Looking for Transwonderland (21 page)

‘That's why it was painful for me when we ended the relationship,' John said. ‘I have no money now.'

‘What if you don't find me attractive?' I asked.

‘It doesn't matter. As long as you look good when we go out. I just want someone to love me, take care of me, have fun. As long as she can take care of me and her heart is clean. Are you hearing me? If she tells me, “This is what I want,” I will do it.'

The next guy I rang – a twenty-three-year-old, self-described ‘worker' called Dan – was less romantic. This time, I pretended to be a fifty-three-year-old divorcee looking for my first ever toy boy.

‘You're fifty-three? . . . Wow,' he stammered nervously. But it took him less than a second to digest the information and shift into an aggressive, transactional frame of mind. ‘You have to satisfy me,' he demanded. ‘I don't care if you are fifty-three years old, we have to be together.'

‘What are you looking for in a sugar mummy?'

‘I need assistance from people like you, you understand? I want to further my studies.'

‘Have you had a sugar mummy before?' I asked.

‘You'll be the first person I've been seeing. Women have approached me before but they were not serious, they were beating about the bush . . . I need a dedication of your time.'

‘I've never done this sort of thing before. How much money would you expect me to give you?'

‘I won't ask you. Give me what you have . . . whatever you think is good for me. I'm not doing this because of pleasure. I want to further my studies . . . I need cash. If you are rich, I will satisfy you.'

‘But can you satisfy me if you don't find me attractive?'

‘Blood flows in my veins,' he said impatiently. ‘I'm not a statue. You're going to have
feeling
. . . I promise. You can use oil to make
it more crazy. You are pushing your menopause, right? So I would advise you to use oil.'

I asked Dan for his philosophical perspective on male pride and the power dynamic in sugar relationships.

‘I just want your security, your loyalty,' he insisted. ‘I won't ask you for money. It's like dating a young girl . . . you have to give her what she needs. You just have to apply that situation to this. So when are we going to meet?'

I put down the phone. His enthusiasm was overwhelming.

Sugar mummying isn't rife in Nigeria, but when men start com-modifying their bodies, one senses that the economy must be in a bad way. Money was subverting Nigeria's social norms in surprising ways. I'd always regarded gigolos as something confined to a film fantasy or photo-less confessions in a British Saturday magazine, but they existed in Nigeria too. Peeping through this hole in our pious veil gave me a glimpse of the future, perhaps; the wobbling first steps towards gender equality, the end of polygamy, or some other kind of social change. It was comforting, because if there was one thing deterring me from living in this part of the world, it was fear of rigid, old-fashioned social structures.

 

I spent my last day in Abuja plotting my journey around Northern Nigeria. I knew little about the Islamic, northern half of the country. Ketiwe had helped me buy a long, flowing djellaba gown that I would wear out there. In Wuse Market we had consulted with some stall owners, five old Muslim men, about whether I needed to wear one. They said I didn't have to wear a djellaba, but if I respected myself and I wanted respect from others, then I should wear one.

The north was a very different place, foreign enough to make me feel like a true tourist. Without family connections here, I planned on exploring the region as if I were on one of my guidebook-writing trips. As a pure tourist I could replace my increasing
emotional baggage with a (metaphorical) knapsack and travel lightly. That was the plan, at least.

Saying goodbye to Abuja would be a wrench, however. I'd gotten rather comfortable here. Leaving my brother's home felt like an ejection from the warmth of a duvet into the cold of the bedroom air, and I slightly dreaded having to reorient myself in a new city once again.

 

 

The harmattan mist still clogged the city the next morning. Abuja was a sandy-grey haze of immaculate, sleeping buildings. In these cool, early hours, things weren't much quieter than in the afternoons – the city slumbers, then stirs, never fully waking.

I boarded a Peugeot 505 bound for Kano, five hours north of Abuja. We zoomed along the highway through sparsely vegetated plains interrupted by the occasional dome-shaped, rocky inselberg. The driver, a pretty, feline man, wore smoky eyeliner (a Hausa tradition), spoke no English and barely moved a muscle, save for his fingers tapping to the Hausa music that jangled from a cassette tape. His stereo was set to maximum treble and minimum bass. The music's repetitive bassline and percussion were overlain with Hindi-style singing, which combined with the blazing sun and sandy landscape to mesmerise me into a deep slumber.

