Caboose

I’m organising a workshop on library services with NTI and VSO. It’s challenging to get the NTI side of things organised when everything has to be approved, passed up through directors to the chief executive and then back down. Most of the directors spend most of their time in Abuja, in meetings with the Ministry of Education.

Just to make things even more fun because of Ramadan working hours are 8am to 3pm, or 1.30pm on Fridays. And Monday is a public holiday (for Independence Day, which is actually the first), although this wasn’t announced until a couple of days ago.

I just got back from a trip to visit Aine in Minna. Tammie is now on her farewell tour, so I thought I’d catch up with her there in case I don’t manage to see her elsewhere.

Minna is in Niger state (that’s Niger state, Nigeria, not the Niger Republic, they’re pronounced differently), one of the shari’a states and coincidentally also fairly backward. In fact Minna is also home to former dictator Ibrahim Badamasi “I organised the fairest election Nigeria’s ever had but didn’t like the result, so I cancelled it” Babangida, who is probably going to stand for president next year. He can certainly afford to buy his way into the presidency with all the money he stole while in power.

On the way back today I went to the motor park in Minna and joined a bush taxi there. One seat remained to be filled. The first sign of trouble was when the car had to be moved to the other side of the motor park so that the last passenger could order people to load his luggage for him.
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Apart from yoghurt there’s not a lot of dairy produce around in Nigeria. Milk comes as powder or condensed/evaporated in a tin, butter is only found in expensive supermarkets and cheese is something that comes in little triangular foil packages.

Blue Band margarine is very popular, but I don’t entirely trust a food product that doesn’t go off when kept in a warm cupboard for a year. My suspicion is that Blue Band is actually a form of spreadable plastic.

This post was triggered by me treating myself to a bottle of milk today. Two hundred and eighty Naira for one litre, so a bottle of milk costs more than a bottle of beer! I also passed by Baker’s Delight supermarket to get some imported Kerrygold butter. Nigerians really don’t understand the European fondness for dairy products (neither do Filipinos).

At first this seemed a bit odd to me, after all the country is full of cows. However the Fulani’s cows don’t produce much milk, certainly not up to the standard of European cows raised on special hormones and produced by centuries of selective breeding.

There is a cooperative dairy just up the road from NTI. On the right day they might even have something to sell. Last time I went there I bought butter, but they only sell kilogram tubs (400 Naira, much cheaper than the Kerrygold). After weeks of cooking with butter instead of oil, having bread, butter and jam for breakfast and even making shortbread I still had some left to throw away today.

I’m looking forward to cheese when I’m back home on holiday next month…

I was just struck by the thought that I haven’t heard a fire alarm in a long time.

Some Nigerian buildings have fire alarms (NTI does) but I’ve seldom seen one that showed any signs of actually working.

In fact about the only time you hear sirens or hooters here is when some big man is passing by on the road and his police escort want you to get out of the way. It’s quite noticeable that the Nigerian police don’t waste their sirens on trivial things like getting to the scenes of crimes quickly.

If you’re interested in visiting the Sukur kingdom you’ll find some background information at sukur.info, written by some anthropologists who worked there.

I put together a map of the area, based on the Federal Survey’s 1969 Madagali NW and SW sheets. It took quite a bit of effort to scan the map in, calibrate it, convert from the weird Nigeria East Belt Grid (measured in feet, of course) to UTM grid (GPS-compatible) and turn it into a nice PDF. It will print out on two sheets of A4 which you can stick together.

A few things to note:

• You should get written permission from a National Commission for Museums and Monuments office before visiting Sukur. There’s one in Maiduguri and others in Abuja and most state capitals.
• It helps if you speak at least some Hausa, many of the Sukur people speak no English.
• Getting to Sukur isn’t as difficult as the guidebooks make out, if you leave Maiduguri early you’ll be at the palace by midafternoon.
• It might be a good idea to spend the night in one of the villages at the bottom and then walk up to Sukur in the morning, when it’s cooler.
• Take something to use as padding, the bamboo beds are very hard.

