by Peter Boehm
I felt sorry for Toussaint’s mother. I didn’t want to leave like that. That’s why I promised to drop by again before I left N’Djamena.
Toussaint took me to the main street, and to a taxi. For the first time, he didn’t pester me, when we were alone, to take him to Germany.
I went back a couple of days later. In the meantime, Toussaint’s mother had found out that he’d failed the term. She’d threatened to send him to work in the fields in the south of the country if he didn’t pass the next one. She had relatives there.
She was very disappointed. She asked me for advice about how she could help Toussaint do better at school. I told her that I didn’t understand why Toussaint didn’t do any homework, and why he didn’t follow up on his classes and study at home. His brothers and his cousin, Valentin, who spoke very good French, could surely help him with it. Besides this, Toussaint should go to the library at the French Institute of Culture, or to any of the municipal libraries. You can borrow books there for free.
By now, Toussaint’s eldest brother had got home from work. He worked at a ministry in the city. He said, “That’s all well and good, but how’s Toussaint supposed to do that? We haven’t got the money to pay for the journey into the city.”
It was no more than 15 minutes on foot from Toussaint’s house to the French Institute of Culture.
But it wasn’t about that. It was about preying on my generosity. Of course, I’d already given money to Valentin and Toussaint. And Toussaint had to give half of his to his mother. But Toussaint’s eldest brother didn't want me to get off that lightly.
He was huge – certainly well over 6 feet tall. He had a hard, angular face. I estimated him to be in his early thirties. He was more lying than sitting in a huge bulldozer tyre, which was kept in the courtyard evidently just for this purpose.
“I’ve got one more question”, he began, so tentatively that I could already guess what was coming. As I knew, he was the eldest man on this property, he said, and as such he had a right to know what I’d been doing here.
I don’t know how often I’ve had this discussion during my reporting – but in any event, often enough that I was sick of it. I interrupted him straightaway and said, directly, that only those who have done something could earn any money.
At first, that seemed to knock him off his track, but he didn’t give up that easily. He then said, bitterly, that he only wanted to know one thing – “Who will benefit, in Germany, from the text and from the photos you’ve taken here? Not us!”
At first, I hadn’t been particularly surprised by the fact that in Africa you can’t ask for directions, ask a favour, or take a photo without paying something for it. The people were poor. They took whatever they could get.
But at some point I noticed that it didn’t have anything to do with people's poverty, but with their traditions. People you asked favours of or photographed expected money because they were entitled to it, not because they were poor.
That’s the traditional way of understanding the law. All important events in a person’s life – birth, marriage or death – set in motion a sequence of giving and taking. In fact, all interpersonal relationships are based on a reciprocal exchange of money or goods.
The Africans gave their picture and their permission to be photographed – they gave something. So how could they not receive anything in return?! And they stuck to it, even though the real world now often calls this practice bribery, coercion and banditry.
There was a larger picture too, of course. There was an administration everywhere in Africa, but you had to bribe its officials – they were doing something for you, after all. There were also politicians, but in turn they had to do something for their family/clan/ethnic group, as these were the ones who had elected them in the first place. And so, of course, the politicians had to dip into the exchequer’s funds. Everything worked, continued to function. Rather ineffectually, admittedly, but it got there.
It’s just that, whilst the old ideas had survived in Africa, the outside world had changed. The challenges now were very different. The countries needed to develop economically. The real world expected it, and so did almost all of the Africans, yet they nonetheless stubbornly stuck to their old ways.
That’s the real tragedy of Africa. The world has changed, but the African mindset just hadn’t kept pace with it.
And that’s how it came that Toussaint’s eldest brother was lying around in his yard, trying to cash in on the share to which he was entitled, whilst everything around him had been in its final stages for quite a while.
Moursal, where N’Djamena’s civil servants lived, looked like a slum. The district’s primary school resembled some kind of task force and, at twelve years old, his brother Toussaint was already shrewder than many people in Europe will ever become in their entire lives.
After we’d said our goodbyes, Toussaint again accompanied me to the taxi rank. Shortly after we’d left the gate of the compound behind us, the well-known grin again appeared on his face.
“So, now what? Will you take me to Germany?” he asked.
NIGERIA
But no, officer! (Border – Cameroon – Dutse)
N’Djamena had seemed to me like a sleepy provincial backwater, not like the capital city of an independent country. In the next country, Nigeria, on the other hand, I encountered again the basic accoutrements of modern man – real newspapers, books, TVs, cinemas, Internet and tarmac roads.
Despite this, Nigeria is a synonym for all that has gone wrong in Africa. It’s one of the ten largest producers of crude oil in the world, but it’s a country where people think that any politician who doesn’t help himself to government money can’t be quite right in the head. And a country where barely a month passes without an ethnic conflict erupting somewhere. The police and the army are so corrupt that tribal militias have formed in the regions of the three main ethnic groups, and these militias have taken the duties of the security forces upon themselves. The country is drifting apart and, since the introduction of Sharia law in some northern states, and the riots of February 2000 between Muslims and Christians in Kaduna, it’s again on the verge of civil war.
