by Peter Boehm
But have the Hausa arrived in the 21st century?
That was what Aminu Aliyu Gusau, General Secretary of the Islamic movement JTI, and editor of its magazine “The Light of Islam” in the city of Gusau asked himself.
It is the JTI activists, not the local police, who have enforced Sharia in Zamfara State. They have patrolled the city and they have brought suspects to court.
Aliyu Gusau has long been active in Nigeria’s largest and most important Islamic organisation and, as a result, has also spent a few years in prison at the peak of the movement in the 1980s.
Since then, he has also been head of a small primary school in the city. Here, he tried to dispel the conservative Hausa’s reservations about sending their daughters to school. He promised the parents they’d get their daughters back untainted, and tried to reconcile the Hausa’s Islamic tradition with western education.
He said, “Our people are distrustful of western schools, and they’re afraid of hospitals because they think it’s un-Islamic to use them. Previously, the Hausa were very powerful. They were a trading people for many centuries, and they ruled a huge region. But they suffered an enormous shock due to British colonisation. They got completely mixed up, lost their direction, and fell into a deep lethargy. They had no more motivation to develop or improve, no more dynamism for moving forward. The reintroduction of Sharia, which the British had removed, has to be a catalyst for bringing our people back into the world.”
My experiences entirely align with this suggestion that the people in Africa had fallen into lethargy. It had often seemed that way to me too – as though the Africans had been overcome by a secret paralysis, as though they’d become stiff with fear, whilst everything around them was falling into the final stages. They’d probably noticed this too, but simply didn’t know what they could do about it.
But Aliyu Gusau’s analysis just had one slight flaw. It was demanding the impossible. It wasn’t that the people should adapt themselves to the world and their times, but the world should adapt to the people and their traditions. So, of course, the Hausa will continue to be weighed down by the blues.
Despite the introduction of Sharia law, everything will of course stay just as it’s always been. Despite all the prosperity from the Nigerian oil revenues, the people in Dutse, Kano and Gusau will continue to have no running water, and only sporadic electricity. They’ll continue to live in their subsistence economy, the tribal distribution mechanism of patron and client will continue to function and, lower down the scale, income from oil extraction will continue to simply be allocated at the discretion of the patrons.
But as soon as it becomes necessary to organise something which requires some form of administration, something which can’t be achieved through tribal structures – for instance a water or electricity supply, or a functioning police force and legal system – the employees will immediately begin to help themselves from public funds, and everything will go wrong as usual.
In Kano, the inhabitants are even officially letting their historic city wall fall into a state of ruin. While I was in the city, a journalist wrote an impassioned appeal to a major daily newspaper for it to be retained. No-one reacted.
When I first saw the clay city wall in Kano, I thought it was a mountain, it was that high and that wide at its base. It was truly impressive, but it has now been weathered away to pathetic little heaps of rubble in many places.
Of course, the Kano city wall is the most powerful symbol of the Hausa’s glorious history. But you’d need an administration to stop its decay. It won’t happen through vacuous talk about the catalyst effect of Sharia.
In fact, the Hausa people couldn’t care less about the city wall. After all, this concrete image of their past is missing the thrust of the tradition which they constantly emphasise – resistance, and its concurrent justification against the supposed path of western development. So yes, that’s the Hausa Blues.
Country kids learn (Gadou)
I’d first noticed the small, ragged boys in the cities of Chad. They were between seven or eight and perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, and they wandered the streets, tattered clothes covering their scrawny frames, a plastic bowl in their hands, begging for food or a little money.
There were hoards of them in northern Nigeria. If I ate outside, they’d surround me, hungrily, and wait patiently for my leftovers.
In Niger, they stole the bones off my plate whilst I was still eating, and gnawed at them greedily.
And later, in Mali and in Senegal, they also were everywhere. This time, however, they were equipped with a small bucket for their scavenged food, not an old saucepan or a plastic bowl.
I ignored these boys as best I could. They could only mean trouble for me. There were so many of them, and the gulf between them and me was too big, much bigger than for the average African, anyway. They had nothing, I had an awful lot. It could only have ended in their wanting something from me, and my having to send them away. So I kept my distance from them.
Everyone told me they were pupils from the Quran schools. In Djerma, the language of the ethnic group around Niger’s capital city of Niamey, they were known as Talibé (from the Arabic “Talib” = “Quran student”), in Hausa they were called Almajiri.
Since they seemed to live on the streets, I thought they were street children from broken homes, with the usual story of poverty and neglect, just as you find in every large African city.
I only began to get interested in them once I’d discovered that they very probably did have parents and a family. The boys came from the countryside, I now heard in Niger. It was their parents who had sent them to a marabout – an Islamic teacher – in the city. That changed everything. I now wanted to get to know these Quran students.
In Kano, the Governor, Rabiu Musa Kwankaso, had claimed to have dramatically reduced the number of Quran students in the city, by educating their parents. A daily newspaper quoted him as saying that they now preferred to send their children to the state-run schools instead of sending them out to beg. The boys you still saw on the streets now were from Niger. Then, in Niger, I heard that the ones you saw here were from Nigeria.
