A kingdom of craft.

Nadel's wording is deliberate. He separated what he called objective history from ideological history, and he put Tsoede firmly in the second category: a founding account that carries some factual freight while functioning primarily as a claim about legitimacy. Later historians have been blunter still: a 1980s paper in History in Africa reopened the question under the title "The Tsoede Myth and the Nupe Kinglists: More Political Propaganda?"

We are not going to resolve that here, and we are not going to flatten it either. A founding story that binds an Igala father to a Nupe mother, and explains a kingdom's origin as a returning hostage, is doing real political work; it links the Nupe to a powerful neighbour while insisting on their independence from it. That is worth more as a live question than as a tidy legend.

Islam arrived gradually. Etsu Jibiri, reigning around 1770, is recorded as the first Nupe king to become Muslim; the Fulani preacher Mallam Dendo was central to its spread, and his descendants ended up ruling at Bida. Older practice did not simply stop. Shrine ritual and ancestral observance continued alongside the mosque, particularly outside the town.

That last step is why lost-wax pieces are worth understanding before you look at one. The process guarantees the object is unique, not as a marketing claim but as a physical consequence: the mould cannot survive its own use.

Brass survived the twentieth century better than any other Bida craft, largely by adapting. When aluminium became cheap and available, the smiths added it, and the guild absorbed a new material without abandoning the old one. That flexibility is why the Wednesday market still has brass on it.

The work happens around a single structure, and the structure is unusual enough that museums describe it in detail: a domed furnace with its base dug into the ground, a hole at the top of the dome to let smoke out, and a constant feed of air from bellows worked by hand. It is fed and kept going by a team, not an individual.

Inside that team, the roles are fixed. One worker's entire job is to keep the melt viscous: not too stiff, not too runny. The others dip iron rods into the glass, lift out a gob, and rotate it quickly to shape it before it sets. Beads, and bangles.

That is not a decorative comparison. Seamless glass bracelets were made in Iron Age Europe by a technique that was lost, and the Masagá make them now, which means the workshop in Bida is one of the few places on earth where the problem is still being solved in front of you.

Two things happened. European glass bottles arrived in Nupeland in the late nineteenth century, and colonial trade made them plentiful. Recycled bottle glass is easier, cheaper, and comes in colours the guild could never have made, so the beadmakers began melting bottles in the small clay wood-burning furnace and forming the molten glass with iron rods, exactly as before but with a wider palette.

The other thing is the loss. Producing bikini itself required raw materials that became expensive and hard to source; the sand and soda ash were brought from as far as Lake Chad, later from Kano, and the firing takes weeks. So the production was largely phased out. A formula kept secret for two centuries was not stolen or forgotten; it was priced out.

European attention to all of this began in 1911, when the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius documented the beadmakers' technique. Examples of Bida glass are now held in museum collections abroad, including at the Corning Museum of Glass. The guild is still working. Whether it will still be making its own glass in a generation is an open question, and there are projects underway specifically to record the knowledge before it goes.

The decline is real and dates from the middle of the twentieth century. Imported fabric was cheaper and endlessly various, and it won the daily market. But the framing that matters is the one the tradition's own scholars use: printed cloth is worn alongside the indigenous textiles, not instead of them. A community that had always absorbed outside materials into its own work absorbed one more.

You can see the whole argument in a single photograph. Look at the water carriers below: printed cotton, a plain indigo wrapper, and a striped hand-woven cloth with a red selvedge, all on the same morning, in the same yard, on people who would not have thought of it as a contradiction.