Badalar Kano, the Dying Days of History

Badalar Kano is a symbol of great ancient civilization and universal value. It is also an important marker of Hausaland civilization.  The building of the great walls started in 1095-1134 through to the 14^th century, expanded to current positions in 16^th century. 

The walls were designed for defense and security, to protect the city against enemy invasion. Like many historical landmarks, the moat survived its original use and came to serve as an important cultural heritage. Kano residents can still see its original purpose.   

In 2007, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee had, among other sites, put the ancient Kano city walls on the Tentative List of world heritage sites. Which means further work on conservation and protection before the Committee can finally declare it world heritage site. But this is unlikely due to administrative negligence, political corruption and trespassing that undermine the possibility of its inscription on the World Heritage List by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. 

 

Original site of Ƙofar Kabuga in a state of neglect and disrepair

These horrible factors are not limited to Kano heritage sites alone. Only two Nigerian sites are conclusively listed on World Heritage List - Sukur Cultural Landscape and Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, due understandably to poor maintenance culture and care and preservation.

Africa as a whole likes to boast as the cradle of civilization yet none of the countries is among the nations with most UNESCO heritage sites. This is a challenging statement to our civilization as a result of longstanding uncultured and uncultivated leadership. 

It pains me to the bone the walls are gradually disappearing, as though people are hacking at me when I see them hack at the walls. But there are some handful residents that still feel about the Badala.

Mallam Abdulkarimu Na-Badala is taking it up on himself to protect and rebuild the walls, at least the portion around his home, as I have seen him at work with his men. Twenty-five years back, he rebuilt the collapsed portions. This time age is telling on him, he stood and supervised. 

Men at work

Tijjani Aliyu  Sultan, a resident of Ƙofar Waika, spoke favorably of the Na-Badala’s effort. “This is long overdue” he said. “It is good, because we grew up hearing Badala and its history. We will not hope to see this cultural legacy being eliminated. It is really good job.  My friend and I are ready to come out and actively participate. We can be given a portion to work on as much as there are tools and materials.”

Neighboring communities to the wall face obvious challenges: open defecation in the ditches, drainage blockage, air and land pollution, and having their kids easily infected by diseases such as cholera.  Often, when the refuse is set on fire dense smoke fills their houses. One family lost their asthmatic baby to the smoke. 

Bashir Abubakar, 25, was happy and grateful. Na-Badala’s work is a good initiative, he said, it is a welcome development because the walls still offer security. The ditches is being used as hideout by grass smokers and criminals, so it shields us from them thugs, thieves and other miscreants, he said.

It is hard to find a man all over Kano who feels so personal about the walls like Mallam Na-Badala. 

Why is he called that name? It’s a long story, he said, when his lone house stood near the walls. He was being referred to as the man near Badala to direct pregnant women seeking medicinal herbs to his home. It is very common to hear people who live near the walls being referred to with the walls. Abban Badala, for instance, my primary school friend.

Na-Badala’s story goes beyond living near the walls alone. The late emir Dr. Ado Bayero knew of  his work. When the portion of Badala to his home fell twenty five years ago and bikers were falling into the ditch, he sought permission from Sarkin Ƙofa Na-Liti. The shocked Sarkin Ƙofa was surprised but granted the permission nonetheless. 

Traditionally in Hausa culture it’s the Palace’s duty to coordinate and execute public work. Na-Badala embarked on the job out of respect for the Palace. 

 “If you stretch a rope and measure the entire walls,” he said, “it spans 12 miles, no more no less. It was meant for security, to protect the town against fighters and invaders.” 

Goron Dutse was initially carved out of the walls but the then emir foresaw security threat: invading armies could climb on to the hill and launch their attack. 

Abdulkarimu Na-Badala supervising the work

Bricklayer at work

Na-Badala has much in his head but is unwilling to share. Once university students came to him. He refused to go on speaking when he realized they’re taking notes. It took minutes to convince him to speak to me. 

Gates are named after significant events that took place at the spot or a passage route for some far away communities travelling through to the city. Ƙofar Waika, for instance, or Ƙofar Dawanau, are passages for Waika people and Dawanua respectively.  

