Chapter 6 Breaking Out West

Lagos, 25 April 1972

As you can see from the postmark, we’ve now reached Lagos. We spent the whole of the past two days trying to get visas for Togo and Dahomey, travellers’ cheques, motor registration and extended insurance to cover other countries in West Africa, not to mention cholera and yellow fever jabs. Mostly its gone fairly smoothly, though it took three and a half hours to persuade the Central Bank of Nigeria to part with £25 worth of travellers’ cheques. The only real fly in the ointment has been the insurance for my motorbike. Guess who its insured with - your old firm, Guardian Royal Exchange, but the Nigeria branch. So far they have issued two cover notes but they haven’t got round to producing an actual policy. When I called in on their agents in Jos on the way here to enquire about it, they said, “No problem, you can fix everything up at the head office in Lagos.” But of course when I went into their office here they claimed it was nothing at all to do with them, they couldn’t extend the cover without the original policy, so I would have to go to their office in Kaduna and ask for the original policy documents. I don’t usually lose my cool, but after a pretty stormy interview with the manager in which I completely lost my temper, they finally agreed they would issue an entirely new temporary policy valid for a month for a mere £5.00. This is despite the fact that I’ve already paid them £12 for insurance for the entire year, but as you need an extension to this to cross the border into other countries there wasn’t a lot to argue about and I had to pay up. We were rushing to get all the paperwork sorted out as tomorrow id a national holiday, then it’s the weekend, and the last thing we wanted to do was to have to stay three more days in Lagos.

Traffic here is absolutely chaotic! There are only two bridges from the mainland to Lagos Island where most of the shops, offices and embassies are located, and these are absolutely chock-a-bloc with traffic all day long. It can take anything up to one and a half hours to go the 8 miles from Yaba, where we are staying with a VSO at the College of Technology, to the city centre. The drivers have no road sense whatsoever, have never heard of signals or indicators, overtake on all sides and cut in and pull out with absolutely no consideration or regard for other road users. But so far we have managed to avoid any mishaps!.

After leaving Port Harcourt we carried on to Onitsha, passing the famous Uli airstrip on the way. At the height of the civil war this was the only way planes could land or take off with supplies for the shrinking enclave of Biafra. It’s actually just a section of road which is wider than normal, with lines painted down the centre to guide the planes in. You can still the wreckage of around ten or more planes littered about in the bush at either side of the main road, and the whole extraordinary sight is completed by the huts of the locals who have moved in and built grass-roofed extensions around the shattered remains of the planes.

Then

Biafra’s Last Stand

Ojukwu was betting that the centrifugal forces of tribal, religious and economic rivalry would tear Nigeria apart in time to save Biafra. But his men ran out of food before that debatable historical process could run its course. Thousands of them faded into the bush, shed their uniforms and, clad only in shorts, melted into streams of refugees. The Nigerians overran Owerri, the last remaining city of any size (250,-000) in Biafra. Then they pressed on toward Uli with their 122-mm. Soviet cannon, shelling the strip from a range of 13 miles.
Shortly before Owerri fell, Ojukwu held an all-night Cabinet meeting at which it was decided that he should leave Biafra, ostensibly to seek help elsewhere, actually to facilitate the surrender. …At Uli airstrip by that time, half the runway lights and some of the runway itself had been knocked out by Nigerian guns. The control tower began to wave off flights; they dropped from 17 a day to three, and soon were discontinued. The last pilots to get in with dried fish and other food had to unload their own planes because workers had fled. Often food moved from Uli was brought back because distribution centers had been overrun. The last telex message from Biafra to Markpress, a Geneva public relations firm that has handled the Biafra account with skill, said tersely: "Despite widespread rumors to the contrary, the airstrip at Uli is functioning normally." Next day it fell and with it the nation that it had kept barely alive for so long.

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Onitsha appeared to have been very badly smashed up during the war. We visited the remains of the famous covered market, once the greatest market in Nigeria and now a twisted tortured mass of steel girders, and also the shanty-town market which has now replaced it. The European quarter of Onitsha, with its grand two-storey houses, has been almost entirely obliterated. We left Onitsha across the famous Asaba Bridge over the Niger, which was blown up by the retreating Biafran army and now has a makeshift Bailey bridge to connect its missing spans with the main part of the bridge, which is still standing.

