By Renn Offor
We were scheduled for a city tour of Calabar as part of the package for all the participants, travel writers and delegates who attended the Nigerian Association of Tour Operators (NATOP) Annual General Meeting (AGM). This was about a fortnight before I visited Ile-Ife for the first time. That first time visit eventually culminated in a repeat visit after three days! The visit to Ile-Ife was so revealing, especially as the newly installed Ooni, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi, took time to expound to us the mysteries that make Ile-Ife so sacred as the watershed of the Yoruba civilization. So, awe-inspiring indeed!
On the Calabar city tour; every one of us was enthusiastic about the excitement about the fun ride through the Carnival city. The Carnival Calabar having just lived up to its bidding as Africa’s biggest street party just about a month behind, it was an opportunity, especially for those who never witnessed the Carnival to experience a quiet city without the beehive of carnival activities, bands, music, colours and the mixture of people from all walks of life and from different parts of the world. We anticipated having fun; none of us envisaged that history was waiting for us inside the Calabar Marina Resort’s Slave Museum – a brutal history that left everyone almost at the verge of tears!
The two cities are Calabar in Cross Rivers State on the South-Eastern and Ile-Ife in Osun State on the Western part, both are in Nigeria. The convergences of these histories form some of the most powerful forces that have shaped the whole identity of Nigeria and Nigerians in the present day, in within the country and in diaspora.
Ile-Ife and Calabar are two cities in Nigeria that have synonymous attractions of history. And in both cities I came face to face with discoveries. And while one reveals the quiet history of a brutal past which forms the cradle of Nigerian’s national struggle for independence from colonial masters based on the historical happenstances in the city, the other contains the awe-inspiring sacred identities of a people whose culture, traditions and deities have had a far more reaching influence all over the world, more than any other culture, tradition and deities worshiped or revered in Nigeria.
Follow me to Calabar, and let’s sojourn in to the horrors of the brutality of the slave trade hidden away inside the Calabar Marina Resort. Nigerian brutally, awe and inspiring filled cities. Enter Calabar by air and get enchanted with wonder at the air-Snake shaped rivers that maneuver through the entire landscape of Cross River State.
Calabar is noted for its unique location, strategically enshrined on the tropical rainforest zone of Nigeria, with a topography which supports a healthy people whose diets are high on green vegetables. The gradual decline of ancient traditions are obvious to a keen 
observer, like the renowned Calabar Monikim dance which is gradually being obliterated by the wave making Carnival Calabar displays. This progressive decline is still imperceptible to majority of the locals of the State.
For instance, when I first visited Calabar, we were greeted and entertained by the traditional Calabar dancers, but on this visit, just like what was witnessed in Accra during the Accra Weizo, it was the Calabar Carnival Queens that welcomed and entertained us. Yet their dances were a complete deviation from the signature Calabar dances. I think this could best be explained as a transition from the traditional to the modern. This fading but impressive traditional dance of Calabar is characterized by well-coordinated and rhythmic movement of the legs, the hands and the hips, found nowhere else but in Cross River and Akwa Ibom States.
During a post event tour, the big secret was discovered inside the Slave Museum of the Calabar Marina Resort and the Cenotaph of fallen Nigerian soldiers who participated and lost their lives in the first and Second World Wars with each of their military identification numbers.
The Marina Resort is set on the River Cross from which the Cross River State drives its name. The atmosphere of the Resort with its amenities was so refreshing, sophisticated and scenic that the area fits some European climatic areas and countries. Little wonder, then, Cross Rover State and Calabar in particular was the initial fascination for early missionaries and European merchants who came to do business in the Dark Continent, and the Niger area in particular.
After enjoying the scenic waterfront of Calabar Marina Resort with a lot of us taking photographs, our tour guide unceremoniously led us into a cinema theater. It had a lot of people watching a movie. From there, we entered through another door leading through what seemed like a tunnel. By the time we came out of it, we were facing sordid and tear-provoking pictorials, sculptures, graphics and of the brutal acts of the slave trade. It seemed the first time, for all the travel writes and journalists on that tour, hearing of and visiting that slave Museum. Particular mention was made of the various kings and areas in Nigeria who actively took part in the slave trade.
I was so carried away with the sceneries in the museum that I almost missed my flight! I was overwhelmed with empathy about the heartless and brutal pains my forefathers endured from the white men, the slave merchants; and more pains to me was the wicked betrayals of the kings who, instead of protecting their subjects like the Obas of Benin who at some point refused to trade in slavery with the Europeans. The other kings in the south, through to the Obas of Lagos, all of them because for the lust for wealth and money that European merchants gave to them, they killed, maimed, betrayed and sold their subjects into slavery! What a shame!
Other details in the museum were that of those of the inside of the underground docks and underground containers below the boat, where the slaves were kept. Hardly having enough ventilation, the slaves were strapped to the floor with chains. They were laid out in such a way that one man’s head follows another’s leg in a long row and bound tight with fetters. You could be broken to tears by that sight!
