Africa Askew

by Peter Boehm

  “Are you of sound mind?” the judge thundered. “Are you a true Muslim? Then you should pay the woman the money.” The man simply mumbled “yes....yes...yes...” throughout.

  “That was two years ago”, my translator told me. “He’s spent the money – the equivalent of £800, US - himself.”

  “It’s therefore no longer a civil law case”, the judge decided. And, turning to the criminal prosecution representative, he commanded, “Arrest this man immediately and take him away.”

  Hadn’t the old man yet heard that the judge in Gyadi Gyadi gave short shrift? Why hadn’t he just stayed at home? Then, as he’d already done with a couple of other cases, the judge would have had to postpone it.

  During the afternoon, even a businessman who’d made a journey here from Lagos, around 600 miles south of Kano, appeared before the court. A friend had advised him to go to this judge, he told me. He was said to be incorruptible and fair.

  Apparently, almost two years before, a business partner had defrauded him of over £60,000 – USD. “But he bribed the police. So he was never accused”, the businessman said. And the translator added, with a smirk, “Yes, yes, Lagos!”

  At the end of the day of proceedings, the judge heard the businessman’s case in the back room. He felt honoured that his fame had already spread so far. He smiled appreciatively at the account of the case, rather like someone who recognises a good wine when he drinks it.

  But first, the businessman had to return with his documents proving the fraud, before the judge would decide whether to take on the case.

  During the inheritance case against the elderly man, the Hisba suddenly burst in. A goat bleated, and three men in the bright green ponchos of the militia brought a barefoot young man, wearing dirty trousers and a ripped t-shirt, into the room. They’d caught him with the stolen goat the previous night in Tukuntawa, a district in southern Kano, neither particularly poor, nor particularly rich. That was what Bala Auwalu, the Hisba Chief in Tukuntawa, explained to me later.

  The Hisba (Arabic = the group) is a voluntary militia, which has formed in all districts of Kano with the introduction of Sharia. Its main participants are young men. The patrol every night, “give advice to the men of the district whom they encounter in dark corners with women”, and bring suspects to the police.

  But they’ve also often taken things too far in Kano in the past months, burned down hotels selling alcohol, set light to beer lorries, and rioted in the streets.

  The Tukuntawa Hisba is especially active. The men have often brought suspects directly to the court in Gyadi Gyadi, and some of them spend the whole day here to make sure that “everything happens as it should.”

  Its leader, Bala Auwalu, is forty-one and a trained teacher. He works for the local government, but he seemed slightly paranoid to me.

  A lot of minibuses and motorbike taxis in Kano displayed posters with Osama Bin Laden’s portrait. That was before 11th September 2001, but after the attacks on the US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, from which Bin Laden had distanced himself with extremely ambivalent words. Nonetheless, over 250 people had been killed, mostly Kenyans.

  Auwalu had a sticker of Bin Laden in his bedroom, below a sign with the words “All power belongs to God”. Auwalu prayed for Bin Laden, he told me, “because the USA is persecuting him, and he’s going through a difficult phase in his life just now. I can empathise with that.” But he considered Bin Laden to be a good Muslim, and so deserving of his fellow believers’ solidarity.

  In the tiny office the militia had rented in Tukuntawa, funded by private donations, he explained to me that the Hisba’s work was necessary “because Nigeria has completely gone to the dogs.” At the word “Nigeria”, he grimaced as though he were talking about a contagious disease. “People can buy their children a pass in their final school exams, the police and the courts are corrupt, and the criminals do what they want.”

  What’s more, he said, the local police are trying to boycott the Hisba’s work as best they can. “Most of the police are from the South. We had to take the goat thief to Gyadi Gyadi today, for instance, ourselves. It seems the police don’t have any cars.”

  Auwalu told me, by way of dark allusions, of a major operation against a house in their district, where criminals find accommodation. He told me he’d had numerous death threats on account of this.

