Africa Askew

by Peter Boehm

  Were people already looking at us? Were they already clustering around us?

  This didn’t concern the strawberry-lipped woman in the slightest. In fact, our being at the edge of a busy street seemed instead to egg her on. She kept on chattering.

  Pardon? I couldn’t understand her accent, and said so. That way she’d surely give up at some point.

  “Oh man, you don’t understand a thing!” she said, resigned, and swung herself back onto her motorbike taxi, with a coquettish “See you!”

  What didn’t I understand? She certainly wanted to get me into hot water.

  Three days later, I conducted an interview with the famous Zamfara State Governor, Ahmed Sani. By now, posters with his portrait had appeared in Kano and Kaduna, bringing him into the running for the Nigerian Presidential elections of 2003. Many saw him as the great hope for northern Nigeria, someone who would challenge the south’s President Olusegun Obasanjo.

  After the usual final stages – holes in the chairs, holes in the ceiling, cables hanging loose – in his press office, I sat in the Governor’s waiting room and marvelled. There were no final stages here.

  The room was bathed in light, covered in smart white tiles, and air conditioned. CNN was playing on two large TV sets, and the new leather sofas along the walls were filled with delegations of petitioners.

  A Malay journalist was sitting beside me. His newspaper had sent him here to write a series of articles about the introduction of Sharia law in northern Nigeria. There’s an Islamic movement in Malaysia too. The journalist found the petitioners in the waiting room especially amusing. And he talked mockingly about what he’d seen in Gusau.

  “The Islamic penal code constitutes only a very small element of the Islamic Order”, he said, curling his mouth. “The rest is cleanliness – hygiene – and no corruption in the administration, and a banking system which doesn’t charge interest.”

  I’d also noticed that there were even more plastic bags floating around, and even more rubbish lying about in Gusau than in the other northern Nigerian cities.

  Some of the petitioners came into the Governor’s office with us two journalists, and they approached the Governor’s desk with bowed heads and folded hands. Two minutes later, however, they had to return to the waiting room, as the Governor now granted us an interview.

  A cameraman had also come into the office with us. I don’t think the interview was broadcast anywhere. After all, there weren’t any TV stations in Zamfara. It was evidently filmed only because the participants believed that this was the done thing today. It was the same in many of the interviews I conducted during my trip – with the Mayor of Hargeisa, for instance, and a moderately well-known marabout in Senegal. That was what the officials had seen on TV, on CNN. So their interviews had to be filmed too. It didn’t matter that they wouldn’t be broadcast afterwards.

  Once the cameraman had indicated that he was filming, the Governor and his colleagues raised their opened palms heavenward. They were praying for forgiveness for their sins, the Malay journalist explained to me. Then, to prove that the real world hung on the Governor’s every word, the cameraman panned to us journalists, as we posed our questions, and then to the centre of attention, the Governor himself.

  I let the Malay journalist go first. The Governor launched into a long recital of the achievements his government had already brought for Zamfara since taking office two years earlier. He listed schools, more schools, hospitals, an end to corruption in office, increased tax revenue, distribution of fertilisers, re-surfaced roads, new streetlamps, the provision of electricity in the villages, and plans for a local television station.

  The largest project of all, however, was the construction of a new Governor’s palace that year or the following one. A colourful model of the building was sitting on a shelf beside the Governor’s desk. It looked enormous. The main building had several stories, and three large glass domes.

  The Governor had spoken freely, but five of his staff, sitting on a sofa behind us, prompted him when he hesitated in reciting his list. If he persistently ignored them, they wrote him notes and placed them on the desk. One read, “Introduction of weekly prayers.”

  The Governor finished his sentence, picked up the piece of paper, and looked like a school child who had been picked up on an error when reciting a poem he’d learned by heart. “Oh, that. Child’s play! That was simple. I knew that”, his eyes seemed to say. Then he boasted about the introduction of weekly prayers which were broadcast on the local radio, made a cautious glance to check whether the camera was still rolling, and continued with his rote-learned recital.

