Chapter II: Kano, Northern Nigeria, the Commercial Metropolis of the Western Sudan

Twice a week a mixed passenger train runs from Lagos to Kano, which, despite its crude discomfort, must serve the traveller who wishes to go north, for there is no other way for the present.

When the time came for me to set out upon that journey, to say I was astonished at the crowds of natives at the station and at the confusion would be to put it very mildly. Drowning the sound of clanking trucks and blasts of engine whistles in the station, arose the deafening cries of instruction and abuse of a highly excited, hustling mob about to board the train, after bidding demonstrative farewells to two or three generations of relations and friends. Din and confusion reigned supreme; there was no calm eddy there, no steady head or hand to order silence or orderliness. One might be forgiven if, for the moment, one thought, as I did, that I had mistaken my direction and had entered a native market-place, in which a great sale was going on and the bidding eager and heated, in a volcanic atmosphere of excitement.

Patience was necessary, I assure you, to carry master and boys and baggage through the jostling of some hundreds of people, past the ticket-desks of distracted native clerks, who were being overwhelmed by a fiercely gesticulating, clamouring mob, that know, by force of primitive environment, only their rude desires and nothing of manners. And when the train had finally been boarded and the journey begun, I found it was necessary to keep hold on patience throughout, for many stations on the way held something of the same fearful din and disorder.

Much could be done by strict measures on the part of the railway authorities to “tone down” and regulate such native shortcomings, which white men would surely welcome, for it is little less than unchecked raw exuberance that is prevalent among them—perfectly good-natured, as a rule—which interferes with the quick and systematic disposition of the service, and which is not in keeping with the fitness of things in modern travel.

But such circumstances are among the drawbacks which unprecedented prosperity has brought in its wake. Nigeria, rich beyond all possible estimate in natural resources, has come, and is coming, into her own; no longer gradually and steadily as cautious and perhaps wise men might wish, but by leaps and bounds in keeping with the impatient spirit of the age. So that laggards are apt to be left behind, or things which are primitive become out of date; and that is what has happened with the Nigerian railway, which was built, no doubt, and run for the little needs of the colony as they existed a few years ago, but which is not now an adequate nor well regulated service, and fails sadly to fall in line with the astonishing progress of present-day commerce. Hence, in part, the cause of the congestion and confusion at the stations which is so prevalent to-day.

Nigeria urgently needs more railways, more railway facilities, throughout the width and breadth of the land: a land that has few equals in untouched natural wealth; _a land of immense possibilities, provided wise laws conserve its native labour_ and cease to over-educate and over-wean it, and bring it back to the natural conditions from which it has been swept in a whirlwind of haste to clutch Prosperity and let everything else go by the board. Meantime it is bottled up in its vast interior for lack of outlets, while it is struggling like a thing unborn to break loose from bondage.

It is only a very little of the awakening, of the struggling, which one sees at almost every station “up the line,” but every sign, little or great, is a sure forecast of a dawning and, perhaps, wonderful new era in West Africa.

The three days’ wearisome journey to Kano need not be dwelt on at length. Throughout it was through a country rich in forest and bush, with no great change in geographical aspect or in altitude. The change in appearance begins in the Kano region, at the end of the railway, where the sub-deserts of the north come down in places to the fringe of the bushland and grade one into the other. The elevation of Kano is 1,700 ft., and this comparatively small change in altitude over the long distance from the coast to Kano—a distance of 704 miles—takes place gradually, so that the country, with small exceptions, appears flat throughout. There are great dense belts of oil palms and coco-nut palms in from the coast, which in time, as you proceed up-country, give place to more varied tropical forests of tall stately trees growing from jungle undergrowth; while further on again, toward the north, the growth is less prolific, and there is much acacia bush, which is open or dense in patches, and of no imposing height.

To step from the train at Kano and shake oneself free from the discomforting heat and dust of the carriage and know that the journey was at an end was a cause for rejoicing with me. Civilisation now lay behind; here would I gather together my caravan of camels and natives and set out on the open road with all the freedom of a nomad.

