In this article I wish to draw attention to two paradoxes: the first concerns the historiography of the nineteenth-century Sokoto caliphate, which was Africa’s largest independent polity, lasted a hundred years, and expanded throughout that time. As an example of state-building it was truly remarkable. It witnessed almost no rebellions or schisms, famines or epidemics, and it was economically successful as well, with trade and manufacturing in the region expanding as never before and merchants who traveled far and wide. Its reformist leaders wrote more than three hundred books. Yet in some recent histories of Africa published in the U.S. and Europe it is either ignored or disparaged.Footnote 1 Within Nigeria, too, the bicentenary of its founding was totally ignored. So why are historians so reluctant to examine the details—or even offer critiques or develop revisionist analyses? Is “Sokoto” now so sacred that its history has become like myth—not to be taken seriously, neither celebrated nor deconstructed? Is this a warning of what might befall the rest of Africa’s precolonial past—the usable bits turned into rhetorical clichés, while its complex vocabulary goes unheard or is treated as mere “noise”?
The second paradox is more mundane: how did a radical, Islamic-activist (jihadi) commonwealth create its capital on a “green-field,” open-bush site? How did a Sufi unworldliness adapt (if it did) to the bustling business world that came with the jihad’s material success? In commenting on these paradoxes, I am seeking to make clear how little we still understand of an astonishing episode in African history—and how much work there is to be done. There is still a great deal to be known about Sokoto, both as a city and as a huge caliphate—its judicial processes, for example, are still underresearched, as are the roles played by specific officials in particular events. Although some tax registers from the 1890s exist, overall income from taxes has yet to be calculated. Practical administrative details such as communications and transport, routes, refuges, and dangerous “hot spots” have not been mapped. We know that some main “roads” were sometimes scarcely two-feet wide in places—so how did large bodies of troops or traders pass?Footnote 2 How many men were actually in any one of the jihadi armies that established the caliphate—as few as the seventy horsemen who took control of the great city, Birnin Zazzau, on Saturday morning, December 31, 1808?Footnote 3 And why did the established rulers evacuate their cities without a siege? These details matter, I suggest—or should matter to Nigerians—as much as civil war details matter to Americans or the events of the French Revolution matter to Frenchmen.
In the 1960s history in Nigeria was the “queen” of disciplines, excitingly pioneering and well staffed: the best students seemed to choose it as a major field of study and went on to good jobs in government, politics, and business. Today, with a hundred universities thriving in Nigeria, students are numerous, yet history departments are struggling to survive, no longer attracting the best students, or indeed enough of them. A root cause is the elimination of history from the curriculum of primary schools; the subject remains only as an option in junior and senior secondary schools, where it is seen by students as a less appealing choice than the familiar “social studies.” Many departments now have relabeled themselves as “history and international relations,” “history and diplomatic studies,” “history and development,” even “history and strategic studies.” Student numbers do go up as a result, but history is rarely the major subject of any undergraduate; for most students who take a history course at university, it’s just a difficult subsidiary subject. By itself, it is not seen as a viable route to a job. And among the faculty, pioneering work is rare: there is so much routine teaching to be done for less motivated students that original research is not a priority. There is much recycling of data from the colonial archives; actual talking with the elderly and locating ancient sites and the stories associated with them are time-consuming and costly—and funds for fieldwork are scarce. It is as if we already have all the “usable” history we need: we can gaze generally on either the glories of Sokoto or its oppressiveness, and then move our focus to today’s politics.
It is not only history as a discipline that’s at risk. The past, in the form of buildings or sites, is being knocked down or built over. I think there is scarcely a single ordinary mosque dating back to precolonial times now standing in northern Nigeria: the mud walls and columns and roofs have been replaced by concrete in a new modern style, often sub-Saudi in inspiration. Old houses, whether “palaces” or homes, have been replaced by modernized ones; the city gates were replaced long ago to allow motorcars to pass, but town walls are also gone, and where sections of wall have been rebuilt as mementos (with German funds) they are built with new-style blocks, not traditional tubali (Hausa-style bricks). The fabric of the past, as distinct from its memory, is not considered worth preserving: modernization is better. It might be argued that the sites themselves remain, identified with their past use—in this sense an ancient mosque or a palace is still “there,” with continuity of association outweighing any continuity of shape or engineering. But I suggest we need to know—and see—the technologies and aesthetics of the past. For example, precolonial mosques as well as eighteenth-century new towns were oriented 15 degrees north of east; how, and how well, did local builders estimate this? Is it not worth noticing the decorative plate placed at the apex of a large vault in a reception room (zaure) which acted as an advance warning, should it fall, that the whole skillfully cantilevered roof was about to cave in? With the urban borrow pits filled in for new housing, historians forget the changing hydrology of cities and the significance of symbolism attached to watercourses; or the way deep household wells were for women the main sites for suicide.
