Lost history · Paintings possibly 1,000-2,000+ years old; reported 1955
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Strike the right boulder at Birnin Kudu and it rings like a bell. Nearby, on the rock faces, someone long ago painted cattle that no longer live in Nigeria.
Birnin Kudu sits in the south of Jigawa State, about 120 kilometres south east of Kano. It is a big, busy local government, the most populous in the state at the 2006 census. It is also the kind of place where the rocks have been quietly holding a secret for a very long time.
Some of the boulders there ring when you hit them. Archaeologists call them lithophones, or rock gongs: natural stones used as percussion instruments. Hit one spot and you get one note, hit another and you get a different one. At Birnin Kudu, a French researcher, Le Quellec, recorded that the lithophones produce eleven different notes. That is not one lucky stone. That is close to a whole instrument made of the landscape.
These are not toys. According to the British Museum's rock art project, the gongs at Birnin Kudu are linked with rituals women go through before marriage. The archaeologist Bernard Fagg, who reported the gongs in 1955, believed they had been in ceremonial use since at least 940 AD, going back to a town called Baud'a that came before Birnin Kudu itself.
The town has its own long history. It was founded as a chiefdom in the tenth century, some decades before Kano, the historian M.G. Smith wrote. Its capital was ringed by walls more than three miles long with twelve fortified gates. Much later, in the 1700s, it chose to submit peacefully to Kano rather than be conquered, and became Kano's south eastern corner. When the jihad swept Hausaland in the early 1800s, Birnin Kudu dug in again. It held out against the new Kano Emirate until 1819, when Emir Ibrahim Dabo marched on it and its chief, Dan Guri, fled with many of his people. The Fulani ruler Dabo put in his place faced a Hausa revolt just two years later. Through all of it, the rocks outside town stayed where they were, still ringing.
Close to the ringing rocks are paintings. This pairing is not a coincidence. Across northern Nigeria, painted rock sites tend to sit next to rock gongs, and Birnin Kudu is one of the places where the two turn up together again and again.
The locals always knew about them. They only reached official reports in 1955, when Fagg wrote them up after an appeal for notes of local historical interest to print in a newspaper published in a local language. He thought the paintings had survived because overhanging rocks sheltered them from rain, and because the air is dry. The rains here come in violent bursts followed by bright sun, so the rock dries fast. Even so, what survives is probably a tiny fraction of what was once painted.
What did the painters choose to show? Mostly cattle, painted in red. Long-horned and short-horned cattle, and the important thing is that none of them have humps. The long-horns are probably the type called Hamitic Long-horn, whose direct descendants now live only in the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea. The short-horns are almost certainly the West African Short-horn, the animal Hausa speakers call muturu. There are sheep too, and geometric signs. One painting site, at Dutsen Mesa, the "rock of the python", is believed to be over 2,000 years old.
The humps are the clue to the age. The cattle you see across the north today are mostly humped. If the painters only drew humpless ones, the argument goes, they probably painted before humped cattle arrived in northern Nigeria. On that basis, the archaeologist Thurstan Shaw suggested in 1978 that the paintings may be at least a thousand years old. Fagg, more boldly, put them at 2,000 years or more. Other researchers looking at nearby sites with horse paintings have argued for other dates. Nobody has settled it.
Nobody knows who the painters were either, or exactly what the images meant. What is clear is how people treat the sites now. Local communities see them as sacred, and the paintings are thought to be linked with spiritual practice. Not far away, at Geji in Bauchi, Fulani herders were recorded scratching pigment off old paintings to mix into food for themselves and their cattle, to protect the herd. Villagers there believed the paintings were not made by people at all but had come out of the rock, and would grow back if damaged. They did not grow back. That practice has destroyed some of the art for good.
In 1964 Birnin Kudu was declared a National Historical Monument, partly to bring in tourists. It has not worked out well. Researchers have complained that the site has been poorly kept and poorly managed, and the visitors never really came. So the rocks still ring, and the cattle are still on the walls, and most Nigerians have no idea either is there.
