Introduction^{Footnote 1}

The production of colonial knowledge is arguably one of the most intensively treated subjects in colonial and global history. Studies based on authors such as Michel Foucault and Edward Said have flourished in the last thirty years as most recent authors have stressed that colonialism was as much about conquering and governing new polities as it was about acquiring and creating local knowledge of these territories.^{Footnote 2} “Knowledge” and “construction” have thus been two crucial words in the historical writing about the postcolonial world. One book in particular represents this constructivist school: Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Colonial India was the title that Nicholas Dirks chose in 2001 to highlight the reification of the Indian past by British colonialism.^{Footnote 3} For this author, caste is “a modern phenomenon”^{Footnote 4} and the “product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule.”^{Footnote 5} If it became commonplace for scholars of India to deconstruct the historical concept of “caste,” the same phenomenon happened in Africa with “ethnicity” being regularly and thoroughly analyzed by Africanists. Many scholars have pointed to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide as an example of this. Authors such as Gérard Prunier showed how the German and more especially the Belgian colonizers manipulated the concepts of Hutu and Tutsi for their own benefit.^{Footnote 6} The construction and, by consequence, the deconstruction of knowledge could thus help analyze but also criticize the colonial period. As it was directed mainly against European colonialism, the deconstruction of knowledge had therefore a strong polemical tone in African studies.

However not every single scholarly work was polemical. In Nigeria, for example, John Peel analyzed the role of the nineteenth-century European missionaries in the creation of the Yoruba language and national identity,^{Footnote 7} whereas Dmitri van den Bersselaar shed a light on the relationship between the Nigerian colonial administration and George Basden, an Anglican missionary, who became an “expert” of the Igbo.^{Footnote 8} The present article is an attempt to highlight the construction of historical knowledge in an African polity without referring to “ethnicity,” “tribe,” “language” or “religion.” No African exceptionalism therefore. This paper will focus on Borno, the successor of the ancient kingdom of Kanem-Borno. Created in the eleventh century, this polity has attracted numerous researchers for its precolonial history who have produced scant publications about its more recent colonial past. As a consequence, this article makes a contribution to the historiography on colonial Borno as the history of this region has been under-studied.

In addition, this article will describe in detail the creation of historical knowledge undertaken by the Bornoan elite and the colonial administration. This type of cooperation between a local elite and a colonial administration has already been studied in the African colonial context. For example, Peter Pels highlighted the “reification of Luguru political discourse” by the British colonial administration in Tanganyika.^{Footnote 9} Ralph Austen and Jonathan Derrick showed that, instead of being passive during the precolonial and colonial times, the Duala played a very active role in the redefinition of their trade, politics or culture in contact with the Europeans.^{Footnote 10} It is worth noting that Anthony Kirk-Greene already mentioned the importance of British colonial officers studying Borno.^{Footnote 11} Nonetheless, Kirk-Greene’s contribution to the historical field is more about colonial administrators and the colonial service in general than about these specific colonial officers in Borno. This article thus expands on Kirk-Greene’s argument about the importance of the figure of the district officer in Africa.^{Footnote 12} Scholars such as the authors of the edited collection Ordering Africa have stressed the close relationship between anthropology and European imperialism.^{Footnote 13} This article seeks to contribute to this scholarship and will bring an historical dimension to the lines of enquiry developed in Ordering Africa. More generally, because of its richly documented past, this article will argue that Borno is a perfect example of this reconstruction of knowledge in a colonial context.

The Colonial Heralds of Borno

Borno was one of the oldest kingdoms of Africa when the Europeans invaded it at the turn of the twentieth century.^{Footnote 14} In their colonial endeavor, the latter genuinely desired to understand the societies they just conquered. The first colonial residents realized that the history of Borno was not limited to the very recent events of the colonial conquest. If not already aware of it, they soon realized that they were dealing with a kingdom tracing back its history to the eleventh century. It is worth noting that their understanding of Borno’s history did not come from their own experience in Africa only. The narratives of the nineteenth-century explorers were part of their compulsory training while in Europe. The travellers’ perception of this territory was largely influenced by the first descriptions of Borno by nineteenth-century explorers such as Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton^{Footnote 15} but also by the historical accounts given by Heinrich Barth^{Footnote 16} and Gustav Nachtigal.^{Footnote 17}

