Disappointingly, it was my last day in Jos. I explained to the woman my reasons for coming here.
‘Ken Saro-Wiwa was your father?’ asked a visitor, a strapping pale-skinned woman. Her big eyes widened and a gap-toothed smile lit up her face. ‘Oh, he was a hero! He made me aware of how important it is to stand up for your rights,’ she said. ‘Because of your father I decided to make people here aware of their rights. Me, I am Igbo, but I want people here to fight for what is theirs.’
The woman, Ruth, was referring to the Birom people. These Christians are indigenous to the Jos region but these days find themselves competing for jobs and farmland with Hausa and Fulani migrants from the north. Here in Nigeria’s middle belt, the Islamic north meets the Christian south, two dissonant communities with a common need for survival. Biroms and Hausas have learnt to live side by side, but the peoples are like two mildly combustible elements that occasionally sputter on contact beneath the city’s placid surface. In 2001, those sputters erupted into a full-blown explosion.
It began during the local government election, which was contested between the incumbent People’s Democratic Party (PDP) – a mainly Christian party – and the largely Muslim All Nigerian People’s Party (ANPP). After losing in a massive landslide, the ANPP accused the PDP of electoral fraud. Scuffles between their rival supporters drew upon old religious tensions, although the fundamental problem was economic.
Nigeria’s oil-reliant economy runs on a system of patronage in which the ruling party dishes out jobs and oil contracts to its friends and supporters. Those who are kept out of this largesse must fend for themselves in the tiny, non-oil sectors. To some Nigerians, losing an election is equivalent to facing an economic depression, inspiring panic, profound fear and bitterness. Elections become high-stakes affairs, in which human lives become expendable.
After the election results, mobs of largely unemployed young men grabbed sticks, knives, guns and machetes, and took to the streets. People were stabbed and burned, churches razed, bodies lay unclaimed in mosques. Seven thousand people evacuated their homes. But the episode, like most in Nigeria, only lasted a few days – the seams of our society fray without actually tearing apart. The army restored order, and ordinary life resumed once again in Jos, its inter-ethnic bitterness simmering down to indoor grumbles and jostling for resources.
Ruth, though an ethnic Igbo, had lived in Jos for years, and her loyalties lay firmly with the Christian Birom people.
‘These Hausa-Fulanis have taken over,’ she complained, highlighting the numerous Muslim-owned businesses in town. ‘And the Biroms are working as security men,’ she fumed, nodding at the security guard sitting and listening on a table nearby. ‘The Birom youths say, “We go to Kaduna . . . the Hausas are there; we come home to Jos and we cannot get job here.”’
Ruth was particularly irked by the voting power she claimed Hausas enjoyed as a result of their larger numbers.
‘The Hausa man can have four wives and ten children with each wife. The Birom man has just one wife and, let’s say, four children. Come election time, who has the most power? There’s no border in the north with Niger state. A Hausa man’s brother can come down here, vote, and return. You cannot do that sort of thing in the south! These Hausas buy a plot of land with nothing but goats on it, then they claim fifty people live there. Oh it boils my stomach.’
In matters as fraught as these I couldn’t be sure where the truth lay. Nevertheless, I loved Ruth’s spirit. It was a gust of fresh air that cleared the cobwebs of female compliance so prevalent (at least on the surface) in these parts.
‘Didn’t the government hold a national census recently?’ I asked.
‘That census was rigged as well,’ Ruth harrumphed. Something had to be done about it, and she wasn’t going to be a mere spectator. ‘I don’t believe in all this “turn the other cheek”,’ she declared. The security guard grunted in agreement. ‘God knew that eighty per cent of human beings are right-handed. If I come and slap you,’ – Ruth pretended to slap my left cheek with her right hand – ‘you can defend yourself. You can use your right hand to stop me, you see? So you must fight and stand up for your rights.’ Her logic confused me slightly, but I was enjoying it nevertheless. I’d never heard such an entertaining argument against the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy.
