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‘Because I'm the man of the house,' he beamed.

Simon introduced me to Sukur's current xidi in the royal compound. His name was Gizik Kinakakau, a pleasant and relaxed eighty-seven-year-old who had outlived his teeth and much of his eyesight. His wrinkled, reddish-brown skin almost matched his brown djellaba and headscarf, which he draped over his kufi hat. A former cattle rearer, he was elected as the xidi in 1983. I asked him questions while Simon translated, his Sukur words and sentences sounding ten times as long as my English ones.

‘Why were you chosen?' I asked the xidi.

‘I never dreamt I would become king, but since the beginning I never fought with anyone,' Kinakakau said in gentle tones. ‘I always helped people and made sacrifices. I am a poor man. I didn't have money to give to anyone to elect me.'

Poverty seems to be the only recipe for maintaining humility in our leaders. I suspected that the xidi's lack of economic power made him far less autocratic and corrupt than the politicians in government. His humble leadership was the very opposite of that of the siren-wailing buffoons occupying the state governorships. He told me that he happily accepts criticism from his people: after the Zoaku festival held every September, the Sukur community holds an annual meeting during which the people are given the chance to wag a finger at their king and find fault with his leadership. The Xidi said he even apologises if he's done something wrong, despite having the power to order a villager to sacrifice their valuable ram or bull when a visitor arrives.

‘How many wives do you have?' I asked him.

‘I have one wife.'

‘Just the one?'

Everyone laughed at my surprise.

‘I don't like to have more than one wife,' the Xidi shook his head. ‘I once had a second wife but we divorced after two years.'

‘What was the problem?'

He smiled. ‘If a man has many wives in his house, the problems will be many.' Kinakakau's restrained loins had produced just five children, most of whom lived in Sukur.

His powers were gradually fading. In traditional times, the Xidi had the final word during community disputes. These days the law courts deal with them, but Gizik didn't resent the modern legal system as it deters the cow thieves who used to steal from Sukur with impunity. The kingdom has changed in other ways, too. People once walked all the way to Maiduguri when they needed big-city goods, and herbalists, not hospitals, would minister to people's afflictions. They now make the journey in three hours by car, and get medical treatment there; the kingdom is opening up to the wider world.

Once upon a time, my village bore the same placid simplicity. I found myself envying Sukur's isolation, so high up in the mountains, away from the predation, the oil wells and the armed gangs that stirred so much fever down in the tropics.

‘Do you want Sukur to change or stay the same?'

‘I am praying for the government to take serious action to bring social amenities,' the Xidi said. ‘If that happens I will be very happy.' Sukur needs a secondary school, a hospital, a craft training centre and water ‘so the place will be more developed than it is now'. A cable car would be an added bonus for both tourists and the Sukur people. The Xidi turned and pointed towards the top of the mountain. A small crowd of people were shuffling slowly up the slopes, hoisting a teenage girl above their shoulders. She had sprained her ankle, Simon explained. ‘You see,' the Xidi said, ‘this is the problem people are facing here presently. We need health facilities.'

‘Have you been anywhere outside Sukur?' I asked.

‘I have visited Borno, Yobe, Gombe, Taraba and Cameroon,' he said. They were all neighbouring states.

‘Did you like these places?'

‘Since the beginning Sukur has been a blessed land. I learned this from my grandfather. If I stay in Maiduguri I can't be king,' he chuckled. ‘So I prefer to stay here in Sukur.'

Although it was time for me to return south again, a part of me wanted to stay here too. From Sukur's splendid elevation, I stared at the distant horizon towards the rest of Nigeria, and for a second I yearned for this country to throw itself back to an Iron Age of sorts. I fancied being in a place where the gap between expectation and reality didn't leave such a frustrating chasm; where I was at the mercy of nature's caprices, not corruption's iron fist; and I was ruled by a leader who, blessed with the miracle of humble introspection, actually listened to my gripes. Relatively speaking, that seemed like heaven.

