The Catnachs of West Africa

Abstract

A FEW YEARS AGO I worked for a while in a university in Northern Nigeria. Its main campus was at Zaria, a hundred miles or so to the south, but the department in which I worked was housed—somewhat incongruously and pending the erection of permanent buildings—in the old Airport Hotel at Kano. One's lectures were punctuated by the occasional roar of a VC10 taking off for Rome and London, but the inconveniences of the place were more than compensated for by the old city of Kano itself. A drive of four or five miles from the airport led one past the Sabon Gari, the Strangers' Quarter where all those from Southern Nigeria lived, along the walls of the city and to the Nassarawa Gate. Once inside, one stepped back almost five hundred years into the Arabian Nights, one felt. Certainly the atmosphere of the city with its mud‐walled houses dominated by the huge mosque, and the colossal market‐place with its leather and metalwork, its occasional veiled Touaregs, armed with yataghans, strolling among the white‐robed inhabitants, the stalls with Maria Theresa dollars and the sight of the occasional camel‐train leaving for the Saharaall these captivated me, and like many expatriates I fell in love with the place and its people, and became convinced of the superiority of the pure Islamic culture to the effete and westernized south.

Citation

Fordyce, A.J. (1970), "The Catnachs of West Africa", Library Review, Vol. 22 No. 7, pp. 367-369. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb012542