Looking for Transwonderland

by Noo Saro-Wiwa

  Saying goodbye to Abuja would be a wrench, however. I’d gotten rather comfortable here. Leaving my brother’s home felt like an ejection from the warmth of a duvet into the cold of the bedroom air, and I slightly dreaded having to reorient myself in a new city once again.

  8

  Straddling Modernity’s Kofar

  Kano

  The harmattan mist still clogged the city the next morning. Abuja was a sandy-grey haze of immaculate, sleeping buildings. In these cool, early hours, things weren’t much quieter than in the afternoons – the city slumbers, then stirs, never fully waking.

  I boarded a Peugeot 505 bound for Kano, five hours north of Abuja. We zoomed along the highway through sparsely vegetated plains interrupted by the occasional dome-shaped, rocky inselberg. The driver, a pretty, feline man, wore smoky eyeliner (a Hausa tradition), spoke no English and barely moved a muscle, save for his fingers tapping to the Hausa music that jangled from a cassette tape. His stereo was set to maximum treble and minimum bass. The music’s repetitive bassline and percussion were overlain with Hindi-style singing, which combined with the blazing sun and sandy landscape to mesmerise me into a deep slumber.

  Part way through the journey, I was yanked out of sleep when the car swerved violently to the left of the road. Coming towards us was a government car with a wailing siren, tailed by a convoy of five or six other vehicles, including police cars. They veered into our lane in order to overtake the vehicles in their own lane, but the length of the convoy meant that regular cars in both directions were sent screeching onto the hard shoulder in panic. Senior politicians enjoy travelling this way, their sirens screaming non-stop throughout long intercity journeys as they move with an urgency that’s manufactured to flaunt their importance.

  Five hours later, I woke up in a motor park somewhere on the edge of Kano city. My Peugeot was descended upon by taxi men competing to take me to a hotel. They were all ebony-skinned Muslims, wearing djellabas and kufi hats, and speaking in rapid Hausa filled with Arabic-sounding glottal stops and rolled Rs. Our shared nationality seemed a rather abstract and unreal concept. The only man among them to have a smattering of English won my custom and loaded my bags into his car.

  Dusk closed in on us as we drove through Kano’s streets. The aroma of skewered meat breezed through the car. Several minarets extended into the ochre sky, adding a touch of elegance to a city that was otherwise draped in that homogenising Nigerian blanket of street hawkers, okadas, litter and eye-watering smog. But I hadn’t seen quite this many mosques in one metropolis before. No matter how tiny and poor, they adhered to an Islamic architectural style, with minarets and domes, albeit more blocky and angular than the Middle-Eastern style. Nigerian churches, by contrast, are free-form and modern, often lacking the defining Christian spires and stained-glass window features.

  The city felt new and unfamiliar, but it wasn’t my first visit. I had spent a week here with one of my aunts and some cousins in the 1980s. As on most family visits, I played indoors most of the time. I didn’t see much of Kano. My only memory was of an exotic haze of orange mud walls and kufi hats, and my father pointing ahead and telling us that our next-door country, Niger, was over there. I thought he’d meant it was literally behind the wall.

  Kano is the oldest city in West Africa, a once-glorious ancient city at the crossroads of trans-Saharan trade, established as one of seven walled city states of the Hausa people more than 1,000 years ago. It became strategically important in the trade route, and established connections with Mali and North Africa. People from these parts, and Muslim Fulani herders from the Senegal valley, migrated to Kano, bringing artisanal skills and Islam, which arrived some time between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The Fulani integrated with the Hausa people as an educated elite. By the sixteenth century the city had became a centre of Islamic scholarship, and was ringed by a large wall. Kano’s traders travelled as far as the Mediterranean, modern-day Ghana and Gabon to exchange leather, pottery, metal works and cloth in return for salt, silks, spices, perfume, Islamic books and weapons. At the height of its powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the city state was sending 300-camel loads of cloth to Timbuktu. By the nineteenth century, Kano was receiving cloth from Manchester in England, silk and sugar from France, clothing from Tunisia and Egypt, and reading glasses from Venice.

