Chapter 10: Bauchi:
The Pearl and Its Margins

The Legendary Sarkin Maigini

Mallam Mikhaila was the Sarkin Maigini — the chief builder — of his era, appointed by the Shehu himself, the title hereditary in the direct male line. His reputation rested on a method that was part technical mastery and part legend: he preferred to build at night, completing substantial portions of a structure before dawn, working by a kind of improvisational instinct that made no use of drawn plans. A hundred labourers, most of them enslaved, would spend the daylight hours collecting mud and preparing thatched clay; the master arrived after dark and shaped it. The nocturnal schedule may have been practical, the cooler air making the mud easier to work. It may equally have been spiritual: building as devotion, the night as the appropriate register for an act of creation. His growing fame, the histories note, also brought about his death. The Emir of Birnin Gwari, having commissioned him to build a mosque of unsurpassable magnificence, had him executed afterward to guarantee that nothing comparable would ever be built elsewhere. It is the kind of story that attaches itself to exceptional craftsmen across many cultures and many centuries.

Terracotta Walls & Curved Earthwork

The exterior of the Gidan gives little away. Its walls are the deep terracotta-red of Sahelian mud-brick, massive and rounded at the corners in the way that load-bearing earthwork inevitably rounds when it has been standing for a century and a half, the surface repaired and re-plastered enough times to have lost any sharp edge the original construction may have had. One enters low, through a doorway scaled to discourage mounted assault rather than to welcome guests, the leather-covered door — rare for buildings of the period, the guides point out — swinging heavy on its hinges. Inside, the air changes. The barrel-vaulted reception chamber is cool in the way that thick mud-brick walls are cool: not the mechanical coolness of conditioned air but something older, a temperature that the building has been maintaining since before anyone present was born. The vaults spring from thick column-piers, their surfaces plastered smooth and painted with geometric bands in ochre and white. High up, narrow apertures admit light in angled shafts. The overall effect is of a space that has been thinking about itself for a long time and arrived at its current form with considerable deliberation.

To the Foothills of Toro

That afternoon, on Leonardo’s instigation and with the Bauchi Emir’s representatives having arranged it with characteristic efficiency, we drove west of the city toward the rocky foothills between Toro and Zaranda to visit the Zul — a small farming people numbering around four thousand, a subgroup of the Gezawa, whose existence sits almost entirely outside the frame of reference that northern Nigeria presents to the outside world.

The Zul Farmers

The Zul are farmers: millet, guinea-corn, groundnuts, yams, some cattle. They are Christian — converted by missionaries, in a state whose population is roughly eighty-five percent Muslim — and their older generation still observes the pre-Christian religious practices alongside the newer faith, which is a common enough accommodation in the region and one that organised religion tends to regard with more anxiety than the practitioners themselves. They were originally a mountain people, living in the upland terrain around Zaranda and Geji before British colonial administration brought them down to the plains, an act of administrative tidiness that also began the erosion of much that made them distinct. The lip piercings — round discs or white wood inserted into the upper and lower lip — ended in the early 1960s. The facial tattoos, diagonal stripes on both cheeks, lasted a decade longer. One still occasionally sees the tattoos on older women. The language, Zul, was reported for decades to be dying; more recent evidence suggests it has more speakers and more vitality than the pessimists assumed.

The Dance of the Blue Skirts

They were waiting for us on the road into the village, the women already dancing. The dancers wore bright blue wrap skirts over white tops, their waists crossed with coloured sashes, small round mirrors — green, red, yellow — held out in one hand as they moved. The mirrors caught the late afternoon light and sent it back in flashes. The dance had the quality of something organised at short notice for visitors and simultaneously entirely genuine: the younger women moved with the self-consciousness of performance, the older ones with the ease of people for whom this is simply how one celebrates an arrival. Long flutes provided the melodic line against a steady drum pulse; the footwork was grounded and precise, a shuffling rhythm punctuated by sharp shoulder movements. The village elders sat in a row on plastic chairs against a mud-brick wall, watching with the composure of men who have seen many dances and expect to see many more. On the wall behind them, someone had painted, in white lime, the numbers 1+200. I did not ask what it meant. Some inscriptions are better left as questions.

Nigeria Contains Multitudes

What the Zul represent, within the larger frame of a journey through Nigeria’s north, is the north that the north’s own dominant narrative tends to omit. The story of the Sokoto Caliphate — of the jihad, the emirate system, the trans-Saharan trade, the Hausa-Fulani political culture that still shapes this region — is a story of conquest and consolidation, and like all such stories it has a residue: the peoples who were there before the jihad swept through, who converted or resisted or retreated to the mountains and came down only when the colonial administration told them to. The Zul are that residue, one of fifty-five distinct ethnic groups that the Bauchi Emirate absorbed into its territorial domain over the course of the nineteenth century, technically its subjects, administered through the emirate’s district head system, their dance today arranged through the Emir’s office. Four thousand people on the plains between Toro and Zaranda, dancing for a group of foreign tourists arranged by the Emir’s office, their mirrors flashing in the afternoon sun. Nigeria contains multitudes. Most of them are not in the guidebooks.