Hearing Northern Nigeria's Own Historians
By
There is an almost overwhelming mist of brutality, sadness and melancholy which jumps out from writings by young historians from Northern Nigeria about Northern Nigeria. In the last four decades, shades of fear and aggressive anxieties circulate around the region's various nicknames of: "Lugard North", "Core North", "Far North", "Holy North", "Middle Belt North" or "Minority North". There is in some writings a thinly veiled cry to be heard; a desperate wrath dressed in timid narratives about social, economic and political records. In the context of rituals of inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflicts which have shaken the region since General Ibrahim Babangida's "transition programme" (which his critics have called "Maradona Dribbles"), it may well be imperative for nation builders in the region to interrogate these works. A little effort will be made here by way of offering some hints.
A most intriguing proposition is made by Professor Abdullahi Mahdi, the current vice-chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, in his doctoral thesis on the history of pre-jihad Kano. It runs as follows. The record of statecraft in Kano is marked by one major "Habe Error" and two major "Fulani Errors". The Habe Error was the love by its ruling classes for conspicuous consumption, indulgence in personal vanity as manifested in the love of finery in dress, and the power of bribery in the judicial process. This made them take from the ruled and not give attention to the development of the Talakawa and their happiness. When Fulani social reformists in 1804 challenged their power, these Habe rulers had no popular legitimacy and support to throw their attackers. The new Fulani rulers made their first error when they tribalised power by ensuring that each set of rulers from the emir down to what would later be termed as "Native Authority" officials would come from the same stock and bloodline. They thereby missed the benefit of "Indirect Rule" as practised in Ancient Borno by which the Mai's harsh tax pressures on the population was hidden behind the familiar stares of officials drawn from within local tribes and communities. The second "Fulani Error" followed from the first. By keeping power tightly in the grip of Fulani bloodlines, they abandoned the wisdom of Ancient Kano in which access to the very top of power was open to any person with ambition, talent, political skills and economic acumen, regardless of where he had arrived from. And people arrived from as far and diverse afield as Kwararafa, Libya, Nupeland, Eko, Borno, etc. Out of these many came an open and all-welcoming citizenship cherished as Kanawa - the people of Kano. It was a concept which in 1983 would shield Sabo Bakinzuwo's political ambition to be governor of modern Kano State against opponents who recalled, negatively his Nupe travel donkeys.
Professor Mahmud Hamman's writing on the much younger Muri Emirate in the far-east of the Caliphate suggests that this "Fulani Error" had spread with the flag of Fulani conquest. The Fulani jihad rulers added onto their own errors the core Habe defect of extracting from the people without giving them development and happiness. Dr. Pongri's narrative about contact between the invading forces of the Fulani Jihadists and indigenous nationalities sees it as a "revolutionary terrorism", which refused to open their doors even to ruling groups they found in power among the so-called ethnic minorities in Adama's new territory.
Professor Monday Mangvwat introduces into this picture the arrival of a British colonial virus by which officials teamed up with missionaries to encourage and trap Hausas, Igbos, Tiv, Yoruba and the indigenous Birom to form separate tribal associations on the Jos Plateau's mine camps. British officials discriminated against using Biroms and Tiv as clerks in preference for Ghanaians, Gambians and later Igbos and Yorubas or "Southerners". The Hausa and Igbo were the only groups allowed to buy food from villages and cook and sell to mine workers. The Birom and Tiv were to do the dirty and low paid work of carrying soil from the mine work areas. The accompanying cultures of contempt for the "minorities" and division between tribal associations were nurtured by British officials. When Nnamdi Azikiwe's anti-colonial call for Nigeria's independence rang out in the tin mines (through copies of The West African Pilot), Mangvwat heard European missionaries, miners and officials whispering rumours of impending Hausa-Fulani/Muslim domination over Christian ethnic groups as well as about Igbo locusts coming as dark clouds from southern Christian skies. These double-tongued British whispers would, two decades later, give birth to two antagonistic political twins: the Northern Nigerian Non-Muslim League (NNNML), and the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC). It was a viral attack for which the "Fulani Errors" of power had no herbal cure - the political HIV/AIDS of its time.
Kazah Ture (from Southern Kaduna) and Dr. Yoroms Joses Gani (from Adamawa State) come into this scenario with interesting gazes. Ture's research in the Kaduna Archives came out with stories of British District Officers refusing to remove oppressive and unpopular local Fulani officials despite vigorous protest from "minority ethnic groups", and later on turning these pent-up resentments into Southern-Sudan type of secessionist demands. British rumours to the effect that with Nigeria's independence the Hausa-Fulani/Moslems would re-enslave the Christian ethnic minorities did the secessionist trick. There was no evidence of local Fulani rulers gazing beyond their noses to notice that the drama of post-Second World War global politics opened up new opportunities and new challenges for their own initiatives at nation-building and trans-ethnic African nationalism. The Northern Elements Progressive Union, NEPU, was brutally suppressed and its help lost.
The chemistry of Fulani Errors interacting with British viral attacks against Nigerian nationalism, would in Dr. Yorom's work, yield a chart of what he might have called the Ten Hostile Geological Tribes of post-colonial Nigeria. I will indulge and list them, as he does, thus:
"1. The ruling elites and Aristocrats of Muslim Hausa-Fulani group.
