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The following morning I faced the logistical puzzle of leaving the ranch without my own 4 x 4 or helicopter. High-end Nigerian tourism doesn't cater for the middle-income traveller relying on public transport. The ranch staff tried finding transport to take me to Obudu town, 30 kilometres or so beyond the foot of the mountain. No luck.

‘Do you want to take okada?' a man asked, straddling his motorcycle. I hadn't considered this as an option, not with my heavy suitcase and bulky shoulder bag. Could he seriously fit them – and me – onto a bike and then ride down a steep mountain?

The man nodded as if I'd asked a stupid question, then picked up my suitcase and balanced it on the handlebars of his motorbike. Tautening his back so that he could see the road over my luggage, he urged me to sit down behind him. Slowly we moved off, cautiously winding down the beautiful, sunny mountain, back down to earth, back to the jagga jagga of Nigerian life. I must have been the only guest in Obudu's history to check out in so spectacularly unstylish a fashion. But it didn't matter. I swallowed my pride and enjoyed the ride.

 

 

My journey took a haphazard swing westwards. I wanted to visit the city of Benin before heading to my home region. Groggy and puffy-eyed, I clambered on board a minibus and promptly fell asleep against the window. During the journey, I lolled in and out of consciousness, my eyes briefly widening to take in bridge after bridge, stretching over luminous green rivers and a thick, domed canopy of palm trees. The Niger River Delta is vast.

We arrived in the market area of the ancient city of Benin. Sunlight bounced off oranges, bananas, batik-dyed cloths and okada wing mirrors, blinding me momentarily as the minibus crawled through the hustling mob of traders and pedestrians. Was the market encroaching on the road or was the traffic driving through the market? I couldn't tell.

Half a millenium ago, finesse, excellence and orderliness ruled here under the magnificent Benin empire, one of West Africa's most influential kingdoms. The empire flourished for 500 years and ruled over an ambitious stretch of Nigeria's southern region. I'd become fascinated with Benin's history after visiting the modern-day Republic of Benin, Nigeria's next-door neighbour, some years before. Great empires didn't feature strongly in the Nigeria I knew from childhood, and most African diasporans I'd met seemed to
fixate on caramel-complexioned Nubian princesses and Ethiopian emperors, while overlooking the civilisations of West Africa.

The Benin empire particularly impressed me because it developed without the influence of Islam or Europe. Headed by an oba, it was a highly centralised kingdom that experienced minimal infighting. During its glory days between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, the empire expanded through military campaigns, particularly under Oba Ewuare (1440 – 73) and Oba Esigie (1504 – 50), and held dominion over large chunks of Southern Nigeria, including Yorubaland and Igboland (as far east as Onitsha), and as far west as Ghana, where the Ga peoples still claim Benin ancestry. The empire's well-disciplined army (estimated by historians to be 20,000 strong) was divided into the oba's specially selected regiment of warriors, a metropolitan regiment, a queen's regiment, and various village regiments, which formed the biggest contingent of the army. The armies adopted a strategy of encircling their enemies and weakening them by cutting off their supplies. Highly organised on the water, they skilfully navigated the labyrinthine creeks and rivers of the Niger Delta to expand their empire eastwards.

Organised administration was another defining characteristic of the Benin regime. Only men with a strong knowledge of the state, its customs and traditions were appointed as prime ministers. And even the oba's succession, though hereditary, had to be confirmed by two senior officials.

I'd seen the Benin empire's famously elegant fifteenth-century bronze castings and masks in museums around Europe. Their intricate carvings depict animals, battle scenes and life at the royal court. The skill involved in producing these was world class. The craftsmen lived and worked in specific districts of the city, alongside woodcarvers, ivory carvers, bead makers, leather makers and blacksmiths who fashioned military swords and spearheads. The kingdom's geometric grid of wide, straight roads was lined with houses, some of which were made of wood and fronted with porches.

Flanking the enormous gate of the oba's palace were two towers, each topped with 15-metre-long bronze pythons. The palace interior was festooned with ornate ivory and bronze sculptures, wooden bas-relief plaques and wooden pillars covered in copper carvings. The kingdom was protected by a wall 9 metres thick and 100 kilometres in circumference. The wall and the oba's palace were partly built by prisoners of war, who also helped to construct the inner city wall and build a 15-metre-deep moat around it.

Benin's wealth and power attracted foreign attention, mainly from the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to make contact in the 1480s. By the sixteenth century, Benin played host to Christian missionaries, sent its own ambassador to Lisbon and began trading with the British after they visited Benin in 1553.

The British provided guns, textiles and other European goods in exchange for pepper, ivory, palm oil and slaves. The Europeans fomented war between African tribes in order to produce prisoners of war who could become slaves. Although the Benin obas weren't under serious economic pressure to sell slaves, the presence of European firearms made it imperative for them to do so: if they didn't sell slaves, they wouldn't have firearms to defend against their armed enemies. It was a vicious circle.

During the eighteenth century, the Benin empire began to decline. It was the only kingdom on the Nigerian coastline that wasn't under British control, preferring to trade independently and refusing to join the British protectorate. The British Consul General wrote to the oba, stating his intention to visit the kingdom for talks. But the oba asked him to delay his mission because he was performing customary rituals from which foreigners were barred. The Consul General, dismissing the oba's wishes, sent several British officials and traders to Benin anyway.

En route, the men were ambushed outside the city and seven of them were killed. The British responded by launching a punitive expedition against Benin in 1897. Troops ransacked the place, stole
the oba's palace artwork and razed the kingdom to the ground before sending the oba into exile. The British justified their actions on the grounds that they were defending themselves against barbarism and the despotic rule of a fetish-priest who indulged in human sacrifices. The artwork they stole was kept by officers or sold to the US and Germany to cover some of the costs of the military action. A few pieces were destroyed during the Second World War.