To get to Sukur:

• Maiduguri seems to be the most convenient place to start.
• Take a bush taxi from Maiduguri to Bama, from the Bama motor park. Alternatively you may be able to get a bus all the way to Madagali (probably heading to Mubi).
• From Bama you should be able to pick up a bus to Madagali.
• You can either drop at Madagali or at the turn-off for Mildo (there’s a sign advertising Sukur World Heritage site). We hired a minibus from Madagali to Mildo for 1000 Naira, on the way back we took okadas for 200 Naira each.
• Go to the museums office by the district chief’s house to sign in. If the office is closed ask someone to show you to the museum’s guide’s house.
• You’ll be guided up the mountain by one of the NCMM guides. It’s not an especially strenuous hike but steep in parts and very hot if the sun’s out.

The week before last I went on a little holiday with Dave, up to Maiduguri in the north east of Nigeria and on to the Mandara mountains on the border with Cameroon.

I’ve added all the posts about Sukur to a new category: travel/sukur.

When I get time I’ll summarise all the details of how to get there.

My fun with Nigerian electrical equipment continues.

Last night I was boiling some water for drinking, as usual. I filled the pan with water, sat it on one of the electric hobs on the cooker, turned on the hob and then put the lid on the pan. As the lid came into contact with the pan I got an electric shock, not just the slight “buzz” you often get from badly-wired products here but a proper shock that made my right arm spasm and throw the lid across the kitchen.

Being an engineer I then went an fetched my multimeter. It turns out that all of the exposed metalwork on the cooker is live.

I will be going to speak to the NTI electricians this morning and am resisting the urge to find the guy who wired up my cooker, grab him by the throat and explain the importance of doing your job properly so you don’t kill people.

We had a day of sightseeing in Maiduguri, starting with the zoo. The guidebooks claim that it’s OK. “Many of the animals are captives without cages, and are kept in place by large ditches surrounding reproductions of their habitats” says the Rough Guide. In fact many of the enclosures are empty, all of them are overgrown and the animals looked distinctly neglected.

The right-hand picture above is of an enclosure in one of the more neglected parts of the zoo. We could make out something inside the building but couldn’t tell what kind of animal it was (maybe a hyena, there was one in the next cage). The floor of the cage was littered with rotting meat, the puddle you can see below one of the lumps was frothing with maggots and the smell was nauseating.

It seems the locals in Maiduguri keep complaining about the zoo and it seems to be a popular place to go. Maybe the state government could raise the entrance fee from 20 Naira and actually look after the animals a bit better.

Next we went across the road to the state museum. The building was fairly new but had obviously been neglected since it was built. The staff showed us round the few exhibits and explained a bit about the history of the area.

We looked at some craft shops and then had lunch. I got mine quickly but Dave suffered from the common Nigerian problem where everything he ordered had finished.

The next day we travelled back to Jos and had a couple of days relaxing there, on the whole a very restful holiday.

We got up a bit later than planned after another uncomfortable night. The rain had made it a bit cold, so I actually climbed inside my sleeping bag, which meant there was less padding underneath me.

After another breakfast of unsweetened porridge we packed our things, including the still damp clothes from yesterday. The leftover food was dashed to George, who seemed quite pleased.

The king and his advisers appeared for a final photograph and to send us off back down the path to Mildo market. Tuesday is market day, so many of the locals had already gone that way.

At Mildo market we stopped for refreshments with George and the others who had walked down with us. The Site Higher Executive Officer from the National Commission for Museums and Monuments came to greet us and ask how we had enjoyed our visit.

Dave stopped to buy a present for Marebec and then we headed over to where the buses and motorbikes were. The only taxi driver was demanding far too much money, so instead we arranged motorbikes to take us back to Madagali for 200 Naira each.

Just as we were leaving Simon the guide reappeared in a bit of a flap. He said we should have come to see him at his office to “sign out”, but his office is some distance away beside the District Head’s house. We had visited Simon’s house as we’d promised on Sunday, but he wasn’t there. He hadn’t brought his forms with him, so in the end we just left him complaining at the side of the road.

We were waiting for a bus at the side of the road in Madagali when a man appeared, saying that he was from immigration and we had to come back to his office. It seems his boss had seen us passing on the machines. After checking his ID we hopped on machines again for the short journey to the immigration office.

