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‘Why do they disappear like that?'

‘I think there's something in Islam that says people can't announce when they're going to pray. I'll go away for a few minutes, come back and find the workers praying on the factory floor! I had to get one husband and wife to job-share because the husband would not work on Fridays, so the wife comes in during those days.'

‘Would people work more if you docked their wages?'

‘You just have to let them pray,' Onias said. ‘If people realise that you don't respect what they respect, they don't like you. The best way is to allow them to express themselves. Then they will agree to work overtime without fuss. They are hard-working, but their faith is powerful.'

Even the leader of the Zimbabwean farmers, Allan Jack – a man described by Onias as a ‘pushy' taskmaster – was forced to concede that Friday was a day off. ‘That made me laugh,' Onias chuckled.

Life had visibly improved for the Nupe people. As we drove through their villages, dozens of men scooted around on motorcycles provided by the government. Few of them had owned motorbikes a year earlier. And the villages' infrastructure was transforming: the government had built 76 kilometres of new roads, a new borehole to draw potable water, and a GSM mobile phone network. Young Nupe kids can now earn extra cash by selling phone cards. When the farms are fully operational, the government plans to have electricity flowing unblinkingly throughout the villages, and the schoolchildren will be taught how to farm commercially.

Onias and I stopped off at the house of one of the Zimbabweans so that Onias could fetch something. The owner of the house, Paul, was out of the country for a week, and had left his home (with its cable TV and other modern appliances) unlocked.

‘How can he leave the house unlocked like this?' I asked.

‘It's OK,' Onias assured me. ‘Nobody will take anything. Nigerians don't steal.'

He was right in some respects. There were armed highway robberies and museum thefts, certainly, but pettier theft wasn't as prevalent as I feared. On my travels, I'd had no qualms about leaving my bags unattended in a minibus on intercity journeys. I and my fellow passengers would disembark the vehicle, its windows left open, and eat lunch. Nobody stole our things, not even the
alma-jari
street kids who swarm around vehicles in northern towns to beg for food and money.

Interestingly, cheating was more common in economic transactions. Onias said he was shocked when the mother of a farm worker – a woman he knew well – deliberately overcharged him for some eggs, almost doubling the price from the week before. It's as
if our corrupt politics have normalised dishonest financial opportunism while leaving the rest of our integrity reasonably intact.

Onias drove us through lightly forested land. ‘Look at this land,' he said, pointing at the side of the road. ‘It's unutilised. There's only one guy using it . . . growing groundnut. So much of your land is idle.'

We continued across the grassy floodplains of the river. Concentrating very little on his driving, Onias kept stretching his neck to eye the dozens of slim, bony-backed cows grazing on the land.

‘I'm excited when I see that,' he grinned. ‘I like cows!' His fetish for the animals was real. He counted them obsessively, cooing over them and murmuring his appreciation as we drove along. ‘There must be about two thousand of them!'

The cows belonged to the nomadic Fulani cow herders who live in the area for part of the year. Their animals, rather lean Bunaji breeds, eat grass and yield 4 litres of relatively non-nutritious milk a day, a meagre amount when compared with the 20 – 25 litres a day pumped out by commercial, silage-fed Jersey cows. The Zimbabweans are going to import the Jerseys from South Africa to interbreed with the heifers. The plan is to mechanise milk collection for Fulani herders around the area. The Fulanis will attach their cows to milk-pumping machines, then sell the milk at the collection point. It would be a significant culture change for these nomadic herders, who live in settlements on the swampy floodplains of the river until the rains flood the area, at which point they move on.

A quintet of Fulani ladies, carrying loads on their heads, walked past our car. They were slim, demure and elegant, with pigtail plaits cascading from colourful headscarves.

‘Beautiful . . . look at that,' Onias cooed. He loved these women almost as much as he loved cows. He jokingly pondered how many cows he could sell in order to buy a Fulani wife. ‘Their menfolk
would never give them up,' he chuckled. ‘You can never go near the women. The men won't allow it!'

We parked by the banks of the river, under a cluster of big mango trees. Onias pointed out an old, disused water pump by the river. The Tsonga dairy was also going to build an irrigation system for the farms, he informed me. He stared at the river and shook his head, unable to comprehend Nigeria's abundance of fruit, water and animals. All around him lay a vista of squandered opportunities.

‘Why isn't anyone
selling
this?' he said, prodding a dangling baby mango. ‘You could make nice fruit juice, canned fruit . . .' His voice tapered into speculative silence. ‘Because of your oil you don't think about the small things. All you need is five or six governors with vision, and this country will really start to develop. This is the
best
country. It is richer than South Africa in national resources, but you have nothing to show for it.'

 

Before returning to Ilorin, my driver dropped me off in Esie, a dozy village where hundreds of mysterious, ancient soapstone sculptures were excavated in the 1930s. The site of the discovery was now a museum, a plain adobe building set in a tranquil garden where bright red flowers bloomed on low hedges, and the breeze shook the citrus trees.

The museum door, covered in bas-relief carvings, opened into a simple, sunny room filled with the stunning sculptures. Organised in terraced rows, dozens of beautiful, ornate stone effigies lined the four walls. Each sculpted head or figurine was made from pale steatite stone and stood between 14 and 120 centimetres high. Every image had unique, individual facial features and elaborate hairstyles and poses: one covered its mouth in exclamation; another played what looked like a string instrument; one was pregnant.

