Through unknown Nigeria

The residential parts of Kano are made up of irregular square mud houses, most of them with slightly domed flat roofs. That is the prevailing form of architecture. There are some round ones having thatched tops and a few made altogether from that material. They belong to the poor. The style is not favoured by reason of the danger from fire. The Emir allows the more flimsy product on an understanding that it be replaced by mud as soon as the worldly prospects of the dwellers warrant the improvement.

There is no private landlordism—or rather, according to the law, there is supposed to be none—in Kano. The State, in the person of the Emir, owns the ground. It is not his individually; it belongs to the people; he regulates occupation.

A ground rent is fixed according to the space covered by the compound—which may contain several buildings—at the fraction of a penny per square foot annually. This does not work out at an extravagant sum according to our ideas. You can, as a native of Northern Nigeria—none others are allowed to be occupiers—obtain a house if it be vacant or ground to build one at a rental of 1s. 6d. a year. These dwellings are not exactly palatial mansions.

The scale of rents rises by a few pence to 3s. 6d., at which quite a desirable residence may be secured. My very good friend Adamu Ch’Kardi, a man greatly respected by all classes, from the Emir to the beggars in the streets, pays 3s. 6d. a year, and as 34 persons live in his house and its annexe, and as Adamu is not a person to be content with piggish surroundings, the house will be estimated as pretty large. Those who desire to keep up greater style have full opportunity. Rents go as high as £1 a year or even £2, £3, £4, or £5, which is the scale for a palace with a large surrounding garden. The Prime Minister occupies a house of the kind in the corresponding Belgrave Square of Kano.

Though there are 30,000 inhabitants, streets are not named, but each house has a number. I do not know the top numerals; all my observations and investigations were made without official local assistance. Adamu’s house is 4,032, and I have seen 6,249. So, whilst in the Cantonment at Zungeru you may live up to number 8 Zungeru—if I remember rightly that is the highest—here your address might be 6,242 Kano. I happened to pass number 1 and took a photograph of it. It struck me as distinctive—no. 1 Kano. But there was nothing distinctive about the house. The occupier’s 9 olive branches came outside for the picture, but neither is that quantity of youngsters distinctive for a proud father in these parts.

The population is to some extent a floating one. Many persons stay in Kano a matter of weeks or months, then journey eastwards or north for a similar period, alternating from Kano to the centres of commerce in the interior of Africa and on the shore of the Mediterranean. Certain of the Arab merchants keep their own houses in Kano. Others are boarded and lodged for a stipulated amount. The more general arrangement is for a man to be put up at no settled sum. He agrees to pay his host 1s. from each £5 worth of goods sold, and the host helps the guest by making enquiries respecting requirements in quarters where he will have better and more intimate knowledge than the stranger within the gates.

The mud habitation is characteristic of Hausaland. Persons in Europe may think of them as thin, weak structures, run up in a few hours and liable to be blown to bits by a strong wind. Nothing of the sort. A mud house which you folks at home would look upon as a mere hut, properly made may be the ideal form of domicile, away from the perfectly-constructed stone bungalow with scientific ventilation—punkahs, air-fans, etc., etc.—and electric light. And I am not at all sure that I do not prefer the mud dwelling. The principal advantage of the former is that a continuous draught clears winged insects, an exasperating torment when writing continuously. In the course of the last few weeks, days and nights have been passed in four mud houses each of which differed from the others. Two of them were as comfortable as one could wish to be, much more so than the ordinary house in England during the extremes of summer or winter.

But the mud house, as I have said, must be properly built. There is a right and a wrong way, as in most things. They know the correct way in Kano. The time to erect your mud house is at the end of the wet season, when there is an abundance of water in the ponds and lakes of the city and the ground is soft, for you can obtain ample material gratis. But it must not be taken from the street; fields are set apart for the purpose, and there people draw supplies.

Bit by bit the walls are raised, the outcome of each day’s work being plastered by hand into that of the preceding ones, and before the last layer has been laid on, the whole will be still susceptible to thumb pressure. Completed, the building is left to dry in the undiluted blaze of the burning African sun, which bakes all into the hardness of brick.

