The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,52

these days, but there is no magic wand to solve it. People will have to solve it on an individual level. Just as I solved my power problem with a generator.”

I wanted to know about the position of the Amir. Was he like the Oni of Ife, or was he more?

They all said that people respected the institution. There was no coercion.

The writer said, “The Amir does not control production. He is identified with Islam and he stands for the inspiration of the people, and he is revered.” The people of Kano did not think of themselves as Arabs. In this they were different from the people of Sudan. “They are black as night but pretend to be Arab because they speak Arabic. We will never want to be Arabs.”

IN THE geography books I read at school, Kano was a great mud-walled city. Photographs showed smooth-plastered walls, pierced with narrow drainage pipes. I had wished then to see Kano, but now I had to be content with that faint memory, of an old photograph seen long ago. I couldn’t find anything like that, and I found in the end that some cultural arm of the Germans was looking after the little stretch of mud wall that had survived. Its surface was dug up, and very far from being plastered and smooth.

The first palace I saw was the Amirs’ weekend palace. With a name like that it should have been many miles away from the city, but it wasn’t, leaving one to worry about its purpose.

The walls were high and ochre-coloured. Their only decoration was a series of abstract designs in raised concrete, which might have been created by moulds. Here too children ran after visitors and waited patiently for the gratuities that were doled out at the end of the visit. The doorway or gateway was set in the middle of the wall, which was apparently many feet thick, but when you looked up you saw that the thickness was an illusion, that above the ceiling (of corrugated iron) was a vacancy that reached to the very top.

The ceiling was broken in many places and open to the sky, and there were birds nesting in the corners. The wall was hollow. Inside there were courtyards around small low buildings that were shut. Against one wall was a very old tree, with a thick trunk. At the very back there was an orchard, walled again, where the concubines of the Amir of two generations ago might have relaxed, if they weren’t too old or if they hadn’t been discarded.

The main palace, to which we came in due course, was more challenging on this day of heat. It was in a big open dusty semi-arid maidan, sun-struck and bare except for the neem trees in the driveway, with great distances between the cool of the three gateways. The walls were high and brown.

In the second gateway a small white kitten with a patch of colour on its back was crying. It was like the kitten I had seen in Uganda in the Mountains of the Moon hotel. It was possibly the last of the litter, surviving heaven knows how. It would have taken very little to comfort it, but I was with people to whom cats were spirits and familiars; and I had to leave the dainty little creature opening its mouth and crying, still remarkably whole, still nourished by the milk of its mother, now perhaps persecuted and killed.

This little tragedy, and my own helplessness, cast a shadow over the rest of my visit to the palace, to the various durbar rooms, including the England room, where framed photographs on the wall showed Queen Elizabeth being received many years ago by the Amir of Kano.

These inner rooms were being repaired or redecorated, especially the ceilings with their raised decorations and earth colours, the colours of sand and gold in one room, and grey, black and white in another. There was a harem area in the palace, unlikely as it seemed, with wives and concubines and slaves and eunuchs, Islam living out its good old ways at its African limits.

The harem was, of course, off limits to me. I sat on a dusty chair in a durbar room and waited for the rest of the party to come back.

9

DELACROIX’S PICTURE of the ladies of the harem in Algiers shows idle women in colourful clothes. The vacancy of their minds shows in their faces. I suppose some such picture—the clothes, the idleness—had worked