Later

Perhaps the greatest chaos we experienced in Nigeria was trying to cross the bridge over the Niger River at Onitsha. The Niger River roughly bisects Nigeria, entering from the northwest to about the country's center and then flowing directly south to the Bight of Biafra, as the corner of the Atlantic south of Nigeria is named. The region where the Niger flows into the Bight is a huge swampy area that accounts most of Nigeria's massive oil reserves and significant production is usually simply called "The Delta".
The Delta is now well known for its civil unrest, gangs, private armies, kidnappings, and general mayhem, so it was a definite no-go zone on the checkerboard of areas in southern Nigeria the British Foreign Service has warnings against traveling to. Although we had no reason to go to the Delta, these warnings were in effect in several other areas of southwestern Nigeria, requiring us (for insurance coverage purposes as well as safety) to take a circuitous route instead of the main expressway which passed through some areas of conflict.
All roads in south-central Nigeria, however, seem to converge into one serious bottleneck - the bridge across the Niger at Onitsha, one of the greatest scenes of anarchy I've ever experienced. Nigerians must be the world's most aggressive drivers to begin with, but here thousands of cars were all jostling for space and numerous roads converged to cross the only bridge for at least a hundred miles in each direction that linking the eastern and western halves of the country, a bridge with only one lane of traffic in each direction and numerous stalled vehicles the traffic had to squeeze around. All told, it took us about three hours from when we hit the traffic jam until we got over the bridge, all spent in stifling humid heat. Onitsha was a crowded and chaotic as any other Nigerian city we passed through, but my main recollection of its unpleasantness was the choking soot and vehicle exhaust fumes hanging low over the city that literally left a bad taste in my mouth.

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From Onitsha we carried on to Benin, an ancient city famous for its medieval bronzes, wood carving and weaving. We had a look round the chief’s house but couldn’r wait the 48 hours it takes to get permission to go round the Oba’s palace. It was fascinating watching craftsmen making bonze statues and wooden carving using the same techniques thay have used for centuries. Our visit to Benin coincided with a cocktail party in honour of the Queen’s birthday. The VSO we were staying with was well in with the Assistant High Commissioner and got use invited, along with him , to act as waiters at this event. It seems they didn’t entirely trust the local staff not to purloin bottles of gin and whisky and squirrel them away over the wall. They had signed up the local police brass band to play rousing tunes and the two national anthems, then the Military Governor of the state made a rather boring speech. All the male guests, apart from us VSO waiters, were dressed in tails and bow ties and the female guests in smart cocktail dresses. The next morning we drove on towards Lagos, stopping the night in Ondo because a bridge on the road to Shagamu had fallen down. The next morning we got some locals to carry our motorbikes across the river for 5/= each. Tomorrow we plan to spend the day on Bar Beach – famous as the site of public executions in Lagos state, before setting off for Dahomey the following day. The rainy season has now begun and each night there are torrential downpours with violent thunderstorms. In spite of all the rain we’re having to eat out tonight because the water supply has failed again. The food in Lagos is very peppery and slightly lacking in variety, but a meal in a café rarely costs more than 3/= for rice, stew and peppers, or yams and soup.

May 2nd 1972
Elmina

Elmina is so incredibly delightful that’s its difficult to describe on paper. We’re sitting on a beautiful silver beach with not another person in sight and not a single footprint in the sand but our own. Round the bay, the coast, fringed with coconut palms swaying gently in the breeze stretches away as far as the eye can see. There’s no need to but coconuts, you just wait till one drops from the nearest tree! Every now and then a dugout fishing boat with a square sail, looking rather like a Chinese junk, floats out from behind the breakwater, battered by the waves as they crash onto the rocks. The other side of the bay, hidden from sight at the moment, the fishermen are mending their nets and distentangling crabs and lobsters ready for their next fishing expedition tonight. This morning we went shopping in the market and bought some juicy tangerines (5 for 1/=) and provisions for lunch. Then we wandered about taking photos of the fishermen mending their nets and finally collapsed on the beach and just floated around in the water.

