Monthly Archives: December 2011

The Complicated Energies of Kano

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It happened fast. A motorcycle spurted from behind a truck and hit Nasiru Wada’s car head-on. The airborne rider thumped into the car’s windshield and rolled off the side. His passenger sprawled on the hood.

Nasiru jumped out. He barely glanced at the two abraded young men slowly getting to their feet. He was focused on his prized Corolla, now blemished by a smashed headlight and dislocated fender. The headlight would have to be repaired before we started our trip the next day towards Lake Chad. Nasiru shook his head, exasperated. The young men, looking chagrined but intact, were inspecting the motorcycle’s crumpled front end. As we left, they were pushing the bike towards the side of the road. Few words were exchanged, and no information.

Considering the anarchy of Kano’s traffic, we would be lucky to get out of town after only one collision. The roads, no matter how wide, had no lane markings or stop lights. Right-of-way was earned by nerve and loud horns, both of which every driver in Kano exercised freely.

Okadas in Kano, by Andy Waite

Two-thirds of the vehicles seemed to be motorcycles and scooters. Many were okadas (taxis).They swarmed and buzzed like hornets, darting into the smallest gap, their side mirrors pushed in to create an extra few inches of clearance. They often surrounded Nasiru’s car, only inches away no matter the speed, before his insistent horn parted them like a shark charging into a school of baitfish.

Sometimes this seething chaos congealed like quick-drying cement. Progress was measured in fractions of inches. We once needed 30 minutes to gain one car-length. The blockage was caused by a taxi-van that had stopped in the middle of a crowded intersection, a perfect spot that the driver refused to leave until all his seats held paying customers. I spent the lull watching goats pick through a hill of garbage on the roadside and breathing in Kano’s bouquet of exhaust, dust, and wood smoke.

Barth was invigorated by Kano’s crackling entrepreneurial energy. That aspect of the city hadn’t changed. Most roads were lined with small businesses, some of them nothing more than ramshackle sheds. Mechanics hung auto parts from trees, women displayed colorful cloth or vegetables on the ground. Everyone seemed to be selling something or haggling to buy.

Wall of old Kano

This energy contributed to the city’s tolerance of immigrants and religions other than Islam. Sharia law wasn’t enforced in the new settlements, said Nasiru Datti, where people could practice their faiths. These new towns also had clubs and places where anyone could go to drink alcohol, prohibited by Islam. The people of Kano believed in peaceful coexistence. The fanatical violence that had rocked other places in northern Nigeria had so far bypassed them. [Update: this changed on January 20, 2012, when the city was rocked by 20 coordinated bombings, claimed by the radical sect Boko Haram, that targeted police stations and certain homes.] “Kano is a commercial city,” said Nasiru. He laughed. “Nobody here wants trouble that could keep them from going to the market the next day.”

Gate into old Kano

Yet if someone returning from the new towns was caught drunk in old Kano, the penalty was 80 lashes. Adulterers got 80 lashes in the market, if they were single. If married, they were stoned to death.

“But we’ve never had a stoning,” said Nasiru, “because you need four eyewitnesses to the act. If you only have three accusers, those three get 80 lashes, to keep people from being accused unjustly.”

We picked up Nasiru’s younger sister at Bayero University, where she had earned a degree in biochemistry. Like most women in Kano, she wore a headscarf but no veil. Some families allowed women to be educated and to work, others didn’t. Nasiru and his sister were two of their father’s 19 children. When Nasiru heard that I had only two kids, he looked sympathetic. When I said they were both sons, he looked concerned. “So you have no daughters to take care of you,” he said somberly.

We left Kano the next morning, heading east toward Lake Chad.

Royal Palace, Royal Slaves

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The Emir of Kano lives in a 15th-century palace within a walled 30-acre compound in the center of the city. As in Barth’s day, the compound’s high walls enclose the living quarters of the emir and his wives, concubines, and children, as well as reception halls, courts, forests, and grazing lands.

Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero

The current emir, Ado Bayero, has been on the throne since 1963. He is the direct descendant of the emir who accommodated Barth in 1851. Like his ancestor, Ado Bayero is the most important man in Kano.

