At the National Museum in Kaduna, the resident curator unlocks the rusty padlock to the main building. I step around rat droppings to enter one of two inner rooms. There are banners hanging from the walls, displaying images of clusters of foreign students at various excavation sites in the Nok basin. In some photographs, they squat, hands in the dirt, digging. In other frames, they encircle a professional, receiving an on-site lecture. There are no Black faces in these images. No signs of an African receiving hands-on learning about themselves. This photographed group of teachers and learners is the party of foreigners Chief Beno Adamu had referred to, an expedition from Germany’s Goethe University.

Comprising archaeologists, archeobotanists and other professionals, and led by Professor Peter Breunig, the Germans had occupied the Nok soil from 2005 through 2013. They are equally responsible for most of the authoritative literature on the subject. Where problems stemmed from, however, and what analysts deplored when major excavations began, involved ethical conduct more than it did historical acuity. It was a decade-long controversy, originating around 2007, on the wholesale removal of hundreds of terracotta pieces freshly unearthed in the Nok valley to Frankfurt for ‘repair’. In October of 2013, the artefacts would get a comparative exhibition in Germany for the first time, alongside Egyptian and Grecian works. The exhibition spanned months and confirmed a number of Germans as Nok experts, a situation many African professionals begrudge.

One such professional is Zacharys Anger Gundu, a professor of archaeology, whose job at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, linked him with the Germans at the Nok basin. Having witnessed the exercise, Professor Gundu blasted Nigeria’s federal government for handing over to the Europeans a premier opportunity to have sole custody of Nok finds, a situation that could skew the interpretation of the terracotta and reinforce biased European historiographies.

‘I was not a part of it,’ he clarified rather sternly about the excavation. ‘But I was aware of it.’ We were speaking via phone and text for the second time in July 2024. At the time of the excavation, he was president of the Archaeological Association of Nigeria.

It is stale knowledge that Western outfits are more likely to align every tangible bit of African history with a narrative of the primitiveness of African culture. But it ought to be acknowledged that this tendency only takes root in the absence of a convincingly comprehensive output from relevant African institutions. In lieu of this, Gundu berated Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) for its mishandling of a strategic heritage resource. He wrote in an August 2020 paper:

Nigeria has continued to show weakness in engaging European countries and museums on the question of returns. [It] is yet to appreciate the fact that antiquities seized can only return through pressure. In the meantime, [it] continues to approve the exhibition of looted materials in Europe.

Kwame Opoku, a Ghanaian cultural commentator, criticized the affair. He decried what he called the stripping of Nok art of its social connections. He considered it a disrespect to assume that Nigeria was incapable of contextualizing its own history. He said:

It is difficult to understand why artefacts newly recovered in Nigeria should be exhibited first in Germany, and not in the country where they were discovered. This raises the question: to whom the Nok pieces are of relevance? Whose history and culture does this new evidence enrich or clarify? Are Nigerians the primarily concerned people? What relevance has the Nok pieces to German history or culture?

To flip Opoku’s concern on its head is to expose an even grittier matter: what relevance did Nigeria’s government place on Nok and the historical significance of its terracotta? Was the NCMM, at any time, disposed towards the task of contextualizing Nok art and establishing Nigeria’s place as West Africa’s foremost hub of civilization? It is disheartening to realize that, amid a vast range of historical and cultural wealth, historical and anthropological research in Nigeria are in want of state attention, financial and otherwise. Archaeology as an academic discipline is mostly disregarded nationwide. Institutions that dare to offer such degrees have had to pair them with some other field to preserve their threadbare relevance.

Professor Gundu refers to this situation as a crisis of confidence. Concerning the absence of a Black face in the picture frames I found inside the National Museum in Kaduna, he had likewise complained:

Since 2005, when the Nok project started, the Germans have trained up to eight postgraduate students of European extraction at the master’s level using the Nok valley as a laboratory. At least two of these have started a PhD programme on different aspects of Nok. Interestingly, no Nigerian has yet been trained from this project at the postgraduate level.

From the highest to the lowest levels of the educational process, there is a glaring institutional disinterest in the histories of the ethnic nationalities that comprise Nigeria. Despite the role history could play in curating an authentic identity for the Nigerian, the basic school curriculum manifests the barest agenda towards deploying this tool. It should be asked—what sources of pride exist for the Nigerian child who is newly inducted into society? How familiar is the average Yoruba child with the Ife bronze works and their artistic novelty to be able to appropriate their ingenuity? What are the chances of finding an Efik schoolgirl from Cross River who knows and understands both the wholeness and transmission styles of the Nsibidi syllabary as a testament to the intellectual past of her forebears? Is it possible to cull two in ten boys from north-east Nigeria who may at least acknowledge the statecraft of the Kanem-Bornu empire, which boasted the most efficient pan-African trade relations in global history?

It would appear that, according to the Nigerian administration, the pursuit of a cohesive national entity requires the obliteration of sacrosanct foundations and identities. Divisive tendencies in a multi-ethnic system can evoke such an unseemly measure, but there are no real benefits to be gained from this. For a vastly multi-cultural society like Nigeria, this is a vain venture, if not a self-harming one. This is because, while Nigeria may be a recent creation, even more recently refreshed at her 1960 independence, the Nigerian themselves is not a recent entity. The Nigerian is a culmination of centuries of specific social transformations, a product long in the making.