It is from him that I first learnt Ƙofar Ruwa as Ƙofar Lunkwui.  And it all made sense. I have been passing through the Lunkwui area but hadn’t made the connection.   

Cultural heritages like Badala are protected by relevant city authority. The Federal Government in 1959 took over control of the walls. However, the walls are continually being erased to erect personal structures, shops and dwelling houses. Politicians can allocate or sell the land at wills to their cronies and acolytes. In 2004, three years before appearing on the Tentative List, the German government donated the sum of $68,000 for the rehabilitation of the walls.  

Securing international protection is unlikely if the walls are continually being chiseled away and damaged. The UNESCO Committee may even go ahead to inscribe the walls on the List in Danger and finally delist it. 

For nothing at all, there is a need to preserve the crude labour of our forefathers which symbolizes a significant stage in our civilization.

Film Review: Haƙƙi

Title: Haƙƙi

Company: Iyantama Multi-Media

Producer: Hamisu Iyantama

Director: Hafizu Bello

Year:  2018

Haƙƙi is a good movie compared with other movies, but not a standard of what a film should be for Kannywood industry. One thing admirable about the movie is its core subject matter, which radically departs from the much-criticized love theme of which common narrative is: a boy meets a girl, they fall in love but there is a feud between the families; they’ll manage to get married in the end and live happily ever after. 

The film runs two items concurrently: exploitative labor practice and cache of female criminal who use their body to lure male victims into their den and rob them at gun point in collaboration with other men. 

At a more pronounced level the movie shows the role of labor union and is an exposé of poor working condition and company intrigues. Jabir, the dedicated labor union rep in a leather factory, puts his life on the line to defend the rights of his men. Scheming follows and sabotage; some elements within the union and the company management work to stop him. One of the factory workers slips and knocked his head. He is taken to the clinic from the factory in concussion, the company grants stipend as his medical bill. When he finally dies, the management is not forthcoming with the payment of his benefits.

Jabir is set to fight for that. But would he give up in the face of fierce adversary and attempts at his life?This is what defines the movie and for that, it is a very good theme selection worthy your dollar to watch. Despite that, however, the film cries for what the industry lacks in terms of technical aspects.

I believe the industry people have their side of the story, but money apart, from what I can tell they don’t seem to appreciate professionalism, and unwittingly producers like to disallow competent hands they hire to execute their work. At another level, while producing movies, they don’t seem to have global audience in their mind. Otherwise you wouldn’t have found basic errors in most of their films such as atrocious subtitling. This, I understand, comes from want of appreciation of good English usage and unawareness of the implication bad English subtitling can have on indigenous-language films.

What’s more, the film does not look at environmental damages that companies cause. Labor union plays an important role, but it is cast in a light too good for what obtains in reality. If that is deliberate, then we can understand, otherwise no deal. 

Nonetheless, I have come to understand the nuanced constraints the industry faces even though some challenges are not really insurmountable. They are repeatedly pointed out, so the question is why they refuse to go?

Review: Stay With Me – Ayobami Adebayo

A young woman and a man met in a movie hall of a university one night. It was love at first sight. Politely and deceptively they both broke with their former dates and soon after tied the knot of matrimony. However, their marriage is afflicted with the inability for conception and childlessness that only a brother in-law could solve.

Ayobami’s book is rough, gripping, breath-suspending; as you reach one climax, you reach another climax to discover how husband and wife kept each other in the dark.

Page after page, readers grapple with the storm of rising issues: pain of childlessness and obsession with childbearing, the place of women in society, the political ’80s, the secret going-ons in the religious underworld, competing struggle between the modern, spiritual and the tradition.

The problem of childlessness is an enduring theme in African literary narrative. People are conditioned to unreasonably put the blame on female side. Yejide must conceive and deliver children since, in the words of her mother in-law, ‘Women manufacture children, nobody has ever seen God in the hospital ward giving birth to children.’

When she conceives, Yejide is not seeing the burden and trouble involved in pregnancy — morning sickness, vomiting, difficulty eating and other eerie eccentricities — sweetly blind to the difficulties and ‘bragged about the enormity of my feet,’ and “proudly” ‘complained incessantly about how difficult it was to find sleeping position.’ In fact, what supposed to be wearing and taxing is, for her, ‘the best time of my life’ (122).