‘When you pray, you must keep one eye open,’ Ruth said. She bent her head and clasped her hands in prayer while her bulging left eye scanned her surroundings with comic suspicion. The security guy chuckled with me. ‘If you do not vote, you cannot complain to God that the election was rigged,’ she continued. ‘But if you register, and the election was rigged, you can say, “God, I stand before you,”’ – she raised her hand, still clutching her mobile phone – ‘“I voted for my man but he was denied.”’
‘I try to encourage women to register to vote. Some will say, “Ay, but my shop . . . I cannot leave my shop.” But if she does not vote, how can she complain when the election is rigged? You must stand up and be counted! So I try to create awareness among people, one by one.’
‘How do you do that?’
‘I speak to people with influence, who can spread the awareness further. I go around and disciple this person, then the next. Your father’s struggle touched me.’ I glowed with gratitude. ‘He created a disciple in me,’ she beamed. ‘Your father’s blood speaks!’
11
Kingdom of Heaven
Maiduguri and Sukur
The beautiful morning sunshine poured grace onto an inglorious scene. Cars clogged the gas station, more than twenty vehicles lined up in a convoy that snaked out beyond the forecourt and onto the road leading out of town. Our driver was hoping to refuel for our journey to Maiduguri, a city in Nigeria’s far north-east. Oil shortages seemed to happen more frequently in Jos than in any other town I’d visited, although none of my fellow passengers knew why.
‘I think maybe they are withholding oil because the government will soon raise the oil price,’ one man suggested.
Everyone in the car kissed their teeth and mopped their faces with handkerchiefs.
‘Sometimes the advertised prices are not the same as the prices at the pump,’ complained the man next to me.
I climbed out of the car to stretch my legs. All along the queue, drivers were vacating their cars to speak to the station staff. Sometimes, the conversations resulted in their moving faster up the line. Feeling restless, I peered into the window of the forecourt office.
‘Are you looking for something?’ asked a man wearing a baseball cap and leaning against a car, a toothpick wedged smarmily between his teeth. ‘I am the manager here.’
‘I was just looking around,’ I said. ‘How come there’s so little gas?’
‘Are you a journalist?’
‘No, I just want to understand the situation. I don’t live in Nigeria.’
‘You know, a Nigerian always answers a question with a question,’ he grinned evasively.
Oil shortages are a regular part of Nigerian life, and the cliché about ‘selling ice to Eskimos’ rings embarrassingly true here. Although we’re the twelfth-largest oil producer in the world, we still import billions of dollars worth of refined fuel because our government hasn’t built enough refineries. Ordinary Nigerians speculatively grumble that the oil ministers (who have lucrative contracts to import refined oil) deliberately maintain the status quo, in order to make more money. They cause fuel shortages at the forecourts of their privately owned gas stations by selling their oil to black marketeers (at an inflated price) instead of regular car owners. These black market vendors are generally young men who stand on the roadside with cartloads of petrol cans. Every driver heading out of town has to decide whether to wait at the forecourts or take their chances and find fuel along the highway.
‘Why are there shortages?’ I again asked the gas station manager. Saying nothing, he folded his arms and grinned some more, exuding the arrogance of a man who has benefited from flouting the rules. He t
ipped his head back and inhaled. But just as he opened his mouth to speak, my driver ordered me back into the car – our tank was full, it was time to go. I marched back to the vehicle, annoyed that he had been let off the hook. Perhaps it was for the best, anyway. I was slamming myself against a brick wall of selfishness, and nothing productive would come of it.
The road east to Maiduguri cut through beautiful yellow grassy plains and large boulders that had been defaced by the names of electoral candidates. Dotting the roadside for miles were baobab trees, with their characteristic upside-down appearance; their thick trunks sprouted skinny branches that resembled roots, reaching towards the sky in petrified supplication. Between my many naps, I glimpsed towering anthills, Hausa cow herders resting their arms on sticks laid across their shoulders, and women on the roadside selling pyramids of purple onions and supernaturally red tomatoes. I wanted to stay on that road forever.
In the afternoon I reached Maiduguri, a hot Islamic city slowly being buried alive by Saharan sands blowing in from the north. Maiduguri once lay less than an hour’s drive from the mighty Lake Chad, on Nigeria’s north-eastern border. But that distance has stretched to more than two hours. One of the world’s most voluminous bodies of freshwater is being sucked dry by irrigation, dwindling rainfall and desertification caused by the felling of trees. The lake, once an expanse of 26,000 square kilometres in the 1960s, now occupies a humbling 1,500 square kilometres.
