Bauchi

Bauchi was founded at the start of the nineteenth century by Yakubu, a scholar and soldier and the one ruler of the Sokoto Caliphate who was not Fulani, who took a flag from Usman dan Fodio during the jihad of 1804 and carved out an emirate on the hilly country south-east of the Hausa states. His town, established in about 1809 and sometimes called Yakubun Bauchi after him, became the seat of one of the largest emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate, drawing in a patchwork of peoples from the plateau and the plains who had not been part of the Hausa world.

The British arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century and ruled through the emir as they did elsewhere in the north; in 1926 the town became the headquarters of Bauchi province. Mission and colonial schools produced a generation of northern civil servants, and when the railway reached Bauchi in 1961 the town grew as a collecting point for groundnuts and cotton and a trade centre for grain and livestock.

The most consequential of them was Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, born in the south of the province in 1912, a teacher who became Nigeria's first prime minister at independence in 1960 and was killed in the coup of January 1966. He is buried in Bauchi, and the mausoleum built over his grave is the city's best-known monument. Bauchi State was created in 1976 out of the old North-Eastern State, with the town as its capital; Gombe was separated from it as a state of its own in 1996. Since then the city has grown steadily as an administrative and university centre while the wider northeast has been shaken by insurgency.

The city is unusual in the northeast for how mixed it is: Hausa and Fulani predominate, but the state contains dozens of smaller peoples from the plateau edge and the southern hills, among them the Sayawa, Jarawa and Gerawa, and the city draws people from all of them. Hausa is the common language of the street, with English in offices and classrooms.

Most residents are Muslim and the Friday mosque and the five prayer times shape the week, but there are substantial Christian communities and churches, particularly among migrants from the south of the state. Relations between the two are a constant subject of local politics, and religious and traditional leaders are expected to keep the peace between them.

The Emir of Bauchi remains a figure of standing, and the Eid durbars outside the palace, with horsemen in quilted trappings, are the city's great public spectacle. Weddings and naming ceremonies are large and formal, with matching cloth for families and friends. Crafts include leatherwork, weaving, embroidery of the long babban riga robes, and pottery. Bauchi is proud of Tafawa Balewa, whose face is on the national currency and whose name is attached to the university and the airport, and of the wildlife reserve that gives the state its tourist reputation.

Bauchi is a state capital of several hundred thousand people; the 2006 census counted 493,810 people in its local government area, and the city has spread outwards along its main roads since. Its economy rests on government — the state secretariat, courts, schools and hospitals — together with the university, trade at the market and the farming of the country around it.

That country grows millet, sorghum, maize, groundnuts, beans and, on wetter land, rice and vegetables, and Fulani herders move cattle through the savanna. Small workshops, tanneries and food processing add to the mix, and a steady flow of traders passes through on the roads between Jos, Gombe and Kano.

The rhythm of the day starts early, before the heat: markets and offices open at first light, the middle of the day is slow, and the streets fill again in the late afternoon and evening, when food stalls and grills come out and people gather over sweet tea. Electricity supply is unreliable, so generators are common, and water supply is a recurring complaint. Poverty and youth unemployment are high, many children are out of school, and the city has absorbed people displaced by the conflict further north-east, adding to the pressure on housing and services.

Bauchi eats the grain-based food of northern Nigeria. Tuwo — a stiff porridge of millet, sorghum, maize or rice — is the daily staple, eaten with a soup poured over it: miyan kuka, dark and slightly sour, made from dried baobab leaves; miyan taushe, thickened with pumpkin and groundnuts; or miyan yakuwa, made from sorrel leaves. Rice with a tomato and pepper stew is the other standard plate, and dan wake, small dumplings of bean flour dressed with oil and pepper, is a cheap and popular lunch.

Meat is the pride of northern cooking. Suya, thin skewers of beef rubbed with the peppery groundnut mix called yaji, is grilled at roadside stands in the evening; kilishi, beef sliced paper-thin, spiced and dried in the sun, keeps for weeks and is the gift people carry home; and dambu nama, shredded and fried spiced beef, is another way of preserving it.

Breakfast and snacks come from the stalls: masa, small fermented rice cakes cooked in a dimpled pan, kosai, fried bean fritters, and fried yam or plantain. Fura da nono, millet dough balls stirred into fermented milk, is sold by Fulani women and drunk as a meal. Kunu, a millet drink, zobo made from hibiscus and very sweet tea are the everyday drinks, and alcohol plays little part in public life.