DispatchCalabar4.98°N 8.34°E
What a month of carnival is actually worth
Calabar stages the largest street festival in Africa every December. The rest of the year is the harder question.
Strand
People
Whose ground it is. Profiles, interviews and days spent with the people who make a place what it is.
DispatchKano12.00°N 8.59°E
The last indigo pits at Kofar Mata
Five hundred years of dyeing in Kano has come down to a few dozen working pits and the men who still know the recipe.
DispatchOnitsha6.14°N 6.80°E
Everything crosses at Onitsha
A river port with what is often called the largest market in West Africa, and one bridge holding it all together.
A day inJos9.90°N 8.86°E
The cold months on the plateau
Jos gets genuinely cold, which almost nobody outside Plateau believes until they have spent a January there.
ProfileIkot Ekpene5.18°N 7.71°E
The union that still runs the Raffia City
Ikot Ekpene has traded on woven palm fibre for a century, and the trade is still organised the way it was in the 1970s.
DispatchMaiduguri11.83°N 13.15°E
The camels still come to Maiduguri
A trade route older than the border it crosses, and a market that has quietly kept working.
Photo essayOnitsha6.14°N 6.80°E
Ikpu ite: the pots and the last people making them
Hand-built water pots, made the way they have always been made, by women who are candid that nobody young is learning.
DispatchArgungu12.74°N 4.53°E
The festival that depends on a river that keeps failing
Argungu is famous for one morning a year. The rest of the year is a town watching the water table.