But that is all her imagining, having believed, after visiting Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles, to have immaculate conception — in the process she slips into mental condition — until she is diagnosed with pseudocyesis, showing all signs and symptoms of pregnancy where there is none. Nebbish and impotent Akin constantly debunks her claims of Bluetooth pregnancy.

From the first few pages you will get to realize you are in Yoruba world, bits of life rendered in natural prose, speaking real-life-like world neatly woven in unpretentious language. In fashion of Adichie, the salon is the chat-room of intimate locker-room gossip. The book speaks in language that everyone will understand, yet not everyone can understand. Adebayo’s pestle is a cousin to Lola Soneyin’s snail in Baba Segi’s Wives and Yemi Aribisala’s ‘egg’ in her fainting girl essay.

Modern love gets into loggerheads with tradition as Akin’s mother pressured him to get a second wife. To spare Yejide insult and harassment, he gets into an arrangement and travels regularly to find cure for their barrenness. In between the travels Yejide gets into sexual affairs and delivers three children. Out of which two had died. Orphaned herself at childbirth, her unthreatening threat to her dying kid is ‘You this child, I will kill you if you die’ and anxiously prays Olarotimi will ‘stay with me’ all trying to mend the dent in her missing motherly affection.

Coming and going alternately between the world of the living and the dead, suspected as Abiku, Moomi insists the third baby should have marks inscribed on her, lest she returns it could easily be identified. She firmly stood her ground when Akin objected. ‘…What do you think? We should just fold our hands against our bodies and watch doctors treat what they cannot cure when we have another route we can take? Another route my daughter? The whole world knows there are many routes into any market place. But the white man has deceived some of you, told you his way is the only way’(199).

But the children, scientifically speaking, are not Abiku. Not even Yejide, even the reader is being kept off-kilter, wondering and guessing. Given the disruption and pain that truth can cause, Adebayo challenges the traditional conception of paternity for the educated people who live on a patina of modern society with a collapsed sense of tradition and community, beneath which lies the culture residuals and mystic cosmology. For even when lettered people like Akin ‘trusted in medical science,’ hard truth can force them to conveniently retract and eat back their words. ‘There are things scientific test cannot show, things like the fact that paternity is more than sperm donation’ (192).

One thing led to another and culminated in the hospital lab, where revealed is the truth about Yejide’s sexual affairs which in turn leads to the discovery of Akin’s terrible secret.

Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday - Review

I finally grabbed a copy of Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday after two or three years of publication from a bookshop at Gwammaja, opposite National Orthopedic Hospital Dala.

I have been anxious to read the book since its release in 2015, and after reading the short story several times that appeared in the first chapter. It piqued my curiosity. It is not set in a nebulous elsewhere, so it is easy for me identifying the events, cues and unstated motives of the characters aided by intimate understanding of the workings of their mind.

I as well read several reviews to get clue of the controversy surrounding the book. So I approached the text with an added layer of caution and scrutiny of the suspicious other.

I became scared soon after reading some pages and saw Dantala’s struggle, perils and the huddles he went through, his inner struggle with sexual fantasies, fear and loss of love. Dantala is literally on his own. Hundred thousands kids are out there like him fighting dangerous forces in the streets.

If he is not thinking and worrying about home, his brothers and a sister and how they are neglected and maltreated by the males of their society, he is strategizing ways of survival in the Sheik’s mosque and trying to balance his loyalty to the two clerics.

The torture in the cells of the Nigerian government is acutely captured that you could literally feel the pain. From Dantala’s ordeal in the hand of security men we get to understand that shooting a captive in detention cell is actually an act of kindness. So sad, sad that after his release, after the torture, hunger and thirst, Dantala finally loses his mind and his love!

Pain and anger for our society is in every chapter of the book, buried in humor and  expressed in the innocent, probing questioning voice of the narrator. Small issues people take for granted are brought under close examination and depicted as very complicated; bra, a common female wear turned out to be very complicated thing that Dantala wondered who came with that idea.