My guidebook raved about one particular state-run hotel in Maiduguri. Arriving at the unlit lobby, I stood at the reception desk, waiting for someone to attend to me. Several minutes passed. I flopped into an old armchair and stared at an abstract painting on the wall next to the presidential photo.
Eventually, a very cheerful man introducing himself as Columbus trotted limply into the lobby, as if his limbs were controlled by a puppeteer’s strings. He looked drunk.
‘Saro-Wiwa!’ he exclaimed as I filled out the check-in form. ‘You are from Rivers State.’
‘Yes.’
‘I am so happy to see a fellow southerner! I am from Imo.’ His round face and bulbous nose came from my neck of the woods, though his apparent inebria cancelled out any sense of affinity.
Columbus led me up a wide staircase to my room, furnished some time in the early 1980s and seemingly untouched since then. The 1970s-style cylinder lampshades, circular tables and squares of ancient carpeting looked unstained and unworn, as if mummified by the shroud of dust coating the entire room. The water pump was broken. In the bathroom, Columbus showed me the buckets of water I would have to use for bathing and flushing the toilet. I half wished I’d bought a tent and slept outside. Without running water or electricity, I felt I was staying in a glorified shack and paying for some pretty bathroom tiles and carpeting.
‘This is your towel,’ Columbus told me, patting the towel and throwing up a swirling cloud of dust.
‘Maiduguri is very dusty,’ he said. Or perhaps, I thought to myself, the room hasn’t been cleaned in a while? He moved around the room with exaggerated meticulousness, dusting down the tables, chairs and bed coverings. ‘I always like to help my people,’ he said. ‘I will give you discount. I don’t want no wahala for you.’ He reduced the tariff from an audacious 10,000 down to a slap-in-the-face 5,000. I didn’t have the strength to argue.
Running low on cash, I took an okada into the town centre, hoping to find an ATM machine. The paved streets were concealed beneath 5 centimetres of Saharan sand. I trudged along. None of the banks accepted Visa cards. I’d have to conserve my money until I reached the next big city. Feeling more anxious than necessary, I headed to the market to buy a wrappa (a traditional patterned cloth worn around women’s waists) to spread over my dusty hotel bed. The market was a particularly fly-ridden and dispiriting affair. I fought my way through tightly packed stalls, feeling clobbered by fatigue, the heat and the sand. My surroundings merged into a nauseating blur: the veiled women, the men’s kufi hats, the mosque minarets, the okadas sliding along the Saharan streets. Stomach cramps and rapidly depleting funds had unleashed the misanthropic beast within me and sapped my patience with everyone and everything. I tutted impatiently whenever people walked in my path, and my unending quest for small change took a ruthless turn: after buying a fistful of groundnuts, I waited cold-heartedly as the vendor rummaged her pockets to find change for my 1,000 note.
Unable to face it all, I returned to the hotel. The sight of my dusty, hot room brought on a complete collapse in morale. I spread my wrappa over the bed cover and curled up like a self-pitying foetus.
It was dark when I woke up. Columbus had warned me that NEPA, the state electricity supply, wasn’t working, and the hotel generator was broken. I fumbled for the lamp switch. Nothing happened when I turned it on. Outside was pitch black too – without even the beams of light from a streetlamp. I left the room by torchlight and stared into the corridor, a dark, silent vortex hiding all sorts of potential horrors. Was I the only guest in this entire hotel? Trying to suppress my fear of the dark, I hurried down the central staircase and into the shadows of the lobby, which was eerily empty too, like the aftermath of an apocalypse. Columbus was nowhere to be found. Perhaps the penultimate person to leave planet Earth had remembered to turn off the lights. I pushed open the main door and walked gingerly into the car park. Several seconds after passing through the door, I heard it slam violently behind me. Before I could let out a scream, I realised that the door had simply bounced open and shut again. A quick scan of the hotel’s exterior revealed that not a single candle illuminated any of the windows; I think I really was the only guest.