Benin was a different city now, a witchcraft hotspot (by Aunty Janice's reckoning), with a reputation for armed robberies and modern-day people trafficking. In true Nigerian fashion, the city assiduously downplayed its former illustriousness; one would never guess that one of Africa's greatest empires once preceded the open drains, low-tech Internet cafés and nondescript 1970s architecture laid out before me. Bas-reliefs are still part of the city's cultural aesthetic – I saw a few on shopfronts and residential gates here and there, although the depicted images were now Christian angels with African faces – but Benin's past splendour felt very far away, almost folkloric.

Benin's former glories had now retreated behind the four walls of its museum. Reaching the place felt like a life-threatening challenge, seemingly designed to test one's commitment to its antiquities. The museum was sequestered within the confines of a busy roundabout that forced visitors to sprint across four lanes of ruthless traffic to reach it.

‘You run very well!' an okada man shouted after I narrowly avoided being mown down by him. Mildly shaken, I walked across a tatty compound to the museum door. An eighteen-month-old girl in a white party dress waddled towards my legs, wrapped her arms around my knees and grinned up at me.

‘Does she know you?' a woman asked with friendly curiosity.

I was equally bemused. ‘No.'

The woman was the museum's caretaker and mother of the toddler. I paid her the entrance fee and began examining the artefacts
on display. Every object, no matter how minor its function, was designed exquisitely: the sixteenth-century bronze kola nut container shaped like a fish; the bronze cock that was once displayed on altars dedicated to dead queen mothers; the leopard-shaped container for storing water used during the oba's ritual hand washing. I had to restrain myself from stroking the carved ivory armlets, ivory flutes and gorgeous carved elephant tusks.

Since the British invasion of 1897, many of Benin's finest artefacts have been scattered and hoarded around the world, including in the British Museum, the Louvre in Paris and the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Still, the Benin City National Museum had plenty of wonders on display. My favourites were a gorgeous bronze bust sculpture of a queen mother from the early sixteenth century and a divine pair of stools sent by an oba to a king of Portugal some time in the same century (the museum was vague with the facts). The bases of the stools were decorated with frog and monkey bas-reliefs, the stems had been carved into the form of coiled pythons, and the rounded seats on top had intricate carvings lining their perimeters.

Beneath some beautiful bronze plaques layered with bas-relief carvings, the museum caretaker sat and breastfed her youngest child while chatting to a man who exhibited an in-depth knowledge of the heritage sector.

‘The state of Nigerian museums is terrible . . . terrible,' the man said. ‘In the sixties and seventies Ghanaians used to come to Nigerian museums for training. Now they have overtaken us.' His name was Maurice Archibong, and he turned out to be a travel writer for one of the national newspapers. We exchanged numbers and agreed to continue the conversation in Lagos in a month's time.

Across town, I searched for Chief Ogiamien's house, the only imperial building not razed to the ground by the British. The geriatric building stood next to a noisy motorbike repair garage, the latter overshadowing the former with its modern vigour. Ogiamien's
house was made of red earth with the characteristic horizontal grooves running along its exterior walls, and bas-relief carvings decorating one of the doors. There was nothing, no plaque or sign, to celebrate this sole remnant of empire. Metal chairs and low tables cluttered its courtyard.

At the back of the house, among the complex of rooms, a smiley elderly woman sat in an alleyway. I hoped she could tell me more about the house, but she didn't understand English. As I took photos, she gestured to me, speaking in Bini. Unintelligible as her words were, the international language of begging was easy to decipher. I dashed her
40 and left.

 

The oba lineage still continues in Benin, although these days the oba's palace is fighting for supremacy in a world where money and political power wield far more influence than traditional titles. In 2007, the oba of Benin banished the
esama
– a non-hereditary title-holder – from the royal palace after the esama was accused of acting as if he were the oba himself. He certainly enjoyed a lot of power. The esama is the father of the wealthy ex-governor of Edo state, a man who was under investigation for corruption. In an audacious move, the esama ignored the oba's traditional New Year ceremony at the palace, and instead invited several high chiefs to a ceremony of his own.

Catching wind of this, the enraged oba suspended the esama from the palace for flouting palace protocol (an ‘abominable act'), and barred him and the naughty chiefs from wearing palace paraphernalia or partaking in palace activities.

This wasn't the first time the oba and the esama had clashed. The esama – ranked sixth in the palace but number one in wealth – was accused of acting above his station when he decorated a visiting Jamaican ex-prime minister with royal beads, a ritual traditionally performed by the oba. The ‘upstart' esama also received Ghanaian and Yoruba royalty at the airport in a sumptuous parade before
inviting his guests to
his
palace, not the oba's. The esama's son defended his father's behaviour, saying that the esama ought to use his wealth and influence to ‘protect' the royal traditions. But the oba considered it an erosion of his status.

Age and seniority used to matter a lot more in Nigerian society. As a child, my older relatives would conclude arguments with me by deploying that most infuriating of non-sequiturs, ‘I am your senior!'; any chocolate disputes with Zina, my twin, were routinely settled in her favour because she entered the world ten minutes before me. Age was a prime criterion for competency, respect and authority, and it still imbues certain old men with the belief that they are omniscient demigods beyond reproach. When, for example, President Obasanjo's son accused the then vice-president of corruption, the VP's spokesman issued this response in a national newspaper: ‘The VP does not belong to a culture in which children trade words with elders . . . Young men who attack men old enough to be their father are dismissed as rude and uncultured. This boy will not be glorified with a response.' The ‘boy' in question was a grown man with a PhD.