At the chimpanzee enclosure, a chimp beat her chest and stretched out her arm to us, demanding food. She threw banana peel at me, but showed Sonny more respect by doing a press-up in front of him.
‘She’s greeting you,’ James explained to Sonny. He told us that the vulval swelling of the chimp’s backside signified that she was in heat and therefore receptive to males. In another part of the enclosure I watched a long-limbed, long-faced chimp with silvery-white fur enjoying his own company. Unlike the others, he was a lowland chimp, native to Equatorial Guinea and Central Africa. He reclined on his back and gazed into my camera lens, a poseur on a photo shoot. A few feet away, a baby lay on top of his mother. She fondled his toes while he pulled savagely at her eyelids and scraped out flecks of dirt.
For the first time, I noticed how closely the soles of the chimpanzees’ feet resemble human feet. The texture – the leathery, faint brown swirls – were identical to mine. Seeing it kindled in me an intense affinity with these animals, stronger than I’d ever felt before. The possibility that they may become extinct within a century or two was too catastrophic an outcome to contemplate, the near-equivalent of losing an entire race of humanity. Liza said that roughly 200,000 chimps are left in the African wilderness. Numerically, this was no disaster but, she reminded me, most of the apes live in disparate, isolated teams with no chance of mixing their genes with other groups; each gene pool was tiny.
‘We don’t want a brother and sister to be sexing, but what can you do?’ James shrugged.
After looking at the enclosures, James’s colleague Peter took Sonny and me on a walk though the canopy. We filed along a narrow, elevated steel bridge that swung 20 metres or so above the forest floor. It was 450 metres long. Peter strolled along it, walking incredibly quickly without breaking a sweat, but Sonny wasn’t so nimble. When we reached one of the viewing platforms built around a tree trunk, he asked to take a break.
‘Go ahead, I’ll wait here,’ he said, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. Anxiety lined his forehead. He hadn’t told anyone he was afraid of heights. Unfortunately for Sonny, the canopy walk was a one-way system, meaning he had no choice but to shuffle behind me and Peter, not knowing where to look.
‘My hand dey shake, o,’ he stammered. ‘I don’t look down . . . It will turn my brain.’
Peter smiled. This wasn’t the first time he’d escorted someone who was scared of heights. He once took the governor and his entourage on a walk along the canopy bridge during a state visit.
‘It took them hours, not minutes!’ he grinned, imitating the governor’s jittery, mincing steps.
Back at the base camp, I excitedly told Liza about my deepened love for chimpanzees. She lamented that the state showed little interest in the animals. ‘We don’t get any money from the government,’ she said. All her cash was raised during her annual three-month returns to the US. Nigerian zoo curators were corrupt and indifferent towards the animals’ survival. In 2002, the woman in charge of Ibadan University’s zoo was sacked after illegally selling four endangered western lowland gorillas to a zoo in Malaysia and pocketing $1 million.
‘Nigerians have been cowed into submission,’ Liza said from her wooden cabin office overlooking the mountain face. ‘They prefer to do nothing and live under this “contractocracy”. People like you should come back here and help this country.’ I gave her a donation for the ranch before saying goodbye. Walking back to the car, I was simultaneously buoyed with inspiration and freighted by obligation.
Sonny and I continued on the highway north towards the Obudu Cattle Ranch, close to the Cameroonian border. I was looking forward to this portion of the trip. The cattle ranch was the jewel among Nigeria’s few tourist resorts, an upscale hotel set in the rarified heights of the Cameroon Mountain range. Spending a night here would be my one concession to luxury on this trip.
Towards the foot of the mountain, the road became less congested and was obsequiously surfaced with better tarmac for the Obudu Ranch guests who travel along it. Other guests prefer to skip the road and arrive by helicopter. Sonny and I wound higher and higher up the mountain, into white mists that clung to the grassy slopes, rising around us like sleeping green giants. Palm trees gave way to a scattering of temperate trees covered in beautiful red leaves. We were leaving behind the heat, humidity and mosquitoes of the tropical lowlands and ascending to heaven. I immediately felt invigorated by the drop in temperature. No longer was I bullied or suffocated by tropical heat; there was space to take stock and think.
The ranch started life as a colonial farm established by Scots in the early 1950s. It then expanded to become a retreat where ruddy-faced expats could escape the heat. Now it was a getaway for well-off Nigerians.