The novel is just bold and not sacrilegious as you can sense from occasional grumblings. But you can link people’s fear to the fact of who the writer is. Abubakar Adam’s Hajiya Binta is disgusting, if not more, than Elnathan’s characters. Of course the book will be okay even without some “scenes” but Elnathan is a rebel who writes deviant arts.

He might choose to be very blatant and brutal, but even where he kicked at social norms, convention and sensibility he did largely in mild and subtle ways. For good and sober reasoning he showed that you hardly can solve your problem if you don’t know the source of it. How people hinge everything on God, and since it is God, they make no effort at improving their lot. In this society you find people who believe poverty is a sign of piety.

Elnathan has taken pity of the community, and in messianic patronage attempts to teach how life should be. That aside, what Elnathan attempts to convey is plain and clear: The society should raise the quality of their thinking and approach life in sensible and realistic ways. He worries really that people have no idea how and where the rain started beating them.

Several people vented similar anger at one point or other of their career before they softened, some straight into despair, after reaching some point of realization.  It is easy to understand why some people are playing “race traitors” daily. Which is good, because, without shocking challenge and rude criticism to our established belief, no matter how absurd – I guess the challengers know that – there would be no agency of informed and matured views that are conscious of other views. That sends us back into rigorous scholarship for well-grounded, knowledgeable and more substantiated argument.  

The subtext of Elnathan’s creative effort and other public commenters who worry about the condition of our society is to spur the community into action and do something if they are really angry!

Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen review - Hand of Fate

Racy, menacing, and enthusiastic, through the eyes of the child-narrator, the story is told of adventurous life and escapades of Eme children. Told on many levels of tragedies, the substance of  Obioma’s Man-Booker-Prize-shortlist narrative is premised upon internal dislocation, demise of dreams and the quietly unremitting pursuit of destiny.

The Emes are not so happy family though, controlled and ordered by the authority-wielding, Guerdon-threatening father. If the unraveling begins with dark prophecy at Omi Ala river by Abulu, the transfer of Agwu Eme from Akure to the Yola branch of the Central Bank of Nigeria is the floodgate; his absence, offering the children a free reign of their life, to venture beyond their confined domain.  

Abulu’s prophecy of Ikenna’s murder is to be fulfilled by Boja, despite his attempt to thwart it, being aggressively jovial and assuring to his determinedly belligerent brother who seems conspiratorially bent on being killed.

There are referential overtures to storytelling tradition of Things Fall Apart and the Yoruba folktales that Tutuol incorporated in his “drunkard” book. But the difference is that while Achebe allowed language and culture to stand on their own, Obioma gives them prop and crutch to support on.

Behind the child-narrator keeps watch an adult imposer. The author-narrator on many instances appears to be almost neatly out of his society, peering over it from above. A familiar place is treated in this manner: “Tell me, where did you go?” the mother asked. Obembe replied: “We have been playing football at a pitch near the public high school” (259).

It gives the impression as though they are speaking, looking over their shoulders, very aware of and sensitive to the stalking outsider.

While this may be helpful to an outsider, it creates contradiction within the child-voice innocence narration. The voice becomes a stern prescriptive, allowing no room for the reader’s engagement.

But that is just a righteous indignation. What if the Africans are not the intended readers, and are a margin of, and not the core, global audience?

This should not be assumed as pigeonholing, nor shackling restriction; but it is quite hard to decontextualize and deauthorize narratives. Narratives are more interesting and engaging if they allow for cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, away with much of explaining proverbs and other cultural acts.

Who else tries to explain a proverb in Achebe’s work? Who else explains proverb in the real world conversation?

While aiming for global outreach, narratives have an intrinsic footprint and inevitable claim to their origin, which should not be dispensed with at the expense of global readers.  Rushdie, Garcia Marques, Nagib Mahfouz, Narayan, Gao Xingjian, Orhan Pamuk, Jorge Borges all have their unique linguistic flavor untempered.  

Piggybacking breathlessly on flashback, almost leaving you gasping, by now we can realize that the story begins at the end. After killing Abulu to avenge their brothers, Obembe went into exile; Ben was put on trial, recounting at court session the incidents of his family. As readers, we feel called upon to sympathize with them for being innocently punished by the cruel hand of fate.