Africa Unplugged

Before ever I set eyes on Africa, I got to feel it through my skin, inhale it through my nostrils and hear it from the distant Muezzin and the cicadas ensemble. It was the perfect way to be greeted to my new home. As I stood inside the doorway of the plane at Kano International Airport, waiting my turn to descend the steps, the all encompassing, overly warm air surrounded me like an extra skin; a desert, sun setting, end of the day heat, unlike anything I had experienced before. But with it, inseparable from it, the air carried the all-pervading, in your face aroma of ground nuts and groundnut oil. I was leaving from the narrow stairway at the rear of the plane and so we disembarked slowly in single file; and I had a couple of minutes to ponder what awaited me. I had never been any place where my senses have been assaulted in such a full frontal fashion; it was alien, exciting, raw and carried with it an adrenaline charge; a stirring in the stomach. Literally my first gut feeling was that this was a continent not to mess with; an alpha male kind of place, a place where it was essential to observe, show respect and learn. It is interesting that in those few short minutes before I even got to look at the Kano skyline, I should have fabricated this template to guide me through four years in Nigeria; a basic outline that I never subsequently found reason to change. Had this been America I was about to enter or Denmark or even Turkey, all places I'd never visited at the time, I would have inevitably found similarities to my own experiences; variations on a theme. New York, Copenhagen and Istanbul are all special, different and unique and yet their differences from London or even Manchester is essentially a case of fine tuning. A difference of architecture, local customs, history and politics but each has a modern, market economy and each with the indelible stamp of “Man in Charge”.


I had over my lifetime assembled my own urban-living manual and when later I visited New York and Istanbul was able to appreciate the fascinating differences, the scale, the colour, the energy and drama of New York; the Mosques, bazaars, the sense of the Orient and the fabulous waterside setting of Istanbul. But already I could sense that the Africa that awaited me was a very different beast. I must leave as much as possible of my English way of viewing life, on the steps as I descended; comparisons were not to be an option, if I were to benefit from my stay in Africa. I had come to Africa to experience something totally different and already, still 20 feet above it, I realized that I had chosen well; had fulfilled my wish in spades. When my turn came and I descended the steps, I looked out to the city and saw minarets, a reddening sky and the silhouettes of a number of enormous pyramids comprising sacks of groundnuts. The cicadas within the insect hum was even louder once outside, although the heat and aroma was much the same as before. The city had some modern buildings but were not tall and the lighting was much more muted than any city I had seen and diminished considerably as you moved away from, presumably the center, and out towards the suburbs.


I remember nothing of the customs nor the airport in general, nor the place we stayed that night. My memory returns on two further occasions on this, my first visit to Kano. The first memory took place at the house of the British Council representative in Kano, who welcomed us, and we were given an informal orientation, mostly about things “African” to expect; so that while we may still freak out, we couldn't say we hadn't been warned. We sat around and discussed things amicably and everyone was favorably impressed by our BC Rep who was a representative of the Government Organization responsible for us as VSO volunteers. Two things stay in my memory from this evening and the first was the abundance of insects, something incidentally that I never got used to, and one insect in particular that night which was slower than the rest, so you had a realistic chance of smacking it if it landed on you. I don't remember the British Council guy warning us until most of us had squashed a few, so maybe this was the interactive part of the orientation. Only after complaints became more strident and swollen, blister-like wounds were being resurrected on the site of the bug assassinations, did he mention the fact that they were flying acid beetles; the name says it all. I remember thinking Wow! even the flying bugs here kick ass. The second revelation was more surreal as during all the pleasant chitchat, the British Council guy said in an “Oh, by the way look what I got today in the post” sort of way, showed us a gold embossed invitation card, but rimmed in black, which read “The Governor of Kano State cordially invites you to witness the public execution of................”


The other memory that sticks from that arrival, resulted from a half hour wander I made on that first evening and I remember it so vividly, I think because it was then that the realization really dawned that I had indeed landed in the Third World. To this point in my life, my foreign experience was limited to Europe. On my first visit to Greece we had taken the Orient express and after the change of train at Munich had travelled through Yugoslavia as it was then called and at a station just outside of Skopje, I had had my first experience of real poverty. Small children without shoes, ragged clothes and gaunt faces; some begging, some selling knickknacks and others small wooden carvings. All appeared distressed and with none of the vitality I was accustomed to seeing in pre-adolescent kids. And Skopje was high, on an elevated plateau dry, barren and blisteringly hot then, but I suspected with cripplingly cold winters. This was a year or even less since a terrible world news-breaking earthquake had devastated the whole city and surrounding area; and so I associated the poverty, maybe erroneously, with that disaster; a temporary imbalance on the road to recovery.


