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Article Excerpt
Introduction
This paper explores three interrelated issues; the origins and development of a Hausa-Caliphate imaginary in the intertwinements of caliphate and British discourses and its subtle entry into official British colonial policy in northern Nigeria; how the search for administrative coherence prompted British colonialists to craft an administrative policy envisioned to normalize and spread this Hausa-Caliphate socio-cultural and political model to the Middle Belt; and the on-ground unfolding and implementation of this policy in the non-Hausa speaking part of the Middle Belt. [1]
This colonial administrative project of politico-cultural uniformity sought to make the Middle Belt more like the Caliphate sector, which was deemed more suitable for the British administrative policy of Indirect Rule. [2] It was not aimed at achieving cultural sameness for its own sake but as a vehicle for ultimately strengthening Indirect Rule in all of northern Nigeria. This was largely a pragmatic administrative project, although pre-existing British and Caliphate narratives about the sociology and politics of northern Nigeria contributed to its formulation as an ideology of colonial rule. But the accentuation of ethno-cultural difference was indispensable to Indirect Rule. How then did difference and homogeneity co-exist in British colonial administrative practice? To tease out the paradox in the British creation of both ethnic difference and functional cultural homogeneity is not to suggest that the British consciously thought about or crafted these ideas in those terms; that would concede more coherent intent and intellectual deliberateness to British colonialists than they actually exhibited in their encounter with Africans. The argument here is that the two fundamental prerequisites of Indirect Rule--ethnic difference and a pre-existing, centralized system of rule--necessitated the creation, witting or unwitting, of both difference and politico-cultural sameness across northern Nigeria, using the colonially-approved Hausa-caliphate model as a reference. The most notable site of this colonial policy was the Middle Belt, which, while possessing the desired ethnic difference, lacked the centralized political and cultural institutions and symbols of the emirate system, deemed crucial to Indirect Rule.
To illustrate this British colonial phenomenon of using a Sokoto caliphate idiom to "civilize" those considered not civilized enough for Indirect Rule, I will focus the empirical discussion and examples of this paper on the Tiv-Idoma (Benue) axis of the Middle Belt. The choice is informed by the fact that this was a part of the Middle Belt where Hausa was not spoken or understood to any significant degree and where Caliphate culture had not penetrated as much as was the case in other parts of the Middle Belt. As a result of these interpellations, this colonial policy of engineering administrative sameness was more contested here, and its outcome a lot messier than was the case in the Hausa-speaking parts of the Middle Belt.
The literature on colonial political constructions of ethnicity in Africa has focused largely on the emergence of politically charged ethnic categories as a function of colonial practices and ideologies of ethnic differentiation for the purpose of Indirect Rule. Ethnic and cultural difference was central to Indirect Rule because of the centrality of tradition and customs to its working. The standard argument identifies a key site of struggles over ethnicity and culture: the bureaucratization of "created" or reified ethnic difference, the witting and unwitting imputation of privilege and marginality into these categories of ethnic difference, and the colonial and postcolonial appropriation of difference as a claim-making device by Africans. It is argued that European colonialisms, for a variety of reasons, were obsessed with ethnic and cultural difference among their African subject populations; that they proceeded to make cultural difference the centerpiece of colonial administrative policy; and that the legacies of colonial ethnic differentiation have been tragic for postcolonial Africa, inspiring ethnic hatred, civil war, fierce political competition, and even genocide. [3]
For Nigeria, James Coleman argued as early as 1958 that the divide-and-rule ethos of Indirect Rule compartmentalized the "diverse elements" of the Nigerian area and subsequently made national unity difficult. [4] Emmy Irobi asserts that Indirect Rule "reinforced ethnic divisions." [5] Echoing the same thesis, Davis and Kalu-Nwiwu remind us that "the structure of British colonial administration" and the drawing of arbitrary boundaries delineating "[ethnic] territor[ies] restricted development of a national consciousness within the broad expanse of Nigeria's borders." [6] Indirect Rule is analyzed as a catalyst for ethnic differentiation and the postcolonial problems of national unity that are rooted in it.
This argument correctly identifies colonial administrative and anthropological practices of ethnic and cultural differentiation as sites from which much of contemporary African ethnic politics and conflicts emanate. However, the creation and bureaucratization of ethnic and cultural difference was not the only preoccupation of colonial powers in Africa--or, for our purpose here, northern Nigeria. Integral to the British colonial project of cheap, convenient, indirect administration was a utilitarian and ideological preoccupation with the simultaneous creation of ethnic difference and cultural homogeneity. Ethnic and cultural difference was not always a colonial administrative asset. It was not in post-conquest northern Nigeria. Although Indirect Rule was founded on amplified ethnic and cultural difference, its implementation, as this paper will demonstrate, ran into problems in the Middle Belt area precisely because of an actually existing ethno-cultural difference, a difference that the British deemed unsuited, if not injurious, to the goal of convenient, cheap, and coherent administration. Subsequently, both cultural difference--which was indispensable to Indirect Rule--and the engineering of homogeneity, considered necessary for a uniform implementation of Indirect Rule in the region, came to simultaneously and contradictorily sit at the heart of British colonial administrative policy in northern Nigeria.
