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This top-down approach to boosting Calabar's economy seemed hollow. I'd heard Nigerian politicians' endless talk about theme parks, tourist resorts, shopping malls and their ‘trickle down' effects on the economy. But there's no such thing as ‘trickle down' in Nigeria – money trickles upwards or evaporates on contact with air. I couldn't see how Tinapa's tax-free retail would stop six-year-old kids selling bananas on a weekday instead of attending school, or stop toddlers like the girl in the village next door to Tinapa playing barefoot and unclothed among chickens.

I had forgotten to ask the okada man who brought me here to return and pick me up, and there was no other public transport. A few hundred metres away, a taxi deposited someone and drove off slowly but I didn't have the strength or speed to catch it. Almost crazed with hunger, I dragged my feet through Tinapa's concrete wilderness, past the unblemished road signs and strips of grass lining the dirt-free sidewalk. The afternoon sun bounced off the new tarmac and blinded my eyes. I was close to fainting.

Forty minutes later, on the road leading out of the development, a lone okada materialised in the distance, on the lookout for a customer. His beady eyes spotted me and we beckoned to one another. I exhaled with relief as he rumbled towards me, the buzz of his engine filling the air like music.

‘Mr Biggs,' I instructed him. He whisked me back to Calabar.

 

 

Sonny was my father's driver for over twenty years. He was the one who had chauffeured us around Nigeria on that big trip of 1988. I had last seen him in 1990, on my final summer holiday in Nigeria. An Ogoni from the same village as my family, Sonny was an opinionated and forthright autodidact who always seemed over-qualified for his station in life. He picked me up the next morning in the family's car. Now approaching his mid-fifties, Sonny still looked the same – slim build, slight overbite and a fantastically chiselled face. But his hair glinted with silver and, in my father's absence, he took on a more avuncular and authoritative role with me, which made for an awkward dynamic since I was now a grown adult paying for the petrol and dictating the itinerary.

We were driving to Ikom, a town north of Calabar where archaeologists at the turn of the century had found ancient stone monoliths carved with hieroglyphics. As there were no signs directing us to the monoliths, we stopped on the roadside and asked a policeman.

‘Good afternoon, chief,' the officer greeted Sonny. People often assumed Sonny was a ‘chief' because he drove an SUV, although it was actually a borrowed car. Money, power and respect were so tightly interwoven, it was amusing to see how simply driving the
right car could elevate one's perceived status and compel others to kowtow.

In the late afternoon, we arrived at Alok, a village just north of Ikom, set in flat, sparsely wooded grassland. Three scruffy kids led us to a house where we would find the man in charge of the monoliths. I stepped onto the verandah and knocked on the door. A rotund man in his fifties wearing a pink towel around his impressive girth opened the door and greeted me warmly.

‘Hello, I'm looking to see the stone monoliths,' I said, feeling guilty for arriving unannounced.

‘Wait.' The man stepped out and called out a boy's name . . . no response. He called out for him again, and again, but the boy wasn't answering.

‘
Where
is that boy? He's the one who keeps the key for the gate.' The big man pointed at a cluster of monoliths sequestered inside a compound near his house. ‘What is this nonsense,' he muttered to himself in embarrassment. ‘If he knows he cannot be here, he should give the key to someone else. Sorry,' – he turned to me – ‘ . . . I'm coming.'

A minute later, he emerged fully dressed and introduced himself as Chief Sylvanus Ekoh Akong, higher technical officer for the Commission for Museums and Monuments. Sylvanus was in charge of antiquities in the area, but without the keys he couldn't show us the main monolith site. He led us to another site a mile away in a grassy field where, aside from a small fire crackling unthreateningly in a clump of bushes, the tall grass swayed silently in the golden evening breeze.

The monoliths stood scattered around a 2,000-square-metre field with no protective fencing. They were fat phallic-shaped basaltic rocks, around 1.2 metres high, keeling helplessly towards the ground. They had stylised human features – with gaping mouths and eyes, slightly reminiscent of Mayan carvings, and rows of dots arched across their brows. The monoliths were arranged in circles,
possibly in the centre of an ancient village, archaeologists have suggested. By some estimates, they date as far back as 2000 BC. Sylvanus said that around 450 of these circles lay scattered around the region. Two monolith sites have been fully excavated, while another twenty-five need to be fully unearthed. I was intrigued by what other secrets the soil might be harbouring.

