THE SCOURGE OF THE MOUNTAINS

For the start of our story we return to Vandu Zra Tè, a locally renowned expert in the oral history of the area:

The tale depicts Hamman Yaji as larger than life, feared but also admired, ruthless, and without fear. As might be expected, other accounts of his succession differ slightly from the almost mythical rendering of my informant.

Hamman's father Bakari was Fulbe lamido at Madagali, part of the Adamawa Emirate under Zubeiru, who was under the nominal tutelage of the Sokoto Caliphate. Zubeiru had a long and complicated relationship with each of the three colonial forces, German, French, and British, for he was caught in their inter-colonial rivalry as they coped with Mahdist insurrections. Gradually he became, in the British eyes, a major obstacle to colonization, and the ambivalent relationship of the 1880s changed into open warfare.Footnote ¹⁴ After his defeat by the Germans in 1902 (the ‘Marua massacre’), Zubeiru was later killed by non-Moslem local people.Footnote ¹⁵ When Bakari realized that the Germans considered him to be an associate of Zubeiru, he fled but was caught and the German commander Dominik ordered him to abdicate in favour of his son.Footnote ¹⁶ Bakari told the Germans that Hamman was not acceptable as chief and escaped again. However, the German commander sought him out at his mountain refuge, and forced him to return to Madagali, promising to spare his life.Footnote ¹⁷

On the hunt for Zubeiru during that year, 1902, the German officer Hans Dominik recounts that he heard that against his orders Bakari had sheltered Emir Zubeiru. Determined to punish the Madagali lamido for this ‘disobedience’, he attacked, and in a skirmish the lamido was killed inside his own compound. His son Hamman Yaji surrendered, using as a token a ring Dominik had given Bakari in an earlier encounter.

The next day Hamman Yaji, aged 35, was installed as chief.

Oral history has its own rendering of the succession itself, as recounted by a tale from Mokolo, the regional centre of the Cameroonian side of the Mandara Mountains:

Yaji started his diary on 16 September 1912, and kept a succinct record of his ‘administration’ until 25 August 1927. He raided the whole of the North-western part of the Mandara Mountains, and faithfully recorded these raids. As an example some entries regarding Higi/Kapsiki villages (omitting the Fulbe dates):

During the period covered by the diary, Yaji was in view of the various colonial powers: from 1884–1916, the region was under German control, 1916–22 the region was French, and from 1922–61 it was under the British, as part of the Northern Cameroon. At independence in 1960 it would go to Nigeria. Yaji had to adapt to three colonial regimes, each different in its colonial policy, but with one common denominator: administration and control were marginal, the local rulers were left in place, and the mountain people were of peripheral concern to the administrators. The first report on Yaji was not particularly negative. Captain Zimmerman led a military mission against what he referred to as ‘pagan excesses’ – attacks on Hausa merchants on the roads to Madagali. He seemed to be quite taken in by his visit with Hamman Yaji:

Later the opinions changed considerably. In 1914 a British colonial reported that ‘[t]he chiefs are indulging in an orgy of oppression and confiscation’.Footnote ²¹ Yet successive officials had no option but to extend a mandate to the Fulbe rulers to continue their administrative hold on the Kirdi [‘pagans’], as the mountain people were called.Footnote ²² It was only from the 1920s that a semblance of direct control was established. For most of his rule, Yaji did as he wished: up to 1920 he raided the mountain peoples for slaves and cattle, tortured, lopped off heads and stole cattle wherever he could. In his diary he recorded some 100 raids, in which a total of 2,016 captives were taken or killed (at any rate counted) and a far greater number of cattle stolen.Footnote ²³ Sukur, the mountain chiefdom between Madagali and the Kapsiki, bore the terrible brunt of his horrors,Footnote ²⁴ both in his slave raiding and in his meddling in the internal politics of this important chefferie, which was in his immediate vicinity:

