Kaura Namoda Railway: Before And After The Trains
Perhaps, nowhere else was the dawn of the railway system of transportation so arrogantly announced throughout Nigeria, in the early 1900s, than in the ancient town of Kaura Namoda (popularly called Kaura), located about 50 kilometres from Gusau, the capital of Zamfara State. Although the trains were to bring cargo loads of fame, exponential […]
Although the trains were to bring cargo loads of fame, exponential riches, social cohesion and cultural diversity to Kaura in later years before their subsequent demise, they had equally orchestrated the fall of its kings, thus bequeathing it an ambivalent history that is both sweet and sour at the same time.
At the palace of the present Emir of Kaura, councilors painstakingly relate the old negative story without leaving out or skipping a single detail from the historic mosaic.
According to the legend, which dates back to more than 80 years ago, when the Whiteman was laying the railway tracks to open Kaura to the world (or rather for making it easily and maximally accessible for exploitation by the British colonial enterprise), he first connected the historic city of Zaria and then Gusau.
As was the case with other colonial administration’s project, the work was being executed under the watchful eyes of British engineers. The work had reached a village in the outskirts of Kaura Namoda, called Kurya, when a white inspection officer came to assess its progress.
While he was riding on a rail trolley (a hand-driven carriage) on the newly laid rails, a villager called Mamman Epa flagged him down as the carriage approached Kurya. Thinking that he was going to scoop some valuable information, the engineer quickly disembarked and hurriedly met the locals.
The narration revealed that Epa, for yet to be disclosed reasons, hacked the British official to death and disappeared into thin air.
Though he was said to have later been trailed to Funtua in Katsina State, and arrested on the orders of the then Sultan of Sokoto, no one was aware of what had became of his fate after he was dragged to Sokoto to answer for his alleged crime. It was further stated that even with the order from the sultan, the suspect was able to evade arrest by maintaining a low profile, until the day his former girlfriend recognized his customized pipe in a cigarette shop and alerted the police.
The penalty of murdering a British officer was however swiftly exerted on Epa’s traditional rulers. Because Kurya was under the Emir of Kaura, the reigning monarch Sarkin Kiyawa Malam, who was barely two months on the throne, was deposed and banished.
Similarly, the Emir of Kurya, who was his junior – and on whose soil the alleged crime was committed – was also dethroned and sent on exile.
So it followed, that, from then on – until when the last train made its last journey along that axis – the people of Kaura Namoda and other villages surrounding Kurya, would use the rattling sound from an approaching train to make a song, mocking Epa’s village. They would say: kuyi mani murna, na wuce Kurya (let’s celebrate, I have passed Kurya).
But while the railway ousted Kaura’s indigenous rulers on one hand, it ushered in new chiefs; new communities in Kaura, expanded its economy, and enhanced its significance as well as influence on the other hand.
The rail system of transportation was first introduced to Kaura Namoda around 1926 – some 85 years ago – according to the town’s current traditional ruler, Emir of Kaura, Alhaji Muhammadu Ahmad Asha, and since then the history of the town is never really complete with out the mention of the train.
Alhaji Ahmad Asha, the second in the chronicle of traditional rulers, who ruled the kingdom after the change of the ruler’s title from Sarkin Kiyawan Kaura to Emir, and by his own account, is very junior to the contemporaries of the railway’s early days in the community.
In spite of the gap, the monarch was able to give a picture of what his people have dearly missed about train days. He mustered some of his exposé from his personal experience, drawn from few years of contact with the railway, while most of it came from a repository of valuable facts he had received from his “elders.”
“We were told that railway was introduced to our community at a period when cotton and groundnut farming, as well as hides and skin businesses were booming,” he related. The rail system helped improve those agrarian activities in great ways, he said.
“Farm produce were brought from as far as Niger Republic on camels and donkeys, to be loaded onto trains for transportation to other parts of the country and abroad. In return, goods available in those regions were freighted back to Kaura by the train. That activity bolstered economic growth and coming together of our people and people of other tribes from different parts of the country,” the Emir stated.
With a hint of nostalgia, the traditional ruler recollected the days when groundnut pyramids were an unexceptional achievement for his people, while contrasting them with the present, when no such things exist. “Nowadays, not a single groundnut pyramid can be found anywhere around here, simply because the railway system is dead,” he lamented with concern.
