Badagry Heritage Museum

Badagry Heritage Museum, also known as the Old Residency Museum, occupies the Old Residency building on Marina Road in Badagry, a coastal town roughly 60 kilometers west of central Lagos that served as one of West Africa's major departure points during the transatlantic slave trade from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The building itself, constructed in 1863, is documented as the first storey (two-level) building in Nigeria and originally served as the residence of the British colonial district officer. It was converted into a museum in the late 20th century to document Badagry's role in the slave trade and its subsequent history as an early center of Christian missionary activity and Western education in Nigeria. The exhibits are arranged across the building's original rooms, presenting artifacts including replica slave chains, shackles and branding irons, historical maps tracing the routes marched to the coast, and documentation of the European trading companies, British, Portuguese, French and Dutch, that operated in Badagry. A separate section covers the arrival of the first Christian missionaries in Nigeria at Badagry in 1842 and the establishment of the first primary school in the country nearby. The curatorial approach is broadly chronological, moving visitors from the pre-colonial slave trade era through abolition and into the town's role in early Nigerian education. Restoration of the Old Residency has preserved its original colonial-era brick construction and veranda, with the building maintained by the Lagos State government as a protected heritage site rather than left to private upkeep.