For Yaji himself this was simply the way of life of a Fulbe chief: ‘Hamman Yaji's values were those of nineteenth-century Moslem Fulbe society, which had established suzerainty over the pagans of the area in a complex arrangement with the much larger emirate of Adamawa.’Footnote ²⁶ A callous dismissal of pagan lives contrasts sharply with the personal concern he showed for his own domestic slaves, just as the theft of cattle seems at odds with the meticulous book keeping of gift exchanges with other chiefs. He took considerable care that cattle rustling and slave raiding only take place on his ‘own’ territory, in those villages which constituted his fief, though he sometimes crossed that border as well. After the British made it clear on 25 December 1920 that there could be no more slave raiding, no more raids were entered in his diary. In short, he evidently adhered to the law, his law and that of his superiors; but, as we shall see, other factors made that compliance easy. The halt to his raiding did not mean the real end of slavery or even slave trading, as the internal conflicts in the region kept providing him with a trickle slaves to sell abroad.Footnote ²⁷ For instance, accusations of witchcraft or theft in the villages generated slaves for the market:

Yaji's relation with Mogode, the home of of Vandu Zra Tè, reveals his fashion of ‘keeping of the law’. Though he raided the surrounding villages of Kamale, Sena, Garta and especially Sukur, he generally spared Mogode, which housed already a minor Fulbe chief,Footnote ²⁹ who depended on Gawar, part of the Marua lamidate.Footnote ³⁰

It was not his slave raiding that eventually turned the colonial forces against Hamman Yaji, it was religion. Hamman started to follow the Mahdi faith that had been propagated by Rabeh up until 1900:

This brush with Mahdism would in the end cost him dearly. More than the slave raiding – which he had ended by then – it was the threat of a Mahdist insurrection that convinced the colonial administration to get rid of Hamman Yaji.Footnote ³¹ British experience in the Sudan had made them wary of Mahdism, and when they arrived in Cameroon the Mahdist rebellion of Hayat Sa'id had already shown the anti-establishment and anti-colonial force of such a movement, which could also incite the massive slave population to flee.Footnote ³² Later, the British had been confronted with the Mahdist rebellion of Satiru.Footnote ³³ So the mention of Mahdism, even as late as 1922, immediately sounded warning bells.Footnote ³⁴ And Yaji flirted with a strain of Mahdism straight from the Sudan. For in the Lake Chad area it was Rabeh, a war lord who had come from Mahdist Sudan, who was at the origins of Mahdism in the region. Rabeh had wrought havoc under the established emirates, including the Wandala in the late nineteenth century; ultimately he was killed by the French in 1900.Footnote ³⁵ It was the daughter of this very Rabeh who contacted Yaji and gave him presents (entry 28-10-1918), including a rifle, during his gradual adoption of Mahdism.Footnote ³⁶

So the British decided to get rid of Hamman Yaji, as a Mahdist Fulbe chief was a thorn too many in the colonial flesh. It took some time, but in 1927 they moved to arrest him. In Kapsiki/Higi even his arrest was to become the stuff of myth. As Vandu Zra Tè put it:

All montagnards were happy to see him gone. Judy Sterner noted a splendid story in Sukur:Footnote ³⁸

The British written sources tell a slightly different story, but also an exciting one. The colonial administration wanted to get rid of Yaji, but their control of the region was weak and they expected fierce resistance. Kirk-Greene relates an intensive correspondence between Yola, the centre of the Adamawa administration, and their colonial superiors in Kaduna and Lagos. They decided on a cautious strategy: separate military columns would depart from Yola with varying marching orders, as if they were reinforcing the Maiduguri garrison. In Madagali they would meet ‘by chance’. This was done with great circumspection, but in the end a police detachment of 30 men proved sufficient to carry out the arrest, and the rest of the 300 men were kept behind.Footnote ³⁹ Yaji thought he was to receive guests, but was apprehended on the spot with his son Bello and his chief slave Ajia. It was then that the diary was found.Footnote ⁴⁰ There was to be no insurrection and Yaji was transported to Yola on 26 August 1927. However, his reputation did not fade that quickly, and Yola was too close to French colonial territory (Yaji's brother was lamido of Mokolo in Cameroon), so after a perfunctory trial he was put on a steamer to Sokoto.Footnote ⁴¹ In the colonial office in Kaduna this arrest was hailed as an important victory over Mahdism, though it was in effect a disavowal of Lugard's doctrine of indirect rule. Mahdism – and thus Yaji – was still considered dangerous in Sokoto, so the prisoner was transferred to Kaduna, where he died of a renal infection.

