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The harmattan wind infused the narrow passageways with the pungent odour of handcrafted leather. I bought beautiful snakeskin handbags and leather sandals, and when the trader placed another of his purses in my hand, I willingly, reluctantly, happily accepted it at a silly price. It was far easier, though, to say no to the modern, Africa-shaped leather pendants, those tacky symbols of Pan-Africanism.

Afterwards I took an achaba towards Dala Hill, the highest point in Kano. The bike weaved through the Old City, which, like the market, consisted of narrow alleyways flanked by flat-roofed, one-storey buildings, some of them centuries old. The occasional satellite dish poked out above the rooftops, but for the most part any shiny gloss of modernity was dulled by the fast-encroaching Saharan sands, which blended with the ochre houses, tree branches, human skin and soil to form a kaleidoscope of brown.

A few people rode through the streets on horseback. I saw flashes of women and girls in brilliantly coloured headscarves, materialising between buildings like shy tropical birds. Their colourful veils – lemons, pinks, bright oranges, lilacs – made my all-black hijab seem needlessly austere and dull. I questioned why I bothered wearing it; I also questioned whether headscarves actually protected Nigerian
women's modesty. Our coiffeurs aren't the focus of our sex appeal. If anything, Muslim African women should hide the curve of their backsides from the gaze of men, not their hair.

Kano women were a mystery to me, an inconspicuous, penumbral presence in the city, partaking little in public activity. Men appeared to do everything: they made up the entirety of cinema audiences, dominated the basketball courts, repaired clothes and sold all the fruit on the roadside.

‘Ninety per cent of my friends in the north don't work,' said Rabi Isa, from her desk at the British Council in the centre of town. ‘Many of them have degrees but they got married and started having children straight after graduation.'

Rabi was an unusual specimen – an employed Hausa woman who wore T-shirts and jeans, but kept the headscarf on. She didn't bend completely to sharia law or other religious rules. A few of her friends wanted to start earning money now that their marriages were in trouble, she said, but most of them still preferred to defer to men.

‘I tried to organise a debate about women running for the presidency. I wanted to invite an eminent female professor to speak in favour of the notion, but she declined because she didn't believe in the idea of a female president.'

Rabi said that another woman, a state commissioner, also declined her invitation on the basis that she was happy to occupy a high-status position so long as she could answer to a man above her.

‘Is sharia law still being enforced?' I asked.

‘Not really. Sharia was mainly for political gain,' Rabi believed. ‘The present governor got lots of grassroots support for it, especially in the rural areas.'

In the late 1990s, military rule had ended, and legions of poor Muslims were anxious to combat the corruption, poverty, elitism and baggy-jeaned hip hop threatening their culture. Sharia law was introduced in several northern states around that time. Emboldened conservatives pushed for it to be introduced in Kano, which though
Islamic, considered itself too complex and diverse to lurch in such a conservative direction. But intense local support, backed by Islamic preachers and scholars, compelled the Kano government to gradually introduce the new law.

Women were banned from riding achabas and alcohol was prohibited in all areas. A sharia police force known as the Hisbah patrolled the streets and enforced the new rules, sometimes very enthusiastically. By some reports, they raided a wedding suspected of conducting un-Islamic activities, and invaded certain private homes for the same reason. Although sharia applies to Muslims only, Christian women seen straddling achabas were beaten, and so too were their hapless drivers. The government was forced to relax the achaba ban after vehement public protests.

The Hisbah also made themselves unpopular with the secular police force, which bristled at having to share its authority with them. The forces clashed regularly. While the Hisbah confiscated alcohol, the secular police were escorting lorry shipments of liquor in exchange for tips. This convinced the Hisbah that the secular police were deliberately undermining sharia law in collusion with the government, which had implemented the Islamic code reluctantly. The government had failed fully to fund provision of sharia reference books to train new judges, or to pay existing judges on time. Consequently, sharia never established itself as strongly as hoped (or feared) in Kano. The hand amputation machines said to have been imported from Saudi Arabia were never used, adulterers were never stoned and sharia courts took too long to process legal cases anyway.

