The 16th good thing about Northern Nigeria: seeing life's realities along with incentive to eat our vegetables

Our next stop on our tour agenda was a visit to the camel market. On the way there, we passed the street in this first picture which was lined with stalls with wooden tables covered with various pieces of meat being cut and sold -- sorry it's hard to see in this picture, because there was quite a lot of people shopping at the time we passed by. You couldn't pay me to buy my meat there, but to each his own. I'll give you fair warning now that this post has some pictures that shouldn't be studied closely by animal lovers or those with weak stomachs.

When we left the bus and entered the market, we learned that this meat market had a lot more than camels. At first we just saw cattle and goats.

As I was watching, one cow lying on the ground was having what looked like seizures and then laid still -- it appeared to be in the process of dying.

Others looked not far off from death.

There was a little cattle drive within the market area.

And rather comical efforts (in a sadistic kind of way) to get a cow to take a step up into the truck.

The camel area was at the far end of the market. Camels were once brought here as part of the Trans-Saharan trade route. Our guide said that now most of the camels are sold and used for their meat, not for transportation.

I suppose the marks on the camel were to document ownership.

Some members of our group took a ride on a camel. Brent and I passed on the opportunity, but the watching crowd enjoyed the show.


Anyone for some appetizers?

And, yet again, we visitors draw a crowd for the local people at the market.

Some people hang around for the show and others take a look and go on their way.

These girls all had a different reaction to being photographed, but don't you love that smile on the girl in the middle?

In another section of the market are tools needed for slaughtering the animals...

right beside a booth where one can get a manicure.



Then there is another business area of the meat yard. As you near it, you see the fires burning and smell some memorable odors (and --I'll give you a clue --it doesn't smell like steak cooking on the grill!).

We never saw where the cattle were butchered with the meat that made it onto the tables outside the walls, but there was a very busy area that used all the other parts of the cow that you don't see packaged in the meat section of your supermarket.

There were cow skulls and horns and legs. They would burn these parts over the fire to singe any hair and then cook them in kettles of water to get everything edible off them.

The day after our visit here, there was a segment on CNN International talking about how young people in Great Britain were starting to learn to use alternative and cheaper cuts of meat to economize with the rising costs of food. And I thought, "at last, something the Nigerians can teach the English!"

Are you ready to go vegetarian?

And on the street outside the market, sellers prepare suya, a skewered spiced beef stick, sold here complete with flies. (We didn't buy any.)

The 141st good thing about Lagos: Enforced quiet on election day

Forgive me a brief departure from my posts about our trip to the North. Today is election day for Lagos State and we were advised by our company security to plan on staying at home today due to the risk of unrest on the streets. But I noticed very early in the morning that the street outside our apartment was quiet. Brent said that the directive was not just for us, but for all residents in Lagos there is a "restriction of movement" in place. I don't know the legal difference between that and a curfew; presumably people are still allowed to get to their local polling area to vote. There is a lot of voter apathy here, among the Lagos residents we talked to no one was planning to vote.

Here's some of what our company security briefing said:

Local government elections will be held on 11 October in the commercial hub of Lagos state. The state governing Action Congress (AC) is likely to win an easy victory in the polls. However, a dispute between the AC and the national ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) over the state government’s decision to conduct local elections in council areas outside the 20 recognized in the constitution could fuel unrest during the election period. The PDP’s directive to its candidates to boycott polls in 37 unrecognized council seats is likely to cast a shadow over the legitimacy of the elections and the final results. Sporadic political violence is a credible prospect in the next 48 hours as the polls approach, and the security force response is likely to be heavy-handed.
The AC has held the Lagos state governorship position since former president Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007) came to power in the 1999 democratic transition and is keen to consolidate its authority in the state. The fact that it holds such a prestigious governorship seat has often strained relations with the PDP-dominated federal government in recent years.

I haven't heard anything on our CNN coverage here about elections in Lagos, but there's almost constant coverage of the upcoming US elections (where no one would dare put a "restriction of movement" in place on election day) and, of course the world economic crisis. We can't avoid that here, though we can try. So we've got a quiet day at home -- time for exercise, reading, dinner and games with friends upstairs, and, hopefully, some more blog posts.

The 15th good thing about Northern Nigeria: religious reminders along the streets

Here in Lagos, the Christian churches predominate, though there are, of course, mosques, and along the road here and there are rugs spread out, occasionally with Muslims making their devotions. But in Northern Nigeria, Islam is the predominant religion and the evidences are everywhere. The large central mosque looms over the center of Kano, with activity all around it.