  He reeled off his performance just as he’d practised it, and if he floundered then he had his staff behind him to prompt him. This rather gave the Governor the appearance of a child, whose enthusiastic parents had trained him for a performance on the school stage.

  And by now I had seen current photographs of him, and had compared them with those taken before his election, a good two years earlier. They showed two different men. The old photos showed a young man, with a round, youthful face, a pencil moustache, and a cap on his head. But the current photos showed a thick-set man, with a full beard and a white turban on his head, smiling so benevolently it frightened you.

  In the meantime, the Governor had also changed his name. Before the election he’d still been known as Ahmed Sani. Today, he was Ahma(!)d Sani. He’d arabised his name, and the young round-faced man from the election campaign had been transformed into an Islamic sage.

  Now it was my turn to ask questions. Just exactly a week earlier, I’d laughed heartily. A southerner in Kano had told me that the introduction of Sharia law in the North was just a trick for squeezing money out of the Libyan revolutionary leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

  It’s no secret that Gaddafi has long viewed Nigeria as the enemy of his politics in West Africa, and as an agent of the USA. And it’s not unlikely that he therefore used his money to harm Nigeria.

  Besides, everyone in the city talked about the numerous Arabic delegations hosted in Gusau. Nonetheless I'd still thought the claim that Sharia law had only been introduced in northern Nigeria in order to get Gaddafi’s money was just an jovial exaggeration or one of the typical conspiracy theories so frequent in Africa.

  Now, however, after a couple of days in Gusau I also felt that the Governor seemed to have a little too much money. I had nothing to lose in the interview with him. I could only talk to him once. Then I’d be off again. So I now asked, outright, where all this money came from.

  So far, the Governor hadn’t been challenged at all. He’d reeled of rote-learned quotations from the Quran, and had circuitously interpreted them for us. He’d shown off his well-rehearsed programme, and no-one had questioned him. But my direct question now obviously caught him off guard. For a brief moment, the mask of joviality fell from his face, and was replaced by blank fear. “Does he know?” his fearful eyes seemed to say. “Does he know?”

  I knew. How could I not? After all, I’d seen the 200 or so new motorbikes, not yet unpacked, standing in the courtyard of the Governor’s palace. They’d be distributed for free among the Governor’s clients, who would soon turn them into motorbike taxis. Besides these, there were six brand new tractors. Earlier, the courtyard had already housed a delivery of motorbikes straight from the factory, and before that minibuses, second hand cars, bikes and, right at the start, even donkeys. “The whole courtyard was full of their dung”, someone had told me. “It stank so bad, they had to be handed out as quickly as possible.”

  Besides, the day before the interview I’d been to the city’s largest hotel – the Gusau Hotel. There was a notice on the reception desk, “We are sorry, but all rooms are occupied.” And the manager, Sanusi Lawal Jobe, had told me, “Since the Sharia was introduced, our revenue has increased by thirty percent.”

  I’d suggested there was some kind of gold rush going on in Gusau. “Yes, exactly! That’s precisely what I mean!” he’d confirmed.


  There even was a rumour in the city that the Governor also distributed cash in his palace. I’d seen the delegations of petitioners for myself. So, all this money couldn’t possibly come from rationalised tax collection, as the Governor wanted me to believe. He’d come upon an extremely abundant source of money. That was certain. I just had to put two and two together. So how could I not know!

  If you were honest, you’d have had to admit right at the outset that the introduction of the Islamic penal code in northern Nigeria was the first time anyone had introduced anything in Africa for the sake of principle. Once you’ve understood the patron-client relationship that governs all cities, parties, villages, families – in fact, all human relations – in Africa, this was clear to see.

  In Africa, there are so many clients looking for a patron to keep them fed throughout their lives, that anyone with money can surround themselves with as many as they like. Like this they buy their clients’ loyalty. And these in turn, if they get enough to distribute, become patrons themselves, who buy clients, and so on and so forth, until you end up right at the bottom, at the level of the family, where a man with money has nothing to stop him finding as many happy wives as he wants.

