Lagos is theoretically Christian but also very largely pagan

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 245.

The High Commission was recently built, open-plan, largely glass fronted, and ablaze with light. It was also in the highest degree exotic. Thanks to Dot’s passion for animals, there was a wonderfully acrobatic gibbon who had free run of the house, two crested cranes that wandered round the garden and took food from your hand and a small regiment of parrots. I stayed there for about a week, enjoying myself hugely, then at my host’s suggestion drove up to Kano in the north, where the Consul—a charming man with the wonderful name of St. Elmo Nelson—and his wife kindly put me up in their fine mud house. I loved Kano. Where Lagos is theoretically Christian but also very largely pagan, the north is Muslim to a man. Architecturally, it is—or was, forty years ago—almost entirely built of mud. I was taken on a tour of the Emir’s Palace, in which the mud was full of mica—natural or artificially added I was unable to discover—which made every wall sparkle, even those on the inside.

The Emir himself had recently died, and his successor was due to be formally inducted the following spring. The Nelsons told me that this was one of the most astonishingly picturesque ceremonies that even Nigeria could offer; what a pity, they said, that I couldn’t come back for it. Well, I thought, if it was really that good, why shouldn’t I? I was after all a free agent now; one reason why I had left the Foreign Office was in order to be able to seize opportunities like this. With any luck, moreover, the trip could be paid for by a well-placed article or two.

And so, some six months later, I took the plunge—and the experience proved more thrilling than I could ever have dared to hope. All the greatest and richest potentates of Northern Nigeria had gathered in Kano for the occasion, all accompanied by enormous retinues, all dressed in almost unbelievable splendor, some of them in robes which seemed also to be flecked with mica, glistening and glittering in the sun. Their horses and their camels were gorgeously caparisoned; and since many of them had brought their private orchestras, the assault on the ear was almost as great as thaton the eye. And yet, despite the dazzling colors and the deafening drumming, the atmosphere was one of intense solemnity. There was no laughter, no suggestion of celebration, as there would certainly have been in the South. These were princes, possessed of all the dignity of Islam, sitting proud and unsmiling in their saddles, fully conscious of their own nobility and of the significance of the ceremony that was being performed. I felt that I was attending a modern Field of the Cloth of Gold, transported to Africa and translated into African.