In Greece we visited small islands away from the tourist haunts; societies essentially poor but without any real evidence of that stamp of poverty which strips away hope. Life here was simple and modest without any of the extras that Western Europe craved, even then. The children laughed and their parents smiled and to my immature and idealistic eyes I felt a warmth and surety, a confidence in their own culture that was lacking in England. But although they were poor, there was I felt a system in place that would cushion ill-fate; would not let anyone starve in their village, in their family. One brother who had made good in Athens would become the crisis support for those who stayed behind; over and above anything that the Greek government might provide. All the poor people I had encountered in Europe or at home had some agency looking out for them and providing a protection of sorts. Not maybe a safety net from which you would spring back up smiling but one at least that would prevent you from being crushed in the fall. My encounter with the Skopje waifs was a shock, a departure from my belief that nobody was beyond another's concern.


I remember an outdoor market in Liverpool, on a waste piece of ground in a poor suburb of the city. Along one edge was a large brick wall, the remnant of the demolition that had created the market space. On the wall was graffiti of all sorts but three social comments, presumably interlinked, were I thought signature themes of Liverpool; namely religion, sectarianism and humour. The largest, central slogan said simply 'God Loves You'. Next to it 'Gypos Out' and tucked underneath 'The Vicars Up My Arse'.In the centre of the space, and this is the point of the anecdote, were stalls of sorts; tables with recognizable and even desirable junk. But as you moved outwards from the centre, items for sale were laid out on blankets and then further out resting on the unsurfaced ground. Finally there came a point where it was hard to know where one guy's stall, selling old and used nuts, bolts and screws ended and the residual detritus of the wasteland took over.


My half hour of wandering the streets of suburban Kano was very much like this; the road was unpaved, potholed and had no definitive edge. It crept to within a yard or so of some of the shops and in other places had to compete with the slightly raised place to walk; while in places tongue-like offshoots of the road penetrated the spaces between the shops, and were caused by the collapse and erosion of the soft, red, unconsolidated, laterite soil. The shops were made mostly of corrugated iron and windows with shutters and padlocks. The front of the shop was fully open when open for business and those closed, corrugated and padlocked. Pete Seeger's 'little boxes little boxes' rang some truth; certainly made of ticky-tacky but none of them just the same. Poverty in England meant having substandard facilities, property in disrepair and services too expensive to afford. What I was seeing was an absence of these very things; there was no electricity at any cost, only oil lamps; no broken windows when there's no glass. There was it seemed, an air of not having any long-term expectations; there was no “Man in Charge” label stuck anywhere here. It was evening and the warmth and peanut smell somehow softened the scene and the glow from the hanging oil lamps and the occasional hissing hurricane lamps caste pleasing silhouettes of trees and threw shadows of the people onto the road. Few people were around but the women wearing brightly coloured and patterned wrappers, many with small babies on their back, brought the scene to life with saturated yellow, red and blue shades set against such shining black skin. Some of the women I remember were more somberly dressed and fully covered, with a separate black head cover wrapped across her face; so that only the eyes, hands and feet were visible.


I was mesmerized, I'd never seen anything like it; I felt like I was walking in a dream. This was all I had asked for, it was exciting and disturbing at the same time; it was colorful and yet mysterious. I realized I had nothing to connect me to the thoughts, feelings and lives of these people. My emotional compass was swinging uncontrollably and I remember asking myself how I ought to feel; as though I was so divorced from my normal reality that I needed to treat the experience as a portion of a film, the significance and degree of authenticity of which, could be reviewed and discussed later with friends, over a pint and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. How can one empathize with someone whose life and beliefs you cannot even guess. What do I know, what can I ever know of that young, all covered, black robed ,Muslim woman? Without that knowledge how can I relate to her honestly; without falling back on prejudice, or on what I would feel like, if I were her.


As I wandered back to meet up with the rest of my group, I recognized that what I had witnessed was an unvarnished reality; that the people I had seen were not necessarily poor. How could I know? They were striving to live in the best way possible, no different from the coal miners in Barnsley or the stockbrokers on Wall Street. But I was left thinking, that the struggle of these Kano residents was much more Darwinian; and that the ecosystem in which they operated was both more hostile and more unforgiving; with their margin for survival much reduced. It is easy in the West to equate poverty to personal failure; the idea is even encouraged as a spur to work harder. Only laziness keeps you poor; your destiny lies within your own hands! My doubts of the validity and veracity of this belief began on that brief stroll; and grew steadily over the succeeding four years.


What else do I remember? That the smile to people ratio was higher than I'd ever seen; and also that, that pillar of English behaviour, the notion of reserve, had yet to reach this continent!