Moreover, although acting under the general administration of the Emir, the Alkali is irremovable, as Judges are in England. These features of a regularly-paid, ample salary and fixity of office give the Alkali—and other Alkalis as well—an independence of judgment uninfluenced by temptation of bribery. The Governor can, of course, remove an Alkali, and though there is no formal appeal from an Alkali’s Court, which at Kano is empowered to deliver death sentence in a case of murder, all the decisions can be altered by the Resident or revised by the English Chief Justice attached to the Governor’s headquarter staff.
AN ENTRANCE TO THE COURTYARD OF THE EMIR’S PALACE.
THE PRINCIPAL MOSQUE.
Judicial and administrative functions are separate. The Alkali decides punishment and the Emir’s officers carry it out, just as in England, though Nigeria practice is the outcome of native usage.
A single decision of the Alkali is selected as an example. A young constable complained that his wife—who looked his senior by several years—entrusted with some cattle for sale had appropriated the proceeds and transferred her affections to another married man with whom she had dissipated the money claimed by her rightful lord. The woman admitted the action but put in as defence that what she had sold had been purchased with her own earnings and was her individual belonging. She proved that to the Alkali, who thereupon dismissed the charge of theft but held that if the woman did not promptly return to her husband the new domestic partner she had taken unto herself must monetarily recompense the original one for the loss of connubial felicity and to the extent of the wedding portion he paid for the angel on the hearth, minus a proportion for the years of married life.
The Married Women’s Property Act may not be embodied in clauses and sections; statutes of Parliament are not codified and docketed; jurisprudence is not packed in dusty volumes, one contradicting another; but the principles of justice and common-sense, blended with the outlook of the people on what is right and proper and fair, mark the judgments of the men set up to decide among them.
Assessment and collection of taxes have been explained in Chapter VII. I went to the Beit-el-Mal and saw the accumulated revenue in boxes holding copper and nickel penny coins, bags of guinea corn—taxes paid in kind—neatly piled and stored to be sold at suitable opportunity—and boxes containing silver coins, which were interned in an inner chamber, locked and dark.