The Governor of Kano had set up a committee to eradicate the problem. And, when I was in Kano, its chairman wrote in a whole page spread for the daily newspaper “This Day”, that the only reason the Quran students had to beg was that the British colonial powers had destroyed the Islamic education system.
I had my doubts, however. After all, I eventually remembered that I’d already read something about these Quran students. So I looked it up, once I was back in Germany, and found it in Gustav Nachtigal’s travelogue. The German doctor had travelled through today’s Niger, Nigeria and Chad in 1869 – so over thirty years before the British colonised northern Nigeria.
I read in Nachtigal’s travelogue that the begging students had been around even then. Just like today’s Talibé, they’d left their villages to study the Quran in the urban centres. The only difference was that, instead of the pans and plastic bowls, they’d used a hollowed-out pumpkin for their begging.
In today’s Maiduguri, for instance, they wore some kind of uniform – the hide of a goat, leopard or hyena thrown around their shoulders and hips. As well as begging, in those days they also carried out unskilled work to eke out a living, and since they could, therefore, only study early in the mornings or late in the evenings, many lived this way until they were grown men.
Today, the city dwellers were embarrassed by the begging children and their poverty, so plain to see in the streets. So they just claimed that the Quran students came from another country, and the politicians simply passed the blame onto colonisation.
That’s the way it was. The problem remained, but no-one could be made responsible for it – except the British. Before they’d come, the education system had worked well. Once again, they’d destroyed a good tradition, which would be bound to still be serviceable today. And the fact that, in those days, there had still been enou
gh work to enable the students to earn some money on the side, was simply the most glaring symptom of African development.
Today, now that only an economy based on subsistence and distribution remains, the client existence, and charity, has taken over. So I was on the trail of yet another African story.
13-year-old Elias Gadou lived as an Almajiri with a marabout in the Bani Fandou I district of Niger’s capital, Niamey. All he owned was a ripped pair of trousers and two old shirts. Apart from his pan for begging, which he carried on his back, secured to his head with a cord headband, he’d had nothing at all when he’d set off – no blanket, no towel, no toothbrush, no mug, nothing.
He slept on a raffia mat under a roof of branches, in his school yard. And when it got too cold at night, he was allowed to lie on the concrete floor of the huts where the youngest pupils were taught during the day.
I asked him whether he liked school. “I do like it, but sometimes I don’t have enough to eat”, he said.
Following morning prayers, he had two hours of classes, ate what still remained from the previous evening, had another two hours of classes, and then walked the 2.5 miles into the city, to beg at the central market.
If he didn’t have much time, he’d canvass the neighbourhood with the other children, calling “Almajiri, Almajiri” at the gates of the compounds and, with a bit of luck, people would give them a little of their lunch. At 4.30 each afternoon he’d return to school for two hours of classes, and then he’d go begging again in the evening.
But Elias was lucky. He didn’t have to give his marabout any of the few coins he received. The aid organisations in Niamey could tell you a thing or two about the number of fraudsters there are among the city’s Islamic teachers today. They get rich and fat, and beat the boys if they don’t bring back enough money from their trips each day. The Djerma marabouts in particular – those from the ethnic group in and around Niamey – had a very bad reputation.
So my translator and I went to the renowned marabout Cheik Issakou Guingarey, in the Bani Fandou I district. He was Hausa, not Djerma, was considered a religious authority, sometimes talked on Nigerian radio during the fasting month of Ramadan, and was also the Imam of the Woresh Mosque nearby. That was how we met 13-year-old Elias.
Bani Fandou I was a typical Niamey suburb, with low houses and sandy streets. Only during the uranium boom of the 1970s had a handful of modern administration buildings been constructed in this metropolis, on the banks of the Niger River. And since many nomads come to the city during the dry season, together with all their possessions and their camels, and set up their camps in the streets and open spaces, Niamey, with its suburbs of low dwellings cobbled together from clay and rush mats, looks more like a large nomad camp than the capital city of a sovereign country.
Niger and Mali are two of the poorest countries in the world. Both countries are regularly right at the bottom of the UN’s development index. Only countries which have long been caught up in civil war score worse. Their northern regions both extend into the Sahara. Agricultural conditions are poor. There are constantly long periods of drought.
Elias’ school in Bani Fandou I was encircled by a high wall. Behind this were two bare concrete huts, and the sandy yard covered with a roof, where Elias slept.
Apart from the two dozen boys sent here from their villages by their parents, Elias’ school was also attended by children from the neighbourhood. They sat tightly packed on the concrete floor of one of the huts. They were much younger and far more numerous, and for them the Quran school was more like a kindergarten. “Their parents are simply happy to be free of the little pests for a few hours”, the translator said.
Their parents paid the equivalent of just over 10 pence per week for this. Elias’ parents paid for the whole year with a goat or a sack of sorghum, depending on how good the harvest had been.
