Sallah In Sokoto

A couple of weeks ago, we were invited to travel with some Nigerian friends to Sokoto and celebrate Sallah (the end of Ramadan festival) with their family.

On Monday morning, they came to pick us up and, having crammed our bags in the boot with theirs, along with the food and gifts they were taking and our offering of a bag of yams and some cloth, we crammed ourselves into the car: Mahmoud (my colleague’s husband) in the driver’s seat, Simon in the passenger seat, and the back seat: Hadiza (my colleague); Hauwa (her sister); me; and three children ranging from 1 to 10 years old. It was a surprisingly comfortable, 6 hour journey (most of which was spent with a sleeping child on my lap) to the far north of Nigeria, which is hot and dusty and can see temperatures of up to 50 degrees!

We were warmly (no pun intended) welcomed into the family home and shown to the guest room where we would be staying. Over the 5 days we were there, we were treated as warmly as family, but as generously as honoured guests: really very humbling and lovely. The visiting culture here is quite different from that in the UK. At home, the burden is perceived as being with the host – the visitors make sure they arrive at a convenient time, having announced their intention to visit (or, actually, more usually with an appointment) and make sure that they bring a gift to repay the hospitality they receive. Here, however, the hosts are honoured to received guests and are expected always to provide some manner of refreshments for their visitors, who can – and usually do – turn up unannounced.

Visiting others is a duty, particularly around festivals like Sallah. On our penultimate day in Sokoto, we accompanied Hadiza and other family members on a round of Sallah visits to friends and relatives. We drove from house to house, took our shoes off, sat down in living rooms, were presented with soft drinks and bowls of chin chin (deep fried dough snack) or slices of cake and left after brief greetings – the longest we spent in any one house can’t have been more than 15 minutes, the shortest was around 2 minutes. It seems that the visits aren’t really about having a catch-up or conversation (or even the pretence of this, as might be the case at home), but just about having shown someone the honour of paying a visit.

Of course, on the day we travelled – the day before Sallah – the family were still fasting. (We attempted some sort of camaraderie in that we tried not to eat and drink after our large, late breakfast, but after several hours, simply couldn’t go without water any more!) At 7pm, we joined them in breaking their fast – sitting on the floor in Hadiza and Mahmoud’s room, eating with the women and children (the men seem to eat separately, although Simon as a foreign man seemed to always be with us). The food was good: tamarind gruel (nicer than it sounds!), kosai (deep fried bean cakes = food of the gods), chips and omelette, all washed down with coke on ice. But being invited to be a part of that family scene was really special.

That night, we were told that the moon had been sighted in Saudi Arabia (the sign that Ramadan has come to an end), so the following day would be Sallah. The next morning, we were taken by a couple of friends of the family to watch the tail end of the Durbar. The town was busy, festive, strung with bunting. Crowds of beautifully dressed men, women and children gathered on the streets, maintaining at least 3 or 4 feet between the front row and the barking police dogs on leashes. Whole families rode motorbikes, with the youngest perched at the front with plastic sunglasses and big, proud smiles. Small horses and gargantuan camels strode through the streets, covered in tassles and sparkly things.  The great and the good sat up on the canopied seating in the Sultan’s palace, and the media crowded round as he gave a speech. We would meet the Sultan face to face later in the week.

The day of Sallah is marked by dressing up in your finery (everyone – even the children who are usually seen begging in rags), cooking and eating a feast with your family and going round to visit other people. In this household – and, I assume in most – the men got up early and went out to pray at the mosque. The women didn’t take their bath or get dressed up in their festive outfits: they got down to the dirty work of cooking while still in their nighties or t-shirts and wrappers. As a guest – and, more significantly, a wussy western woman who doesn’t know how to cook Nigerian food and can’t heft a big pot full of rice – it was difficult for me to help, but they involved me, nonetheless. We were behind schedule (for no other reason than this is Africa, as far as I could see), so it was after what should have been lunchtime when we took the par-boiled rice and other ingredients outside to make a fire on which to cook our fried rice. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), being with all the women, who were doing all of the work, was a LOT of fun. As the men looked on, hungrier and hungrier, unable to do anything but wait until the feast was prepared, the women laughed, and joked, and danced, making amused remarks all the time about how it was riling the men to see the women enjoying themselves when their food was late. Babies were passed round, wood was added to the fire as we tutted about how poor quality it was and how it was taking ages to really heat up, songs were played on mobile phones that sparked reminiscing about when they were first heard. Lots of fun. And when it was all cooked (who knew that making Nigerian fried rice was such a complicated and long process?), and we had tipped it into a huge thermos box to be taken back into the house, Hadiza, Simon and I sat by the dwindling fire, scraping out the bits of rice stuck to the bottom of the pot and eating them with our fingers.

On the Wednesday, we went for a picnic by the river. The women had prepared some delicious snacks – yam balls, ‘stick meat’ (i.e. kebabs), cabbage rolls (steamed cabbage leaves filled with spicy meat – a bit like ready-assembled yuk sung), prawn crackers, crème caramel and a cake – and we sat down on mats by the water to eat. There were some men with camels, riding up and down the path next to us, transporting goods to or from the market or the farm, and one of our party decided to ask one of the men to stop and let her have a ride on the camel. Everybody wanted a go, but several people were really quite scared of it: every time it lifted it’s back legs to stand up, tipping the rider forward in the seat until it lifted its front legs too, there was a communal scream followed by laughter. I decided not to go anywhere near it, preferring to stand and the back of the crowd with two terrified children. I kept explaining to the 6 year old that it was ok, nothing was going to happen, no-one was going to fall off and then, obviously, someone fell off. And in spectacular fashion – instead of holding on when the camel came to kneel to let them off, the woman riding at the front of the seat just let go, and toppled over its head, face-down onto the ground, swiftly followed by the woman who was riding behind her, who landed squarely on top of her. No-one was seriously hurt and, as is the way with Nigerians, everyone found the whole thing hysterically funny, including the victims. (Although the 6 year old was decidedly perturbed by the whole thing, and the one year old was clinging onto me for dear life!)

On our penultimate day, a friend of the family, who is related to the Sultan, arranged for us to go and visit the Sultan in his palace. This was a big deal: the Sultan presides over all of the Emirs in Northern Nigeria. He is, I guess, the most powerful man in Northern Nigeria and has paid state visits to Prince Charles etc. Upon entering the grounds of the palace (which is quite a modern, not very grand building), I noticed that I was the only woman apart from one hawker who was trying to sell slippers or something. There were hundreds of men, just hanging around – some waiting to see the Sultan, but mainly just those who hang around to show their respect to him. We were shown into a private waiting room, where one of the Sultan’s staff spoke only to Simon, including to ask what I did: we weren’t in Kansas any more.

I was really surprised, then, to find that when we were eventually ushered into the Sultan’s room (where he sat on a throne, with three aides to his right), he actually spoke to me. We took off our shoes and went to kneel before him: he held out his hand, so Simon went to shake it before kneeling (I knew better than to try this myself). Having greeted us in Hausa, he went on to ask us a question we didn’t understand, and so switched to very good English (most Emirs and Sultans are educated in the West) and proceeded to have a conversation with both of us about VSO, how it was funded and who we were working with. The meeting can only have lasted a maximum of 5 minutes, but we were told by Mahmoud and his friend who had accompanied us that it’s highly unusual for the Sultan to say anything at all during those meetings: usually people just go in, kneel before him, and then eventually say their goodbyes and leave!

These few adventures aside, the week was mainly spent eating, watching TV, playing with children and being just one of the family. A fantastic few days of being made to feel incredibly welcome in someone else’s home, family and culture, for which I am very grateful.