Tefuga (3 page)

The track leads out through the trees and almost at once you're in thick scrub. When I was coming up river it felt as tho' we were paddling along through jungle most of the way, but really except in the south the trees are a bit like stage scenery, just a thin line along the river banks and emptiness behind them. Only here in Kiti, between the trees and the emptiness, there's a belt of rather nasty scrub, a bit like elder but with little cactusy leaves and thorns. It's terribly difficult to clear 'cos every bit of root grows, so nobody lives in it. The real Kitawa live out beyond, in the hinterland. The track wound through this stuff, usually only wide enough for one, but where possible Ted came up alongside and gave me a history lesson before I met the Emir. I'm going to write it down to get it clear in my head, 'cos it's important I shouldn't put my foot in it by saying the wrong thing.

Kiti is at the bottom edge of Northern Nigeria, and in Northern Nigeria the Law and the Prophets and the Laws of Cricket is something called Indirect Rule. That's how we British govern the natives. Thing is, when we got here first we didn't find just a lot of jungly tribes, like down south, but a sort of tottery empire with its own laws and its own princes, called emirs, ruling the different bits. They were all Mohammedans, tho' some of the people they ruled over weren't. So we said “Right, you go on ruling, and we'll just put in a District Officer or a Resident to advise you how to do it better, and stop you slave-raiding and things like that, and show you how to collect your taxes more fairly. And we'll pretend you are still the real rulers and we're just advisers, only you'd jolly well better do what we advise!” So that was alright.

We got to Kiti almost last of all—it's always been a complete back­water—and we found Kama Boi calling himself Sarkin Kiti, which means King of Kiti so we thought we'd do the same thing here. We made him Emir and gave him an adviser and told him to carry on. Only things were a bit different here, which we didn't realise. You see, there are three sorts of people in Kiti. There are the Emir and his lot at Kiti Town. They're Hausa. There are the river people, who are the usual mixed bag of fishermen and farmers and traders and so on. And there are the Kitawa, who are a quite big tribe who live inland and don't wear any clothes and keep themselves to themselves as far as they can. What we didn't realize when we told Kama Boi he was Emir now and had to collect taxes from everyone was that he wasn't really ruler of anything except Kiti Town. The Kitawa simply weren't used to paying taxes to anyone.

About a hundred years ago, you see, there was a terrific war in the north, and one lot called the Fulani beat another lot called the Hausa and made themselves emirs. Then one of the beaten Hausa who was Kama Boi's great-grandfather came south with his men and crossed the river and said to the Kitawa, “Look, if you let me build a fort at Kiti Rapids, which is the only good crossing-place for miles, and give me some land to farm, I'll stop the soldiers from Soko slave-raiding you across the river.”

The Kitawa must have thought this was a good idea, 'cos there'd been a lot of slave-raiding (it was the emirs' favourite sport, like fox-hunting in England). So they made a treaty with Kama Boi's great-grandfather and to show how sacred it was they held a juju ceremony (human sacrifice, Ted says!) at the holiest place in Kiti, and they did the same for his successors, including Kama Boi. Nothing's written down, of course, but Ted says it's just as binding as a treaty between France and England, and still matters tremendously. He's had a lot of trouble with it 'cos Kama Boi is not a good ruler and Kaduna are always trying to send for him to tell him to pull his socks up, only he refuses point blank to cross the river. He says part of the juju is that he must never leave Kiti, and that's that!

Well, Kiti's such a backwater that at first Kaduna only grumbled a bit about the taxes not getting paid, and Kama Boi grumbled back at them about not being allowed to slave-raid into Soko so how were he and his people going to run their farms, but nothing happened till a man called Harry Bestermann was sent here as D.O. He was a real goer, Ted says. (Ted's got a little song—“Harry was a goer. Harry's been and gone. Tick fever.” Rather horrid—Ted isn't a goer, you see. More of a stayer, really. That's rather good—better not tell him, tho'—he's sensitive about things sometimes.)

Well, Mr Bestermann bullied Kama Boi into taking his spear-men and his
dogarai
—they're the Native Authority police, fearful ruffians, Ted says—out into the bush and going from village to village and
making
the Kitawa pay up, and next thing the quiet, peaceful Kitawa were in revolt! Their women got hold of five
dogarai
and gave them drugged beer and did frightful things to them and then put them in a hut and set fire to it, and before you could say Jack Robinson all KB's men had to come scuttling out of the bush and shut themselves up in Kiti Town.

