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The seats around the courtyard down below us were filling up with hundreds of spectators, most of them connected to the royal household in some way. State TV cameras trained their lenses on the crowds. On the edge of the courtyard, groups of rival political party supporters had gathered. One of the parties was protesting the results of the recent local government elections. As the two groups chanted and waved posters and flags at one another, a mounted emir's guardsman separated them with a big stick.

The sound of sirens filled the air as the state governor's convoy screamed across the courtyard, kicking up a self-important plume of dust in its wake.

‘Only the African man does that,' the woman behind me chuckled to her companion. ‘Can you imagine? Thirty cars, just to bring in this governor!' The politician got out of his car and took his seat by the courtyard.

Finally, groups of horse-mounted warriors entered the courtyard in a long procession. They were divided into regiments, each one belonging to a prince or lesser aristocrat. The warriors wore opulent turbans and magnificently billowing
babanriga
gowns of every colour and pattern under the sun: all-white ones, shiny purple ones, gowns with orange and yellow stripes. These macho peacocks bounced on their horses around the edges of the courtyard, followed by drummers, dancing infantrymen and
kirari
singers. Even the horses had embroidered fabric and chain mail draped over their faces. The infantry guards carried placards inscribed with names, denoting the royal title-holder the guards belonged to. Each title-holder is responsible for organising and funding his regiment's costumes – the richer the title-holder, the bigger the entourage.

Lithe warrior regiments marched along on foot while chanting, banging drums or wielding sticks. Some of them had painted their faces bright blue and engaged in fake sword fights. One warrior tied calabashes around his torso and shook his waist to produce a salsa-style percussion, while a chorus of bagpipe-sounding horns wailed in the background.

The Durbar wasn't organised in straight lines like military processions elsewhere in the world. Like many Nigerian rituals, it had less of the symmetry and aesthetic orderliness that preoccupies other cultures. The substance of such festivities, not their neatness, was what mattered.

I enjoyed watching the Durbar, much more than I used to enjoy
the festivities in my own village where I used to feel mildly threatened by not being fully au fait with Ogoni culture. I remember the affectionate ridicule I used to face when trying to dance Ogoni-style. I couldn't bend forward and wiggle my backside while keeping my torso still. I concluded that certain arts can only be learned during one's early formative years; there seemed no hope of acquiring them genetically or through effort.

Within each Durbar regiment, I saw certain individuals wearing turbans tied above their heads to resemble rabbit ears. These were the sons of the emir, Nadira explained. There appeared to be a prince within each of the countless groups that cantered past us, and they came in all ages, shapes and sizes. There was a prince in his mid-fifties, another in his forties, several teenagers and twenty-somethings. All of them trooped past, raising a clenched fist in salute to their father. A small prince, roughly six years old, struggled to control his small and hyperactive horse. He was trailed by another prince of a similar age who rode more confidently and wore aviator sunglasses to complement his shiny outfit.

‘Knowing how to ride horses and tame them is viewed by the Fulanis as a form of intellect,' Nadira informed me. By all appearances, the emir's offspring were taught to ride as soon as they could walk. A four-year-old trotted by on his own horse, wielding his tiny fist in the air. His two-year-old brother came at the rear of one group; he was mounted but was escorted by a man who walked beside the horse and controlled the reins on the prince's behalf. Nadira and I laughed when the boy raised a tiny fist shrouded in a black leather glove.

The princes were getting even younger still. I did a double-take when a baby filed past, perched on a man's lap. His tiny head was wrapped in a turban just like his brothers, the dense fabric engulfing his face almost to the point of oblivion. The toddler sat with phenomenal composure. At that age, my nephews would have have wriggled like wild animals if anyone tried to wrap their faces with
fabric, but this little boy was a bundle of poise and discipline. The age gap between him and his eldest half-brother must have been at least forty-five years.

‘I can't believe how many sons the emir has!' I gasped.

‘And that's just the
boys
,' Nadira reminded me.