The secular government neutered the Hisbah's powers even further by introducing its own compliant Hisbah force, thus splitting sharia policing in two, and giving the secular police the option of ignoring cases brought by the non-government Hisbah. As sharia's influence waned, the prostitution and alcohol consumption it helped to reduce tiptoed back into Kano life.

Supporters of sharia law accused the authorities of equivocating about the more serious issues. The ordinary poor folk watched corrupt politicians get richer, while the sharia authorities focused on the fripperies of film censorship and dress codes.

‘Sharia is hypocritical,' Rabi said. ‘There's one rule for men and another for women. It was basically introduced as a way of controlling women. Men can do what they like. There's an area just here, near Government House. Prostitutes congregate there every night. The politicians know they're there but they don't do anything about it. If sharia is anti-corruption, why don't those corrupt politicians get their eighty lashes?'

That night, I walked around the Sabon Gari (‘foreign quarter'), a section of town where non-Muslims are traditionally exempt from Islamic laws and customs. While the rest of the city fell dark and silent, the Ibo Road hummed with life. For the first time that day, I observed men and women socialising freely. Further along the street, the silhouettes of Hausa men in their fez-style kufi hats fronted tiny, light-filled street taverns crammed with bottles. Suya barbecue smoke mingled with the exhaust fumes of passing cars, and the cars' red tail lights complemented the occasional red light bulb hanging above a front door. At a table outside one restaurant, four animated men drank and joked in the presence of a scantily dressed woman who sat sulkily beside them, an inanimate accessory to their chatter. I wondered if she was dreading ‘dessert' with her client. Hedonism, the flip side of the piety coin, had reasserted itself in Kano.

I realised that the power struggle between Islam and Christianity here requires enormous dexterity, like conducting a wrestling match on a tightrope. Compromise is key. Prior to the elections of 2007, after much internal infighting, political parties running for office included Muslims and Christians on their tickets. And in the 2006 national census, questions about religious affiliation were left out altogether, such is the sensitivity of the issue. Revealing the true
sizes of the Christian and Muslim populations was considered too great a risk.

Maintaining our ethno-religious Pangaea requires skilful manoeuvring and compromise, something that Nigerian politics – for all its evils – has achieved. On some level, I admired the adeptness with which our society handles its cultural fault lines – especially when compared to the British angst over its tiny Muslim minority. Our sporadic flashes of violence don't reflect complete failure, I realised, but instead the occasional spewings of an active volcano that Nigerian society has done remarkably well to contain.

 

Back in my bed at the guest house, I watched TV. Many of the shows and commercials were dubbed or subtitled in the Arabic tones of Hausa. English-language TV and Nollywood movies aren't as popular in the north since English isn't as widely spoken here. The movies' witchcraft themes also hold less appeal, I was told, because pre-Islamic animism was severely dented during the Fulani jihads, which swept across the Hausa states in the nineteenth century. Many Hausas prefer culturally similar Bollywood movies over Nollywood films.

The nationwide cable channel still broadcasts Nollywood movies, however. A film called
Long John
came on, the best and funniest Nollywood film I'd seen. The eponymous central character (played by my favourite actor, Nkem Owoh) storms around his village, raging at the immorality he witnesses around him.

In one scene, Long John encounters a member of the village committee canoodling with a woman by a tree. When the couple realise that Long John is approaching them, the woman hides in front of the man.

‘What are you doing?' Long John enquires aggressively.

‘I'm just urinating,' the terrified man tells him, keeping his back to Long John. ‘I'll . . . I'll see you at the meeting.'

But Long John spots a piece of the lady's clothing dangling between the tall man's legs.

‘Are you wearing apron?' he sarcastically asks the man. ‘Are you urinating white silk? . . . Ah, I go see legs, o! You are urinating a whole human being.'

