Africa Askew

by Peter Boehm

  He’d done his Business Studies degree at a prestigious British university, and had subsequently worked as a high-ranking official on all kinds of state-owned farms in northern Nigeria. He talked of coffee plantations, of breeding silkworms, and of fibre plantations. In between times, he’d also once been a head of department at the Nigerian state airline and, prior to succeeding his father as Emir in 1995, he’d run his own road construction company.

  I could already imagine his answer to my question. After all, everyone in Africa would choose a government post over having your own firm. But he nonetheless seemed to have been successful as a businessman, and so I asked him whether, six years earlier, the prospect of becoming Emir von Dutse had actually appealed to him.

  He responded with exactly the same words that the traditional healer Sana Tembini later used, in Mopti, in Mali, “In our tradition, everyone wants to be his father’s successor.”

  And becoming traditional leader didn't seem to have been to his detriment financially. The Emir of Dutse has over 100 court officials, advisers, masters of ceremonies, chauffeurs, bodyguards, grooms, chefs, and around 200 employees in his security forces in the rural districts and villages.

  The Dutse Emirate has just over a million people, extends over a third of the area of Jigawa State. The Emir pays all these officials out of funds from the municipal administrations in his Emirate. They all give him five percent of their income.

  I initially found it inconceivable that there was a darker side to this apparently very gentle man, that he was the Chief of Police of his Emirate.

  The Emir had appeared to me to be very stately, but entirely unpretentious. He’s 56 years old, but struck me as much younger. Although his courtiers, in their bright red turbans and green and red boubous, knelt before him and expressed their loyalty in long, formulaic phrases before starting work, I hadn’t felt that I was talking to a dignity, but rather to a strange man, who I happened to be sitting opposite in a train compartment, and whom I liked immediately. I didn’t address the Emir as “Your Royal Highness”, as I should have done. And he answered my questions in polished English and the solemn tone that probably becomes second nature in a position like his. But there was no topic he avoided, no question he didn’t answer. I conducted a perfectly normal interview.

  Nonetheless, I thought that the Emir exuded a certain air of being removed from reality, a kind of ethereal tranquillity. That was why I was so surprised now about the man sitting opposite me, who suddenly said, in a very matter-of-fact way, about the weekly police reports from his rural districts: “There are so many things we want to know. Have new people moved to the region? Who are they? What do they want? What are they doing here?”

  But then, of course, I knew, too, that Africans rarely perceive these questions as rude because there’s not really any such thing as privacy here, and so you can’t impinge on this either.

  The Emir said that the officials he employed had the task of recognising dangers in advance, identifying any suspicious persons and, if necessary, also mediating in conflicts.

  He certainly didn’t exaggerate the importance of his security force. Of course, the federal police force should have been responsible for these duties but, just like the country as a whole, Nigeria’s custodians of the law are especially notorious for their corruption.

  And anyone who’s been to an African police station knows, in any case, that African police hardly ever carry out their duties. The least you have to do is bring petrol with you for their police cars. And it’s always advisable to make a small contribution to their communal kitty.

  The Emir now said, probably with no irony intended whatsoever, “The police we have here don't know the place, so our own people can do the work far better.”

  After an hour, it was time for the Emir to turn his attention to other duties. Just as every morning, he visited a school which he sponsored, in a convoy of five cars led by a police van. The school was particularly well-equipped, and even had computers for the youngest pupils, he told me proudly.

  And as he drove through the poverty-stricken streets to Dutse’s new mosque, in a huge black Mercedes with the number plate “EMIR OF DUTSE” and a pennant on the bonnet, the people in the streets stopped and cheered as though he were a pop star.

  The Emir looked around the building site, holding a long gilded stick. The place of worship was built of concrete, had a huge dome, and the craftsmen were busy fixing enormous stucco decorations to the walls.

  The Emir is the religious leader for his Emirate’s believers. His father had already begun to collect private donations for building this mosque.

  Enormous mosques like this one are currently being built for Friday prayers in many towns in northern Nigeria. And of course, the Emir has campaigned for the implementation of Sharia law in Jigawa. “There can be no Muslim who doesn’t want to live according to God’s law”, he told me.

  After these morning visits, the convoy drove to the leader’s palace on the hill above the town. The Emir then received his First Minister’s morning report in his study. The minister crawled up to the Emir’s desk on his knees, and continued to crouch before him whilst giving his report.

  The Emir introduced me. He spoke in Hausa. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but his explanation seemed very long – too long. He seemed to be justifying his bringing a white journalist with him. Yes, he seemed to be imploring the minister, like an old married couple who have to get along – “Don’t blame me. You can have your way again next time.”

  The answer to the puzzle was that the minister, on his knees before the Emir, was his elder brother. It wasn’t he, but the younger one, who had become their father’s successor after his death. The least the younger one could do was make the elder one his minister.

  The Emir later told me, “We have kingmakers. Before I was named Emir, there was some tension between me and my brother. But once the decision had been made, he had to submit.”

