Looking for Transwonderland (29 page)

Running low on cash, I took an okada into the town centre, hoping to find an ATM machine. The paved streets were concealed beneath 5 centimetres of Saharan sand. I trudged along. None of the banks accepted Visa cards. I'd have to conserve my money until I reached the next big city. Feeling more anxious than necessary, I headed to the market to buy a
wrappa
(a traditional patterned cloth worn around women's waists) to spread over my dusty hotel bed. The market was a particularly fly-ridden and dispiriting affair. I fought my way through tightly packed stalls, feeling clobbered by fatigue, the heat and the sand. My surroundings merged into a nauseating blur: the veiled women, the men's kufi hats, the mosque minarets, the okadas sliding along the Saharan streets. Stomach cramps and rapidly depleting funds had unleashed the misanthropic beast within me and sapped my patience with everyone and everything. I tutted impatiently whenever people walked in my path, and my unending quest for small change took a ruthless turn: after buying a fistful of groundnuts, I waited cold-heartedly
as the vendor rummaged her pockets to find change for my
1,000 note.

Unable to face it all, I returned to the hotel. The sight of my dusty, hot room brought on a complete collapse in morale. I spread my wrappa over the bed cover and curled up like a self-pitying foetus.

It was dark when I woke up. Columbus had warned me that NEPA, the state electricity supply, wasn't working, and the hotel generator was broken. I fumbled for the lamp switch. Nothing happened when I turned it on. Outside was pitch black too – without even the beams of light from a streetlamp. I left the room by torchlight and stared into the corridor, a dark, silent vortex hiding all sorts of potential horrors. Was I the only guest in this
entire
hotel? Trying to suppress my fear of the dark, I hurried down the central staircase and into the shadows of the lobby, which was eerily empty too, like the aftermath of an apocalypse. Columbus was nowhere to be found. Perhaps the penultimate person to leave planet Earth had remembered to turn off the lights. I pushed open the main door and walked gingerly into the car park. Several seconds after passing through the door, I heard it slam violently behind me. Before I could let out a scream, I realised that the door had simply bounced open and shut again. A quick scan of the hotel's exterior revealed that not a single candle illuminated any of the windows; I think I really was the only guest.

The distant light of an okada grew larger and quickly lit up the street. ‘Can you take me to Mr Biggs?' I asked the driver, feeling hollow with loneliness. Mr Biggs was a relatively new and ubiquitous fast-food chain. I could always rely on its unwholesome, mass-produced Nigerian dishes when I lacked the energy to find a proper eatery. Under a brilliant starry sky, we cruised through the sandy, unlit residential streets. The bike skidded and slid in all directions on the sand, nearly throwing us off several times. I arrived at Mr Biggs and comforted myself with a polystyrene boxful of jollof
rice and rubber chicken, eaten under a dim, bluish light and a TV screen broadcasting Nigerian hip-hop videos. The singers were simulating the fabulousness of an American lifestyle using the most economical of props – hotel swimming pools, cheap sunglasses, old cars.

By the time I returned to the hotel, the electricity was flowing. I switched on the TV, although the only transmission available was the local state NTA channel. Three men were solemnly singing traditional Hausa music and shaking percussion instruments in front of the garish swirls of a cheap, computer-generated backdrop. In my eyes, the imagery was Nigeria exemplified: shoddiness without apology. It triggered the deepest dysphoria I'd felt so far. I was fed up with expensive inadequacy, fed up with unpredictability and low standards. Rarely do I feel homesick or isolated while travelling, but on this night, my resilience was punctured, the accumulated tensions of the past few weeks releasing themselves from my body with a deflated whimper. I switched off the TV and the light and fell asleep, dreaming of ATMs and aeroplanes.

 

The silvery morning sun rose up and lifted my spirits with it. My taxi careened through the pretty Borno State countryside, along tree-lined roads flanked by flat grassland and fields striated with crops. In the distance, the hazy Mandara mountains erupted from the plains. Somewhere at the top of those mountains was my destination – Sukur, a Stone Age mountain kingdom 900 metres above sea level on the Cameroonian border. Sukur is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its people still live in stone dwellings and employ Stone Age techniques for smelting iron, and – in a rare combination of land use – their farming terraces double up as burial sites.

At the foot of the Mandara range, we stopped at the local secretariat of Magadali town, where the staff introduced me to Simon, a man from Sukur who would escort me to the top of the mountain.

Getting to Sukur involved a long climb up the mountain, a sweltering ascent along centuries-old granite steps constructed at an ungodly gradient. From further up the mountain I looked down at the valley extended below me, its trees sprinkled over the plain like green peppercorns on a bed of mustard-coloured grass. All was quiet, except for the mooing of the cows wafted by the wind across the vast emptiness.

Thirty minutes into the climb, I stopped at one of the stone benches to catch my breath. The pain drained from my legs but I was too shattered to ask Simon any questions; all I could do was point breathlessly at an animal running across the pathway.

‘It's a squirrel,' he said without a puff. By himself, Simon said he could walk to the top of the mountain in forty minutes, wearing only floppy slippers. We continued up the mountain, passing a formidable old woman who shuffled with the aid of a stick while balancing a basket of fruit on her head. She was at least three hours and a million steps from her destination, yet seemed undaunted and unhurried. Time stretched measurelessly ahead of her, without demand. But for me, time was circular; it ruled my life and hemmed me in like a hamster on a treadmill. My climb was a time-consuming means to an end, and I wanted to finish it as quickly as possible.