To be sure, famous (political) names from the past decorate streets. Inevitably “Usman Danfodio” became a suitable name for a university or for halls of residence. The name of a daughter of his, Nana Asma’u, has graced many a women’s residence, and the name of his son, Muhammad Bello, has been used, too, especially in its short form as “Bello” or as the mistitled “Sultan Bello.” Indeed the first premier of Northern Nigeria appropriated “Bello” to follow his own first name, “Ahmadu,” to make it more distinguished and link him to the famous caliph—a solecism in naming that not all approved of, but the premier was by then too important to contradict. But history mattered then, both to the premier and to his political party: in the 1950s and 1960s much money was spent on embellishing significant tombs. History thus became party-political. The various opposition parties called on their own pasts—and then endured old insults as “rebels” (ʾyan n tawaye).Footnote 4 So is it politics that has tainted Sokoto’s history; is its tainted past best forgotten, at least in a modernizing Nigeria?
The antagonism to the Sokoto caliphate is especially understandable on the caliphate’s frontier. The frontier emirates acquired much of their revenue from raiding their neighbors beyond the border—exacting either goods or people whom they could then pass on to merchants. There was a military subculture in these emirates, with young men who were too “rough” for a scholarly life at the caliphate’s center being sent off to a border ribat, or stronghold. Some of the emirs in these borderlands are portrayed in the records as almost psychopathic in their cruelty toward prisoners—tales of excess have been preserved precisely because they were so appalling to the average citizen at the time. But there seems to have been no mechanism at the center for dismissing such psychopaths. The “dark” side of caliphal history needs to be examined: the (occasional?) use of crucifixion as a punishment for persistent, usually “pagan,” opponents; the practice of impaling serious offenders—we know such punishments occurred throughout the century, but not how frequently they occurred or for what offenses (see Last Reference Last2011). Similarly, people might be walled up alive by a city gate or in a stretch of town wall, initially exposed to public sight for a few days before being suffocated by more mud—again, we do not know the offenses for which this was the punishment, but women were apparently a target. The use of a madigo (dildo) by a concubine could end in her execution, with her head displayed on a pole as a warning for all to see. A slave who misbehaved could be thrown into a pit, left there for days, and then pulled out: victims were notably keen to “reform” and get out, it is said.
It is hard, however, to estimate the extent or pervasiveness of violence. As a general rule, prisoners and their families taken in war were not summarily killed (as happened periodically in Europe and the U.S.): there was no genocide. Captives were instead “monetized,” put on the market and relocated to wherever their purchasers took them. But we know that on some campaigns the hands of the enemy’s women were cut off—was this done in order to leave them stigmatized and much less marketable, or was it simply to terrorize opponents (see Lander Reference Lander1967,ii:36,43)? The killing off of a “pagan” culture—by taking away as captives all members of that culture—might perhaps be labeled “genocide,” but the original jihad of 1804–8 did not target non-Muslims: it specifically targeted “bad” Muslims whom it reclassified as kuffar (infidels) by virtue of their “sins.” It was on the caliphate’s frontiers that non-Muslims eventually became the targets of choice and a crucial source of revenue to those stationed there—to such an extent that some non-Muslims beyond the frontier were not “allowed” to convert to Islam, although they could negotiate an agreement (amana) to pay tribute and enjoy peace. Old stigma lingers, however. Even today new converts are not always regarded as properly Muslim, even after they have been to Mecca.
So I do not wish to deny that there were—and are—good reasons to regard the Sokoto caliphate with abhorrence. But I do urge scholars to gather the detailed evidence. We know, for example, that at certain points in the nineteenth century there were huge numbers of slaves in the caliphate: circa 1824, a group of residents in Kano said slaves there outnumbered free people by thirty to one (Clapperton Reference Clapperton1966 [1829]:171). We also know that slave raiding not only condemned individuals to a life of servitude either within the caliphate or abroad in North Africa or the Americas, but that it also broke up communities so effectively that return for a runaway was futile. But if the Kano figure is even remotely correct, the question arises: why did slaves not rise up and kill their captors, or even run away en masse? Was coordinated resistance among captives impossible? We know that concubines occasionally murdered their menfolk at night, and owners were scared enough to keep a weapon with them in bed; some rich men even slept in tents to avoid revealing exactly where they were sleeping. So fear was “in the air” (as it is today in Abuja, friends tell me)—but no large-scale uprising ever took place (as far as we know). Persistently troublesome slaves were sold off south for eventual transportation across the Atlantic; caravans arrived from North Africa to buy up captives to sell to fellow Muslims in the north (Daumas Reference Daumas1856:198–206). But everyone else was “used” locally, and of these, many, it seems, did not wish to escape, even if they had the opportunity. Instead, they worked and raised families; some apparently even earned enough to buy their freedom (see Kirk-Greene Reference Kirk-Greene1971). As a result, a huge number of Nigerians living in Hausaland today are ultimately of slave descent, however temporary that ancient slave status may have been. In some areas local residents know whose ancestors were once slaves, but it scarcely matters—they have been absorbed into Hausa society as fellow Muslims and citizens. I even know of one instance of a farmstead of free men that was named after its chief slave.
