slave tour for Nigeria. They write that "Arochukwu has a distinguished reputation as a source for the supply of slaves." I wonder if the good people of this town would like to be considered in this way. I'm not sure its quite something to be that proud of.
OK, to be sure we don't treat the history of the slave trade as gingerly in Nigeria as we do in the U.S. An old girlfriend of mine was from Arochukwu, and when I wanted to tease her (which was often) I called her "slave trader". She'd call me "bushman" It's all good. Of course I didn't dwell on the fact that my Mom is from near Calabar, where the Aros would typically sell all the slaves they'd captured in their raids on the Igbo interior (where my Dad is from).
But even for those of us who can be that relaxed about it all (easy enough when your forbear was not the one shuffled off in a coffle to Calabar for a ghastly journey and a ghastlier existence abroad) the idea of building a tourism industry around all that sounds potty. Then again, I remember once traveling to New Orleans with a bunch of my Norwegian friends. They were dead set on going to see a plantation museum (I rememeber the flyer laid it on thick about "witnessing the slave's experience"). I recoiled from the idea and excused myself from the expedition, preferring to sleep in the car, but they came back all a-twitter. I guess there might be some logic to the whole thing. The same logic that keeps Mme Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors and the Torture Museum in Amsterdam going. I also hear that many Black Americans visit Goree in Senegal and Ghana's coastal slaving fortresses, and that such tourism is supposedly Ghana's largest source of hard currency.
It's all about the Benjamins. Especially when Benjamin used to be named "Baneji".
And oh by the way... Whoever designed that Nigerian Tourism site? And whoever paid for it? I got something fo' dat ass. I don't remember the last time I saw anything that garish on the Web. It needs to be in a bad design competition.