The most impressive sight in Elmina is the castle, or rather two castles. One was built by the Dutch around 1666, the other by the Portuguese as early as 1482. The larger castle, which we plan to look round this afternoon, is not used as a Police Training School. The beach where we’re sitting at the moment lies just under the battlements, separated from the castle wall by a fringe of coconut palms. A double moat, now dry, guards the entrance to the vast, rectangular, 97,000-square-foot castle, built over the course of four centuries. Perched on the end of a rocky peninsula, its four great watchtowers command a view of the surrounding sea; above, on the landside, six 12-foot-long Dutch cannons are aimed at the town. Inside, an eerie stillness hangs over a large stone courtyard, illuminated by the sun's unrelenting glare. The castle's inner facade, made of lime, stone and bricks imported from Europe, is stark and austere. Darkened windows gape above its great double stone stairs; a black iron balustrade, marked "W" for William, King of Orange (1672-1702), is the only touch of decoration.

Then

Today, Elmina Castle is a tourist attraction and World Heritage Monument in Cape Coast, Ghana. This hasn’t always been the case. Looking at the castle from the outside, nothing can ever prepare the unsuspecting visitor or tourist emotionally to hear about the tales of horror and atrocities that went on beyond those walls.

The Portuguese built the castle in 1482, originally established as a trading post for goods bartered for local gold and valuable gem. However, as the demand for slaves increased in the Americas and Caribbean, the castle became strategic in the perpetuation of this abhorrent human cargo trade. The storerooms of the castle were converted into dungeons, and the ownership of the castle changed hands several times, eventually ending up being seized by the British in 1872. By this time, slavery had been abolished. The British didn't use Elmina to house slaves; they used Cape Coast Castle for that. During World War II the castle was the training ground for the West African Frontier Force, which fought with distinction in Burma. Today, on the former site of the Dutch Reformed Church on the second floor, it houses one of Ghana's District Assemblies, a relatively new experiment with democratic forms for the one-party Government.

Elmina Castle, known then as the slave castle, is one of over twenty castles built along the shoreline of the Gold Coast (now known as Ghana). The Gold Coast was one of the richest markets for slave traders during the peak of the slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of captives passed through the dungeons of Elmina Castle, and were shipped off, like commodities into the Americas and Caribbean against their wishes. This illicit human trade carried on for close to 300 years. …



Not knowing what awaited them on the slave ships, those who made it to the coast were held captives in the castle’s dungeons. They were subjected to all sorts of indignities, intimidation and torture. They were shackled in the damp and dark dungeons. It is said that up to three hundred captives were packed into each dungeon, without room to even lift an arm or move around. Food was scarce and disease was rampant.
The unsanitary conditions under which the captives lived were unbelievable. Without room to breathe properly in those dungeons, the captives had to defecate there. The sick were often not attended to, and many of them died while held captives there. Air quality wasn’t a priority. The stench in those dungeons must have been nauseating. Even today, the dungeons still reek. Inside the castle is a smaller, older stone courtyard flanked by four dungeons. Each held as many as 200 women for up to three months. Food was handed through the iron gates on a long paddle; there was no toilet, no room to lie down and sleep. The only air or light came through the doorways or a few small holes at either end of the ceiling. When the governor wanted a bedmate, he stood on a balcony above and picked one of the women herded into the courtyard, our guide said. The fate of those who rebelled -- those who tried to escape, for instance, or cause unrest -- was harsh. Men were sent to the condemned cell, a small black room with one hole in the wall, where they were starved to death, our guide said. Women were beaten and chained to cannon balls in the courtyard.

A visit to Elmina leaves one with an eerie feeling of ghostly hallucinations. As the tour guide is talking, it is easy to visualize hundreds of captives in the dungeons, screaming out their agonies, just pleading to be returned home. But alas, we know that didn’t happen. Countless number of them died under these atrocious conditions. Those who survived the dungeons had to endure further indignities of being shackled together, tightly packed like cattle, on those slave ships. As we all know, when they died, they were simply tossed over-board into the sea, and their names were forgotten.

Throughout the slave trade period, at different times, thousands of captured slaves were chained to cannonballs at the castle, and made to stand in the blazing sun. Women, when their capturers were not raping them, could be made to lift heavy cannonballs in the blistering sun as punishment. Other so-called rebellious captives were either murdered outright, or placed in solitary confinement in an airtight, dark holding ‘facility’ in the courtyard, and could be left there to starve to death. Yet, while all these atrocities were going on, the castle also served as a missionary sanctuary and housed a church. The slave traders held church services there.