The colonial officers in charge of Borno were eager to discover its history. One could argue that their interest was simply due to their need to implement British Indirect Rule. Indeed, in order to create the very type of colonialism Frederick Lugard desired, the colonial officers had to analyze and understand the African structures they were officially in charge of. As Lugard put it himself, the resident must “study the native laws and customs, which react on Koranic law in Moslem districts, and replace it in pagan areas. (…) The officer who knows the language cannot fail to acquire a keener interest in and sympathy with the people.”^{Footnote 18} Lugard had particularly Northern Nigeria in mind when he theorized the role of the residents and the district officers in the British colonial empire. The relationship between the British and the emirs of the Sokoto Caliphate has often been perceived as the embodiment of Indirect Rule.^{Footnote 19} However, because of its Muslim population, its hierarchy and its size, Borno provided another ideal case. That Borno symbolized the type of colonial rule Lugard desired is indicated by the fact that he referred to Borno no less than thirteen times in his book, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa.^{Footnote 20} It would thus be possible to consider the British interest in the history of Borno as a purely instrumentalist study for the sake of the implementation of effective colonial administration.^{Footnote 21}

Colonial officers operating in Borno count as the first western scholars of the history of Borno who collated and analyzed documents of the history of the kingdom. In doing so, they emulated their predecessors in India. For example, eighteenth-century British scholars, Nathaniel Halhed and William Jones were considered as “aficionados of Indian culture.”^{Footnote 22} The first governor-general of India, Warren Hastings already mentioned in 1784: “Every application of knowledge and especially such as is obtained in social communication with people, over whom we exercise dominion, founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state.”^{Footnote 23} This scholarly interest was not, of course, devoid of any racist prejudice. These studies were not only undertaken in the name of Knowledge but for the sake of colonial rule. The scholar-administrators of Borno did not see the contradiction between their work as scholars and as administrators.

In an article published in 1974, Gwilym Jones, a colonial administrator turned anthropologist, examined the development of colonial anthropology in Nigeria. He isolated four different phases: the first one was that of the early and middle nineteenth-century traveler-ethnographers, the second phase concerned military men interested in travelling at the turning point of the twentieth century; the third phase was the era of colonial officials who were amateur ethnographers in the first half of the colonial period; the last phase was mainly about the professional anthropologists trained in London by Bronisław Malinovski. The time sequences examined by Jones correspond to the construction of historical knowledge in Borno.^{Footnote 24} The first historians followed the example of nineteenth-century explorers such as Denham, Clapperton, Barth, and Nachtigal who were eager to discover the past of Borno. As a result, compared to other African regions, the nineteenth-century history of the Lake Chad area is rather well-documented. At the turn of the twentieth century, the tradition of studying Borno was perpetuated by European military officers who also developed an interest in the history of their conquests. For example, the Foureau-Lamy mission of 1898-1900 was charged with unifying the French colonial possessions between Western and Equatorial Africa. Among other goals, it had to deal with a Rabih, a Sudanese warlord who had invaded Borno in 1893. However, its members also studied the countries they visited. The scientific results of the expedition were published in the Documents Scientifiques de la Mission Saharienne de la Mission Foureau-Lamy.^{Footnote 25} These missions are by consequence a perfect example of the double aspect of the military conquest of Borno. On the one hand, they violently fought their way into the Lake Chad region, but studied on the other hand the invaded societies. In the first decade of the twentieth century, European soldiers, even if not fighting on the Northern Nigerian soil, were still writing about Borno. A French military member of the Anglo-French boundary demarcation mission paid specific attention to the Lake Chad region. With the help of his interpreter Moïse Landeroin, Jean-Auguste Tilho published the results of his enquiries in the same series of Documents Scientifiques as his predecessor Foureau.^{Footnote 26} A scholarly study of Borno started by nineteenth-century explorers was thus prolonged by European soldiers at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In Central Sudan, the European military and colonial conquest was never undertaken with a total ignorance of the conquered societies. The material collected by these soldiers contains a wealth of documents and in the case of Tilho’s Documents Scientifiques particular examples of recorded oral history. These studies constitute the link between the narratives of the nineteenth-century explorers and the first colonial officials. Former member of the Anglo-German demarcation commission of 1903,^{Footnote 27} the German officer Arnold Schultze published in 1910 a monograph entitled, in German, The Sultanate of Bornu with a Specific Emphasis on German Bornu.^{Footnote 28} This book was the first western monograph entirely devoted to Borno. In nine chapters, it revealed the new perception of the kingdom by the colonial officials. The historical interest developed by Barth and Nachtigal could be found again in Schultze’s work as the latter was trained as a geographer.

