No Way But Gentlenesse

by Richard Hines

  Confused, I looked at him, then he told me that last night a mob of northern Nigerians, who were from the Hausa tribe, had roamed the town searching for eastern Nigerians from the Igbo tribe. And that they’d found six Igbos, dragged them out of their homes and killed them. Ian butted in, saying if the mob had come anywhere near his bungalow carrying their flaming torches and machetes he’d have come out with his double-barrelled shotgun and blasted a barrel over their heads. And if that hadn’t stopped them he’d have blasted the other barrel into the mob before reloading. Turning to me, Ian then said: ‘You’re lucky they didn’t make it up here.’

  ‘What?’

  He told me the mob were on their way to the Government Rest House to search the chalets for more Igbos to kill, but that when they were a couple of hundred yards or so away, the police had managed to turn them back after persuading them there were no guests staying in the chalets.

  There was one guest staying in one of the chalets fast asleep and unaware. Me.

  Pointing at me, the Nigerian woman began to laugh.

  ‘Look at his face,’ she said.

  I was terrified, as I imagined what might have happened: being woken by voices; the door crashing in; being dragged out of the chalet; the seething resentment against arrogant white expats being directed against me by machete-wielding men in the light of flaming torches.

  That afternoon Ian needed to go to the bank in Potiskum. I went with him, and as the Land Rover inched along behind a herd of bleating goats, he filled me in on the recent events which had led to last night’s trouble. He told me there had been retaliatory massacres earlier in the year against eastern Igbos, when Igbo plotters had killed northern leaders in a government coup in which General Ironsi, an Igbo, had taken power and become President of Nigeria. Through the windows of the Land Rover we could see, plastered on the mud walls of flat-roofed buildings, posters of Colonel Gowon, who had recently taken over as President in a counter-coup. Nodding towards one of the posters, Ian told me he had been surprised by last night’s massacre of Igbos in Potiskum now that Gowon, who was from the northern region, was in power.

  Later, I was sitting in the parked Land Rover waiting for Ian to return from the bank when four young Nigerian men approached. Three of them carried a machete each; the other had a club-shaped stick. Scared, I wound up the open window next to me. Passing by threateningly close, the four men stared in at me. Avoiding their gaze I looked down at the long blades of their machetes glinting in the sun, and saw that a nail was protruding from the club-shaped stick.

  Thousands of people were killed throughout Nigeria in 1966: there were massacres of Igbo in the north by the Hausa and retaliatory massacres of Hausa in the east by the Igbo. But after that awful night when six Igbos were dragged from their homes and killed, no more Igbos were murdered while I was in Potiskum after the Emir had said, at Friday prayers, the killings were wrong and must stop.

  Those four young men in town armed with machetes and the spiked club had terrified me, yet I found the Hausa people open and friendly. On one occasion Jahid, a Hausa friend in his twenties, invited me to his home for lunch. With him in his white kaftan and white skullcap, and me in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, we sat in the open air on mats in his compound – a small backyard enclosed by high mud-coated walls. His wife, dressed in a colourful wraparound dress and headscarf, brought out the food then sat with us and joined in the conversation. I recall eating with my right hand and dipping yam into a sauce. After the meal Jahid told me they’d bought a drink especially for me, and his wife went inside and returned carrying a tin of Ovaltine. I’d no idea why they thought this bedtime drink was special. But sitting there under a cloudless African sky, drinking the milky chocolate-coloured drink I’d last had as a child wearing pyjamas, I suddenly missed home and those carefree days in our mining village when I was little and Dad was alive.

  On a different occasion, Audu, another Hausa friend, invited me for an evening meal. We sat on mats inside his flat-roofed mud-walled home. As we chatted, at one point I thought he’d asked me if I liked beetles. Fed up of the chips, beans and fried bread served at the Government Rest House, and suddenly excited at the prospect of eating an exotic indigenous dish, I replied yes. My host stood up, walked across the room, pulled back a cloth to reveal a record player, and put on a record.

  ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ blasted out of the speakers.

  As we listened to the Beatles, who I loved, my friend’s young wife brought in the meal, crouched down and put it before us as we sat on the floor. I hoped that she’d stay with us to eat and join in the conversation. But after she’d put down the food and stood up from her crouching position, to my astonishment and dismay she bowed to me before shuffling backwards, repeatedly bowing to me until she was out of the room.

  Seeing a friend’s wife bow her way out of the room simply because I was white upset me. I’d begun to wonder if my African friends really felt at ease with me and if my friendship was an imposition. Feeling isolated and lonely, and fed up with my job, I desperately wanted to move from the tsetse fly eradication unit. So, although I’d only worked there for a couple of months, I told my boss Ian that, having been accepted at teacher training college, I’d be interested in teaching. Ian contacted someone from VSO who found me a post as a volunteer teacher in Kano.

  SIXTEEN

  Checke, or to kill checke, is when . . . other birds coming in view of the Hawke, she forsaketh her natural flight to flie at them.

  – Symon Latham, Latham’s Faulconry, or The Faulcon’s Lure and Cure, 1615

  My job in Kano was to teach English in a technical school, where teenage boys from all over Nigeria lived in dormitories and were taught trades such as motor mechanics and plumbing. The bungalow in which I lived in Kano didn’t have the romantic charm of the isolated thatched bungalow in Potiskum. Roofed in corrugated iron, my new home sat between similar bungalows where the white teachers lived. Unlike the thatched bungalow and my chalet at the Government Rest House, which were lit by paraffin lamp, this bungalow had electricity. What had caught my eye when I first arrived was the fridge; there would be no problem keeping hawk food fresh here. Then, through the back window, I spotted the school field: perfect for flying a falcon to the lure. But once again hawk-keeping was impractical. There was no garden in which I could build a mews. Nor was there a spare bedroom in which I could keep a hawk. Here in Kano, I shared the bungalow with Tom, a tall, thin American Peace Corps volunteer teacher.

  Yet the impossibility of falconry here meant I could direct my energy into my English teaching job. I’d read lots of books on teaching for my Leicester Training College for Teachers interview the year before, and once I arrived in Kano I spent hour after hour in the school library, preparing lessons and reading about teaching methods. Even so, I did worry about my lack of teaching experience. Occasionally I asked a couple of other qualified teachers who also taught English if I could look at samples of their students’ written work. To my relief it seemed my students’ work was on a par, or at least not far behind the work of their students. This might not have had anything to do with my teaching, of course. The only thing I remember from teaching an actual lesson is a lad called Aliyu saying how strange it was that in English we say someone sleeps ‘in a bed’ rather than ‘on a bed’.

  My airmail letters home to Jackie were full of my new experiences. In one letter I told her how, when I’d moved into the bungalow in Kano, I’d been taken aback to discover that we had a cook. He was a small Nigerian called Sali, who, despite being around my mother’s age, and despite my protests, embarrassed me by insisting on calling me master. I went on to tell Jackie that we also had a Tuareg night watchman to guard our bungalow. Unlike his camel-riding desert ancestors, he was no longer a nomad. Instead, he slept on a mat in the garage in the day and guarded our bungalow at night, sitting cross-legged on our veranda, his long sword tucked into his waistband, with only his eyes visible through a slit of the dark blue wrap wound around his head
. In another letter, I told Jackie that to beat the heat we started work at 8 a.m., and how each morning, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, shorts and sandals, I rode the short distance to the technical school on my bike. And how, when the sixteen-year-old lads I taught, who were Muslim, went out to pray, a small flock of tiny brightly coloured finches would fly in, hop around the floor and on the desks, and then all take off together and fly back out through the open classroom door.

  Most of the teachers were white, but there were also two or three Nigerian teachers, and one day as I was sipping my tea one of them called across and told me someone wanted to speak to me. When I walked to the door, there, standing outside in the corridor, was our cook, Sali. He looked upset.

