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The debate about whether antiquities should remain in their countries of origin simmers on. Some people believe that no country can enjoy automatic claim on ancient artefacts found within their borders because there is no evidence that the people who created the antiquities are direct ancestors of the present-day citizens of the region. Yale professor Kwame Appiah has written: ‘We don't know whether Nok sculptures were commissioned by kings or commoners; we don't know whether the people who made them and the people who paid for them thought of them as belonging to the kingdom, to a man, to a lineage, to the gods. One thing we know for sure, however, is that they didn't make them for Nigeria.'

But Appiah went on to say that if an artefact is ‘found in a country, and no one can establish an existing claim on it, the government gets to decide what to do with it'. He added that if artefacts such as the Nok terracottas are of high cultural value, ‘It would be better to think of them [the government] as trustees for humanity.'

I felt cheated that I should travel all this way to Jos – the source – and find some of the least fine examples of Nok terracottas. But after experiencing the crumbling replica buildings of the Archaeological Museum, a treasonous corner of my mind made peace with the foreign custody of some of our antiquities. At least they're guaranteed
better security and maintenance in museums abroad, and will be viewed by a wider audience. Without these artefacts in the West, I think the world might know a little less about Nigerian history.

 

Walking along the streets of Jos afterwards, I came across the National Film Institute. Curious about its activities, I decided to investigate the premises. After passing through the unmanned entrance, I entered a brightly lit warehouse, its shelves stacked with celluloid negatives of Nigerian life dating back to 1932. The institute had bought many of its films from British archives in London, and its staff in Jos cleaned, restored and preserved the celluloid tapes. I wanted to know if they had any footage of my father that perhaps I hadn't seen before.

The lady in charge asked me what I was looking for.

‘I'd like to watch some of these reels.'

‘You need to have written permission,' she replied.

‘How long will it take?'

‘Two or three days. There is a lot of bureaucracy. Once they sign and give permission then we can let you watch the film.'

Disappointingly, it was my last day in Jos. I explained to the woman my reasons for coming here.

‘Ken Saro-Wiwa was your father?' asked a visitor, a strapping pale-skinned woman. Her big eyes widened and a gap-toothed smile lit up her face. ‘Oh, he was a hero! He made me aware of how important it is to stand up for your rights,' she said. ‘Because of your father I decided to make people here aware of their rights. Me, I am Igbo, but I want people here to fight for what is theirs.'

The woman, Ruth, was referring to the Birom people. These Christians are indigenous to the Jos region but these days find themselves competing for jobs and farmland with Hausa and Fulani migrants from the north. Here in Nigeria's middle belt, the Islamic north meets the Christian south, two dissonant communities with
a common need for survival. Biroms and Hausas have learnt to live side by side, but the peoples are like two mildly combustible elements that occasionally sputter on contact beneath the city's placid surface. In 2001, those sputters erupted into a full-blown explosion.

It began during the local government election, which was contested between the incumbent People's Democratic Party (PDP) – a mainly Christian party – and the largely Muslim All Nigerian People's Party (ANPP). After losing in a massive landslide, the ANPP accused the PDP of electoral fraud. Scuffles between their rival supporters drew upon old religious tensions, although the fundamental problem was economic.

Nigeria's oil-reliant economy runs on a system of patronage in which the ruling party dishes out jobs and oil contracts to its friends and supporters. Those who are kept out of this largesse must fend for themselves in the tiny, non-oil sectors. To some Nigerians, losing an election is equivalent to facing an economic depression, inspiring panic, profound fear and bitterness. Elections become high-stakes affairs, in which human lives become expendable.

After the election results, mobs of largely unemployed young men grabbed sticks, knives, guns and machetes, and took to the streets. People were stabbed and burned, churches razed, bodies lay unclaimed in mosques. Seven thousand people evacuated their homes. But the episode, like most in Nigeria, only lasted a few days – the seams of our society fray without actually tearing apart. The army restored order, and ordinary life resumed once again in Jos, its inter-ethnic bitterness simmering down to indoor grumbles and jostling for resources.