A FRONTIER OF VIOLENCE

Hamman Yaji was the epitome of slave raiding and Fulbe cruelty, but he was never the only raider.Footnote ⁴² Paul Lovejoy estimates that at the time of the collapse of the trans-Atlantic slave trade Adamawa, the province that includes the Mandara mountains, exported 5,000 slaves per year to the centre of the realm, Sokoto, ‘a policy of relocation on a gigantic scale’, not only of ‘pagans’ as also some Moslem were enslaved.Footnote ⁴³ As Lovejoy remarks, ‘Under the guise of pursuing the jihad, slave raiding and war were institutionalized into a coercive system for the mobilisation of labor and for the redistribution of peasant output.’Footnote ⁴⁴ The very first contact Europeans had with the Mandara Mountains was in a slave raid: Major Dixon Denham, in 1823, was the first ‘Nasara’ [white man] to see the Mandara hills.Footnote ⁴⁵ Denham was travelling from Bornu on his way to the Sultan of Wandala – as the emirate which included the mountain was called – in a mixed expedition ‘as much a result of internal politics at the court of Bornu as it was a slaving expedition’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the Wandala capital he saw a mountain tribe give 200 slaves to the sultan as tribute in order to buy off a raid, plus a host of other gifts. Gifts were regularly given as tribute to the sultan of Wandala by the montagnard settlements in the neighbourhood.Footnote ⁴⁷ Denham estimated that a thousand slaves a year were captured in the hills and sold on the slave markets of Mora, the capital.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, the relations between Wandala and montagnards were sometimes non-violent as well, with the latter serving as free soldiers in the armies of the Sultan, while freed slaves carried out trade between plains and mountains; the mountain people traded iron with the Wandala emirate, against salt and fish. As a Mafa montagnard put it, capturing the paradoxes of the relationship: ‘They bought our iron, then used it to make the shackles they held us with.’Footnote ⁴⁹

A generation later the famous German explorer Heinrich Barth witnessed slave trading in the Bornu capital and he too visited the mountains as part of a slave raid, this time against the plains dwelling Musgum (though it had set out as a punitive expedition against the Wandala). The raid he saw failed, at least for the raiders, just as the one witnessed by Denham had.Footnote ⁵⁰

From the first, these Europeans admired their Moslem hosts. Barth was impressed with the cosmopolitan character of the West African savannah realms that hosted him, but the ‘wretched state of the pagans’ he noted was in fact the result of those very emirates.Footnote ⁵¹ The early German colonist Morgen, from the other side of the colonial border, remarked on the state of mountain peoples, though he complained more about economic loss than about human suffering:

Mountain people like the Kapsiki were not simply the passive victims of slave raids, as they learned to defend themselves with increasing efficacy, both through habitat and organisation.Footnote ⁵³ The Mandara Mountains became a refuge from slave raids.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the phrase of Eric Wolf, the people of the Mandara mountains tried to ‘stay out of history’, adopting a strategy of resistance that countered violent aggression with fierce defence, forceful inclusion with deliberate marginalisation, and central administration with seeming anarchy.Footnote ⁵⁵ The military equation was less unequal than Barth's picture evokes, and Denham only just managed to escape with his life from the Musfeia raid.Footnote ⁵⁶ The mountains did form a viable defence area, as did the riverside swamps of the Massa, Tupuri, and Musgum.Footnote ⁵⁷ Raids into the mountains were not without risk for the cavalry, and the poisoned arrows of the defenders did score many a victim, and sometimes a victory: Yaji's men were repulsed several times. This may be one reason why the Wandala emirate, the closest to the Kapsiki, never mounted large scale expeditions into the mountains, just hit-and-run raids, and relied instead on tribute.Footnote ⁵⁸