Although the main part of Borno was British, the first study came from a German rather than a British officer, which reflects the nineteenth-century German academic interest in the Lake Chad area. The kingdom attracted a comparatively large number of publications. For instance, Rudolf Prietze, Nachtigal’s nephew, wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century on the flora, fauna, songs and proverbs of Borno.^{Footnote 29} Between 1913 and 1942, Adolf von Duisburg wrote ethnographical articles and books on the Kanuri.^{Footnote 30} In the 1920s and 1930s, Albert Drexel, a linguist who desired to find links between Sumer and Africa, studied the Kanuri language among other languages.^{Footnote 31} From the 1930s to the 1950s, Johannes Lukas was the first linguist to study the Kanuri language within Borno itself;^{Footnote 32} despite the loss of Cameroon, German academic interest never disappeared.

British colonial officers rapidly understood the potential of such studies and in 1913, Philip Benton, an officer stationed in Borno translated Schultze’s monograph.^{Footnote 33} He also published a revised version of Von Duisburg’s grammar in 1917.^{Footnote 34} According to Anthony Kirk-Greene, he “became an authority on Bornu’s ecology, embracing a host of interests, such as history, language, exploration, flora and fauna and thereby lending weight to his personal credo of, as he once expressed it, ‘I am Bornoan, I consider nothing that is Bornoan alien to me.’”^{Footnote 35} Most of his writings were collected in The Languages and Peoples of Bornu reprinted in 1958.^{Footnote 36} Other colonial officers devoted their time to the study of Borno. John Patterson, later Chief Commissioner of Northern Nigeria, published Kanuri Songs in 1926.^{Footnote 37} Charles Temple, Chief Secretary of Northern Nigeria in 1910 and lieutenant-governor in 1914, edited one the first ethnological surveys of Northern Nigeria in his Notes on the Tribes, Provinces, Emirates and States of the Northern Province of Nigeria.^{Footnote 38} This collection of notes compiled by his wife Olive Temple^{Footnote 39} can be seen as one of the first attempts of the British administration to gather ethnological intelligence on the whole of Northern Nigeria.^{Footnote 40} As Charles Temple put it: “a close and detailed knowledge of the habits and customs of the native is of the first importance to the European administration.”^{Footnote 41}?

This bibliographical account of the scholars of Borno is not a simple list of studies undertaken by colonial officers. It shows how a territory such as Borno became the centre of an academic tradition. The next section of this article will assess the motivations behind the pursuit of knowledge in colonial Borno.

A Question of Authority?

The history of Borno was most of the time published in articles or books produced by Europeans. The reasons which pushed the British colonial officers to analyze the history of Borno can perhaps be found in their education. In 2000, Anthony Kirk-Greene published a monograph on the training of British colonial officials.^{Footnote 42} The anthropology training became quite important in the 1930s when these colonial officers were encouraged to take such courses while on leave in the United Kingdom.^{Footnote 43} Post World War II officers were especially trained to administer Muslim communities such as Borno as they were encouraged to study Islamic Law and Arabic in order to fulfill their duty of District Officers in Northern Nigeria.^{Footnote 44}

The officers present in Borno were directly influenced by their own education in Europe and consequently drew comparisons between European and Bornoan history. The content of their theoretical courses in Europe heavily relied on the experience of their predecessor but also on a version of history directly influenced by their European background. How could they not remember their education with the landmark of 1066 when William the Conqueror won the battle of Hastings? The Sayfawa dynasty of Borno had equally been in power between the eleventh and the nineteenth centuries. In Borno, the new subjects of the British Empire had been subjects of a king as long as the English themselves. As the Europeans were building colonial empires, they perceived themselves as heirs to the Romans. Richard Hingley demonstrated to what extent the British colonial officers in India and Africa were directly inspired by the Roman example.^{Footnote 45} For example, the British duplicated the Roman frontier policy of building a limes by creating the “Salt Hedge” or “Customs Hedge” in Northern India in 1843.^{Footnote 46} Similarly, for early colonial officers, the British battles against the Mahdi in Sudan mirrored the Roman fight against the “Welsh.”^{Footnote 47}

