Legend · Ancient tradition, still observed · Tradition
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A queen gave birth to twins, one a boy and one a snake. In a desert town on the Niger border, the snakes still come to the palace for weddings, births and coronations, and the emir calls them his brothers.
Machina sits in the far north of Yobe State, right against the border with Niger Republic. It is the headquarters of Machina Local Government and the seat of an old emirate. Around it the land is rocky and dry, yet the town has water. Pools collect in the rocks, and there are old wells with names. One is called Baram Gedimi, which in Kanuri means something like the ancestral well. Another rock pool is called Chira'a, meaning the sandy one. So Machina is an oasis, a green place held inside stone.
People there have a saying about their town: "Machina kirbi kau-wa." A kirbi is the bucket you lower into a well to draw water. Kau-wa means the place with rocks. Put together, the saying calls Machina a water bucket full of rocks, a fair picture of a desert town that sits on wet, rocky ground.
The people mostly speak Manga, a form of Kanuri. Their king is called the Mai Machinama. Mai means king, and Machinama is often taken to mean the monarch of Machina, though the word more plainly means the owner of Machina.
Now to the snakes. In Machina, people say royal blood runs in them. The story goes that long ago a queen in the palace gave birth to twins. One was a human child. The other was a snake. A snake could not stay long at its mother's side, so it slid away into the rocks behind the palace. People say its family has lived there ever since and that its children still carry the honour of royalty.
The present emir, Dr Bashir Albishir Bukar, told the journalist Babagana Kamba of Kanem Press in 2022 that he believes it fully. The snake, he said, began a family in the rocks the way any human family begins. "I am the 77th Mai Machinama," he said, "so there must be one snake that has attained the same position in their kingdom." In other words, if he is the 77th king of the human line, somewhere in the rocks there is a 77th king of the snake line too.
What makes the story come alive is the way the emir talks about the snakes as relatives who drop by. When his father was installed as emir, he said, many snakes came out and gathered at the palace entrance. They mixed with the crowd and harmed nobody. Some journalists who had come to cover the event tried to photograph them, but each time a camera was pointed at a snake, the snake slipped out of sight. In the end the reporters gave up. Only with the family's permission, the emir said, can a person get a picture of them. The palace children take photos freely, because to them the snakes are brothers.
He said the snakes come for sad days and happy days alike. Old snakes were present at his own turbaning. Young ones come out whenever one of his wives is about to give birth, and when he sees them, he prays, because he takes it as a sign that something is about to happen.
When he married his younger wife, a snake moved into the house and stayed more than a week. It would stretch itself along the wall in the morning, vanish in the afternoon, and come back in the evening. The guests were frightened. The bride was frightened too at first, the emir said, but she got used to it. A courtier added that one of the princes sometimes finds a snake in his bed at night and simply pushes it over and lies down beside it.
The family once kept a spot where milk was left out for the snakes, and at sallah, when animals were slaughtered, pieces of meat were thrown around for them. But the emir was clear that they do not eat snakes, and they do not play with them much either. Sometimes, he said, he rescues one himself when it falls into a ditch.
In Machina, killing a snake is forbidden. People say the snakes harm no one unless someone tries to harm them first. Every visitor is told this, and the emir told Kanem Press three stories of people who did not listen.
The first was a snake charmer from outside. One night a snake appeared and his men began to shout. Local people told them to leave it, that it would go its own way. The charmer was sure his powers protected him, and he chased it, trying to stamp on it. The snake bit him. He was rushed off for medicine, but he died, the emir said, while preparing to bathe with it. The snake died too.
The second was a truck driver who came to drive the old emir's lorry. He had brought one wife and married a second, local woman in Machina. When a snake came into the house, the local wife said to leave it. The husband refused to share a house with it, and the first wife, who was pregnant, boiled water and helped him pour it into the snake's hole. According to the emir, her baby girl was born with the movements of a snake. She could not walk, and her parents carried her about in a basin until she died at eighteen. The emir said he knew her when he was young.
The third was a young man clearing the old emir's farm, who killed a snake and tossed it onto an anthill. The ants, the emir said, went back into their holes and did not come out again, and by evening the young man's house was full of snakes. He fell sick, crawling and hissing. Clerics prayed over him at the palace and he recovered, but the sickness came back every season until he died.
There is a gentler story to end on. Once the palace's outer wall fell and was rebuilt, and then fell again, and again. A courtier noticed that the gap the snakes used to come into the palace had been sealed. So when the builders tried once more, they left holes in the wall. The emir says it has stood ever since.