However, the external threat was by no means the only one for the montagnards like Kapsiki/Higi. Throughout remembered history, villages have fought each other; internal war is one of the structuring principles of Kapsiki sociopolitical organisation.Footnote ⁵⁹ In principle all neighbouring villages waged war on each other. Some villages trace common descent, and either did not fight each other, or did not capture slaves or use poison. The number of pitched battles between villages in the twentieth century has been limited: each village had about three to five, each lasting one or two days. Though captives caught in these skirmishes were often ransomed back, these conflicts have nevertheless presented a constant threat, a condition of ‘Warre’, in Hobbesian terms: life was, indeed, ‘brutish, nasty and short’. Raiding and war still figure at the background of human relations inside mountain villages.Footnote ⁶⁰ Most villages in Kapsiki have one clan or lineage called ‘mava’, slaves, usually descendants of slaves, or an immigrant group likening their position to slaves.Footnote ⁶¹ Still, though slaves were not solely the product of Fulbe raids, the number of slaves and the intensity of warfare increased dramatically with Fulbe slave raiding.

For the northern neighbours of the Kapsiki, the threat of internal enslavement must have been even greater.Footnote ⁶² Particularly during the hunger years around 1914–5, Mafa sold their own people, sometimes their own kith and kin, into slavery, just as some of them also served as middlemen in the slave trade.Footnote ⁶³ Especially for women the threat was severe, as their value in internal slavery was much greater than of men, and their selling price was often correlated with the bride wealth: if the selling price was higher than the bride wealth, girls and also women were in danger. The one taboo that seems to have held was against selling a pregnant woman into slavery.Footnote ⁶⁴

Hamman Yaji appears to fit into this pattern, his slave raiding seemingly an extension of the long established slave raiding in the larger region. But the scale and intensity of his operation are exceptional, and he never exacted tribute; he lacked the stable relations with local heads that such an exchange demands. His rule, crucially, came after the demise of the slave-hungry emirates that had dominated much of the nineteenth century – and in the context of the new presence of European colonialism.

THE INTERSTICE: DYNAMICS OF EARLY COLONIZATION

For European colonizers – British, French and German – the Sokoto Caliphate presented first a military and then a moral challenge. The British had been prime actors in abolishing the slave trade, so an African empire that fed on slave labour was a considerable moral problem. However, wider colonial experience encouraged a policy of gradual transition: stopping slave raids, halting the slave trade, but preserving for the rest the status quo.Footnote ⁶⁵ Thus on the Caliphate and Emirate level the Europeans took over the existing structures. At Yola, the centre of the Emirate, their arrival did change the situation of slaves considerably, as the Fulani slave keepers made the system more lenient for the slaves; in the words of a very old informant in Yola:

In the far away Mandara Mountains the effects were different, though. The political superstructure was removed by the colonial conquest, creating a power vacuum beyond the local lamibe. The complex, personal relations of these local Fulbe chiefs with their superior in Yola were severed, and the local Fulani chiefs were more on their own than they ever had been. Thus, in this region at the margin of the realm the colonial interstice set in, a period between the old established Adamawa Emirate with its functional political and economic system, and de facto colonial rule, as the latter took a considerable time to establish. This macro-political vacuum offered chiefs at the border of the realm the opportunity to expand their raiding activities as the network of patron-client relations that had permeated the local chiefdoms, linking them also to local chiefs and endogenous slave traders, had crumbled. In part these relations had been secured through tribute payment. The colonial interstice isolated the different Fulbe chiefs from each other; even if they did usually respect one another's fiefs, their commonalities under the emirate had fallen apart and they simply became competitors on the slave market.

The interstice also changed the military equation. European military might was superior, but could incidentally be used to further the causes of a lamido, for in this ethnically fragmented backwater of their colonies, the early colonizers had little choice but to try to rule through the lamibe. So Yaji took great care to have good relations with the Europeans. When the expedition of Fritz Bauer, one of the early arrivals in the region, visited Madagali, he was extremely welcoming: ‘The present lamido [of Madagali] three hours before arrival, put 40 horsemen at our disposition and received us with great cordiality. … The lamido sent us two cattle and a very good horse.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Yaji tried to convince the Germans to subdue the ‘Mildouh pagans’ near Madagali (north of Sukur), but Bauer refused as those ‘pagans’ had left him at rest.Footnote ⁶⁸ But this hospitality did pay off: when two years later Hamman Yaji asked the German Resident permission to include the village of Mildouh in his district, this was granted.Footnote ⁶⁹

