Female Chieftain Only in Kumbwada, Nigeria

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And now, for your daily plot bunny....(or Henry Rider Haggard lives! )

Reporting from Kumbwada, Nigeria - The palace, under a rusted corrugated roof, looks mostly like a shed. Only one delicate pair of feet in its single room is shod, and they are in black rubber flip-flops. This is the genteel court of Queen Hajiya Haidzatu Ahmed. The queen's henna-dyed fingers are childlike and slender, her smile girlish and her voice soft. Whenever she speaks, the men who are her courtiers listen, enraptured. Whenever she giggles, they laugh loudly. Whenever she explains some point, they nod solemnly.

In Nigeria's conservative Islamic north, women are barred from ruling, except in the kingdom of Kumbwada. Here, an ancient curse keeps males off the throne, according to locals. Male pretenders who dare to try will be buried within a week. The last man who wanted to overturn the tradition of female rulers was the queen's father, Prince Amadu Kumbwada, 58 years ago. All he did was say he wanted to succeed his mother, then still alive. He was immediately taken ill.

The prince was rushed to a distant kingdom, where he eventually recovered. He never returned.

"There has never been a male ruler," the queen says, chuckling, a sound like dry, crackling paper. "Even my father just voiced his desire to be chief, but it almost killed him."

Her grandmother, on the throne for 73 years, died when she was 113.

Full story here.

Icing on the cake is that she sounds like a really good and cool queen. It may be a dirt-poor place with a dirt-poor queen, but she comes across as having tons of common sense, wisdom, compassion, patience and insight, and is clearly doing her best to improve to lot of her subjects--we could use more leaders like her just about everywhere. It's just sad that the religion of Nigeria keep other women from participating in politics, even in this place.

 

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The religion of part of Nigeria.

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