And as a starting-off point, I learned, on close acquaintance, that Kano was ideal, for it proved to be a place of the frontiers and of the outdoors that harboured a host of wayfarers that passed to and fro from the great and historical market-centre of the north.

The ancient city of Kano is situated on an extensive plain of cleared and cultivated bushland, which is not completely bare and waste nor treeless, but which, nevertheless, bears a distinctive change from the country further south, and has much of the appearance of sub-desert in the dry season, for it holds the palest of colouring—that true buff shadeless neutral tint common to desert lands which oceans of wind-lain sand and ranges of dry prairie grass give to a sun-parched, rain-thirsty country. But only in colour and sand-winds of the Harmattan has it great resemblance to desert, for, beside the scattered trees and bush, the level stretches on closer inspection are found to be largely lands that have been cultivated during the short rainy season and are now waste-grown over a very sandy soil, which is dry and cracked and powdered to fine dustiness on the surface. One of the common and best-known ground plants amongst the dead vegetation on the sandy soil is that named “Tafasa” by the Hausa people (_Sesbania sp. Leguminosæ_). It is a straw-yellow, long-stalked underbrush, with long thin bean-pods, and known to everyone about Kano, for it grows about 2 ft. high in considerable extent, and crackles noisily in brittle dryness as one brushes against it in passing. Another well-known plant there, and everywhere in the bushland, is that which the natives call “Karengia” (_Pennisetum Cenchroides Rich._), and which is a very annoying burr-grass that adheres to any part of one’s clothing, and which is a terrible pest to the hunter.

It was the season of the Harmattan when I reached Kano, for it was the month of December, and the driving winds from the Sahara had already set in. The Harmattan (often designated “Hazo” by Hausa natives, which means mist) is a season of hot, dry, dust-filled winds that blow from the desert interior steadily day after day, but seldom with the abandoned fierceness of a sandstorm. At that period the early mornings are cool even to coldness, and fresh and vigorous with the stirring of strong wind, which bears down with the coming of day, and brings with it a fine mist-like haze which envelops the whole country. But the haze is not an atmosphere of laden dampness, such as is familiar to England; quite the contrary, for it is dry with the intensity of a white heat, and mist-like only because the wind is so full of fine sand particles from the tinder-dry desert in the north, which it carries and lays in a carpet of fine penetrating dust wherever it passes.

The dryness in the land at this season is unbelievable if you have not experienced it; moisture is dried up as if the flame of a furnace was licking at it; ink, for instance, dries as fast as each letter of the alphabet is penned, and the clogging pen-nib is almost unmanageable: writing-paper, books—even the stiff book covers—everything of the kind curls up and becomes unsightly; boots that fitted with comfort in England shrink to such an extent that they are useless; nothing escapes, not even one’s person, lips crack, and nostrils and eyes sting; and altogether one has days of intense personal discomfort. Moreover, the fine almost invisible sand-dust searches into everything, and very soon both my watches were affected; next my camera shutter went wrong, and later on a rifle and gun. These latter were the greatest mishaps to befall me during Harmattan, and they were serious enough at the onset of an expedition.

Thus it will be seen that at Kano there is already something of sand and bleakness, and, to a considerable degree, it is therefore relative to the boundless Sahara to the north, while the advent of the Harmattan and driving sands bring to one the very atmosphere of the great lone wastes of the hinterland. And in keeping with such impressions, and enhancing them, stands the strange, and ancient, and powerful city of Kano, which in its unique earth-built aspect has all the character of a city of the mystical northern desert and little or none of the character one is accustomed to see in Nigeria. Perhaps, most of all, Kano impressed me with its atmosphere of age: the gigantic ramparts around it, and many of the quaint mud dwellings were obviously time-worn, in that inimitable manner of things that are unmistakably ancient, and carry about them for ever the rudiments of the craftsmanship of strange races that have passed and gone for all time.

