Dr Patrick Darling

UK - 16-Dec-10 -

Professor Ade Obayemi, the only Director General of Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments to drive away in an old VW Beetle and not a new Mercedes, once requested an ethnographer to go and work at Kwiambana ... but she refused because lions lived in the hills eight km away. Kwiambana walled town lay close to other walled towns in a once densely settled area well east of Zaria, which has a Kuyanbana gate; but the upheavals of the C19th led to depopulation of the region around. One needs to travel by okada (motorbike taxi) and cross one river by foot to reach the site.

Old Ningi was formed of various refugee groups in the mid C19th and lay amidst wild volcanic hills. It raided far and wide, travelling on little-used paths. Its steep-sided Lungu valley fortress was composed of three cross-dykes, the outermost of which was composed of a 2m high mud wall atop a metre high stone base, which acted inside as a parapet. It L-shape close to the main gate provided such effective cross-fire that the wall was never breached. For over half a century, it resisted the surrounding emirates and brought the Bauchi slave-trading economy to its knees. Only treachery revealed a hidden water path for the British to by-pass these walls and capture Old Ningi in the early C20th. A pack of spotted hyenas now live along that path; and vicious wait-a-bit thorn covers much of the old settlement; and the visit by okada along gullied tracks is for the more hardy adventurer.