  The suspected goat thief claimed, before the court, that he’d stolen the animal because he wanted to buy medicine for his father. He had tuberculosis. Once the Hisba had made a phone call to check, and had discovered that the young man was lying, he broke down and admitted everything.

  All the defendants who appeared before the judge, with his piercing gaze, became putty in his hands. I didn’t hear a single defendant deny his crime. None had a lawyer, and none wanted to appeal.

  When I interviewed the judge at the end of the day of proceedings, he said that the goat thief probably wouldn’t have to have his hand amputated, because the stolen goods weren’t of the required value for that.

  Retribution was, however, one of the fundamental principles of the Islamic penal code. “If a man has gouged out one of his victims eyes, we’d probably have to take his eye”, the judge said, jovially, regarding one of his other cases.

  At 12.30, the defendants were finally brought from the remand prison. The judge immediately interrupted his civil law cases, and began the proceedings against them.

  The first to appear was a 19-year-old, who had been caught by the Hisba a month earlier in the village of Kumbotso, 10 miles outside Kano, smoking marihuana.

  The local Hisba Chief, Adam Umar Usman, a retired army major with a grey goatee beard, had arrested him at 1.30 in the morning. He, too, attended the court at Gyadi Gyadi every day, and also seemed to me to be truly paranoid.

  He told me, proudly, that he organised military training for the youngsters in his village. “We Muslims have to be prepared.” He patrolled with a group of fifteen men until 4am every night. “Then I sleep for two hours.” And during the day, he brought the suspects to court, pulled at their clothing, commanded them to kneel, and generally made himself useful wherever he could.

  The judge had already finished taking evidence against the 19-year-old marihuana smoker during the previous hearing. Today, he simply pronounced the verdict. The young man didn’t have a lawyer, and he’d confessed. Since he’d already been sentenced once for the same offence, he was this time sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, as well as to eighty lashes.

  The judge read out his reasons for the verdict from his thick book, where he recorded both the proceedings and his verdicts. The 19-year-old had strayed, despite knowing God’s law, the judge pronounced. “And he contravened it nonetheless. Is this how good Muslims behave?!” he fumed.

  He then quoted two Quran verses, and a passage from one of the Hadith collection – a book containing a collection of the Prophet Mohammed’s actions and utterances.

  The Islamic penal code, and the entire judicial practice, was shaped during Mohammed’s reign and that of the subsequent four “rightly-guided” Caliphs. These four are considered to be his most loyal and devout followers, or were even related to him.

  The penal codes introduced in the northern Nigerian states are based on those of Sudan and Saudi Arabia. The Islamic penal code has been in use there for years already.

  Admittedly, in Khartoum, Ahmed was sentenced to only forty lashes when he was caught drinking. So why did the 19-year-old in Kano receive twice that?

  “In Mohammed’s time, drinkers were punished with only forty lashes”, the judge in Gyadi Gyadi told me after the proceedings. “But in Omar’s time – the second Caliph – drinking became very widespread among believers. That’s why the Caliph doubled the punishment.” Besides, it was also left to the judge’s discretion to determine the number of lashes.

  The 19-year-old had listened to the reasons for the verdict silently, his head bowed. Now that he was permitted to say a final word, however, he began t
o wail and whine, “Oh God! I swear by God that I’m innocent. I’ve never drunk. Oh God! Never in my whole life.”

  “He’s begging the court for mercy”, the translator said.

  But the judge stayed firm, “You’ve already admitted your crime. Now you suddenly claim that you’re innocent. Besides, you’re entitled to appeal.”

  However, the 19-year-old would be lashed today in any case – even the appeal wouldn’t have had any impact. He didn’t appeal anyway, and the Hisba Chief with the goatee beard took him away.

  Then a group of seven defendants, aged between twenty-two and forty, were brought forward. They’d been arrested two weeks earlier during a raid on a club in a village 60 miles to the east of Kano. The other guests had been able to escape, but these seven hadn’t been able to run away quickly enough. In the club, the police found millet beer, marihuana and small bottles of solvents for sniffing.