The leeway Yaji had in this interstice was considerably enlarged by the peculiarities of colonial geography. Madagali was right on the border between three colonial territories: the Germans in present-day Cameroon, the English west of them, the French to the north. Besides, after the First World War the turnover of the Kamerun colony to Britain and France meant redrawing the colonial borders around and in the mountains, a marginal area that served as a bargaining chip in the negotiations between the three – later two – powers.Footnote ⁷⁰ For some time Yaji managed to play them against each other, and the vagueness of the precise border created a splendid opportunity to intensify his hold on the population.

In fact, discussion about border infringements characterized the relationship between the German and the English colonial officers in the area, and started right in the year of Hamman Yaji's instalment as Lamido. The German Lieutenant Dominik was accused of having ‘entered a village of Kilba, where, though meeting with no opposition, they killed seventeen people and took the same number prisoners returning to Garua with over a hundred head of cattle’. High Commissioner Lugard, who wrote this letter (and promised in a handwritten postscript to the report to verify it), pointed out that this was British territory, also acknowledged by the French, and urged von Puttkammer to take measures against Dominik, to ‘prevent the repetition of such regrettable incidents’.Footnote ⁷¹ Three months later, Dominik complained to the British about the ‘removal of the emir of Bornu’ from German territory; to this allegation Lugard answered – to von Puttkammer – that Dikwa, the town in question had never been German and that the sultan ‘came entirely of his own free will’.Footnote ⁷² Dominik was defended by von Puttkammer acting as a character witness, vouching for his pleasant personality.Footnote ⁷³ A year later, Lugard had to respond to German charges that lamibe from the British side collected tribute in villages on the German side.Footnote ⁷⁴ Not only did Hamman Yaji prefer the French (who did not interfere much with him), after his land had been transferred to the British the borders of his own land with that of other chiefs were redrawn on several occasions, as a number of diary entries in 1920 and 1921 testified. This constant redefinition of land ownership also set up the chiefs against each other, further destroying any remaining patron-client relationship that could mitigate the impact of slave raiding.

Overall, early colonial administration generally helped the Fulani chiefs against the ‘predations’ of the pagans, as the colonizers were thin on the ground and governed in fact by a concordance between them and the Moslem chiefs.Footnote ⁷⁵ Eckert notes that the German attitude towards the slave raiding and keeping societies was even more permissive than the French one, in fact bordering on admiration for the Fulbe, which is one reason why German Kamerun remained a ‘notorious source of slaves in the first decade of colonial rule’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Their principal worry was to keep the political agreements with the Moslem emirates intact, and German control remained largely nominal.Footnote ⁷⁷ It took the Germans some time to realize that they were habitually fooled by the Fulani into helping them in slave raids under the pretence of action against anarchy and keeping the region calm. Yaji was not the only one to benefit from this period of transition. Similar opportunism occurred in the ‘French territories’, where the transition from French to German colonizers changed little on the ground:

The British and the French were quick to criticize the Germans for their half-hearted policy towards slave raiding and trading, but often were not much more effective in implementing their own emancipatory policies.Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus, for the mountain people like Kapsiki/Higi, genuine pacification came late. On the British side the Resident characterized the northern districts of Madagali, Cubunawa and Mubi in a report of 1920 as:

In 1922 the Western part of the mountains was ceded to Great Britain as ‘Northern Cameroon’ and the first major expeditions ventured into the mountains from the western side. Though instructions were that ‘the pagans that have never been subjugated, for example, those living in the Mandara hills are to be left untouched for the moment’, a skirmish between montagnards and colonial forces ensued at Bazza, the first Higi taste of English colonial force. Shortly afterwards, some degree of administration was set up, but well into the thirties this did not amount to much.

The mountain people resisted the new colonizer as well, especially their taxes. But slowly the mountains became ‘quiet’. The British part, after the collapse of the League of Nations in 1942, became British Trust Territory, until with independence approaching in 1960, it would choose to belong to Nigeria.Footnote ⁸¹ Only during the 1950s, in the very last days of British and French rule, were the mountains drawn into the realm of administration.

