DEBATES ON THE TRANSITION TO GROUNDNUT CULTIVATION IN WEST AFRICA: MARKETS, LABOR AND COLONIAL POLICY

Although several writers have recognized the importance of slave labor in groundnut production in West Africa during the period of transition to cash-crop cultivation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of them have focused on the western Sudan, not on Fanisau. Bernard Moitt, in a journal article, discusses the crucial role played by slave labor in the expansion of groundnut production in the region of Senegal, particularly in the period between 1850 and 1905.Footnote ⁶ According to him, although Senegal did not experience any radical technological changes following increasing demand for its groundnuts by European industries (which needed more fats and oils for their operations) after the 1840s, it relied heavily on the extension of its transportation network and on the use of slave labor to expand production for export. Moitt explains that Senegal mainly acquired slaves from the French Soudan (or what is now known as Mali), and by the first years of the twentieth century slave labor was extensively used in the major production centers of Kajoor and Bawol, in spite of half-hearted anti-slavery measures taken in the 1890s by French colonial administrators such as Albert Grodet. Although slave labor was central to expansion in groundnut production up to 1905, in the period that followed this was not the case, as members of the Murid Islamic brotherhood and navetanes (migrant workers)Footnote ⁷ became primarily responsible for further expansion in production. Moitt claims that the decline in the importance of slave labor in production was especially tied to the 1905 law passed by French colonial administrators that outlawed the alienation of a person's labor. In his opinion, this specific law encouraged slaves either to leave their households or to work out new relations of production.

In Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa, Klein affirms Moitt's ideas that slavery and slave-trading persisted in Senegal up to 1905 and that slaves produced a considerable proportion of groundnuts for export largely because of the predominance of the slave population in the Wolof regions.Footnote ⁸ In addition to confirming these ideas, he demonstrates that slave labor was used extensively for groundnut production in both the Gambia and Guinea. Although groundnut production started in the Gambia in the 1830s, Klein's analysis indicates that slave labor only became crucial in production after the Soninke–Marabout wars, which began in the 1860s. It also suggests that the predominance of slave labor in groundnut production in the area was relatively short-lived. Klein claims that, as in Guinea (where slave labor was especially central to production in Rio Nunez and Rio Pongo), slave labor was crucial in production in the Gambia up to the 1880s.

Detailed analyses by James F. Searing, who studied Wolof and Kajoor, contradicts the claims of Moitt and Klein that slave labor was central to production in these regions up to 1905. Searing questions Klein's upward revision of the 1903–5 census figures on slavery for the Wolof districts, and argues that, although slave labor was central to groundnut production before the twentieth century (specifically from the 1860s to 1882 in Kajoor), the chaos of conflict and war experienced around 1883 to 1895, rather than the 1905 colonial anti-slavery policy, encouraged flight by disaffected slaves as well as negotiated settlements. Thus, in Searing's opinion, by 1903 slave labor was no longer crucial in groundnut production.Footnote ⁹

While Searing questions both conclusions – that slave labor was significant in production after 1883 and that the 1905 colonial anti-slavery policy was responsible for slave flight – Kenneth Swindell and Alieu Jeng, in a relatively recent study on groundnuts in the Gambia, argue that the colonial policy introduced in 1894 was what led to the decline in the importance of slave labor in groundnut production there.Footnote ¹⁰ According to them, in the nineteenth century groundnut production relied on a diverse labor force, but from about 1857 the Soninke–Marabout wars fostered slave-trading and the extensive use of slaves in production. Thus by the 1890s slaves, in their own words, ‘outnumbered freemen by two to one’ in the North Bank, which was the major center of groundnut cultivation in the Gambia.Footnote ¹¹ As mentioned, however, for Swindell and Jeng the decline in slavery and the use of slaves only occurred after the 1894 slave trade abolition ordinance. They suggest that, following the introduction of this ordinance, slave flight and emancipation increased, while the general erosion of slavery encouraged rapid and more efficient forms of labor, as well as increasing use of migrant labor.Footnote ¹²

In terms of extant literature on the ‘cash-crop revolution’ in early colonial Northern Nigeria, much of it says little or nothing on Fanisau and most authors also fail to focus significant attention on the use of slave labor in groundnut production. Although Jan Hogendorn offers passing comments on Fanisau and explains why there was a changeover to groundnut production in one of his first major works on groundnut production in Kano and other parts of colonial Northern Nigeria, he was uncertain about where the labor involved in the production of this crop came from.Footnote ¹³ In particular, he suggests that, faced with Lancashire's cotton mills or British need for a new source of cotton, and partly because of high population and other conditions favorable for cotton production in Kano, the British Cotton Growing Association were more concerned with encouraging Kano to produce cotton at the turn of the twentieth century. In pursuit of this interest, according to Hogendorn, British interests pressured their home government (which was also influenced by defense and other economic considerations) into constructing the Baro–Kano rail line.Footnote ¹⁴ With the assistance of the colonial government, they also promoted universal cotton-growing in Northern Nigeria.

