How do you keep a hundred year old cloth alive in Ibadan's wet season?

Cloth is the most fragile thing we own. A painting on board can shrug off a bad week; a cotton wrapper dyed in 1924 cannot. Indigo itself is tough, but the starch resist, the hand stitching and the cotton fibres all answer to the air around them.

In the wet season, the air in Ibadan can sit above 85 percent humidity for days. At that level mould can grow on starch residue in under a week. In the harmattan it drops below 30 percent, and old cotton turns brittle. Our target in the cloth rooms is 55 percent, give or take five, every hour of every day.

That means the cooling and the dehumidifiers never stop. Since 2025 they run on the solar roof by day and on the inverter bank at night, with the generator as a last resort. The building has not lost climate control for more than twenty minutes in a year.

Light is the other enemy. Indigo is quite stable, but the reds and yellows in the strip-woven cloths fade quickly. Every cloth in the show is lit at 50 lux, about as bright as a room at dusk, and rests for three years in the dark store after six months on the wall.

Before Indigo, each of the sixty cloths spent between two and thirty hours on the table. Most needed only a gentle vacuum through a net screen. A few needed small stitched supports where old repairs had failed. None were washed: washing would remove the history of how they were worn.

And the night the inverter failed? It was in August, at 2am. The alarm reached the duty manager's phone, she drove in, started the generator by hand and sat in the store until morning. The humidity rose by four points. Nobody has let her forget it.