On the chaos in Kano

Or rather, on the anarchy in my beloved state. Yes. I am affiliated to Kano in more ways than one. What better connections could there be other than that of faith, of Islamic identity; of sights and scenes that remind you of Khartoum, of Makkah, of the fountain, of the source.

“Khartoum?” Yes. Khartoum, the capital of Sudan – that beloved city, the city of wonders, of knowledge and illumination. Khartoum was all of these and more before the protest against scarcity and high bread prices became a revolt against self and other. Khartoum was all of that combined before 19 April, 2023. Before you knew what was happening, the city had lost its innocence, the homely became unhomely.

There in Khartoum, the Sudanese have forgotten what it means to be humans, to live a normal human life. There in Khartoum, the abnormal has become normal; the humans have become beasts, and more. Yes, worse, in line with the Quranic description (Quran 7: 179), than beasts. Or how else do you make sense of a scene where brothers became implacable enemies of their brethren without any just cause? How do you make sense of the nonsense in the scene you are confronted with in which bearers of athar sujud now relish and savour the destruction of their brethren in faith?

Khartoum! Khartoum! The city of love and the beloved. Khartoum is now a ghost town. Omdurman is now a hungry land. Ahfad University for Girls in Omdurman has become a deserted landscape just like International Islamic University of Khartoum, not to mention the famous University of Khartoum that was established around the same time the Universities of Ibadan and Ghana were founded in the late 1940s!

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And it came to pass. Kano erupted in chaos. What I beheld was both frightening and saddening. I was frightened when I came face to face with what I always dread its occurrence – the eruption of a volcano, of a storm of hungry and angry youths: the danbawas, the orphans, the hopeless, the neglected, the forgotten. Yes. Kano, our city, has always existed on the brink. It has always existed under the threat of its own dysfunctionalities, its inner disjunctures, slippages, failures and contradictions.

Kano has always remained our city of choice, but ironically, it is equally one in which opulence and incontinence of the upper class constituted the touchstones of its social fabric. Here in this city, in Kano, the foetuses that bore at least two of Nigeria’s billionaires were interred. Here in this city, you equally and ironically too have one of the greatest assemblage of children who do not know who their parents were nor the reason they came to into the world. They remind me of the late Abbasid philosopher and poet, Abul Ala al-Maari, who gave instructions that the following epitaph should be written on his grave after his death: “I represent the crime committed by my father; but I (succeeded) in not committing a similar one (at my death) against anybody”.

Thus whenever I come back to this city of mine, and I am surrounded at each junction and intersection from the airport to my hotel or Bayero University, Kano, by bowl-carrying young girls and boys – children the age of mine, children who were born and raised on the streets, children who could be deployed by anybody as weapon either of affection or destruction, I always became afraid. I always ask myself: “what is the Emir of Kano doing about this frightening scenes and sounds? What is the governor of this state doing to give these orphans new meanings of life? Do those in whose hands Allah has reposed the affairs of this land not know that they shall be called to account for whatever evils these “street-boys and girls” perpetrate?

Then the “EndBadGovernance” protest came. Then the boys, children of less than 15 years, children who, under normal circumstances should still be on their mothers’ bossoms, occupied the city. They began to shout. Then they stopped. Then they started shouting again. Then they started marching. “Exactly where were they heading to?” Nobody knew. Public protests, particularly those fed and driven by primordial interests are usually rudderless; they are like airplanes cruising at 38,000 feet above the sea-level but without pilots! The protesters saw beauty ahead of them. They knew what beauty meant. That was my thought. They knew what was good; that was my supposition. They were conscious of their own deprivations; of the fact that their society has left them behind.

Thus, when they saw the new ICT building meant to be launched by the federal government, utterly unaware of what it stood for, they succumbed to the urge of the Bezeelbub; the spirit of destruction, of despoliation. Like locusts on the rice or wheat plantation, they descended on the infrastructure. They started feasting on its beauty and accoutrements. Sad. He who actually knows beauty and the beautiful does not destroy it; rather he preserves and protects it!

But sadder I became when those compatriots of mine entered the national library in Kano. They looted everything ‘lootable’. But they left the books on the racks intact! Yes. The books were not touched by the ‘’protesters’’ simply because it had no ‘’value’’, at least for them. But perhaps not. The books were probably saved from the wrath of the protesters the same way the whole city of Kano could have been saved if adequate resources had been put into reading of books, of learning how to write, of literacy, of knowledge generation, of knowledge dissemination, of knowledge consumption.

What saved the books in the national library is what has always saved and protected civilizations across climes and times against liquidation – Knowledge. Discernment. Reasoning. Whenever knowledge is lost, every other thing is imperilled!

If those in leadership positions in this country fail to learn these lessons, they can potentiate more heinous and grievous situations with dire consequences than the acts of unreason that we all saw during the past week across the nation. You can only reason people out of that which they were reasoned into ab initio. The contrary is a categorical imperative!