Benjamin the Donkey is laughing

The character Benjamin the Donkey in George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm was said to be the only animal on the farm that never laughed. Whenever the other animals asked why, Benjamin said it was because he never saw anything to laugh at. In some ways I resemble Benjamin. Since the inception of this Republic in 1999, I have not seen anything from the work of either the National Assembly or any state assembly to laugh at. That is, until last week.

I grinned from ear to ear like the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when I read a story about a bill introduced into the House of Representatives to prohibit the killing and export of donkeys. The Donkey Export and Killing [Prohibition] Bill, 2018 was sponsored by Garba Datti Muhammed [APC, Kaduna] and read on the House floor for the first time last Tuesday. This very perceptive MP said the main thrust of the bill was to preserve endangered donkey species from extinction. He said, “This bill seeks, among others, to prohibit the killing of donkeys in Nigeria and the exportation of its derivatives, especially the skin, out of Nigeria, given the depletion in their population and the threat of extinction. Donkey has aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational and scientific value to Nigerians and thus needs to be preserved exclusively for use in rural transportation.”

If anything, he understated it. I can imagine that most of today’s urban youngsters, who grew up taking Uber taxi rides for a trip just a few blocks away, who believe that it is impossible to go from Maiduguri to Lagos by any means other than a plane, and who fret and worry because Amazon took more than a day to deliver a parcel they ordered from California, are wondering what the fuss about donkeys is all about. Well, members of my generation think differently. Growing up in my hometown in the early 1970s, I went nearly every weekend with my small uncle Buzu to take manure to my grandfather’s farm. Kai taki, it was called. We would load two well balanced sacks, called mangala, unto the donkeys’ backs and begin the long trip to the farm. The part I liked most was sitting on top of the mangala and steering the donkey with a stick. It got even more exciting during the return trip because, without the manure, the donkey galloped with us sitting on its back. We had to be careful though because a donkey is very mischievous and could throw you off its back at the slightest opportunity.

Now, most goods in our villages and small towns were moved around by donkeys. They were particularly good at taking manure to the farm, evacuating farm produce and leftover millet and corn stalks, and at taking traders’ goods in-between village markets. Although Hausaland had a lot of horses, these were not beasts of burden but beasts of royalty and grandeur. Even though they are bigger and stronger, horses did not do the menial jobs that donkeys did. Horses were twenty times more expensive than donkeys. In 1971 my grandfather bought a white stallion for seven pounds. On the same day he bought a fully-grown donkey for seven shillings [i.e. 70 kobo, less than one naira].

Horses were also much more expensive to maintain. A donkey is so versatile food-wise that it eats dry millet stalks and even some grasses that are rejected by sheep and goats, e.g. the waterside weed we call kyasuwa. A horse on the other hand will eat only fresh grass, leaves of beans and then corn, which we laboriously stripped from the stalks. A horse will not drink water into which leaves and sticks have fallen. The horse drops massive amounts of dung around its stable everyday but it will not lie down if the dung is not cleared. Yet, it does not carry goods around. Camels however carry heavier loads than donkeys, only that they are fewer in number. In my hometown, it was Tuaregs that usually owned camels and you still see them by the roadside ferrying heavy loads of minerals and local cosmetics all the way from Niger Republic.

Oxen, on the other hand, are used to pull ploughs. They are very strong and they pull the plough through sandy or marshy soil, work that will otherwise take men weeks to do. Nomadic pastoralists also use cattle to ferry their belongings, especially when they are migrating from one rugga to another. Sometimes they place their children atop the cattle but I have never seen an adult pastoralist riding on a cow. Together, these animals did some of the heaviest menial duties in rural Northern Nigeria, until the coming of the wheel barrow and the push truck called amalanke or kurar mota [i.e. hyena’s motor. When the Hausa say something is of the hyena, it means it is a caricature]. The coming of pickup trucks in large numbers in the 1970s also displaced the push truck, which was why the former is called A Kori Kura [i.e. banish the push truck].

Our donkeys survived push trucks and pick-ups but another, bigger challenge to their survival has now reared its head. In presenting his bill to the House last week, MP Garba Datti “warned of severe depopulation of donkeys in the country as a result of the recent invasion of West African markets by Chinese traders in search of donkey skins. He said the demand for donkey skin is extremely high because gelatin derived from it is prized for its nutritional tonic, blood boosting and immune system enhancement.” In all the centuries that we have owned donkeys in this part of the world, we never ate it, except for one brief period in 197374 when beef prices skyrocketed due to the Sahelian drought and our butchers surreptitiously tried to make up for the supply gap with donkey meat. There was a huge uproar when they were caught, including a memorable song by local Sokoto musician Shu’aibu Tsamaye.

Though we have many local medicine men, they never said donkey skin had any medicinal value. Why therefore should the Chinese come here and try to eat up our donkeys? If they must eat something, why not eat up the giant panda in their bamboo forests, which they are busy protecting? The Chinese can also eat the Yak, which is abundant in Tibetan mountains. They can go and eat the Mongolian wild horse, Przewalski, or the two humped Bactrian camel. They can cross over to Japan and eat the Mikado Pheasant, or they can eat the Orangutans in Indonesia. There are millions of kangaroos in Australia that the Chinese can eat. From what I can see from here, a kangaroo has more meat, milk and skin than a donkey. Or the Chinese can round up all the king cobras and kraits of India. In fact, the Siberian tiger found nearby is clearly richer in meat than a donkey.

Many Nigerians are not speaking up for the donkey because we believe that it is a stupid animal. That belief was promoted by our primary school teachers. Whenever a pupil gave a stupid answer to a question, the teacher said he was a donkey. But I have news for you; the donkey is smarter in some respects than humans. When we were taking manure to our grandfather’s farm during the dry season, we located the farm using some dry baobab trees as landmarks. However, one day when we went at the peak of the farming season, Buzu and I had trouble finding the farm because everywhere was lush green and the bush paths were encroached by weeds. As we searched, the two donkeys we were driving suddenly veered off the bush path, stormed their way through tall millet stalks and came to a stop at one spot. We then realized that that was the farm we were looking for. From that day, I began to respect donkeys.