 

 

I stepped off the aeroplane into the Calabar evening, and inhaled. The vegetative aroma of moist tropical air steamed through my nostrils, a welcome change from the desiccated sands of the north's Saharan air. I was very happy to be back down south, and especially pleased to be in Calabar.

‘You can't miss Calabar,' my uncle Owens had told me over the phone. Calabar, capital of Cross River State in the south-east, is the favourite city of many Nigerians. It's Nigerian good governance made manifest, a city where a little vision and a smidgen of ambition had made it as well groomed as Abuja but without the sterility or manufactured ambience; the one place where Nigeria can exhibit itself to the world without shame. On Calabar's spotless streets, civic pride was shockingly abundant: colourful Christmas ribbons still lay draped across government buildings, across the fire station and even the Mr Fans fast-food place; public bins with PLEASE USE ME signs lined the roads (this, in a country where most cities don't have any refuse bins). Roadside billboards reminded passers-by that AIDS IS REAL, SEX IS RISKY and you should PAY YOUR TAXES. One billboard displayed photos of the ‘clean roads' and ‘good drainage' that come from paying the taxman.

The local Efik people credited all this to their long-standing
culture of cleanliness (sniffily contrasted with the Yorubas in Lagos), and the work of Cross River's ambitious ex-governor Donald Duke, who chose not to suckle at the teat of national oil revenue but to make an asset out of Cross River's natural beauty instead, turning it into Nigeria's tourism capital. I wanted Calabar to be the capital city, too. Deep down, I suspect it likes to think it is. In the town centre, a gargantuan Nigerian flag – visible from miles away – flapped in the river breeze, an emblem of this ambitious usurper of a city.

A bright and enervating sun burned the sky the next morning. I flagged down an okada and was surprised when the heavy-set driver silently handed me a protective helmet. Dismissing his orders, I rested the helmet on my knee, reluctant to dishevel my hair, but the okada man soon spotted my bare head in the wing mirror and applied the brakes.

‘You
must
wear the helmet,' he insisted for the second time. ‘It's the law.' I looked around and saw other women okada passengers with their helmets perched begrudgingly on top of their braided hairdos. It really was the law. Two months in Nigeria was all it had taken for me to capitulate to the culture of transgression. Throwing plastic bottles into ditches or ignoring my seatbelt had become second nature to me. But here in Calabar I was forced to relearn good citizenship.

We zoomed towards the riverside, down a serpentine road winding through fresh lawns and trees, bound for Calabar's National Museum. The museum was in a yellow, pinewood colonial building with overhanging eaves and verandahs. Raised on stilts, it perched on a hill that overlooked the magnificent, palm-fringed estuary of the Cross River, from where shiploads of slaves were sent to the Americas 500 years ago. The museum was the best in the country, stuffed with Calabari artefacts that detailed how the slave trade transformed the Efiks from fishermen and farmers into Anglophile traders.

The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão is thought to have first landed ashore in the Calabar region in 1482. By 1505 slaves from the area were being sent abroad. Selection for slavery was a broad, equal-opportunities affair: war criminals, prisoners of war, debtors, insubordinate children or servants, weakened enemies and their families all found themselves shackled and marched onto boats destined for São Tomé or the West Indies. Most slaves were seized during raids (organised by local Efik slave traders) from Igboland, plus the lands of the Ibibio people, the Cameroon highlands, and even as far as the Benue River basin towards central Nigeria.

This manpower was exchanged for European goods: tobacco, rum, brandy, gin, guns, gunpowder, cannon, swords, cloth, furniture, brass basins, beads, mirrors and champagne (not much has changed in the latter respect – Nigeria was the world's biggest importer of champagne during the oil boom of the early 1980s). The Efik chiefs – like many of our rulers of today – didn't bother to learn the technologies that created these foreign products. But they coveted the items, along with the British lifestyle. English-style houses and furniture were imported as symbols of prestige and power designed to impress the chiefs' African and European trading partners. The houses, prefabricated in Liverpool, had wooden floors, chandeliers, cabinets and framed photographs on their walls. In a fabulously ostentatious move, an Efik king called Eyo even laid down a red carpet on the floor of his extra-long royal canoe. In the centre of the boat was a tiny roofed cabin, where King Eyo would sit on plump cushions.

