Every Day Is for the Thief

by Teju Cole

the Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on the Slave Trade in 1848, the trade out of Africa was in the tens of thousands every year in the early nineteenth century, much higher than it had been in preceding centuries. It reached an annual peak of 135,000 in the five-year period between 1835 and 1840. At that time, several hundred ships were being loaded up each year along the Niger Delta. And this was in spite of a British ban on the trade in 1808, and a British naval presence in Nigerian waters. According to Alan Burns in his History of Nigeria, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian ships often sailed under American colors until they were out of range of the British ships. This history is missing from Lagos. There is no monument to the great wound. There is no day of remembrance, no commemorative museum. There are one or two houses in Badagry that display chains and leg-irons but, beyond that, nothing. Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But in Lagos we sleep dreamlessly, the sleep of innocents.