Slave History Museum

The Slave History Museum opened in 2011 on the site of a 15th-century slave-trading warehouse at Marina Beach — on the actual ground where captives were held before embarkation. That setting gives the museum an immediacy that no amount of display design could manufacture.

Five permanent galleries cover the Esuk Mba slave market, the trade goods exchanged (copper bars, guns, cloth), the physical horror of the middle passage — life-size figures demonstrate the conditions in which people were packed into ships — and finally the abolition campaign that made the trade illegal in 1807, though it continued here for decades longer. The exhibits are unflinching and meticulously researched. It is not a comfortable visit, which is precisely the point.

things to do museum sight
A story
Between 1662 and 1863, an estimated 200,000 enslaved Africans were shipped from this stretch of shoreline. At the height of the trade in the early 18th century, roughly 17,000 people a year were being sold here to European traders. The barracoon at this site held the captives while they waited for the ships. Calabar was one of the major embarkation points of the entire Atlantic slave trade.

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