Chapter 6: Maina Turjiman
The life of Muhammadu Mai Maina; Sarkin, Trader, Soldier, Spy
This is one of my favourite chapters in this book. Not just for the life of Muhammadu Mai Maina but the fact that we see interpretation as a kind of political estate handed down to him from his grandfather, Abbega.
Based on feedback I got on the Audu chapter, I have included a map to give a better visual representation of the territory this story covers.
Introduction: The Parrot’s Work
Chapter 3: Audu With The Big Belly (no paywall)
I
Sometime in 1910, a young Scotswoman named Olive MacLeod interrupted her journey at Lokoja and went to call on the old chief whose house stood near the market. She was on her way up to Lake Chad to find the grave of her fiancé, an explorer killed earlier that year in the country beyond it. She had come up the Niger by steamer, past the floating villages and the distant ranges, and at the quay the resident magistrate had met her and put her up in a government house. The old chief lived among the people. She found him courtly, unhurried, and entirely at ease with her: a man who spoke fluent English and liked to rank the countries he had seen by the richness of their produce, the way another man might rank them by their armies.
He had been to Europe. He told her about it. There had been a dinner for two hundred guests at the Kaiser’s palace, which had impressed him greatly. There had been an audience with Queen Victoria, who had given him forty pounds. And there had been a receiving line of English ladies, each of whom, on shaking his hand, had pressed two shillings and sixpence or five shillings into his palm - so that the African visitor came away from the introductions a little richer with each one. He had seen Europe, in other words, several decades before most Europeans had seen the Margi hills he came from.
The old chief had travelled, as a young man, with two German explorers, and he had been at the side of one of them when he died near the lake. He had buried the man himself - buried him, he said, “deep-deep,” so that the body would lie beyond the reach of digging animals. Then he had gone on with the surviving German, west to Timbuktu and north across the desert, and eventually all the way to those palaces in Europe.
His name was Abbega, or close enough; Abbega, Abbiga, Abiga, Abigeh, and, for one stretch of his life, Frederick Fowell Buxton, after an English philanthropist he never met. He was a Margi from the borderland southeast of Bornu, and he had arrived at that house by the market by a route too incredible for any novelist to submit to an editor: captured as a child, sold, freed by an explorer, carried to Germany and England, baptised, turned to preaching the Gospel, returned to Islam, employed in by a Scottish consul, a French trading house, and an English chartered company, and finally made a chief. By the time MacLeod met him he had outlived almost everyone who could contradict any version of his story.
What she had no way of knowing was that the old man’s compound held a grandson. The boy had been born at Jega and raised on the river, in the same trades of language and usefulness. The Kanuri of Bornu would give him a name that later turned into a title - Maina Turjiman, the prince of interpreters - and he would spend his twenties walking into walled cities under false colours, talking emirs out of their guns, and kneeling among the dead to identify the bodies of fallen sultans. One of the smaller errands that fell to him along the way would be to ride out into the country east of the lake, find an old woman who remembered a grave, and dig up the bones of the very German his grandfather had put into the ground half a century before.
II
The particulars of Abbega’s capture into slavery are lost but the direction ran toward Kukawa, the Bornu capital, the great clearing-house at the western edge of Lake Chad where captured children changed hands. His companion in everything that followed, the Hausa boy Dorugu, left a fuller record of the same system: snatched in a raid as a child of eleven or twelve, carried off to Zinder, sold to a Kanuri merchant, taken down to Kukawa to work as a houseboy, and then resold to an Arab in the city to settle one of the merchant’s debts.
What rescued both boys from that circuit was an accident of geography. In 1851 two German explorers, Heinrich Barth - in his day the foremost European explorer of the Sahara and the central Sudan - and Adolf Overweg, were living at Kukawa, the survivors of a desert crossing that had already killed the leader of their expedition. Dorugu was hired out to Overweg as a camel boy on a journey north of the lake, and he wrote down his first sight of the explorer like a frightened child: “His face and hands were all white like paper, he had a red fez on his head, a long beard.” Overweg bought the boy out of slavery for fifteen Maria Theresa dollars - about twenty-five dollars - and had a redemption certificate written out by a mallam. Abbega, three or four years older, was freed by Overweg in the same fashion. Then, in October 1852, Overweg died of fever near the lake, and the boys passed to Barth. The surviving explorer took both boys west to Timbuktu and back, and then north across the Sahara, and he talked to them the whole way in Hausa - “even mostly,” he wrote, “with the Marghi lad Abbega.”
