The digging began early in 1995, after a farmer uncovered a sculpted terra-cotta head. For $30, nearly twice what he made a month selling yams, he peddled it to a traveling antiquities dealer. Word of the windfall spread, and locals started tilling the ground around Kawu, 30 miles northeast of the Nigerian capital, Abuja. Within months, more than 2,000 diggers were burrowing into Kawu's stony earth. Dealers bid against one another, pushing up prices, in Kawu's version of the Gold Rush. Bars and brothels opened, and newly rich locals bought motorcycles. "Everybody was looking for money," says Abubakar Sala, the local primary school teacher, who headed to the fields after classes to try his luck and found two sculpted heads. "Farmers let their crops rot because they were too busy digging for terra-cotta."
Africa, its people already plundered by slavers, its animals by poachers and its mineral wealth by miners, is now yielding up its cultural heritage. Across the continent, artifacts are looted from museums, from universities and straight from the ground. Most of the objects--ancient terra-cotta and stone figures, brass and bronze sculptures, wooden grave markers, masks and doors--end up in the U.S. and Europe, where collectors prize such items as the 16th century Benin bronze castings whose technical finesse rivals works produced by Europeans of the same era. Among the most sought-after items are figurines from Kawu, with their distinctive triangular eyes and abstracted features, remnants of the Nok culture that flourished in central Nigeria from 500 B.C. to A.D. 200.
Nigeria has suffered the most looting. During the past two decades its museums have been robbed of hundreds of their most valuable items. In an infamous break-in at the National Museum in Ile-Ife in 1994, thieves with an inside contact smashed open 11 display cases. Their haul, which included some of the best-known 12th and 13th century Ife terra-cotta and brass heads--all uninsured--was worth about $200 million. It was the museum's third burglary that year. Nigerian traders also target villages like Kawu, buying artifacts from locals or encouraging rudimentary digging. "It's not exactly excavation," says Abiye Ichaba, head of research and documentation at the Abuja Council for Arts and Culture. "There's nothing systematic about it, no pattern to it. We call it plundering."
Some governments have attempted to regulate or prevent the sale of antiquities. So has the International Commission of Museums, which publishes a Red List of African archaeological objects particularly at risk of looting. None have had much success. Interpol, the international police organization, estimates that the illicit trade in cultural property is worth $4.5 billion a year worldwide, up from $1 billion a decade ago. Africa accounts for 10% of this black market, and its share is growing. "It's a fantastically big problem," says Omotoso Eluyemi, director general at Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments (N.C.M.M.).