In 1843, Efik chiefs invited teachers and missionaries to use their land in and around Calabar. Decades of contact with Europeans began to influence Efik culture quite heavily. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Efik nobility had Christianised their family names. Surnames such as Effiom became Ephraim, and Okon became Hogan. Other names, including Duke and Henshaw, were also adopted, while fiefdoms such as Atakpa became known as Duke Town.

Calabar's elites discarded the traditional
ofon isin
(waist cloth) and
ofon idem
(top cloth) used during ceremonial occasions, and replaced them with Victorian top hats, brass helmets, medallions and masonry lodge aprons. Efik ladies, paying no heed to the tropical heat, wore flowing Victorian dresses with matching elbow-length gloves. The museum displayed old photographs of these Calabar kings and queens in their European-style crowns, posing with starchy Victorian sombreness while sitting on thrones, appearing regal yet somehow diminished by their imitation. But contact with outsiders brought genuine benefits. Many Efiks became literate, and by the eighteenth century were noting down their trading business in diaries. The early colonial administration relied on them as administrative officers, which led to the Efiks' mid-twentieth-century dominance in Nigeria's civil service.

Donald Duke, a descendant of this elite, became governor of Cross River State in 2000. Considered one of the more proactive politicians, Duke was among the few governors not to be investigated for corruption by the EFCC while in office. Under his stewardship, he cleaned up Calabar, made it more attractive to investors, and Cross River became Nigeria's premier state for tourism.

Calabar's riverside, once witness to the forced export of slaves, was now an entertainment area. Early that evening, I visited the Marina Resort, a new waterfront development further west from the museum. Children squealed on a merry-go-round, and couples strolled along a jetty that protruded into the shimmering Cross River. Fishermen hauled nets beside moored speedboats. An ordinary scene in most other countries, but in Nigeria such a relaxed, man-made environment was worth talking about. And, it seemed, worth dressing up for: one couple clothed their sullen twin boys in black shirts, white suits and black trilby hats perched at raffish angles. They looked like reluctant extras from Michael Jackson's ‘Smooth Criminal' video.

Opposite the merry-go-round, the authorities had built a modern waxwork slave museum. The lights weren't working in the first room I entered. Out of the unsettling dimness loomed a wooden slave ship, where the tops of several human heads and several pairs of feet poked out of the vessel's side, startling me. They belonged to the waxwork models of slaves tethered on deck, but in the shadows of the unlit room their heads, and especially their feet, looked terrifyingly lifelike.

Other rooms contained waxwork sets representing various scenarios from the slave trade. There was a slave market, people tending fields of sugar cane, slaves being hung or emancipated. All the waxwork figures had gratifyingly authentic-looking Afro hair on their heads (Western reproductions of Afro hair usually involve an unrealistic woolly fuzz). Background speakers emitted the barks of vicious dogs chasing a runaway slave, or the pained howls of slaves being branded by hot irons for identification. It was harrowing, shudder-inducing stuff, exactly as slavery should be portrayed, without the guilt, the kid gloves, or the dispassion of the slave museum in Badagry. I knew I could rely on Nigerians to present this chapter of history in a raw, indelicate fashion. How I wished we held the cultural monopoly on the portrayal of African history.

 

Back at the hotel that evening, I ordered dinner at the front desk. Emmanuel, the receptionist, was a very sweet young man who went out of his way to make my stay as comfortable as possible. He was attentive, professional, timely, and took care to caress my ego at every opportunity, bombarding me with a volley of superlatives and compliments. He was everything one could possibly wish for in hotel staff. In a repeat of the night before, I requested rice and goat meat stew. Emmanuel called the kitchen to place my order, diligently setting the phone on loudspeaker to prove that my order was being expedited.

‘Do you have goat?' he asked the cook.

‘No,' she replied.

Emmanuel: ‘Do you have chicken?'

Cook: ‘No.'

Emmanuel: ‘Do you have rice and stew?'