UP THE ISLAMIC NORTH
It was 2015, and I sat across a potential employer slouched nonchalantly on his chair. The interview had gone pretty well and it was certain I would get the job.
My potential employer asked me if I would accept a posting to the North of my country, to which I responded with a resounding no. I needed the job, but not bad enough for me to consider moving up North.
It was true that if I had to grow in the organization, I needed to have experience from all regions of the country—a sentiment which he expressed to me, I calmly replied that, one needs to be alive to grow in an organization and going up North did not guarantee the safety needed for me to grow in the organization.
It was an election year and the news was rife with the violence taking place up North, the rampages of terrorists, religious unrest and inter-ethnic clashes, those were not ideal sets of conditions for a Southerner to go up North.
For years, I had deep suspicions on the safety of the North of my country, that fear never abated but seemed to increase ever so slightly every year.
Though I rejected the offer, over the years, I had made brief incursions into the North, more to the nation’s capital—and I didn’t consider those true representations of the Northern experience.
Come 2021 and being compelled by work to go up North for a week, this time I braved it, but not without echoes of concern from family and friends to be safe.
Arriving at Kano; arguably the most populous state in my country, I was greeted by the dry Northern wind—my first experience of this harsh terrain where the weather knew no moderation but consistently oscillated between extremes of cold at night and heat in the day. I was sternly warned by the airport security not to board just about any taxi as “bad men” usually lurked about in such taxis looking for easy prey—it seemed like my suspicions were being confirmed with my first interaction, this was not a safe place; luckily my colleagues were around to pick me up.
However, working within the city during the day, I was met with unexpected warmth and I was surprised at how easy-going people here were. They didn’t have the mean mind-your-business look of us Southerners, they smiled easily and eagerly shook hands in greeting.
I began to test my perceptions of the North and asked my colleague why he wasn’t married at 24 seeing Northerners married much earlier, he corrected me that the practice was only prevalent in the rural areas and not the city centres and that it was just another misconception about the North.
Those I spoke with were educated and fluent in English like myself, which was also surprising to me, perhaps another misconception on my part. In market centres, businesses to my admiration were run by highly educated people, University graduates, lecturers and professors and the likes.
I was enamoured by their accents as words sweetly rolled down their tongues—next to the British accent, the Hausa accent was my favourite, it sounded exotic—yet not in the tokenistic manner in which the west sometimes viewed other cultures as exotic—it was a deep and genuine admiration for the accent, and for once I wished I had grown up in the North to be able to speak as beautifully as they did.
I slowly but surely began to enjoy and appreciate the North. Everyone went about their business unbothered, the environment was serene, no violence, not even the mock aggression of touts I was familiar with back South. Was this supposed to be the North ingloriously famous for religious intolerance and violence?
My colleagues, perhaps noticing my awe, asked if I was not surprised at the serenity of the city compared to what the media usually reported, I agreed affirmatively.
I noticed people of all ethnicities, religions and shades of colour live in harmony. In one shop, I saw a Fulani man, who displayed stereotypical white features—pale skin, thin nose, straight hair and almost grey-green eyes, yet he was just as African, Nigerian and Fulani as his much darker and thick-haired boss—perhaps the west could learn from the nonexistence of racial categorization based on skin colour from this part of Africa.
I learnt of how inter-ethnic marriages were common and how easy it was for different ethnicities to become subsumed under the dominant Hausa culture.
Sharia law was in force here, but I learnt it only applied to Muslims, I could confirm that as women moved about in western-style attire their hair uncovered. Even the music playing from the car radio was no different from what I would have heard back home.
After all these, I began to reassess my assumptions about these people; my countrymen—who seemed as alien to me as the aborigines of Australia. Perhaps I was wrong about them, perhaps what I knew all these years was incomplete.
They were just people living a life not so dissimilar to mine, in them I saw a kinship and understood that we were all pilgrims in sojourn and that we were not each other’s enemies—the true enemies being the ruling class, politicians, who have subjugated the masses and exploited ethnic, religious and cultural differences to stage us against one another.
Yet I was under no delusions that this was a utopia, everyday life was peaceful and calm as it did back home but poverty was rife, and religious and inter-ethnic violence could easily break out and shatter the serenity I was experiencing. However, I knew these challenges were hardly unique to the North. It was all a part of being human, of being Nigerian.
When my business was done returning to base, as I looked out the window of the plane shuttling me back home I prayed that more people will come to the realization and understanding that we are all just human, before anything else.
Charles Ekokotu writes from Nigeria