  By taking part in the global exchange of goods and ideas that much of Africa missed out on, Kano enjoyed high levels of literacy and architectural sophistication – its Malian-influenced Islamic mud-walled buildings contained vaulted ceilings, pinnacled buttresses and elaborately carved wooden gates. Even the British, who captured Kano in 1903, eschewed their customary destructiveness and instead converted one of Kano’s palaces into their central administration office.

  By the year 2000, the city was enforcing Islamic sharia law, the strict Islamic legal code, more widely than usual, prescribing lashings and amputations for thieves and miscreants. Women were temporarily banned from riding okadas (too much spreading of legs) and ordered to sit at the back of buses instead. Religious hostilities surfaced in 2007 when a rally to protest the killings of Muslims by Christians in central parts of the country lurched into violence. Muslim mobs burned and looted Christian-owned properties and businesses in Kano; up to 600 people were killed.

  Now the city was at peace again. But I felt particularly alone here. I had entered the true north. The uniformity of dress code, the forest of minarets and the weaker Western cultural influence were very foreign to me. My relatively brasher southern energies felt straitjacketed by Hausa’s rigidity and poise. Here, I was very much an Ogoni and a Christian. Not that I felt threatened by it, but Kano seemed to me to be underpinned by a tight power structure based on a male-dominated ethnic kinship far removed from my identity. I felt an uncharacteristic urge to ‘fit in’.

  The next morning, I walked down the street in an ankle-length djellaba, sweating beneath my headscarf. The inflexible hem restricted my stride, forcing me to walk at a slow, demure pace. I cut a foolish figure in my trainers, Ray-Ban sunglasses and less than demure demeanour, which singled me out as flagrantly as full-frontal nudity. When I tried to mount an okada, the stiff hemline forced me to raise the garment to the tops of my thighs, a rather counter-productive move. I subsequently ran back to my room – at a Christian guest house – and slipped a pair of trousers on underneath. God knows what the receptionist thought of it all.

  Once out and about in the drier Saharan air, I began to wonder whether adopting Islamic dress code was necessary. Most women were modestly covered up, but I spotted quite a few individuals wearing T-shirts, trousers and no headscarves – and not a dirty look or stoning mob in sight. Any evidence of religious tension had vanished. Islam, established here long before Christianity arrived, was an older and more languid affair, free of evangelism’s teenage fervour. Christianity confronted you and pummelled, whereas Islam lay under your feet, underpinning every aspect of society in its quietly dictatorial way. Everyone appeared laid-back. The Hausa people took such a supine approach to life, I found it hard to read their emotions or motives. As a child I mistook their leisured stature for laziness. They were disproportionately prone to begging, I believed. Now I realised it was a trick of the mind – Hausas are simply more noticeable than other beggars because of their Islamic dress.

  The boys who rode okadas (or achabas as they’re known here), possessed none of the competitive, time-pushed zeal of the southern okada men. They sat on their bikes, looking utterly passive, as though someone had physically deposited them on the seats, wrapped their fingers around the handlebars and turned the ignition keys for them. None of them spoke English. And some of them didn’t bother letting me know this. They would nod at my destination request without understanding me, then take me to entirely the wrong place. My subsequent tongue lashings were greeted with a vacant stare or gentle shrug of the shoulders; a mule would give a more animated reaction.

  Eventually, someone delivered me to
the old city wall, which was first erected in the tenth century and fortified in the fifteenth century. The adobe structure had crumbled long ago, but part of it is being restored with assistance from the German government. I walked past a small completed section of it, 4.5 metres of beautifully compacted mud, water and straw. The traditional gates, or kofars, leading into the city are still in use, but they’re signified by modern hoardings rather than the elaborately carved wooden doors of old. These kofars made for handy geographical reference points when travelling about town, especially as the achaba men rarely knew non-Hausa street names or hospital names.