  The Emir’s itinerary that day included the official appointment of seven new village leaders. They’d already been waiting in the palace forecourt, with their supporters, when we’d arrived. They had all inherited the position from an older relative and, although their villages now had several thousand inhabitants, they still had the name of the ancestor who had originally founded the village.

  Of course, the village leaders kept their previous jobs – they remained farmers – but their new position gave them an additional income, rather like a pension. So you could still see them trading in their yard, and distributing money to their followers who had supported them, in their nomination, against rivals from their own clan.

  Then the new village leaders were taken, in succession, to a bare cellar room of the palace, where a lower-ranking official placed, as a symbol of their new position, a green turban on each man’s head. Their supporters were beside themselves at this, and leapt around so wildly that the palace guards had to use leather whips to bring them to their senses.

  However, before the village leaders could take their official oath in front of the Emir, a delegation of politicians and academics suddenly appeared, wanting to pay him a courtesy visit. They brought him the news that the federal government in Abuja had now granted funds to revive the agricultural institute for research into date cultivation in Dutse. So the entire court now moved to the larger throne room.

  Here, the Emir was at once in his element. He could discuss an agricultural topic, a local TV camera was rolling, and he had an attentive, grateful audience. It suddenly became clear for me why he, and not his elder brother, had become Emir. Today, even a traditional leader has to be media savvy.

  Compared with the Emir, his brother appeared clumsy and awkward. When I’d sat beside him in the office earlier, I’d been the one who had to try to fill the awkward silences. But as the Emir now rose to speak, you could tell that he felt comfortable in front of an audience. He’d taken his place on a throne of cushions at the front of the large room. Behind him, on the wal
l, was the coat of arms of his Emirate – three palms painted on the wall and a real sword.

  The room was of the style typical for African palaces, decorated with gold varnished chairs and a lot of tat. The walls were hung with clocks, one beside the other, as they’re produced in Nigeria as business gifts, and parallel to these were star reliefs, painted red, yellow, blue and silver.

  The Emir gave a brief summary of the final stages in which the institute of date cultivation found itself – rain came in through holes in the ceiling, there was no paper, no test tubes, and the employees hadn’t been paid for ages – and he emphasised the importance of date cultivation for the region.

  After a good half hour, everyone was happy. The Emir could feel flattered that the delegation had come to him, even though they didn’t have to, and they, in turn, knew that they had, in the Emir, an influential advocate for their institute.

  The court then moved back to the slightly smaller room, to appoint the village leaders. It was painted just as brightly as the throne room. The walls, however, were decorated with naïvely painted portraits of the Emir. A faux-antique sofa served as a throne.

  The guards drove the village leaders, and a dozen of their supporters, into the room as though they were cattle. They lay, more than knelt, before the Emir as they took their oath. Their feet were dusty, their boubous dirty, and they smelt of cowsheds. A small cloud of flies came in with them, buzzed around them persistently, and then disappeared again once they’d kissed the Emir’s hand and left, heads bowed. During the ceremony, two servants wafted air at the Emir with an ostrich feather fan. Once the last of the villagers was out of sight, the court officials put the flap of their turbans over their heads to breathe a bit more easily.

  At that point, they seemed to me like actors who had disappeared off-stage and could now take off their masks. Yes, of course! That was it. The whole court, with its ceremonial fuss, with its courtiers clad in bright robes, was a type of theatre for the subjects. That was how they wanted it. That was their image of the Emir’s court. So that was what the courtiers gave them. And they weren’t paid badly for their efforts either.

  By now, it was time for the midday prayers. The Emir disappeared into the mosque beside the palace, which also had rooms for the female staff, cooks and cleaners.

  He then got back into his dark Mercedes and was driven to his bungalow, where he spent the rest of the day. I was given lunch in a small apartment at the entrance, and had the chance to relax a little and complete my notes.

  The Emir came to see me again, half an hour before his evening walk, as I wanted to ask him a couple more questions.

  He was now wearing a white cap, a plain boubou and shoes encrusted with clay, and he leant on a stick with a rubber stopper on the end. You could now, for the first time, see his grey beard. Without his elaborate turban, he looked frail and fragile, like a rather elderly man you’d offer your seat to on the Tube.

  We then looked briefly at his horses in an area beside his bungalow. He kept them for parades on important public holidays. And we collected the man who always accompanied him on his regular evening walks. He was the supreme judge of Jigawa State, also in his 50s, and he too leant on a stick with a carved wooden handle. A bodyguard also walked silently behind us.

  It’s not unusual in northern Nigeria for people to kneel before someone. I witnessed this before officials, judges and Muslim religious leaders, and in the end it even happened to me. A beggar in Gusau knelt before me, evidently because he expected it would gain him my charity.

  But now, as we wound our way through Dutse’s residential areas with the Emir, a real orgy of homage began. A lorry, for instance, transporting sand and a few men, immediately stopped. All the men jumped down and out and knelt before the Emir. The Emir, who always walked slowly, courting displays of homage, then stopped, smiled his gentle smile, and nodded gracefully.

  During our interview a few minutes earlier, he had said that the Hausa people are very conscious of their tradition. “Their Emir is very important to them, as he’s the symbol of their culture. You should see how they spend the whole day waiting in the palace courtyard, just so they can see me.”