  The judge sentenced the seven to eighty lashes, with the same justification as for the 19-year-old. They, too, had confessed, and they didn’t appeal either. But they accepted the verdict silently and, it seemed to me, almost with relief.

  “I think they’re pleased that it’ll soon be over”, the translator said, “and that they don’t have to go back to prison.”

  The day of proceedings had come to an end. When I entered the judge’s office, in the room behind his lectern, a man and a woman were kneeling before him yet again. It was another inheritance dispute. The woman had apparently not received her share, and she now described the case and asked the judge whether he would be able to help.

  The judge’s office, just like the court buildings as a whole, had recently been renovated. Compared with the courtroom, however, it was luxurious. There was a brand new, bright red carpet on the floor, and the judge sat barefooted, his legs tucked under him, on a sofa of the same colour. The office also contained an enormous desk and, behind it, a bookshelf, dwarfing two fat, leather-bound tomes.

  When the judge saw me, he amicably called out “Bature!” (in Hausa = white man), and motioned with his hand that I should sit down beside him on the sofa. He dispatched his visitors, and was now able to devote all his attention to me.

  He’d insisted, yesterday, that I should come to his office after the day’s proceedings, because western journalists often have difficulty understanding the Islamic justice system. This was entirely in my interest, as I’d assumed I really would have questions. But of course, I also knew that he wanted to harass me about it.

  But there was no sense of that anymore. He chatted with me, in a relaxed way, as though talking to an old acquaintance. I’d sat at his feet the whole day, and noted his every word – which probably accounted for his good humour.

  The judge had a successful day behind him – the kind of day he liked. He’d administered justice, and that without the sophisms of the enlightened western justice system, which made it far too easy for the criminals, with its emphasis on rules of procedure.

  He now told me, with good humour, that he’d studied Arabic and Islamic Studies in Kano in the late 1970s. His only formal legal training had been a six-month course in civil law. Nonetheless, he’d presided for two decades over a court in the city which, like his current one, dealt with criminal and civil law cases.

  Civil law cases, inheritance disputes and divorces had, however, long been decided according to Sharia law in northern Nigeria, just as in many African countries with large Muslim populations.

  But now I didn’t want to sit any longer beside the judge on the sofa, chatting to him as though nothing had happened. The ease with which he changed his tone and mood frightened to me, and I was nervous about the fact that you could never be sure that he wouldn’t have a sudden outburst again the next minute.

  I wanted to leave. But he wouldn’t let me go that easily now. At his car he was still giving me his best wishes for the future, and I wished him all the best in return. I’d have preferred to just walk away.

  He had turned the role of judge – one of the most important and delicate duties of human society, carried out by someone who can tip the scales one way or the other in order to right a wrong and re-establish peace between the parties – into the role of a general disciplinarian, raging against anything which didn’t appear in his book.

  I shuddered at the thought that he could have someone crucified for an armed robbery with murder, and have married women and men stoned for adultery. And that, following such rough-and-ready hearings as I’d seen.

  But the main reason I didn’t want to exchange any more courtesies with him was that I’d seen how he had reacted to the lashings of those he had sentenced. The sentence had been carried out immediately following the proceedings.

  Before the punishment began, I had been speaking to a lawyer from the South, in the courtroom, and hadn’t noticed that the judge and the sentenced individuals had already taken their positions on the landing outside the court. The judge sent for me and said, as though I were about to experience something truly special, “Have you ever seen something like this?”

  One after the other, the defendants had to remove their shirts and lie on their stomachs on the floor. A court usher administered them the eighty lashes, because the Ministry of Justice hadn’t yet employed anyone else to do this. Those who had participated in the hearing, and a few curious onlookers, watched. They almost all looked embarrassed, and some even turned away, disgusted.

  Only the judge was different. He’d put his sheepskin hat back on, and fetched some reflective sunglasses. Legs astride, and his head high, he stood there and oversaw the lashing. And after the first defendant, he gave the usher a sign to strike less feebly.

