Collection 2: "Mallam Sile" by Mohammed Naseehu Ali

Mallam Sile was fluent only in his northern Sisaala tongue, though he understood Hausa—the language of the street’s inhabitants—and spoke just enough pidgin to be able to conduct his business.

Yet late at night, after all the customers, idlers, and rumormongers had left the shop to seek refuge in their shanties and on their bug-ridden grass mattresses, Sile could be heard singing love songs, hoping that a woman somewhere would respond to his passionate cries...

But still the rascals derided him. “When are you going to give up, Sile?” they would say. “Can’t you see that no woman would marry you?”

At three-thirty, after la-asar, the second afternoon worship, Mallam Sile moved his personal belongings and all his tea paraphernalia to a room in the servants’ quarters of the chief’s palace.

The nearest tea shack was three hundred metres away, on Zerikyi Road—and not only that but the owner of the shack, Abongo, was generally abhorred. And for good reason. Abongo, also a northerner, was quite unfriendly even to his loyal customers.

He then chased the customer out of the shop, brandishing his bullwhip and cursing after him, “If your mama and papa never teach you manners, I’ll teach you some!..."

What took place was this: Samadu, the pugnacious sixteen-year-old whose fame had reached every corner of the city, was the tough guy of Zongo Street.

For nine months running, no one in the neighborhood had managed to put Samadu’s back to the ground in the haphazard wrestling contests held beside the central market’s latrine.

Abeeba didn’t pay any attention to the women’s admonitions.

The exuberant crowd was hushed by this unexpected turn of events.

But Samadu wasn’t heralded as the street’s tough guy for nothing.

He threw a sharp jab at Abeeba’s stomach and succeeded in releasing himself from her grip by deftly undoing the knot of his sleeping cloth.

The crowd gasped as the tough guy attempted to extricate himself from Abeeba’s grip.

He, of course, had no inkling of what had taken place.

Later, when Abeeba told him that Samadu had paid the money he owed, the tea seller, though surprised, didn’t think to ask how this had happened. In his naïveté, he concluded that Samadu had finally been entered by the love and fear of God.