Despite their initial resistance, peace was welcome for montagnards, and the liberation from the Fulani is fondly remembered. The memory of Yaji and his cronies is still fresh, and so gratitude for the liberation by the colonial powers and the appreciation of the pax colonialis, are readily expressed:

INFLATION IN AN ‘UNCOMMON MARKET’

Let us return to our main character, Hamman Yaji, who according to Vandu Zra Tè ‘bought calabashes with slaves’. Though Yaji was part of a much more general picture of slavery, he was exceptional in the ferocity and intensity of his slave raiding. Why? One factor has become clear: the vacuum created by the colonizers on the fringe of the former emirate and the support given to him by the early colonizers. The Fulbe world of the old emirate was fragmented and in the colonial interstice no new supralocal power structure had emerged. Three other factors should be examined: ecology, weaponry, and market. The climate in this part of the Sudanic belt was relatively wet in the nineteenth century, an important precondition for state formation, as both people and horses grew more abundant.Footnote ⁸³ However, after the wet nineteenth century, the turn of the century experienced a series of droughts and famines, a locust plague in 1899, a drought in 1904, and in 1906 an epidemic of chicken pox.Footnote ⁸⁴ The terrible drought of 1914 and 1915 was still uppermost in people's memories when I started my research. So Yaji operated in conditions in which people were impoverished, even sometimes selling their kinsmen in to slavery, and existence meant a struggle for sheer survival. The increase in slave raiding coincided with a series of natural disasters, a combination that made Yaji the ready emblem of all evil. To the extent that slavery was a means of survival for the victim populations, this only increased their resentment against their atrocious enemy.

Slave raiding is based upon military inequality. Horses have been for centuries the main ‘means of destruction’, in a type of battle that is strongly associated with Islam in the region: the cavalry attack. But against this weaponry, the montagnards were not without defense: bow and arrows scored many a small victory, especially in the rugged mountain terrain. This, admittedly skewed, balance on the battlefield changed however with the coming of the rifle. Before the mid-nineteenth century the trans-Sahara trade had furnished horses and muzzle-loading muskets, both of course paid for in slaves.Footnote ⁸⁵ But these muskets did not greatly upset the balance in the battle field: Denham's account makes clear that muzzle-loaders were not a decisive force in the cavalry battles of his time. Reyna, in his Baghuirmi military history, mentions only the startling sound of muskets: ‘The dogs jumped from it.’Footnote ⁸⁶ Most slave raiding in the Mandara Mountains prior to the coming of the colonials was done without muskets; the Kapsiki, at least, did not really know any type of guns till the arrival of colonial forces. But then the colonizers brought the much more effective breech-loading rifle, and from that moment onwards, the slaving field was not level any longer, and the military supremacy of the slave raiders became absolute. The diary shows Hamman Yaji continuously busy with obtaining rifles and ammunition, and much of his raiding was aimed at getting exchange value for rifles; transactions over rifles are meticulously recorded, down to the details of minor damage to a weapon.

Yaji became more ‘efficient’ at capturing and killing ‘pagans’, which brings us to a final consideration, the market. What happened to the slaves Hamman Yaji caught? House slaves, children and young women were the last to be captured, and often the last to be freed as well, so their perspectives are represented in the majority of the oral history tales collected by the anthropologists in the field. Van Santen cites at length a woman taken captive by the Fulbe of Hamman Yaji in MokoloFootnote ⁸⁷ at the end of the Yaji era, who returned to Mokolo just before the Second World War. However, the stories usually come from domestic slaves who were lucky enough to stay alive, to return, and even those lucky ones still were slaves.

