CAPT. JOHN J. BROCKLEBANK, D.S.O.
THE PREMISES OF THE LONDON AND KANO TRADING COMPANY AT KANO.
Captain Brocklebank will occasionally say something stronger than a big D but always with the slight drawl which marks his intonation, never raising his voice, and with the smile which shows he is not angry. I have never seen him look so serious and solemn as he did when I was taking his photograph. He speaks Hausa colloquially and will frequently make the natives laugh by his waggisms in that tongue. I have heard him switch off his conversation with an Arab merchant to discuss matters with a French officer who could talk only in his own language. He would probably strike you as being languid and indifferent, but no Arab merchant is more alert, mentally, to the turns in a business transaction, and I happen to know that there are few, if any, individuals who look further ahead in a commercial survey. He appears to take things easily, and never hustles; but no day’s work ever overlaps another.
A man who in England is spick and span, keeps his high-power motor and dwells in a large town house and a country mansion, at Kano his domicile is a more or less dilapidated mud dwelling where white ants cause pieces from what must be called the ceiling to drop continually on the mosquito curtains over the camp-bed. The combined sitting and dining-room is, I warrant, not nearly as comfortable as the stable for his hunters in England. The “wine cellar” is a shelf in the mud wall furnished with one decanter and three other bottles. The wines are for his friends. He does not take any.
As we sat in this hovel, comparatively speaking, smoking cigarettes over a cup of tea, Captain Brocklebank leaned back in his folding chair and remarked laughingly, “I really don’t know why I am here.”
“Nor does anybody else,” was my rejoinder. “I assume because you like it.”
“Yes, that’s the explanation, I suppose.”