City of lost children

My colleague was washing his feet before going inside the mosque that flanks the square.
“I’ll just go and pray” he said.

“Sure” I replied.
I turned around and standing there, staring at me, was a huge crowd of children.
Kano is a city of children. They stand on corners and junctions, outside cafes holding bowls, leading their infirm parents around, security guards scatter them like locusts but they really have nowhere to go.
“I think I’ve drawn a crowd” I said, and waved at the kids standing there. No one waved back. They contemplated me quietly. Big eyes slowly, unflinchingly, scanned me. Somehow, the white of their eyes seemed to penetrate me.
One who had been sucking a frozen yoghurt pack spoke. He was talking about me, making an observation, but I had no idea what. Their dirty clothes were tattered. If I moved left they followed with their eyes, and then reformed around me. They didn’t touch me, they just looked. I had to get out of there.
What happens to these children? These lost boys? The way they are always under people’s feet, in and out of the traffic, probably sleeping rough, I’d say many of them die before they reach their early teens. Theirs is a vulnerable life. I can’t see how they can survive on begging alone. The very youngest will probably sift through piles of rubbish, where the weak ones will die of disease. They will fight over the limited amount of scraps that fall from the table, the stronger ones will get them, the weaker ones will not. Out on the street many will be crushed by trucks or run over by cars. Also they’re vulnerable to predatory abusers, ritualists, or paedophiles, who exist in every society, no matter how disdainful the thought.
Those that do survive into adolescence must be tough. What have they done to get there, what hardships have they overcome? Standing in the crowd children would walk past me and tap my pocket, just to see what was there. Older ones (maybe they were working together) sneaked the tips of their fingers into my pocket. Standing by the gate to the Emir’s palace I felt the tickle of a pickpocket, and snatched at his hand. I saw the fingers pursed together, made small, like a snake’s head, my eyes followed the arm to his head his eyes snapped forward from my pocket to the procession. I had caught him.
“I see you!” I shouted “don’t even try it!” I wanted to let him know he’d been caught out, that was all, and as soon as I spoke I realised my mistake. A man who was guiding me around grabbed the boy and started beating him. His eyes looked like ice cubes. I saw his face and noticed the scars from acne on his cheeks. I grabbed between them, trying to stop the blows raining down. I shouted: “He didn’t get anything!”, but some other people grabbed him and he was sucked into the crowd.
From then on my two friends stood at either side of me protecting my pockets. But even that wasn’t enough. As we watched the Hawwan Daushe pass through the town, a boy in a white and black striped kaftan stood in front of me as I was taking pictures.
Suddenly there was a sound like a stinger missile swooping through the air and a crack as my guide’s hand connected with the boy’s head. With a yelp he tried to defend himself but more hands started to beat him, and he too was dragged away.
“Did you see him trying to take something? I didn’t,” I said.
“He was trying” said my friend. Picking a pocket while you’re standing in front of someone is the most difficult way. In the UK it’s called “the sucker’s kiss”. I wondered if trying it this time cost that boy his life. What happened to these boys? I don’t know.
If these lost boys make it to their twenties, at a time when they should be most productive, these children will be hardened, illiterate, possibly resentful of life itself.
As we charged down toward Gidan Murtala after the durbar ended I was nearly crushed by a danfo covered by men waving placards and shouting. As the junction we saw more, stomping out their support for a local politician, waving their hands in the air and chanting. In the flickering kerosene light, their flailing limbs looked like giant spiders fighting.
A cleric I met said: “I run a school, trying to educate children, and the parents bring their children there and leave them. They don’t come and pick them up. Where are they, the parents?”