Thousands of devout Christians thronged the dusty streets of Kano in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north to mark Jesus’ crucification in a show of sharply improved sectarian ties in a city previously notorious for religious intolerance.
Escorted by police, over 4,000 weeping, sobbing and somber Catholics walked a four-kilometre (2.5-mile) procession singing hymns as a man in his 30s pretended to be Jesus wearing a white robe and a thorn crown as he carried an eight-foot red wooden cross.
The symbolic whipping of ‘Jesus’ by the soldiers sporting mock military camouflage and their encouragement by the ‘Pharisees’, dressed in white robes and brown cassocks provoked more wailings and sobbing from the faithful.
The celebration comes as sectarian tensions run high in Nigeria following recent spates of deadly ethnic and religious violence in the central city of Jos which claimed hundreds of lives.
Sectarian violence between Muslim Hausa-Fulani and Christian Beroms left over 326 dead, most of them Muslims, according to police, while two separate reprisal attacks on Christian farming villages last month, claimed more than 500 lives according state officials.
Nigeria’s central Plateau state has been the de facto buffer between the largely Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south and sectarian clashes sometimes spill over to other parts of the north, particularly Kano.
“The situation in Plateau, which is very ugly has kind of gone down … although there is a sense of anticipation that something is likely to go wrong,” Reverend Father Salihu Joseph of Kano’s main Catholic Cathedral told AFP shortly before the procession kicked off.
“The sectarian situation has an effect on the Easter celebration in the sense that people tend to be apprehensive,” Joseph said outside the 82-year old cathedral.
He said the procession route had to be carefully selected to avoid predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods “because that will be provocative and we will also not feel safe”.
As the procession moved around the Christian neighbourhoods, clusters of residents lined the streets to watch while others looked from rooftops and balconies as police diverted vehicle traffic.
“We were apprehensive of reprisal attacks after Jos violence … but we are glad nothing happened. For now it is safe,” Okey Ogbou, 40, an interior decor trader said during the march.
Standing outside a yellow-painted mosque in the Christian neighbourhood, Muktar Idriss, said : “Christians believe in the Crucification of Jesus which I don’t, but that doesn’t give me the right to despise them or try to stop them from professing their belief in the same way they don’t have the right to interfere with my mine”.
“If we can observe this mutual respect there will be religious harmony and those killings in the name of religion will stop,” added Idriss.
Ngozi John, 30, agrees. “This could be a starting point towards interfaith harmony and tolerance,” she said as the Christians dispersed from an open field after the ‘Jesus’ was put to the cross.
A Christian trader Gideon Akalula from Nigeria’s southern tribe was in 1996 beheaded by a Muslim fundamentalist group for alleged desecration of the Koran and his severed head hoisted on a spike and displayed around the city in triumphant jubilation.
Members of the radical Muslim group, Jama’atu Tajdidil Islami had scaled walls of Kano prison where Akaluka was being detained, spirited him away and decapitated him.