And though we may know from hearsay that great powers in race and religion have lived within the walls of Kano to fight and struggle for power and existence through ages of History—as is the destiny of kingdoms—it is difficult to realise how slowly time has advanced in this secluded back-eddy, and how very close the past is to the present, until you have walked within the ancient walls and fallen under the spell of the old-world character of the people, and their dwellings, and their customs.

Undoubtedly this atmosphere of the Past which hangs so closely about Kano remains there because the town so long lay out of the way of the ever-hurrying feet of that advancing, engulfing “civilisation” of our age which is the ruling “God” of the white man in his own land, whereso ever that be, or in any other land that he has fallen heir to through the honourable, or mayhap—be it whispered—dishonourable enterprise of a bygone grandparent.

It was as late as 1902 that the white man came before the gates of Kano, demanding admittance, and since the aggressors were the great “Bature,” and had many rifles (a few arms collectively are invariably construed as _many_ by timid, untaught natives), the Hausa inhabitants, who were at discord with the Fulani, who were their masters at the time, and deserted by the cowardly Emir Alieu, forthwith bowed before Destiny with true Negro fatalism, and accepted British rule without serious dispute, and without making any kind of stout-hearted defence against the undermanned punitive expedition that was sent out at the time; a fact to their discredit, for they were in their thousands.

It would appear, from records, that the pact between conqueror and vanquished was a friendly one, and of such wisdom that the change of rule was not a drastic one and brought no tyranny; in fact, the hands of the Crown’s Trustees were laid so lightly upon the people in directing their administration, that they (the natives) lost none of their ancient characteristics or pride of race at the time of small beginnings of acquaintance with Europeans; so that almost up to the present day Kano remained to all intents and purposes completely native and original, and a great and powerful centre of the Hausa people and of Mohammedanism. It is at the present time that the careless breath of civilisation has swept inevitably—for it is useless to expect to gainsay Destiny—in from the South, and has cast a blight upon the simplicity of the natives, with unnatural consequences to their frail character.

In 1911 the Nigeria railway was laid down to Kano. In 1914—about six years ago—there was less than a score of Europeans within the British segregation about a mile east of the Hausa City, and at the time of my journey, early in 1920, somewhere about six score; the former a barely perceptible number amongst the vast native population; the latter just enough to have started the swing of the pendulum of commerce and speculation which already promises to change a fine old world that is rare to a new world that will grow commonplace. I treasure old things, as I fancy we all do, and therefore cannot refrain from regret when I see something that is dear totter on the brink of destruction—so often it cannot be saved by reason of circumstances or environment, and it goes out for ever, for the passing of the _Old_ is just as inevitable as the coming of the _New_ beneath the propelling will of Destiny.

The population of Kano is a fluctuating one, on account of the nomadic propensities of many of the people, and I think I am right in saying that there are on that account no exact statistics concerning numbers. There is said to be an average population of about 80,000 inhabitants in Kano, which dwindles to about 60,000 in the “off season,” and rises to about 100,000 in the height of the trading season, when ground-nuts are marketed.

The province of Kano, of which the City of Kano is capital, has a population of 2,871,236,[4] which is a much greater number than that contained within any other province in Nigeria, its nearest competitor having barely half that total.

Those few figures may serve to proportion the extent of the importance of Kano; but let me lay statistics aside henceforth, for I would fain wander back in random fashion within the old gaunt walls of the city and examine the quaintness and the rudeness wherever dust-lain mysterious lanes may lead me.

Within the walls of Kano the city is composed of thousands of diminutive hutments, which crouch low and are huddled together as if to gain each from the other strength, and companionship, and protection, which is indeed the intention in a land which suffers from the sting of driving, biting sandstorms, and knew in the Past the swoop of attacking enemy.

The huts, and the enclosure walls about them, are built with reddish clay-soil taken from pits in the neighbourhood, and, with the addition of water and plant fibres, kneaded into a plaster which, after it has been applied, sets very hard. Dwellings so built are cool and weather-worthy for the greater part of the year, but at the time of the Rains some damage is usually wrought by the heavy wash of water, and repairs are necessary thereafter.