Histories of Borno by colonial officers clearly reflected Edward Gibbon’s history of the Roman Empire, written between 1776 and 1789,^{Footnote 48} and demonstrated the extent to which the first colonial officials were influenced by their own classical education when considering Borno. This history of the kingdom was always depicted as the history of the rise and fall of the “Holy Kingdom.” This phenomenon was not limited to the scholarly-minded residents but also to other colonial officers or travelers. Margery Perham who travelled through Borno in 1932 described in her diary her personal feelings of admiration about the kingdom. In her book, she made sure to mention that Borno once “dominated that whole dry heart of north-central Africa, stretching from the present Bornu to the borders of the present Sudan.”^{Footnote 49} Rex Niven, resident of Borno from 1940 to 1943 and again from 1948 to 1950, did not hesitate to repeat the history of the territory of Borno in his memoirs, Nigerian Kaleidoscope.^{Footnote 50} For him, the residency of Borno was “something essentially unique and out of this world.”^{Footnote 51} This Bornoan exceptionalism was reinforced by other colonial officers. In their memoirs of civil servants throughout the whole of the British Empire, Gawain Bell,^{Footnote 52} and Bryan Sharwood-Smith^{Footnote 53} emphasized the history of nineteenth-century Borno. R. Trevor Kerslake, Assistant-District Officer in Borno from 1942 to 1944, stressed that “Bornu was, and perhaps still is, a remote and somehow separate part of what was known as the Holy North.”^{Footnote 54} Trevor Clark, member of the last generation of colonial officers in Nigeria, also referred to the history of Borno in his edited book.^{Footnote 55} Nicholas McKlintock in his memoirs evoked: “The core of the province was the great central emirate of Bornu itself, under its venerable ruler, the Shehu.”^{Footnote 56}

Different travelers or colonial officers in Borno reproduced the idea of a Bornoan exceptionalism as the colonial authorities reproduced the ideas conveyed by the earlier colonial administrators and the Bornoan elite. The conservatism of the colonial officers in charge of Borno made them consider the territory of Borno as a “Holy Land” in essence. By repeating endlessly in their colonial reports or memoirs, the history of the rise and fall of the kingdom of Borno, they assured that it would survive the British colonization. Kirk-Greene stressed how these political officers sought to ensure that their power remained unchallenged in the whole of Northern Nigeria.^{Footnote 57} Securing knowledge was thus a strategy to reinforce their own power for these career-minded officers.

Studying the history of Borno enabled the colonial officers in charge to capture intellectually their province. This personal sense of belonging enabled them to administer Borno more as a ruler than as a colonial officer. Two factors were responsible for such an attitude. Firstly, the geographical distance between the administrative capitals of Northern Nigeria, Zungeru and later Kaduna and the capital of colonial Borno. As a result Borno was particularly isolated from the rest of the colony of Northern Nigeria.^{Footnote 58} Arguably, the residents in charge of Sokoto never developed such a strong autonomous attitude. Secondly, it could be argued that the British colonial officials were directly influenced by the strong political framework of Borno. In 1958, Robert Heussler, a historian of Northern Nigeria, described the specificity of what was then called “the Holy Kingdom.”^{Footnote 59} Indeed according to him: “In a North that was sacred overall, Bornu was the sanctum sanctorum where the power of a small clique of officers was as great as their ideas were reactionary.”^{Footnote 60}

Admittedly, Northern Nigeria was not at the summit of the career ladder for British colonial officers. In the unofficial hierarchy of the colonial empire, India, Sudan and Eastern Africa were more reputable and sought after. However if these officers were sent to Western Africa, it seems that Borno was an ideal place from which to advance their career. After his eight years in Borno, Palmer was promoted lieutenant-governor of The Gambia and became later on governor of Cyprus; Gordon Lethem, resident of Borno from 1925 to 1931, became governor of the Seychelles, the Leeward Islands and British Guyana; John Patterson, resident of Borno in 1937, became chief-commissioner in Northern Nigeria.^{Footnote 61} For career-minded Western African British officials, Northern Nigeria was then a place where they could advance their career. Comparatively, other colonial officers from Southern Nigeria did not obtain such prestigious positions.^{Footnote 62} Being stationed in Borno gave these officers the largest share of the prestige attached to Northern Nigeria. In addition, studying Borno provided academic laurels to them which benefitted their own career. The conjunction of these two factors made the British colonial officials eager to follow the steps of Benton or Palmer. Their scholarly interest, even if undeniable, was thus partly self-interested. As a consequence, these colonial officers became “authorities” in the two meanings of the term. In a system of Indirect Rule where the spatial structure of the nineteenth-century territory of Borno was preserved, they were at the head of a hierarchy through which they could exert their power. As products of European universities, they could become academic authorities of Borno to foster their own career. These officers were compelled to promote the unity and continuity of the Bornoan space to improve their own status as residents of the province. They were not in charge of a semi-arid, remote and relatively impoverished province; they were residents of the kingdom of Borno. The relationship between these two perceptions made these officers proud and defensive of their own authority of their province.