Perhaps the most significant memory from Elmina Castle is ‘The Door of No Return’.
This was where hundreds of thousands of our ancestors passed during the slave trade era to awaiting slave ships to be transported across the Atlantic to the so-called New World. An underground tunnel, through which slaves passed when they left Elmina, sweats with dampness. The peeling walls are covered with a green mold. At the end is a narrow opening, which once led to the beach where canoes took the captives to ships at anchor. It frames the sun's brilliant light; inside the tunnel all is dark.There is a plaque next to the condemned dungeon door at Elmina. It reads:
“In Everlasting Memory of the anguish of our ancestors. May those who died rest in peace. May those who return find their roots. May humanity never again perpetrate such injustice against humanity. We, the living, vow to uphold this.”

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The other fort, much smaller and cosier, is our temporary home in Elmina! Owned by the Antiquities Department, you can stay here for 5/- a night for a bed with sheets and a mosquito net. We seem to be the only people here at the moment, with a bedroom each and a dining room perched on the battlements just under the watchtower. You buy whatever you want to eat in the village then give it to the caretaker, who cooks for you, lays the table, then washes up afterwards. I’m sure anywhere else but in West Africa the place would be absolutely swarming with tourists, but we haven’t seen another white face so far here. The only concession to the more upmarket tourist trade is a motel a couple of miles down the road. We went there last night and found we and three other people were the only customers. Ite fort were staying in is called Fort St Jago and is on top of a hill overlooking the harbour with its fishing boats and Elmina castle down below. This morning we were woken at 0600 a.m. by the reveille trumpet and staggered out of bed at sunrise and watched the police trainees on the castle parade ground below doing their drill. It looked a bit like a scene from a film in the middle ages with the peasants pushing their carts along the street below and staggering up the steep hill to the castle gate with bundles, boxes and buckets of water. Ten minutes ride away there is another pretty little coastal town, Cape Coast, which also has a picturesque castle, with great heaps of cannon balls piled up to act as a breakwater.

Later
As you wander round St George's Castle, one of the more delightful aspects is the way its twin, Fort St Jago, keeps flitting into view through the windows and turrets. Perched on top of a small hill across the fishing harbour from St George's Castle, Fort St Jago is small and perfectly formed. In keeping with its pleasant aspect, it doesn't share the dark secrets of its bigger brother, for while the Portuguese and the Dutch herded slaves through St George's as quickly as they could, Fort St Jago simply sat there, looking down on the travesty below without comment.

When the Dutch captured St George's Castle by bombarding it from St Jago Hill, they realised that they would have to retain possession of the hill if they weren't to lose their new acquisition to the same trick. With this in mind, in 1666 they built Fort Coenraadsburg on the ruins of the Portuguese chapel, to act as a military barracks for protection of the town, which was booming with the burgeoning trade in locally mined gold and locally captured slaves.
The Dutch would occupy Elmina town and the two forts for 235 years, until the British, keen to control the whole Gold Coast so they could add it to their growing empire, attacked first in 1871, and then again in 1872. It's surprising that this hadn't happened before – on a clear day you can see Cape Coast Castle from Elmina, which must have been really irritating for the empire-mad Victorians – but it turned out that the Dutch weren't remotely interested in defending this distant outpost, especially as the trade in slaves and gold had long since dried up. So, to avoid a long, hard struggle to a foregone conclusion, the Dutch wisely sold Elmina to the British for a small sum and sailed off to concentrate on their more profitable colonies in In-donesia.

Under the British St George's Castle became a colonial police academy, and it remained an academy after Ghana's independence until it was finally declared a national monument in 1972. However, after the departure of the Dutch, Fort St Jago passed through a number of strange incarnations over the years. It started its new life as a guesthouse and then morphed into a leprosy hospital (until a permanent hospital could be built in town) and then a prison (again, until a prison could be built elsewhere) before returning to life as a guesthouse. In 1986 the government closed the guesthouse and started promoting the fort as a piece of Ghana's heritage, but surprisingly the guide on the fort door told me that plans are still afoot to convert it back into a guesthouse; it's just money that's the problem. Given that Fort St Jago is a World Heritage site it seems a little odd that it might end up being a guesthouse again, but for once I can see the logic. The fort would make a perfect place to stay.
For a start, the rooms are huge and airy, and given a reasonable amount of work they'd be wonderfully atmospheric. The old chapel would make a great suite and the officers' rooms would be perfect for a dormitory, while the tower would be the ideal spot for a candlelight dinner as the sun sinks into the shoreline. Meanwhile the courtyard would be a great spot for sitting and reading, sheltered from the hot afternoon sun by the shadow of the entrance hall and lit at night by the lovely Victorian-era streetlight in the middle of the yard.