  This led, in the 1960s, to Africa’s politicians becoming Capitalists or Communists, depending on which camp seemed able to distribute more money. In the 1970s, they became real Africans, when it briefly looked as though their Presidents would become the top patrons thanks to their countries’ wealth of natural resources. And then in the 1990s, when the donor countries (those with something to give) suddenly demanded that Africa’s politicians should become Democrats, they of course introduced free elections.

  Deep down, however, the politicians had remained true to themselves. They remained what they had always been – clients. And if it could help develop new sources of money, then it was just the natural way of things that a rather naïve-looking young man named Ahmed Sani should, with apparently no inner conflict, become the Islamic spiritual leader Ahmad Sani. And it was equally unsurprising that a rakish man like this could bring the continent’s most populous nation, and its second richest country after South Africa, to the brink of civil war.

  Three weeks later, I read the following announcement – a government commission had suspended the deputy speaker of the Zamfara State parliament from his post. He’d been arrested in Kano, with several prostitutes and a six-pack of beer. And just the previous day, the MP Mustapha had been caught drinking in his car with his girlfriend.

  And then someone wanted to introduce the Islamic penal code in Nigeria of all countries! – where the politicians’ corruption is so notorious, and where their showy cars and indulgent lifestyles are as much a part of everyday life as the heat is in Africa. There had to be something fishy about it. Ok. That makes sense. By now I’d understood too.

  P.S. Dear lady with the strawberry lips, I think I owe you an explanation. You were right after all. When I arrived in Gusau I didn’t understand anything. My mistake. How could I have let myself be so taken in, despite all my experience and all my better knowledge.

  Later on, I always looked out for you when I was having a beer in the police barracks or in the pubs on the army bases just outside the city. I always hoped I’d bump into you again, but you’d disappeared. If only I’d known when we met what I know now, I’d certainly have reacted entirely differently. Of course I was a member of the Abdullahi or the Mammadou family. Whichever family you’d prefer in fact. And I’d certainly not have refused the chance to indulge in some slight contravention of Sharia law with you.

  Sharia Cha-Cha (Kano)

  This is the story of the Sharia Cha-Cha, a dance from northern Nigeria. In Africa, every ethnic group, every country, in fact virtually every town, has one.

  The Hausa people have the Sharia Cha-Cha, but they don’t dance it as you usually would, to rousing music in the bars and clubs of their towns’ suburbs. They dance it before the court. And their conductor is a judge. I observed it at the Sharia High Court of Gyadi Gyadi, in Kano. And this is how it went.

  The introduction of the Islamic penal code was very popular in Kano, the largest city in the north. An elderly woman, involved in an inheritance dispute before the court in Gyadi Gyadi, told me, “Finally justice is beginning to work again.”

  Sharia also met with enthusiasm in Kano because the impetus for it came from rural Zamfara. If these backwaters could introduce Sharia, many people thought, then tradition-steeped Kano hat to take the lead.

  And of course, Sharia law also has a lot of supporters in northern Nigeria, because it put a spanner in the works of Olusegun Obasanjo’s government, and because the north could get back at the south and its president.

  But the most frequently mentioned argument for introducing the Sharia in Kano was that the old justice system had become completely useless, the judges were corrupt, lawsuits had just petered out, if they had even got off the ground. You no longer got any justice. So the final stages again really!

  That was probably why this morning the judge in Gyadi Gyadi was a changed man. Yesterday, when he’d asked me to be here for 10am, he’d struck me as rather threatening and unapproachable, with his black sheepskin hat, his piercing eyes, his thick grey full beard and his flowing robes – rather like a relic of a bygone age. Yesterday he’d spoken to me only via the law officials who had brought me to him, but he hadn’t spoken to me personally.