Part way through the journey, I was yanked out of sleep when the car swerved violently to the left of the road. Coming towards us was a government car with a wailing siren, tailed by a convoy of five or six other vehicles, including police cars. They veered into our lane in order to overtake the vehicles in their own lane, but the length of the convoy meant that regular cars in both directions were sent screeching onto the hard shoulder in panic. Senior politicians
enjoy travelling this way, their sirens screaming non-stop throughout long intercity journeys as they move with an urgency that's manufactured to flaunt their importance.

Five hours later, I woke up in a motor park somewhere on the edge of Kano city. My Peugeot was descended upon by taxi men competing to take me to a hotel. They were all ebony-skinned Muslims, wearing djellabas and kufi hats, and speaking in rapid Hausa filled with Arabic-sounding glottal stops and rolled Rs. Our shared nationality seemed a rather abstract and unreal concept. The only man among them to have a smattering of English won my custom and loaded my bags into his car.

Dusk closed in on us as we drove through Kano's streets. The aroma of skewered meat breezed through the car. Several minarets extended into the ochre sky, adding a touch of elegance to a city that was otherwise draped in that homogenising Nigerian blanket of street hawkers, okadas, litter and eye-watering smog. But I hadn't seen quite this many mosques in one metropolis before. No matter how tiny and poor, they adhered to an Islamic architectural style, with minarets and domes, albeit more blocky and angular than the Middle-Eastern style. Nigerian churches, by contrast, are free-form and modern, often lacking the defining Christian spires and stained-glass window features.

The city felt new and unfamiliar, but it wasn't my first visit. I had spent a week here with one of my aunts and some cousins in the 1980s. As on most family visits, I played indoors most of the time. I didn't see much of Kano. My only memory was of an exotic haze of orange mud walls and kufi hats, and my father pointing ahead and telling us that our next-door country, Niger, was over there. I thought he'd meant it was literally behind the wall.

Kano is the oldest city in West Africa, a once-glorious ancient city at the crossroads of trans-Saharan trade, established as one of seven walled city states of the Hausa people more than 1,000 years ago. It became strategically important in the trade route, and
established connections with Mali and North Africa. People from these parts, and Muslim Fulani herders from the Senegal valley, migrated to Kano, bringing artisanal skills and Islam, which arrived some time between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The Fulani integrated with the Hausa people as an educated elite. By the sixteenth century the city had became a centre of Islamic scholarship, and was ringed by a large wall. Kano's traders travelled as far as the Mediterranean, modern-day Ghana and Gabon to exchange leather, pottery, metal works and cloth in return for salt, silks, spices, perfume, Islamic books and weapons. At the height of its powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the city state was sending 300-camel loads of cloth to Timbuktu. By the nineteenth century, Kano was receiving cloth from Manchester in England, silk and sugar from France, clothing from Tunisia and Egypt, and reading glasses from Venice.

By taking part in the global exchange of goods and ideas that much of Africa missed out on, Kano enjoyed high levels of literacy and architectural sophistication – its Malian-influenced Islamic mud-walled buildings contained vaulted ceilings, pinnacled buttresses and elaborately carved wooden gates. Even the British, who captured Kano in 1903, eschewed their customary destructiveness and instead converted one of Kano's palaces into their central administration office.

By the year 2000, the city was enforcing Islamic sharia law, the strict Islamic legal code, more widely than usual, prescribing lashings and amputations for thieves and miscreants. Women were temporarily banned from riding okadas (too much spreading of legs) and ordered to sit at the back of buses instead. Religious hostilities surfaced in 2007 when a rally to protest the killings of Muslims by Christians in central parts of the country lurched into violence. Muslim mobs burned and looted Christian-owned properties and businesses in Kano; up to 600 people were killed.

