At six in the morning in January, on the road out of Jos towards Bukuru, you can see your breath. This is a sentence that reliably provokes disbelief from anyone who has not been, and mild irritation from everyone who lives there and has had the conversation many times.
Bitrus Pam farms acha and potatoes on land his family reclaimed from a worked-out tin pit. The plateau was tin country for most of the twentieth century and the mining left two things behind: the money that built the city, and several thousand flooded holes in the ground that nobody has ever been made to fill in.
The altitude that makes the cold also made the city. The British built a hill station here for the climate, and the climate is still the reason a good deal of Nigeria's temperate produce comes off this plateau.