You’ll never understand Nigeria unless you know an important number – 419. That’s the number of the paragraph in the Nigerian criminal code concerning fraud. 419 doesn’t so much describe a criminal offence, as an attitude towards life, a chance which everyone uses if they can. Regardless of the consequences.
In Kano, I witnessed an accident one evening. I was sitting in the backseat of a motorbike taxi. We must have been doing at least 50mph, but the vehicles were crowding, bumper to bumper, towards the two-lane city bypass when, in front of us, a cyclist got caught between two cars. One swerved to the right, the other to the left. The cyclist fell. We were just about able to swerve to avoid running him over and, when I turned around, the traffic was already surging over him again, like a wave in the surf.
My driver simply carried on. Just like everyone else around us. No-one made any attempt to stop and see what had happened to the cyclist. Who cares about a human life? That way, no-one had to worry, or even stop. The cyclist was surplus, an everyday loss, a squashed frog on a country road. Nothing more.
But before I reached Nigeria, I first had to travel through the far northern tip of Cameroon. Germany had negotiated this narrow strip of land over a hundred years ago, in order to give its colony access to Lake Chad.
Before we set off, our driver stuffed a bundle of 500 Central African (CFA) franc notes – about 65p each – into his breast pocket. He now jumped out at every police station, and gave each official a note. Most of them were watching the world go by, from the shade of a tree. Of course, the driver had added this toll money to our ticket price at the outset.
The one I found most entertaining was the policeman who, gazing out good-naturedly, his uniform stretched over his stomach, had positioned himself immediately behind a toll booth. Our driver clearly hadn’t reckoned with him.
He was sitting on a blanket on the ground, his legs apart, happily peeling vegetables for his lunch. Our driver pretended he hadn’t noticed him. But the policeman blew his whistle, and waved him over enthusiastically.
The driver wasn’t impressed by this. “But no, officer!” he cried, pleadingly, from the car. But the fat policeman wouldn't have it. He blew his whistle again. He wanted his 500 CFA francs too.
In Nigeria, on the stretch to Maiduguri, the landscape was even more desolate than in western Sudan and in Chad. It had a rather post-apocalyptic air. The world had become useless, uninhabitable, dead.
There shouldn’t actually have been a desert here. But nothing had outlived the people and their herds. Even the puny, leafless bushes and shrubs which otherwise hang on in the most barren of places, had disappeared.
The Emir of Dutse told me later that, twenty years ago, all the hills around his city, 250 miles further west, had been covered in forests. There had been monkeys living there in the wild. But today it’s all bare.
I’d always instinctively believed that the existence of anything like a Fata Morgana was just part of desert legend. After all, that a virtual oasis should always appear precisely at the point when desert travellers were about to expire, had struck me as a fantasy, even from childhood. But they really do exist. I’ve seen them.
Fata Morganas occur above hot patches of ground because the air density, and thus the refractive index, is much lower there than at higher altitude. That’s why the blue of the sky is reflected on the upper surface of the super-heated layer of air.
I prayed silently that our Peugeot 504 wouldn’t break down here. The air was as hot as that of a hairdryer, and I found the desolate stretches, which turned into reflected lakes, spooky. Seeing the illusionary lakes, enticing you to go for a cooling swim, in this hostile environment frightened me, and I was always pleased when we approached another settlement.
I spent the night in Maiduguri. Just as in such over-populated countries like India or China, Nigeria also has cities, the names of which you’ve never heard of, with over a million inhabitants. Maiduguri is one of these. Just like Lagos and Kano, these cities are huge, and have no real centre. New suburbs of single-storey houses, shops, huts, shacks and stalls spring up on their outskirts, expanding ever further into the wilderness, aimlessly and endlessly. The streets are jammed with thousands of speeding Okadas – small mopeds, which their drivers weave between the cars for 20p or less, disregarding all traffic regulations, and driving at such breakneck speed that you really need to have resigned yourself to death if you dare travel in their passenger seat.
The heat of the Nigerian cities, and their noise, dust and exhaust fumes are hard to bear. The streets are overrun with people. The pavements are taken up with traders’ goods. Everyone seems to live outside. The houses are too hot anyway.
You can spend hours in traffic jams. Street hawkers lean through the open windows proffering fresh drinking water, newspapers or flaccid white bread. “Some peanuts, sir?” One passenger’s advice – “Just hang on tightly to your bag!”
Even at night the cities still seem overcrowded. There’s movement everywhere, no-one stands still. There’s no pause for thought, not a moment of quiet, no escape.
• The Emir of Dutse (Dutse)
It was through an article in a British magazine that I found out about the Emir of Dutse. The article was about the introduction of Sharia law in the Nigerian state of Jigawa – of which Dutse is the capital city. The ceremony for this had been cancelled, however, as the organisers feared street battles like those seen in Kaduna in February 2000. There had been over 2,000 deaths there.
The article had said that the Emir was highly educated, and had travelled the world. But I was more surprised by the fact that he seemed to talk to western journalists.
There are traditional leaders like the Emir of Dutse almost everywhere in Africa. They’re Muslim or Christian, and a couple are even Animists. Some rule over villages, others over an entire region, and some even over a whole ethnic group.