  Today, however, the judge seemed transformed. His eyelids fluttered and his voice faltered when he had to admit that the defendants hadn’t yet been brought in for that day’s proceedings.

  “It’s now 10.30”, he said. It was almost eleven. “We called in the prisoners a long while ago, but there’s only one prisoner transport van for the entire city.”

  Kano is a city of over a million inhabitants, but I’d already noticed that all that glittered in its justice system wasn’t necessarily gold.

  When, the previous day, I’d organised my current visit while at the Sharia Court of Appeal – the city’s highest court – I’d been introduced to the supreme Islamic judge. A bookkeeper was standing beside the great Kadi’s desk, and showed him a list with the names of twenty officials. Beside each, in the salary arrears column, it said “seven months”.

  The officials were pleased to have a European journalist to show around – that was difficult not to notice. The introduction of Sharia law had had a very bad press in the West. They wanted to change this, by showing me the new beginnings in the Kano justice system.

  But when one of the officials took me to two Sharia courts, the judges weren’t there. One had apparently not turned up because his mother had died. The other was in the Sharia Court of Appeal – where we’d just come from.

  “It’s still rather difficult with the Sharia courts”, the official, therefore, agreed, and finally took me to the judge with the sheepskin hat and the piercing eyes, in Gyadi Gyadi.

  He presided over one of seven Sharia High Courts in Kano. These deal with big civil law cases and serious criminal proceedings, the official explained. The judge in Gyadi Gyadi told me, via the official, that cases concerning the consumption of alcohol were scheduled for the next day, and he told me to come at 10 sharp the following morning.

  Since the defendants still hadn’t been brought in from the prison by 11.30, however, the Gyadi Gyadi judge began with the civil law proceedings.

  The courtroom was divided down the middle by a wall. On a couple of wooden benches around forty women were sitting on the left-hand side, and attendance was even higher on the men’s side, to the right. Only the judge, at his lectern on a podium, could see both the men’s and the women’s side.

  Behind him, on the simple whitewashed wall, was a picture of the great Kadi, and a worn leather bag containing the Quran. At his feet there was a bench for the lawyers, and on the men’s side a small table for the representative from the police criminal investigation department. He was the prosecutor too.

  The court’s two offices were at th
e front, to the left and right of the entrance. One contained a wobbly bookshelf, with disordered yellowed papers. Certainly finished with, rubbish for the shredder, I thought – until one of the court employees assured me that these were the court records.

  First of all, the judge reprimanded a young woman who, although wearing a headscarf, also had lipstick on. She had come to get a divorce, but now had to listen to a long tirade from him about how it was un-Islamic to wear make-up and I, sitting on the lawyers’ bench at his feet, had to hear about how British men wear an earring to indicate their homosexuality.

  So, er, I think...I stammered..., there are also men who wear earrings but who aren’t homosexual.

  The judge had jumped straight from the made-up woman to the shocking circumstances in Britain. He switched to English, and addressed me directly. He seemed to expect an answer. What was I to say?

  Shortly after that, the court usher had to bear the brunt of one of the judge’s outbursts of rage, because he’d walked through the room chatting loudly while the judge was speaking. This judge certainly wasn’t someone to be trifled with. That much was already clear to me.

  In the afternoon, he even took a witness to task. The elderly man had only come before the court to confirm that it was his goat which had been stolen the previous night. But the judge didn’t let him get away that easily. The old man had let the animal walk around outside his house and eat the grass and rubbish in the street, just as everyone does in Africa. But the judge told him that it was un-Islamic to let the animal wander around freely. He was, therefore, partly responsible for the theft. “You have to feed the goat and make sure it’s healthy”, he pronounced, with that glint in his eyes which appeared when he believed he was announcing a particularly wise judgement. “I shall have to punish you for this carelessness.”

  Then an elderly woman was called up. She was taking action against a distant relative who had sold an inherited house for her, but had apparently never given her the money for it. The relative, a grey-haired man, didn’t contest that.