THE VOICE IN THE DESERT

A class in geography

Nigeria is a ponderously large country—in land mass and in every other sense. But you’d never know it, cooped up as you are in one little corner of the country. We all maintain our own little slices of the nation, hardly venturing beyond our neck of the woods, whatever that expression means.

Take a drive through the northern part of the country and you’d see what I mean. On September 26, 2006 after leaving camp we breezed through Minna on our way to Kontagora. Of course leaving Paiko had its own amazing set of problems but we were all headed for our respective places of posting which had put camp romances asunder and all else could stay afloat until we settled.

Driving through the norther region is an unrivalled lesson in geography. I never knew what Zungeru looked like before RN433 purred through it in Fatherland, but now I know the sleepy little town like the back of my hand. It is filled with people easily scared and excited by crime. I once escaped being robbed in the town on my way to Minna two months later in November. Unfortunately, while I was safe behind the stickup the robbers attacked someone I had come to know even though nominally. Mrs Obi, a peer-education trainer from NYSC and an NACC patron. Later I would get to know more of her.

Back to geography class. The landscape is breathtaking. If there is one thing the north has over the other regions of Nigeria, its panoramic, beautiful landscape—rocky formations rising on all sides and tumbling over each other like tiny cancerous bumps ready to regenerate once cut. The fields of green ears of corn (maize and millet) sweep endlessly before you as if there is no tomorrow.  When they turn straw or brown in the dry season the beauty of straw is even more astounding. To see such is to be one with nature at least and God at most. A poet could lose himself watching such wonder and come up with a masterpiece at most or at least a piece that would rival most masters. And the quiet is sheer bliss, broken only by the occasional roar of automobile engine as your vehicle rushes past another.

The only thing breaking this great swathe of Mother Nature is the long black tarred road snaking out ahead and behind you. You could drive for hours and hours and see nothing but green or staw fields (depending on the season of the year) for endless hundreds of kilometres. Not a soul, human or beast.

The human settlements by the roadside are few and far between and are commonly pastoral, bucolic simple fellows who are too busy tending the lone family cattle and gathering the family’s maize and beans to spend two heartbeats drinking in raw beauty. They live with it everyday, they don’t see it. And those who don’t—like us—are too busy trying to find our way to soak up the sights.

I know that, because when Uwa asked whether there were tourist attractions, I said, no there wasn’t. As if none of those qualified as attraction. The sight was beautiful but I couldn’t see that anybody would drive five hours along lonely roads only to park and stand by the roadside to gaze upon endlessly sweeping fields of green and straw. No, sirree.

The time of travel and the landmass to cover once made me want to pat OBJ on the back and tell him he was doing an unenviable job. But I didn’t. After all, I know a few countries that have more landmass than Nigeria and whose presidents still have one head even though they control countries large enough to span several time zones. Russia, China, India, USA, Canada.
Population is a different thing, mind. Some of those countries have more people than Nigeria, others less. But the north definitely has less.

Uwa said that was why the infrastructure remained intact: because there wasn’t anybody to use them, and I believe him. That made Ndubuisi conclude that elected officials here in the north really have no work to do, compared with their counterparts in other regions. Again, he too was right.

But to see how those officials maintain already provided infrastructure needs another change in geography.

You will not get a photograph to seal the moment. But the memory will linger like a distinct yet fading daguerreotype, sealed into your heart long after the old white-and-black has ceased to be fashionable. You will come to know the name of the season in different languages—hausa babban sallah (big sallah), Arabic eid-el-kabir(the big holiday)—is apt to a point. It will be a time when you will discover so many things that may not be true to type.

If you reside in bigger cities like Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, the Sallah will be more public in those parts of the city populated by Muslims and people of northern descent. Don’t expect the same populous celebration in the backblocks like Kontagora. In fact, the opposite.

Especially if you live on the outskirts of the town. You will find that your neighbours who’d never seemed to know that most people closed shop on Sunday s will toe the line. Their shops, even those ubiquitous automobile repair shops that ever stay open till the late of night, sometimes all through the night, will be firmly shut and deserted.

So will the roads be. And you would think a war had broken out and everyone had fled and left you behind. Only motorbike operators and their flashily dressed pillion passengers will note to you that you are still safe.