The first Emir of Kano was appointed by Usman dan Fodio, the Islamic scholar and revolutionary whose jihad in the first decade of the 19th-century against corrupt pagan rulers and slipshod Muslims transformed central Africa. Dan Fodio’s armies overran the region, and his crusade inspired jihads throughout greater Sudan.

He built his new capital at Sokoto, still a major city in northern Nigeria. He divided his kingdom into 30 emirates. Most of the current emirs are direct descendants of dan Fodio’s original appointees. Likewise, the current Sultan of Sokoto, who is still considered the spiritual leader of Islamic northern Nigeria, is a direct descendant of dan Fodio.

Entrance to the palace

During business hours, the long tree-lined drive to the palace’s entrance is crowded with cars, soldiers, and men in glittering robes. Just inside the gate are attractive plazas flanked by courtrooms and galleries. The emir hears cases almost every day.

One of my guides, Nasiru Wada, had grown up in the palace, because his father is the emir’s chief spiritual advisor. Now he and his young family had rooms at the rear of the palace, in the quarters of the royal slaves.

I thought I had misheard. Royal slaves? In Barth’s time, all African rulers owned many slaves, but I assumed the system had been abolished. Nasiru asserted that royal slaves, as in the old days, enjoyed social prestige and were grateful to be under the emir’s care. No doubt true, but such benefits can’t justify the practice.

Like many travelers to Islamic Africa, Barth noted that slaves there were treated relatively well compared to slaves in the West. They had certain rights and privileges. Some reached positions of power and became slave-owners themselves. A few children of royal slaves became kings.

Still, it stunned me to find traces of this in modern Kano. Nasiru, a scholarly modern man who works in IT and drives a Corolla, took my surprise in stride. He pointed me to a study of the palace’s history and culture by Heidi J. Nast, now a professor at DePaul. Near the end of Concubines and Power: Five Hundred Years in a Northern Nigerian Palace (2005), Nast writes that the tradition of royal slaves and harems continues in Kano. (In addition to the four wives allowed by Islam, the emir has about 60 concubines, who enjoy the traditional prestige of their position.) Business relationships in Kano, notes Nast, are sometimes still cemented by the gift of a concubine. Barth would have recognized the gesture.

Changing, Unchanging, Dyeing: Dala, Kurmi, Indigo

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The first signs of Kano seen by an overland traveler are the city’s two hills, Dala and Goron Dutse, rising from the plain. The 1,700-foot hike up Dala’s hard red earth is short but steep. Its flat top offers a 360-degree view of Kano, irresistible to visitors.

One of the first Europeans to see Kano, the British explorer Hugh Clapperton, climbed Dala in the 1820s. His guide pointed out the hoof print of the camel “on which the Prophet rode to heaven.” Clapperton asked why the other three prints had disappeared. “God has done it,” said the guide, which Clapperton noted was the all-purpose explanation for any mystery in Islamic Africa.

Kano from Dala hill

Barth climbed Dala and sketched the “glorious panorama” (see previous post). I followed him 159 years later. The view remained superb. Solitary date trees still rose like chlorophyll fireworks above the dust-colored patchwork of buildings. Kano was still a busy commercial city and a magnet for people seeking opportunity. My guide, Nasiru Datti, pointed to the north, where the sky above the settlements was hazy with Saharan sand, and then to the east. That’s where Kano’s newest immigrants live, he said, coming from Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Senegal. Kano has always welcomed new people. But old Kano, added Nasiru, was reserved for natives of the city. Houses there were obtained by inheritance and were never sold to outsiders.

Both Clapperton and Barth were astonished by Kano’s market, the largest in central Africa. The Kurmi market, 600 years old, is still a labyrinth of skinny alleys lined with stalls crammed with every imaginable object and enterprise. Many of the goods mentioned by Barth are still on display. Men chip rocks to make kohl, fashion baskets from reeds, sell spices and chickens and books. Vendors also hawk modern items: steel pipes, auto parts, cell phones, wrecked motherboards, and other digital debris. Herbalists now use a bullhorn to sell remedies for stomach troubles and private rashes. As in Barth’s time, stinking sludge still chokes the Jakara, the filthy elongated pond that borders the market, with the contemporary additions of engine oil and plastic bottles.