Ruth, though an ethnic Igbo, had lived in Jos for years, and her loyalties lay firmly with the Christian Birom people.

‘These Hausa-Fulanis have taken over,' she complained, highlighting the numerous Muslim-owned businesses in town. ‘And the Biroms are working as security men,' she fumed, nodding at the security guard sitting and listening on a table nearby. ‘The Birom
youths say, “We go to Kaduna . . . the Hausas are there; we come home to Jos and we cannot get job here.”'

Ruth was particularly irked by the voting power she claimed Hausas enjoyed as a result of their larger numbers.

‘The Hausa man can have four wives and ten children with each wife. The Birom man has just one wife and, let's say, four children. Come election time, who has the most power? There's no border in the north with Niger state. A Hausa man's brother can come down here, vote, and return. You cannot do that sort of thing in the south! These Hausas buy a plot of land with nothing but
goats
on it, then they claim fifty people live there. Oh it
boils
my stomach.'

In matters as fraught as these I couldn't be sure where the truth lay. Nevertheless, I loved Ruth's spirit. It was a gust of fresh air that cleared the cobwebs of female compliance so prevalent (at least on the surface) in these parts.

‘Didn't the government hold a national census recently?' I asked.

‘That census was rigged as well,' Ruth harrumphed. Something had to be done about it, and she wasn't going to be a mere spectator. ‘I don't believe in all this “turn the other cheek”,' she declared. The security guard grunted in agreement. ‘God knew that eighty per cent of human beings are right-handed. If I come and slap you,' – Ruth pretended to slap my left cheek with her right hand – ‘you can defend yourself. You can use your right hand to stop me, you see? So you must fight and stand up for your rights.' Her logic confused me slightly, but I was enjoying it nevertheless. I'd never heard such an entertaining argument against the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy.

‘When you pray, you must keep one eye
open
,' Ruth said. She bent her head and clasped her hands in prayer while her bulging left eye scanned her surroundings with comic suspicion. The security guy chuckled with me. ‘If you do not vote, you cannot complain to God that the election was rigged,' she continued. ‘But if you register, and the election was rigged, you can say, “God, I stand before
you,”' – she raised her hand, still clutching her mobile phone – ‘“I voted for my man but he was denied.”'

‘I try to encourage women to register to vote. Some will say, “Ay, but my shop . . . I cannot leave my shop.” But if she does not vote, how can she complain when the election is rigged? You must stand up and be counted! So I try to create awareness among people, one by one.'

‘How do you do that?'

‘I speak to people with influence, who can spread the awareness further. I go around and disciple this person, then the next. Your father's struggle touched me.' I glowed with gratitude. ‘He created a disciple in me,' she beamed. ‘Your father's blood speaks!'

 

 

The beautiful morning sunshine poured grace onto an inglorious scene. Cars clogged the gas station, more than twenty vehicles lined up in a convoy that snaked out beyond the forecourt and onto the road leading out of town. Our driver was hoping to refuel for our journey to Maiduguri, a city in Nigeria's far north-east. Oil shortages seemed to happen more frequently in Jos than in any other town I'd visited, although none of my fellow passengers knew why.

‘I think maybe they are withholding oil because the government will soon raise the oil price,' one man suggested.

Everyone in the car kissed their teeth and mopped their faces with handkerchiefs.

‘Sometimes the advertised prices are not the same as the prices at the pump,' complained the man next to me.

I climbed out of the car to stretch my legs. All along the queue, drivers were vacating their cars to speak to the station staff. Sometimes, the conversations resulted in their moving faster up the line. Feeling restless, I peered into the window of the forecourt office.

‘Are you looking for something?' asked a man wearing a baseball cap and leaning against a car, a toothpick wedged smarmily between his teeth. ‘I am the manager here.'

‘I was just looking around,' I said. ‘How come there's so little gas?'

‘Are you a journalist?'

‘No, I just want to understand the situation. I don't live in Nigeria.'

‘You know, a Nigerian always answers a question with a question,' he grinned evasively.