There were beatings in Elias’ school too. But the teachers – the marabout’s three eldest sons – only stormed at their pupils with a raised wooden rod if they’d yet again been chatting and not paying attention.
All the children learned according to the methods which have been traditional in the region for hundreds of years – they learned each individual sura of the Quran by heart, through melodious sing-song and in a choir, and only then did they learn to read and write Arabic.
The whole time, Elias sat huddled under his roof, copying Quran suras onto a small wooden board with a quill made from straw, and ink made out of coal dust. When he had finished, he showed them to his teacher. If he’d written them correctly, Elias wiped the ink off the board again, and began the next one. Usually, however, he started again with the old one.
Just like all children, he understood neither the meaning of the Arabic characters he was scratching on the board, nor the words he reeled off by heart. That wasn’t the purpose of the teaching either. Not even Guingarey’s eldest son understood Arabic.
“The translation is the hardest thing of all. That doesn’t come until much later”, the 34-year-old explained, as though it were obvious. And to become a marabout often took ten or fifteen years. He was still learning himself.
Guingarey himself understood Arabic only because he’d lived in Sudan and Saudi Arabia for a few years. The ability to speak Arabic wasn’t, however, a requirement for becoming a marabout.
Elias came from a village which was only 20 minutes’ walk from Guingarey’s birthplace. Elias’ parents wanted the boy to become a marabout himself one day, to set up a school, and to then support them at home in their village. That’s why they’d sent him to Niamey three years earlier.
Elias said that he wanted that too. And in response to my question of whether Elias was talented, and whether he’d ever be able to become a marabout, Guingarey said, in typical African style, that yes, of course Elias was one of the most obedient pupils, he’d learned to accept the authority of the elders, and so he fulfilled the necessary requirements.
Elias’ village, Gadou, is 90 miles to the north east of Niamey. But it was still a difficult journey to get there. We had to leave the tarmac road in Filingué, and drive 12 miles through the bush in a shared taxi, followed by another two hours in a donkey cart.
Elias’ father was currently in a neighbouring village, getting some supplies. He wouldn’t be back until the evening, Elias' mother told us. She was visibly shocked to see Elias suddenly standing at the door with a white man. Even after he’d assured her that everything was fine and that I’d only come with him because I wanted to see the village, she remained distrustful.
She lived with her husband and his second younger wife in a small yard with two huts. One was for her and her four children, the other for the second wife.
The huts had clay walls, which got so hot during the day that even inside you couldn’t lean on them, and almost spherical straw roofs. This made them look like oversized igloos.
Elias’ elder sister was already married. His mother herself didn’t know how old she was. I’d guess she was in her late thirties. But the translator said, “The women here get worn out very quickly. Often they’re already married at fifteen.” So Elias’ mother must have been around thirty.
Elias’ family grew sorghum during the rainy season. It was astonishing that anything at all could grow in the sand around the scattered yards. But sorghum grows everywhere in the Sahel region, even in the most barren conditions.
The sorghum looks like small maize plants. But sorghum stalks don’t have cobs on them, and the corn grows in ears at their tips.
Apart from an extinct type of rice, this is the only type of cereal still known in Africa today which was originally native to the continent before the Portuguese landed here in the 15th century.
Its corn, pounded and mixed with water and sugar, is used to prepare the daily gruel, known as “furra”.
Besides this, Elias’ family also had a cow. A small herd of goats had died during the most recent drought.
And Elias’ father had a sewing machine. Once a week
, he transported it on his camel – the family’s most valuable possession – to the market in the village on the road to Filingué to darn people’s clothes and earn himself a few CFA francs.
Elias’ mother initially said that they’d sent Elias to the Quran school in Niamey because he was already too old for primary school. So they hadn’t been able to register him there anymore.
But why hadn’t they tried earlier then?
“We forgot”, she replied. “We only realised once it was too late.”
They’d forgotten! How could you forget something like that?
She was sitting on the floor of her hut, her back against the tree trunk in the centre which supported the roof, and wafting some air with a cloth to her naked youngest son. She was wearing a headscarf which just covered her hair, and a light, short-sleeved dress. It was so hot that the sweat was streaming down me.
“Well, at first we didn’t have the money to pay the school fees”, she explained, hesitantly. “And besides, there’s no school nearby, and it’s such a long way that you’d have to send the child to live with someone else.”
Generally, today, she claimed, you could send children to both schools – the Quran schools and the state ones. The state-run schools admittedly have the advantage that children learn French there and so can get a job in the state administration, but the Quran schools have other advantages instead.
I found out the reason why the mother gave several versions of one event only when we were suddenly standing outside a primary school that afternoon. The mother was evidently ashamed of the true version.
When I later wanted to take a photo of her with her children, she fished out some shirts, which were far too big, and put them on the little ones – so people in Europe wouldn’t see little naked children whose parents couldn’t afford a shirt.