“If government will revive the rail transportation, it will be in the greatest economic interest of Kaura Namoda and the country in general,” Alhaji Ahmad Asha enthused.
The idea of sighting a railway terminus at Kaura Namoda was resorted to, according to unconfirmed reports, after an initial plan to locate it at Sokoto was scuttled by a stiff opposition from the then Sultan, who was said to have based his rejection on the ground that the railway was capable of corrupting morals and inducing decadence.
The reports further had it that prayers were organized consistently to repel the approaching ‘disaster’, until Kaura Namoda was subsequently chosen as a new terminal.
It was gathered that a site had already been proposed for a railway station in Sokoto, before the project was jettisoned.
The construction of a branch line from Zaria to Kaura Namoda terminus, connecting with the main lines from Lagos and Port Harcourt, was said to have been completed in 1929.
One of the greatest achievements brought about by the railway is the settlement of peoples from other parts of the country in Kaura Namoda. And one group which still maintains a significant presence in the community is the Yoruba tribe.
Historically, trade relations between the Hausa people of Kaura Namoda and the Yorubas of Western Nigeria, had been in place before the advent of rail transportation into the country, when trading missions were undertaken to either region by the two races.
The novel role played by the railway in further integrating the two peoples, was by enticing the Yorubas to make Kaura Namoda their home.
Alhaji Hamza Alhaji Badaru is the Sarkin Yarbawa (Yoruba Chief) in Kaura. His bearing the Hausa title of Sarki, instead of Oba, underscores the strong affinity that has grown between the tribes. Like Alhaji Badaru, his father before him, was the chief of the Yoruba in the community. In fact he was their first in Kaura.
But unlike the current chief, who was born 60 years ago in Kaura, his father belonged in the category of Yoruba who would bring goods from the West to the area, in exchange for the ones they would take back home.
The trader was also among the first set of non-indigenes to be motivated by the promising new railway to settle permanently in Kaura, where before his death, he gave birth to a number of children, two of which had ruled.
Alhaji Badaru took our correspondent round his family compound and into its cornfield backyard, containing the tomb of his parents.He returned to his sitting room to tell their (Yoruba’s) story of Kaura.
His parents before him had the land tilled and planted corn in that backyard in Kaura. His elder brother, who had ruled before him, also did the same. So he hopes his children will same do after him. “Kaura is my home,” he said, with strong conviction. “My father started ruling in 1943, followed by my brother and then, now, me. That explains how deeply rooted we are to this place,” he stated, adding “For originality, I’m a native of Iwo Malami in Osun State, while in reality, I’m an indigene of this place.”
All his claims about holding Zamfara State indigeneship have been respected over their years. While he rose from the position of a classroom teacher to become a senior staff in the zonal education office of Kaura Namoda, his wife, also Yoruba, is the principal of a girls’ secondary school in Zurmi local government of the state. He testified that they never faced any discrimination on account of their “origin”.
He traced the first contact of Yoruba with Kaura Namoda to 1901, when according to him, “They started by trading kolanuts , palm oil and ginger,” adding, “They would take back with them, beans, hide and skin, eggs and fish.”
The goods were transported on camels and donkeys, says Alhaji Badaru. According to him, most of the Yoruba traders hailed from Ilorin and Oyo States. “But as soon as the rail system was established, other Yorubas, especially Ogun and all over the south west, trooped to the north to take up jobs as railway cashiers and clerks,” he explained. Others also worked for trading companies.
From that moment, he related further, his kinsmen began to settle there and helped found a second town known widely as Sabon Garin Kaura (new Kaura). “Apart from the Yorubas, other non-natives who settled in the area included people from Katsina, Kano, Funtua and Birnin Kebbi, with majority of them coming as either labourers or traders,” Alhaji Badaru narrated.
He continued: “Sixty per cent of the population of Sabon Gari Kaura is made up Yorubas and Igbos. Any house around here that is not owned by a Yorubaman, must have been sold out by one,” he emphasized.