Yaji only occasionally mentions a sale (25/2/1917: ‘I received 50 shillings and two gowns for a slave girl’). Sometimes the villagers ransomed their women back (36 shillings, 7/11/1914), but most slave women were given away (21 & 22/2/1919). For ‘slaves’ – presumably men – there is the case of six slaves returned to Sena (a Higi village, 23/7/1913).Footnote ⁸⁸ The diary never indicates a slave market. So it remains an open question how much Yaji actually profited from his slave raiding. It is difficult to gauge the slave market at the start of the twentieth century, but the market for plantation slaves had already disappeared. The global situation in slavery had changed drastically.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is unlikely that many slaves from the Mandara region had in the past found their way to the south, as Moslem slavers rarely furnished slaves for that trade.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nevertheless the end of the trans-Atlantic trade had changed the overall market situation.Footnote ⁹¹ As Lovejoy has shown, the slave markets of the Sokoto Caliphate in the nineteenth century were balanced between the trans-Atlantic, trans-Saharan trades on the one hand and the huge domestic slave market on the other; this market seems to have been remarkably stable.Footnote ⁹² At the start of the twentieth century the internal demand had disappeared.Footnote ⁹³ With the trans-Saharan trade the situation was slightly different. The bulk of that trade collapsed in the first decades of the nineteenth century,Footnote ⁹⁴ but there must have remained at least a trickle going, for the local, physical slave markets of Mora, Madagali, and Yola were still in existence. Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1928 the English colonial resident Browne indicated that Madagali was still infamous as a slave market town.Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet, much of the market must have slumped, and it is astonishing that Hamman Yaji never mentions the sale of his slaves. Kopytoff and Miers correctly state that: ‘The essential impossibility of extracting any surplus value from labor, does not, however, eliminate the exchange value of human beings.’Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet getting a good market price is another thing and Yaji needed cash, for horses and guns. He never developed a plantation system, as did Sokoto in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁸ So the story we started with, about the use of slaves in petty transactions, does ring true. Female slaves in particular did become a currency, as when he priced a horse at three slave girls. If he indeed used slaves to buy things as simple as a calebash that meant two things: that he had plenty of captives, but also that as the slaves had come to be used as currency they lost value and the system had become inflationary. In fact in his diary Yaji gives almost the same weight to the capture of cattle, which have had a commodity and exchange value for a much longer time.

In order to see how this ‘orgy of violence’ was brought about at the local level, let us look at the diary, at the most intense periods in his slave raiding. After the diary's start in September 1912, the relative absence of any raiding over the course of the period from the end of 1913 to the end of 1914, is remarkable. In 1915 as well the ‘low’ was 52 captives.Footnote ⁹⁹ It is against the second half of 1915 that the true reign of terror starts, with more and larger raids. Why the interval? The conflict of 1914–15, between the British and the Germans, coincided with the time Yaji stopped raiding; the diary here is full of contacts with the whites, first the Germans, then the British. The numbers from cattle raiding give about the same picture: a lull during the war. Yaji never mentions his men being taken for service in the colonial army, but that is a possibility. It is clear that the Europeans needed his logistics: in mid-1914 he furnished 100 ‘carriers’, but those must have been slaves; late in 1914 he was instructed to deliver porters for the Germans, and mid-1915 he delivered 22 horses to the British in Mandara (the sultanate), which were paid for later. Immediately after the surrender of the Germans in June 1915, Yaji started raiding again, and on a sizeable scale: June 25 slaves, June 30 in Kamale (a Higi village under Gawar tutelage) 40 slaves and 56 cattle, a sizeable operation which suggests that he had his men and horses back.

As for the women – the most valuable captives for the internal Caliphate market – before 1914 slave girls were explicitly mentioned, and form the majority of the captives.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At the resumption of the raiding, they were only mentioned till 1917 and then at lower numbers; after 1917 it is just about ‘slaves’. In 1920 (14 January) the diary mentioned the sale of three slave girls as Yaji needed cash, but that is all. So it might well be that 1914 was a watershed year, in which colonial political fortunes reversed, but also changes in the market became apparent. The first reason is ecological; we saw that 1914 and 1915 were drought years, and even if the precise effects of drought on the slave markets are not overly clear, the slave market must have felt its impact. The drought probably increased supply: the montagnards sold their own people, the productivity of slaves was at an all time low and other value was scarce as well; cattle died in great numbers. A drought as severe as the 1914–15 inevitably lowers the value of human life.