These days, most “empires” (the exception being China’s Han empire?) are out of fashion as subjects of history—and Sokoto is still stigmatized as an “empire” despite our attempts in the early 1960s to destigmatize it a little by replacing the colonial label “Fulani Empire” with the more properly Islamic label “caliphate.” Nonetheless, Sokoto was never your ordinary “empire”—it was not like, say, the Ottoman, Roman, or British empires. There were no “consuls,” “district officers,” “residents,” or “governors” sent out from Sokoto to govern other emirates; there was no senate or parliament, no cabinet or council at the center to create or debate policy throughout the caliphate; there was not even a central army—let alone a “navy” to ply northern Nigeria’s rivers and do “gunboat diplomacy.” Instead, Sokoto’s caliphate was more like a confederation, in which white flags of command were given out to those who came from distinct regions of Hausaland and put themselves forward as able both to raise an army and to lead the Muslim jama’a (community) in their area; preference was given to those who were Islamically trained and learned and therefore already knew the common, basic rules of the new polity-to-be. In effect, it was a franchise for which there was a common product: good Islamic government as modeled on the classical Abbasid caliphate of eighth–thirteenth-century Baghdad and Islamic law (Maliki school), and acknowledgment of both the leadership of the Amir al-mu’minin (Commander of the Faithful) in Sokoto and the right of the officials he sent out to install a new franchise-holder (emir) and affirm his right to hold the flag of command for that area. In the city of Sokoto there was a small bureaucracy headed by the vizier who in his own house had some scribes to receive and write short (one-page) letters in classical Arabic to those emirs he was in charge of overseeing (Last Reference Last1967:190–97). Imported paper and local ink were used, and letters from the Amir al-mu’minin had his personal stamp on them (the vizier and the emirs had no stamp of their own). The letters were never dated, but they were folded in a precise way and carried in a pouch by a messenger; it could take a week or more for a letter to reach the addressee, since fifteen miles a day was a good speed and distances were huge.
A reason for the decentralization was the sheer scale of the caliphate which, in nineteenth-century terms, required a journey of two months from north to south (say, from Agades to beyond Ilorin) and four months from west to east (from Dori in what is now Burkina Faso to eastern Adamawa, beyond Tibati and Rei Buba in Cameroon today). Indeed, it was always too big to be run from a single center, so early on (ca. 1810–12) the whole territory was split into four quadrants—the east and north under Muhammad Bello in Sokoto; the west and south under ‘Abdullahi dan Fodio in Gwandu.Footnote 5 The Amir al-mu’minin was resident in Sokoto and maintained overall suzerainty over the whole system, though in practice he did not interfere in Gwandu’s half of the polity; the ruler at Gwandu was addressed as simply “the Emir” (al-Amir), with no added place name qualifying it.
The system worked well. There was only one serious rebellion—by the Emir of Hadejia in midcentury; although a caliphal army was mustered, it did not succeed in defeating him, but once the rebel emir had died his successor brought Hadejia back within the caliphate. Economically, the unity and peace that extended over such a large area brought about a trading boom; merchants could send their agents across frontiers—for example, to Borno to buy stocks of imported paper—and they set up diaspora communities as far away as Asante (for kola) or Kisangani; there were Hausa-speaking communities in Eritrea (en route to Mecca). As a consequence, Hausa became a lingua franca in many towns in west and central Africa. Thus the influence of the Sokoto caliphate spread much farther than its political control: there was a huge “middle ground,” to use Richard White’s (Reference White1991) term. I would argue that people “became” Hausa, combining a range of more specific local identities with this general identity, which the Sokoto caliphate made desirable and functional in a manner similar to that of other large-scale polities like Rome, Britain, or the U.S. Because the unity created by the Sokoto caliphate reduced the crippling inter-emirate warfare that had been so frequent in the eighteenth century, one might suggest that in this sense the caliphate was neither good nor evil but rather necessary—a judgment (attributed to St. Augustine) first made in regard to the Roman Empire.
It is that unity that has made the Sokoto caliphate so “usable” to the colonial British—and so detestable to some in Nigeria today. Politically, the emirates of the old caliphate retain a common orientation, if not always a common purpose, though today they are relabeled collectively as “the North” or the “far North.” Hausa as both language and culture enables communication, however inadequate, across class and place of origin; people can become “Hausa” through their dress, speech, and behavior (and they can cease being “Hausa” if the demands of indigeneity certificates now require them to relinquish this identity). The colonial regime relied on the caliphal system to run its locally adapted system of “indirect rule” (based as it was on British practice in imperial India); the Caliph was renamed by the British as the “Sultan” of Sokoto, and his area of responsibility was restricted to a new “province” of Sokoto. (Before that, the only emir using the title of “Sultan” was Kano’s, asserting a scale and a significance that other emirs did not have.) Thus the unity of the region was not only maintained under colonial rule but also expanded into areas that no emir of the caliphate had ever ruled. Most notably, the ancient Muslim state of Borno became part of “the North,” as did non-Muslim areas of Plateau, Adamawa, and Benue, and an ability to speak Hausa became a distinct advantage even in areas where the local lingua franca was Fulfulde, Kanuri, or some other tongue. Thus the odor (and odium) of colonialism can cling to the caliphal style—even perhaps to Hausa.