You will walk for minutes without seeing a singly soul. Otherwise the only souls will be a pair of lovers, the guy holding the girl seated on his thighs, billing and cooing and so busy whispering sweet nothings on one of the broken concrete park benches. They won’t even notice your coming. If you applied more stealth than a roaring caterpillar you could catch them doing the deed flagrante delecto.
You will ask yourself whether you are sure this is the Niger that was supposed to be Shari’a compliant and Kontagora was supposed to be one of its backwoods where conservatism runs high. But the hormones running amok will tell you otherwise.

You will understand that wearing a hijab doesn’t mean a girl hasn’t got hormones that run wild at the thought of sharing a park bench under trees in the heart of a deserted park with a guy she imagines looks somewhat like Ramsey Noah. And that donning a scholarly-looking jalabiya doesn’t mean a guy can’t eye the sweet-looking girl in another guy’s arms in the middle of the kasuwa (market).

That’s for the indigenes. The non-indigenes, especially the non-Muslim Yoruba and Igbo will positively knock your socks off. Islam and Shari’a only place restrictions on people’s hormones not bleed them of their juices.

It’s a grab-what-you-can-while-you-can thing, for exactly eleven minutes later you will see the park lovebirds, a vision of sky blue blouse and skirt and fishnet hijab, flying past you on the pillion seat of a motorcycle.

Deeper into the heart of the town you will find life, all of it, crowded around gidan sarki, the emir’s palace or quite literally the house of the king. It will look like a trade fair and amusement park rolled into one. There will be boys and girls innocently screaming gleefully while gulping yoghurt and kunun, older boys strategically positioned as to catch sight of the cutest sweeties strolling around pirouetting birds flaunting themselves before the niggers, as the admirers are routinely addressed. And there will be men without the women. The roads will be chock-a-block. Everyone will have an innate sense that the killing power of vehicles has been taken out and neutralised. They—man and beast alike—will throng the road and even edge vehicle out.

Stand back and you will see a sea of beings—all similarly dressed in the same style of jalabiya: all new, all sparkling, big shoulder-to-ankle gowns over string-waisted trousers and new sandals or shoes. The only difference among the clothes will be their colours—the brighter the shades of colours you can identify in the multitude, the newer the robe.

The air will be thick with dust pounded upward by thousands of feet (two-and four-footed0 and the smell of cooking food and frying meat, especially the raw kind. That will be a common recurring decimal. In every block there will be a man using a sharp blade slightly curved near its tip to snip the last traces of muscles off sheepskin and bundling them into piles for transport and processing later. By counting how many white sheepskins—one for each slaughtered sheep—you will know how many livestock gave up their lives so that everyone could be happy at Sallah. You only are able to count because the skin is taken off for tanning and leather making. With Christians, you can’t figure that because the Christians consume everything—flesh, skin and bone sometimes.

But there will be things to take your mind off the scene even if for a second. A lonely curtain dealer will tell you you should try attending his church even once, as though it would change his life. He’ll tell you about an aboki, a friend, of his, a corper indigene of Kontagora and serving in Oshogbo, who forced him to converse in hausa because English was like cruising the Mediterranean and the Red Sea at the same time. He’ll wonder aloud how the English-challenged corper every understood his courses at university, how he manages to teach students during his service posting at Osogbo and how he’ll cope with working life. He’ll conveniently forget that this guy, despite his deficiency at Turanci—Hausa for that excruciatingly difficult language English—will end up a local government chairman sooner, if he’s about the only male to attend university in his hometown, than later.

You will meet people who have no reason to be inebriated, Shari’a being ever present and all.

People who will feel too big-boy to gather at the fair at gidan sarki; who would rather organise—binge? drinking?—parties at Safara and the barracks, one of the two places plus the Prison staff club where alcohol is available.

An aunt who doesn’t live in her marital home, whose son is so sex-crazed he’d sleep with anything in hijab and his cousin describes as so uneducated he wouldn’t heed the advice to use a condom during some of his Shari’a-frowns-upon-this-but-I-just-can’t-help-but-do-it escapades. Yet the cousin doesn’t know how he prevents the easy lays from getting knocked up; he only knows none has ever got pregnant.

