I have recently been thinking through cityscape, city life and design in a beautiful combination of the art, literature, and landscape architecture. Marc Auge’s book Non-Places provides the basis for my thinking about the Kano Emir’s Palace as an anthropological place and its standing as well as other places of modernity in the city.
It is hard to think of another place in Kano aside the Emir’s Palace that can serve as a public square and cultural center, a place where people can go and reconnect with the essence and spirit of the city in moments of pain or laughter. I understand the sentiment to think of other places like Gidan Makama and Gidan Ɗan Hausa as cultural centers, but they are different from the Emir’s Palace. Gidan Makama can be considered as the wider Emir’s Palace, it however does not meet the definition of a free public square.
Both Gidan Makama and Gidan Ɗan Hausa are cultural centers. They serve different but related functions to the Emir’s Palace. They are symbols of tradition; they are places of cultural value; they are tourist attractions and house artifacts. One problem is they maintain elements of super-modernity. They impose restrictions for entry based on fees and ticketing and the demand for proof of innocence. Hotels, bars, cafés, restaurants, museums, and amusement parks – places of super-modernity or non-places – require proof of innocence at the entrance and leaving. They cannot therefore qualify as open spaces that embrace public life on spontaneity. It is public place vs exclusive place. On occasion, Gidan Makama and Gidan Ɗan Hausa host public events, but those events are on different character and purpose. Often, the events are organized and require entrance fees. They can’t host large, city-wide gathering with briskness and spontaneous burst of life. Emir’s Palace, for one, is where people go to commemorate and share.
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| Emir's Palace, Kano 2024 Credit: High Click Media |
Someone suggested that even Emir’s Palace is not completely accessible to the public except you know someone on the inside who can facilitate your access. The idea of public space is not uncommon in Kano, but the idea of cultural center as public square is not easily fathomable even though the people have been practicing this culture as a habitual pattern of life since time immemorial. Emir’s Palace is a public monument. It is a place that pre-existed any living person and would survive them. You are left in awe and respect of the place because of the history it carries. It is the tangible expression of permanence for everyone to experience.
All roads lead to the town center. Ancient cities maintain a town center. Traditionally the seat of royalty or a site of revolution or political establishment, town center provides active social life for the residents. It overlooks an open space. Around the center are other cultural buildings like the town hall, the court, the mosque and other buildings of civil and cultural authority. Raise your vision from the gate of the Emir’s Palace to the south, in the horizon you can see Municipal Council building, Gidan Makama museum and the court. On the other side to the north stands the Kano Central Mosque and Gidan Shettima. You cannot have bars, cafes and restaurants lining up the street of the Emir’s Palace. It is a cultural thing. In ancient times travelers to the city relied on the hospitality of their hosts through their duration of stay rather than on commercial services of hospitality industry and the people had their own way of hanging out with friends.
The area of the Emir’s Palace is a swathe of giant museum of tangible and intangible heritage that harks back to memory and nostalgia. The Emir’s Palace area has administrative mood, festive and trading activities around it. Friday is a big mini event. The day has a rhythmic revelry in which residents deck out in their finest. It provides a chance to meet and greet. It is a day of warmth and spontaneity. Happy moments are commemorated on Friday, including causal visits as well as lovers’ meeting late evening at the town square. Town center is traditionally where the market square is held. Traces of that can be seen on Friday around the edges of the Kano Central Mosque.
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| Kano Central Mosque, 2024 Credit: High Click Media |
In the morning you would see the emir’s subjects milling about the Palace, going in to pay homepage to their ruler. It is a chance for people to catch up, where exchanges between friends happen. Once it is noon people have already begun to converge for Jumma’at prayer. Children would save through the week to have money to pay for bike ride and play games at the square of the Central Mosque. Old women would proceed to visit patients, pay condolences to friends, and see their relatives. Ƙofar Fada is where itineraries intersect and mingle.
These were the rhythms of everyday life around Gidan Sarki in the olden days. This is why Friday cannot be a fully working day in Kano. Older people prefer to pray Jumma’at prayer in the Central Mosque than anywhere else even though Jumma’at mosques sprung up almost every inch of the city. They would rather brave distance and any form of discomfort than commit the sacrilege of praying Jumma’at elsewhere. Some would stay behind and go back home only after Asr prayer.
My friend Baffa and I walked through the downtown of the ancient city as secondary schoolers, carefree and unburdened, troubled only by our equestrian zest. After school, Baffa would come pick me up from my house. From his horse stable at Ƙofar Wambai, the famous shamakin Ƙofar Wambai, we traversed the ancient city, Dukawa through Yola to Soron Ɗinki to Gwangwazo via Gidan Sarki and back, crisscrossing the alleys and backstreets. Those were our daily destinations driven by our interest in horses, checking up on friends and their horses, exchanging the latest and hottest information about equestrian activities: durbar, the new feeding techniques and adventure, the latest and most expensive horse in town and everything else. Walking around the surrounding areas gave us a chance to experience the city.
This layout and flow of life is replicated across villages and districts. The house of the district head is overlooking an expanse, near the central mosque, the civil office or town hall, and the court. Kano city sprawls out without carrying these traditions along. Beyond the ancient city, the town becomes endless giant chaotic quarters where residential buildings, shops and businesses compete for every inch of space in a way that makes the ambiguous sense of place acute and incoherent. The middle-income neighborhoods are just there erected without the guidance of planning theory while the low-income areas are terrible eyesores. With no effort to preservation, the ancient quarters continue to suffer gentrification. Poor residents are being driven out to the outskirts into the densely populated neighborhoods.
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