Paulette said that, for the most part, the Islamic presence here is very peaceful and without fundamentalism. But when we were returning to our home from the airport in Lagos, in discussing our trip with one of our company security people, he was saying that he at one time lived in Kano, but left because he thought there was getting to be more tension between the Muslims and the minority Christians. He thought it was a big problem that the Koranic schools are the only educational option for many children and worried that it would be easy for them to be indoctrinated with a fundamentalist Muslim outlook which could be more intolerant of others.

Something I found quite interesting were the road signs on many intersections and lining all the major roads in Kano with verses from the Koran. It was hard to get clear photos of them as we drove past.

This one says "Oh Allah I seek your forgiveness." It was one of the most popular, frequently repeated signs.

Here's my list of others I saw:

"Fear Allah whereever you find yourself"

"Praise be to Allah"

"There is no Diety worthy of worship except God"

"Allah is the greatest"

"Unavoidable thanks be to Allah"

"Allah the Bountiful, thanks be to you"

"Oh Allah, Shower all your blessings on our leader, Prophet Mohammed"

"Allah the Bountiful, thanks be to thee on whom we depend"

"Purity and Praise be to Allah"

"Oh Allah, who showers blessings on the righteous"

I thought it was quite nice to have these reminders of prayer along the road.

I know there were more than these that I jotted down. Any guesses on what this sign says?

The 14th good thing about Northern Nigeria: public food assistance at the Hausa museum

After our Sunday morning visit to the villages, we returned to the hotel for lunch and a mid-day rest. We then went out for some more Kano sightseeing. Our first stop was at the Kano historical museum -- the Hausa Museum.

The two main ethnic/tribal groups in Northern Nigeria are the Hausa and the Fulani. I'll blog later on our introduction to the Fulani, but Kano is a main city for the Hausa people, though they are spread throughout West Africa. We came across many of the local people here who didn't speak English, only Hausa. The tribe adopted Islam in the 11th century (says the interesting Wikepedia article in the link), and the Hausa are now known as good businesspeople. Their architecture is quite beautiful -- this museum showcased the thick textured walls (here stucco, but probably in earlier times just made of mud) and pretty decorative designs.

This is a very poor photograph of an interior room in the museum which shows the decorative painting in a traditional Hausa palace.

The museum had items showing off Hausa culture and history. Next door was the Kano Hall of Fame.

It had a very pretty interior room with paintings, trophys and photographs of notable local citizens.

When we arrived at the museum, there was a gathering of people in front. We weren't sure why they were there.

But it became clear when some vans drove up and people brought out tubs filled with plastic bags of garri.




The plastic bags full of the cassava paste were quickly distributed. Garri doesn't have a lot of nutritional value, but it is a starch that is heavily relied on here just for filling stomachs.

With bowls and plastic bags full of garri, the crowd quickly went on their way.

The 13th good thing about Northern Nigeria: experiencing groundnut processing

Someone on our trip said, "Nigeria is a strange country: they sell water in plastic bags and peanuts in glass bottles." And it's true, cheap drinking water local people buy from vendors on the street (not purified well enough for us) is often in a plastic bag and the drinker tears off a corner to consume the contents. And the local peanuts available for sale in the stores are often packaged in recycled soda bottles. But here they call them "groundnuts," and they are a major crop in the north of Nigeria.

After we left the weaver's village, before we reached the main road back to Kano, we stopped beside the road where workers were shelling and bagging groundnuts.

Their work area was on plastic tarps spread right beside the road. I guess this made it easier for transportation of the raw and finished products.

I was kind of surprised that in this country where human labor is extremely cheap that there is actually a mechanized step in this process. The raw groundnuts are put through this machine which crushes the shell.

Women with calabash bowls then lift up the nuts and shell pieces after they pass through the machine and sift the material, separating the heavier nuts from the lighter pieces of shell.

Women then pick through the remains of that process to reach out any nuts that may have been missed.

The groundnuts are separated for bagging.

And the shell fragments are also bagged, we guessed they use them for animal feed.






The animals are just a bit too close to the drying nuts here for my comfort zone. Watching this didn't make me too anxious to consume more of the local groundnuts -- a little too much personal contact-- though before this I always found them quite tasty.