The regional stability that was carried over from the jihadi caliphate into what I have called the “colonial caliphate” was carried over in turn to the “party-political caliphate” of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), whose power was backed by the retiring British officials for whom maintaining stability was paramount (see Last Reference Last, Robinson and Triaud1991). The NPC was the party of the Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello (the premier of Northern Nigeria), who I think saw himself as operating within the original caliphal tradition: he was focused on creating a degree of unity across the whole northern region, not this time based on jihadi regulations, but by cultivating his charisma as leader in order to build a new, multifaith bureaucratic commonwealth. Once again, however, this ambition involved a degree of violence against opponents, whether as individuals or as communities: although some Nigerians today look back at the early 1960s as a golden age (as, indeed, some regard the precolonial Sokoto caliphate), both periods had its dissidents, the more extreme of whom expressed their dissent in religious terms. Many experienced oppression and injustice at the hands of the Sardauna’s regime: his drive toward modernizing “the North” could be reinterpreted by the pious as corrupting the core Islamic values of the old caliphate. On at least one occasion many people were seriously worried, given the evident misbehavior of the political elite and their wealthy allies, that the end of the world was nigh.Footnote 6
This panic was nothing new, however. From the beginning of the jihadi period, circa 1806–10, there had been small groups of Muslims who opted out of the jihad and established communities of their own far out on the fringes of Islamic territory, Dar al-Islam (see Last Reference Last2011). Their dissent was based on the way the new caliphate centered on Sokoto was developing—in their eyes, being taken over by men or groups whose primary focus was this world, not the next world. They rejected the materialism that was transforming the scholarly, often Sufi, settlement out in the “bush” at Degel (upstream from the new Sokoto town), where a Muslim jama’a had until 1804 been led by Shaikh ‘Uthman dan Fodio but was now, it was thought, turning into a very wealthy political caliphate, with a city full of strangers and opportunists, armed with swords rather than Islamic texts. Today’s Boko Haram movement (or, to use its formal name, Jama’at ahl al-sunna li’l-daw’a wa’l-jihad) is within this tradition of angry or disillusioned radicalism, in which a return to proper Islamic values is urgently demanded of the regimes in power.Footnote 7 While what is modern is the ability to use firearms and explosives, quick transport and mobile phones, the basic inspiration has scarcely changed. One crucial difference, however, is that until circa 1979 such radical groups were hidden deep in the countryside where central government could ignore them; since 1980 they have joined the general migration of youth into the cities, where inevitably their passionate young supporters have sooner or later clashed with the local police and forced the government to respond to their radicalism, usually with extreme force.
The Post-Jihad “Capital Territory”
Whatever happens to Boko Haram as a dissident religious movement, the central dilemma facing all such movements remains: how does a radical Muslim group maintain its ideals in the context of (1) modern (“corrupt”) life where materialism rules; (2) living in a city, which is necessary in order for the group’s members to find work and be able to support their families; and (3) a huge expansion of members that transforms the radical core into a mass movement. I suggest this was much the same dilemma that the Shaikh ‘Uthman dan Fodio and especially his senior son faced in Sokoto circa 1810 when their jihad was now won and a state had to be set up. However, even at the beginning, everything did not go as planned. The shaikh’s brother, ‘Abdullahi dan Fodio, had opted out earlier (ca. 1806) in disgust at what was happening and headed toward Mecca, only to be persuaded in Kano to turn back.Footnote 8 Once back, he set up his own community at Gwandu, where many of the poets and Sufis joined him as he set about composing long works of scholarship and versifying them for easier memorization. He left most of the military campaigning southward (into Nupe and Ilorin) to his nephew and junior, Muhammad Buhari, who, though also a poet, was the emir responsible for the south in Gwandu’s half of the caliphate. Was this then to be a kind of “alternative” polity, deliberately distant from the post-jihad marketplace?