In appearance the dwellings are stoutly built at the hands of patient, careful labour (for the natives are not a little skilled in their work), and, though they have seldom ornament of any kind, their simple lines and odd and primitive planning have an attraction, and a novelty that is peculiar, apparently, to the walled-towns on the northern borders of negro-land.

Kano, like most native towns, has grown upon no preconceived lines, with the result that it is to-day a happy-go-lucky jumble of dwellings that in many cases appear to just save themselves from complete imprisonment by the number of lanes that provide, by the genius of necessity, a way of escape to the encompassed dwellers. Throughout the whole city runs an amazing network of street-lanes, zigzagging and turning and twisting in every conceivable direction and holding to no true course for any appreciable distance, which is the outcome of the numerous den-builders having built their little dwellings wherever an open space or a corner was available, without preconceived attempt to form the whole in any kind of symmetrical plan.

From the outside the openings in the severe lane walls—which are 8 to 10 ft. high—do not invite a stranger to enter freely into the privacy of these native dwellings, but, not wishing to miss anything, I one day plucked up courage and asked of an aged woman, who was squatted on the ground at a doorway in a lane, if she would show me the interior of her house?

But before making my request I tactfully gave her the long formula of Hausa greeting:

_Self_:—Sanu sanu! (good day!)

_Aged woman_:—Sanu kaddai! (thank you!)

_Self_:—Sanu da aiki! (blessings in your work!)

_Aged woman_:—Sanu kaddai! (thank you!)

_Self_:—Enna lafia? (how are you?)

_Aged woman_:—Lafia lau! (very well!)

_Self_;—Enna gajia? (how is weariness?)

_Aged woman_:-Babu gajia! (none!)

_Self_:-Enna gidda? (how is your house?)

_Aged woman_:—Lafia lau! (very well!)

_Self_:—Madilla![5] (thank God!)

_Aged woman_:—Madilla! (thank God!)

which formula the Hausa native dearly loves to be greeted with, since it is the habitual form of friendly salutation; and it now brought me good-natured bidding to enter.

Across the door-opening in the wall I stepped from the lane into the yard or compound—a small open space with high walls on all sides— which was clean, though earthen and dusty, and contained a few naked infants that played about the hut doors in company with a pair of young goats of an age to be nursed and nourished at home, while a few bantam-sized African fowls scratched for pickings where wooden mortar stools and pestle poles on the ground told that the industrious women of the house had lately been crushing grain for the forenoon meal. There was not, contrary to the usual custom, any tree or bush preserved within the narrow limits of the yard for sun-shelter.

The yard I had entered contained two huts built of the same clay-soil material as the outside walls, and, bending almost double, I entered the low dark doorless opening which gave admittance to the home of the old woman, and stood then in dim light in a tiny den which had only a few feet of space altogether. Indeed, such dwellings contain area of so little extent that if a long woodframed couch is placed therein, or a grass mat for reclining upon is laid upon the floor, one full side of the room is taken up. No window lit the interior—though there are sometimes one or two narrow loopholes near the ceiling in huts of this type—and but a dim light filtered indoors from the sun-shadow that fell athwart the low doorless opening; the hard-baked floor was of the same red clay-soil as the rest of the dwelling and of the colour of the ground outside; the flat ceiling— which showed the ant-proof dum palm beams and the spans of grass matting between, which carried the weight of earth that composed the roof overhead—was densely hung with cobwebs and black with the wood-smoke from years of night-fires and cook-fires, which had also dimmed the rough red walls. There was no furniture in the hut, nothing that had the purpose of an ornament, for though the Hausa people are excessively fond of ornament on their persons, strangely enough no such taste is reproduced in their dwellings. Upon the floor lay a clean grass mat, whereon the inhabitants are wont to crouch around the food-bowl at meal-time, or individuals recline in sleep in the heat of the height of the day; a few calabash drinking-bowls and bowls for drawing well-water hung from the ceiling and from the wall, where also a well-used bow and a buck-skin sheath of arrows hung from a peg.

