On my last day in Kano, with an hour to go before the cloth market opened, Abdsallaam took me to the zoo. He had only been once before, years ago when he was 'trying to waste some time'. "Funny," he said, "because that is what we are doing now, wasting the time."

The only other people at the zoo, a desolate dustbowl containing ten different kinds of hyena, a lion with a purple and green lizard sunning itself on its back and a baby giraffe, were a hijab-wearing woman studiously writing down the name of every animal she saw in a notebook, and a group of child-disciples to a religious teacher. The children were bare-footed, wore rags and had scabs on their shaved heads. They stared at me as much as they stared at the animals, peering vacantly into the python's pen, periodically sneaking looks around to see what I was doing.

"Ah-ah!" cried Abdsallaam when we came across a pen of goats. "They even put goats in the zoo. People are very stupid."

As we strolled around the grounds of the zoo, I found myself enjoying the spectacle of going to a Nigerian zoo much more than I did the animals. Abdsallaam, on the other hand, complained wittily throughout; there were too many hyenas, the lions were too thin, and there were too many empty pens. The hippo was too ugly, the warthog looked like it was dead. (Being poorly-sighted, he had to take my word for it that I could see the warthog blinking its long eyelashes from time to time.) Abdsallaam seemed to be having a really terrible time.

I asked, at the end, if he had not enjoyed the zoo.

"Ah," he reflected as we walked past a dog-faced baboon with one of its arms missing ("done on capture"), "I can not say that I have suffered myself."

When we finally came to the market, Abdsallaam went off in search of a green shiny fabric that his daughter needed for her school uniform hijab. While he was searching for the exact colour match, this cloth trader, no more than a teenager, caught my eye.