  I asked an achaba man to drop me at Kofar Mata, next to the old indigo dye pits. Cloth has been dyed in these pits for 500 years, largely by the same family. In the courtyard, three wizened, red-eyed men dipped cloths inside circles of brilliant indigo pools that twinkled in the sunlight. They mix natural dyes and ash in water and pour the mixture into the pits. Indigo plant sticks are added and the dye mixture is left to ferment for two or three days. Potassium and more indigo are added to the dye, which is fermented again for a further three days until the dye is ready. By the side of the courtyard, inside a dark room, several young men were pounding dyed clothes with wooden clubs to give the cloth a beautiful sheen. By the back wall several pieces of dyed cloth imprinted with patterns and swirls had been hung out to dry. Local chiefs still wear them as ceremonial robes.

  Afterwards, I visited Kurmi Market, in the centre of the old city, where people have traded for nearly 1,000 years. The market was a dense warren of stalls packed tightly enough to partially block out the sunlight. My eyes struggled to take in the piles of henna, spices, eyeliner (worn by men and women), and ink balls for writing books. The place buzzed with artisanal activity, all of it handled by men. They calmly but firmly urged me to examine exquisitely weaved rugs, raffia mats and beaded necklaces, the intricate feminine designs draped over their thick manly fingers.

  The harmattan wind infused the narrow passageways with the pungent odour of handcrafted leather. I bought beautiful snakeskin handbags and leather sandals, and when the trader placed another of his purses in my hand, I willingly, reluctantly, happily accepted it at a silly price. It was far easier, though, to say no to the modern, Africa-shaped leather pendants, those tacky symbols of Pan-Africanism.

  Afterwards I took an achaba towards Dala Hill, the highest point in Kano. The bike weaved through the Old City, which, like the market, consisted of narrow alleyways flanked by flat-roofed, one-storey buildings, some of them centuries old. The occasional satellite dish poked out above the rooftops, but for the most part any shiny gloss of modernity was dulled by the fast-encroaching Saharan sands, which blended with the ochre houses, tree branches, human skin and soil to form a kaleidoscope of brown.

  A few people rode through the streets on horseback. I saw flashes of women and girls in brilliantly coloured headscarves, materialising between buildings like shy tropical birds. Their colourful veils – lemons, pinks, bright oranges, lilacs – made my all-black hijab seem needlessly austere and dull. I questioned why I bothered wearing it; I also questioned whether headscarves actually protected Nigerian women’s modesty. Our coiffeurs aren’t the focus of our sex appeal. If anything, Muslim African women should hide the curve of their backsides from the gaze of men, not their hair.

  Kano women were a mystery to me, an inconspicuous, penumbral presence in the city, partaking little in public activity. Men appeared to do everything: they made up the entirety of cinema audiences, dominated the basketball courts, repaired clothes and sold all the fruit on the roadside.

  ‘Ninety per cent of my friends in the north don’t work,’ said Rabi Isa, from her desk at the British Council in the centre of town. ‘Many of them have degrees but they got married and started having children straight after graduation.’

  Rabi was an unusual specimen – an employed Hausa woman who wore T-shirts and jeans, but kept the headscarf on. She didn’t bend completely to sharia law or other religious rules. A few of her friends wanted to start earning money now that their marriages were in trouble, she said, but most of them still preferred to defer to men.

  ‘I tried to organise a debate about women running for the presidency. I wanted to invite an eminent female professor to speak in favour of the notion, but she declined because she didn’t believe in the idea of a female president.’

  Rabi said that another woman, a state commissioner, also declined her invitation on the basis that she was happy to occupy a high-status position so long as she could answer to a man above her.

  ‘Is sharia law still being enforced?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really. Sharia was mainly for political gain,’ Rabi believed. ‘The present governor got lots of grassroots support for it, especially in the rural areas.’

  In the late 1990s, military rule had ended, and legions of poor Muslims were anxious to combat the corruption, poverty, elitism and baggy-jeaned hip hop threatening their culture. Sharia law was introduced in several northern states around that time. Emboldened conservatives pushed for it to be introduced in Kano, which though Islamic, considered itself too complex and diverse to lurch in such a conservative direction. But intense local support, backed by Islamic preachers and scholars, compelled the Kano government to gradually introduce the new law.