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We spent last weekend in Accra, mainly to insure our motorbikes for Ghana. The Guardian Royal Exchange here was a ,ot more helpful than in lagos and charged £2/10- to extend the cover for two weeks, saying we could reclaim this back in Nigeria – though I have my doubts! So at the moment my motorbike is covered by three separate and concurrent insurance policies (except that the endorsements don’t appear on the first two). Accra is a pretty, clean, green and open city nothing like Lagos which was just the opposite. Most things in Ghana seem to be better organised and generally more developed than in Nigeria. But the piece de resistance was Lome, the capital of Togo, where we stayed two nights at Edith’s Inn, a hotel run by a black ex-Peace Corps nurse, quite reasonably priced and fantastic value for money, with air-conditioned rooms for only £1 a night. I had the first hot shower I’ve had for four months, and we fed like lords. There was a splendid little German restaurant just round the corner where you could get the most succulent steaks for under £1. There’s nowhere like it in Nigeria – even the top hotels don’t produce such good food but charge ten times the price
We agreed we ‘d have to go through Lome on our return to Nigeria and gorge ourselves again! The beach, however, in Lome was not so good - miles of beautiful sand but it shelved very steeply. This, combined with breakers about 20 feet high and an extremely strong undertow meant it appeared to be too dangerous to do anything more than paddle on the edge of the water, but even then you kept getting swept over and seawards. In Accra we stayed with a couple of VSO electricians. I went with one of them on Sunday morning to the Presbyterian Church and imagine my surprise when the minister, a Rev Forrester-Paton, turned out to be the father of a student who lived a couple of doors down the corridor in New College back in Oxford. Small world! They say almost everyone in the world knows somebody who knows someone six degrees of relationship removed from themselves. The Forrester-Patons were in the middle of packing up to return to England after 25 years in Ghana but gave us a very nice lunch and told us all about Elmina and advised us to get the Museums Department in Accra to phone up the castle and let then know we were on our way – sound advice because it meant we got VIP treatment on our arrival.

Colin Forrester-Paton, Church of Scotland missionary in Ghana, was born on 5 April 1918 at Alloa, Scotland. His family had missionary connections, his uncle Ernest was a missionary in India and his great-aunt Catherine had trained women missionaries in Glasgow. Forrester-Paton was educated in Moffatt and Norfolk then at New College, Oxford University where he graduated 1st class BA Hons in 1940. He attended the United Free Theological College in Edinburgh and then graduated with a B.D. from London University in 1943. In the same year he was married to Jean Lorimer Crichton Miller (1917-1998) who had been working for the air force. Between 1943 and 1946 he was secretary of the Student Christian Movement and his contacts with Gold Coast students in Edinburgh at this time led to his interest in missionary work. He was ordained by the United Free Presbytery in 1944 and in 1946 left for Ghana with the Church of Scotland. His wife followed in 1947 and they were stationed in Akropong where at first Forrester-Paton taught at the Presbyterian Training College and studied Twi then concentrated on literature work. He did various work for the Presbyterian Church and Christian Council of Ghana involving literature and translation and was especially involved in ecumenical work. The Forrester-Patons also spent periods at Amedzofe and at Sandema in Northern Ghana. From 1960 Forrester-Paton acted as mission secretary and gave an increasing amount of time to the Accra Ridge Church. Jean Forrester-Paton raised three children and also often took services in schools and colleges and spoke at women's meetings and conferences. Her main work was with the Christian Marriage and Family Life programme of the Christian Council of Ghana. The committee (CCMFL) was set up in 1961 and instigated programmes and provided advice and training on family planning, marriage guidance, sex education and family relationships in general. Jean Forrester-Paton was its secretary from 1961 to 1972 and played a large part in securing the co-operation of the Roman Catholic Church in 1967. The Forrester-Patons left Ghana in 1972 and the following year Forrester-Paton became an associate minister in Hawick. He retired in 1983 but had been appointed Chaplain to HM the Queen in 1981 and was Extra Chaplain in 1988.

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