Unhappily for the proponents of cotton, however, margarine production stimulated a ‘new demand’ for groundnuts in Europe between 1906 and 1914. In part because of this ‘new demand’ and the better profit opportunities it soon presented, Kano traders, whose operations were based on a system of clientage, took several measures to ensure that a large amount of the crop would be grown, at the expense of cotton. Specifically, they employed propaganda by sending their clientage agents into the countryside to spread news, directly via village headmen and traders in village and hamlet markets, about, among other things, the relatively high profit that could be obtained by selling nuts. They also recruited village heads to act as agents in popularizing particular clientage networks at harvest time. Finally, Kano traders often sent agent-buyers to outlying areas, not only to identify hardworking and honest farmers but also to encourage such individuals to grow more groundnuts, in part by assuring them of instant purchase and/or by handing credits and/or gifts to them.

According to Hogendorn, the methods adopted by Kano traders generally raised the acreage brought under cultivation, resulting in two major groundnut booms shortly after the Baro–Kano rail line was completed: in 1912 and in 1913–14. In his estimation, the first boom resulted in the sale of over 10,000 tons of groundnuts; while the second boom, in spite of the terrible drought experienced in 1913–14, resulted in the sale of over 11,900 tons of groundnuts. Having tied the expansion of groundnut production to entrepreneurship, market, and the completion of the Baro–Kano railway, Hogendorn recognizes that expansion in production occurred within the context of abundant land and scarce labor. In his view, the labor problem was primarily compounded because:

Overall, Hogendorn recognizes that, because of labor problems, slavery and other forms of unfree labor were involved in groundnut production. He also appreciates that reallocation of labor from other crops and activities and reduction of leisure by farmers helped to address labor problems. Largely because of silences in the sources, however, he could not establish whether slave or non-slave labor played a larger role in production. In other words, as mentioned, he was uncertain about where the labor involved in the changeover to groundnut production came from.

Hogendorn's works have been criticized, to a greater or lesser extent, by several writers who think, inter alia, that they are based on ‘voluntaristic notions’ and that they present colonialism in Northern Nigeria as undisruptive. Major critics such as Michael Watts, Robert Shenton, and Louise Lennihan generally stress that expansion in groundnut/cash-crop production only occurred through a reallocation of labor from other tasks and that this process itself, which was never costless, was mainly fostered by colonial land policies.Footnote ¹⁶ According to their various analyses, following colonial conquest an alliance was forged between merchant capital, the state bureaucracy, and the indigenous or ‘traditional’ aristocrats in Northern Nigeria. In the context of this alliance, the state introduced and implemented two major land policies prior to 1914. The first policy, introduced between 1900 and 1906 by Frederick Lugard, promoted the development of large-scale estates owned by a class of landlords and worked by a class of landless wage laborers. This policy was not, however, in line with the ideas of many of Lugard's colleagues, who, influenced by the theories of Henry George, believed, among other things, first, that the interests of large-scale estate-owners or landlords mainly served to limit production and trade, and second, that, to prevent landlords from reaping the benefit and exertions of others, land should be nationalized, while the state should guarantee the right of all land users and also tax away all rent that could have accrued to private landowners.

After the first departure of Lugard from Northern Nigeria in 1906, those who opposed his land policy became dominant forces in the region, and, for the critics of Hogendorn listed above, it was following Lugard's departure that the initial land policy was ultimately substituted in 1910 by another one that ensured that smallholder or peasant agriculture predominated; that more acreage was brought into cultivation; and that incentives compelled smallholders into reallocating labor from other tasks to cash-crop/groundnut production.Footnote ¹⁷

