...let youself go!

City of God

“Everything about Calabar is special,” tour guide Joy says with a hint of happiness as the tour bus steers slowly past the Millennium Park, where a massive national flag flaps in the midday wind. And it is a boon to be able to see some of the city’s travel assets in the company of other guests with a skilled guide narrating the stories behind each one. After we have been to the plush precincts of the Government House, the upbeat Watts Market (the biggest in town) and a couple of streets of local significance, the bus takes us through Eyamba Street in Old Calabar and stops.

“You can see the houses are old, the roofs are old—even the people are old,” Joy says rhetorically. It’s a deliberate attempt to make her listeners laugh and she succeeds. The bus is just a few metres from Efe Ekpe Efik Iboku, a bungalow and cult enclave, where every newly appointed Efik monarch, the Obong of Calabar, must first be taken to perform the initial coronation rites. Only the initiated, we learn, can enter the place.

Calabar has a longstanding record of missionary work dating back to the mid-19th century. Just across from the Iboku, there is a one-storey prefabricated building where the first Catholic mass in Calabar (and possibly Nigeria) was held. And just to its right stands the first Presbyterian Church ever in Nigeria.

“The missionaries didn’t just come to evangelise,” a local Presbyterian preacher said recently in a newspaper interview, “they helped build churches, hospitals and schools.”

Way back then the people warmed up to the earliest missionaries and the local culture served Christianity well. According to Joy when the missionaries came “it was the Ekpe masquerade that went about chasing the people to church.” Joy rounds up at that point and we are on our way to the next stop.

Within minutes, the driver pulls over at the tomb of Marry Slessor, the famed Scottish missionary who, who among other good deeds to the area, saw to it that the twins born at the time were spared the cruel faith of being cast into the ‘Evil Forest’ to die as was the established practice. Her tomb, a conical mound decked with a giant cross, stands out from the many other tombs of early European missionaries who lived, worked and died in Calabar. And before her death in 1915, Slessor had learned the local dialect sufficiently to be able to serve as judge in myriad domestic and communal cases. A street is named in her memory and a monument in town is proof of her abiding presence.

Meanwhile, Christianity in Calabar sprang from the ashes of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A thatched bungalow complex, situated in the old town and not far away from the first Presbyterian Church, served as transit accommodation for the captured slaves.  At the National Museum, the slave trade years is documented in piercing detail. A note on one of the museum’s walls says Nigeria has the highest percentage of slaves shipped from Africa (41.4%); and Cross River State officials argue that about 30 per cent of the unfortunate victims passed through Calabar soil, which may explain why the state government has deemed it appropriate to construct a Marina Resort that incorporates a slave trade museum. On another level, Calabar has a thing about dates. The whims of History has bequeathed it an amazing array of landmarks, which so happen to be either the first of their kind (or the most striking) anywhere in the country. And Joy dutifully reels out the dates of key events and milestones as it relates to the tour itinerary. “1894—the first pre-fabricated building (Hope Waddel Institute) was assembled in Calabar. The game of football was first played in this compound too.” Read more