  The usher was as thin as a rake, and over 6 feet tall. His buckteeth and overbite made him appear good-natured and slightly dopey. Once he’d lashed the eight men, I saw him again, placidly and with his harmless expression, carrying files through the court.

  He administered the lashes regularly – twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three – and calmly one after the other, well spread over the defendants’ backs, evidently so that their skin wouldn’t crack and begin to bleed. He used a whip of braided leather cords, slightly longer than a riding crop. And he hit with a raised arm, but without the final snap of the wrist.

  Despite this, the lashes were very painful for the defendants. They seemed to be experiencing pain which, even in this short time, was very hard to bear. They writhed around under the whip like a stranded fish, held their eyes shut with their hands, pulled at their hair, and twisted their feet into unnatural positions such as I’d never seen before.

  But the worst thing, so Ahmed had told me in Khartoum, wasn’t the pain, but the humiliation that it all took place under the gaze of onlookers.

  A couple of days earlier I’d seen a traditional Hausa dance on Nigerian TV, filling a break between two programmes. It had seemed to me to be entirely unnatural and dispassionate. The dancers waved their hands around a little, and wiggled their bottoms slightly. That wasn’t a dance – at least, not an African one.

  These men, on the other hand, danced with real passion, and the court usher was their dance teacher, setting the rhythm, slightly bored – ssst, ssst, ssst.

  These men danced because they could do nothing else, and they really expressed what they felt. There was no pretending anymore.

  I’ve never before seen such an authentic dance. The men danced the Sharia Cha-Cha. Whether they wanted to or not. But they danced. Directly back into the Middle Ages.

  NIGER

  Hausa Blues (Border – Niamey)

  It was only the contrast with the landscape in Niger which made me realise that there was a lot of money in the northern Nigerian landscapes. It was only when I saw, immediately beyond the border, another enormous sandpit stretching away to the horizon and containing just a couple of stunted shrubs, that I realised that, in Nigeria, I’d passed through lavishly designed spaces, large carefully laid-out parks, tended gardens really.

  The people living eit
her side of the border, however, were the same – Hausa. But the gnarled baobab trees, the smoothly curved stretches of grass around them, and the precisely cultivated sorghum fields between Kano and Gusau, and above all between Sokoto and the border, suddenly smelt of money.

  Ok, the trees were sometimes also in rows – so they’d been planted – but the fact that the whole landscape here was planned and set out, struck me only once I could contrast it with poverty-stricken Niger.

  And there was more – all those freshly-washed, beautifully patterned boubous which the Nigerians wore, the cars, the electric appliances, the satellite dishes the people could afford; there were none of these in Niger. So you may well have thought that it couldn’t be all that bad for the Nigerian Hausa.

  Nonetheless, the Nigerian Hausa felt such hatred towards the south of the country and the State of Nigeria as a whole that I’ve never experienced in any other African country.

  But where did this contrast with Niger come from, I wondered. What do the Nigerian Hausa have which their northern neighbours don’t?

  Nigeria has crude oil, and the national budget gives them access to income from its extraction from the Niger Delta. So does that mean that, without the crude oil in the south of their country, the Nigerian Hausa would have as much money as those in Niger – in other words, virtually none?

  I thought the Nigerian Hausa were deceiving themselves if they believed they’d be better off without the southern part of their country. And living this lie was made no less tragic by the fact that the Hausa are not simply any ethnic group in Africa.

  Kano is the oldest city in West Africa. It has been a hub for caravan routes south of the Sahara for almost a thousand years. And the Hausa are perhaps also the largest ethnic group on the entire continent. Almost one in six Africans is a Nigerian, and as many as one in two of the West Africans.

  And since the Hausa are also the largest ethnic group within Nigeria, and so have not only the greatest chance of holding the Nigerian Presidency, but also, since the political opening of the early 1990s, a good chance of the Niger Presidency, they can also be considered one of the most politically influential ethnic groups in Africa.