Mustafa is no ordinary 16-year old. He is the son of a well-known Sheik in Niamey, and has studied under eleven maribouts in five West African countries. Since his arrival here in Djibo his eloquence and charisma have made him something of a leader amongst the garibous. He is well on the way to memorizing the entire Qur’an, as well as an intriguing variety of apocrypha and folklore. He declared yesterday that football is deeply wrong and that in the afterlife a football-sized stone would crush the head of anyone who had played it here on earth. The garibous accepted this without comment and then continued to discuss Mali’s prospects in the African Cup of Nations.

Djibo is garibou capital of the Sahel. You can not walk anywhere in the town without encountering several of these young boys on the road, dressed in rags and clutching their plastic begging bowls. At each gate they stop and call out, “Allah garibou!” (Garibou of God!), an appeal for leftover food. Those inside will call back either “Waru jaba, garibou!” (Come and get it!) or “Allah ne’u, garibou!” (May God provide).

Alu is fifteen, although he is very small for his age. He is from Menegu, a village in the north-east of Burkina Faso, and he has come to Djibo to live with Boureima Gorom, one of the many maribouts here. Every morning Alu gets up early and goes to the bush to collect firewood. Then he goes to the market to beg for his breakfast. Alu and his contemporaries spend the day begging and brawling, and when night falls they go back to their maribout and give him his share of the day’s winnings.

Like the Artful Dodger and his gang returning to Fagin each evening, the garibous return to their master with some trepidation. If they have not brought enough millet back for him, the consequences are likely to be painful. Three nights ago the whole group was punished. Each boy had to crouch down, weave his arms through his legs and hold onto his ears, and in that position shuffle to and fro across the compound. Those who lagged behind were beaten with a bicycle chain. Boureima is creative with his cruelty.

Most of the actual study happens at night. Alu sits cross-legged by the fire with his wooden slate, quill and pot of ink, and he writes Qur’anic verses right to left on the slate in his uneven Arabic. Mustafa and the other boys are doing the same, and Maribout Boureima is lying on his mat, watching them. “Put your tongue in, Alu,” he growls. “A gecko does not make a good maribout.”

Sitting some way off, Hamidou, the youngest of the group, is kneeling by his fire. He is having trouble mixing his ink tonight; it refuses to thicken properly. Hamidou stirs the ink furiously and casts the occasional fearful glance over at Maribout Boureima. He fingers a weal along his left side, a mark left by the impact of a camel-hide whip. He had trouble mixing his ink yesterday as well.

In traditional Fulani culture, the first son in a family looks after the cows, and the second son belongs to God and is sent away to study with a maribout. Boys as young as six years old leave their parents’ village with nothing but their begging bowl and the clothes they wear. These children do well begging because they inspire pity, but they are also less streetwise and more likely to have their food stolen by the bigger boys. ‘Garibou yidaa garibou,’ goes the Fulani proverb - a garibou does not like a garibou. The town’s several hundred garibous are in direct competition for food and they know it.

As always, Mustafa is the first to finish writing, and he starts to chant, breathlessly reciting the verses on his slate. One by one the other boys join in, each memorizing something different, depending on which chapter they are on. Their high voices carry clear and far on the still night air. They do not know the meaning of the words they are chanting, and neither does Boureima, scowling up at them from his mat. They do not understand Arabic, but they can read and write it, and that is enough to get by on. Mustafa, Alu and the others will some day become maribouts themselves, and on that day each one will throw away his begging bowl and invest in a camel-hide whip.

It is late at night; the fires are burning low and Boureima is snoring. Hamidou’s ink has finally thickened, and painstakingly he begins to write from the beginning of Sura 1: “In the name of Allah, most Gracious, most Merciful...” If Hamidou understood the words he was writing, I wonder whether the irony of his situation would strike him.