In the centre of Niamey—the capital of Niger, one of the poorest countries on earth—stands a lavish monument to the global reach of Islam. The Great Mosque of Niamey casts long shadows over the surrounding squalor. Its pencil-thin, aspirational minaret, cavernous prayer hall and enormous green dome tower above the rubbish and depressing low-slung houses, where single rooms are home to entire families. The mosque cost around A$1.25 million to build in a country where more than 60 per cent of the population lives on less than US$1 per day.
Each time I have visited Niamey, the mosque has always stood empty, as if it belongs to another place, an edifice somehow transported here from a world where money doesn’t matter. This substitute for much-needed infrastructure, and reassertion of Islamic credentials, was an act of appeasement by a bankrupt government as desperate to survive as its people. This myopic gesture carried with it echoes of Madame Diori, wife of former President Hamani Diori. She was known among the whisperers on Niamey’s streets as ‘l’Autrichienne’ (the Austrian) after Marie Antoinette’s famous pronouncement: ‘Let them eat cake’. Her husband’s sorry government—which had led Niger since independence in 1960—fell in April 1974, after it was discovered that food aid sent to relieve the great famines of the 1970s had been hoarded in the homes of government ministers. The Diori government stole its people’s dreams of an independent Africa.
The closer you get to the border with Nigeria, the more obvious the growing separation between governments (and local manifestations of Islam) and the needs of the people they claim to serve.
Maradi is Niger’s third-largest city. Hard up against the Nigerian border and surrounded by enormous sand quarries, which produce clouds of lung-choking sand, Maradi has a reputation for being a politically active and restive city. Its predominantly Hausa merchant classes are the most vocal in Niger, and protests against government policies or unpaid wages invariably start here. It is a transit town. Nigeria is a few short kilometres away and everyone appears to be involved in some form of cross-border trade.
Maradi’s sprawling markets straddle the main highway which passes south to Nigeria. The markets, which spread out from the clamorous bus station and are almost invariably awash with people, are surrounded by trucks unloading cargo in a great din of horns and shouts and diesel fumes. Everything is for sale here, from fresh