Looking for Transwonderland (25 page)

We dismounted at the Dagona bird sanctuary. The lake was a large oxbow formation set in the middle of a huge bowl-shaped grassy field. Tens of thousands of Palaearctic birds (from Eurasia and
North Africa) and inter-African migrant waterbirds from Southern Africa and Europe migrate to the area between November and March, fleeing winter. Zanna and I stood at an unthreatening distance to watch dozens of migrating geese, grey herons, egrets, ruffs and storks skim the lake's polished surface, which refracted the evening sky's deep amber glow. I wasn't used to Nigeria being this unspoilt, beautiful, peaceful, untouched by the relentless land-grabbing of our growing population. Zanna said that the local people are encroaching on the land and depleting firewood at accelerating rates. Chopping trees down reduces the bird habitat, especially that of the grey heron and little egrets, which breed here.

Zanna's enthusiasm for the flora and fauna made a gratifying change to the money-chasers in the cities. The bustle of Kano felt a thousand mornings away. In some ways, this contrast from the city gave the Dagona sanctuary its appeal. Admittedly, it was no Serengeti: there were no pink flamingos, no hippo eyes blinking above the water's surface – Ravi's disinterest in Dagona was understandable – but I was enjoying being there.

‘Can you see the cow droppings?' Zanna asked me. ‘The Fulanis have been grazing here illegally.'

‘Are you the only person patrolling the place?'

‘No, there are thirty-two of us for the thirty-two square miles, but many of our people are in Kano for the Durbar.'

Zanna said the government had actually reserved land for the Fulanis to graze their cattle, but the herdsmen weren't satisfied with its quality. They believed the grass by the lake was richer, and that ‘one cow will make two' if they graze on it. They weren't wrong: the Hausa villagers living by the lake easily grew tomatoes, peppers, onions and other crops in the highly fertile soil.

We rode back to the base camp. After saying goodbye to Zanna and exchanging hostilities with the patas monkey, I mounted Harry's bike for the return trip to Nguru. Rushing to beat the sunset had become a familiar routine on my travels. It would have been
more convenient to stay at the sanctuary overnight, but there was no food or accommodation. Harry and I zipped along the highway, praying we'd get back to Nguru without bursting another tyre. At that point I realised I hadn't eaten since leaving Kano in the morning. Hungry, tired, desperate for the toilet, I shivered in the headwind as the bike cruised through the twilight.

Ahead of us I saw two men crossing the highway with a caravan of ten camels. They wore elegant white djellabas that contrasted with the dusky purple sky and red sun liquidizing on the horizon. Riding on a camel each, the men shepherded the animals gracefully along the savannah, blending into their surroundings so regally. I felt we were imposing rudely on the landscape as we cruised along on our metallic blot of a motorcycle. Bound for the distant markets of Kano, the camels disappeared into the semi-darkness like an apparition, taking my traveller blues with them.

 

The next morning, Harry and I biked across town to pick up Hasan, another ornithologist who was joining us on a bird-watching excursion on the lake. Along the way, Harry stopped to greet passers-by. The traditional Hausa greeting is a long one, performed with perfunctory speed, as though the participants want to complete it as quickly as possible:

‘How are you?'

‘Fine.'

‘How are the children?'

‘Fine.'

‘Did they eat well?'

‘Yes.' And so on and so forth.

Social interaction required time and patience, things the local Hausa people had plenty of. Harry, who was originally from the south, said they were very fatalistic people, and that they accepted death's certainty without fear, often doing nothing to mitigate against misfortune. On some level, this seemed quite liberating.

‘Someone will die in a car crash, but they do not say it was because of speeding,' Harry said. ‘They say, “His time has come . . . God wants it.”' Malaria was a big killer in the wetlands area, and the Hausas' attitude to their high child mortality was of the ‘God gives, God takes' variety. ‘They don't know when one of their kids will die, so they keep having more,' Harry said. ‘I have a friend who has three wives and twenty-four kids!'

Harry and Hasan recruited four villagers to load our small boat onto a cart and then attached it to a pair of oxen, which dragged the cart towards the lake shore while we walked alongside it. Harry, Hasan and I lowered our wobbling backsides onto the seats of the small boat and drifted out onto the water. Its clear blue surface was fringed by tall typha reeds flinching in the chilly breeze.

‘Here, you can have these Mungo Park binoculars,' Harry said, handing me a chunky old pair, reminiscent of colonial-era British explorers. We observed the different bird species flying above us, perched on trees or standing in the reeds. Harry and Hasan cooed gently over the ruffs and egrets. I inhaled and meditated on this bed of blue tranquillity. I wasn't used to silence of such magnitude.

We were sailing on the lake a few weeks before high season when hundreds of thousands birds migrate here from Europe, their huge flocks almost obliterating the skies.

‘What do the villagers think when they see so many birds in the sky?'

‘They think about how to get them in their soup pot!' Harry smiled. People kill the birds using line traps or by putting poison on leaves of trees and bushes. The bigger species, such as ducks and storks, are shot with guns.

There was a second, smaller lake roughly 100 metres away from Lake Nguru. We crossed the railway tracks, oxen and boat in tow, and floated on the lake. The water was clear enough for me to see large catfish and red lily stems coiling like electric wires towards the floor. Hassan fished a lily from the water and handed it to me.

‘He's in love with you!' Harry joked before picking a bulbous lily fruit out of the water and putting it in his mouth. ‘Fishermen eat these. It suppresses their hunger.'

Having skipped breakfast, I grabbed one and bit into its mainly crunchy white body, flecked with green and purple and full of seeds. It tasted of nothing.