At the main hotel, I offloaded my bags, said goodbye to Sonny and checked into my room. I did a quick tour, ecstatic at the power shower, the patterned wallpaper, the soft clean carpet, the TV and the remote control with – praise be – functioning batteries!
Lunch was a solitary affair in the emptyish dining room. The silence was surreal, and so was the decor – three haystacks with wine bottles perched decoratively on top of them, and a large model cow standing beside them. The menu was limited in its range but not in the audacity of its prices. I had to take a deep breath when I saw that the main course cost 5,000.
After lunch, I took a walk outside, past the tennis courts, down a sloping path and into a bucolic picture book. The green hills and valleys were reminiscent of the English Yorkshire Dales. Fresian cows munched on the yellowing grass; horses grazed by fields of potato, cabbage, lettuce and carrots. Feeling serene, I walked down a path to a leafy grotto where a small bridge arched over a river that bubbled beneath a 3-metre waterfall. Behind me, a golf course undulated into the distance, its trees looking fresh and ghostly in the mist. It was glorious, almost unreal.
A chilly late-afternoon wind picked up and sprinkled goose bumps over my arms. I hurried back to my room and listened in a vegetative state to the hectoring yap of CNN reporters. After dinner, back on my firm bed and staring at the carpeted, wood-carved comforts around me, I felt faintly uneasy. Wasn’t all this quiet, cleanliness and cool air what I’d been craving these last few months? Solitude was partly to blame, but there was more to it. Dare I say it, I think I was missing the chaos, the jagga jagga of Nigerian life. The term jagga jagga, slang for ‘messed up’, was made famous by hip-hop artist Eedris Abdulkareem in his song of the same name, which criticised contemporary Nigerian society. I half longed for the infuriating but amusing lack of protocol I’d experienced on my journey so far: room service staff lingering in the doorway for conversation; the receptionist asking for my telephone number; hotel cleaners arguing with one another along the corridors (‘Don’t talk to me as if I am your boyfriend. I have not requested a co-wife, so stop bothering me.’). At Obudu, everyone was perfectly compliant and dull. The place felt too clean and quiet. It reminded me of Ewell in England, where I grew up. Nothing ever happened there: no dramas, serious crime, water shortages, robberies, glamour, excitement, flavour – nothing that might affect one’s equilibrium. Its dullness was the trade-off for material comfort and stability, and so was Obudu’s.
After breakfast the next morning, I strolled in the dewy morning greyness and exchanged greetings with a passing old couple, who were one of the few pairs of guests at the ranch during this post-Christmas period. At the top of a hill I sat on a bench and watched cows chewing the cud on the grassy slopes, and the sweetest kid goat bleating forlornly for its mother. Within minutes, the mist rolled in amazingly quickly, erasing the hills, cows and trees, and wrapping me in a sea of white oblivion. I strolled down to the ranch’s Beehive Natural Reserve, a wedge of forest at the bottom of a hill with a tropical microclimate all of its own. In a matter of minutes I went from the Yorkshire Dales to a humid rainforest rustling with dewy, hundred-year-old ferns.
The afternoon sun vaporised the mist, allowing me to take a ride on the cable car, the ‘longest in Africa’. T
he car floated above the hills and cows grazing next to a precipice I hadn’t realised was there. As I moved above and past it, the ground plunged into a valley hundreds of feet deep, giving the impression that the cable car was taking off vertically. Yellow-grassed mountain peaks jutted in every direction, interspersed with red-leafed trees. And it was deathly quiet, the cable car moving along as if propelled on silent wings.
Three maintenance workers passed me in the opposite direction and waved hello, nonchalantly reclining in a shallow metal crate and looking perfectly at ease with the frightening altitude. Suddenly, my cable car stopped. Perhaps the electricity had cut out. My car hung noiselessly, suspended in mid-air. Fighting an urge to throw my notebook out of the window, I eyed the valley floor through the glass floor. For three minutes I sat back and daydreamed in the cool, tranquil air. Stillness of this kind was hard to come by in urban Nigeria; I inhaled deeply, savouring every moment, amazed at the restorative power of a few minutes of dead air. My mind was made up: this is what I ultimately needed, to be away from the commotion of people and okadas, and away from the oppressive sterility of quiet hotels – hanging in the middle of absolutely nowhere, in a mist of white nothingness. Sometimes, changing altitude, not latitude, was the best way to find peace.
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.
14
Behind the Mask
Benin
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.
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