The tall man bribes Long John with alcohol to keep quiet about this sexual indiscretion. Long John accepts the bribe, then says he'll still report the incident to the village elders. The next we see of him, he's drunkenly complaining to a goat about how rogues, his ‘fellow goats', have entered Nigerian politics.

Long John brilliantly captures the archetypal mouthy Nigerian who hollers pious, rapid-fire invective, reducing his victims to quivering little children. His rage, his hypocrisy, and the dialogue – delivered in typically starchy, vernacular English – was hilariously authentic. He reminded me of Michael Douglas's character in the Hollywood film
Falling Down
, whose frustration at society sends him on a wanton, self-destructive warpath around the city.

Long John later catches another couple canoodling. He accuses the man of being too lustful (‘Even a she-goat is in trouble with you') and advises him to ‘offload the burden around your waist and discharge it' by the tree. ‘I can see you want this place to be germinating ground for bastards,' he spits disdainfully.

Next, Long John staggers drunk into a meeting of the council of elders and demands that from then on everyone should speak to him in ‘Queen's English'. He turns to the chief. ‘You have no manhood between your testicles,' he tells the old man before accusing him of embezzling public money. The other elders agree, and accuse the chief of living a rich lifestyle: quaffing only expensive bottled water, and ‘masticating fruit like
mad
'.

The film goes on like this, a series of scenes covering everything from the sexual indiscretions of church members to theft (increasingly on Long John's part). We see him capitulate further to his own vices when he tries to seduce his friend's pretty niece. Long John
steals his own wife's clothes and offers them to the niece as ‘brand new' presents – at which point, the film suddenly ends.

Nollywood movies are notorious for dividing themselves into three one-hour-long instalments, designed to create more money for producers. Unless one watches every segment, it's not always possible to understand the plots and overarching messages. Not once can I remember completing a Nollywood film from start to finish. I could only guess what message
Long John
's director was imparting. Even so, the brilliance of the script and relatively high-quality cinematography gave me another glimpse of what Nigerian cinema could achieve one day. Uplifted, I fell into a deep sleep.

 

When the British overran Kano in 1903, they took over Gidan Makama, the home of a member of the Hausa aristocracy (‘Gidan' means ‘house' and ‘Makama' means ‘heir apparent' to the emir). The colonialists used the building as their administrative headquarters. The Malian-style edifice had cool interiors and rounded turrets protruding from sloping, sturdy mud walls, its exterior printed with the interlocking Hausa-Fulani symbol. Today, Gidan Makama is used as the city's main museum.

I met my guide inside the dark, cool interior. He was a lovely Hausa man who spoke broken English. I never asked him his name, so I'll call him Amadu. We walked through the first room, which contained black-and-white photos of old Kano, still walled, still separated from the outside world by wooden doors, also decorated with carvings of the Hausa-Fulani motif. The museum's collection of artefacts demonstrated Kano's early sophistication and connections with the outside world: arrow-proof battle shields made from elephant hide; wooden guns manufactured by Kano citizens in the sixteenth century; horned animal masks used as decoys for hunters; various examples of Mali-style, turreted mud-wall architecture.

Beyond the courtyard, in a second set of rooms, a cabinet
displayed the emir's clothes, including a pair of ornately designed trousers that must have been 2.5 metres wide between the legs. Amadu laughed with me. He explained that the emir used the excess fabric as a cushion to prevent saddle-soreness during long journeys on horseback.

Another room showed two sacks printed with the Barclays Bank logo and filled with groundnuts. Until fairly recently, groundnuts were used as a form of currency in Kano, each bag representing the equivalent of £100.

‘My mother could not adjust to the use of notes and coins,' Amadu told me. ‘When I told her something cost
1,000, she asked me, “How many bags is that?” Groundnut was our cash crop in those days. In the south you had palm oil and cocoa. Now it's all oil. I think the government do not take an interest in tourism because of oil.'