The city was, and still is, famous for its fine cotton cloth and beautiful indigo dyes. Kano cloth and garments were coveted throughout central Africa. As soon as he could afford it, Barth splurged on a Kano “guinea-fowl” shirt with a speckled pattern of small blue and white squares.

He mentions Kano’s dye-pits, in use since the end of the 15th century, and the tandem cloth-beaters. Both still operate. The dyers ferment dried indigo, potassium, and papaya ash in the 20-foot pits for four weeks. Then they dip cloth in and out: an hour-and-half for light blue, three hours for deep blue, six hours for blue-black. Patterns are made with the method called “tie-and-dye.”

Today’s residents of Kano still take their cotton robes to the tandem beaters, the way Westerners take shirts to the cleaners. The beaters pound the cloth with huge wooden mallets. Central Africans believe that thumping the cloth in this way preserves the cotton fibers and gives the material a silken glitter, in contrast to ironing, which injures and dulls the fibers. I certainly felt drab next to Nasiru in his resplendent, soundly-beaten robes.

The Celebrated Emporium of Negroland

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Barth became curious about the city of Kano on his trip around the Mediterranean, during a conversation with a Hausa slave in Tunisia. “Seeing the interest I took in his native country,” wrote Barth, “[he] made use of the simple but impressive words, ‘Please God, you shall go and visit Kano.’ These simple words were constantly ringing in my ears . . .”

Kano from Mt. Dala, 1851, from Travels and Discoveries

On February 2, 1851, after almost a year of hard travel, he reached Kano, “the celebrated emporium of Negroland.” It was by far the biggest place he had seen since leaving Tripoli. He was dazzled by “the wonders of this African London, Birmingham, and Manchester.” Kano was already 1,000 years old. Islam had arrived in the 14th century. The city’s existence was unknown in Europe until Leo Africanus mentioned it in his book of travels in the 16th century.

Kano from Mt. Dala, 2010

Barth estimated its population at 30,000, not including domestic slaves and periodic swellings from large caravans bringing salt, natron, or slaves to Kano’s vast market. He was amazed by the European goods for sale in this remote place 1,500 miles from Tripoli: cloth from England, beads from Trieste, paper from Venice, razors from Austria, sword blades from Germany.

He would have seen the temporary palace built for the emir in 1442, which still stands. It has been a school, the home of the city’s war chief, and the colonial offices of the  British. Today it houses the Gidan Makama Museum, an absorbing introduction to the region’s history and a striking example of Sudanese architecture.

The building’s walls are 10 feet thick, made of clay reinforced with the husks of beans. The annual rains partially dissolve the walls, which are repaired with more earth and fiber, in a seasonal cycle that is centuries old.

The size of a 19th-century African city could be gauged partly by the number of gates that interrupted its fortified walls. Kano had 15. The museum exhibits one of the old gates, a massive thing of rough timber sheathed with iron plates secured by crude rivets.

Sabuwar Kofa Gate in Kano

Many historical items of daily life are on display. A royal drum, the size of a small barrel, was once beaten to announce that the emir was on the move. Some dusty brass bells once adorned warhorses of Kano’s large cavalry. The bells of each kingdom had a different sound, to help soldiers distinguish friends from foe in battle. Displayed nearby were thick heavy swords and shields made of elephant or camel skin. On the pastoral side, there were hoes, sickles, and flutes, and jewelry made of bone and ivory to adorn rich brides. Against one wall was a hut of bamboo and thatch used by a mallam—a teacher of the Qur’an—with the traditional wooden slate on which he and his students wrote verses to be memorized.

Then as now, the people of Kano considered themselves to be living at the cosmopolitan center of the world, like Londoners in Barth’s time or New Yorkers in ours. “The ceremonies to be gone through,” complained Barth, “are scarcely less tedious than those at any European court.” He was annoyed at being detained by the hospitable but avaricious emir, who hoped to squeeze the impecunious infidel for presents, and kept him there for more than a month.