Kaduna
Northern
Nigeria
May 16, 1957
Dear Eddie and Alice...
This is a part of the country that I knew almost nothing
about before I came here, and if I'd asked to guess what it would be like I'd
have missed the mark by from here to City Hall.
Northern Nigeria, to save you a trip to map, lies in the
Sudan, south of the Sahara. The people are mostly Moslems, Negro Moslems, and I
still find it confusing to see black men in flowing robes of cotton or,
sometimes, silk and nylon, with silk turbans or little blue, white or black
fezes; or to have them greet you with salutations in which the only
understandable word is Allah. Strange it is, too, to cash a traveller's check
in a bank and note that the teller, who speaks excellent English, has his face
carved in an elaborate pattern of scars, and has a big star tattooed in
heliotrope on his forehead. Nor can I easily get used to the sight of a camel
train plodding down the street, loaded with bundles of hides from the country
to the north.
This is the African bush, and it is not what I expected. I
had expected jungle or desert, but this is in between. The land is mostly flat,
like the land in Eastern Washington, around Richland, but it is covered with
low green scrub, rather like salal, a yard high. There are occasional trees,
thirty or forty feet apart: mangoes, which at this time of the year, the end of
the dry season, are hung with lovely, breast-shaped fruit; locusts, large but
small-rooted, festooned with black pods two feet long, from which the Africans
extract small brown beans about the size of corn kernels, that they make into
cakes precisely the shape, texture and taste of mud pies. But mostly the land
is scrub.
It rains here. My God, does it rain. Two days ago it rained
six inches in two hours, and yesterday while I was out visiting a leper
community in deep bush a storm blew up suddenly and for twenty miles the road
was under water. We drove in a Land Rover (British jeep) through country turned
abruptly into a lake. We crossed rotting bridges of palm logs, with the water,
which was yards below the bridge when we came in, running over the mud-covered
boards as we left. Brown sheets of water cascaded back over the windshield, completely
blinding us at times. We passed the pagans from the leper village, extremely
primitive people who trotted through the rain stark naked, except for the long,
silver earrings of the women, and calabashes and wooden carrying bowls which
they managed to balance on their heads even as they ran. We braked desperately
to a stop as a herd of Fulani cattle streamed across the road, well-fed beasts
though this is the very end of the dry season, Brahmas, grey and wide-horned,
followed at a run by little herdsgirls, four- five- or six- years old, with
pointed goads with which the guided the great bulls. The Fulani are true
nomads, following their cattle for thousands of miles -- well, anyway, hundreds
of miles -- through the bush, living in teepees made of the stalks of
guinea-corn, which grows ten or fifteen feet high. The women make butter and
cheese and a kind of yogurt, which they sell in the markets. The men tend the
cattle and pick off any stray game they encounter with long, barbed spears or
poisoned arrows. They are a fine looking people, tall and thin, with thin
noses, thin lips, high cheekbones, looking like Phoenicians. The women wear
scarves of dark colors, and blouses of primary colors, and wrap-around skirts
of any kind of cloth that comes to hand. The men dress mostly in white, and
have funny white or grey leather caps that fold over at the top. They are all
most friendly, and if you wave as they pass the women bow and hold their knees,
while the men cup their right hands around the back of their necks. They hold
the pose until you are past.
The Hausas, on the other hand, who form the largest tribal
group in these parts, salute by raising their clenched right fists above their
shoulders. This has no political significance, but one of the Britishers here
said that he hadn't had so many of those salutes given him since he stood with
Leon Blum at a May Day parade in Paris in 1938.
Mostly I have been working on a story about leprosy control
measures. There are 595,000 lepers out of a population of 18,000,000 in
Northern Nigeria, so you can see it is quite a problem.
The other day I went out, with a Public Works Department man
to look at Malaria Control Measures. That's a problem, too. Most of the houses
here are made out of mud -- the round, beehive houses you see in old copies of
the National Geographic. When they dig the mud for the hut they leave pits. The
pits fill up and breed mosquitoes. It is Public Works job to fill or oil the
holes. There's just one slight problem. They have a budget of 5,000 dollars a
year for the work in a town half the size of Tacoma.
Yours,
m.
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