When perhaps the thirtieth bunny-eared prince rode by, I wondered how much time and energy the emir devoted to this conjugal shift work – many of the princes, perhaps a dozen of them, looked the same age, give or take a year. My museum guide Amadu had told me, perhaps jokingly, that when the princes and princesses are brought in front of the emir he identifies them by asking who – among his several wives and concubines – their mother is.

Loud gunshots punctured the air, suddenly. The shots were announcing the arrival of the emir and his massive entourage. Wearing a wide, ornate hat, he was mounted on a horse and shielded by an embroidered umbrella, which signifies the covenant he keeps with his subjects. The entire audience stood up and raised its fists in solidarity. The emir settled in a corner in preparation for the final part of the Durbar. From the opposite side of the courtyard, each of his noblemen and sons charged on horseback towards him. The horses galloped at full speed, kicking up a miniature sandstorm, before suddenly halting about a metre away from the emir. It was an awesome display of horsemanship. The nobleman then raised his sword in salute.

This sort of traditional rule – the amount of patronage involved, the (governmental) expense of maintaining palaces and emirs' salaries – seems inefficient and outdated in any part of the world. Yet at the same time it would be sad ever to see it disappear in the name of modernisation. All that pomp and ceremony can be wonderfully self-affirming for the people, the only chance for a community to display orderliness, glamour and rectitude in an otherwise shabby and incompetent world.

At the end of the Durbar, a mass of people filed out of the palace and clogged the streets, hawking up phlegm and spitting it randomly. The harmattan haze and the setting sun reduced visibility to only a metre or so. A truck rumbled slowly through the crowd. At the back of it stood a handful of government workers closeted inside a metal cage, throwing sachets of insecticide paper onto the streets, to protect against malaria. The scene descended into a melee as men and boys scrambled to catch the sachets, grabbing and pushing one another in the dusty dusk. I sidestepped their flailing limbs and competed with other bystanders to find an available achaba.

The Durbar was over for another year, and as the sun went down over Kano, I rode away from the city centre, glancing back one last time as it reverted to the chaos and indignity of modern life.

 

 

The next morning, I sat clamped within a mass of elbows, thighs and shoulders in a Peugeot 505, en route to Nguru, the most northerly town in Nigeria, close to the Niger border. Trees lined the road, which cut through fields of golden grass. Further north, the road became potholed and the roadside grass grew long and intensely green, a brilliant contrast with the cloudless blue sky.

Nguru was situated near a wetlands conservation project I wanted to visit, but my guidebooks offered little information about where to stay or whom to contact. My stomach churned at the possibility of getting lost. Uncertainty seemed to be my most persistent travelling companion in Nigeria.

The Peugeot broke down 13 kilometres outside Nguru. I flagged down a passing achaba and rode into town, where my achaba man asked passers-by for directions to the conservation project. We were sent to a residential-looking house sprawled quietly beneath the shade of several trees next to an open field. The caretaker was surprised to see me – apart from foreign researchers, no other visitors had graced the area in the past year. She invited me to sit down and wait for the conservation field worker to return. Half an hour later, a Nigerian man called Harry Hudson pulled up on his motorcycle. He had work to do, and he hadn't planned on showing me around
for the day, but ‘I must be a good host,' he smiled, and urged me to hop onto his bike.

Being this close to the Sahara normally made me feel faintly depressed. I disliked its heat and emptiness and claustrophic distance from the sea. But it was a real treat to speed through the open countryside on a motorbike. We rode along the highway towards the Dagona lake, through arid savannah dotted with acacia trees and doum palms; there was not a house or building in sight. Every so often, a lake appeared, transforming the parched landscape into a quenching patchwork of shiny blue water and green reeds. Harry pointed out the oil drums poking out of the ground, explaining that they are used for apportioning land to nomadic cattle grazers as a way of preventing territorial conflicts.

