Exploration of Aïr

by Angus Buchanan

Nigeria urgently needs more railways, more railway facilities, throughout the width and breadth of the land: a land that has few equals in untouched natural wealth; a land of immense possibilities, provided wise laws conserve its native labour and cease to over-educate and over-wean it, and bring it back to the natural conditions from which it has been swept in a whirlwind of haste to clutch Prosperity and let everything else go by the board. Meantime it is bottled up in its vast interior for lack of outlets, while it is struggling like a thing unborn to break loose from bondage.

It is only a very little of the awakening, of the struggling, which one sees at almost every station “up the line,” but every sign, little or great, is a sure forecast of a dawning and, perhaps, wonderful new era in West Africa.

The three days’ wearisome journey to Kano need not be dwelt on at length. Throughout it was through a country rich in forest and bush, with no great change in geographical aspect or in altitude. The change in appearance begins in the Kano region, at the end of the railway, where the sub-deserts of the north come down in places to the fringe of the bushland and grade one into the other. The elevation of Kano is 1,700 ft., and this comparatively small change in altitude over the long distance from the coast to Kano—a distance of 704 miles—takes place gradually, so that the country, with small exceptions, appears flat throughout. There are great dense belts of oil palms and coco-nut palms in from the coast, which in time, as you proceed up-country, give place to more varied tropical forests of tall stately trees growing from jungle undergrowth; while further on again, toward the north, the growth is less prolific, and there is much acacia bush, which is open or dense in patches, and of no imposing height.

To step from the train at Kano and shake oneself free from the discomforting heat and dust of the carriage and know that the journey was at an end was a cause for rejoicing with me. Civilisation now lay behind; here would I gather together my caravan of camels and natives and set out on the open road with all the freedom of a nomad.

And as a starting-off point, I learned, on close acquaintance, that Kano was ideal, for it proved to be a place of the frontiers and of the outdoors that harboured a host of wayfarers that passed to and fro from the great and historical market-centre of the north.

The ancient city of Kano is situated on an extensive plain of cleared and cultivated bushland, which is not completely bare and waste nor treeless, but which, nevertheless, bears a distinctive change from the country further south, and has much of the appearance of sub-desert in the dry season, for it holds the palest of colouring—that true buff shadeless neutral tint common to desert lands which oceans of wind-lain sand and ranges of dry prairie grass give to a sun-parched, rain-thirsty country. But only in colour and sand-winds of the Harmattan has it great resemblance to desert, for, beside the scattered trees and bush, the level stretches on closer inspection are found to be largely lands that have been cultivated during the short rainy season and are now waste-grown over a very sandy soil, which is dry and cracked and powdered to fine dustiness on the surface. One of the common and best-known ground plants amongst the dead vegetation on the sandy soil is that named “Tafasa” by the Hausa people (Sesbania sp. Leguminosæ). It is a straw-yellow, long-stalked underbrush, with long thin bean-pods, and known to everyone about Kano, for it grows about 2 ft. high in considerable extent, and crackles noisily in brittle dryness as one brushes against it in passing. Another well-known plant there, and everywhere in the bushland, is that which the natives call “Karengia” (Pennisetum Cenchroides Rich.), and which is a very annoying burr-grass that adheres to any part of one’s clothing, and which is a terrible pest to the hunter.

It was the season of the Harmattan when I reached Kano, for it was the month of December, and the driving winds from the Sahara had already set in. The Harmattan (often designated “Hazo” by Hausa natives, which means mist) is a season of hot, dry, dust-filled winds that blow from the desert interior steadily day after day, but seldom with the abandoned fierceness of a sandstorm. At that period the early mornings are cool even to coldness, and fresh and vigorous with the stirring of strong wind, which bears down with the coming of day, and brings with it a fine mist-like haze which envelops the whole country. But the haze is not an atmosphere of laden dampness, such as is familiar to England; quite the contrary, for it is dry with the intensity of a white heat, and mist-like only because the wind is so full of fine sand particles from the tinder-dry desert in the north, which it carries and lays in a carpet of fine penetrating dust wherever it passes.

The dryness in the land at this season is unbelievable if you have not experienced it; moisture is dried up as if the flame of a furnace was licking at it; ink, for instance, dries as fast as each letter of the alphabet is penned, and the clogging pen-nib is almost unmanageable: writing-paper, books—even the stiff book covers—everything of the kind curls up and becomes unsightly; boots that fitted with comfort in England shrink to such an extent that they are useless; nothing escapes, not even one’s person, lips crack, and nostrils and eyes sting; and altogether one has days of intense personal discomfort. Moreover, the fine almost invisible sand-dust searches into everything, and very soon both my watches were affected; next my camera shutter went wrong, and later on a rifle and gun. These latter were the greatest mishaps to befall me during Harmattan, and they were serious enough at the onset of an expedition.

Thus it will be seen that at Kano there is already something of sand and bleakness, and, to a considerable degree, it is therefore relative to the boundless Sahara to the north, while the advent of the Harmattan and driving sands bring to one the very atmosphere of the great lone wastes of the hinterland. And in keeping with such impressions, and enhancing them, stands the strange, and ancient, and powerful city of Kano, which in its unique earth-built aspect has all the character of a city of the mystical northern desert and little or none of the character one is accustomed to see in Nigeria. Perhaps, most of all, Kano impressed me with its atmosphere of age: the gigantic ramparts around it, and many of the quaint mud dwellings were obviously time-worn, in that inimitable manner of things that are unmistakably ancient, and carry about them for ever the rudiments of the craftsmanship of strange races that have passed and gone for all time.

And though we may know from hearsay that great powers in race and religion have lived within the walls of Kano to fight and struggle for power and existence through ages of History—as is the destiny of kingdoms—it is difficult to realise how slowly time has advanced in this secluded back-eddy, and how very close the past is to the present, until you have walked within the ancient walls and fallen under the spell of the old-world character of the people, and their dwellings, and their customs.