By Ridwan Badamasi
In mid-April, while in Dutse, I went to Maigatari, a border town on the Niger-Nigeria border, to purchase livestock, but first, I was to meet with D., an acquaintance and a middleman. D. had told me he knew a trustworthy livestock seller who was an old friend and I knew it was imperative to buy from sellers who weren’t cheats. I needed to avoid those animals fed bean-rich feed, so they grew, in a span of two to three days, larger than they actually were.
These animals would then, to the misfortune of whoever had bought them, pass out gas intermittently until they returned to their normal scrawny selves. At the market, knowing buyers would prod the animals, jerking their tails back and forth before buying. I knew how to look for the signs: dull, listless eyes; bellies swollen often in comic proportions, filled with impending flatulence instead of muscle and fat; no bleating and baaing in the chaos of an open market. Still, it wasn’t something I did every day. I needed D. And I needed Maigatari. Its livestock market is one of the biggest in the north, so it was considerably cheaper to buy there than at the hands of farmers in major northern cities.
I left for the park early, hoping to reach the unfamiliar destination in good time. The driver, a middle-aged man wearing an old zanna cap, told me there was no direct vehicle to Maigatari at that time. I went around the park; the other drivers told the same story. I was worried about the time, so I made a phone call to D. He advised me to meet him at his village, Kwanar Sarkin Dare. “You’ll certainly find a driver going that way,” he said.
Kwanar Sarkin Dare. The name rolled off my tongue as I returned to the driver. It sounded like a name from a folktale. The driver needed only one more passenger before he could leave. “Kwanar Sarkin Dare,” he said and nodded. I climbed in. The driver slammed his door shut and, with solemn ceremony, wound the tasbih he’d been fingering around the rearview mirror. After a few prayers, entrusting the journey to Allah, we set off.
The highway wound on and on, the carriageways initially double, then merging into a single, narrow strip of asphalt. I had taken a dose of promethazine with Coca-Cola—a remedy I’d discovered, through trial and error, for the terrible motion sickness that plagued me. The wind blew hot. An hour in, we were driving through dogonyaro trees, their leaves and small fruits littering the ground; mango trees with fat, unripe fruits hanging unplucked; thornbushes thriving by the roadsides. Occasionally, a kuka tree rose in the distance, ancient and gnarled. The landscape alternated between scenes of growth and sparseness. Now and then, I saw where erosion had ravaged the soil, with gullies yawning wide open in the earth’s belly and trees precariously perched at the edges, their roots exposed. The rainy season was still a long way off, but I occasionally caught the glint of small rivers and pools of green slime. The farther we travelled, the less dense the villages became. Now, there were only simple farm settlements, often with fewer than two families or twelve people living in small, hand-molded brick houses. Again and again, I saw herdsmen leading their animals—magnificent long-horned cattle—to pasture.
“Kwanar Sarkin Dare,” the driver soon announced, slowing down without ceremony. Even as I alighted, I asked if he was sure. There was no road sign, no bus stop, just a cluster of huts in the middle of nowhere. The driver zoomed off. I sat in the shade of a crumbling mud wall and checked my social media. The network was sputtering, and for once, the algorithm didn’t know what I wanted or deserved. Apart from the one Facebook ad repeatedly showing brown cargo pants priced at $65, there was nothing new. No hard data mined from my location. The algorithm had chewed up my location and was spitting out blanks.
I watched the village, wrapped in a comfortable silence, broken occasionally by the call of birds, the mooing of cows, a child’s cry. The farmland surrounding the village was all bare soil, without a single blade of grass. Ridges and furrows had been dug; the farmers were waiting for the first rains. I wondered what I’d find if I ventured into the village. Was it, like its name, a relic of some distant past? Perhaps I’d discover it still held vestiges of 18th-century Hausaland, like Bori, the ancient Hausa cult of animism. Perhaps I’d find people eating scorpions, conversing with djinns, lacerating themselves, dancing into ecstasy and unconsciousness. I Googled the name of the village but found nothing. A group of near-naked children spilled out of one of the huts, armed with buckets and kegs. I watched them troop to the lone borehole, their dark, spindly limbs working the pump. The children shrieked and laughed as they doused each other with water. Their sounds stayed with me—these children who’d never been on a Ferris wheel or watched Nickelodeon after school.
I called D. again, and like an apparition, he emerged from the thick of the village. Moments later, we were hailing a lorry packed with people and animals. At the far end of the carriage sat a camel, its long neck stretching almost to the driver’s side mirror. There was a bull, a handsome beast with earthy maroon skin stretched tight around rippling muscles. It had been tied with multiple lengths of rope to the carriage frame and stood swaying with each dip in the road, a glazed, exhausted look in its eyes. Five sheep and two goats tottered under and around the larger animals.
The lorry took us past several nondescript villages and checkpoints. The air was hot and stifling. It was almost noon. We passed the Emirate of Gumel, where we took in a horse, and from there, the landscape turned ruthless. This wasn’t the disorderly hills of Dutse and the lush savannah beyond. There was a stillness here, an absolute stillness, which, when coupled with the intense heat, gave the landscape a quality of hushed tension. It wasn’t the desert, but it was close. The stunning blue sky seemed to be the only focal point, so at times, the road appeared to be slinking into it. I saw no farms, no signs of human activity. There was nothing—just the sound of hot breeze rushing past my ears and the lorry chugging up and along the dark snake of road.