Then of course KB came to Mr Bestermann and said, “Now look what's happened,” and Mr Bestermann persuaded Kaduna to let him have something called Bestermann's Patrol, which meant marching to and fro with forty soldiers and a machine gun showing the Kitawa that if they didn't let themselves be counted and start paying taxes nasty things would happen to them. We didn't hear about any of this in England 'cos it was 1916 and we were too busy with the war. Anyway it was all very fair. The patrol only shot people when they tried to fight, and cleared them out of the huts before they burnt them, and when they caught someone they thought might be a ringleader they didn't hang them straight off but sent them to Lagos to be tried and hanged there. So in the end the Kitawa gave in.

It's still all very difficult, Ted says. The taxes are tiny and Kama Boi's a lot poorer than he used to be and so are his nobles, and Kaduna can't make up their minds what to do next. After the patrol they allowed Kama Boi to go on being Emir but to show everyone the revolt was really his fault (!) they sort of demoted him by putting Kiti under Soko, which was an absolutely terrible idea, Ted says. The Emir of Soko is a Fulani and so he's Kama Boi's hereditary enemy, and his ancestors used to slave-raid the Kitawa so they hate him too, and Kama Boi used to slave-raid the Sokowa. (Suppose I have to make allowances, because if Kaduna hadn't done it that way Ted would be a Resident instead of just D.O., so naturally he feels a bit sore! Remember the way he laughed about Mr de Lancey when he scribbled on my cartoon?)

Then we got to Kiti. That was quite exciting. First off you hear the rapids, then you see the river-trees, but before you reach them you come out of the bush into neat Hausa fields and straight ahead there's one great mud wall, towering up. You think, “Golly! How could natives have built anything so big?” Then you see it's on a cliff. Actually there's a ridge of rock running all the way across the river, and that's what makes the rapids where the river's smashed it down, but this side it's a proper cliff. Still, the wall's pretty impressive even allowing for that, thirty feet high and ten feet thick, Ted says. It's a bit ruined in places 'cos Kama Boi doesn't bother to keep it mended now he knows we British will stop the Fulani attacking him. I shall come and do a picture. The most exciting bit is where the track bends and you're going along almost under the wall and you see the yellow rapids tumbling down beyond.

That's where we found Ted's Messenger, Lukar, waiting for us on his donkey. He's the head messenger, so he has a capital M—the others are just errand boys, but Lukar's quite important 'cos he can speak Kiti tho' he's a Hausa and he's been Messenger for years, since before Mr Bestermann's time. We come and go but they stay on. He's a very black little man, thin-faced and hooky-nosed. He wears a white robe and a pill-box hat. He led the way. A scrambly track slanting up the cliff. Quite a good road between the river and the town ditch, with the wall beyond it. Ditch full of fearsome thorn scrub. Islands in the river. Extraordinary tangles of wood between some of them and a fisherman scrambling around like a shiny black spider 'cos of the spray, getting at his fish-traps. Beyond the town what Ted calls New Kiti, another of his jokes 'cos it's only a jumble of tin shacks and mud huts, higgledy-piggledy round the market. More about that in a mo.

But first, something that happened inside me. While we were riding between the river and the wall I suddenly had the most extraordinary feeling. Here we were, in the middle of Africa, just the two of us, and I hardly count 'cos of being a woman. The nearest white man was probably Mr de Lancey at Birnin Soko, eighty miles away. If you look at a map you see all this enormous country coloured pink. Kiti mayn't look like much on the map, but it's big as an English county. And it's pink because of Ted being here. Just one man. The natives talk about
the
White Man.

The White Man orders this. The White Man forbids that. As far as they can see there is only one White Man—Ted, with his sun-helmet and his pipe and his red face and his red knees showing under his shorts!