Their relatively sizeable number notwithstanding, the Yoruba settlers did not stay away from their hosts – they instead mixed up with them. Alhaji Badaru’s sister, Rabi, has been married to a Hausaman for close to 50 years, and when we interviewed him some months ago, he disclosed that his own daughter was being prepared to take a Hausaman as a husband, “in few months to come,” he stressed. Several other intertribal unions had taken place over the years between the two tribes.
“I know of many Yorubamen who are married to Hausa women,” said the chief. In all, he put the number of Yoruba speaking people residing in Kaura as teachers, students and settlers to be in the region of 10,000. “Now the Yorubas are of two categories here.We have the indigenes who were born and brought up in this place, and those who moved in here later in their lives, for reasons of work or study.”
But one serious issue that is giving him so much concern is the new form of discrimination targeting some of his subjects, particularly those whose parents came to Kaura long before his own. He listed treatments like denying them indigeneship certificates, or labeling them as strangers to be the cheap forms of the prejudice that he said is fast gaining grounds.
Much as he detested the withering away of the bonds of harmony and brotherliness that had kept their two peoples as equals in Kaura, Alhaji Badaru is also pained by the collapse of the railway, which had first contrived their coming together.
Not far away from his palace, a couple of hundred metres off a major road traversing the Sabon Garin Kaura, is the famous Kauran Namoda railway station, formerly revered for its high locomotive and human traffic, now sitting like a ghost town.
Only the three tracks look clean and their ballast stone walls shiny, as though commissioned newly and anticipating the arrival of the station’s first train. Aside these lines, everything else looks grotesque and misshapen. Two large stores – one made of corrugated sheets and the other of bricks – occupy an extensive platform, with nothing to show than their abject state of decay.
The second one has its roofs and gates completely blown bearing age-old junk, with only once-prosperous item a rusted safe, devotedly geared to a corner and locked. The strong building and other standing structures, have apparently endured to provide posterity with an idea of the fortune that has been deliberately or inadvertently allowed to waste.
At the stations ticket point and control room, only some mailbags, mutilated levers and another locked safe, have survived to prove that some form of organized human activity once thrived there, only less than half a century ago.
At the side of a window, on which it is inscribed, “Tickets for All Stations,” a giant metal scale for weighing goods is markedly present, however, now occasionally serving as a good resting place for goats and rams.
Part of the station has been taken over by a school. Similarly, one out of four platforms used for erecting the historic groundnut pyramids, for which the northern region was exceptionally famous, is now being used as a badminton court for students. The presence of the court notwithstanding, there seems to be a deliberate effort to preserve the site for historical purposes – no more for pyramids, evidently.
Then a large staff quarters, containing dozens of houses, but now completely deserted. The only person occupying one of the rooms with his children, had been retired from the services of the Nigerian Railway Corporation two years ago.
Yusuf Usman, 66, joined the services of the corporation in 1973 under the engineering department. After working in Nguru, Kano and Zaria, he came to Kaura on transfer and retired in 2009. Usman sired 13 children, some of whom died and some married.
Though from Mangu in Plateau State, his eldest daughter is married to a native of Kaura Namoda, and by his own account, she was to go for the just concluded hajj exercise to Saudi Arabia. Usman recalled that in the heydays of the Nigerian railway, Kaura used to be a Mecca of sort for travellers.
“There were a lots of people coming from Katsina, Shinkafi and many other places at that time to board the train. Others were coming for the freight services,” he explained. According to this railway veteran, two trains stopped at the terminus on a daily basis, saying one of them carried passengers and the other freights.
“The quarters used to be fully occupied and the station was like a big market, but now I’m the only one around. All my colleagues packed out as they retired,” he said with an expression of self pity crossing his face. Usman, who was sick during the interview, disclosed that half of his retirement benefits has been paid to him by his bank , and that he was waiting to take the balance before he will move out of the official residence.
Beside the routine maintenance work that is carried out on the tracks by the NRC, Usman said some Chinese experts visited the station earlier in the year in the year, raising hope of reviving the Kaura Namoda line of the railway in the near future.
“Government should work towards resuscitating it, because it will serve the interest of the country,” he advised.
Also recalling the past years of the railway, Sarkin Sudan Kaura Namoda, Alhaji Umaru Abubakar, said other than people who brought goods from the southern parts of the country, Nigeria’s neighbours in Niger Republic were not left out of the trading activity.