In 1855 Barth carried the two of them back to Europe, where they were, in all likelihood, the first northern Nigerians ever to set foot in England or Germany. A relative of Barth’s looked them over and recorded that Dorugu was a small, light-skinned, “highly intelligent” Hausa of fourteen; Abbega was “a coal-black muscular Marghi pagan, 18 years old but less gifted than the other.” That verdict did not age well as the “less gifted” of the two boys would go on to learn five African languages besides Arabic and English, to cross between two religions and three European commercial systems, and to die a chief.
Barth meant to keep the boys for two years, have them taught English “and if possible some handicraft,” and then return them home as Christian lay missionaries who would carry the Gospel back in a familiar accent. The boys did not cooperate with the plan. Within months they were homesick, and the British Foreign Secretary (George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon) himself was drawn into arranging their passage - a surviving instruction to the consul at Tripoli directs that the two freed Africans be given an Arabic passport “such as liberated slaves generally receive,” placed under the protection of a trustworthy man bound for Kano, and furnished with a camel.
While the passage was being arranged, the boys were lent to a missionary linguist, the Reverend James Frederick Schön, who had been up the Niger on a calamitous expedition in 1841 and was now assembling the Hausa grammars and dictionaries on which the next half-century of evangelism and administration would lean. The secretary of the Church Missionary Society met the two of them and found them “as home-sick as any Swiss”; to every inducement to remain in England, he wrote, their only answer was “Africa! Africa!” And then, on the eve of departure, they changed their minds. Dorugu announced that if Abbega were willing he would rather stay and be educated than go home in ignorance, and Abbega was willing. Barth refused. He had had a great deal of trouble arranging their passage; he had also been publicly accused by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society of importing two slaves into England. He spoke to the boys sharply in Kanuri and they went down to Southampton subdued, telling the missionary they would rather sail than be a cause of bad feeling between the two men.
Schön followed them to the ship, he said, only to see them off. When they caught sight of him at the quay they asked whether they might still leave the vessel and go with him. He put the question to the captain, who wished to know only one thing - whether it was the boys’ own free choice - and, satisfied that it was, let them disembark. They ran to gather up their few belongings and came away “in great joy.” Had the missionary arrived a few hours later, the ship would have sailed. The point he made afterward, when Barth accused him of taking the boys by “artifice and violence,” was a simple one: they were free men in free England, and had done nothing but what free men were entitled to do.
In Schön’s house at Chatham they settled down to be his pupils. He taught them to read their own tongues from a little primer; he also worked on them for his scholarship, and was candid about the division of labour. Abbega, he found, “spoke Hausa like a foreigner, being a Margi by birth,” though communicative enough to yield a vocabulary and a few stories in Margi itself. Dorugu was the prize - a real Hausa who would dictate to him “for hours together and even till late in the night.” What came out of the boy was the story of his own short life: his Hausa childhood, his capture and sale, the journey down to Kukawa and out across the desert, all the way to England. Around it he wound the rest of what he carried in his head - folktales, riddles, the narratives of how things were done at home - until the missionary had “a Hausa literature of several hundred pages” in front of him, the first connected prose ever written in the language, narrated by a boy of sixteen or seventeen who could not yet speak a word of English. That literature would be printed under the missionary’s name. Its substance had come out of the mouth of a teenager who had been a slave three years before.
In May 1857 the two boys were baptised at the mission house. Dorugu took the names James Henry, after the missionary and the explorer; Abbega was christened Frederick Fowell Buxton, after the missionary and after the great abolitionist who had been called “the friend of the African race.” Then their paths forked. Abbega sailed for Africa that same year; Dorugu stayed on in England for another seven, reading and studying, before going home in 1864.
The two of them met once more, at Lokoja, and then their lives ran apart for good. Abbega went up in the world. Dorugu did not. He drifted, by one account, through “an unsettled life in and around Kano,” surfacing at the turn of the century as a schoolmaster to the new Northern Nigeria Regiment and a Hausa tutor to British officials, ending his days teaching Hausa at a government school for the sons of emirs. When he died in a Kano suburb in 1912 - of a leprosy discovered only at the end, his body “a skeleton with brown parchment stretched over it,” his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, his English still without the trace of an accent - they found in his house the residue of a lifetime spent close to power: boxes of biscuits and cocoa and jam, all unopened, a dozen pairs of spectacles, two 250 pounds in little rolls of gold and silver, and a wardrobe of European clothes from which you could read off, by the initials stitched into them, the names of every white man he had ever served. There was a last turn to it. By law, his Hausa widow stood to inherit the whole of his small estate if she declared herself a Christian, as her husband had been, and only a fraction of it otherwise; the matter was carefully put to her; and she answered, without hesitating, that she was a Muslim, and then gave away as alms the little that came to her. The faith that had been the making of Dorugu’s career did not outlast him by a day in his own house.
