An emir travelled through Nigeria with the PostBus tri-tone horn

Muhammadu Sanusi I ruled the Emirate of Kano in northern Nigeria from 1954 to 1963. During this time, Martin Zutt, now 69 years old, lived in the area as a boy with his parents Heidi and Peter as well as his two sisters. He and his younger sister Liza were born in Nigeria. His father ran a branch of the trading company UTC in Kano. It traded in all sorts of things, including tools, Bernina sewing machines, watches, MAN lorries and GM cars, i.e. Cadillac, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Opel and so on.

Emir Muhammadu Sanusi was always chauffeured in a Cadillac that he had ordered through Peter Zutt. “Some time in the late 1950s, the Emir must have either been in Switzerland or seen a film about Switzerland. In any case, he heard the PostBus horn and wanted to put an original one on his Cadillac,” says Martin Zutt, who now lives in Eggersriet SG. So his father was commissioned to procure such a horn, which he managed to do via the UTC headquarters in Basel. The post horn was delivered to Kano, and Peter Zutt had it installed on the Emir’s light blue Cadillac by a Swiss mechanic. “The people of Kano would always hear the “Du-Da-Do” in the distance whenever the Emir was travelling with his entourage. They would kneel whenever they heard it,” Martin Zutt recalls.

The memories of the mechanic’s wife 

Peter Boesch from Schiers GR is also very familiar with the Nigerian post horn era. At the same time as the Zutts, his sister Maja Conzett was also living in Kano with her husband Christian. Peter Boesch recounts his sister’s experience as follows: “My late sister married a car mechanic from Prättigau in 1956 and moved to Kano (Nigeria) with him. On her first night in Africa, she dreamt that she was sitting in a postbus in the Grisons mountains and heard the comforting three-tone horn. When she woke up, the “Du-Da-Do” sound continued. When she told her newly-wed husband Christian about her dream, he laughed and told her “It wasn't a dream. I recently installed a three-tone horn on the Cadillac belonging to the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi I.”

A topsy-turvy world 

A surprising story: While the horn had been warning oncoming traffic on Swiss mountain roads for exactly 100 years, in Kano it became a symbol of authority for a few years – including for Martin Zutt. His parents told him the following story: “When I heard the Du-Da-Do on holiday as a little boy in Switzerland, I excitedly shouted: The Emir is coming, the Emir is coming!”

We can assume that the Nigerian post horn era lasted until 1963, when the reign of Muhammadu Sanusi I came to an end. For Martin Zutt, who has lived in Switzerland for the last 60 years, it still resonates today. He still associates Postbus journeys in the mountains with his early childhood in Nigeria.