Each rock (known as an
akwanshi
) contains a unique set of geometric carvings called
insibidi
. No one knows exactly what these hieroglyphics signify, but they're thought to convey specific information – rules and regulations, perhaps. Chief Sylvanus pointed to a figure-of-eight symbol, saying that it represented a staff of office for senior villagers.

‘This is a person with a hunchback problem,' he said, showing me a monolith with a bulge at the back of it. ‘You see this cross?' Sylvanus pointed to the front of the rock. ‘It means “human beings coming together”. It is the same cross that we Christians use as a symbol of Christ.'

Sylvanus also believed the crosses were used as mathematical symbols. There was also a Y-shape carving, symbolising the Benue – Niger river confluence, which represents the centre of the earth, or the biblical Garden of Eden. The stones, Sylvanus claimed, were inspired by the pyramids of Egypt. He pointed to a rock with swirls on it.

‘They depict the woman who started giving birth to all of us,' he said. ‘
Agbor shi she
means the “founding mother” or Eve.' The equivalent phrase in Hebrew is
shi shi
, Sylvanus said. He and some Nigerian researchers believed that the similarity proves a link between Alok and Jesus and the Holy Land. Evangelism's strong arm was influencing Nigerian historical research too, it seemed.

Back at the main, fenced-off monolith site, Sylvanus, Sonny and I peeped through the wrought-iron railings and looked at the circle of monoliths nestled among the trees and long grass. The spirals on each stone signified weather. Anti-clockwise meant good weather,
clockwise meant bad weather. ‘Today, they use these spirals in modern meteorology,' Sylvanus claimed, referring to the shorthand swirls and arrows denoting rain and wind on weather maps.

I was a little sceptical of these interpretations, with one eye on the Bible and the West, as if our identity were tethered to these parts of the world. Whatever the carvings really mean, they've been adopted by contemporary Nigerian culture. The patterns are reproduced in regional hairstyles for certain occasions, such as marriage, and also appear on the cloths used to make costumes for members of Ekpe.

‘These marks here . . .', Chief Sylvanus pointed at some swirls on the stones. ‘In Benue state, the Tiv, Igala and Nupe peoples have the same marks on their faces. It is the tribal marks that you take to know who is who. But they are not allowing anyone to put tribal marks any more. They say they are disfiguring their faces.'

Africa has a reputation as a place where change rarely happens. But its people and cultures are constantly shifting, disappearing; buried beneath the sands of time and governmental indifference to history. Our ancestors' enigmatic traces are interpreted and misinterpreted by everyone and anyone. I guess we'll only discover the truth when our universities receive proper funding and start producing world-class historians and archaeologists again. Apart from thinly funded work by home-grown and overseas academics, Nigeria seems a poorly researched country, a half-empty page readily soiled by anyone with a racial, religious or economic agenda, be they evangelicals looking for links to Israel, or foreign racists wanting to deny African history altogether. I left Ikom feeling teased by its secrets, and all the more ravenous for knowledge about the past.

 

Nothing is more beautiful than a rainforest in the morning mist. The sunlight shot through the towering trees, giving their greenness a dewy, sparkling translucence, which hinted at the possibility that spirits truly existed in the forest. Sonny and I were cruising north from Ikom the next morning, negotiating a narrow, bumpy
road cleaved open by gorges of soil erosion. The other vehicles on the road did not fare as well as our 4 x 4. With their minimal suspension, they clattered along the road, windows rattling, the cars' lifespans shortening with every expensive jolt. Capitalism is an odd thing: the parts of the world with the best roads also have cars with the best suspension, whereas countries like Nigeria with the worst soil erosion and the worst roads tend to have poor-suspension vehicles. If only economics mirrored the natural world's propensity to adapt.

