Violent clashes broke out in Yelwa, in Nigeria's Plateau State, in February 2004. The combatants on both sides defended themselves by raising the specter of the Sokoto Caliphate. One side claimed their ancestors had founded the town as a Caliphal outpost; the other argued that the Plateau was never conquered and thus the Muslims were strangers with no political claims. Moses E. Ochonu opens the book with this scenario, reminding us that anyone interested in Northern Nigeria's contemporary problems should revisit the region's political history and historiography.
Shifting attention away from the Sokoto Caliphate, which has dominated scholars’ attention, Ochonu focuses on neighboring southerly polities of the Middle Belt to explore fraught and increasingly unequal political relations between Muslims and non-Muslims and between different ethnic groups. It was precisely into the peripheries that the Hausa, deputed as agents of British colonialists, gradually moved and built their own empire, he argues. He writes that both ‘Hausa-Fulani and the non-Muslim communities of the Middle Belt were instrumental subalterns’ in the British colonial system, but ‘Hausa instrumentality … was largely proactive while Middle Belt peoples’ initiatives were mostly reactive’ (p. 220).
I see the colonial-era transformations of religious and ethnic identities as more dynamic than Ochonu does. I also disagree with his view that the British wanted to erase ethnic differences by using the Hausa as subcolonialists to ‘Hausaize’ others (p. 8). The British invited Christian missions into the Middle Belt while restricting them in Muslim areas, all but guaranteeing religious difference, not sameness, in the region as a whole. Yet Ochonu is entirely convincing in his well-documented and detailed analysis of violations of historical territorial boundaries and relative political equilibrium in the Middle Belt, and in his argument that, despite local differences, a wide political consciousness arose based on a shared anti-Caliphate politics. He exposes the origins of contemporary political inequality by demonstrating how peoples considered ‘stateless’ were subsumed into the state and thus into perpetual marginalization. In each zone he discusses – Zazzau-Southern Kaduna, Bauchi-Plateau, the Benue Valley, and Adamawa – conflicts persist today.
The term proxy suggests that Hausa-Fulani stood in for the British colonial government, but, in Chapter One, Ochonu locates a precolonial Muslim ‘manifest destiny’ towards non-Muslim polities to the south. Caliph Muhammad Bello, the son (not brother) of Usman ‘dan Fodio (p. 24), erected a territorial imaginary that extended beyond the actual physical boundaries of his realm. European travelers accepted this geography and, using it, derided ‘the barbarians’ beyond the gates. Such othering, a common practice of imperial powers, effectively led to a ‘strategic sidelining’ of non-Muslims (p. 89) by Hausa and Fulani authorities united by Islam and their Europeans sympathizers, who promoted monotheistic monarchies that mirrored their own. Ochonu later qualifies this reading by noting that Muslim actors of other ethnicities effectively became Hausa, which I address below.
The next five chapters analyze precolonial political arrangements and the transformations wrought by British empowerment of Hausa agents. Ochonu explores power negotiations involving titled officials, commercial agents, and pastoralists, making clear that in the zones discussed, politics were divergent, dynamic, and delicately balanced. Variation in the four regions can be confusing at times. A more systematic analysis of ethnogenesis than Ochonu gives would have been welcome. In the Benue Valley, ‘Hausaized’ Nupe, Gbagyi, and Yoruba entrepreneurs were central, whereas in Plateau, Hausa themselves flocked to the tin mines, and in Adamawa, Fulani pastoralists were the primary movers. Readers may struggle to fully grasp the complex socioeconomic shifts playing out differently in each locale.
Yet common patterns do emerge. Precolonial slave raiding and economic domination shaped colonial-era tensions. The British made pragmatic choices to use Muslim political and economic agents that inadvertently aggravated preexisting tensions. While emirate authorities had a political repertoire beyond military strategy for dealing with non-Muslims, including amana truces (pp. 51–2), colonial changes made the Hausa the loathsome ‘face’ of British exactions (p. 127). Resentment of Hausa grew, deflecting it from the British, who received petitions from non-Muslims for protection from Muslim authorities. Middle Belters used new tools of literacy and organization developed in Christian missions to protest, but British attempts to mitigate ethno-religious tensions did not lead to real reforms. Chapter Five explores the forces that contributed to Middle Belt consciousness – Christianity, nationalist movements, and a desire for greater social development – that none could ignore by the 1950s.
The final chapter addresses a paradox of decolonization: despite strong anti-Muslim and anti-Hausa-Fulani sentiment, many Middle Belt communities, the Tiv being an important exception, backed the dominant elite's Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) party instead of the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC). Ochonu explains this paradox as arising from dislike of the UMBC's exclusionary aims, personal benefits gained from joining the NPC, and even admiration for Ahmadu Bello, the leader of the NPC. Ochonu's uses oral interviews with three key figures (pp. 203–6) to richly illuminate problems facing minority activists then and now in Nigeria.
European racialization of ethnic categories cannot fully explain postcolonial tensions, Ochonu rightly concludes. We must study African taxonomies of difference. Ochonu's work is grounded and searching in its sensitivity to both political power and histories used to support it. His pioneering and invaluable contribution should inspire scholars to no longer ignore non-Muslim Northern Nigerians as political actors.
