A town of craftsmen.

Bida sits in the middle of Nigeria, in the country held between the Niger and the Kaduna: a low valley interrupted here and there by flat-topped plateaus rising straight out of the plain. The town itself is not on either great river. It is on the Bako, a minor tributary you could wade across in the dry season, at the point where the roads from Jebba, Zungeru and Agaie happen to cross.

That is the whole explanation. The two rivers were the region's road system for centuries, carrying goods from the northern savannah down to the southern forests and back. Bida sat inland of both, at a junction, close enough to reach the water and far enough to be defensible. Everything else followed.

The land gave the materials. Clay from the floodplain for pots and for the walls of the compounds. Reeds and cane from the riverbanks for mats and baskets. Sand for glass. Cotton in the fields alongside the millet, sorghum, yams and rice. Timber from the wooded edges. None of it had to be imported, and all of it arrives seasonally, which is why the kilns fire when they fire and the looms fall quiet when the rain comes.

Before any of this, Bida was a small Beni village. Around 1531 it was taken by Tsoede, also called Edegi, who united the Nupe clans and became the first etsu Nupe, king of the Nupe people. He is the founding figure of the whole story, and he belongs to the next chapter, because what he founded was a people rather than this particular town.

Bida's own moment came three centuries later, and it came out of a fight. The Nupe kingdom had been conquered by Fulani forces around 1806 and absorbed into the Sokoto empire as an emirate. In 1835 Usman Zaki proclaimed himself etsu Nupe. A rival Fulani emir, Umar Bahaushe, contested it, and the Nupe civil war ran from 1847 to 1856. Usman Zaki won it at Bida, and so Bida replaced Raba, sixty-seven miles west, as the capital.

Then came the wall. Begun in the 1850s, built of the red clay the floodplain provides, it eventually enclosed five square miles of town. It is still there. If you walk the circuit in the early morning you are walking the outline of a nineteenth-century capital, and the modern town has spilled well past it.

A Bida compound held a family and its trade behind the same walls. The furnace was in the yard. The loom was in the passageway. Children learned by carrying: charcoal to the fire, water from the well, finished work to the market. By the time they were old enough to be useful they had watched the whole process several thousand times.

The trades were organised into guilds, and the guilds were organised into wards, so a whole quarter of the town might be brass. Membership was largely hereditary and largely male. There is one significant exception, and it is worth naming: cloth weaving. Nupe women wove, and they wove inside the compound passageways rather than in a guild workshop, which is a different economy operating in the same building.

In 2021 Bida was designated a UNESCO Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art, the first Nigerian city to join that network. The citation lists glass production, metallurgy, wood carving, fabric and raffia weaving, and notes that the artisans still work with traditional furnaces and hand-made tools. It is a real distinction and it is also, read carefully, an argument about survival.

What is thriving: brass and aluminium smithing, which adapted when aluminium became cheap and never looked back. Glass beads and bangles, still made by the same hereditary guild. Embroidery. Mat and cane weaving. Terracotta and moulded façade work.

What is thinner than it was: the cloth. Nupe women's weaving, the marriage cloths and the elaborate red wrappers made in compound passageways, has declined since the middle of the twentieth century. It has not disappeared, and the ceremonial cloths still matter enormously, but imported fabric took the everyday market. Printed cotton is now worn alongside the indigenous textiles rather than instead of them.

And one thing is genuinely close to lost. The Masagá glassmakers, who held the formula for their own raw glass for nearly two centuries, largely stopped making it: the raw materials became too expensive and too hard to source, and recycled bottle glass does the job. That story belongs to the next chapter, and it is the sharpest thing in it.