2. The educated elites of the Moslem Hausa-Fulani group.
3. The ruling elites and Aristocrats of the minority ethnic Christian and pagan group.
4. The middle class of Moslem minority ethnic group.
5. The middle class of Christian Hausa-Fulani group.
6. The middle class of Christian minority ethnic groups.
7. The lower class (Talakawa) of Muslim Hausa-Fulani group.
8. The lower class (Talakawa) of Muslim minority ethnic group
9. The lower class (Talakawa) of Christian Hausa-Fulani group.
10. The lower class (Talakawa) of Christian minority groups."
I will not spend time worrying over when a group is "Muslim" and not "Moslem". Yoroms suggests that there is no "melting pot" situation here by which identities melt and open out to a possible higher common and equal Northern Nigerian citizenship. There is also no "salad" situation here by which each ethnic group contributes their positive ingredients, tastes and juices into a desirable and nutritious togetherness. Tribal group 10 is completely shut out of contact with groups 1 and 2. Group 6 members lose job appointments to Groups 4 and 5 etc. It is a texture tapestry and summation of a Grand Failure in social engineering, if seen from a potential Northern patriotic unionist wish; or a Grand success in investing in balkanised permanent conflict if seen from a Lugardian pedigree of statecraft based on nurturing and giving deep roots to the Fulani Errors, the Habe Error and the British genius of planting seeds of conflict ("reaped" from pages of the Holy Qur'an and the Holy Bible flapped at each other) across the Sahelian savannah in order to compound those errors.
General Babangida once told a reporter that if his regime had not taken certain preventive measure, the victors of the Cold War would have disintegrated the Nigerian federation in the same way they had done with the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Like a Maradona dribble, it wasn't clear where he was going next. Dr. Yoroms (himself probably a world-class footballer) thought he saw Babangida exploiting this conflictual chemistry of the Geological Ten Tribes. He sees IBB's dashing heels flashing out in the Atyap-Hausa conflict in Zangon Kataf (1992); the Hausa-Seyawa mayhem in Tafawa Balewa in Bauchi State (1993); the Igbo-Hausa clash over a German Christian preacher in Kano; all the way to General Sani Abacha's creation of Zamfara State, etc. Presumably the idea was to let out some of the hottest gasses of conflict, oppression and denied ethnic nationalisms among the 31 ethnic minorities across the North which he lists as "Still under the emirate system". Perhaps other speculators might also allow themselves visions of IBB seen wearing OPC football boots in Lagos, and a Tarok jersey in Wase local government in Plateau State.
This return to the wit of historians was aroused by the inter ethnic/inter-religious bloodletting which hit Kaduna in 2000 and 2001. Jos town was engulfed several times in early 2002 and continued to contaminate other areas of Plateau State. A newspaper daily recently carried horrible pictures of related death and destruction in Wase local government of the state. The underground press also carried word that retired General Mamman Kontagora had declined former General Joe Garba's job as the Director General of the National Institute of Strategic Studies in Kuru near Jos because hostile political voices in Plateau State will only accept one of their own for the job. The region's record over these matters is untidy. Yoroms writes that: "Civilians appointed into key ministerial posts favour the Hausa-Fulani settlers in the Middle Belt more than the indigenous ethnic minorities. Hausa-Fulani politicians from Adamawa, Taraba, Plateau, Nasarawa, Gombe and Bauchi may be appointed into various offices". Is the current Plateau State leadership's stance a case of anti-ethnic ethnicism or ethnic "liberation" by also committing the sins of the other? Will it provoke a new and bold interrogation of the past by both sides?
It may well remain the fashion, for some time to come, to ignore even the positive initiatives which General Sani Abacha may have taken. A National Reconciliation Committee, led by Chief Alex Akinyele, did go round the land digging up complaints and grievances by various ethnic groups. It was reported, for example, that at Maiduguri, the committee heard the accusation that all former and current Borno State's share of ambassadorial appointments had gone only to members of the Kanuri ethnic group. There was apparently a veritable stampede when the committee proposed the creation of new local government areas as a remedial measure. To what extent was General Abacha being a creative reformer and deconstucter of structures of violence within the body politics of Northern Nigeria? Or was he merely planting cheap mushrooms of support to serve as his umbrella against long June 12 rainstorms?
I started by claiming that I had heard cries for a hearing in the works of several historians of Northern Nigerian origin writing about the region. It is currently a season of much talk about a "National Conference". Perhaps the explosion of violence in the region is another conferencing and writing historical narratives; with torrents of blood and tears running across physical and mental landscapes. It is valid to ask if there are minds and hearts in the region with ears to hear these various languages of history. I have thrown stones here at three languages which have been spoken by the histories of the North; the "Habe Error" language, the "Three Fulani Errors" language, and the British conflict virus" language. Perhaps, it is new languages time. Some of the new lingua may do well to reach back to a dialect from Rumfa's Kanawa and their open gates for all; a heavy dose of Tiv and Bachama in each household, etc. It will demand herds of courage and sharp-horned imagination.
Sept 2002