  ‘Come home, master,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Thief man.’

  Sali told me that he’d put a pile of my shirts on the ironing board in the kitchen to be ironed, but when he returned after doing something in another room they were gone. Rushing to the open kitchen door, Sali had spotted the thief running across the school sports field with half a dozen of my shirts in his arms. Sali went on to tell me that he had run to the garage and woken up our Tuareg night watchman, who, sword in hand, had raced across the field and caught the shirt thief and was now holding him prisoner on the veranda, awaiting my return and the arrival of the police.

  I rode the few hundred yards home on my bike, amused by the image I had in my mind of the thief running across the school sports field with his arms full of my shirts. Making my way through a small crowd of Nigerian cooks who’d hurried out of the other bungalows on hearing Sali shouting, my mood changed to horror. Sitting on the concrete veranda floor with his back against the bungalow wall was the thief, a thin old Nigerian man. Running down his forehead and down the side of his nose and on to his cheek was a deep wound. The night watchman had slashed him across the face with his sword. He also had a sword wound across the top of his arm. Showing me the palms of his hands, the old man looked up at me and quietly pleaded, ‘Let me go’. The sword cut on his face wasn’t bleeding much, but I gave him my handkerchief to press on the wound on the top of his arm to stem the bleeding. Sali was annoyed with me for showing concern for the thief, and, as the wounded man sat on the veranda holding out his palms begging me to let him go, Sali and the small crowd of Nigerian cooks abused him in Hausa. When I told Sali he shouldn’t have called the police and that I didn’t want to press charges, the cooks from the other bungalows turned their anger against me. Sali and his fellow cooks got their wish. The old man was taken away by the police and I never heard what happened to him.

  Later, I asked Sali why he and the other cooks had been so angry. ‘Thief men’ jeopardised their jobs, he told me, because in their experience if anything went missing from a white man’s house the cooks tended to be blamed and got the sack. I shook my head, smugly thinking that I wasn’t implicated in any such arrogant behaviour. I’d even befriended a group of beggars in Kano. One had all his fingers missing on both hands. Two or three of them had been crippled by polio and pushed themselves around on home-made trolleys, and others couldn’t find a job. Whatever their woes, it didn’t seem to affect their sense of humour. They thought it amusing that I rode a bike and were always asking me how come I, a white man, a ‘baturi’, hadn’t enough ‘kudi’ – money – to buy a car. I usually gave them money, but one day, for a bit of fun, I told them that I rode a bike because I was hard up. To my amusement they had a whip-round for me, each of them taking a few coins out of his begging bowl and throwing them into a white cap. But one day I discovered that not all Nigerians were so amused by baturis.

  I was fetched from the staffroom by a student who told me a fellow teacher needed to speak to me. He wouldn’t say why, and I innocently followed him back to the classroom where minutes before I’d been teaching.

  ‘Wipe it off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You wrote it. You rub it off,’ said the Nigerian teacher as he held out a board rubber and pointed to the white chalk writing covering the blackboard, which I’d forgotten to wipe off. Taken aback by his aggression and bad manners, I glanced at the students sitting in their rows of desks, looking for support, but I couldn’t see any of the lads I taught, or any of the lads I took for football training. These were students I didn’t know and there was no support there. All too used to seeing white men ordering Nigerians around, this was probably the first time they’d seen the tables turned. There was silence as the students waited to see how I, the baturi, would react. I sensed they were willing my humiliation, willing me to do as their Nigerian teacher had ordered me to do, willing me meekly to wipe the blackboard clean under their sneering gaze.

  ‘Come on. Clean the blackboard,’ the Nigerian teacher said, even more aggressively, as he stepped forward holding out the board rubber. I couldn’t understand such seething hostility, and my surprise turned to anger. As he stood there offering me the board rubber, I wanted to shout in his face. I wanted to tell him he wouldn’t have picked on me if I’d been older and had a little moustache and an authoritative presence like many white expats. Hurt and rendered inarticulate by anger, I responded like a child.