  I had seen this. But I now wondered whether there weren't two sides to these displays of homage. I found the genuflections embarrassing. And they went on and on. If I’d been the Emir, I’d definitely have done away with them. But the Emir now said, “We don’t consider it to be backward when someone kneels before someone else. It displays respect for age, for wisdom.”

  But the Emir was an educated man, he’d travelled the world. I couldn’t understand how he didn’t find the genuflections embarrassing. And he didn’t understand why I didn’t understand.

  “I respect the traditions of my culture”, he said, as though it were obvious. “I’m very proud of my African roots. I’ve never been a westerner. I’ve always been African.”

  There it was again – the tradition which you can’t renounce, just simply can’t renounce. The Emir had studied in England and in the United States. He’d spent an entire year travelling the world, and in so doing had visited almost every corner of the earth. But he’d returned exactly the same man as he’d been when he set off. I wasn’t surprised that his subjects worshipped him. They were uneducated. I simply wondered whether it shouldn’t have been the duty of a leader, with the privilege of an education, to help them develop, and not just to fulfil the expectations they had anyway.

  So I didn’t let up. “Shouldn’t a Hausa monarchy also develop, to be able to rise to the challenges of the time?” I asked him.

  “But would you really want that?” responded the Emir. “Then the whole world would soon all be the same, and you wouldn’t have any reason to come here anymore.”

  The argument that the whole world would soon look the same was one I’d often read before in extreme right-wing German newspapers.

  By now we were on our way back again. A few children on the dirt road were once again bowing before the Emir, when a young woman without a headscarf, in a short T-shirt and tight, knee-length trousers came rushing up to us.

  She was definitely a southerner. She looked around briefly, shook her head and swept – whoosh! – through the middle of the scene of homage, her head held high. The Emir, shocked, took a step to the side, a frail old man, quickly getting out of harm’s way, avoiding an express train thundering towards him.

  That’s what you had to do. Without his devoted subjects, the Emir was an eccentric elderly man in a beautiful shell, about whom no-one had to bother much.

  And it’s tricky with tradition in Africa. The tradition of the Emir of Dutse goes back a couple of hundred years but this traditional leader, just like many others in the region’s small towns, was demoted by the powerful Emir of Kano in the 19th century to a district leader. He was promoted to Emir again only in 1991, when Dutse became the capital of the newly-formed Jigawa State. By an extremely un-traditional military governor.

  So it was only recently that a district leader had again become an Emir. In the Emirate’s villages, the tribal security forces kept the upper hand over the federal police, and in Jigawa the western-based penal code had only just been replaced by Sharia law. Its main features were forged during the reign of Mohammed and the first four Caliphs, about 1,400 years ago.

  So not only was the tradition very much alive in Dutse, it was even gaining ground. It was in the process of replacing the enlightened achievements made by the colonial powers. The ancient was devouring the modern, which had clearly never been established as tradition.

  I may be wrong, but I think that Africa is one of the few continents which has reversed the course of time – first came the present, and then came the past.

  The strange transformation of Ahmed S. (Gusau)

  Not a moment had passed since my alighting from the bus in Gusau and getting onto a motorbike taxi – and already someone was stopping me!

  “Psst!” I heard behind me. “Psst!”

  Initially, th
at was nothing unusual. My appearance and skin colour meant that many Africans felt obliged to stop me. It only became a nuisance when the driver heeded it and not my tapping his shoulders and signalling with my hands to just keep going.

  By then it was already too late. We’d stopped already. A motorbike taxi pulled up beside us. There was an attractive young woman – no older than 20 – on the back seat, her lips painted strawberry red, and Rastafarian braids reaching halfway down her chest. She was certainly a southerner.

  What did she want with me? Was it a trap, a trick to put me to the test?

  Just half an hour earlier, at the border, I’d passed a sign with the words “Zamfara – Home of Agriculture and Sharia” in large red lettering. The fact that it was advertising the introduction of the Islamic penal code as an achievement – as a tourist attraction even – set off loud alarm bells for me.

  Sharia applies only to Muslims, but you still don’t take any chances. And, after all, Zamfara was the first state in northern Nigeria to have introduced the Islamic penal code. Actually, it was its Governor, Ahmed Sani, who had set off the chain reaction of Islamisation, with his idea. Since then, it had spread to almost all the northern states. And now, a pruriently made up young woman was chasing me through the streets of its capital city, and clearly wanting to get me into trouble!

  But she really was attractive. And she seemed to know me.

  “Aren’t you from the Abdullahi family?” she asked, before she’d even greeted me.

  I was completely bewildered – er, no.

  “But you must know someone from the Mammadou family?”

  Was this some kind of parole, a code, used by enemies of the Sharia to recognise and communicate with one another in the street?

  I evidently had to clarify a misunderstanding here. So I said I was from a European family.

  But that seemed of no importance to her. She blithely continued flirting and chirping away in her melodic Pidgin English, which is spoken mainly by Nigerians in the Niger Delta.