Now the city was at peace again. But I felt particularly alone
here. I had entered the true north. The uniformity of dress code, the forest of minarets and the weaker Western cultural influence were very foreign to me. My relatively brasher southern energies felt straitjacketed by Hausa's rigidity and poise. Here, I was very much an Ogoni and a Christian. Not that I felt threatened by it, but Kano seemed to me to be underpinned by a tight power structure based on a male-dominated ethnic kinship far removed from my identity. I felt an uncharacteristic urge to ‘fit in'.

The next morning, I walked down the street in an ankle-length djellaba, sweating beneath my headscarf. The inflexible hem restricted my stride, forcing me to walk at a slow, demure pace. I cut a foolish figure in my trainers, Ray-Ban sunglasses and less than demure demeanour, which singled me out as flagrantly as full-frontal nudity. When I tried to mount an okada, the stiff hemline forced me to raise the garment to the tops of my thighs, a rather counter-productive move. I subsequently ran back to my room – at a Christian guest house – and slipped a pair of trousers on underneath. God knows what the receptionist thought of it all.

Once out and about in the drier Saharan air, I began to wonder whether adopting Islamic dress code was necessary. Most women were modestly covered up, but I spotted quite a few individuals wearing T-shirts, trousers and no headscarves – and not a dirty look or stoning mob in sight. Any evidence of religious tension had vanished. Islam, established here long before Christianity arrived, was an older and more languid affair, free of evangelism's teenage fervour. Christianity confronted you and pummelled, whereas Islam lay under your feet, underpinning every aspect of society in its quietly dictatorial way. Everyone appeared laid-back. The Hausa people took such a supine approach to life, I found it hard to read their emotions or motives. As a child I mistook their leisured stature for laziness. They were disproportionately prone to begging, I believed. Now I realised it was a trick of the mind – Hausas are simply more noticeable than other beggars because of their Islamic dress.

The boys who rode okadas (or
achabas
as they're known here), possessed none of the competitive, time-pushed zeal of the southern okada men. They sat on their bikes, looking utterly passive, as though someone had physically deposited them on the seats, wrapped their fingers around the handlebars and turned the ignition keys for them. None of them spoke English. And some of them didn't bother letting me know this. They would nod at my destination request without understanding me, then take me to entirely the wrong place. My subsequent tongue lashings were greeted with a vacant stare or gentle shrug of the shoulders; a mule would give a more animated reaction.

Eventually, someone delivered me to the old city wall, which was first erected in the tenth century and fortified in the fifteenth century. The adobe structure had crumbled long ago, but part of it is being restored with assistance from the German government. I walked past a small completed section of it, 4.5 metres of beautifully compacted mud, water and straw. The traditional gates, or
kofars
, leading into the city are still in use, but they're signified by modern hoardings rather than the elaborately carved wooden doors of old. These kofars made for handy geographical reference points when travelling about town, especially as the achaba men rarely knew non-Hausa street names or hospital names.

I asked an achaba man to drop me at Kofar Mata, next to the old indigo dye pits. Cloth has been dyed in these pits for 500 years, largely by the same family. In the courtyard, three wizened, red-eyed men dipped cloths inside circles of brilliant indigo pools that twinkled in the sunlight. They mix natural dyes and ash in water and pour the mixture into the pits. Indigo plant sticks are added and the dye mixture is left to ferment for two or three days. Potassium and more indigo are added to the dye, which is fermented again for a further three days until the dye is ready. By the side of the courtyard, inside a dark room, several young men were pounding dyed clothes with wooden clubs to give the cloth a beautiful sheen. By
the back wall several pieces of dyed cloth imprinted with patterns and swirls had been hung out to dry. Local chiefs still wear them as ceremonial robes.

Afterwards, I visited Kurmi Market, in the centre of the old city, where people have traded for nearly 1,000 years. The market was a dense warren of stalls packed tightly enough to partially block out the sunlight. My eyes struggled to take in the piles of henna, spices, eyeliner (worn by men and women), and ink balls for writing books. The place buzzed with artisanal activity, all of it handled by men. They calmly but firmly urged me to examine exquisitely weaved rugs, raffia mats and beaded necklaces, the intricate feminine designs draped over their thick manly fingers.