A teenage Nigerian transvestite and seller of love potions who lived undetected for seven years among the married women of his conservative Islamic community has been caught and now faces jail.
Abubakar Hamza said this week that he disguised himself as a girl and ran away from his home in a remote farming village of Ajingi aged only 12, after his parents divorced and he came to hate his stepmother’s scolding.
Now 19, he has lived ever since among married women in purdah — the practice of screening women from men or strangers by means of a curtain or all-enveloping clothes.
He even attracted unsuspecting suitors among the young men of the city of Kano, all the while struggling to conceal the attraction he felt towards his female hosts.
But his life fell apart on April 22, when a visitor from his home village recognised him at a naming ceremony held by one of the families which had been taken in by his winning performance.
He was forced to strip and the tissue paper padding his bra was discovered.
Hamza has since become a local celebrity. Photographs of him in female guise taken from the albums of his former admirers have been copied and sold as posters on the streets of the city for 100 naira (70 US cents).
Last week he appeared before an Islamic Sharia law court in the Yankaba district of the city charged under Section 9 of the Prostitution or Immoral Acts Law of 2000. He faces a 10 000 naira ($70) fine or a year in jail.
Having exchanged the modest dress and headscarf that he had worn since childhood for a man’s short-sleeved shirt, Hamza begged the court for mercy.
”I pray the court to show mercy on me. I know what I did was not good but I was only trying to make a living. I promise I will change and never play a girl again,” he said.
Later, in his Kano jail cell, the lanky youth explained in his soft, effeminate voice how he had come to be known as Kawajo, a young woman who sold magical charms and potions to the married women of Kano.
The fourth child of a failed marriage, he sought solace with the girls of his village when his step-mother’s bitterness became too much to bear.
”I began dressing like them and gradually moved to their homes to live with them, despite my father’s attempt to stop me,” he said.
”When my father’s disapproval of my dressing like a girl became unbearable I left home and lived with a family in a nomadic settlement, dressing and behaving like other girls in the family, an act I enjoy playing,” he added.
Rural society in northern Nigeria is deeply conservative, ruled by local tradition and by Islamic law
Hamza had to keep on the move from town to town, from family to family to escape detection.
He found he could be taken in by married women by offering them assistance to ward off genies or to prepare aphrodisiac potions to excite their husbands.
”I get my inspiration on medicine from spirits who work in collaboration with me to assist people. Their intention is just to help women,” he said.
”I lived with my women hosts, cooked with them, ate with them. I slept on the same bed with them and plaited their hair,” he said.
”They would change their dress in my presence, exposing their nakedness since they thought I was a woman. But I dared not sleep with any of them for fear that my true identity could be exposed,” he explained.
”And whenever I sensed my disguise was threatened or I found my sexual need for my host becoming hard to control, I would leave because any attempt to make love to my host would blow my cover,” he said.
According to one of his unsuspecting hosts, his self-control did not fail.
”She lived in my house for four years and never showed any trace of manhood and none of my three daughters who shared [a] bed with her ever complained of any funny behaviour,” Adamu Muhammad (65), a grocer, told the court.
Kawajo’s disguise was so successful, and his fair complexion and feminine way of walking considered so attractive, that he came to be seen as quite a catch, said Muhammad.
”Because of the increasing number of men coming to ask her for a date and even marriage I had to call her to order, asking her to choose one of them to marry, if she was interested, or ask them to stop coming,” he said.
Hamza explained: ”I would tell them that I was not ready for marriage, so we would just chat and they showered me with gifts and money and I came to like it because I found a way of living on them.”
Abdullahi Ahmad, a 35-year-old man who asked for Hamza’s hand in marriage, said: ”There was no way one would differentiate Kawajo from any girl in the neighbourhood.
”She walked and talked like a girl and I could not resist making advances to her, although I knew she had rebuffed many such offers,” he added.
”The competition between two friends in this neighbourhood over Kawajo degenerated into a quarrel and they stopped talking to each other for weeks.
”But when it became known that Kawajo is a man and not a woman they just laughed over it and resumed their friendship,” Ahmad smiled.
The case has been adjourned until September 16. — Sapa-AFP