We turned off the highway and into the forest, along a narrow, red soil path that was even rougher than the main road. The looming forest, now enveloping us on all sides, seemed less enchanting and slightly more intimidating. The bugs, the heat, the unknown fauna lurking in the darkness – I would be walking within it soon. We entered the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary, an area of protected rainforest holding its ground against encroaching humanity. South-eastern Nigeria is blessed with some of the most biodiverse land on the planet. Gorillas, chimpanzees and drill monkeys live here, as well as civet cats, parrots, eagles and other monkey species.

If someone told me all of this as a child, I clearly wasn't paying attention. I used to stare from the balcony of our Port Harcourt home and dream of roaming exotic places, oblivious to the rainforest that lay two hours behind me, as virginal as anywhere in the Amazon or Congo. Rainforests weren't something I associated with Nigeria. Our acres of palm trees and farmland and urban sprawl were far more familiar to me.

The Afi Drill Ranch on the edge of the rainforest was dedicated to protecting drill monkeys and chimpanzees. Only about 300 Cross River gorillas are left in the wild, and the chimpanzees are threatened by poachers and hunters. The ranch protects the drill monkeys and chimpanzees, but lets the gorillas roam freely. It was established and run by Liza Gadsby, a formidable blonde American in her late
forties, who slightly resembles the model Lauren Hutton. Liza first arrived in Nigeria in the 1980s while overlanding in West Africa with her boyfriend (now her husband). They had stopped in Ibadan to get parts for their Land Rover, back in the days when the town still had an assembly plant. There they met a friend who was involved in animal conservation in Cameroon. Eventually, the American pair settled in Cross River State and created a primate protection programme.

Afi's base camp was nestled in a clearing surrounded by beautiful folds of dense forest. Nearby were heaps of bush mangoes stockpiled for feeding the monkeys and apes, and in the distance, the Afi mountain itself soared upwards through the foliage. In her tent, Liza was making herself porridge for breakfast, next to a shelf lined with American novels.

‘The gorillas live up there,' she said, pointing at the massif. Sighting this reclusive species was next to impossible. Liza said three British men had stayed at Afi Ranch on their friend's pre-wedding stag week, and spent seven days hiking up the steep mountain, searching for gorillas. They found a trail of faeces only.

‘On the index of diversity, Nigeria's primates make it the third most biodiverse country in Africa,' Liza informed me. The country has a bounty of fauna, but we're losing it. She blamed it on the ‘Nigerian government and the Nigerian people. We used to have giraffe in Borno State, and rhino. But they're all gone.'

‘What happened to them?'

‘Poached for their meat. People like their bush meat. Animal husbandry has never really been a part of the way of life here,' she said, referring to Buanchor, the village near Afi Ranch. ‘They let their goats wander around – they don't eat them. Do you know what the main meat source for people here is?'

‘No.'

‘Frozen fish from Europe.'

‘
What?
'

‘There aren't any fish left in the rivers because they put chemicals in the river to kill the fish and catch them.' Sonny nodded in confirmation.

I didn't know giraffes were even edible. There seems to be a place in Nigerian cooking pots for anything that moves. I adore meat but limit my intake for health reasons; but I had found eating vegetarian in some hotels and restaurants next to impossible. Waiters and waitresses stared at me as if I were insane. I remember one very nice staff worker at my Ibadan hotel being particularly resistant to my request for jollof rice without goat:

‘Why?' she frowned in disbelief.

‘I don't feel like it tonight.'

‘But you must have meat.'

‘I don't want any.'

‘Is there something wrong with it?'

‘Yes,' I said, pouncing on the opportunity to lie. ‘It's . . . it's too tough.'

‘We will make it tender.'

‘No, please, I just don't want to have any meat.'

‘You will like it.'

‘No, I really don't want any.'

‘You will
like
it.'

‘ . . . OK.'

In many parts of Nigeria, eating a meal without meat was a pointless, flavourless endeavour that needed urgent rectifying. Quite often, my request was simply disregarded, and my rice would arrive with hunks of goat or chicken defiantly embedded in it.