What is striking about the early days of the post-jihad caliphate is the way each leading figure had his own personal place of settlement: there was no immediate “capital.” Thus ‘Abdullahi dan Fodio, responsible for the Gwandu sectors, lived at Bodinga, some seven miles away; Buhari, his second-in-command, lived at Tambawel, some two miles from another local center, Yabo. The shaikh himself went to live in his own settlement, Sifawa, which was not a “capital,” though many students thronged to attend his teaching (da’ira). His senior son had a camp at Sokoto, while others built little settlements or camps of their own (e.g., Shaikh ‘Abd al-Salam at Abdussalame), especially once they had acquired their personal band of followers and much livestock. Traditionally, in histories of Sokoto, each camp has been formally labeled a ribat or a thagr—a stronghold or secure refuge to protect the frontier against raiders—but they also replicated the cultural habit of living in dispersed settlements, a segmenting practice that is useful for people with herds of cattle and sheep. The overall area thus protected was quite small—some twenty-five miles north to south and perhaps fifteen miles west to east: it is as if the caliphate was centered on a “capital territory,” a kind of much enlarged “D.C.” with its leading figures living within a few hours’ walking distance of one another but with no “White House,” no “Sublime Porte.” Indeed, it seems that jihadi leaders actively preferred not to live in a city or a crowded settlement: they tended to move away to another small settlement—to a Wurno or a Cimola, leaving the “capital” and its problems behind. This is not unique to Sokoto, of course: the new jihadi emirs in Kano city had places nearby (Nasarawa, Dorayi) that were not simply camps for mustering an army (as was Fanisau) or frontier strongholds (as Takai). But if an army larger than a band of friends (ashab) is to be raised, a well-populated city might well be necessary, as soldiers joined up for campaigns voluntarily—there was no compulsion or recruiting system, just a call made at the Friday prayer for men to prepare for a campaign to start the next day. And often, we know, many failed to turn up.Footnote 9 Thus a dispersed settlement pattern ruled out a large-scale military machine, making political authority tentative and effective leadership crucial.
In this jihadi “capital territory,” seniority mattered greatly, but leadership was still confirmed by formal election: even the shaikh, at the very start of the jihad, had to be elected as the community’s imam, though he had to be persuaded (he said he was too old). Similarly, later leaders were elected or put forward for election by a small group of “kingmakers”: succession was not automatic or uncontested, or even desired by some—you were asked to be leader. At root, I think, lay the basic sense of individual or clan autonomy: one could always refuse to recognize the new leader, detach oneself and start one’s own group or settlement—just like a successful son could leave his father’s camp. Or a “leader” could be like a Sufi shaikh: his followers could choose to follow him, or they might try out another shaikh or teacher, or even become shaikhs themselves. And once a shaikh died, his followers were free to choose another: shaikh–student bonds last only during the former’s lifetime. Yet the principle of good manners always remained, such as the Fulbe pulaaku (code of conduct) that requires both self-restraint (“shyness”—semtende) and courtesy, alongside patience, courage, and obedience (see Abubakar Reference Abubakar2008). In a way, a combination of dispersed settlement and invited leadership made such good behavior feasible once the rigors of jihad and initial state-building were over. Indeed, I suggest that the way the later caliphate was organized and run reflected this distinctive model that existed early on at the heart of the new state.
The new caliphate, however, was much more than a scholarly network of shaikhs and students writ large—it was also an economy with potentially huge material rewards. Herein lay another dilemma. Already some scholars, far away from Sokoto, had refused to join the jihad on the grounds that it offered only this-worldy goods, whereas they were focusing on other-worldy goods.Footnote 10 The jihadi economy, of course, was based on booty both legitimate and illegitimate and above all on prisoners removed from their homes and put up for sale. The market was therefore huge, and it attracted established merchants and commercial opportunists alike, along with their transport systems of slave-porters and the drovers needed for the dozens of beasts of burden (mules, donkeys, camels, even slow oxen). But the market also, of course, served the men with booty to sell—the jihad’s soldiers (mujahidun) who could now, with as many women as they wanted as wives and concubines, live off their profits from having joined the jihad; their motives, we are told in the texts of the time, were often less pious than their commanders wished. A further dilemma, then, was where this worldly market would be located; another was who would govern it, preferably along Islamic principles. The answer was an enlarged Sokoto town, the war camp of the shaikh’s son, the scholarly Muhammad Bello.
From Green Field to Capital City
Within ten years, Sokoto, where the elderly Shaikh ‘Uthman went to live circa 1815, had grown from a small campsite into a huge town of some one hundred thousand people, the largest in Hausaland and Borno. By 1825 it had attracted all sorts of people, “riff-raff” as well as scholars and students, cashing in on the success of the jihad across the whole “Hausa” region. The new wealth—in people (captives), trade, booty, and gifts—was a major attraction. Especially for such a green-field site, the rate of growth was phenomenal. An immense amount of building work had to be done, requiring huge numbers of laborers. For defense, long, thick mud walls twenty-five feet high had to be raised around the core site with some twelve guarded gates; even these first walls soon had to be extended. Wells had to be dug, food had to be grown on fields carved out of the “bush” and fertilized with manure, fuel had to be gathered for cooking fires—all this in an area that at best was rough pasture land and scrub.Footnote 11
Building, of course, required digging earth and mixing it with grass and dung, shaping by hand tens of thousands of tubali; it required hauling water from the river, and gathering materials for thatch (special wood, reeds) and rope. Sokoto’s sand and laterite rock would have made construction difficult, and though a river was at the foot of the ridge where the new settlement was sited, donkeys had to carry the large carrier bags (taiki) holding heavy water pots or tubali up the steep hill; these bags and pots needed sourcing too, along with the hoes to dig the clay, axes to cut the wood, sickles to gather the grass—everything had to come from afar where there were iron mines, smelters, and blacksmiths, as well as potters and mat-weavers, since the Sokoto area had few if any of these raw materials and skilled craftsmen. Similarly, donkeys needed to be brought in or bred, and mules or camels found; horses were more valuable as cavalry mounts than for use as transport. Above all, supplies of labor were needed to do the digging, the carrying, and the building—but from where would the labor come? The Sokoto area was not densely populated. Instead, there were Fulbe pastoralist settlements that themselves needed space: hence the initial appropriateness of the Sokoto escarpment as a temporary war camp, open pastureland with a nearby spring but close enough to allies and river-edge routes. So the necessary labor had to be brought in. It seems that most of the laborers were the slaves, captives taken in the course of the jihad. Prisoners were not in chains or even watched over by guards with dogs. We do not know how many captive laborers ran away to join the “brigands” in the woodlands nearby (and we know that raiders were numerous enough to pose a constant problem): but, though captives far outnumbered free men, there is little evidence that this happened at all. The new system—relocating people wholesale to work on the new project that was “Sokoto”—was, I think, sustained in part by the charisma of the Shaikh ‘Uthman: his presence sanctified the new society that was being built both figuratively and literally. Is it plausible that in building the new Sokoto the people felt they were building a new society that Allah had blessed with victory, against all odds? That this was a new world?