Hogendorn and Paul Lovejoy subsequently rejected the notion that Lugard's vision was altered by the 1910 land proclamation.Footnote ¹⁸ In their opinion, Lugard's vision could not be altered, in part because it was hard to implement the theories of Henry George since Africans did not comply with all colonial land policies, while long-established local customary rules of tenure continued to be observed.Footnote ¹⁹ Hogendorn and Lovejoy also suggest that the land proclamation of 1910 was not primarily aimed at creating peasant farmers, as Shenton and others claim. Rather they argue that, as with earlier colonial land policies, it (and other non-land colonial policies) mainly served to enhance the ability of the British administrators, local authorities, and merchants to control slave labor. Having established several ways in which colonial land policies shaped the control of slave labor, Hogendorn and Lovejoy ultimately conclude that, although peasants and freed slaves were important suppliers of labor, slavery was the dominant source of labor for groundnut/agricultural production in the early colonial era and that, in fact, slavery and plantations were still widespread in Northern Nigeria during this period.Footnote ²⁰

The problem with their analysis, however, is that it offers no real proof that slaves and freed slaves were growing groundnuts on plantations or elsewhere. Likewise, Steven Pierce's detailed study of Kano fails to address this problem, in part because of his focus on ‘small scale landholdings’ and in part because he examines Ungogo, rather than neighboring Fanisau.Footnote ²¹ The problem posed by Hogendorn and Lovejoy's analysis therefore remains. While this is apparent, Austin has recently explored the causal relations between the ‘cash crop revolution’, ‘the slow death of slavery’, and debt bondage. He laments that there is still no adequate study of the contribution of slave and other forms of coerced labor to the ‘cash-crop revolution’ of the early colonial period.Footnote ²²

This article primarily attempts to address the problem of the specific nature of labor in the transition to cash-crop cultivation in the early colonial period through the case study of Fanisau. The article draws on varied source materials, including colonial records, oral data, and secondary sources. The oral data used in this study are derived largely from a single source, the Yusuf Yunusa collection. The collection is a set of oral data on the economic history of the central savanna, recorded in 1975 by a team of scholars led by Lovejoy and Hogendorn.Footnote ²³ I have relied on the Yunusa collection specifically because, of the varied collections of oral data recorded by the team led by Hogendorn and Lovejoy, it is the only one that deals with the history of Fanisau in particular and Kano emirate/province in general. The Yunusa collection is also important because it is based on testimonies of former slaves, the sons and daughters of slaves, and the families of plantation-owners and their assistants. Since informants whose testimonies were recorded were based in various parts of Kano emirate, it is therefore possible to check the content of a testimony derived from one part of the emirate against another recorded elsewhere in the same emirate. It is also possible to internally check the testimonies from any given unit of Kano emirate.Footnote ²⁴ More importantly, however, some of the testimonies in the Yunusa Collection were either collected at Fanisau or at plantations nearby and therefore have information on daily life, resistance, and accommodation that are not found in conventional sources. Indeed, it is this source that enabled me to understand the development of the complex of plantations at Fanisau.

Inevitably, a problem of chronology arose in reference to the establishment/growth of the Fanisau plantations, since the oral data mostly applies to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This problem of chronology and understanding change over time could, however, be addressed through periodization related to the accession of Ibrahim Dabo in 1819, Clapperton's visits in the 1820s, Barth's visit in the 1850s, and the Basasa (Kano civil war of 1893–4), ending with the colonial conquest and the escape of many slaves. That said, the informants whose testimonies are relied on in this study include Hamidu Galadiman Shamaki (seventy years old in 1975, hence born in 1905); Yusuf Yunusa recorded his testimony on 4 April 1975 at Fanisau. As the chief overseer of the emir's estates in this settlement, as well as a descendant of the slaves introduced there from the Ningi region, he was knowledgeable about the affairs of the settlement, especially as they related to plantations. Muhammadu Rabi'u (59 years old in 1975, hence born in 1916) was interviewed by Yunusa on 13 July 1975 at Fanisau. At the time of the interview, Rabi'u was an Islamic scholar as well as a farmer. He was very knowledgeable not only about the history of the settlement but also about the history of slavery in Kano emirate.

Colonial records on Fanisau are very limited. As a matter of fact, I am aware of only two colonial documents that mention the settlement in passing, specifically for the time period considered in this article. One of these colonial documents provides very brief information on the origin of Fanisau, while the other mentions groundnut production in the settlement during the early colonial era.Footnote ²⁵ Hogendorn and Lovejoy also consulted these documents. However, in this article, I will mainly attempt to highlight and more carefully analyze one colonial document, a 1913 Annual Report on Kano, which they used.Footnote ²⁶ I will also draw attention to a few details from this specific document that Hogendorn omitted or missed in his work on the transition to groundnut production in Northern Nigeria. To establish that slaves played a large role in production, this article will necessarily draw further attention to the fact that aside from Kano traders, peasants, and slaves, the emir of Kano also took important actions that fostered expansion in groundnut production. The article focuses on the period 1913–14 mainly because this brief time corresponds to the initial groundnut export boom.

