Maiduguri is reported on for one reason, and the reporting is not wrong, but it produces a picture of a city that is only the last fifteen years old. The city is a thousand years older than that, and the camel market is one of the places where you can see it.
The animals come down from Niger and Chad along routes that predate all three countries. The traders are matter-of-fact about the border, which they treat as an administrative feature of the journey rather than a boundary of the trade.
Behind the station stand the carriages of the line that ran to Port Harcourt. They have not moved in a long time. The camels, meanwhile, arrive weekly.
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