You will question further and he’ll start to say something like avoiding getting girls in the family way by noting their menstrual period. (And you thought only enlightened city couples and singles knew about Billing’s Way.) He’ll tell you he can identify that period because there is a perceptible foul smell—a pollution, he’ll call it—around girls during that period, and it is so strong he can tell a girl with the curse simply by sniffing the air when one’s just walked past.

The day will fly by, fast and furious. Darkness will fall, punctured in several places by yellow light bulbs. Night will bustle until 8 or 9 and you will find six persons on a bike—three on pillion and two before the rider. The night air will be chilly as you walk through the dark, and you will feel even a sense of safety, as though Kontagora hasn’t yet discovered crime yet. You’ll feel safer in a Kontagora that in Benin City where you’ll always fear being jumped walking along a dark empty road. As you approach base in the dark, through neighbourhoods that resemble rabbit warrens, your steps will become brisk, jaunty, enlivened by the cold biting your hands and feet. You will want to disappear off the road and materialise on your warm bed or mat. You will wonder whether this is all there is to babban sallah and how really different it is from normal days.

On the first day of Christmas, my dear lord said to me....yaddah, yaddah, yaddah...

We all know that song, or some parts of it anyway, and the feelings it evokes.

Imagine my feelings when last night I heard a presenter on ART say the words, “On the eighteenth day of Ramadan....”

I never consciously thought Muslims kept track of how many days into Ramadan they had gone.

Now that’s a mistake. The muslims around me do keep time: they keep track of how many hours they have spent without food, and how many more hours to go before the fast is broken for the day.

They also keep track of how many more days have to go before they can throw off the fast, have a big break and kick up their heels celebrating eid-el-kabir.
The mistake is this: the muslims around me don’t necessarily represent the true image of islam. There are ordinary followers of faith among Christians. Islam has its own category of nominal followers.

Back to the presenter. He spoke Arabic, or so I thought, seeing as I was watching him on a TV set inside a restaurant whose owner decided it was much civil to leave the volume turned so low the pictures on screen made you feel like you were watching those old soundless movies.

Apart from speaking Arabic or something like it, subtitles were provided on screen by ART. At least, that’s what the credits said.

This presenter was fully bearded and bespectacled, endowed with pinkish lips that made all the ladies in the restaurant sit up and take notice. He had charisma. I turned sideways to my companion and mentioned that the presenter was the Pastor Chris Oyakkhilome of the Muslim world. My companion easily agreed.

The word God kept flashing across the screen, and it took the sharpest of eyes to discern that the presenter was a muslim speaking to the muslim world. My companion placed him in a world of his own. I thought that was wrong, kind of. The word God, and the few times the word was represented by the masculine pronoun capitalised (He and Him), wasn’t the preserve of Christians. Come to think of it, it was an English word. The fact that the name Allah never made it into the subtitles didn’t help things with my companion. The name of the Prophet, however, made it onscreen a couple of times.

Prejudices aside, when the programme ended a few minutes later, it left me with the same feeling I get when I watch Christian programming on television.

Swearing (in some languages, chiefly English) has the power to shock a listener into paying attention.

But this can only when it is used carefully.

When speech is unnecessarily sprinkled with swearing, the concept loses its power to arouse thought and grab attention: it becomes not just insulting but a demonstration of a vocabulary-challenged speaker.

At least, that is the way I feel about it. Not that we are always right though.

People have different reasons for choosing to swear. Some think they look cool when they spout so many F-words. Others feel they are really communication.

Of course, they could be doing just that—if they have the right audience, or if they are sensible enough to check.

So to swear some eighty times on a forty-minute television programme? Well, duh! What does the guy really want to say?

You may add your comment on BBC WORLD HAVE YOUR SAY pages

Swearing (in some languages, chiefly English) has the power to shock a listener into paying attention.

At least, that is the way I feel about it. Not that we are always right though.

People have different reasons for choosing to swear. Some think they look cool when they spout so many F-words. Others feel they are really communication.

Of course, they could be doing just that—if they have the right audience, or if they are sensible enough to check.

So to swear some eighty times on a forty-minute television programme? Well, duh! What does the guy really want to say?

You may add your comment on BBC WORLD HAVE YOUR SAY pages