In the following pages, I first briefly discuss the scale of slavery and plantation agriculture in early colonial Kano. I then highlight the strategies that the emir of Kano used to stimulate the production of groundnuts in early colonial Kano. Next, I explain the measures employed by Hausa traders to further foster groundnut cultivation. Here, as in the subsection on the emir's strategy, my analysis mainly focuses on Fanisau. Finally, in the concluding section of the article, I briefly explain the implications of my findings.

SLAVERY AND PLANTATION AGRICULTURE IN EARLY COLONIAL KANO

Kano, one of the central emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate, was a major agricultural center prior to the twentieth century, producing a variety of crops including cotton, indigo, and millet. It is clear that none of these crops was meant for the European market. Rather, Kano's agricultural products were in part destined for local consumption and in part used as raw materials for the handicraft cotton textile industry. The products of this industry were meant for regional distribution either across the Sahara or southward towards the forest region of West Africa.Footnote ²⁷ In terms of the total export commodities of Kano, however, groundnuts had virtually no share. As a matter of fact, this specific crop even had a relatively small share in terms of output for local consumption. In other words, groundnuts were not a major agricultural product in Kano during the nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, the British colonial administration in Northern Nigeria established the Baro–Kano railway shortly after it annexed Kano, and only then did groundnuts become the single most important cash crop or export commodity produced in the region.Footnote ²⁸

As Hogendorn and Lovejoy rightly suggest, slavery and plantation agriculture were still common in early colonial Kano. To understand the importance of slave labor in the shift to groundnut production in Kano, it is necessary to understand the scale of slavery and plantation agriculture in the society during this period. In what immediately follows, therefore, I will proceed to address this specific issue.Footnote ²⁹

At the time of colonial conquest, the population of Kano was probably between 1·5 million and 2 million.Footnote ³⁰ Considering what is known about the slave population in Kano during the nineteenth century,Footnote ³¹ I am inclined to accept the argument that slaves must have constituted between a quarter and a half of Kano's population during this period of British conquest.Footnote ³² Major slaveholders were relatively few, however, and they were of diverse background. The emir was one of these major slaveholders. His slaves and the slave population of other slaveholders had risen in the course of the nineteenth century, during which period previous Kano emirs encouraged the ‘lawful’ enslavement of ‘others’, specifically those whom they considered political rivals or culturally different.Footnote ³³

As a major slaveholder, at the time of the British conquest the emir used slaves in various capacities, including as concubines, soldiers, messengers, tax collectors, administrators, and plantation laborers. Other non-aristocrats who owned slaves also employed them as plantation laborers and in other, varied ways by this same period. Upon realizing the importance of slave labor in the economy of Kano and upon appreciating the importance of the support of aristocrats in local administration, British imperialists, who ironically used the anti-slavery ideology to justify their conquest of Kano, allowed slavery to persist in the society, at least until the 1930s. However, they also took actions that would lead to the slow death of the institution. In this regard, the British proclaimed that anyone born after the last day of March in 1901 was automatically free, that slave-raiding and slave-trading were outlawed, that slaves could make a request for freedom through local courts, that slave masters could no longer refuse redemption, and that slaves could obtain freedom through self-purchase, as specifically laid out in Islamic law. Over time, as the British continued to implement such policies, the freed slave population in Kano increased. In many cases, freed slaves still remained dependants of their ex-masters.Footnote ³⁴

Although an increasing number of slaves obtained their freedom because of the proclamations issued by the British, the slave population of Kano had not declined sharply, at least by 1914. This was partly due to the fact that many slaves chose to remain in bondage, for several reasons. For instance, many slaves remained with their masters because of the ‘prestige’ of being a royal slave, because of the fear of losing a patron or defender, or because of the fear of capture or re-enslavement on the roads after escape. Similarly, for many royal slaves, taking their master to court to request freedom must also have been a relatively risky venture in view of their owner's standing in the evolving colonial order. Many royal slaves, therefore, did not request their freedom from the emir in court, probably in order to avoid a worse experience.Footnote ³⁵

While many slaves elected to remain with their masters, many others were forced to remain as a result of disregard for colonial policies by the emir and other slaveholders and as a result of other different colonial policies. The issue of slaveholders' disregard for colonial policies will be discussed later; here it suffices to note that, as slaves learned more about the British conquest of an increasing part of Sokoto Caliphate, they increasingly deserted their masters.Footnote ³⁶ This situation, of course, gave colonial administrators great concerns. They therefore decided to make desertion very difficult, by promulgating a colonial vagrancy law and by encouraging the emir and his subordinates not to grant land to runaway slaves. To make the attainment of freedom difficult for slaves in Kano, the British took other measures, including refusing to establish a Freed Slaves Home in the region.

