The historiography of Africa (which has been produced predominantly in the West since the 1950s) has maintained a faithful adherence to the modern colonial experience as providing the definitive structure for the periodization of African history: precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. Vincent Hiribarren's recent study on the Borno state in the West-Central Sudan, A History of Borno: Trans-Saharan African Empire to Failing Nigerian State, provides a unique study that goes some way to break down this conventional conception of historical time. By adopting a Braudelian approach, he maintains a central focus on the continuity of space and spatial conceptions over a tumultuous period of change, from the nineteenth century, just after the transformative Fulani jihads, to the twenty-first century, as Boko Haram now threatens regional instability in a post-9/11 world. While the centuries-old Borno state is currently contained, more or less, within the borders of Nigeria, it claims cultural sway over populations in neighboring Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. In the modern era, Borno has performed the role of a regional and imperial border zone for successive and overlapping intrusive empires: Mahdist (Sudanese), British, French, and German. Ironically, while this role has allowed it to survive with its territorial integrity relatively intact, Hiribarren argues that each successive imperial state strategically used early nineteenth-century Bornoan conceptions of borders and boundaries to inform and bolster its own claim to political domination.
The book's early chapters are rich with detail about how the ancient state of Kanem-Borno expanded and maintained its power over a fairly vast stretch of the Sudan. Hiribarren covers familiar terrain, providing a close, critical reading of European traveler accounts of Borno from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Cutting through the layers of bias that often come with these accounts, Hiribarren is able to provide a consistent catalogue of spatial ideas that these travelers, along with their Arabic and local counterparts and collaborators, developed over a long period of time. Borno as a historical landscape was imagined as a coherent political territory as much by local inhabitants as by these European interlopers. This conceptual continuity is remarkable, given the fact that the former Kanem-Borno empire was in decline by the end of the eighteenth century. An awareness of this state's historical longevity by both locals and travelers is a feature that contributes to the mythos and weight of a kind of Borno nation.
The interventions that Hiribarren makes on the historiography of precolonial African states, and his theorization of the politics of space across different, overlapping empires are most insightful and useful to historians grappling with the role of space and environment in shaping historical process. By looking at the longevity of Borno, Hiribarren is able to challenge now-dominant historiographical assumptions about colonial disruption. This process is most clear in Chapter Three. At the point of formal colonization, Borno did not disappear into the new colonies of British Nigeria, French Niger, and German Kamerun — rather, the nineteenth-century borders of Borno shaped the imperial claims each these foreign powers made in the early period of European conquest. It took several decades for British, French, and German officials to work out the details and extent of their territorial rule. The duration and complexity of this process was informed by their awareness of the pre-existing Borno state, and the boundaries that Borno elites themselves asserted and claimed. This process of articulating colonial boundaries contrasts with another common historiographical assumption made by historians of colonial Africa — that the colonial boundaries were largely arbitrary and almost always the result of economic or political expediency. While Hiribarren does not question the strategic nature of imperial boundary-making in general, he very much complicates our understanding of this process by giving us an example of how one African state played a critical role in shaping colonial boundaries in Africa.
Chapter Five demonstrates how British colonial officials, in conjunction with local elites, re-wrote the history of Borno, effectively ‘fossilizing’ it as an exceptional space within the Nigerian colony. This chapter contributes to a growing scholarship on the production of imperial knowledge by colonial bureaucrats, who brought their own conceptions of time, hierarchy, and power to bear on the histories they compiled about their once-glorious imperial estates. In the case of Borno, these modern historical accounts of a once-great empire were represented as an extension of British greatness. This imagined and long-cultivated history has led those who have claimed Borno affiliation to maintain a sense of exceptionalism vis-à-vis their neighbors.
In the context of post-independence Nigeria, where an intense federalism continues to fuel state fragmentation, Borno remains relatively intact. Hiribarren argues in Chapter Eight that it is the culture of exceptionalism that allows the patronage networks to remain stable, even after Borno became peripheral within the Nigerian state, especially in economic terms. Political parties continue to curry favor with the Bornu's historic ruling elite in order to maintain a sense of political coherence in the North. However, Boko Haram threatens to destabilize this region. How well will the current Nigerian state and the Kanuri ethnic communities of Bornu be able to maintain the integrity of this imagined community over the coming century? It remains to be seen. A History of Borno is a useful text for anyone attempting to gain a deep historical understanding of an ancient state that has been able to remain resilient through intense modern change.
