Beside Kofar Nassarawa, a gate to the mud wall that once ringed the Muslim heart of Kano, a city in northern Nigeria, there is a mai gyara, a mechanic who repairs scooters and motorbikes. On this atrophying wall in the 1990s there was a poster of Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, a radical Islamic leader, and next to him one of Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shia leader Zakzaky championed. No doubt the mechanic or one of his assistants was a fan of Zakzaky, a fi gure of some charisma among the Muslim youth of the North, but the fact that someone else had tried to tear off the poster of Khomeini registered the wider suspicion that Hausa Sunnis have for Shia worship. Once, while my Vespa was in a line waiting to be repaired, one of the assistants switched cassettes on an old tape player and started playing a bandiri tape. As he did so, one customer started to hum along, recognizing the Indian fi lm tune on which the song was based, but not knowing the words of this Hausa variation. Bandiri singers are Hausa musicians who take Indian fi lm tunes and change the words to sing songs praising the prophet Muhammad. This action sparked an immediate response from two customers who looked on with distaste–clearly uncomfortable at being subjected to this music while waiting for their bikes to be repaired. Their discomfort provoked a mild but clear debate splitting the mechanics and customers–all from the old city of Kano–into three discrete groups: those who wanted to hear the bandiri music; those, including the man humming along, who did not care one way or another, and the last two customers asking for the music to be stopped.