As a result of the ambivalent actions of the colonial administrators and other related factors, therefore, slavery was still a functioning institution in Kano in 1913–14 and plantations remained an important part of this institution. In terms of plantations, those attached to political offices were the most important, followed by the private estates of the aristocracy and merchants, respectively. These estates were often quite extensive and, of the various categories listed above, those attached to political offices alone were about 5,000 in number. In general, the emir was one of the largest landlords and it has been suggested that he controlled thousands of acres of land cultivated by slaves, at areas such as Gasgainu, Yokanna, Sawaina, Madarin Taba, Dawaki ta Kudu district, Gandun Nassarawa, and Gogel, to mention just a few. Overall, as Lovejoy and Hogendorn have written,

GROUNDNUT PRODUCTION: THE EMIR'S INITIATIVES

The emir of Kano, Abbas, took major actions to encourage groundnut production in July 1913. The reasons for his actions may be complex, but one factor may have been that, according to the 1913 annual report on Kano, early in that month a rumor circulated that a special tax was to be levied on groundnuts, and, further that ‘if the supply (of groundnut) increased, the price would fall heavily’.Footnote ³⁸ Partly based on this rumor, the colonial record further reports, many farmers started to uproot their young groundnut plants. Downplaying the emir's initiatives, Hogendorn suggests that word on this development reached a colonial administrator, J. Withers Gill, who in turn instructed the emir to help stop the rumor from causing further harm. He further refers in passing to two specific actions taken by the emir.Footnote ³⁹ According to the 1913 annual report, however, at least one of the two specific actions taken by the emir was based on his own initiative. It is this action that provides us with part of the evidence for the use of slaves and plantations in the expansion of groundnut production. Therefore, the greater part of my analysis will focus on that action. But first a comment on what I view as his less relevant action is in order.

Upon hearing about the rumor resulting in the uprooting of young groundnuts, one of the strategies the emir used to encourage production was counter-propaganda. The 1913 annual report simply states that he ‘instructed all headmen to proclaim the falsity of the rumour’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although, the manner in which these messages were delivered was not indicated, we know that he usually sent his officials on such errands. These officials, at least during the early colonial period up to 1914, usually toured either on foot or on horseback, informing village heads and others of the emir's messages.Footnote ⁴¹ Such officials usually included slaves.Footnote ⁴² It therefore appears likely that slaves were also used in disseminating messages that fostered expansion in groundnut production.

Apart from using propaganda to revive groundnut production, however, the emir, according to the 1913 annual report, ‘on his own initiative went out to Fanisau where he is not in the habit of planting groundnuts and held a large “gayya” for the sole purpose of planting groundnuts’.Footnote ⁴³ The report did not define the word gayya and this may relate to the fact that the use of slave labor or plantations contradicts the British anti-slavery ideology. Although the report is silent on the meaning of gayya, Hogendorn and others state that the term refers to collective farm work.Footnote ⁴⁴ While this definition is correct, we also know that gayya or collective farm work was common and at times compulsory in the past.Footnote ⁴⁵ Therefore, gayya was often meant to include slave labor.

Historically, it is difficult to establish the first moment when gayya was employed in production in Fanisau. However, we know that by the nineteenth century the practice was common and that slave labor was dominant in such collective farm work. According to custom, the slaves themselves sometimes called for the assistance of free persons and freed slaves for collective farm work at the royal estates. In such instances, they would claim that outstanding work at the gandun sarki (royal estate) could only be completed with the assistance of the freeborn. According to Rabi'u, an oral informant who knew about the history of Fanisau, such requests for free-born labor were made to local authorities who, in turn, imposed the corvee. In his words:

These traditions must be treated with caution and appear to serve the purpose of placing responsibility for corvee on the slaves rather than on the management of the plantation; but the impression is that slaves could activate the labor of free people and therefore were actively setting the terms of their own labor conditions. What is more important to note, however, is, first, that the practice of having slaves as the dominant population in collective farm work was evident during the nineteenth century; and second, that gayya at the royal estates in Fanisau could have involved predominantly slave labor but also a portion of the free population in the settlement. It seems that both of these traditions were active in the early twentieth century, or at least until 913 and 1914 as I will attempt to demonstrate below.

