Badagry is a historic coastal town in Lagos State, Nigeria, shaped by waterways, creeks, and lagoons that connect the Atlantic coast to inland routes and neighbouring regions near the present border with the Republic of Benin. Long before modern roads, movement in this region depended on water. Canoes, narrow channels, and coastal paths made Badagry a natural meeting point for traders, travellers, and communities.
Over time, these same waterways tied the town to the transatlantic slave trade. Today, Badagry is known for a group of preserved and interpreted sites that allow visitors to walk through the physical spaces where trade, confinement, and forced departure once took place.
Badagry as a coastal trading town
Badagry did not emerge overnight. It developed gradually as a settlement whose importance grew alongside Atlantic commerce between West Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Fishing, farming, and regional exchange existed long before European ships arrived in significant numbers. As Atlantic trade expanded, Badagry became one of several lagoon based ports where inland routes met coastal access.
This role left visible marks on the town. Unlike places remembered only through documents, Badagry still contains buildings, paths, and shorelines tied to this period, allowing history to be encountered through space as well as story.
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Vlekete Slave Market and the structure of trade
One of the most recognised heritage locations in Badagry is the Vlekete Slave Market. Local government heritage records describe Vlekete as a historic market space used during the era of slave trading. It is commonly presented as a place where captives brought from inland areas were exchanged through negotiated transactions involving African intermediaries and European buyers.
Today, the site is preserved as part of Badagry’s public memory. Visitors are shown how market spaces functioned, not as isolated scenes of violence, but as organised commercial environments. Vlekete represents the point where human lives were converted into trade goods within a system that normalised exploitation through routine exchange.
The Brazilian Barracoon, a surviving confinement site
The most physically intact structure associated with slave confinement in Badagry is the Brazilian Barracoon, also known as the Seriki Faremi Williams Abass Slave Museum. Museum records hosted by Google Arts and Culture describe the compound as constructed in the early 1840s and consisting of forty small cells used to confine captives.
The building stands as evidence of how confinement was built directly into the trading process. These were not temporary shelters, but purpose built spaces designed to hold people while awaiting sale or transport. Thick walls, narrow rooms, and controlled access points reflect a system focused on containment and control.
Seriki Faremi Williams Abass and the coastal trade economy
The barracoon is linked to Seriki Faremi Williams Abass, a figure whose life story reflects the complex realities of the period. Heritage accounts describe him as a man who was once enslaved and later became a merchant involved in slave trading activities along the coast.
His association with the barracoon highlights how the slave trade operated through layered relationships rather than distant abstraction. Power shifted locally, roles changed over time, and individuals could move from captivity into participation within the same brutal economy. The site preserves this uncomfortable truth without simplifying it.
Life inside the barracoon compound
Within the compound, captives were held in multiple small cells while transactions were arranged and onward movement prepared. The structure itself reveals how confinement worked as part of an organised process. People were gathered, stored, and managed as inventory, reduced to numbers and waiting bodies.
While individual experiences varied, the architecture alone communicates the loss of autonomy and dignity imposed on those held inside. The barracoon’s continued presence allows visitors to confront this reality directly, without relying on imagination alone.
The lagoon route and the point of no return
From Badagry, captives were moved toward the coast through lagoon crossings and shoreline routes. One of the most well known sites associated with this stage is Gberefu Island, remembered locally as the point of no return. This name reflects the moment when captives crossed from local confinement into irreversible separation from their homelands.
The journey involved water transport and short coastal movement rather than long overland marches. Its significance lies in what it represented, the final boundary between familiar land and forced exile across the Atlantic.
The Well of Forgetfulness in local memory
Another feature often included in Badagry’s heritage tours is the Well of Forgetfulness. According to local tradition, captives were brought to this well and made to drink before departure. The story is passed down as part of the town’s remembrance culture, symbolising the psychological breaking of identity and connection.
The well remains an important part of how Badagry tells its story. It expresses the trauma of displacement and the desire to name what was taken from those who passed through, memory, home, and selfhood.
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Why Badagry’s sites still matter
Badagry’s preserved locations show how the slave trade functioned through everyday spaces. Markets, holding rooms, wells, and water routes were all adapted into tools of exploitation. There is no need for embellishment. The buildings themselves carry the weight of what occurred.
The Brazilian Barracoon, Vlekete Market, and the route to Gberefu Island together form a landscape of remembrance that turns history into something tangible. They remind visitors that the transatlantic slave trade was not only fought on ships and plantations, but also constructed carefully on African soil.
Author’s Note
Badagry teaches that history survives not only in books, but in rooms, paths, and shorelines, and when these places are preserved and told honestly, they return dignity to those whose lives were once reduced to trade.
References
Badagry Local Government Council, Historical Monuments of Badagry, official heritage documentation.
Google Arts and Culture, Seriki Faremi Williams Abass Slave Museum, site description and historical notes.
Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African History, Portuguese Slave Trade, Atlantic context and coastal networks.
E. Abaka, Slavery, Remembrance, and Sites of Historical Memory, African Economic History Journal.
Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Badagry heritage site records.
Punch Newspapers, Untold story of Nigeria’s 170 year old slave wells, feature report.