Oil shortages are a regular part of Nigerian life, and the cliché about ‘selling ice to Eskimos' rings embarrassingly true here. Although we're the twelfth-largest oil producer in the world, we still import billions of dollars worth of refined fuel because our government hasn't built enough refineries. Ordinary Nigerians speculatively grumble that the oil ministers (who have lucrative contracts to import refined oil) deliberately maintain the status quo, in order to make more money. They cause fuel shortages at the forecourts of their privately owned gas stations by selling their oil to black marketeers (at an inflated price) instead of regular car owners. These black market vendors are generally young men who stand on the roadside with cartloads of petrol cans. Every driver heading out of town has to decide whether to wait at the forecourts or take their chances and find fuel along the highway.

‘Why are there shortages?' I again asked the gas station manager. Saying nothing, he folded his arms and grinned some more, exuding the arrogance of a man who has benefited from flouting the rules. He tipped his head back and inhaled. But just as he opened his mouth to speak, my driver ordered me back into the car – our tank was full, it was time to go. I marched back to the vehicle, annoyed that he had been let off the hook. Perhaps it was for the best, anyway. I was slamming myself against a brick wall of selfishness, and nothing productive would come of it.

The road east to Maiduguri cut through beautiful yellow grassy plains and large boulders that had been defaced by the names of electoral candidates. Dotting the roadside for miles were baobab
trees, with their characteristic upside-down appearance; their thick trunks sprouted skinny branches that resembled roots, reaching towards the sky in petrified supplication. Between my many naps, I glimpsed towering anthills, Hausa cow herders resting their arms on sticks laid across their shoulders, and women on the roadside selling pyramids of purple onions and supernaturally red tomatoes. I wanted to stay on that road forever.

In the afternoon I reached Maiduguri, a hot Islamic city slowly being buried alive by Saharan sands blowing in from the north. Maiduguri once lay less than an hour's drive from the mighty Lake Chad, on Nigeria's north-eastern border. But that distance has stretched to more than two hours. One of the world's most voluminous bodies of freshwater is being sucked dry by irrigation, dwindling rainfall and desertification caused by the felling of trees. The lake, once an expanse of 26,000 square kilometres in the 1960s, now occupies a humbling 1,500 square kilometres.

My guidebook raved about one particular state-run hotel in Maiduguri. Arriving at the unlit lobby, I stood at the reception desk, waiting for someone to attend to me. Several minutes passed. I flopped into an old armchair and stared at an abstract painting on the wall next to the presidential photo.

Eventually, a very cheerful man introducing himself as Columbus trotted limply into the lobby, as if his limbs were controlled by a puppeteer's strings. He looked drunk.

‘Saro-Wiwa!' he exclaimed as I filled out the check-in form. ‘You are from Rivers State.'

‘Yes.'

‘I am so happy to see a fellow southerner! I am from Imo.' His round face and bulbous nose came from my neck of the woods, though his apparent inebria cancelled out any sense of affinity.

Columbus led me up a wide staircase to my room, furnished some time in the early 1980s and seemingly untouched since then. The 1970s-style cylinder lampshades, circular tables and squares of
ancient carpeting looked unstained and unworn, as if mummified by the shroud of dust coating the entire room. The water pump was broken. In the bathroom, Columbus showed me the buckets of water I would have to use for bathing and flushing the toilet. I half wished I'd bought a tent and slept outside. Without running water or electricity, I felt I was staying in a glorified shack and paying for some pretty bathroom tiles and carpeting.

‘This is your towel,' Columbus told me, patting the towel and throwing up a swirling cloud of dust.

‘Maiduguri is very dusty,' he said.
Or perhaps
, I thought to myself,
the room hasn't been cleaned in a while?
He moved around the room with exaggerated meticulousness, dusting down the tables, chairs and bed coverings. ‘I always like to help my people,' he said. ‘I will give you discount. I don't want no wahala for you.' He reduced the tariff from an audacious
10,000 down to a slap-in-the-face
5,000. I didn't have the strength to argue.