In places where they originally didn’t exist, the colonial powers brought them in, in order to centralise the countries they ruled. In southern Nigeria, chiefs still wear the British bowler hat or tropical helmet today, as a symbol of their power. But one thing is common to all the traditional leaders – they exert a significant influence over their subjects, one which their countries’ politicians can’t ignore.
The Hausa Emirs in northern Nigeria are probably the best known and the richest of Africa’s traditional leaders. They have the longest unbroken tradition – going back to the 15th century – and the Emirs of Sokoto and Kano in particular, as religious leaders of the Nigerian Muslims, hold significant political power.
Africa’s traditional leaders had always seemed rather archaic to me – an institution which had survived, but would have to die sooner or later. No matter how long or seriously I thought about it, the African concept of tradition remained something alien to me.
I simply couldn’t relate to it. There wasn’t anything like it in my life. There was traditional dress, folklore, something rather quaint and outdated, but otherwise just rationally-based behaviour which had nothing to do with my roots.
However, it was different for Africans. When Africans talked about tradition, they meant the traditions of their ethnic group – which they not only still knew very well from their childhood in their villages, but also, for the most part, still kept alive. Their common heritage was constantly present, and their leaders were part of this. They had thus entered a domain in which they couldn’t be touched.
That was why I was always so surprised by the utter conviction with which Africans defended their traditions. When a Masai elder proclaimed in his camp, before a little girl was circumcised under excruciating pain, “That’s our tradition. No government, no-one can forbid us from doing it.” Or when my 23-year-old Kenyan-Somali acquaintance Rahema suddenly explained to me, “If you give up your tradition you destroy yourself.” Or when a South Sudanese politician told me, during an interview that, “People who forget their traditions lose their way and go mad in the end.” Then I had no alternative but to be silently astonished. This way of thinking was beyond the realm of my experience.
That was the reason for my visit to Dutse. I wanted to see African tradition up close.
But when I got out of our Peugeot in Dutse, the passengers travelling on to Kano, a good 60 miles further west, gave me puzzled glance. You see, there’s nothing worth stopping for in Dutse.
The small town is little more than a crossroads on the main road through the country. It has a small market, a modern hotel, built on a hill and lacking a regular electricity supply, a couple of government buildings, and a few sleepy streets of neglected houses.
No-one really needed Dutse, much as no-one needs Jigawa State. Jigawa had been founded in 1991, by the then junta leader Ibrahim Babangida, for the sole reason of doing something good for the area’s residents. They gained a Governor and all the accompanying civil servant jobs and, more importantly of course, the Nigerian budget’s financial contribution to the administration of a state. So in essence, Jigawa is just a bore hole in northern Nigeria, created to siphon off to the north a large proportion of the national budget, i.e. of the income from oil extraction in the south.
I got a taxi and went directly to the Emir’s palace on the hill above the town. His palace, which is over 200 years old, is beautifully appointed. There’s a huge gate with a balcony at the entrance. The Emir stands up there on public holidays and greets his subjects. The main building is built from clay, in the imposing style typical of the region, and fortified battlements rise from its roof. The typical, delicate Hausa reliefs on the cream walls are brightly painted, in slightly muted rainbow colours.
When I arrived, the Emir was just leaving his palace and was saying his farewells for the weekend. His musicians were blowing their shawms, their 6-foot long Jericho trumpets and their cow horn flutes, and beating their drum
s. They always play in honour of the Emir when he arrives at or leaves the palace.
A secretary, to whom I briefly explained my business, took my arm and led me towards the Emir. He was encircled by a group of courtiers. I showed the Emir my press pass, explained to him what I wanted, gave him my visiting card – and got an appointment with him for the next working day.
The guards outside his private palace in Dutse’s residential area, however, seemed unable to believe this. They made me wait at the gate. But five minutes later I was led into a bungalow.
If this hadn’t also had the bright Hausa patterns on the walls, and if the floors inside hadn’t been covered with Oriental patterned carpets, you could have mistaken it for a European bungalow.
“His Royal Highness, the Emir of Dutse, Alhaji Nuhu Muhammad Sanusi” – that’s the Emir’s official name and title – approached me with his arms outstretched. He exclaimed, amicably, “Peter!” and smiled as welcomingly as though he were meeting an old, loyal friend, whom he hadn’t seen for many years.
The Emir received me with full pomp and ceremony. He had a beige turban on his head, with the typical knotted horse’s ears of the Hausa Emirs. The turban also covered his chin, and ended with a flap over his chest. He also wore a matching boubou. He sat down on a period sofa, and showed me to an armchair opposite him.
The Emir really is highly educated. After primary school, he went to an American secondary school. “My father was very progressive”, he said. And in the early 1970s he studied for four years at Ohio University. After that, he spent six months in the USA and six months in Europe. “Ever since, travelling has been my hobby. I’ve always been curious to learn something about different cultures”, he said, and his soft, slightly sad eyes wandered to imagined foreign parts. He still, today, has friends in Germany and in the USA, and he only needs to visit East and South Africa in order to have travelled to all continents, to all parts of the world.