ba yara
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 21/Jul/2010 10:57, 34 days ago
Night time here is, of course, full of noises– sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.  The insects and frogs and whoever else is there give the impression of being hardly capable of containing themselves as darkness thickens as occasional sounds become more frequent and then finally erupting when the last light has been swallowed whole (usually around 7.30, incidentally.  One of my Nigerian colleagues found– along with all of the irreligion and homosexuality – the most bizarre thing about the UK to be the sun lingering around for hours and hours.  His wonder became mildly incredulous horror when I said that, in winter, the pattern reverses itself).Around here, though– where we’re happily settled and living, on Ahmed Makarfi Road, off the Kigo Road New Extension – there are some animal sounds all of the time.  Apparently, there’s an academic paper somewhere about the propensity of this area to flood (although a lovely chap who gave me a lift yesterday was absolutely certain that this happens for three days, every three years, and only then).  We’re more or less right next to the river, and it’s easy to imagine this land as fen and fastness.  Probably, given another five hundred years or so of accretions and, as in London, this liquid past will be fully concealed and become a subterranean malice.  For now, though, it’s just the world – plain as a wardrobe.As on the planets swimming far beyond our ken, so in Kaduna North: where there’s water, there’s life.  Several– about three or four - plots of land here are, for no apparent reason, bought and then walled, and then left.  Financial ruin isn’t that common (once you’re up, you’re up), and there’s no real concept of owning things ‘for tax reasons’ because it’s easier to evade tax by paying the taxman; or for investment because that’s not really a concept here - but as far as I can ascertain most of them have been as theynow are for many years.  Pretty much all you can see from the road is grey stone, with wild grasses nodding innocuously above it, and usually pools of water around the outside.  If you’re in a romantic frame of mind, it’s just like a wonderful Old English poem about a ruin: awealstanofharne stanwithhat streamas.  And even if you’re not, it’s like being shut out of a magical mystery land of wildlife and water. One of them (and I doubt it’s by design) has a gap, from the ground to about waist height.  It looks just like a little culvert in an early medieval castle– or indeed in Helm’s Deep.  Water flows out of it constantly, forming a little reedy pond that feeds into channels built along the edge of roads everywhere for stormwater.  You can peek past the flow, into the intensely green world where it’s born, and it’s like a window into the secret garden.  Not that it looks like any garden, of course– and I wouldn’t go in without serious protection for my feet.  But it sure is purdy.There are all the great creatures here you’d expect – birds as everywhere, but more so down by the river.  There’s a bar called ‘Sea Breeze’ which has a big garden looking down at the river and across at the floodplain on the other side – like an alcoholic RSPB hide.  There are bats– huge ones which slowly wing their way across the sky with a clear sense of destination – and those wonderful tiny ones that flit about the streets and trees, defining perpetual motion for the non-physicist.  And there are crickets and locusts, and caterpillars and beetles, and those beautiful lizards, and flies– not just the bad ones (though there are lots of them, nasty tiny things).  Yesterday morning it was pouring with rain (unusually– mostly it rains in thunderous assaults at night).  In an incredibly British way, we were determined to get to work on time (of course, we were the only ones, and didn’t really get dry until the evening.  Why are we so weird?).  Because everyone else, very sensibly, stays under cover when the world is telling them to, we had to walk a long way before we could getachabas– so we had plenty of time to see that there were thousands of quite lovely and large flies, almost like moths, quivering in the hammering rain.  We haven’t seen them before or since.There is, inevitably, a downside to such joys.  Where there’s life, there’re rats.  And where there’s life which doesn’t tidy up after itself, there’re cockroaches.  The rats tend to be a bit smaller than those hulking terrors that stalk the streets of Britain, and they mostly keep to themselves.  I’ve never really minded rats (though mice freak me out a bit), ‘cos they’re big and clever enough to comprehend and reach broadly amicable arrangements with.  I’m no fonder of plague and such-like than the next chap though, and it’s not comforting to see them scurry past your back door on some imperative errand or another.  But I wasn’t really prepared for my reaction to cockroaches.  They aren’t huge here, but they’re not those freakish little wavy things either.  And I like cockroaches (apart from when they carry transferable diseases too, but that isn’t so common).  They’re brilliant, resourceful, well-crafted little fellas who, like vultures, have an absurdly bad press because they do the job we’re too lazy to do for ourselves.  I guess we have an entirely sensible evolved revulsion, given that they’re around because rotten things are – or perhaps it’s just some deranged western nicety – but I’ve been more than happy to play with them, and at one stage would have had some as pets (had I been single…).  When one was in our Guesthouse cupboard, though, my wrists felt as twitchy and helpless as when you see a road accident and don’t know how to help – and my knees were positively unhappy about helping me to move towards it.  Strange, how disconnected mind and body sometimes are.Anyway, beyond some large ants which seem to have some secret bathroom business to transact, our home is tim’rous beastie free (for now), leaving me free to feel excited and curious rather than frightened and murderous.