Custom · Traditional to 1980s · Fact and tradition
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Children in this Katsina town once played with crocodiles at the pond's edge. Each one had a name, a calm old male wore a ring in his nose, and every newborn carried a crocodile mark on the chest. Then the hunters came, and the singer Shata hired young men with sticks and sacks to bring them home.
Musawa is an old town in Katsina State, and if you walk through it you will keep coming upon water. Ponds and soft, marshy patches of sand are spread all over the town. They come in different sizes, and each has its own name. Two of the best known are Tafkin Kada, which means the crocodile pond, and Tafkin Gambo.
The name of the first one tells you what Musawa was famous for. These ponds were once full of crocodiles, and the people of the town say the animals lived alongside them, almost as neighbours. You can still see the ponds today. The crocodiles are gone. People blame hunters.
What made Musawa's crocodiles unusual was not just that there were many of them. It was that each one had a name. People called them by those names and spoke to them.
The town's favourite story is about two of them. One was a male called Dattijo. He was calm and gentle, and he was the one the people loved best. The other was a female called Arkilla, and she was the opposite: fierce and wild. Dattijo was believed to be 200 years old, and he had a ring hanging from his nostril. People brought him offerings. If he accepted what they brought, so the belief went, their wishes would come true.
Nobody agrees on how Dattijo died. Many people believe someone poisoned him while pretending to feed him. Others say it was the trade in crocodile skin, which grew strong in colonial times and sent hunters after the animals until they were wiped out. After Dattijo was gone, the town looked for another crocodile to take his place. They chose one and named him DanDattijo. He was killed in the same way.
In 2016 a 76-year-old man named Malam Halliru Muhammad told the Daily Trust what it had been like to grow up with these animals. As children, he said, they played with the crocodiles. When a crocodile heard people moving about, it would come up out of the pond, and the children would touch it and play with it.
He described the holes inside the banks of the ponds where the crocodiles slept when they were out of the water. They bred there, and the children used to find their eggs. When the rains came and the ponds overflowed, the water spread toward a part of town called Tantanau, and the crocodiles followed it there to be fed by the people. "We never had cause to fear any danger," he said.
The traditional ruler, the Magajin Garin Musawa, Abdullahi Idde, was too young to remember the living crocodiles himself. But he said his generation had grown up on the stories told by their parents and grandparents. The townspeople learned, he said, that Musawa's history is not complete without the crocodiles. You can still see the animal on logos, on stamps, on signboards of some buildings and schools. The old people told him that Tantanau had been the crocodiles' home, where they ate and harmed no one.
There was one custom that tied the people to the crocodiles in their very skin. Every newborn child in Musawa was given a crocodile mark on the right side of the chest. It was simply expected. Anyone born about forty years before 2016 or earlier carries it. The custom stopped in the early 1980s.
The most surprising part of Musawa's crocodile story involves a famous singer, Shata. Dr Aliyu Ibrahim Kankara, a geography lecturer at the Federal University Dutsinma who wrote a book about Shata, says the singer's part in saving the crocodiles should not be forgotten.
When Shata visited Musawa in 1976, he said, the people came to him worried. Their crocodiles were disappearing. They had been seen moving away from two places called Datsin Gabas and Datsin Yamma, and were now settling at Kogin Chofa, Chofa lake, outside the town. People feared that if this went on, the crocodiles would leave Musawa for good.
Shata acted on the spot. He asked for strong young men to be gathered, paid them, and sent them to Chofa to drive the crocodiles back to their old homes. They went with long sticks and sacks, and they brought the animals back into the town. Then Shata sang a song celebrating it. The words, roughly, said: we are happy with Shata, this year he has returned Musawa's crocodiles. It was a new version of a song he had first sung in 1950.
Shata's cousin, Alhaji Balan Guzum, showed the Daily Trust the new pond where the returned crocodiles were kept. For a while, he said, it gave the town real relief after the old ponds at Tantanau had emptied. More than thirty crocodiles of different sizes were raised there again, and people came to admire them.
It did not last. The new crocodiles began to vanish too. Some were moved to Duten Reme, Dikke and Mairuwa in Funtua local government, where they were also raised. But poachers and scavengers kept hunting them, year after year.
Still, Alhaji Guzum said, the people of Musawa and their crocodiles had come a long way together, and nothing could really separate them. "We love each other," he said.
