Imagine you are a child living in Nigeria. Your grandfather worked at the Kano dye pits. So did his father, and his father, and his father . . . all the way back 500 years! (That was so long ago, Christopher Columbus had just discovered America!) Once, the demand for indigo cloth kept 120 dye pits busy in Kano. But now most of the pits have been filled in. Will you be one of the next generation who helps dig them out and make them useful again? To do so, you will have to learn some skills. If you learn them, you will know how to do something almost no one else does—in the whole world!

But don’t expect your work to go quickly. Good things like indigo cloth take time to make. Just preparing dye can take as long as a month! Plus, it smells.

Start here. Dump about 400 gallons of water into your empty pit. (Each pit is about 20 feet deep.) Add 40 buckets of ash. Leave the pit alone for three days. When you come back, add about 440 pounds of baba plant. (English is the main common language in Nigeria. But many people there also speak the Hausa language. Baba is the Hausa word for the indigo plant.) After three more days, skim out the plant parts. Add potassium. Potassium will make the dye stay in the cloth. Now wait some more. The mixture has to ferment—kind of like sauerkraut or yogurt would. Fermentation gives indigo dye its signature stink (or, if you agree with Mr. Ismailu, its chicken smell).

Blue cloth makers in Nigeria follow other traditions too. They weave their own garments using raffia, cotton, and silk. They beat the cloth with a mallet to get out wrinkles. (Doesn’t that sound more fun than ironing?) But style is changing. People who live nearby don’t want as much real indigo clothing. So dyers—present and future—hope for another kind of buyer: tourists.

Hear, my son, your father’s instruction. ― Proverbs 1:8