This contradictory British commitment to a functional cultural homogeneity was a catalyst for administrative crises, ethnic suspicion and conflict in the Middle Belt. This paper argues that the pursuit of an instrumental, albeit illusive, politicocultural homogeneity through the ironical enlistment of an Indirect Rule system underwritten by a supposed hierarchy of ethnic and cultural difference was fraught with serious problems and that it had serious consequences for both colonial power relations and inter-ethnic group relations.
Unlike historians of Africa and northern Nigeria, scholars of British colonialism in South Asia have long recognized the existence of British-supervised indigenous colonialisms or sub-colonialisms. The princely states of British India were political contraptions that exemplified this arrangement. In several of these states, the British recruited or recognized pre-existing martial and princely races, Muslims in many cases, and gave them significant administrative sway over Hindu peasants. [7] Although this divide-and-rule administrative mechanism was founded on pre-existing configurations of power, it recognized, for the purpose of British rule, a British-approved power structure rather than the indigenous sociopolitical norms of the Hindu peasantry. Official adoption of Hindu political institutions and traditions would have conformed better to Indirect Rule in its pure form. But its implementation as an administrative policy would have been expensive, inconvenient, and messy. Hausa-Caliphate sub-colonialism in the Nigerian Middle Belt was thus not unique or without precedent in British colonialism. In fact, the expedient policy of instrumental homogenization in northern Nigeria appeared to have been transferred from British India. In 1931, when Donald Cameron, who had recently assumed the governorship of Nigeria, embarked on an extensive administrative reform to dismantle the emiratemodeled administrative policy and restore autonomy to the Middle Belt ethnicities, he accused his predecessors of having formulated a flawed "policy.... of thinking of the [northern Nigerian] Muslim emirates in terms of the Indian States." [8] What made the fallouts of sub-colonialism more dramatic in northern Nigeria than in India was the newness of the arrangement in the former--the previous absence of an established, uncontested Hausa-Caliphate suzerainty and influence over the Middle Belt.
I begin with a mapping of the convoluted historical processes through which Hausa-Fulani identity and its associative connotations emerged. This discussion will pay prominent attention to the emergence of the Sokoto Islamic Caliphate and the ways in which it transformed Hausa identity and conflated it with a notion of imperial citizenship and privilege. I will then discuss the ways in which Sokoto Caliphate Imperial imaginations of itself and the Middle Belt--articulated in Caliphate writings--and the narratives of European travelers and explorers meshed to produce a British colonial knowledge system that privileged the notion of a paradigmatic Hausa-Caliphate politico-cultural sophistication and its supposed Other--the backward Middle Belt. Finally, I analyze the implementation of a colonial policy founded on the Caliphate-Hausa imaginary and on the necessity for Middle Belt conformity to it; the on-ground manifestation of this administrative policy in Tiv and Idoma Divisions; and the crisis and contests that it triggered.
Hausa: More Than a Language
Hausa is not just a language; it is a category that has become synonymous, and now correlates, rightly or wrongly, with certain ways of acting, expressing oneself, making a living, and worshipping God. Hausa now carries with it a constellation of cultural, economic, and political connotations. As a language of trade and social contact in West Africa, and as the language of an ethnic group known as Hausa, it approaches what Ali Mazrui calls a cosmopolitan language. [9] The presence throughout much of West Africa of people who speak Hausa as a second language, and the role of the Hausa language as a lingua franca in much of northern Nigeria, speaks to the utilitarian importance of a language whose intertwinement with trade and itinerant Islamic practices dates back to a remote Nigerian antiquity. [10]
The Hausa inhabited the savannah grasslands of West Africa, hemmed between the Songhai and Bornu Empires. A receptacle of influences from both empires since perhaps the 15th century, Hausaland, then politically constituted into several Hausa city-states, remained largely defined by the linguistic primacy of various dialects of the Hausa language. After the Fulani Jihad of 1804-08, the variegated existence of the Hausa people was subsumed by the Sokoto Islamic caliphate, which was largely constituted by the territories of the old Hausa city states.
