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I was in a slightly panicky mood. For the first time on this trip, I had recently checked my bank balance, and was horrified at how much my daily routine of okada rides, goat stews and Internet browsing was costing me. After rifling through my receipts with overdue diligence, I realised that hotel accommodation had formed the bulk of my spending, a galling discovery considering that none of my hotel rooms had justified their price. For someone obsessed by hygiene, hotel rooms were a challenging experience, and ‘shower time' was particularly trying. Non-functioning taps, slow-draining baths and mildewed shower curtains clinging to my body had regularly tested my resolve.

So I arrived at my Bauchi hotel anxiously anticipating a variety of stains and malfunctions. My entrance in the lobby was a lesson in customer disservice. A group of people sat silently on chairs, looking too inactive to be staff yet too poised to be guests. Some sat in front of a TV, others leaned against a wall; all of them stared at me
wordlessly. I stared back – bags in tow – waiting to be welcomed. I was eyeballed some more. Only when I asked if any of them worked there did a man slowly peel himself away from the wall and amble towards the reception desk, his feet dragging across the floor . . .
ssssh, ssssh, ssssh, ssssh
.

He took my deposit and led me to my room – the ‘deluxe suite' or some such fiction. The staff on the upper floor apologised for forgetting to supply towels, toilet paper or soap. They weren't lazy, I hoped, just unpractised at serving guests, and doing it, no doubt, for next to no pay. The toilet was thankfully clean (Nigerian hotels never failed in that area), but the air conditioning didn't work, the television set had lost all its buttons, and I had to use my own batteries for the remote control. A lizard dropping rested beneath my blanket, the walls were bespattered with mashed mosquitoes and dried blood; the glass louvred windows – those tired vestiges of 1970s architecture – wouldn't open or close fully, and the cold tap in the bathroom didn't work. All this for a relatively ritzy
6,250 per night.

Throughout my travels around West Africa, I'd noticed that many hotels keep the more expensive rooms spotless while neglecting the cheaper ones, as if impressing richer customers were more important than catering to all clients. I suspect that this was influenced by the system of patronage, in which the big chief distributed wealth to the people. Perhaps some Nigerians still perceive wealth as a centralised resource, with rich people the sole source of income, in the same way that oil is viewed as our country's main source of earnings, or the way the staff at the Lagos National Museum targeted the German tourist as if he were the sole opportunity for a tip.

This pattern of decrepitude was wearing me down after three months on the road. But persistent optimism and curiosity compelled me to continue the trip, despite its annoyances. I wanted more of the pleasant surprises that leaped out of Nigeria's chaos and neglect. Besides, I'd been travelling for long enough to know that
good things always came unexpectedly, while anticipated joys often didn't materialise.

That night in my hotel room, I settled down to watch one of two TV channels available in my deluxe suite. The first, a state channel, was broadcasting a fuzzy studio debate. The other channel was a digital one, centrally controlled by the hotel management. I prayed that the nameless, faceless philistine behind the controls would select something decent. But he skipped past the news channels, teased me with half a minute of
E! Entertainment
, then settled on
Smackdown Wrestling
for the rest of the evening. It was dull, but at least had the benefit of sending me to sleep more quickly.

 

Early the next day, I sat alone in the back of a taxi as it cruised past the giant boulders that dotted Bauchi's grasslands, glistening with beads of morning dew. I was on my way to the Yankari National Park Game Reserve. When I first came here with my father as a twelve-year-old, I was sleepless with excitement. We were going to see lions, he told me, and hippos, elephants, monkeys and crocodiles. But it wasn't to be: on arriving at the park we received the devastating news that heavy rains would prevent us from taking a game drive. Our trip was cut short to just one night, which was spent in a chalet watching gangs of cheeky baboons – the only wildlife we laid eyes on – galloping outside the windows. Twenty years on, I wanted to make up for that disappointment.