Well, the road goes on a bit further than you'd think to join with the ferry-crossing, and then turns back to the main gate. I expect you could find a way through by the wall, but we were going to meet the Emir so of course we had to go round by the grand way. The only sensible thing Mr Bestermann ever succeeded in getting Kama Boi to do was to make a wide avenue leading to the gateway so there could be a proper place for the market, with shade-trees. The trees are quite decent now. The market is terribly exciting—lots of pictures later, but no time for that for the mo. All that bustle and colour after the sameness of things out on the river. Smells, too, I'm afraid, and such flies! Everyone stopped and stared at us as Lukar led our little procession through. I got the feeling they were just curious, but not specially respectful. I'd have thought the natives would have liked Ted, and been grateful to him, 'cos he's doing his best for them, but I'm afraid they didn't show it. Of course these were practically all river people, not the real Kitawa.

The town has a grand gate, two good towers and an arch. A bit of a space in front. An official was waiting for us. He has a perfectly lovely title—he's the Bangwa Wangwa. That isn't Hausa, it's a sort of Hausa-ized Kiti, 'cos his main job is interpreting for the Emir to the Kitawa. It's hereditary. He was taught Kiti by his father, and he's teaching it to his sons. Lukar is some kind of relation of his, which is why he can talk Kiti too, which of course the D.O.'s messenger has to, tho' Ted says some of the Kitawa men talk a bit of Hausa.

Anyway he led us through the gate and there was the Emir and his courtiers and his bodyguard, all drawn up ready to meet us. The Emir was sitting on a special stool with a lovely leaf-shaped wicker fan held over him to keep the sun off. Stools and parasols for Ted and me. The Emir wears a funny loose sort of turban, brown and yellow, and an embroidered robe, same colours, with a loose cotton thing like a tea-gown over. When you get closer you see that none of it is at all clean! The courtiers, eight or nine of them, dress the same. The bodyguards are the best, on horses, with tasselled spears and quilted “armour”—terribly hot—only two of them but
very
impressive.

The Emir shook hands with Ted but not with me, 'cos he's supposed to be a Mohammedan. (Ted says the Prophet must be turning in his grave! KB's hardly Mohammedan at all, he says, and hardly Hausa at all either, 'cos of his father and grandfather marrying women from other tribes. He's really a jungly savage inside, but the funny thing is his children have started going the other way. They've spotted we like the Hausa best, so they think it's a good idea to be as Mohammedan and as Hausa as they can, and then the other emirs will respect them. (By the by, about shaking hands, Ted says he's got a circular from Kaduna saying he mustn't do it with anyone below the rank of emir in case they start getting cheeky—so we're just as peculiar in our own way!) The Emir is an old man, about seventy, very fat, with dark wrinkled skin, smelly as a goat. I forgot almost all my Hausa but managed to tell him I thought the sun was hot. He laughed like billy-oh. Beastly.

Then I sat on my stool while Ted talked to the Emir. It wasn't a business meeting, just us calling and leaving our cards, sort of. Flies everywhere. Luckily I'd come with a veil on my sun-helmet 'cos of KB being a Mohammedan, but poor Ted had to swish away with a whisk. KB just let the flies crawl over him as tho' they weren't there. I couldn't bear to look at him, but luckily there were lots of other things.

Kiti's a great surprise, 'cos it isn't a town at all! I mean, there aren't enough houses to count as a town. Mostly inside the walls it's little patches of “garden”, rather like the allotments you see out of railway windows but more higgledy-piggledy. Natives hoeing between the rows. There are houses, tho' some of them are empty, Ted says, 'cos of only the proper Hausa who came with KB's great-grandfather being allowed inside the walls, and now we've stopped the slave-raiding and the slave-farms some of them have given up and gone away. The grand houses are made of mud, thick walls, only a few tiny windows near the top, buttresses like a church, flat roofs and funny little pinnacles (Ted says I ought to approve of them 'cos they're called “rabbit's ears”!) along the parapets. Some ordinary native huts, with thatch. Ted says proper Hausa towns are
huge
, miles of wall and thousands of people, but still mostly open space so's people could go on farming when there was a siege. Kiti's tiny, compared, not much more than a fort, really. The gate towers are the best bit. KB's own palace was down at the far end, so I couldn't see much of it. Ted says it's nothing special.

He'd cunningly arranged for Lukar to bring some of our own ginger pop so we'd know where what we were drinking came from. We sucked it out of the bottles. It was warm as blood and fizzed up my nose and made me sneeze. The Emir loved that. He kept looking at me sideways while he was talking to Ted and I knew exactly what he was thinking about! I didn't like him one bit. He seemed more like an animal than a person, black and piggy, with the flies coming to drink his sweat.