  ‘Wipe the blackboard yourself,’ I said and stormed out of the classroom.

  Having so far found the Nigerian people I’d met welcoming and friendly, I was left shaken and upset by this episode. That night, unable to sleep, it dawned on me that since arriving in Nigeria I’d never done a menial task. The clean white sheet I was lying on had been washed by Sali; the clothes I’d worn at school earlier that day had been washed and ironed by Sali; tomorrow morning’s breakfast would be cooked by Sali. I started to see the classroom incident in a different way. Rather than thinking I’d just forgotten to wipe the blackboard clean, maybe the Nigerian teacher had seen it as typical white expatriate arrogance, left over from the days of Empire; a manifestation of an attitude that lowly, menial tasks such as cleaning a blackboard were below me, and that like all baturis I expected some Nigerian to clean up behind me. The ‘glories’ of the British Empire had been instilled in me by my 1950s education and the jingoistic cinema newsreels of the time. When I’d read tales of army officers flying hawks in the Empire, and longed to follow in their footsteps, I’d never thought about the lives of those colonised. As I lay there in the hot night, recalling the rows of black faces in the classroom, I realised their seething rage against me was most likely rooted in the fact that, even now, six years after independence from Britain in 1960, the Empire’s legacy still permeated northern Nigerian life.

  Next morning as Sali greeted me with a cheery ‘Good morning, master’, I was acutely aware that, despite my liberal sentiments, I was part of this legacy. Like all white expats I was a member of Kano Club, a legacy of Empire, with its tennis courts, playing fields and golf course. I played cricket at the club, and most days I swam in the outdoor pool. On Saturday evenings I went to Kano Club’s open-air cinema to watch films shipped out from England, and one evening I watched Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit performed on stage by the club’s drama group. Until my dressing-down by the angry Nigerian teacher, I hadn’t really noticed that the only black faces in the club belonged to the waiters. At the first opportunity I asked the club secretary if membership was open to anyone. He said it was, and had been since independence. Then he added that the vast majority of Nigerians couldn’t afford the subscriptions and as a result the club didn’t have any Nigerian members – as a VSO volunteer I paid a special reduced rate.

  Now a disagreement over the cleaning of a blackboard had made me much more aware of the demeaning legacy of British rule. For instance, in the bar at Kano Club the white manager of a groundnut company told me that some of the many job applications he received began: ‘Dear Sir, I humbly and respectfully beg . . .’ And each time I went out in Kano, at least one Nigerian man would hand me a reference from a previous British employer, then stand beside me smiling as I read it, desperately hoping the comments on his cooki
ng, ironing and honesty would impress me enough to employ him. On one occasion, a young man whipped off his skull cap and gave my shoes a quick polish, then asked me for a ‘dash’.

  I’d planned to apologise to my Nigerian colleague for forgetting to wipe the blackboard but when I saw him in the staffroom he looked so unfriendly that I decided against it. Nonetheless, I began to see the world through his eyes, and to understand his anger at this legacy of deference and humiliation. I came to admire the way he had confronted me, and demonstrated to his students that they could call baturis to account. But my favourite act of resistance against we baturis took place every Sunday around 5 p.m., when I played cricket at Kano Club. Two Tuareg night watchmen, dressed in their dark blue head wraps, flowing clothes, and with swords in their waistbands, walked very slowly across the cricket field on their way to work. They would cross the wicket between the stumps, infuriating the white cricketers who stood there in an impotent rage as the Tuareg held up the cricket match. Perhaps they had no idea it was sacrilege to walk across the wicket, but I strongly suspected that their slow walk was an act of defiance. They may have worked for us, but, jobs aside, they were still proud and noble desert nomads, who kowtowed to no one.

  Ironically, I had come to Nigeria full of admiration for the falconers of Empire, and yet, rather than flying a hawk myself, I had begun to question my naive view of that very Empire.

  SEVENTEEN

  Few peregrines are left . . . they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy insidious pollen of farm chemicals . . .