Under the context of the prevailing demographic characteristics of Fanisau, Emir Abbas had no other option but to rely mainly on slave labor to encourage groundnut production when he visited the settlement in 1913. According to various sources, by 1913 slaves constituted a majority of the population at Fanisau, and most of them were plantation laborers.Footnote ⁴⁹ How did this slave population come about, and why was it still high between 1913 and 1914? As I have suggested elsewhere, slavery was an identifiable feature at Fanisau before the 1804 jihad, but slave labor was not significantly used in production and certainly not on the scale of plantations, at least not before about 1819.Footnote ⁵⁰ After Ibrahim Dabo assumed office as emir of Kano in 1819, however, he established Fanisau as a ribat (frontier fortress). Thereafter, many slaves were settled at the emir's ribat for defensive purposes and also to engage in agricultural production, much of it consumed in the palace at Kano city. The grain produced was fed to livestock as well as people. In consolidating this settlement, the emirs of Kano encouraged free merchants to establish their own farms and plantations in the shadow of the ribat. In particular, wealthy kola traders resident in Kano city were given land for this purpose. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Fanisau had become a complex of plantations, two of the largest belonging to the emir and the rest belonging to merchants.

The royal estates at Fanisau were attached by the emir to the office of one of the most significant royal slaves, the Shamaki, for supervision. The estates were large and, in the perception of slaves and their descendants, they comprised two plantations known as Waceni and gandun sarki at Fanisau. The two plantations probably varied over time in terms of size and extent but, by the turn of the twentieth century, Waceni was located to the north of Fanisau town and occupied the entire region between the Juji and Tskiya streams, while the gandun sarki at Fanisau occupied another vast territory to the west of Fanisau.Footnote ⁵¹ The extent of these two plantations has not been established. However, it is clear that the estates were never completely cultivated, owing to their size. One indicator of their extent is the fact that necessary supervision was mainly conducted on horseback. We also know that the gandun sarki at Fanisau was among the three largest royal estates in Kano emirate, according to Yunusa, the two others being those at Gogel and Giwaran.Footnote ⁵² As one of these estates, the gandun sarki at Fanisau must have had at least five hundred slave laborers because it is known that there were that many slaves who worked the smaller royal estate at Gandun Nassarawa.Footnote ⁵³

Prominent among the settlers who influenced the growth of the plantation sector at Fanisau were Madugu Kosai, Madugu Ada, and Dan Sudu, who were free immigrants or their descendants and were long-distance traders. Kosai's estate at Fanisau was located at Kanyan Amana, immediately beyond the western frontier of gandun Waceni. The precise extent of this holding has not been established. However, it is clear that there were at least sixty slaves settled in the slave quarters there at the end of the nineteenth century. Madugu Ada and Dan Sudu had their estates at a neighboring subordinate community to Fanisau, known as Zabainawa. Although the size of their holdings is also not known, other reports indicate that wealthy individuals had estates ranging from 350 to 1,053 acres or even more.Footnote ⁵⁴ Taken together, both the private and royal estates at Fanisau were situated outside the defensive walls of the settlement, and most of them survived into the early colonial era.

In addition to the slaves of the emir and rich merchants who constituted the dominant population at Fanisau, we know that there were a few free individuals, mainly butchers, who had residences in the settlement. Some of these butchers had acquired a few slaves who helped them in their household and in other enterprises, including their small farm holdings. Apart from free butchers, some slaves who had obtained their freedom through self-purchase and other means also resided at Fanisau.Footnote ⁵⁵ In spite of achieving freedom through the proper channels, however, ex-slaves often continued to depend on their former masters for access to land.Footnote ⁵⁶ Consequently, they were expected to provide labor for their ex-masters, even though the obligation was mainly undertaken to symbolize dependence, emphasizing reciprocal exchange rather than force.Footnote ⁵⁷ But, as elsewhere in the Sokoto Caliphate,Footnote ⁵⁸ even these exchanges were necessarily unequal; ex-slaves gave portions of their crops as rent on the land, in addition to their labor. On occasions such as marriages and naming ceremonies, the ex-master gave gifts, as did the ex-slave in turn. However, the ex-master unquestionably remained the guardian of the ex-slave and his children, as he (the ex-master) was supposed to assist them whenever they were in any form of serious difficulty such as sickness or extreme poverty. Indeed, ‘the slave who has been given his freedom still has his ex-owner as his wakili (“representative”), and the children of the ex-owner as the “representatives” of his children as long as they stay in the same place together’.Footnote ⁵⁹

