The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,51
sights of the city, well worth coming for, took place every Friday, the holy day, when after prayers the garbage-strewn streets erupted with hundreds and hundreds of thin little Muslim boys with their begging bowls, waiting patiently for alms from the pious who had said their prayers.
The good Muslims of Kano see their situation as “dynamic.” For these people, once the state is Muslim, and the culture Islamic, there can never be a crisis; the world is whole. This sets them apart from the rest of Nigeria, which lives in a perpetual state of crisis.
THE HOTEL had an unusual number of black-and-white signs, perhaps done on a computer, asking guests not to take away the hotel fittings.
Some friendly local intellectuals in white gowns came to see me after dinner, and we talked by electric light in the sandy garden, away from the parked cars, between the hotel proper and the hotel’s “Calypso” restaurant. We fought off mosquitoes and sand-flies while we talked.
One man, a former Fulbright scholar, taught literature at the university. A man in a red fez did media, and worked for the government. A third man, modest and attractive, said he was “a tiny writer” in English.
They were all proud men of the north, and they had done much thinking about their identity in the mish-mash of Nigeria. They didn’t appear at first to see the Kano the visitor saw. They saw growth and dynamism. Kano, they said, was an ancient trading centre and it still held its place, although the trans-Sahara trade had gone down.
Later, not understanding that they were saying something different, they said that Kano was conservative, and the challenge to it came now from education. There were two kinds of education. One was Western; the literature-teacher said he was part of that. And there was the traditional koranic system. This made people literate in Arabic, and sent them out into the “informal” network. That was a formal academic way of saying that the koranic system sent them out to shine shoes, to drive okada motorcycles, to hawk things in the street, and generally to do “low” work which kept them at a subsistence level. The koranic way, in fact, made the streets of Kano what they were.
This couldn’t have been an easy thing for these proud Islamic men to live with, but their heads were full of the problem of identity as reflected in language, and they let it pass.
The literature-teacher said they were inward-looking people. They wrote in Hausa, a language of the north; they had very few English writers. He said, “We want to look out, but all these writers write in Hausa.”
The man in the fez, the media man, said, “We need new ideas.”
The man who said he was a “tiny writer in English” said, “Kano is a strange place. I look at people who are happy one minute and very unhappy the next. All right and then angry by turns. I look at them because they are my characters, and I want to understand them.” He couldn’t say why they are angry. “They are not vocal. I don’t know why they are so alienated. I feel their anger even though we are an urbane and commercial centre.”
The academic, the literature-teacher, didn’t feel the anger the tiny writer felt. “It is not so palpable to me. It could be an identity issue. What pigeon-hole they fit in.”
They then talked about what was closest to them, the question of Hausa identity.
When did that identity crisis begin?
They said it was started by European anthropologists. And, indeed, there was an American academic in the hotel at that moment, who had come to write about the Hausa and was now at the end of his “fieldwork.”
The tiny writer in English said, “The inwardness of people in Kano is part of our identity, and maybe this is why the social and political advancement is limited.”
We had gone far beyond the brave attitudes they had adopted at the beginning.
I wanted to know how they were reacting to the dilapidation of Kano. In the beginning they had appeared not to notice it.
The media man in the red fez said it was growing, both the city and the dilapidation. “They are all like ants milling around. We do not have much new development.” Again, very different from what they had said in the beginning. “There is a great influx of people, but no jobs, and so many people just do the okada thing.”