At immigration we met the man in charge there, whose office was in a garage. Both men were quite friendly and talkative, I suspect they were just bored and wanted a chat. They’d both been posted up to north-eastern Adamawa state from the south and I think they were finding it difficult. We didn’t mention our little trip across the border yesterday.

They eventually stopped a bus for us and it took us all the way to Maiduguri, dropping us just after the university. From there we took machines back to St Patrick’s.

Once we’d showered and changed we walked into town and tried to visit the palace of the Shehu (the local equivalent of an Emir). The guards asked us to sit down while they talked to the Shehu’s secretary and kept popping back to say he’d be coming shortly. After a while he drove out, the guards insisted he’d be back soon. Eventually one of them pointed out a few features in the courtyard then took us outside to show us the front of the palace. It was a very subtle way to get us out, not what you expect from the Nigerian police at all.

We went out for suya in the evening but were concerned by the hygiene standards at the suya stall. They insisted on washing the cooked suya sticks in grotty-looking water. When we complained they replaced with soapy water from an unknown source.

During the night the early morning call to prayer from the mosques seemed to go on for at least half an hour. In contrast the cathedral summoned its faithful with just a few dings of the bell. Maiduguri has always been peaceful but there were nasty riots there this year, Father Marcel told us about how they had had to barricade themselves inside the cathedral compound.

We stayed in bed until around 9am, to the accompaniment of creaks and groans from the bamboo beds every time one of us moved. The bamboo beds had looked like they might be more comfortable than sleeping on the floor, but after a night on one I wasn’t so sure. Both Dave and I had bruises on our shoulders and hips from contact with the beds.

I made breakfast, having brought porridge oats with me. Unfortunately we had left the sugar and tin of powdered milk back in Jos to save weight. I’d intended to buy a couple of sachets of powdered milk but forgot. So breakfast was plain oats boiled in water, tasty! I’d made plenty, so George helped to finish them off.

We’d planned a relaxing day of strolling around the local area, but as soon as George mentioned that people from Sukur often walked across to Cameroon Dave decided that was what he wanted to do.

Passing terraced fields with many people working in them we walked along another stone-paved path. George explained to us that the most fertile land is all owned by the king, so everyone else has to manage on the hillsides.

The views were beautiful and the heavy cloud cover meant that it wasn’t too hot. In a straight line it would be about 6 km, our route wound up and down and round the hills. Eventually we reached a dirt road that the Cameroonians are building to allow motorbikes to reach the border.

There was no sign of the border, no fence, no guards, not even a marker post. It seems that many of the Cameroonians farm on the Nigerian side and the Nigerians take their produce to the market on the Cameroonian side.

By lunchtime we were approaching the town of Roumzou, passing more people working in their fields and the local graveyard. There were three types of grave, Christian, Muslim and traditional. The traditional graves take the form of a mound covered in concrete, occasionally painted with the details of the deceased. On top of the mound are placed stones, in the shape of a gateway for men, I can’t remember what the symbol was for women.

Our first priority was to get some food after all the walking. George took us to a chop house beside the market. The locals mostly only speak French, Sukur and their own language but one man was keen to practise his English on us. I had fish stew and a kind of pounded maize lump. We then wandered on to a local bar, where I had a bottle of Top Pamplemousse, my favourite drink from my last visit to Cameroon.

George took us round to visit the local priest, a Frenchman, but he was out. As we left the town it started to rain, gently at first but becoming increasingly heavy.

The trek back took about one and a half hours, faster than the walk to Cameroon but much wetter. We were completely drenched by the time we returned to our hut. I didn’t want the inside of the hut to get soaked, so we stripped at the door and George insisted on taking our clothes away to wash them.

Despite the rain there were still many flies annoying us as we changed and then sat in the hut watching the clouds drift past outside. Later on we had some frankfurters and chicken luncheon meat with flat bread for our dinner.

Once the rain stopped the king stopped by for a chat, this time without an interpreter. We occasionally managed to get a vague idea of what he was saying by spotting one of the few Hausa words we knew but it was mostly guesswork.

In the evening we sat outside for a while, George had warmed up yesterday’s burukutu for us, it’s even more disgusting hot.