ABSTRACT
The alarm went off at 5 a.m. It was an unusual Monday morning over three decades ago in northern Nigeria’s Islamic city of Kano. I woke up to a lingering sense of the merrymaking that had taken hold of our home since the Friday before. My parents had thrown one of their usual lively parties, climaxed by the performance of a nostalgic masquerade native to their hometown of far-away Lokoja. Masquerades and the mysterious preIslamic, pre-Christian African legends they represented, had early cast a spell upon my childish mind, which no amount of Sunday School admonitions against “pagan” rites could ever break. Imagine then, my exhilaration that weekend, upon discovering that it was my bedroom the performers had chosen in which to bedeck themselves in the magnificent insignia of the make-believe world about to happen. As I watched them put on their masks from a corner of my room, I heard someone express the apprehension that the lead actor’s real-life conversion to evangelical Christianity may have drained him of the ancient mystical powers demanded by the role he was about to play.