The wet season certainly puts mud houses to severe trial, and those of the jerry-built order sometimes succumb. Even the strongest, having walls two or three feet thick, have to be repaired and patched after continuous rain—as it rains in Northern Nigeria—and the time for general exterior overhauling is also at the close of the wet season, if the threatened habitation will stand so long.

Mud houses are quite common for Europeans near Kano City; in fact, with the exception of brick bungalows in the official element quarter, all whites have that type of dwelling. Part of this chapter has been written in one of recent erection which had not gone through the months of hardening process. It looked substantial enough, with its 24-inch stout walls, circular, from a distance resembling a Martello tower. One might have believed it to be proof against any soaking. Five hours of much less than the standard tornado had caused a steady run of mud to drop with ominous sound on various parts of the floor. The wooden gutters that projected horizontally had been undermined and fallen, and the top of the wall on which they had rested was being steadily and in rather liquid form deposited around me. Still, the very centre of the room was, so far, clear of direct descent; and splashes of dirt, though persistently maintained, are a mere nothing in this country. Presently the owner of the house came in to warn me that I had better stop writing and move my bedding and boxes into his store. In his opinion it was not unlikely the walls would collapse. As he did not seem quite certain on the point I said I would chance it and remain. A journalist who desires to send an expected contribution to his paper must not be over-particular about falling walls around him. Nothing on this earth is so important to his mind as the thought that he must not miss the mail. So I rattled on.

Presently one of my boys ran in dripping, his face—as much as a black skin can be—pale. He gasped, “Massa, the wall he be fit for fall!” and at the same moment the friend who had placed the house at my disposal came and begged me in emphatic language not to make a fool of myself and to clear at once. I did, for the next worst thing to not doing his duty to his paper is for a Special Correspondent to get killed in trying to do it extra well. Sure enough, seen from outside, the thick wall had cracked from top to earth and the perpendicular had distinctly shifted from its original alignment.

The larger houses, in or out of Kano City, are not home-made. There is a recognised trade of builders. If you are ordering a house do not fix the price by contract. You will probably be able, especially if you pride yourself on your astuteness, to beat the builder’s estimate down to almost any figure you care to push it, but refrain from reflecting afterwards that you are an exceedingly clever fellow who has prevented somebody from making a fair profit, which you have saved for yourself. The builder will make the profit he calculated from the first. Your house, or rather you, will be the loser.

It is infinitely better to pay the contractor so much a day, or per week, as long as he and his assistants are building. He will certainly keep the job going as long as he can; it may run into months where days would easily cover from start to finish, but if you keep visiting the busy bees you can be satisfied that more and more is being added to the house, and when you feel content that it suffices for your purpose you cry out, “Hold! Enough!”

Should you, however, decide for a contract payment, be careful that it is comprehensive. Contracts are not sealed, signed, and settled portentous documents. They are verbal and made in the presence of an interpreter. What wonder that where Europeans are concerned misunderstandings arise, and naturally nobody is more surprised at them than the bland, ingenuous builder. He made sure everything was so perfectly clear.

I knew a European who contracted to have a house built, of course outside the city. He would leave no backway to any individual to get the better of him, so he carefully stipulated for every detail, and emphasised them all. He went to bed content that he had made a good bargain. No other Englishman, he was sure, had concluded so cute an agreement.

The walls grew, and as they did—the requisite thickness never lessening—his complacency rose in corresponding degree. The agreed height was reached, and the builder asked for payment.

“Pay you!” cried the indignant recipient of the request; “certainly not; not until the job is finished.”

“It is finished,” was the polite retort.

“Finished! How can it be finished with no roof? Put on the cement roof I said I wanted and you can have your money.”

“Oh,” explained the builder through the interpreter, “the cement roof is another man’s work. Putting on a roof is never understood to be in our agreement. It is quite separate.”

The householder withheld payment, and on the dispute coming before the Resident’s Court—the tribunal which tries cases in which a white is complainant or defendant—the decision, based on local custom, was that the builder was right and that the other must pay.