History has it that in the nineteenth century perhaps 30 percent of all slaves sent across the Atlantic came from Nigeria; and that over the period of the whole trade, more than 3.5 million slaves were shipped from Nigeria to the Americas. Most of these slaves were Igbo and Yoruba, with significant concentrations of Hausa, Ibibio, and other ethnic groups. The other major slave-exporting State was a loose confederation under the leadership of the Aro, an Igbo clan of mixed Igbo and Ibibio origins, whose home was on the escarpment between the central Igbo districts and the Cross River.
The Aro established their ascendancy through a combination of commercial acumen and diplomatic skill. They had a virtual monopoly of the slave trade after the collapse of Oyo in the 1820s. Villages suspected of violating treaties with the Aro were subject to devastating raids that not only produced slaves for export but also maintained Aro influence. The Aro had treaties with the coastal ports from which slaves were exported, especially Calabar, Bonny, and Elem Kalabari. The people of Calabar were Efik, a subsection of Ibibio, while Bonny and Elem Kalabari were Ijaw towns.
On the other hand, my visit to the ancient town of Ile-Ife in Osun State became a return to the sacred dogmata and beliefs of ancient times which represents the history and traditions of the Yorubas, even as it is the insignia of the seat of the progenitor of the Yoruba race. Situated in city center was a massive sculpture of the Olokun.
The first attraction to a first time visitor to Enuwa Court, the palatial mansion of the Ooni of Ile-Ife, is the Oduduwa Park, which is opposite the court. Inside the Park is the imposing figurine of Oduduwa. The statue depicts Oduduwa as a great man, clad in his full royal regalia replete with beads, charms and amulets. And behind the statue is a massive tower.
The atmosphere inside the royal villa clearly informs that it’s a beehive of activities as one observes the continuous thronging in and out of so many people. One observation is that among the ever thronging people, are always groups of people who are identified by their distinguished uniforms which vary from one group to another.
Still inside the villa, the statue of Moremi, a highly revered female legend of the Yorubas is situated to the left hand side, just besides what resembles an old or former reception venue.
The newly installed young and dynamic Kabiyesi, Oba Aadeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi, who recently got married, received us, a delegation of Nigerian travel writers and journalists to his ‘out of this world’ reception. The reception is a large hall inside the court which can seat comfortably about 300 people!
The Ooni, ever exuding a desire about promoting the tourism significance of Ile-Ife was quick in reiterating his passion to us. According to him, he continues to strive to situate Ile-Ife as a tourism destination expressed his passion for tourism. ‘The Ile-Ife tourism day is strategically targeted as an effort to rebrand and repackage and showcase to the world all the hidden mysteries about the civilization and culture of the Yoruba people’, the Ojaja II explained. 50 countries trace their source back to Yorubaland.
‘I am passionate about rebranding Ile-Ife as a tourism destination to attract the world’-Ooni of Ife. So, we are rebranding our rich history and cultural arts so that it will become a tourist attraction to Ile-Ife. Ile-Ife is the cradle of the culture and civilization of the Yoruba race, whose same culture and traditions have spread to over fifty countries and have gained global recognition’.
The Ooni went on to reveal that contrary to the belief historians and archeologists have held over the centuries about the Tower of Babel being located in the Middle East, that the Tower actually existed in Ile-Ife, in a stretch of over a thousand kilometers of hilly upland with every feature that correlates it with the biblical Tower of Babel.
Kabiyesi also spoke of his ‘living wife in the palace, the Yeye Molu. She does not like to be disturbed. If people covered her face, before the morning she breaks it open’.
And according to one of the Oba’s aides who conducted the travel writers around the face of the Yeye Molu, he explained that ‘all the families in Ile-Ife has a mysterious passage that connects to the Yeye Molu, so that if any one mistakenly falls inside her face, which is an open well that has never been covered from the time of Oduduwa until now, the person would mysteriously find himself or herself reappear in his family compound or house in Ile-Ife’.
He explained that the ‘Yeye Molu was actually the first wife of Oduduwa, but that she was barren. And as old age approached, realizing she did not bare children for Oduduwa, she went on and convinced her husband to take another wife. The children of the younger wife she treated as her own. When the time of her death approached, she looked up and transformed into a living well inside the compound of the Oduduwa, her beloved husband’.
The travel journalists, led by Elder Emeka Anokwuru, expressed delight at the reception and audience accorded them by His Imperial Majesty, pledged their allegiance and support to him and went on to remind the Kabiyesi to remain true to his avowed passion for tourism and to still drive the replicating of Enagbe Resorts in the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria as he promised before he ascended the throne of his forefathers, in which he also mentioned Ile-Ife as one of the them.
Oba Adeyeye in his reaction said, ‘I am glad that you remembered that. Ile-Ife in English means the Land of expansion. The Tower of Babel in the Bible, it is in this land. The second one is the ark of Noah in the bible, it is here! It is a mystery.
‘So, we want everybody all over the world to come and see the mystery of this ancient city. And by so doing, we transform the economies of this domain’