The terms "Hausa," "Hausawa," and "Kasar Hausa," denoting the language, people, and land of the Hausa respectively are actually fairly recent coinages; their modern usage probably originated from the writings of Othman bin Fodio, leader of the Fulani Jihad who, before and during the Jihad, homogenized the Hausa-speaking but autonomous peoples of the different Hausa states in what he defined as an undifferentiated collective of bad Muslims. [11] The peoples of these states, and ordinary Fulani migrants who lived in them were more likely to refer to the Hausa States' citizens by their state of origin, e.g "Katsinawa," for those from Katsina; "Kanawa" for those from Kano; "Gobirawa" for those from Gobir, etc. Following Dan Fodio, his brother, Mohammed Bello, discursively formalized "Hausa" as a term of reference for the inhabitants of the former Hausa states. [12]
The Fulani Islamic reform jihad of 1804-08 superimposed a central political and religious authority on the fragmented Hausa states of present-day Northwestern Nigeria and, through conquest and discourse, disciplined them into one politicolinguistic unit. More importantly, the Jihad inscribed Islamic piety as one of the most important markers of Hausa identity. Thus, as John Philips argues, to be Hausa gradually came to mean that one was a Muslim, even though not all Muslims in the Caliphate were Hausa and not all Hausa were Muslims. [13] What the Jihad did was to initiate the process of homogenization and the construction of a politically useful narrative of Hausa identity, a narrative which was underwritten by religious and cultural associations.
The religious content of the Hausaization process was coterminous with the new fortune of Islam as the defining ideal of citizenship within the Sokoto Caliphate, whose core was Hausaland. The new Fulani rulers and their minions adopted the language and culture of their Hausa subjects as well as the administrative infrastructure of the conquered Hausa (Habe) kings. By this process, most of the urbanized Fulani became Hausa in linguistic and cultural terms, although a quiet co-mingling of the two peoples had been taking place before the Jihad. [14] Thus, despite the protest of many Hausa people today about the use of the term "Hausa-Fulani" to describe the Hausa speaking peoples of today's northern Nigeria, it is a historically valid terminology, and it seems that their protest rejects the recent appropriations of the term by Southern Nigerian intellectuals rather than its historicity. For the purpose of this paper, however, I will use the term "Hausa" to denote this compound ethnic category.
The Islamization of Hausa identity is perhaps best underscored by the fact that post-Jihad Hausa identity became synonymous with assimilation into an Islamic consciousness that was packaged, consecrated, and policed by the Jihad leaders and the inheritors of their authority. Thus, the Maguzawa, Hausa traditionalists who either managed to escape the Islamizing influence of the Jihad or became dhimis who traded Jizya tribute for Caliphal protection under Islamic law, were excluded from the post-Jihad narrative of Hausa identity. [15] Although maguzawa has an etymology rooted in the Islamic distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims, and in a Hausaized rendering of this distinction, and although its use to distinguish between Muslim and non-Muslim Hausa, and between urban and rural Hausa, was fairly current in the precolonial period, it acquired additional valence in the post-Jihad period as Islam and its shifting interpretations and consensuses became more central to the definition of Hausa identity. [16] The cosmopolitan nature of Islam in West Africa meant that being Hausa became more and more about Islamic piety and an ability to speak the language than about any originary affinity with Kasar Hausa or Hausa ethnic ancestry.
By expanding the frontiers of a cosmopolitan Islamic tradition, the Sokoto caliphate enhanced the cosmopolitan and incorporative character of Hausa, enabling non-Hausa members of the Caliphal Islamic community to become Hausa in geographical contexts that lacked Hausa ethnic heritage. Indeed, because of the socio-political importance that the jihad invested Hausa with, it became, at least within the Sokoto Caliphate, a political identity denoting belonging, acceptance, privilege, and access. Being Hausa in the Caliphal context cost little. Islamic piety, an acceptance of the religious orthodoxy of the Caliphate founders, and an ability to speak Hausa even as a second language granted one entry into Hausahood. It thus became an appealing identity from a purely pragmatic perspective. Geographic proximity (but not necessarily contiguity) to the Hausa heartland in today's Northwestern Nigeria as well as Islamic piety facilitated social and political access to an increasingly coveted Hausa identity.
A plethora of cultural, attitudinal, and performative indicators sprung up to reinforce the linguistic and religious indicators of Hausa identity. It is this constellation of cultural, religious, economic, and political indices and significations that I call a Hausa-Caliphate imaginary. Steven Pierce argues that this amplification of Hausa identity as a total worldview and way of life is underwritten by the belief among the inheritors of the Sokoto Caliphate Islamic tradition that "Hausa identity ... also encompassed particular ways of making a living ... notably Hausa people's fame as traders ... and a particular approach to agriculture: certain technologies, certain modes of labor mobilization." [17] As a result of these associative reification of Hausa, being Hausa or becoming Hausa gradually came to denote...
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