From this room a short dark passage led to the other hut, which was of exactly the same character and aspect as the first, except that therein two comely women, in bright cotton garb, had taken refuge in shyness of the white stranger—wives, no doubt, of the proprietor, who was not for the moment at home. A few Hausa words to them in friendliness and a coin to the old woman, and I passed outside into the daylight again and on my way, followed by the grateful “Na gode, na gode! (thank you, thank you!) of the old woman, who was much flattered over the advent of a white man to her humble “gidda” (abode).

Therein I have described one native home in Kano, and in describing one have portrayed the type, for, except in minor details, they are all very similar. They are, in fact, when all is said and done, but the simple primitive shelters of an outdoor people of an old world, who are content for the most part to make shift, somewhat in gipsy fashion, with the rude necessities of life like unto the wild things about them.

Of course there are, in addition to the mass of dwellings, the Mohammedan mosque, and Sultan’s Palace, and market-stalls, which have importance and peculiarities of their own and complete the city as a whole; but the great novelty of the place lies along the lanes and about the mud huts of the crowded populace, and upon the rampart walls that stand stalwart guards through the ages.

In the Past it would appear the natives of Kano lived almost altogether within the ramparts of the city, as was the defensive custom of rival centres throughout the territory; for tribal wars were continual in those days, one group fighting another, one city besieging another to such an extent that safety was only to be found behind stout walls and lines of archers, while, in times of disturbance, the bush outside remained a deserted no-man’s-land.

Thus to withstand siege Kano had more than its crowded streets of dwellings within the walls that enclosed an area of 7¼ square miles; there was open ground where goats and cattle and camels could be herded and fed for a time when threat of attack should drive them in from the outside; there were ponds and pits of water, even in the dry season, where beasts could be watered, and deep wells to supply the people. So that with their herds of animals to slaughter for meat, and secreted grain stores, and abundant water, the inhabitants were in a strong position to withstand siege in the good old days of high adventure—days not long removed so far as they are concerned.

Within the walls, also, are the twin hills Goron Dutse and Dalla, outstanding though not massive in area, but most notable because they are the only hills in view on any side over the distance of cleared land and bushland of the surrounding country, so that they are like sentinel posts and fortresses to outside eyes.

Lastly, and most striking feature of all in this place of strange reflection of ancient customs, there are the great ramparts which completely surround the city. They are the very embodiment of strength, towering above all else—of great width and height, and one solid mass of welded clay-soil. Indeed, the whole enclosure is so colossal that one cannot but be filled with amazement when endeavouring to conceive an imaginary estimate of the labour and enthusiasm that the masters and their subjects and their slaves must have put into the work. At some time or other one can easily imagine that countless thousands of naked natives swarmed upon those walls, intent on one great purpose, like so many droves of tireless working ants. The walls are 40 ft. wide at the base, and rise, tapering to 4 to 6 ft. width at the top, to a height of 30 ft. and more. The parapet is punctuated with regular openings to accommodate the drawn bows of archers when kneeling on the ledge or pathway which is on the inside of the top of the wall. The great wall which encircles the city is no less than 11 miles around its circumference, while there are thirteen tunnel-like gloomy entrances, through the great width at the base, on main roadways that diverge from the city, so that exit or entrance can be made from any side. In the side walls of the tunnel entrances there are room-like cavities excavated which apparently accommodated the guard in time of war.

The hour to enter Kano by one of these gates is in the cool of the late afternoon, for at that time you will find that the somnolence which the excessive heat of noonday lays upon the easy-going inhabitants has lifted and that there is a great stir of joyous life about the city. The earth streets and lanes are filled with natives bent on one occupation or another, for Kano is at heart a regular hive of industry—“the great emporium of Central Africa,” as Dr. Barth described it on his travels in 1850. It is the principal hour in the market-place, and women and men pass thereto with baskets of wares carried with easy grace upon their heads; laden donkeys, dun-coloured or grey, pass marketwards too; and long-gaited camels, and sometimes lean-ribbed, big-boned oxen, all converging into Kano in the one direction, whence issues the hum of many voices telling where a multitude has already gathered.

