The Old Residency Museum was built in 1884 on top of Consular Hill close to the Marina Beach Resort. The building is a prefabricated structure of Scandinavian red-pine wood shipped in knockdown parts from Britain to old Calabar.
Today, the resident is part of the National Museum, run by the National Commission for Museum, housing artifact and relics of historical and archaeological interest.
This building was the seat of the British colonial administration for the Southern Protectorate of Nigeria.
The old colonial building in Calabar is well preserved and has been drawing tourists from different parts of the world.
It was put in place about 130 years ago, and it is still in good shape and gives one a better understanding of the kind of buildings the colonial masters were staying in.
Hewett, a stern-faced man with a drooping moustache, was the first resident of what is now known as the Old Residency, a building prefabricated in Britain and then shipped to Calabar in 1884.
The ground floor served as the headquarters of the expanding British Protectorate that would eventually become the southern part of the British colony Nigeria. With Nigeria’s independence in 1960, the colonial rulers left, but the Old Residency remained.
Its Scandinavian red-pine wood walls survived the Calabar climate (a 10-month rainy season), the Biafran War (when anything that could serve as firewood disappeared in Nigeria’s blockaded east), and dictatorial destructiveness (under the military rule of Ibrahim Babangida in the 1990s, a sister building some 100 metres away was torn down to make room for a concrete structure that, until now, serves as the presidential lodge).
Today, “For 100 naira (50 cents), visitors can stroll through the museum’s halls accompanied by a guide.
The exhibition opens with the darkest page in its history: the four centuries of Transatlantic slave trade during which the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British shipped millions of Africans across the Atlantic to sell as slaves.
Calabar used to be Britain’s busiest trading post: almost one-third of the total number of Africans the British abducted from the end of the 17th century until the abolition of slavery in 1807 was shipped from here.
that went on in that those for those years…hmmn