At the border of Yankari I jumped on an okada that would take me to the central office, known as Wikki Camp, nestled 40 kilometres inside the reservation. Thirty years ago, trundling through this wildlife safari park by motorcycle might have been risky, but the men at the entrance gate assured me it was no problem. Confronting a lion was as likely as finding fresh towels in my Bauchi hotel room. Yankari's animal stock had depleted over the decades. Established in 1950, the reserve once teemed with more than fifty mammal species, including leopards, hyenas, buffalo and hippos.
The cheetahs, giraffes and gazelles are now extinct as a result of organised poaching and a rinderpest epidemic in the 1970s and 1980s. Several hundred elephants still remain, however, and the lion population has managed to defy depletion.

My okada cruised along Yankari's tarmacked road, past a sign that issued the warning: WILD ANIMALS PRESENT. TAKE CARE. The only wild animal we spotted was a monkey in the forest trees. My okada man, apparently a stranger to wildlife, pointed it out excitedly. At Wikki Camp's main booking office, I bagged the last seat on a big truck ready to depart on a game drive. My vehicle was overtaken by a second truck containing two dozen Indian men, who waved their hands and roared jubilantly as they moved off in a different direction. Several grey patas monkeys scattered from our vehicle as it rumbled into the reserve's misty, deciduous forest.

Our game warden, perched near the truck's bonnet, told me he'd spotted a pride of lions three days before. I bristled with excitement. Almost immediately, we came across three majestic waterbucks munching between some trees and twisting their powerful necks to stare at us. Everyone took obligatory photos before the driver moved on. Waterbucks were all very well but, frankly, lions and elephants were the animals we had come to see.

‘Where are these stupid animals?' asked a woman in light-hearted disgust. The woman, Njide, was the mother of the large family sitting around me, and she was speaking our minds. Safari had brought out the eco-philistines in us. Rather than delighting in the everyday flora and fauna of Nigeria's beautiful ecosystem, we dismissed the white-rumped vultures, agama lizards,
Afzelia
trees and butterflies in impatient anticipation of the more dramatic big game. As we scoured the forest for Big Beasts, desperation began to play tricks on our eyes: every leaf looked like a lion's tail; every vertical branch was definitely an elephant's leg.

‘Look!' someone cried out from the back. ‘On the right!' The truck braked urgently as we peered intensely into the forest.

‘It's white tree bark,' the game warden confirmed. Everyone kissed their teeth and sighed in disappointment.

‘Come now, let's go,' Njide implored, anxious to sight something more interesting.

Every so often, the warden pointed out mounds of elephant dung, steaming on the ground with tantalising freshness. The herd must have been nearby. Everyone perked up and scrutinised the scenery, beady-eyed and desperate. Suddenly the truck stopped, and the warden pointed his finger. Our eyes trained onto several grey, short-legged birds.

‘Guinea fowl,' Njide said, kissing her teeth again. ‘We see these all the time.
Where
are the elephants and lions?' We rumbled on through the forest. ‘Are they all at a meeting?'

For a long time we saw nothing but guinea fowl. After a while, I didn't even have to lay eyes on these birds to know they were there – Njide indicated their presence with her comical sighs and teeth kissing. She was similarly unimpressed by the baboons playing near a fresh spring. When they spotted us, the apes galloped towards our stationary vehicle as if on the attack, then paused a few metres away and stared.

‘We can see baboons anywhere,' Njide grumbled, ‘even in town.' She and her husband, a doctor from Enugu, had visited Yankari twenty-odd years previously. They had seen all the big animals, she said. This year they had returned with their teenage children, hoping to repeat the experience, but so far Yankari was concealing its treasures.

Suddenly, through the trees, a crocodile slipped into the gentle ripples of the Gaji River, and we spotted another sunbathing on the riverbank. They were exotic enough to ease our disappointment a little. We moved on, past more piles of fresh elephant dung that inflamed our hopes. Later, two large, tawny-coloured western hartebeests leapt across the dirt track in front of us. They looked stunning among the tall yellowy grasses gleaming in the sunlight.
But they – and Njide's dreaded guinea fowls – were all we managed to see in the game drive's final leg. We rolled into the driveway of the base camp where the Indian tourists, still in an exuberant mood, passed us again on their way to yet another game drive, no doubt dissatisfied with their first one.

