Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction by Teju Cole Page B

was busier than Lagos.
    The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business.
    Slave ships visited the river mouths of the Niger Delta, the broad network of tributaries that stretches between Lagos and Calabar, for a period of three hundred years. Here, they needed no forts as they did at Elmina in Ghana or on Goree Island in Senegal. This is because the calm waters of the delta made it possible to berth the ships for weeks or months, however long it took to fill them up with slaves. And because of this geographical peculiarity, littlephysical evidence remains of the long and bitter engagement. There is little for tourists to see here. According to a memorandum attached to 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.
    These are my thoughts as I visit the famous CMS (now called CSS) Bookshop on Lagos Island. From the arcade of the building that houses it, I can see area boys waving down commercial motorcycle drivers and collecting money from them. Those who resist are rough-handled. Earlier, further up the road, I had seen the police doing the same thing. Police shakedowns, as are also alleged to happen in New Orleans. Our shared sin. In the arcade, someone has spread books out on the ground, and it is as if the bookshop has spilled out of its confines. There is a copy of Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate for sale, but I find it steep at almost three thousand naira. Samuel Johnson, in spite of his name, was Yoruba. He was a peace activist, a priest of the Anglican Church, and a great historian. He wrote his masterly text in 1897. There has not been to date another work of comparable scope by a Yoruba historian.

    The interior of the shop is vaguely familiar from my visits here as a schoolboy, when it was the leading bookseller in the city. I used to come here with my mother when there was something we couldn’t find at the University Bookshop in Akoka or at the Abiola Bookshop in Yaba. I don’t rememberthe offerings being as limited as what I see now: the books available for sale are restricted to a few categories. Many