The distant light of an okada grew larger and quickly lit up the street. ‘Can you take me to Mr Biggs?’ I asked the driver, feeling hollow with loneliness. Mr Biggs was a relatively new and ubiquitous fast-food chain. I could always rely on its unwholesome, mass-produced Nigerian dishes when I lacked the energy to find a proper eatery. Under a brilliant starry sky, we cruised through the sandy, unlit residential streets. The bike skidded and slid in all directions on the sand, nearly throwing us off several times. I arrived at Mr Biggs and comforted myself with a polystyrene boxful of jollof rice and rubber chicken, eaten under a dim, bluish light and a TV screen broadcasting Nigerian hip-hop videos. The singers were simulating the fabulousness of an American lifestyle using the most economical of props – hotel swimming pools, cheap sunglasses, old cars.
By the time I returned to the hotel, the electricity was flowing. I switched on the TV, although the only transmission available was the local state NTA channel. Three men were solemnly singing traditional Hausa music and shaking percussion instruments in front of the garish swirls of a cheap, computer-generated backdrop. In my eyes, the imagery was Nigeria exemplified: shoddiness without apology. It triggered the deepest dysphoria I’d felt so far. I was fed up with expensive inadequacy, fed up with unpredictability and low standards. Rarely do I feel homesick or isolated while travelling, but on this night, my resilience was punctured, the accumulated tensions of the past few weeks releasing themselves from my body with a deflated whimper. I switched off the TV and the light and fell asleep, dreaming of ATMs and aeroplanes.
The silvery morning sun rose up and lifted my spirits with it. My taxi careened through the pretty Borno State countryside, along tree-lined roads flanked by flat grassland and fields striated with crops. In the distance, the hazy Mandara mountains erupted from the plains. Somewhere at the top of those mountains was my destination – Sukur, a Stone Age mountain kingdom 900 metres above sea level on the Cameroonian border. Sukur is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its people still live in stone dwellings and employ Stone Age techniques for smelting iron, and – in a rare combination of land use – their farming terraces double up as burial sites.
At the foot of the Mandara range, we stopped at the local secretariat of Magadali town, where the staff introduced me to Simon, a man from Sukur who would escort me to the top of the mountain.
Getting to Sukur involved a long c
limb up the mountain, a sweltering ascent along centuries-old granite steps constructed at an ungodly gradient. From further up the mountain I looked down at the valley extended below me, its trees sprinkled over the plain like green peppercorns on a bed of mustard-coloured grass. All was quiet, except for the mooing of the cows wafted by the wind across the vast emptiness.
Thirty minutes into the climb, I stopped at one of the stone benches to catch my breath. The pain drained from my legs but I was too shattered to ask Simon any questions; all I could do was point breathlessly at an animal running across the pathway.
‘It’s a squirrel,’ he said without a puff. By himself, Simon said he could walk to the top of the mountain in forty minutes, wearing only floppy slippers. We continued up the mountain, passing a formidable old woman who shuffled with the aid of a stick while balancing a basket of fruit on her head. She was at least three hours and a million steps from her destination, yet seemed undaunted and unhurried. Time stretched measurelessly ahead of her, without demand. But for me, time was circular; it ruled my life and hemmed me in like a hamster on a treadmill. My climb was a time-consuming means to an end, and I wanted to finish it as quickly as possible.
Soon after the old woman, a teenage schoolboy loped past. Sukur had no school, so all children are taught in Magadali, returning home only on the weekends. Everything the people needed, be it education, jobs or hospital treatment, was obtained in Madagali. As I heaved myself up each stone step, taking in demoralising views of Simon’s backside zooming ahead with powerful ease, I concluded that I would gladly live life illiterate, unemployed and sickly if it meant evading this daily torture.
I wondered what sort of event drove the Sukur people to live at such bothersome altitudes. My guidebook informed me that the word ‘Sukur’ comes from at sukur, which means ‘feuding’ in the local Bura language. The people of Sukur possibly settled here after a battle of some kind. Simon said this wasn’t true. His only explanation was that the Sukur – Hausa-speaking Christians – migrated here from Cameroon so that they could ‘live more comfortably’.
Looking for Transwonderland Page 20