The market is comprised of long streets of low, roofed-in open stalls, wherein the wares are exposed upon the ground within an allotted space, while the gown-clad Hausa merchants kneel behind them with becoming solemnity and do business. You may see upon some stalls British cotton, and British ironmongery, and British cigarettes which have been imported, and a few other things; but for the most part the wares are native, and you can single out baskets of raw cotton, bobbins of home-spun thread, and stout Kano Cloth—which is renowned in Nigeria—the weaving and dyeing of which is a large industry. Also the sale of hides, and leather-work, and basket-work, and pottery are local industries of importance that bring wares to the market; while tailors and blacksmiths flourish at their trades. There are food-stalls, where such staple foods as millet, and guinea corn, and maize, and beans (whole or ground to flour) are exposed for sale in calabash bowls or grass-woven baskets; and tomatoes, onions, yams, sugar-canes, and the pepper and plant-leaves that go to make up the local pottage condiments. The meat market is set apart, which is wise, for it is fly-ridden and odoriferous, and beef and mutton and choice parts of offal (of which natives are particularly fond) are there exposed for sale.

The merchants of the stalls are principally of the Hausa race, and there are a few Arabs. But in the cattle-market, which is also on one side, the natives are often Fulani and Beri-Beri, who have brought in cattle, sheep, goats, and camels from distant bush where their herds roam.

There are some horses for sale in the cattle-market; high-mettled, Arab-like beasts that are often very attractive, but which, very unfortunately, are almost invariably gone at the houghs through the stupid native habit of throwing a galloping horse suddenly back on its hindquarters on hard ground to make a dramatic halt before an audience or a king’s house, by means of pressure on the locally-made cruel bit-iron which projects on to the roof of the mouth.

It may be gathered at this stage that the local market of Kano is well equipped to supply the wants of the primitive people. Moreover, the whole interchange of trading is so extensive, that there is a very wholesome buying and selling within its own circle which employs almost everyone and makes the city doubly self-supporting and self-sufficient.

This market within the old city, in its entirety, is the everyday mart of the inhabitants and does not greatly concern the white traders, who buy, at their own warehouses in the European segregation outside the walls, their stacks of hides and tons of ground-nuts and beans, which are the rich exports from the place. There is also some European trade in cattle and sheep, which are railed for the consumption of people at “down country” stations and on “the Coast.”

But it is now time to pass on from the market-place and return to quarters, though the loitering crowd that presses about the stalls is so dense that it is difficult to pass through it, and the din of the eager voices is deafening. However, once clear of the congestion and noise, it is very pleasant walking or riding slowly home under the spell of a closing day. Hundreds of natives are still on the dusty roads, arriving joyfully at the journey’s end with burdened animals, from distant parts, or coming from the fields or villages near-by when the work of the day is finished; all gladly and contentedly returning home, or coming to a haven of rest, while the sound of pounding pestle-poles in their mortar stools resounds methodically in the still air to declare to all ears that industrious housewives are preparing the evening meal.

You may hear also, about this time, the monotonous tom-tom of small drums arising from the direction of a group of hutments, and the loud voice of a functionary raised in peculiar declaration to call forth neighbours; from which it may be understood that there is gaiety afoot in some quarter where a wedding-dance is starting. Such sounds on the evening air are very pleasant, as are all sounds close to nature when they are explanatory of familiar living things and joy of life to anyone who is overtaxed with the silence of the lone places, as are many men of the caravans and of the bush who drift into Kano from afar.

Passing through a shadowed gateway, named “Nassarawa,” in the eastern wall, you may leave the strange old city behind in the dusk and take the straight road to the white man’s town while snow-white flocks of Cattle Egrets fly gracefully and softly across the eve-lit sky to their night grounds, and satiated vultures and kites clamber heavily to their roosting-perches on gnarled old solitary trees to gather on each one in colonies.