This does not mean that the Bornoan historical events or characters were overrated by these officers as the quality of their work is undeniable. Anthony Kirk-Greene, who was District Officer in Borno in 1955, stressed how these first figures of residents were genuinely attached but also protective of their own authority.^{Footnote 63} Kirk-Greene even became a specialist of Borno^{Footnote 64} while also focusing on the colonial service, hence becoming a scholar of these early scholars.^{Footnote 65}

Not every colonial administrator wrote scholarly works on Borno. However, all the annual colonial reports still available spell out the history of the “Holy Kingdom” of Borno. For the purposes of British colonial administration, the first part of the annual reports sent to the central government of Northern Nigeria summarized the history of Borno in a version mostly inspired by Schultze and Palmer. A process of accumulation was thus obvious as the history of the kingdom was repeated in every official document sent from Borno.^{Footnote 66} By producing a seamless official history, the British and the Bornoan elite created a vulgate of the history of Borno. Strikingly, this history is still to a certain extent the official version of the history of Borno. History, as it is taught in Bornoan schools, still corresponds to the history written endlessly in the colonial reports or in Palmer’s Sahara and Sudan.^{Footnote 67} Knowledge on Borno was thus created and fossilized at the same time by this European-Bornoan joint-venture.

The Production of Knowledge: a European-Bornoan Joint-Venture

In a 1972 essay, Ronald Robinson revealed how collaboration was essential to British imperialism.^{Footnote 68} The memoirs of the British officers present in Borno certainly reveal such an attitude in Borno. During the colonial period, a new type of history was written, influenced by both the British officers and the Bornoan elite. The last part of this article will thus try to show how the relationship between the British officers and the Bornoan elite fostered the creation of a hybrid type of knowledge.

An affinity between the British colonial officers and the Borno aristocracy certainly existed in colonial Borno. The first colonial officers in British or German Borno were mostly military officers who had no special training in territorial administration. However, each of them developed a personal relationship with the Bornoan aristocracy. This could be considered as the simple result of Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria. For example, when Lugard met the resident of Borno, W.P. Hewby, at the border of Borno province in 1909, the former said: “I may be High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria, but I see, Mr. Hewby, that you are King of Borno.”^{Footnote 69} Heussler stressed that Hewby “was genuinely surprised to get back a rocket from headquarters” when he once mentioned to his superiors: “I never appoint a District Head without having consulted the Shehu.”^{Footnote 70} It seems that from the beginning of the colonial period, the colonial officers were particularly involved with the local Bornoan hierarchy. This personal style could have been a consequence of the shortage of staff of the first generation of political officers as after the First World War, the European colonial officers were more numerous and particularly prepared for their task.^{Footnote 71} This personal involvement with the local hierarchy resulted in the production of knowledge based on information collected on the ground. Indeed, most authors conducted interviews with educated members of the places they visited in Borno. One man embodies this relationship between the British administration and the local elite in particular. This colonial officer, Herbert Palmer, desired to write the history of the kingdom since its beginnings. As Palmer himself stressed in the introduction of his book Sahara and Sudan: “During some twenty-six years spent in various parts of Northern Nigeria, much of the author’s leisure was occupied in attempts to find data for the compilation of a true history of its more important units, or ruling classes, such as the Fulbe and Kanuri of Bornu.”^{Footnote 72} History-writing was thus associated from the beginning with the “ruling class.”

