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Derenle, a slim and straight-shouldered 30-year-old, is the one to take us round the extensive palace complex of the first-class king of Abeokuta city—the Alake of Egbaland—in southwest Nigeria. He has led us through the back entrance into the earliest residence (built 1854) of any crowned king in this part of the country, after a bit of persuasion from me. Outsiders, he tells us, hardly ever get this far inside the building, a white bungalow with so low a roof we all had to bend a bit to go in.

But he would rather not reveal what he knows about the quiet corner facing us right now. The spot, some seven feet from where we are standing, has (I guess) a history as old as the palace walls. A spear, more than six feet long, stands upright on a white-and-black painted wall; the wall around the spear is visibly stained—maybe the result of many years of splashing all manner of solvents (including animal blood) on it. A little brown pot occupies a small rectangular depression on the ground.

At last, Derenle decides there’s no harm in sharing. “After the mandatory 90 days of isolation at Ipebi(a bare apartment where the king-elect gets the basic lessons in kingship and local norms), the Alake wears an old crown and stands before this spear to pray to his ancestors and to perform a couple of other rituals. After that, the crown is stashed away and the king moves on to the palace Square for the ceremonial coronation,” he says.

This hallowed bungalow was in use up till 1904, when the second palace—a storey building—was completed. Up in the second palace bricklayers are busy with renovation work. When the task is done, here’s where the present monarch Oba Adedotun Gbadebo Okukenu IV (crowned 19 November 2005) will hold court and receive visitors. The old bronze Chandelier on the ceiling catches my attention. I hope it survives the overhaul. And a thick blue mattress belonging to the immediate past king (the 9th Alake Oba Oyebade Lipede I, who passed on 3 February 2005, aged 90) stands to my left. The current king lives in a third palace, a more modern one-storey building completed in 1985.

As we descend the wooden stairs to go to the palace chapel, it occurs to me that sometime ago, an African-American tourist told me how disappointed—and enraged—she had been on arriving at the palace of the Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuade, monarch of a town believed to be the cradle of the entire Yoruba people of Nigeria’s southwest, to find not that palace of her imagination but a modern building. She didn’t think that befitted the status of the monarch.

One other travel journalist on this tour feels the same way: why tamper with these quaint buildings just to suit the tastes of the occupier when the old, original look is what the average visitor would love want to see? We get a response to that the following morning from Doyin Ogunbiyi, head of the state’s Tourism Development Corporation.

“You will realize that the second palace is still untouched—it is only being renovated,” she says. “And the first palace is only touched up every now and then to make it more attractive. We are not pulling down any of the structures. They remain monuments of attraction. If you go inside, it’s still the wooden ceiling; it’s still the wooden steps; it’s still the muddy structure. And the carvings are still there.”

Yes, those carvings: they are a fascinating collection of painted wooden images standing at about 2-feet-plus atop the verandah of the first palace. I gather that they represent personalities (deceased kings and warriors) and deities of time past. Coming into the compound, they are about the very first things to catch visitors’ attention. But just one (painted chocolate brown) is identified as “Oba Lipede”.

“I can tell you that the youngest cannot be less than 30 years old and they are regularly repainted to keep them preserved,” Derenle says when I ask why the other ones—numbering 20 or thereabout—are unidentified and undated. I tell him that it would pep up the palace experience, if someone fetches the identities and histories of the images. Standing there and listening to the story could be a one-hour thrill in itself. Derenle nods as if agreeing with my point but something tells me he doesn’t take my suggestion seriously.

The next morning at ten I am shown into King Gbadebo’s pristine and expansive waiting room. The 62-year-old retired colonel is wearing an all-white Agbada ensemble with moderate, crimson beads round his neck and wrists. A white flywhisk is in his right hand. “I have been here now for weeks and you haven’t bothered to visit me,” he teases someone on his mobile.

I take the opportunity to look around. There is a ring of well spaced, ornate settee round the room. The floor is a gleaming brown marble. On the table a few metres from me, lays a huge black book—the famed “first Bible in Nigeria”, said to be a gift from King Edward VII in1904 (to replace one presented by Queen Victoria in 1848 to King Gbadebo’s own grandfather but which got gutted). Next to it is another one in red hard cover, also presented to the palace by the reigning Queen Elizabeth II. Traditional monarchy, English royalty and Christianity in Abeokuta have indeed been an inseparable trio!

“I am ready if you are,” the king calls. His rimless pair of glasses is as charming as the smile he wears. I squat on the marble floor at his feet and push my recorder as near enough to his lips as I could.

About the longstanding relationship between the Egba (natives of Abeokuta) throne and Christianity, the king explains that when his forebears first settled around here in 1830 they were under the command of warriors. That meant many battles in the first 25 years. Then in 1843 a missionary, Henry Townsend, arrived in Abeokuta and advised the leaders to consider returning to the status quo ante—the Monarchy kind of leadership—for the sake of development and peaceful living. And so the first-ever Alake (Okukenu by name) was installed 11 years later.

“So the Alake as it was from 1854 was the making of the missionary. And once you have a foreigner who promoted a particular aspect of your culture that seemed to have gone dormant then there would be a special relationship between you and that foreigner, and that is what has created the affinity between the palace and the Anglican Church.” The Cathedral Church of St Peter in Abeokuta, built in September 1898 in Reverend Towsend’s memory, is also considered to be the very first church in Nigeria.

As for the “oldest copy of the Bible in Nigeria”, officials of the National Archives have done a fair job of preserving it. The British, according to the king, have requested to have it back (perhaps on loan) but the custodians have not been so willing to part with what is now a “national heritage”. So it remains in the palace where tourists can glimpse it on request. “Without an adequate insurance that it’ll be returned to us, we cannot send it to Britain,” the king says.

Oba Gbadebo, to my surprise, reads the Bible keenly. As an A-Levels student at the Baptist Boys High School, he excelled in Religious Studies. He remembers particularly one class activity known as The Drill, during which the teacher would mention a book of the Bible (including its chapter and verse) and expect the class to open to the exact page and put a finger to the scripture in less than ten seconds. The first to get it stepped forward. “We did that all through our days in BBHS, so I am never tired of opening any part of the Bible.”

More than that the king believes he’s way ahead of most preachers when it comes to tracking scripture verses in the Bible. At this morning’s early morning service, for instance, the gathering had to read from the Old Testament. “Not many reverend gentlemen knew where to find it,” the king says, looking straight into my eyes. “Many people in cassock when you ask them to search for a scripture, they go to the wrong end to look for it.”

Yesterday at a public function he was dressed from head to toe in white. Does he always wear white dresses, I ask “I started wearing white since the struggle for the crown of Ake started,” he says softly. “That does not mean that I don’t wear any other colour, only that white is predominant.”

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