Intriguingly, the sculptures appeared to be images of people from ethnic groups from all over Nigeria. Some figurines had the striped face markings of the Jos region; a female figure held a bottle of
alligator pepper (Yoruba spiritual medicine); the numerous bead necklaces on one sculpture were reminiscent of Ibibio culture from the south-east. One of the largest figurines depicted a female Nupe warrior wielding a dagger. Other female warriors carried bows and arrows. Some images had conical or fez-style hats, suggesting a Fulani link, as did the triple-bunch hairstyles on some female heads. Other coiffures bore similarities to those of Nok women. The three parallel lines between the eyes and ears on some sculptures looked like Nupe face markings. Certain sculptures shared a similarity to the ancient soapstone carvings of Ife, the Yoruba capital, while the concentric circles on cheeks seemingly drew inspiration from Benin bronzes. Whoever made these sculptures had knowledge of Nigeria's many ethnic groups. I was fascinated by the idea that a cosmopolitan civilization once existed, or that a forward-thinking explorer once travelled across Nigeria and recorded what he or she saw.

The sculptures were brought to international attention when an English missionary, H. G. Ramshaw, excavated many of them in 1933. Researchers at Oxford University carbon-dated these figurines to 11 AD, but it's still unclear who made them or why. One academic suggested that the sculptures are the work of the Asebu people who claim to have migrated to the coastal region in the fifteenth century from the desert north of Nigeria. The current inhabitants of Esie, the Igbomina, didn't build the sculptures – they're a subgroup of the Yoruba, believed to have migrated to Esie in the sixteenth century from Oyo, the ancient capital of the Yoruba empire. The Igbomina believe that the soapstone figurines, known as
ere
, aren't man-made objects but humans who have been turned into stone.

Oral explanations for the sculptures vary from village to village. One legend tells of foreign visitors who arrive in the area and ask the chief to wait at home in order to receive them. But the chief goes to farm and bathes in the stream instead. While in the water, he sees
his visitors filing past on their way to his home. Realising his faux pas, the chief rushes home where he finds his visitors impatiently waiting to be received. The chief pretends he's been busy preparing them a meal, but they know that he's lying. Angry, they leave in a huff and curse him. However, the Yoruba gods consider the curse to be an overreaction, so they punish the visitors' excess by turning them into stone.

The museum guide, a rather literal-minded man, didn't believe the turned-to-stone theory. He showed me a figurine of a woman with an unfeasibly elongated neck. ‘You see?' he said. ‘This shows their ancestors cannot have been turned to stone.'

The museum guide led me outside to a mango tree where the figurines – arranged in semi-circle formation around the
oba ere
(king) – were first discovered before being moved into the museum exhibition gallery. The statue of the king now sits in a shrine by the mango tree. He's flanked by his wife and his
ibari
, the person whose role is to commit suicide when the king dies, accompanying him on his journey to the next life. In front of the oba sculptures sits the figurine of a palace guide, clutching a goblet from which the oba drinks palm wine.

The figurines are regarded as custodians of the land, responsible for bringing fertility, rain, and the occasional act of evil. Their visual power was strong enough to make me empathise with the concept of idol worship, though their current arrangement in the museum's exhibition gallery wasn't quite as striking as their original positions must have been: seven or eight hundred years ago, the thousand-odd sculptures illuminated the clearing in the trees, a stunning sight to visitors emerging from a narrow forest path.

When the effigies were excavated in the 1930s, many of them had been deliberately dismembered, possibly during Islamic raids in the eighteenth century. The figurines also suffered from the ‘missionary attitude' of locals who, having converted to Christianity, ignored, destroyed or sold their pagan relics on an international
market hungry for African art. Of the 1,500 sculptures that were dug up in Esie, 500 were lost or stolen, partly due to the museum's inadequate security. Maurice Archibong, the travel writer I met in Benin, told me that thieves once looted Esie's museum after befriending the security guards and offering them food laced with a sleep-inducing drug. Maurice also said that the museum's official car, the defunct VW Beetle parked outside, hadn't left the grounds in twenty years. When the curator needs to transport these valuable artefacts, he loads them into boxes and hops onto an okada.

It was quintessentially Nigerian that such impressive artefacts should be hidden in this adobe hut in a quiet village, like a jewel furtively tucked away in a fat woman's bosom. Only 200 visitors passed through the museum gates in an average month. Esie provided the ultimate confirmation, if any were needed, that even the most illustrious parts of Nigerian history seem to be relentlessly buried under time and indifference.

Once again, I was disappointed to see another tourist attraction go so unloved. This ennui repeated itself throughout my travels: the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Benin City, Lagos Museum, the architectural museum in Jos, Lake Nguru. What condition would they all be in, twenty years from now? A small part of me considered the possibility of working in Nigerian tourism to try to stem the decline. But that spark of inspiration immediately fizzled at the prospect of misallocated funds, apathy and dealing with the fecklessness of state bureaucracy. By the end, my thoughts degenerated into a kidnap fantasy in which I abduct Esie's entire collection, like a social worker removing children from their neglectful parents. I would keep the sculptures in my backyard and lavish them with the love and attention they deserved, my conscience cleared by the conviction that I was taking better care of them than our government ever will.

Late that evening in my hotel room, I was sucked into another riveting Nollywood film involving a jealous wife in an Igbo chief's polygamous household (give me infidelity, polygamy or jealousy in any storyline, and I'm hooked). The jealous first wife despised the younger and more attractive third wife, who inflamed her envy by giving birth to a long-awaited male heir. The first wife tried to kill the baby prince, but she failed. Without condoning the first wife's behaviour, I empathised with her rage and insecurity, and I rather hoped she would avoid an ugly fate. But, as usual, the story's outcome became a hazy blur that merged into a nonsensical dream. I floated into a deep sleep and missed out on the film's ending yet again.