Bida
Brass, glass, cloth and clay, from a walled city on the Niger floodplain, nine minutes from where you will be sleeping.
- 01The place
- 03Life then
- 05Life now
Story
Every house has a story. Ours begins in Bida.
Most hotels tell you about themselves. We would rather tell you where you are.
What follows is arranged as three chapters, readable in any order. One is about the town and why anything was ever built here. One is about the Nupe, whose workshops still supply the brass in our corridors. The last is about this house, and it is the shortest, because it is the newest thing here by several centuries.
The Nupe
Brass casters, glass makers, weavers and dyers, organised into hereditary guilds, and one of those guilds kept its formula secret for two hundred years.
- 02The people
- 04Material culture
House 7
Two houses around a courtyard, and a kitchen that starts before you wake.
- 06House 7
The crafts these chapters describe
- Brass casting
- Bellows
- Firing
- Weaving
- Indigo dyeing
- Throwing
- Clay
- Mat and cane
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