Hassan and Harry docked the boat on the edge of an island in the middle of the lake. After fighting our way through the tall reeds we came across the purple feathers of a swan hen scattered on the ground, near a circle of charcoal. Someone had hunted the bird and cooked it. Disappointed, Harry and Hassan stared at the remains, the latest sign of the fragile ecology around us. Locals had chopped down and burnt a mango tree for firewood, he said. The tree would have died anyway since all the island's trees – mangoes, doum palms and debino – fall victim to regular floods. But the absence of trees allowed typha reeds to colonise the soil instead, threatening the rich deposits of potash, which, along with the fruits from the doum palm, is sold by villagers at market.

Each year, money from an international wetlands conservation treaty called the Ramsar Convention is given to Nigeria's Ministry of Environment to protect the lake and its island. But ‘There is no visible evidence that the island is being protected.
No
visible evidence,' Harry said, stabbing the sky with an uncharacteristically angry forefinger. ‘This island place is
begging
for attention. The government doesn't do anything for us. Even that RAMSAR signboard on the roadside was made by the Wetlands Conservation Project,' he seethed. ‘
I
put up that sign.'

Harry's mind brimmed with ideas for the island. He dreamed of tourist chalets with locals working as guides, but as the land is state-owned, only the useless government could build such a thing.

The Wetlands Conservation Project had spent a lot of money creating a development plan. After hiring professionals to produce
a feasibility study, the Project was allocated
40 million a year from the government. Yet it hadn't seen any of that money.

‘Why don't you complain about this?' I asked, outraged.

‘
Who
do we complain to?' Harry replied, raising his hands in the air.

‘The authorities.'

‘They don't give a damn.'

‘It doesn't matter. You should complain anyway. At least write to a newspaper so they know that you're unhappy with the situation. You can't let them think you're accepting it.'

Harry shook his head. To me he seemed to be behaving as fatalistically as the Hausas he had spoken of earlier in the day. Government corruption had become as inevitable to him as death, except that he was livid about it. But who was I to demand action? Fighting government corruption was a monumental task few people had the time or money to take on.

We rode the boat back to the shore. On the other side of the lake, a train rattled noisily along the railway tracks. Rail used to be a common form of transport in Nigeria. These days, the only passengers are livestock and the poorest traders who can't afford to transport their goods by bus. The locomotive unburied childhood memories of a Nigerian train trip I once took as part of my father's educational sadism. He ordered Zina, Tedum and me to travel by ourselves from Port Harcourt to Zaria on a train service that, even back in 1989, was a no-no for respectable people of sane mind.

The journey lasted half a week, a sweaty, shit-stained odyssey that we can laugh about in retrospect, but which left us seriously questioning our father's love for us at the time. We and our suitcases were cooped up in a dirty compartment with two bunk beds and a heavy jerry can of water that spilled repeatedly onto the floor. The miniscule bathroom allowed enough space for a sink and non-flushing toilet (Tedum's frequent bowel movements were a major source of anger), and changing into our pyjamas at night involved a lot of
claustrophobic fumbling by torchlight. The train wasn't entirely safe, either: when Tedum stepped off for fresh air and found
200 on the ground, a man threatened to stone him if he didn't hand it over. At night, the coaches stopped for hours at a time at random points, ending our only source of air conditioning and inviting the mosquitoes inside. It was the longest three days and three nights of my life.

Nowadays, the Port Harcourt – Zaria route ‘takes even longer than that', according to Harry. The rolling stock is old and decrepit. The government, with the help of Chinese engineers, is planning to build a high-speed train service from Lagos to Abuja, which would be a fabulous alternative to those long, risky road journeys. But I wouldn't be surprised if those future trains slip into disrepair again. Our politicians aren't interested in maintenance. They often commission construction projects purely to receive kickbacks, and once the projects are built, the rot sets in as inevitably as human ageing.

The parallels with Nguru's environment seemed ominous. Letting our train infrastructure crumble was heinous enough, though at least reversible. But doing the same to Nguru's lake island would be a tragedy. As I took one last look at the gorgeous blue water, I rued the possibility that our government might leave Nigeria with neither natural beauty nor a fully functioning economy: the worst of both worlds.

 

I was ready to leave the sparseness of the extreme north. I craved more trees, more people, more varied, less arid landscapes. From Nguru I dipped southwards by car to the comforting throngs and slightly greener vegetation of Bauchi, a town on the northern edge of the central highland plateau.

The changing landscape was obliterated by a thick fog that smothered the road, permitting only glimpses of undulating green grassland – and the shock appearance of a lorry's registration plate
3 metres ahead. My driver had to stamp on the brakes to avoid a collision.

Five hours later, the fog cleared to reveal Bauchi itself. The town was pleasingly rubbish-free. Its authorities, Junior had told me, had made a concerted effort to clean up the place. Over its main street arched a modern version of a Kano-style kofar, or gate. It gave some character to the same old urban vista of bland, postcolonial architecture, which housed the usual barbershops, plastic tupperware outlets and food stalls, all manned by placid Muslim men, their womenfolk as ever invisible. Bauchi is a 200-year-old medium-sized emirate that was once part of the Islamic Sokoto empire, a Fulani sultanate that ruled large swathes of Northern Nigeria from the mid-eighteenth century. The name Bauchi is a derivation of Baushe, an ancient hunter who advised a commander of Sokoto to found a city here. These days, Bauchi is a calm, unassuming place, and the closest city to Nigeria's most famous safari park, the Yankari Game Reserve.