Soon after the old woman, a teenage schoolboy loped past. Sukur had no school, so all children are taught in Magadali, returning home only on the weekends. Everything the people needed, be it education, jobs or hospital treatment, was obtained in Madagali. As I heaved myself up each stone step, taking in demoralising views of Simon's backside zooming ahead with powerful ease, I concluded that I would gladly live life illiterate, unemployed and sickly if it meant evading this daily torture.

I wondered what sort of event drove the Sukur people to live at such bothersome altitudes. My guidebook informed me that the word ‘Sukur' comes from
at sukur
, which means ‘feuding' in the local Bura language. The people of Sukur possibly settled here after
a battle of some kind. Simon said this wasn't true. His only explanation was that the Sukur – Hausa-speaking Christians – migrated here from Cameroon so that they could ‘live more comfortably'.

Towards the top of the mountain, we passed terraced fields where the Sukur people grow millet and groundnut and, uniquely, bury their royalty (the commoners are buried in the village). The area just outside the village entrance was scattered with tamarind trees, and a baobab tree which the Sukurs believe will turn you into a hermaphrodite if you touch it. As if to emphasise the seriousness of the threat, the tree had been cordoned off with tape, which only made me want to touch it even more.

An hour and ten minutes later, Simon and I finally entered the kingdom of Sukur. The tiny town was perched on a hilltop between several mountain peaks covered in scrubby vegetation and boulders sprinkled precariously over the vertiginous slopes. The town's circular stone huts were topped with raffia roofs, thatched in a beautiful criss-cross pattern. Their simplicity and smooth greyness looked beautiful against the blue sky. Apart from the ‘kamikaze' horse flies smashing into my face, it was a peaceful, calming place. Young boys gathered around me, grinning inquisitively. Dusty, dry and coarsened through walking on the jagged rocks, their feet looked as though they were made of stone. My pampered, moisturised soles flinched painfully on contact with the rocks, even through my shoes.

The boys showed me around the village. They led me to the ‘caves' where royal blacksmiths still make axes and sickles the Stone Age way, using hand-operated bellows in stone furnaces. Several girls (who were tasked with all the work, apparently) were fetching water from a stone well when they caught sight of me. They scattered from my camera lens in fits of giggles, fearful of being photographed. The boys, on the other hand, idled freely and jostled for space in my viewfinder.

Back at the village entrance, Simon gave me a tour of the
xidi
's (king's) compound. Sukur's royal lineage isn't dynastic – the Sukur people elect their king on a performance-led basis. Only the
dur
(title-holders) can do the choosing, and only a member of their clan can become the xidi. A member of the royal family materialised from the crowd and accompanied us. He removed his shoes and cap before we entered the king's compound, inside which was a complex of rooms made entirely from stone. It was the stuff of my childhood dreams, a
Flintstones
fantasy of stone corridors connecting several rooms, all fashioned from rock and filled with stone furniture. There was a VIP guest room, a watchtower, a meeting area for title-holders, a granary room, a horse stable, and a reception room for visitors awaiting an audience with the xidi. Heavy rains had collapsed the ceiling of the room (now empty) for storing drums, but the king's bathing house was still intact.

The complex contained several narrow gates to the outside, one of which is only ever used for transporting each xidi out of the compound when he dies.

Simon showed me the stone throne where the xidi sits and passes rulings on disputes. Village leaders sit around him on the floor.

We moved on to the stone cattle pen. ‘Sukur people are good at fattening bulls,' Simon informed me. The bulls are fed through a hole in the wall separating the pen from the room where the grain is stored. As we walked, a dozen or so boys followed me, crowding into every room I entered, blocking my view and watching me intensely. Under normal circumstances I might have shooed them away impatiently, but they were so smiley and sweet, I bit my tongue and craned my neck for a better view of my surroundings.

‘And this is the multipurpose room,' Simon said. We entered a round circular hut with a large tree trunk standing in the centre, as if it had crashed in from the sky. Sukur people used the room for initiations, court cases, conferences and corporal punishment. In the old days, criminals' legs were yanked through a square hole in the
wall and pinned down with a heavy branch while their torso languished on the outside of the building.

‘Then you would beat them until they confessed their crime,' Simon explained. For some reason, he and the boys and I found this very amusing. Sukur imagination seemed particularly inspired where punishment was concerned: 200 years ago, the villagers dug a very deep pit so that they could lob miscreants into it irretrievably. It fell into disuse once the villagers began taking their disputes to the civil courts.

After finishing our tour of the royal complex, Simon led me to the Mini Museum. It lived up to its name, consisting of a hut less than 2 metres in radius. I liked its bijou cuteness. On display were examples of Sukur's artefacts, unchanged since the Stone Age and, in some cases, still in use: a type of grinding stone still used by elderly Sukur women for making grain; cots, containers and raincoats made out of grass;
dubul
iron bars, the former currency for marriage dowries; a piece of iron slag; tubular-shaped grass beer filters; traditional trays, also made out of grass; a tall iron spear; a hippo-hide shield; baskets and old leather slippers.

Simon showed me the sleeping mats, which were also exhibits in the museum. The men's mats were flat grass ones; the women's were made of rounded guinea corn sticks, which resembled bamboo. They seemed designed for maximum discomfort. I'll never understand why women throughout the world are made to suffer in such petty ways.

‘Why are the women's mats are so uncomfortable?' I asked.

‘I don't know,' Simon smiled.

My father once told me that it was customary in our village to give food to the menfolk first. Even in times of scarcity, male stomachs took priority over those of women and children. In our house in Port Harcourt, we had a watered-down version of this primacy. My father would sit at one end of the dining table where his fancy crockery and cutlery were laid out over a carefully folded tablecloth.
At the other end, we children had to make do with plain crockery and a naked table top.

‘Why do
you
get all the fancy stuff?' we asked, indignant but amused.