The wildlife that we'd seen was a dwindling time capsule, a flash from a past that I couldn't fully imagine but lamented nonetheless. Yankari wasn't our only game reserve, however. Others, such as the Gashaka-Gumti National Park in the south-east, supposedly teem with chimpanzees, giraffes, lions and elephants. But these places are virtually inaccessible to the ordinary tourist unless they can afford their own vehicles, tents and wardens.

Shaking off my disappointment, I disembarked from the truck and ran down some stone steps. At the bottom was the Wikki Springs, a stunning natural thermal spring filled with pure, cobalt-blue water that bubbled at a very agreeable 31°C. I had vague memories of visiting it with my father. Somewhere at home, there's a grainy photograph of Zina and me in our ‘wet-look' Jheri-curl hairstyles, posing with Tedum by the water. Then, we were the sole visitors there. The scene couldn't have been more different now. Several Hausa men and boys were swimming in the spring, their dark, glistening bodies dive-bombing from the branches of the tamarind tree arching overhead. They laughed, roared, splashed about and hawked phlegm into the crystal-clear pool while their mothers and sisters sat on the water's edge, restricting themselves to the vicarious pleasure of spectatorship. I sat with them and ate a lunch of jollof rice before leaving Yankari and returning to Bauchi.

For all my excitement about the safari, the most interesting attraction of the day turned out to be near my hotel. I decided to visit the tomb of Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria's first post-independence prime minister, who holds the sadly everlasting distinction of being one of our least corrupt premiers. I remember his avuncular visage on the corner of old banknotes, a white turban wrapped around his head.
Balewa, one of the few northern politicians to be university educated, fought for the rights of Northern Nigeria and played a role in creating the Organisation of African Unity, a body that promoted economic and political cooperation across the continent. Unusually by today's standards, Balewa openly intervened in crises around Africa: negotiating during the Congo Crisis of 1960 – 4 and criticising the South African Sharpeville Massacre in 1960. But his administration was undermined by internal divisions, and in 1966 he was deposed in a military coup. Six days after being ousted from office, Balewa's decomposing body was discovered by a road near Lagos; the cause of death was uncertain. He was given a Muslim burial in Bauchi, his home town.

Balewa's tomb lay inside a windowless, artistically asymmetrical building, built in the 1970s, with a wraparound patterned roof. Its form was designed to tell the story of Nigeria's journey to independence. I followed the guide and his student tour group through the entrance, along a tall, cavernous corridor that was almost pitch black, save for a few tiny rays of light streaming through a lattice of holes in the wall. These shafts of light symbolised the distant dream of independence during the dark days of colonialism. As we walked further down the corridor, bigger holes allowed more light to pour in, indicating the achievement of independence.

The corridor approaching the courtyard contained two sets of staircases: a deliberately narrow one with short steps (signifying the ease of life after independence), and a second, wider, staircase with high steps that represented the difficulty of achieving one's goals in a colonised Nigeria. The guide instructed everyone to huddle together and walk pointedly down the narrower independence staircase. One of the students and I couldn't resist taking the bigger, less congested steps instead. We smiled at one another in tacit understanding; it was a matter of convenience, not a political statement.

The steps led us to a sun-filled open-air courtyard where Tafawa Balewa's grave lay. The courtyard's high walls were covered in
multicoloured tiles representing Nigeria's myriad ethnic groups. On the grave itself, a mound of pebbles was piled on a rectangular slab of light stone, Balewa's name engraved on its edge. There was no grandeur, no fanfare, just a simple engraving of his name. The space was breezy, elegant and fresh; the grave's simplicity represented everything I imagined about Nigeria of the 1950s and 1960s: a cleaner, less populated, possibly less damaged place.