A Private Experience

“A Private Experience” is rooted in an exploration of how religious and ethnic intolerance fosters hatred and violence. The riot is sparked when an Igbo Christian man drives over a Koran lying on the roadside, and a group of Hausa Muslim men kill him in response. The initial event is immediately abstracted when the men take his severed head to the market and encourage others to join in. What is presented to the marketgoers is decontextualized—similar to the way the man has been dismembered—but it is enough to set off existing ethnic and religious tensions. This reflects how intolerance, conflict, and hatred leave people primed to commit extreme acts of violence. By the end of the riot, the city’s streets are littered with charred corpses, ultimately indistinguishable from each other. United in death, the burnt corpses represent not only how people are ultimately the same despite ethnic and religious differences but also that there are no winners in such hate-fueled conflicts. Everyone ends up in the same place—dead, desecrated, and anonymous.

This point is underscored when the Hausa woman recounts past riots to Chika. She points out that “they break market” each time a riot occurs (49). The market is located in Kano, which is predominantly Hausa, and its destruction symbolizes the intrinsic harm of such violence on the Hausa people.