It is significant to note at this point that the British occupation of Kano, as well as colonial anti-slavery policies, encouraged not only slave flight but also the growth of the freed slave population in Fanisau. In fact, according to one source, once the British announced in the early 1900s that ‘Let everybody go where he wanted to go, we have captured this town, no more slavery. And anybody who remains in slavery, he should blame himself. He also works for nothing’,Footnote ⁶⁰ slaves immediately started deserting Fanisau for their homelands, among other areas. Nonetheless, many slaves remained, by their own choice. Sometimes they remained because they could not remember their hometown or because they had come to accept that the Islamic religion was against slave escape.Footnote ⁶¹

While many slaves made their own decision to stay in Fanisau, others were forced to remain in bondage by their slave masters. For instance, in spite of the colonial policy that required masters to grant freedom to slaves based on self-purchase, the emir of Kano, according to oral sources, never released any slave on this consideration.Footnote ⁶² Available evidence also indicates that, in spite of colonial proclamations against slavery and contemporary slave flights, the slave population belonging to the emir declined only a little from what it was during the late nineteenth century, partly because slave flight from private estates to the royal estates – a flight pattern that was evident in the nineteenth century – persisted into the early colonial era.Footnote ⁶³

Viewed critically, therefore, it is evident that by 1913, when the emir took specific actions to promote groundnut production, both his royal estates and the private estates (whose owners sought to maintain their plantations and slave population despite colonial anti-slave-trading policy, as will be shown below) at Fanisau were still mainly populated by slaves. Implicit in this is the fact that the gayya held by the emir to encourage groundnut production between 1913 and 1914 was mostly based on slave labor. Freed slaves and free people were less well represented, and even then not all the freed slaves and free people in the settlement could have been involved, as the above-quoted tradition suggests. The emir's intent seems to have been to encourage, through direct order in his Fanisau holdings and through propaganda, production of groundnuts in his estates and in private holdings elsewhere in Kano. In the gayya he held in Fanisau, therefore, the involvement of relatively few freed slaves and free people from both within and outside the settlement would have served this purpose.

While the emir most likely used relatively few freed slaves and free people, available sources suggest that the gayya held on the royal estate in Fanisau after British conquest, including between 1913 and 1914, was not typical of earlier practices because it also often included prisoners. With British conquest, it was no longer possible to sell convicted criminals to slave traders. Many such convicted criminals were therefore brought from Kano into Fanisau and elsewhere in the emirate for participation in collective farm work, which often involved groundnut production.Footnote ⁶⁴ The use of convicted criminals in collective farm work following colonial rule indicates a subtle change in the meaning of gayya, and it partly reflects an unstudied dimension of the actions taken by the emir to stimulate groundnut production during the early colonial era.

GROUNDNUT PRODUCTION: ROLE OF MERCHANTS

As Hogendorn suggests, most of the measures that Hausa traders employed during the 1913–14 growing season to ensure that they would secure a large proportion of groundnuts had been used in the 1912 growing season and they survived beyond 1914.Footnote ⁶⁵ To reiterate, these methods include the use of propaganda, the recruitment of the services of community leaders to popularize a particular clientage network at harvest time, and the dispatch of agent buyers to directly identify hardworking free farmers, and to give them gifts of merchandise to encourage such farmers to grow more groundnuts.Footnote ⁶⁶ Although Hausa traders had used these strategies before 1913, the emir's initiatives in groundnut cultivation in Fanisau and his support for groundnut production through propaganda would have further inspired many of them to use the same strategies during the 1913–14 growing season.