In this Sokoto was very different from the situation in Kano, Katsina, or Zaria where the capital city existed with well-built houses and a “palace,” great long walls and political institutions. Title-holders had their large houses and areas of responsibility, Islamic courts were in place, as were great mosques, saints’ tombs, and burial sites; marketplaces were already in operation (see Moody Reference Moody1969). The new jihadi authorities in the great cities thus had simply to take over the relevant offices and even move into the official residences. New clan mosques might be built locally within the city, but otherwise everything was already in place (Zahradeen Reference Zahradeen and Barkindo1983:57–66): only the conquered population had to be persuaded, perhaps intimidated, into accepting the new regime—and that, the shaikh in Sokoto had suggested, could if necessary be done with force or threats of force: symbolically he sent his new commander in Kano a knife (Palmer Reference Palmer1928:128).
The inhabitants in these old cities had their old identities as Kanawa, Katsinawa, or Zazzagawa, but in Sokoto there was no such identity. They were not called Sakkwatawa; instead they were addressed as Kadirawa—followers of the Qadiriyya Sufi brotherhood under their revered Qadiri Shaikh, ‘Uthman dan Fodio. Similarly, while the long-established cities were divided into distinct wards or quarters with settlement areas such as a “Tudun Wada” or “Fagge,” Bompai, Magwan, or “Tudun Nufawa” associated with distinct groups, Sokoto had—and still has—no such subsettlements, not even a suburban Sabon Gari; even today, Christians can live and trade down by the Sultan’s palace and the main mosque. Sokoto town just has quarters associated with the jihadi official who once lived there (such as Gidadawa).Footnote 12
Sokoto is also in many ways a Fulbe city; unlike other cities, it retains some of its “green-ness.” Each evening around dusk cattle make their way back to their owners’ homesteads, unescorted by any herdsman or child. The city’s houses shelter not only people but also horses—only stallions, since mares, with their dangerously stimulating scents (to the male horses), are not allowed within the city. The horses’ quarters are kept spotless with clean sand, the urine carefully collected in a calabash (the groom is called by the horse stamping its hoof).Footnote 13 The trees in a house’s graveyard may house cattle egrets whose droppings make excellent fertilizer for onions; small fire finches (known as bayin Allah, “slaves of Allah”) come into rooms where students sit studying Islamic texts, and doves nest under the edges of thatch roofs. Geckos roam the walls but they are not admired—munafikun, “hypocrites,” is their common name—and I have known of snakes living within a house unmolested. Dogs, which are considered polluting animals, are unwelcome, but there may be cats (preferred by the Prophet for their cleanliness). Guinea fowl come noisily over the walls and lay their tough-shelled eggs high up in trees; small hedgehogs (bushiya) find their way through the narrow channels taken by wastewater as it exits the compounds.
In short, Sokoto city may have been the capital of a great polity but it was also a rural town. It lacked monuments or monumental architecture, and it was short of ceremonial space; its layout was not designed to impress or intimidate, though the streets were regularly laid out and well built—unusually so, said Clapperton (1828,ii:377). The shaikh’s tomb (hubbare) is his old, originally suburban house in which he also had a tent (laima); his mosque was nearby—low, plain, and many-pillared, so unlike the splendid mosque built in 1836 for the emir in Zaria, or the huge ancient mosque in Kano with its high, bulky minaret. There were no public baths or fountains, no fine gardens—nothing to compare with the famous edifices of the Maghreb or Andalusia: no public hospitals, libraries, schools—nothing built in stone.