Suddenly, one of the tyres burst and we came to a stop in the middle of nowhere. I became an anxious speck in this vast semi-desert. But soon after, a man on a motorcycle travelling in the opposite direction stopped next to us. The nearest service station was 16 kilometres behind him, he told us, yet to my amazement, he turned around and rode back to fetch help, trundling towards the horizon without complaint. His altruism seemed motivated not by duty but by innate reflex. No matter how alien my surroundings in Nigeria, I always felt cushioned by this safety net of human decency.

Harry fiddled with the bike's wheel while I sat on the edge of the highway and fanned myself. Harry was a shy, Hausa-speaking Igbo ornithologist; a hygiene freak with a delicate constitution who liked to inspect glasses and cutlery before using them. After several years living in the US, he retained a slight Atlanta accent littered with the stubs of half-suppressed swear words. When Harry returned to Nigeria, he asked the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the UK for financial help. It donated twenty-five pairs of binoculars, which Harry took around the schools to kindle children's interest in birdwatching.

‘I organised trips for schoolchildren to visit the nature reserve in Lagos. But after one year, the government stopped it.'

‘Why?' I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Someone decided to finish it.'

‘Why?'

‘Do I know? They gave no reason.'

That's just the way it was. Nothing ever lasts in Nigeria. Harry accepted the situation with disgusted resignation. Nowadays, although still living in Lagos, he spends a few months of the year in Dagona, counting the various specimens and monitoring which bird species are still migrating from Europe.

Twenty minutes after our tyre burst, the man on the motorcycle returned with a fresh one, which Harry fixed to the bike. We continued our journey, soon turning off the highway and entering the Chad Basin National Park, a nature reserve that had few visitors, especially now that its tourist accommodation had lapsed into disuse. At the base camp I was introduced to a guide called Zanna, a round-faced Hausa man. He'd spent the afternoon arresting a Fulani cattle grazer and had locked him in the village chief 's office on condition of bail. Grazing cattle in the area is illegal.

‘What happens to the cows?' I asked.

‘They find their own way back home. Sometimes armed robbers take them.'

Fulani nomadic cow herders wander all around West Africa – an area stretching from Mauritania to Sudan – searching for fresh grazing pasture. Their cows' grazing upsets Dagona's environment by compacting the soil and making it harder for trees to grow. The resulting soil erosion has increased siltation of the lake which, combined with the construction of regional dams, has lowered water levels in the lakes, creating water and fish shortages for the local people.

‘We want them to have a sense of ownership and management of the land. It's their forefathers' land,' Zanna said of the local
people. ‘But the Fulanis think they can do what they like with it. Some of them say, “It is our land.”'

Grazing cattle illegally seemed a huge risk, considering how difficult it is to flee with several cows. Weren't the grazers worried about getting caught?

‘They don't give a shit,' Harry said. It was worth the financial risk because land for grazing was limited.

It was time to see the lake, but the conservation project's solitary truck had engine problems, and Zanna didn't want to risk using it. Harry decided he'd stay behind and let Zanna take me to the lake on his motorcycle instead. The bike was parked by a tree where a calm patas monkey, which resembled a baboon, was tethered by a rope.

‘Be careful,' Zanna warned as I walked towards the animal. ‘He hates women.' When I approached the monkey it lunged at me, all teeth, paws and squeaks. Misogyny, even within the animal kingdom, was irritating and alarming. Zanna and I mounted his motorcycle and rode into the bush. We were in one of the most remote parts of Nigeria, at least six hours away from any major town or city. The tall, golden grass and intermittent trees harboured patas monkeys, grey monkeys, jackals and squirrels. We rode past the homes of Hausa villagers, ringed by walls made of weaved raffia. Village boys, all of them tall with dark gangly limbs, played football in a sandy field. Beautiful Fulani women wearing their trademark eyeliner and colourful headscarves sashayed through the grass, carrying calabashes filled with cows' milk.

The path wound its way through a patch of dense foliage. Thorns and branches scratched and lashed us as our motorcycle bounced along. Zanna wasn't bothered by it, but I had to bury my face in his back.