Vernon Mooers writes

THE WHITE MAN'S GRAVEYARD

chapter 3 (1)

There was no first class coach when the train arrived, late as usual. Then came the chaos -- bundles heaved through the windows, sacks, bundles of yams, mats, sugar cane or trade goods. All went in or out the windows to a hubbub of yelled orders. Dim light filtered through the dust so the night looked like dirty fog. Kerosene lanterns sparkled like candles at the kiosks and tables, set up in formation nearby, covered with assorted items that a trader might need -- batteries, soap, cigarettes, tins of mackerel or sardines, sugar, razor blades, pencils. Hawkers laid out baked loaves of bread or fish fried in palm or groundnut oil. Clay jugs or NIDO milk cans were set on mounds of mud, the precious available water for the Muslims, near the mats for praying.

There was such pushing and shoving into the cars that a few minutes later there wasn't a seat available. The racks above and the space under the seats were crammed with bundles and sacks. The train served both as freight and passenger combined. There was hardly room to manoeuvre amongst the mass of people -- women with babies wrapped in cloths on their backs, everyone claiming their spot amidst the loading and the fight for space.

Finally, the train slowly chugged into gear and started to heave and roll from the station. There drifted the overture of discordant voices, chanting passages from the Koran to drown the chatter. There was rhythm in the rolling train, the clickety-clack of the undercarriage, the tapping of the sticks of the blind, chanting as they made their way through the cars, the blending of their voices.

Sometimes several of the beggars would sing in harmony -- one repeating the chorus for the hard-working one in the lead, pouring religious fervour and passion as the verses rose in crescendo. The one behind would take the coins and slip them into a fold in his cloth, never losing the rhythm of the chant. There was always the same blank eyes, manoeuvring through the car, a plastic jug of water on a rope, hands half-eaten by leprosy or lame leg making the journey all the more difficult. They looked like the walking dead -- singing death chants, their bodies half-alive in rags like prisoners in a dungeon.

A trader came by with a basket of oranges on his head. Somehow he'd managed to eke out his living through the years of working the coaches. He stopped, set down the basket and deftly peeled the orange, a yellowish-greenish slightly sour fruit reflective of the area.  He'd spin the orange around the blade so the peel came off in one long strip, sliced a wedge out of the top, and presented it.

The twelve-hour trip down to Kano and on to Kaduna offered much opportunity for enterprise over the more than 200 miles. When the train rolled slowly into a stop, the trading began -- children with trays of kola nuts, pepsi, groundnuts, bread or fruit plied up and down both sides of the train. Everyone leaned out the windows to check what was available, calling the vendors and checking quality, haggling over prices. Big trays of peppered goat or beef grilled on sticks were sliced and served in brown paper torn from cement bags. There was plenty of food for any palate and mats and decorated calabashes, incense or bottles of scent. The traders and children moved the length of the whole train if they could, calling out the items they had for sale in  Hausa, Fulani or a mixture of regional tribal tongues.

Alex opened his eyes. It was just getting light. He had dozed off finally amidst the rabble. The train, like the old work-horse it was, was plodding through fields of maize and millet, grassland brush and baobab trees of the Savannah. The village huts were clustered like bee-hives in the thickets. The well-off villages that became permanently established, had copied the Arabic styles of dried brick dwellings with their high narrow window holes and were circled by a brick wall. There were four or five huts within the compound walls, for wives or extended family members.

There was the endless stream of women in their brightly printed wrappers, clay pots or firewood on their heads, traversing the paths winding through the maize. The women fetched water and worked the fields while men lingered about in the shade of the trees.

"Women work small plots here, but the land is scarce and we have drought. That and cooking are their jobs, and the men go south for seasonal work on plantations, even to Ghana and Ivory Coast," the train conductor told Alex. "They have to work hard there. If they don't bring back money, their families would starve."

The goats were being watched and herded by boys with long sticks or old men with a plastic jug of water slung over their shoulder. The women, in charge of domestic chores, were gathering at each well, drawing the long ropes through well-worn grooves in a log placed over the top, pulling up the bags made of goatskin or inner-tubes. The routine of life in the rural villages continued with a timeless rhythm.

Alex and Jeannie settled as comfortable as possible on the old coach, which must, he thought, have been supplied to the railway when it was built fifty years before. They observed the passing scenes out a window like a film rolling on an endless reel. For them, it was relaxing but still interesting, soothing and pleasant and spell-binding as they felt the urge to comment and point out things to each other.

Alex had only been in Africa a couple of weeks now, and the novelty of rolling across the Savannah, where abundant herds of antelope and elephants had once run free not so long ago, excited him when he thought about it. It was a long way from the seminar room in Ottawa and the faded memory of boarding the international flight. He was actually in the heart of mother Africa, its wild untamed expanse growing and spreading out before him as far as his imaginative eyes could project.

The station in Kaduna was a chaotic flurry of activity, crowded with taxi vans, hawkers and traders. The conductor whom Alex and Jeannie met on the train told them of a hotel by the railway. They managed to find the front entrance and turned left as he had said, to the first street, where they could walk the one kilometre to the hotel. They didn't want to get caught in the claustrophobic traffic of bicycles, lorries, motorcycles, vans and even small herds of cattle because they had to pass there from the main central market to the motor park. 

The conductor had also informed them that Kaduna had gone bad, that crime and burglaries were on the increase and that robbers in the station posed as taxi agents and might disappear after pretending to take their bags to a van. "Pickpockets too," he'd said. "There's no work and it isn't harvest season. All the men are here and idle and some leave the villages just to go to the city and cause trouble or rob. They can never do that in the village. If we catch one we stone them, but in the city even the police are in with them too."

They were told in Kaduna there was an education strike, with Secondary School teachers supporting the Primary Teachers strike, unlike last time when all the unions took part in a national strike and the troops had been out. "These strikes are happening all the time now," the conductor had said, "it paralyses everything. This time the teachers are disputing the government's choice of certain of their colleagues who were sent to study in London. It is normal. There are always problems, if it is not the student demonstrations, it's the teachers protesting." 

They were in the centre of town and aside from the presence of lepers or madmen lying in the street, it was a pleasant walk. People were going here and there, some staring at them, some smiling. 

"Wednesday is market day," they'd been told, "all the tribes will come in from the villages. You will enjoy." Some people studied them or turned to look at them and it was obvious that they were a couple of the few whites, if any, that they'd seen.