For Sokoto lacked sources of stone (Timbuktu’s builders could bring stone in from distant quarries). Though one can build thick, solid walls with laterite, it cannot be shaped like good stone. Instead, the mud work needed careful maintenance; the flat roofs required annual care to keep them waterproof; the extra-large thatch roofs of the wives’ rooms received regular repair (a thatch roof was nicer to live with than a mud roof since smoke from a fire could pass through the thatch). But thatch was in danger when rebels attacked, as they used pigeons with lit pieces of cotton tied to their feet to set the roofs on fire. And fires were a real hazard to grain stores and the city’s food reserves; there was no way of controlling a conflagration—no tanks of water, or pumps, or hoses—just pottery urns in washrooms and deep wells. Not even a downpour of rain could put out a major fire; indeed an accompanying strong wind only helped to spread it.
Hence I suggest that Sokoto city was not established with grandiose ideas of a metropolis in the founders’ minds, even though they had builders and architects who knew the great constructions of, say, Cairo. Sokoto’s significance lay in its people, not in its material fabric; its focus was on the next world rather than on any magnificence in this world—in part, I think, because the world’s end was thought to be coming soon. Why build for a brief spell of (vain)glory? Apart from one high reading room (turaka) within the caliph’s compound, Sokoto did not even have tall buildings or houses of more than one story—in part, perhaps, because the person living upstairs might peer into his neighbor’s house. Given the new need for purdah, privacy was important—horsemen riding through the city were already a nuisance if they looked over the fences at the women inside the houses and even men on foot, who were apt to try to peer through the fence’s stalks, could be troublesome. High mud walls might have been an ideal solution, but they were expensive (and slow) to build, as opposed to fences of cornstalk or matting which, though rarely more than six-feet high, were quick to erect. Hence the regular calls to prayer were not even given from a lofty minaret but rather from a small dais a few feet high, usually by a blind man. A sighted person could tell him the right time from the stars or the sun’s shadow.
In the early days of the caliphate the ruling elite were not city men at heart—or at least they did not much like living even in Sokoto. There was a strong tradition of the emir’s living out in a ribat on the frontier from which a small citizen army of volunteers could attack “rebels” (’yan tawaye) or fend off raids. Big-city life, it seems, was regarded as polluting: Sokoto city was not a place of piety but of merchants and trade, a place where the sins of urban life—gambling, prostitution, drinking—were all “normal,” and unstoppable.Footnote 14 Even in 1824, with Muhammad Bello as Amir al-mu’minin, Sokoto was apparently so “rough” that he preferred to live in Wurno upstream from Sokoto. Sokoto did not need to be beautified or turned into a magnificent capital because the city stood for other, less permanent values than those the jihad leaders had risked their lives for. The jihadi site par excellence was the unadorned camp, the ribat or thagr. Ironically, perhaps, the colonial British similarly had to set up their residential “camps” well outside the cities they sought to control, a practice copied by the independent Nigerian elites today—most notably in Abuja. But in early colonial Kano it was the emir who told the British to live outside his city: the “lion should not sleep with the lamb” he is quoted as saying (Morel Reference Morel1912).Footnote 15 Were the “riff-raff” in early jihadi Sokoto also glad to have their masters largely out of sight?
However, Sokoto, perhaps paradoxically, was also an important place of pilgrimage (ziyara): Shaikh ‘Uthman’s grave attracted many visitors who prayed there and might also attend teaching sessions. He was treated as a wali (saint), and some of his actions were regarded and remembered as miracles (karamat), although Shaikh ‘Uthman himself was reluctant to accept these claims.Footnote 16 He acknowledged that he sometimes overheard spirits (jinn) talking, but he was very modest in his daily life and teaching. Nonetheless, he was the focus of much pious attention: pieces of his hair were collected when he was old; even today, people will gather around a descendant (such as the late Sarkin Kudu Maccido when he became Sarkin Musulmi) just to touch his gown, and the Sardauna of Sokoto, as premier, regularly prayed at the rebuilt tomb of the Shaikh. It is the focus now of an annual pilgrimage by a Kano branch of the Qadiriyya brotherhood on the last day of Safar, the birthday (maulud) of the Shaikh. A women’s religious organization, the ’Yan taru, also go to the tomb formally and regularly. Others of the Shaikh’s family and descendants are buried there, and a proper guide to the tombs (hubbare) was written by the late Waziri (vizier) Alhaji Junaidu. Admittedly, the Sardauna of Sokoto, as premier of the Northern Region of Nigeria, fostered and financed the rebuilding of several other tombs of significance to the caliphate—for example, at Wurno, Matuziggi, and Cimola—but this was before the influx of Wahhabi ideas that strongly discouraged the building of tombs and pilgrimages to saints. Young Muslims have taken up these ideas, but the older generation tends to retain their Sufi traditions. Sokoto thus can mean very different things to different generations.
Sokoto, then, is the city of Shaikh ‘Uthman (birnin Shehu), and traditionally its citizens are publicly addressed as “Kadirawa.” Its location up a long straight road in the northwest of the country accentuates the sense of remoteness today; the colonial railway never reached Sokoto; instead carefully controlled lorries brought in all the necessary goods.Footnote 17 The emptiness of the area, however, is misleading. The colonial regime built its untarred motor roads on high ground where flooding would be a rarity. In contrast, the old precolonial route followed the banks of the Sokoto river, where all the villages and the farmers’ fields were located: the valley was rich and fertile and by-passed the woods and “bush” that housed bandits and rebels. Messengers and traders could thus find food and lodging en route.
