Those who say to travel is better than to arrive have not been on a local train in 1960s Nigeria. Wallahi bebenko, it was purgatory. Far, far faster, safer and comfier to cram under the shell of a drunken tortoise and hope for a following gale. The coaches were packed tight and the air was dense with a stew of sweaty, urinous and other bodily smells. After each climb up the mildest slope, the clangorous steam engine needed to stop for a drink of water and to catch its breath. In its wake it left clouds of thick black smoke eclipsing the sun, perhaps explaining the village kids waddling about on rachitic oxbow legs.
Mum blagged, wriggled and bumped us close to a window where I could breathe much fresher air, and she could carry out some commerce of her own. Clients, sellers and buyers ran alongside the wheezing train for fruits and vegetables, chickens and guineafowls and household goods, such as soaps, sponges, brooms and towels. One woman in a bright yellow frock was haggling with mum when she bumped into a telegraph pole. Mum tittered. It served the greedy woman right for diddling her out of six pence last time.
Bustling Kano was to Zaria as a wild lion was to a kitten. In punishing sunshine the masses on foot, on donkey, bicycle, in coaches and cars, milled around with almost as little space between them as on the local train. Massive flies formed a mat on your back and on anything standing still or left unattended. After a final ten-minute wrestle through the crowd listening to a man hectoring them from the back of a black van, I was grateful to duck into the relative cool peace and safety of Buda’s emporium.
From the jovial wholesaler, Mum bought a selection of textiles which she folded into a 4ft cube and wrapped tightly in polythene. We waited until well past sunset for the heat to subside enough for us to return to the station with our treasure. After supper of water and groundnuts, Kano had plenty of groundnuts, I was just drifting off on the concrete platform when mum asked what I thought I was doing talking to Agnes.
Alarmed, I snapped me out of postprandial torpor. “Agnes? Nothing,” I stammered. But, Mrs Jum Jum, why do we always say nothing when the opposite is so plainly the case?
“Ali, I saw you.” And when it came to her son, her eyes never let her down. Friendship with Jonathan was one thing. But Agnes? Did Dad not have enough on his plate without his son giving madam another excuse to insult him?
Much as I sympathised with Dad, I balked at the suggestion that talking to Agnes was a sin or betrayal. “Ah ah, Mama.” If I ran away when Agnes spoke to me would that not make matters worse? If I could be friends with Jonathan why not with his sister?
“That’s different.”
They always say that. I could not resist sneaking in another retort. So if they were not different, it was alright? If they were the same, there would hardly be much point in my having her as a friend would there?
Mum mumbled her exasperation, something to the effect of asking God to give her strength, and yanked a coverlet over her head.
We got up early the next morning before the first calls for fajr. Mum smuggled us onto a goods train. Goods trains rattled along at about 50mph, stopping only at major towns and as long as you didn’t mind sharing the space with ungulates got you home light years faster than a local train. As we pulled out of the station, I heard the familiar sonorous singing of a woman sitting against the steel rails of the fence, her deformed leg curving up to the sky. Decades later when I hear the acapella singing of Soul to Soul’s great Carol Wheeler I think of that woman’s singing. “Babianla…” She’ll be only about a hundred years old now. No, not Ms. Wheeler. The beggar woman of Kano station.
We got back to Zaria at about 6 o’clock in the evening. Shortly after, we disembarked the platform began to shake and out of a rutilant pool of sunlight, rumbled a majestic snub-nosed engine. The air shimmered around it. Yet there was no coal, no puff of steam or belch of black smoke, nor did flakes of ash tumble through the air to settle on your head or stain your best shirt. Before I could gather myself, a beige coach emblazoned with the coat of arms – horses flanking a blank shield and wavy white pall – glided past me. In it sat the man they called Zik of Africa, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the famous wordsmith. The President. Head of State, now that Nigeria was a toddler Republic, wearing a glowing white agbada, intricate glittering embroidery on his cap.
He raised his learned head, graced by square dark-rimmed spectacles, from his papers. Our eyes met and I went weak and almost toppled back over Mum’s bale of cloth. By the time I recovered to offer a timid self-conscious wave, Zik had gone. Coach couplings clanged, creaked and screeched, pulled taut and the train gathered pace. Hoping for another glimpse of Zik, I loped after the train on my wobbly legs, waving frantically as I weaved through the groups on the platform, which included a dozen noisy “White” schoolchildren and their sun-burned guardians. But with a stiff wriggle of its rear end, the coach rounded a left bend and disappeared in the clouds of steam from an engine chugging the other way.
In that moment I decided that whether or not the Emir lifted his ban on me I wanted to be like Zik, a President and a doctor. A boy who liked Zik, a doctor – I didn’t know he was not medical at the time – was just the type of man Agnes’s parents would like her to have as a friend, surely. When I told Mum, she shrugged, and in a tone that deterred a follow-up said there were many ways to the marketplace. What she meant by that, I do not know but I think she was stalling until she had a word with Dad. What could Dad possibly object to about being a doc like his boss?
