Katsina nightlife

“She is a prostitute” my companion said, sipping a Maltina.
I was sitting in an enclosed garden bar in Katsina, drinking a nice beer. My companion was sticking to soft drinks.
“How do you know?” I asked, perplexed. Wrapped in a very modest, colourful cloth dress she didn’t look like she’d make a lot of money on the streets of UK red light districts, where they tend to advertise a bit more flesh.
“You see her face is whiter than her ankle,” was my companion’s bewildering reply.
“You can tell just from the colour of her ankle?” I asked, sceptically.
“All these people,” my companion said, “They are hypocrites! They might be telling you one day how to behave and that they are good muslims, and here they are drinking and smoking.”
“But how do they make their faces lighter than their ankles?” I asked, still confused. Apparently there are many different creams and treatments that lighten the skin. The phenomenon of “fanta face, coca-cola leg” is a sure fire way of telling someone’s moral credibility.
I went to Kaduna a little while ago, and a friend decried the scarcity of rooms in the cheap state guest houses.
“They are all full, and you know why?” He answered the question: “Because many government people keep their girlfriends there all the time, and come down to Kaduna on the weekends.”
After this visit, I had occasion to bump into the media man for the A Daidaita Sahu in Kano. I put it to him that it seemed sharia law might not be working in that respect.
He said: “On the contrary, I think it proves it is working.”
“How so?” I said, again perplexed.
“It shows it is working because these people have to go outside the sharia states to engage in their nefarious business.”
My friend who had been exasperated by the lack of cheap lodgings in Kaduna overheard and mimed falling off his chair in merriment.
Whatever the prevailing legal aspect of the Katsina bar we were in, it seemed many people were having a good time.
On a second trip there, a friend and I were invited over to sit with a group of drinkers, at what had become my regular retreat. It was 1pm on Friday, and a considerable amount of alcohol had been consumed already.
It transpired that our hosts were all senior civil servants in the Katsina State government, enjoying their half day. With the help of some Kilishi I had bought we spent a very pleasant evening chatting about politics, and other things.
I offered one of our new friends a drink, he turned it down saying: “It is against my religion”. I was flustered and embarrassed to have asked the one observant muslim among this group if he wanted a bottle of something… haram. But after a little while he came and sat by me and hissed at the waiter. “Three star here!” he ordered. The bottles came and I looked for who the third one was for. He gripped one bottle and expertly twisted it against the neck of another, popping the top clean off. Before I knew it he had sucked down the contents of the whole bottle.
He turned to me and said: “I was trying to get that woman to come and sit with me. But it seems that I have not won this time.” He clicked his fingers and ordered the waiter over again. “See that woman in the red? Tell her to come over here, (Insert name of famous Katsina family here) wants to talk to her.” He turned to me. “You can never let one failure get you down.” Later I saw he had attracted the woman he had first tried to woo and who was now sitting behind him. “You see sometimes you win too!” he said. She looked a little bored and sad. I later saw her leave the place on a motorbike, alone. –“Next time lucky, mate,” I thought.
The morning we left the hotel, the original lady my friend had branded as having “easy virtue” emerged from a room, a well dressed man I recognised from the state secretariat in tow.