From 1904 to 1930, Palmer gathered oral and written data while climbing the ladder of the Northern Nigerian colonial hierarchy. First an assistant resident, he soon became resident in Northern Nigeria. He was promoted to the residency of Borno in 1917, before becoming lieutenant-governor of Northern Nigeria in 1925. His published Arabic letters and testimonies became the basis of modern scholarship for Hausa and Bornoan studies.^{Footnote 73} For example, while in Kano, he translated numerous documents into English with the help of his assistant, Abd Allah Al-Ghadamisi.^{Footnote 74} During his eight years in Borno, Palmer focused on the history of the Sayfawa kingdom. Admittedly, his approach and methods are nowadays outdated. For example, Palmer subscribed to the diffusionist theories which wanted to find the origins of Borno in distant migrations. According to him, as the kingdom of Kanem-Borno was the first kingdom to be Islamized in Africa, it must have found its origins in the Middle East. For example, Palmer concludes that the Bornoans were linked with “Iranian Barbarians.”^{Footnote 75} This assumption was directly influenced by the Hamitic hypothesis which wanted to find the origins of complex societies such as Borno outside of Africa. In that sense, colonial historiography of Borno was not different from the colonial historiography of other colonial territories such as Rwanda.^{Footnote 76}

Palmer’s chronology of the previous reigning dynasty was inaccurate and was revised later by historians such as Dierk Lange.^{Footnote 77} Nor did Palmer, for example, quote his sources when he mentioned the existence of a territorial division of sixteenth-century Borno. Palmer’s monograph was not the first example of European scholarship on Borno. However, he promoted the kingdom on the historical academic stage. His monograph Sahara and Sudan revealed the importance of written and oral sources to understand the history of an ancient African territory. Palmer’s work was more than a new way to deal with the history of Borno as every following author repeated the pattern described earlier: informants, even if not acknowledged, were sought after and repeated the apparently identical version of the history of Borno. Using a number of unacknowledged sources, they stressed the antiquity of Borno while focusing on a certain vision of the history of the kingdom. The content of their studies revealed both the preoccupations of the colonizers and the Bornoan elite. Indeed, most colonial officials devoted their attention to the history of famous men and their prestigious feats. The Bornoan scholar-administrators examined great figures of the past such as King Idris who used firearms against his opponents in the sixteenth century. The prestigious roots of the Bornoan kingdom were also sought after. Only informants from the educated elite could have been aware of the political conditions which led to the succession of monarchs of Kanem-Borno.

By publishing what they had gleaned from their time in Borno, the colonial officers rebuilt the political history of the kingdom. This means that the Bornoan elite tried to intervene in the production of knowledge. Because of the lack of sources, it is difficult to assess the precise preoccupations of the colonial officers’ informants in order to determine whether they had a hidden agenda to influence the writing of their history. However, the elitist bias described earlier never disappeared from historical writings produced by Bornoan colonial officers. The motivation of the Bornoan elite to justify their own position in the colonial framework of Indirect Rule can explain this phenomenon. Their presence at the head of the Native Authority was comforted by their intervention in the creation of colonial knowledge. However, because of the lack of direct published and oral sources, recovering the actual voices of the Bornoan elite could be too speculative.

The content of this knowledge revealed the preoccupations of the Bornoan elite and the European colonizers. As authorities of Borno, they had to be perceived as a legitimate source of power. This could not be better illustrated by the fact that the British were constantly referred to as those who resurrected the kingdom of Borno. Defenders of the historical rights of the Kanemi dynasty, the British saved Borno from oblivion. The British were thus who restored the ancient order and British colonization should thus be thought as a territorial and dynastic restoration. For example, the conquest of Borno led to the creation of a relatively abundant bibliography which never displayed competing versions of the history of the kingdom. It seems improbable though that local informants always shared the same version of history. This could be explained by the fact that one official version of the history of Borno could satisfy the heirs of the Kanemi dynasty as they could find common ground with the British colonial administration in the legitimization of their own presence as sovereigns of the kingdom. According to the history of Borno as analyzed by the colonial officers, the founder of the dynasty, Muhammad El-Kanemi, rapidly came to dominate the whole of the territory of Borno after the Fulani jihad of 1810. Murray Last suggested that this was only one interpretation of the events. It is entirely possible that it took years or even decades for Muhammad El-Kanemi and his sons to overthrow the ancient dynasty of the Sayfawa.^{Footnote 78} Conveniently, this hypothesis was never suggested by colonial officers. Louis Brenner also argued that events described in the official history of Borno were not as clear-cut as described by the colonial officers in their history of the kingdom: “In Bornu, where there are virtually no fixed testimonies and the informants are therefore free to relate only what they wish in the manner they wish, (…) cross-checking and re-examination is extremely important.”^{Footnote 79}