The appearance of Maigatari market out of the hot haze was something of a shock. All at once, we were in lanes crowded with more livestock than humans. Cattle were being dragged along on leashes. D. and I alighted. The streets seemed married to dust. Cow dung lay on streets that branched one way or another into the heart of the market. The congestion was overwhelming. Trailers waiting to transport livestock to different parts of the country were parked on either side of the streets, almost closing in and choking the human traffic to a trickle. Simply walking from one point to another, plunging into the human deluge, was exhausting. I followed D., pushing and elbowing my way through the crowd. When we emerged onto one of the main thoroughfares, I checked my pockets for my phone and wallet and sighed in relief.
The shops mostly sold food items, detergents, and soft drinks; some were POS outlets. One large establishment had a flashing neon sign hanging from its awnings: ‘C’est une bonne journée’. A man in a grimy, flowing kaftan roared a crude joke in Hausa, hailed a hawker selling water, pulled a few notes from his robe, and counted in guttural French: “un, deux, quatre.” Up ahead, a garishly painted signboard indicated we were in the Maigatari Free Trade Zone. Beyond that, the Niger Republic was barely a few minutes away.
It is not uncommon to find people in Kano who have relatives in what is now Jigawa. Both state capitals are roughly two hours apart. Jigawa is a recent construct; the state was carved out of the former Kano state in 1991. Only a fortnight ago, while visiting family in Kano, a blind and elderly neighbor asked if I knew his nephew, a school teacher, in Dutse. The nephew’s father, he added, had lived at the other end of Kano during the military era. When General Babangida created nine more states, a branch of the family had overnight become indigenes of another state. Stories like this are heard now and then, but what has become less common is finding people who talk about the shared history with the Republic of Niger. Often, this manifests as people vaguely remembering that one or two distant relatives had migrated from Niger. I had a friend who, by chance, while in university, discovered a long-forgotten branch of his family through a column in a Zinder newspaper. The columnist had the same distinct surname as he did.
From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, the great Hausa city-states and trading centers, the Hausa Bakwai—Kano, Gobir, Zamfara, Daura, Katsina, Zaria, Rano—were located in what is now Northern Nigeria and Southern Niger. Usman Dan Fodio’s Jihad at the beginning of the nineteenth century made Maradi the seat of ousted Hausa princes and their descendants who sought to reclaim their territories from the Fulani. It may have been an inherited grievance: prince after prince swearing to reclaim their birthright. That is, until the French came and changed the landscape, solidifying new political systems. In 1900, the French created a new geographic division, an area encompassing the region between the Niger River and Lake Chad. In 1920, a decree reorganized the area, which took on the name the Niger Territory. Some six years earlier, Lord Lugard had amalgamated Nigeria. New entities were formed, and destinies diverged. The machine of empire had dug into Africa, with the British moving from south to north and the French moving from west to east. The rulers of the areas, with bloodlines stretching back centuries, were now relegated to second fiddle under civilian governments.
Today there’s little to be shared between the Hausa of northern Nigeria and those in Niger; there’s hardly a collective consciousness, and though the historical and economic ties are cherished, they’re often mentioned with words lathered in nostalgia.
D. asked me to follow his lead. My clothes will give me away, he said. The traders were most likely to start bargaining from a high ceiling. This was despite my shoes being caked in a layer of dust and cow dung; dark moons had formed in the armpit of my blue shirt, and on my chest, like a school badge, was a circular red stain from God-knew-what. I stood aside and watched as he haggled for a fat cow, two white rams with prodigious horns, and three clay-red goats, robust and sturdy animals he’d chosen after a series of prodding and other physical examinations. The haggling was like a swordfight, like an art.
The average Hausa trader is voluble. Ask the price of an object in a rural market, he’ll reply, “Hundred. Do you want me to speak gaskiya?” Then you’ll find out the gaskiya price is at least five percent less than the original price he’d first put forth. Then he’d proclaim solemnly that even with taxes rising up, rivers drying, and the cost of transporting goods becoming unbearable, he was ready to sell at a price you’d surely find favourable.
Leaning against the wall of the pen, my thoughts drifted away from D. and the ceremony of haggling. On the street, a black dog wolfed down something from a black satchel. Flies buzzed around a large sore on one of his ears. He ate with his jaw unhinged, swallowing so fast he seemed to be inhaling whatever he was eating. Then with a yelp, he scampered off at the arrival of three growling dogs. They nosed into the satchel but he’d eaten everything. I saw the black dog behind a tree further ahead, watching the other dogs, tongue lolling, jaw pulled back into what looked like a grin.
I went online again and found I had several notifications. At the beginning of the journey, I’d opened WhatsApp messages from H., my girlfriend, and I hadn’t replied to them because there was no network coverage. My data was on and so was my read receipt. She must have seen the blue-ticked messages she’d sent remain unanswered for hours. She’d sent several messages probing my silence. We were going through a rough patch, and those unanswered messages seemed to hold the weight of the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. I couldn’t not think of the read receipts right then as pieces of emotional dismissal. I wondered how lines of code could spell for us the bedrock of trust. I sent a short video of the chaos of the market, the swell of humans and animals. I’d be unavailable for a while, I added.
The adhaan blared from a dozen speakers. Birds flapped and fluttered from rooftops. D. and the seller had come to an agreement. The cost of both the animals and the transportation back to Dutse would cost me exactly a million naira. I judged it a fair price. From nowhere, the seller brandished a POS terminal and slid in my card with a toothy grin. Afterwards we shook hands.
Not a sliver of breeze blew as we trudged up and out of the market, pulling the animals by lengths of rope. The sun was behind some clouds, and they were a terrible ochre, the colour of hydrated iron oxide. Beyond those clouds, the sky was bright and colourless.E