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I'm convinced that gerontocracy stifles individual creativity and innovation. But returning to Nigeria made me realise how much the country's poverty is undermining this old system, anyway: my relative wealth gave me a lot of leverage for a person of my age – gerontocracy is gradually being replaced by corrupt plutocracy.

 

‘We do not talk of his name,' a staff worker at the oba's palace said, wagging her finger sternly. In asking for her opinion on the esama, I had committed a major faux pas.

‘But—'

‘I said we do
not
talk of him here.' She raised her palm in the air. ‘You are a foreigner here, so you didn't know . . . but we do not talk of him.' She blinked and shifted huffily in her seat.

I was visiting the palace, or
eguae
, set in a sprawling, modernised
compound in the middle of Benin City. The palace hummed with activity. Flags flew everywhere, police strolled about, and royal title-holders donned traditional robes and beads, hurrying from one place to the next. The oba spends most of his time inside the palace, emerging only for festivals and other royal functions. The place retained a certain mystique and was the subject of constant rumours, including whispers that the oba's many wives walk in permanent silence, prohibited from uttering a word.

Could I get a tour of the palace? I asked the oba's staff. They said no. Instead, they offered me a booklet about the history and rules of the palace. One page read:

As I read the book, a portly palace staff member called Veronica sat me down at her desk by the palace courtyard. She was a brisk, stocky, short-haired woman whose eyes were windows to a very tenacious soul.

‘Where are you from?' she asked.

‘Port Harcourt.'

‘But you tok like Ingleesh pessin.' I immediately sensed she wasn't asking out of innocent curiosity.

‘That's because I went to university in London.'

‘Where did you attend secondary school?'

‘In Nigeria,' I lied, trying to blink casually at her.

‘Which secondary school?' Veronica demanded. She was shaking me down for information, taking detailed inventory of my answers and my life. I searched the sky for a response but gave up when my hesitation lasted too long.

‘I went to school in England,' I conceded. The confession would cost me, I knew. Veronica turned to her colleague and said something in their Bini dialect. She mentioned ‘London' a couple of times, in tones of restrained glee, as if she'd just won a mini lottery. In her eyes, I had attended secondary school in England, therefore I was rich. I was ready to leave the palace, especially now that they wouldn't give me a tour of the place. But Veronica kept me in my seat. She wanted me to buy a book about Benin and a DVD of the oba's coronation.

‘
3,000,' she said in a freshly adopted salesman's pitch. ‘It's a good price . . . good price.' Zealously, she tapped her fingers on the table and eyeballed me. I bargained downwards but didn't have the skill or patience to lower the price to a reasonable level. Eventually I paid an excessive
1,200 for the merchandise.

‘Won't you dash me something small?' Veronica grinned as she pocketed the cash.

‘I don't have money.'

‘Yes you do, you are from London,' she replied sharply. Her steely smile and fidgety fingers bullied me into submission. I watched my foolish hands reach into my bag and rummage for small change. As Veronica's eyes bored into my wallet, I wanted to tell her she was wrong to think that I was rich, and that life in England is a never-ending payment of mortgages and bills; liquidity and disposable cash were an illusion. But she would never accept this truth. I sourly gave her
100 and said goodbye.

By now, Benin's dereliction of its heritage had become a compelling attraction in itself. I went around town, examining the pitiful remnants of the defensive moat that once ringed the ancient kingdom. They were scattered at various points around the city centre, the water now replaced by tall grasses. Signs had been erected reading: YOU ARE CROSSING THE BENIN MOAT, THE GREAT PERIMETER OF ANCIENT BENIN KINGDOM, ONE OF NIGERIA'S GREATEST LANDMARKS. Further on, I saw a smaller sticker that said: ‘Benin City walls and moats. Our cultural heritage, our national monuments. Protect them. Do not destroy, do not excavate, do not dump refuse.' The sign was surrounded by a mutinous mountain of banana skins, plastic bottles and wrappers floating in bubbly green sewage slime.

‘Aren't people proud of Benin history?' I asked Michael, my okada man. He'd brought me to the widest section of the moat.

‘We are,' he replied.

‘So why is there so much rubbish here?'

‘People are not supposed to build their houses very close. But there is no people to enforce the law, so they can just do whatever they like. You see the rubbish inside the moat? The government is supposed to provide rubbish bin.'

We rode to a large section of moat that was about 9 metres wide and still 6 metres deep, even though vegetation and rubbish clogged its base.

‘It's not the people's fault,' Michael said. ‘It's the government. You can see how they have tied the rubbish,' he pointed at the tied-up plastic bags. ‘They bring it here because there is nowhere else to put it.'

‘The moat is much bigger than I thought,' I remarked.

‘They dug with shovels, no machinery, just wood that they carve into shovels. They were thick men.' Michael flexed his biceps.

If only the moat's litter were as biodegradable as our history. Perhaps it was wrong of me to expect anyone to take serious interest in the moat's remains. It was historically significant, but its function
as a defence against invaders was now obsolete, so why should the people of twenty-first-century Benin care? They had other things to worry about.

Besides, I'd been in the country long enough to take less proprietary pride in the Benin empire than I did when in London. I felt more Ogoni than ever, and Benin's history didn't seem part of my own any more. My ethnic minority status in Nigeria had grown almost as strong as my identity as a racial minority in England. My people, the Ogonis, had been bit-players in the drama of Nigerian history in which the Binis, Yorubas, Hausas and Igbos played a leading role. Mocked as simpletons and cannibals, Ogonis were barely known outside the Delta region until my father made our presence felt.

‘Even your Aunty Janice was surprised when I told her we have over 110 villages in Ogoni!' my mother told me. Janice was an Edo from Benin state.

Neighbouring ethnic groups mockingly twisted Ogoni words:
pia pia
(meaning ‘people') became
pior pior
, which means ‘bad'. According to my mother, Ogonis are characteristically passive and accommodating, to the extent that we became tenants in our own towns. The economic and numerical dominance of the Igbo people engulfed us, their commercially savvy tentacles spreading as far as Bori, the tiny Ogoni town where my father was born. By the start of the Biafran civil war, Igbos owned about 80 per cent of Bori's businesses, my mother told me. Only when the Biafran Republic was declared did most of them vacate the town to join their new republic.

These ethnic disparities were significant at national level. But in a global context, what were the differences between us now? From a foreigner's point of view, the Bini, Yoruba, Ogoni, Igbo and Hausa are all the same; we're all Nigerians, demoted by modern-day corruption – that great equaliser – to bit-players wading in a sea of rubbish and dereliction.

On a sunny morning, I boarded a car destined for Ilorin, a town three hours north of Ibadan. The car waited for passengers in the eye of the honking, rumbling swirl of street life. A vendor thrust a book in my face, written by a Nigerian doctor, called
How to Gain Weight
. A song by the singer Asa boomed from a nearby stereo: ‘
There is fire on the mountain, and nobody seems to be on the run, oh there is fire on the mountain top and no one is running
.'

I paid for two seats at the back of the car to give my thighs breathing space. The gangly man sitting next to me used the extra space to spread his legs as widely as possible, leaving me squeezed once again against the window. I was livid. Months of travelling cheek-by-jowl in cars had instilled in me a new-found loathing of men's legs, which, like air, seem constantly to expand to fill the space available. I'm amazed they're not all buried in Y-shaped coffins.