Another example at the very beginning of colonial rule illustrates how the writing of Bornoan history was manipulated. According to colonial historiography, the British colonial officers convinced in 1902 the heir of the previous ruling dynasty, Shehu Garbai, to rule over what would become the Northern Nigerian province of Borno. For example, Charles Temple wrote: “The dynasty of El Kanemi, in the person of Garbai, son of Ashimi, had meantime been restored to the throne, and the British effectually occupied the country in 1902.”^{Footnote 80} This “restoration” which was often reiterated by subsequent academic writings appears to be more complex as Shehu Garbai was not in British-controlled territory at that time. Hans Dominik, a German colonial officer claimed that Shehu Garbai was reluctant to cross the newly created colonial boundary and that he was “taken away” by British troops. According to this German account, the British kidnapped Shehu Garbai in the town of Dikwa, located in the future German colony of Cameroon but still controlled by the French army in March 1902.^{Footnote 81} This explains why the Germans complained about the kidnapping of a person they perceived as a “German Sultan.”^{Footnote 82} The German archives contain the correspondence between the British, French and German officers in charge of this affair, each of them presenting a different point of view on this complex episode.^{Footnote 83} More than the event itself, Shehu Garbai embodies the European quest for rulers at the beginning of colonial rule. In the context of the creation of European colonies in Africa, local rulers were needed by every single power. Borno was no exception. Moreover, this incident totally disappeared from subsequent British accounts of the colonization of Northern Nigeria where the heir of the previous dynasty gladly joined the British colonial administration. On the one hand, this clearly shows that the British tried to simplify the narrative of the beginning of colonial rule, which, for lack of clarity, was only explained by the fact that Shehu Garbai was willing to acquire the Bornoan throne. On the other hand, this episode is depicted as the return of a king to his rightful throne. Shehu Garbai is presented under a favorable light without any competitor from his family. The extent to which Shehu Garbai manipulated colonial powers in 1902 has totally been eluded by subsequent historical writings. The history of the beginning of colonial rule in Borno was thus simplified to create a coherent narrative favorable to the British version of events and to the person of Shehu Garbai who acquired the right to become the Shehu of what would be known as “British Bornu.”^{Footnote 84}

This raises the question of the exact role played by the elite in the process of writing history. Were they simple informants, secondary or even co-authors? Recent Africanist literature has focused on the role of African as intermediaries or power brokers.^{Footnote 85} As in the conquest or the administration of colonial Africa, the local elite also played a very important role in the creation of knowledge. However, quantifying the degree of this influence seems difficult. Limiting the role of the local elite to that of simple informants would not be satisfying because of their considerable input in the creation of local history. As in the case of the Lunguru in Tanganyika,^{Footnote 86} a genuine pidginization of Bornoan history took place. It means that the colonial administration did not hesitate to intervene in the writing of history as seen previously in the case of the “kidnapping” of the first Shehu of British colonial Borno.

The case of Borno offers a case of historical pidginization where the production of historical knowledge in colonial Borno can be considered as a joint venture. This alliance between the Europeans and the local elite was illustrated by the stance taken by the British colonial administration in relation to education. In 1922, the Phelps-Stoke Report was used as the basis for a reorganization of education in Northern Nigeria and recommended that local languages should be used in class. In order to teach Kanuri culture to the young Bornoans members of the minority which attended Western schools, a series of book called Kitabuwa Kanuribe, the Kanuri books, was published by the Nigerian colonial authorities. The fifth and last book of this series was dedicated to history.^{Footnote 87} Not surprisingly, the first author of this book was a colonial officer in Borno, Randall E. Ellison, who was working as the Officer of Education in 1935. His main informant was Muhammad Ngileruma who later became Waziri of Borno and was the Permanent Delegate of Nigeria to the United Nations Organization from 1960 to 1962.^{Footnote 88} Once again, the history of Borno was the history as reconstructed by colonial officers and the Bornoan elite.

Furthermore, a British version of Bornoan history was also transmitted in schools. The successor of the nineteenth-century rulers of Borno also supported the teaching of Bornoan history. The monarch of Borno from 1922 to 1937, Shehu Sanda Kura, was particularly involved in this production of history books. The joint work of these colonial officers and the local elite was thus taught to the minority of young Bornoans who attended school. This transmission of knowledge completed the hybridization of knowledge initiated by the Germans and British. It could thus be argued that historical knowledge was manipulated and transmitted by the Europeans and the local elite during the colonial times. Because of its richly documented past, the case of Borno was thus an extreme case of this joint production of knowledge.