“They would come from Tasawa, Gazawa, Age, Chaduwa and other parts of Niger Republic with groundnuts produce,” he stated, adding that “more supply of the produce for transportation to south came from Katsina, Wagini and Batsari.”
Some local companies were also set up to act as agents for bigger ones , like U.A.C. GB Ollivant Nigeria Limited, London & Kano (L&K) Trading Company Limited and Lambrosini Limited, disclosed Alhaji Umaru Ibrahim, Magajin Kaura.
The agents were tasked with penetrating villages located far and near to buy groundnuts and cotton.
Alhaji Ibrahim recalled that his father, that of the present Emir of Kaura and some others, jointly owned the then Kaura Namoda Trading Company, which was popularly called KNTC, through which they sent agents to buy the products to be exported by their multinational partners.
What still remains of the companies, are their abandoned warehouses, now completely surrounded by farmlands. Sunday Trust observed that, the railway’s collapse also contributed in killing the activities of the town’s produce inspection office.
Inside the visibly ransacked office, there are still documents belonging to the Northern States Marketing Board. An entry in one of the documents labeled P.I.D Identification Certificate and signed on 8 February, 1976, was showing that 140 bags of groundnut were “correctly inspected” and “confirmed.”
On copies of small green cards, were inscribed Grade II Seed Cotton and every other thing inside the room looked turned upside down, motley coloured forms and registers, cotton tags, mini-sized red boxes , carrying names like Kagaran Dan Daura, etc all dotted the anthill-infested floor.
Although no official was on ground to give explanations, people in the vicinity informed Sunday Trust that the office was the quality control room, for all produce to be transported out of Kaura by train.
Forty-six-year-old Nasiru Makwashe, is a native of Kaura Namoda, and as a young boy, he had seen the good side of this office as well as the railway and even made some “gains” from them. “As children, we went to the train station to pick cotton pieces falling from the bales. Once we had a bagful, we would go for weighing and then sell each kilo at the cost of 10 Kobo. We could earn up to 50Kobo a day, and that was big money then,” he recollected.
The train was to serve him more profitably when he enrolled in school located in faraway Bakura. “I would pay 10kobo to board a train to Gusau, from where I took a vehicle to my school in Bakura.” Makwashe said he was not happy with the collapse of the railway which put many people out of job, and also diminished the economic life of his community. He was even bitterer on personal note: “Now my children cannot enjoy such luxury.”
His friend, Alhaji Kasimu Idris, who also is the Sole Administrator of Kaura Namoda local government councils, has taken part in previous attempts to revive the railway. Under the auspices of a committee of natives of the area, Alhaji Idris once met with a chairman of the local government council to emphasize the need for reviving the railway in Kaura, but nothing had came out of it.
Now occupying the same office, he pledged to work in collaboration with his counterparts in neighbouring Shinkafi, Zurmi, Tsafe and Birnin Magaji Local Government Areas to campaign for resuscitating the rail line. “I am optimistic about it. We can start here at the state level and form the necessary bulwark that can take it up to national level, and I’m very sure we will get listening ears,” he asserted.
“Railway contributed greatly to the development of Zamfara, the North and Nigeria. By and large, it promoted Kaura Namoda to a position where after mentioning Kano, when one was talking about the rail system, you called of Kaura. We are yearning for the return of that era,” he prayed.
At the railway station in the state capital Gusau, it is the same story of no passengers, no goods, no trains and no business. Save for a few staff and a dead train car that stretched out on one of the lines, backing the route to Kaura, no activity is going on.
However, Sunday Trust reliably gathered from sources that in spite of the halt in train movements along the routes, staff of the NRC carry out routine maintenance work on the tracks to keep them in good shape, perhaps in anticipation of the return of the trains .
It was learnt from an official that the station’s only rail trolley, is being refurbished to facilitate constant inspection of the maintenance work on the tracks.
Just before the enormous gate of Kaura Namoda town, a yellow X sign reading “Railway Crossing” is perching metres from the point where the tracks cut through thick mound of newly asphalted road. It is easy for motorists plying it to get the message – the train can come at anytime – but it is difficult to tell how soon, especially for the people of Kaura Namoda, who may have to compose a new song, should that happen.