Much more important, however, is the fact that Hausa traders who had slave estates in Fanisau and elsewhere in Kano were also engaging in direct groundnut production by the 1913–14 growing season. Available evidence suggests that some of the merchants who went into direct groundnut cultivation had estates that dated back to the nineteenth century, and it also indicates that such traders took measures to maintain the number of plantation slaves they had even under early colonial rule. For instance, Miko Hamshaki, the son of Madugu K'osai who established one of the private estates in Fanisau during the nineteenth century, defied colonial anti-slave-trading laws in order to maintain the estate and business that he inherited from his father. Prior to the early colonial era, Hamshaki was a kola-nut merchant and an established slave trader. As a young boy, he sometimes accompanied his father on business trips to areas such as Gwanja, Borno, and Bargami, where they would buy and dispose of slaves along caravan routes. It was in the course of such trips, therefore, that Hamshaki acquired skills as a slave trader. During the early colonial era, he refused to give up his estate in Fanisau. He also continued to import slaves into his holding, and other parts of Kano, until British colonial administrators arrested him while he was attempting to import ten slaves. In his own words: ‘I was caught together with him [Madugu Shaho] by the Europeans when I bought ten slaves; I was given fifty strokes and the slaves were seized.’Footnote ⁶⁷

We do not know the precise date Hamshaki was arrested. However, available sources indicate that illegal slave-trading involving Kano persisted up to the 1930s. According to C. N. Ubah, between 1909 and 1919, Kano traders illegally brought considerable number of slaves for use in the province. He writes that:

Hausa traders such as Hamshaki dominated slave-trading up to the 1930s. During this period, they formed settlements among non-Muslims and used them to camouflage their slave-trading activities. We know, for instance, that Hausa traders sometimes pretended to be selling groundnuts or other products in their houses based in non-Muslim communities, whereas they were actually acquiring child slaves in such locations.Footnote ⁶⁹ After the British conquest, slave traders generally concentrated on enslaving children, partly because they were not in a position to offer resistance.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, such children, as Martin Klein rightly observes in his study of the western Sudan, grow fast.Footnote ⁷¹ It is also clear that many of these enslaved children, as well as enslaved adults, were subsequently disposed of or used in various capacities including plantation work in Kano and elsewhere in Northern Nigeria, as the example of Hamshaki demonstrates. This evidence suggests that the actions taken by Hausa traders to promote groundnut production were more varied than earlier assumed.

While merchants such as Hamshaki imported slaves to maintain production on estates established prior to 1913, available evidence indicates that other rich merchants acquired new plots during the 1913–14 growing season and established them as plantations on which they produced groundnuts. A number of these rich merchants acquired some of these new plots from the emir, and we know that the land grants made by the emir to such merchants were primarily tied to political considerations, largely to appease rival political factions.Footnote ⁷² However, as Allen Christelow has argued, the timing of the decision to distribute property coincided with ‘a time when office holders were being converted into salaried bureaucrats, when the cash economy was rapidly spreading in rural Kano emirate, and when the intrusion of the Nigerian Supreme Court into Northern Nigerian legal affairs was beginning to loom as a possibility’.Footnote ⁷³ Whether or not the motivation on the part of Emir Abbas for embarking on a policy of property distribution was also tied to enhancing groundnut production, we know that the land grants he made did help foster the cultivation of the crop.Footnote ⁷⁴ One of the beneficiaries of the emir's land grant was Alhassan Dantata.Footnote ⁷⁵ Prior to the late 1890s, Dantata's father had held much land in Bebeji and neighboring villages, where the Agalawa were strong and had vast interests, including small farms and plantations.Footnote ⁷⁶ As Agalawa and members of the Tijaniyya brotherhood,Footnote ⁷⁷ his family also sided with Tukur during the Basasa, or specifically during the struggle for the throne of Kano between Yusuf and Tukur, which was triggered by the death of Emir Muhammed Bello of Kano in 1893.Footnote ⁷⁸ Unsurprisingly, with the defeat of Tukur during the Basasa, the family lost out and relocated to Accra, where Alhassan Dantata's mother set herself up as a wealthy landlord. After residing briefly at Accra, the Dantata family finally relocated back to Kano around 1914. It has been established that it was in this period that the emir of Kano, mainly in a land settlement, made land grants to Dantata at Koki and elsewhere. We also know that, upon returning to Kano and acquiring more plots, the Dantata family immediately went into groundnut production and marketing.Footnote ⁷⁹

Overall, it seems evident that strategies that did not involve direct groundnut cultivation (such as the use of propaganda and offering gifts and other inducements to various individuals) were employed by Hausa traders to encourage groundnut production in Fanisau, as elsewhere in Kano, during the 1913–14 growing season. Such strategies must have contributed to the production of significant quantites of groundnuts in that growing season. However, as the above analysis suggests, what underpinned the successful emergence of large-scale groundnut production in Kano, especially in Fanisau in 1913–14, was the combination of the emir's initiatives in groundnut cultivation in Fanisau and his support for groundnut production through propaganda, as well as the important role that Hausa traders such as Hamshaki and Dantata played as planters.