While the early colony gradually became monetarized, it is doubtful whether this really penetrated Yaji's slave economy very quickly. Hogendorn discusses at some length whether slaves can be considered ‘money’ in the Caliphate, contrasting them with the cowries and Maria Theresia thaler serving as currency in the area.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Probably slaves were never so close to general coinage as in this period in the Mandara area. Cowries did not function here, nor the thaler. Whatever limited purpose money there was consisted of iron bars and goats, both serving mainly in bride price payments.Footnote ¹⁰² Slaves became their own coin, an ‘uncommon market’ which then suffered its own inflation, both through an increased supply and a lower demand.

This inflation, which dramatically reduceed the exchange value of slaves, might explain some of Yaji's extreme cruelty, as in the case of Sukur. In raids people die, but the deliberate slaughter of able bodied men is, in ‘normal slave times’, the destruction of capital. Some struggle for power with Sukur might have contributed to the violence, but at that time the struggle for power had already been decided in favour of the British colonials. The inflational dynamic may also clarify why Yaji seemed to have stopped rather easily. As Hogendorn's analysis shows, slavery is more difficult to eradicate when slaves are currency. The reverse holds as well: raiding can be stemmed by low prices. When inflation runs wild, the only way is to abandon it and shift to another currency; indeed, when the colonials halted Yaji's raiding, they had already introduced their own currency, and the monetary vacuum was disappearing. So in two ways the slave system had run its course: slaves were no longer the coin of the realm and their value had dissipated anyway. Also, after 1918 the colonial border situation steadily became clearer, and the division of the colonial spoils brought a greater attention of the British and the French to the area. Borders and a series of corrections to borders kept the Europeans on Yaji's doorstep.Footnote ¹⁰³

So it was in the colonial interstice, before the settling of the border disputes, that the old system of slavery ran amok. Ecological problems had made any kind of tribute extraction problematic, the usual market had fallen away, and no other means of extraction presented itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Inflation meant that more raids were held than ever, and larger numbers of slaves which became worth less and less; so the attention turned more to cattle and even goats and sheep (744 in 1919!). Hamman Yaji's men became just a professional band of well-armed marauders. The fact that they raided even more in the wet season than in the dry months strengthens this view of raiding as a purely destructive system. Maybe Yaji saw the end of this rule coming when he turned to Mahdism. This is the period from which the tales of Vandu Zra Tè stem, when slavery was no longer an institutional relationship between people, but was pure destruction based upon an inflated market wringing the last profits out of a dying system.

CONCLUSION: DYNAMICS OF THE INTERSTICE

A long story should have a short conclusion. Hamman Yaji, the epitome of evil for the western Mandara montagnard populations, was both a man of his time and a figure of excess. His exploits at the turn of the century form an example of the dynamics during the colonial interstice, when traditional polities were shattered, and their exploitative relations loosened from their institutional context. The power vacuum created by the colonizers belongs to the vicissitudes of early indirect rule. The ‘slavocracies’ of West Africa, as one might well call polities like the Caliphate, presented a huge challenge to the colonizing powers. High Commissioner Lugard, for one, successfully pleaded with the Colonial Office to grant North Nigeria a more lenient policy of gradual abolition of slavery.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Both the situation on the ground and the grudging admiration many colonials had for the cultural sophistication of the Fulbe induced them to work through local rulers.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ They had, in fact, no other viable option. The fact that the Europeans not only supported but actually reinforced local potentates became clear only much later, but anyway, the moral dilemma – that of bolstering a slavery based society – had to give way to the ‘logic of empire’. This gradual implementation of colonial rule is characteristic of the backwaters of the new realms.

But Hamman Yaji was also exceptional, his ravages made possible by some contingencies of colonial history. The presence of three colonial powers in a marginal area, the bickering about colonial borders and the internal strife between the European powers in question, deepened, and lengthened the political vacuum in this area. The introduction of new weapons shifted the uneasy military balance between raiders and raided, opening a window for ruthless slave hunting. At the same time severe ecological stress rendered all life cheap. Thus slaves became the principal coin at a time when the external slave markets were disappearing. With this larger supply, and a drastically reduced demand, inflation set in and the slave system ran wild. And thus did Hamman Yaji becoming the emblem of all that was evil in the past. Unwillingly and unwittingly, the colonizers were party to this frenzy of slavery; fortunately, when they fully took control, they also ended the darkest days these mountains ever saw.