Nonetheless, Sokoto could at times feel cut off from core Hausaland. The upland area that formed the watershed between Sokoto/Zamfara and Katsina was dangerous; in the nineteenth century, whenever the Waziri of Sokoto crossed it, he would send a letter back to Sokoto to say that he had crossed the wilderness known as dajin Rubu safely. The roads or paths were often narrow, threading their way across fields of sorghum and millet; there were no bridges this far north, so in the rainy season travelers had to ford streams and rivers if they could, but larger rivers, where canoes worked as ferries, were sometimes impassable. And even in a canoe, one’s goods might get wet and spoil in the bottom of the boat. People usually walked in line or rode a horse with their loads on a donkey, a mule, or an ox, or else on the heads of slaves working as porters (with a head load usually of around 50 pounds; a load of 100 pounds or more was also possible, but rare).Footnote 18 Precolonially there were no wheeled vehicles, since the soft sand made them impracticable. A “caravan” of porters could thus be several hundred yards long, and easy to ambush. Guards often proved inadequate as a deterrent.
Maps in history books often leave the reader thinking of the Sokoto caliphate as a solid, continuous land mass, but the reality was more fragmented. Such a pattern of dangerous forest interspersed with cultivated areas of safe settlement has been common, of course, to many states and empires, but in the Sokoto caliphate there was no centralized state system to overcome the problems. The local emir might provide an escort or a guide within his territory, but not necessarily beyond it. Long-distance caravans therefore needed to be organized as traveling “mini-emirates,” self-sufficient and self-contained, camping well outside any great city (see Lovejoy Reference Lovejoy1980). In ways not unlike radical religious groups, they were essentially mobile and detached from the permanent great cities, yet they also needed them as key points of reference. In the wider scene of today’s Nigeria, then, Sokoto is and perhaps always was anomalous: remote, sacred, yet also very profane, with its own atypical history. Even its founders, I like to think, were puzzled by it—hardly what they had in mind as they packed their bags and books and set out on their long hijra from their old hamlet at Degel on that Tuesday in February (the 21st), 1804.
By Way of Conclusion
The mass movement that developed out of the initial jama’a that risked embarking on a jihad in early 1804 was not only unexpected but also posed a number of serious dilemmas to its leader, Shaikh ‘Uthman dan Fodio. First among them, perhaps, was how to make sense, intellectually, of such a mass movement: he was used to small scholarly groups, but by 1810 he had a mass following of people whose scholarship was poor and whose motives were not necessarily as strictly pious as his. In an undated book, Fath al-basa’ir, he focused on the difference between the elite and the common man, between the proper mujtahid and the rest of the jama’a (Moumouni & El-Hassan Reference Moumouni and El-Hassan2012). It would be appropriate if the text had been composed after the end of the jihad when the numbers in his jama’a had grown exponentially, but we do not know its exact date; he may of course have been thinking about this problem for a long time. Indeed, the book may even have been written by someone else, but it does sharply point up a real problem in the early caliphate.
Although Shaikh ‘Uthman’s jama’a and his jihad were historically unique, the problems he faced two centuries ago can also affect even today any radical group seeking to reform the way Muslims in northern Nigeria live their lives. Once such a group starts attracting large numbers of young men and they increasingly participate in acts of violence against the state, the operational changes eventually pose serious intellectual challenges to a group wishing to remain true to its original inspiration. Similar challenges are posed by the group’s transformation from a small, potentially itinerant band, able to move discreetly between different sites, into a readily identifiable “sect” located with its “capital” within a large city. With that transformation comes the lure of wealth and the dilemma of how to both use it “Islamically” and distribute it equitably. The new sect may then split, becoming a kind of franchise, with each subgroup using different methods to acquire cash, often by means abjured by the original leadership. In short, even a semi-successful group eventually faces the dilemma of how best to manage the outcome of its jihad; it has to ask itself how its ideals can best withstand the process of expansion brought about through the market and a mass influx of recruits. Indeed, will the very act of sustained violence alter the character of what initially was primarily a religious movement dedicated to teaching, to reforming people’s practice, and to improving everyday government? Could the move into war, even in self-defense, prove counterproductive for such a group?
I am suggesting here that the history of Sokoto both as a caliphate and as a town sheds light on answers to these questions, answers that are part of Sokoto’s legacy and therefore open to reinterpretation and fresh research—not least because other separatist religious groups, like the Salihawa in deep rural Katsina or the Digawa in eastern Kano, have answered these same questions in their own quietist way, and have managed, largely out of sight, simply to pursue a life of piety that seems to satisfy them even today. The history of Sokoto and the caliphate has, it seems, still so much political baggage to carry that students are wary of taking it on in all its complex, weighty detail. But in being so freighted it only highlights an essential, persistent problem underlying northern Nigeria’s place within Nigeria itself: how to be a seriously good Muslim in a modernizing world.
