Sabon Giri

I get to Sabon Giri, the foreigners quarter of Kano, by 9pm. The taxi drops me outside the Independence Hotel on Enugu Road. Across the street, a line of open air bars, with televisions turned to the customers near the shacks that store the drinks. A little further away, there is the noise of arabic-hausa pop music blaring out from behind a compound. A metal door to the compound opens and closes. To begin, I assume it is an Islamic club for youngsters, NASFAT or northern equivalent, and hold my distance. But from those entering and leaving, something tells me it is otherwise. I step forward.

Entering the compound, I find myself in a space full of men (most look like hausa guys), with women in blue lace and gele's walking langorously about. They weave between the men, stopping a while. Hands touch hands lightly. The women smoke cigarettes casually, fingers light against the rolled stick. I ask the man at the gate what is taking place here. He says it is 'hausa gramma'. It doesn't look like a language class to me, so I ask him again. 'It is hausa gramma, you know, dancing. Please, take a seat, they have only just started.'

I sit down at the back, on a bench, behind a row of men who are chatting excitedly in hausa. One of the women at the front starts dancing, facing the crowd. Her hips undulate; she does Egyptian-style movements with her hands. A man gets up and starts spraying her. Then another man gets up and starts dancing close to her, but not too close. An invisible pressure seems to stop things becoming too bodily. One of the blue-lace women strolls near me. Although dressed in Yoruba atire, she doesn't look Yoruba at all - she looks northern.

I try to understand what I see before me. The space is complex: from where I am sitting, I cannot see the full extent of the courtyard, it opens out to the left. Perhaps there are rooms leading off that are available? The evening is young: where will it end? Most of the men here are hausa, coming to stare at Yoruba-dressed women, and play the Yoruba game of spraying money. It is as if the Yoruba woman has become the totem for a repressed sexuality, and Yoruba owambe behaviour the code for entering the world of desire. Dressed in lace and gele, she becomes the figure of the courtesan; just out of reach, yet just within reach, the elegantly folded geisha of West Africa.

Sabon Giri is home to a million people. There is no electricity at night. The quarter is pure shadow, lit by the thousands of flickering kerosene lamps of the street sellers. The roads are craterous. People from place to place on achamba (motorbike taxi). Women walk around with bare arms and in jeans - something you don't see in central Kano at all. Sabon Giri is the unrepressed shadow within the Shariah State of Kano: all Muslim cultures have such a space. It is the space where desire is let loose. It is where Nigeria mixes itself up and spits itself out in a variety of transgressions.

I leave the courtyard, and take a seat at one of the open air bars. Prostitutes lurk in the shadows; men come to talk to them, the usual arrangements are made. After my beer, I go to talk to one of them. She says she is from Port Harcourt and is renting a room in a nearby hotel. I ask her how much for the night. She says the whole night is not possible, it can only be for a short while. I ask how much for a short while. She looks at me, then looks at her friend, her mind testing the limits of retail price inflation. After ten seconds, she blurts out four thousand naira (around sixteen UK pounds or 30 dollars). I walk away to find a taxi and my hotel, alone.