  Women were banned from riding achabas and alcohol was prohibited in all areas. A sharia police force known as the Hisbah patrolled the streets and enforced the new rules, sometimes very enthusiastically. By some reports, they raided a wedding suspected of conducting un-Islamic activities, and invaded certain private homes for the same reason. Although sharia applies to Muslims only, Christian women seen straddling achabas were beaten, and so too were their hapless drivers. The government was forced to relax the achaba ban after vehement public protests.

  The Hisbah also made themselves unpopular with the secular police force, which bristled at having to share its authority with them. The forces clashed regularly. While the Hisbah confiscated alcohol, the secular police were escorting lorry shipments of liquor in exchange for tips. This convinced the Hisbah that the secular police were deliberately undermining sharia law in collusion with the government, which had implemented the Islamic code reluctantly. The government had failed fully to fund provision of sharia reference books to train new judges, or to pay existing judges on time. Consequently, sharia never established itself as strongly as hoped (or feared) in Kano. The hand amputation machines said to have been imported from Saudi Arabia were never used, adulterers were never stoned and sharia courts took too long to process legal cases anyway.

  The secular government neutered the Hisbah’s powers even further by introducing its own compliant Hisbah force, thus splitting sharia policing in two, and giving the secular police the option of ignoring cases brought by the non-government Hisbah. As sharia’s influence waned, the prostitution and alcohol consumption it helped to reduce tiptoed back into Kano life.

  Supporters of sharia law accused the authorities of equivocating about the more serious issues. The ordinary poor folk watched corrupt politicians get richer, while the sharia authorities focused on the fripperies of film censorship and dress codes.

  ‘Sharia is hypocritical,’ Rabi said. ‘There’s one rule for men and another for women. It was basically introduced as a way of controlling women. Men can do what they like. There’s an area just here, near Government House. Prostitutes congregate there every night. The politicians know they’re there but they don’t do anything about it. If sharia is anti-corruption, why don’t those corrupt politicians get their eighty lashes?’

  That night, I walked around the Sabon Gari (‘foreign quarter’), a section of town where non-Muslims are traditionally exempt from Islamic laws and customs. While the rest of the city fell dark and silent, the Ibo Road hummed with life. For the first time that day, I observed men and women socialising freely. Further along the street, the silhouettes of Hausa men in their fez-style kufi hats fronted tiny, light-filled stree
t taverns crammed with bottles. Suya barbecue smoke mingled with the exhaust fumes of passing cars, and the cars’ red tail lights complemented the occasional red light bulb hanging above a front door. At a table outside one restaurant, four animated men drank and joked in the presence of a scantily dressed woman who sat sulkily beside them, an inanimate accessory to their chatter. I wondered if she was dreading ‘dessert’ with her client. Hedonism, the flip side of the piety coin, had reasserted itself in Kano.

  I realised that the power struggle between Islam and Christianity here requires enormous dexterity, like conducting a wrestling match on a tightrope. Compromise is key. Prior to the elections of 2007, after much internal infighting, political parties running for office included Muslims and Christians on their tickets. And in the 2006 national census, questions about religious affiliation were left out altogether, such is the sensitivity of the issue. Revealing the true sizes of the Christian and Muslim populations was considered too great a risk.

  Maintaining our ethno-religious Pangaea requires skilful manoeuvring and compromise, something that Nigerian politics – for all its evils – has achieved. On some level, I admired the adeptness with which our society handles its cultural fault lines – especially when compared to the British angst over its tiny Muslim minority. Our sporadic flashes of violence don’t reflect complete failure, I realised, but instead the occasional spewings of an active volcano that Nigerian society has done remarkably well to contain.

  Back in my bed at the guest house, I watched TV. Many of the shows and commercials were dubbed or subtitled in the Arabic tones of Hausa. English-language TV and Nollywood movies aren’t as popular in the north since English isn’t as widely spoken here. The movies’ witchcraft themes also hold less appeal, I was told, because pre-Islamic animism was severely dented during the Fulani jihads, which swept across the Hausa states in the nineteenth century. Many Hausas prefer culturally similar Bollywood movies over Nollywood films.