Sokoto Caliphate

A spark to the tinder

formationDrafted from Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905)

By the end of the eighteenth century, Fulani communities had grown large within the pagan Hausa state of Gobir, organized under their own chiefs and religious teachers whose independent doctrines increasingly unsettled the ruling authorities. In 1802 King Bawa of Gobir summoned their imam, Usman dan Fodio, along with the principal Fulani chiefs, and administered what Shaw calls a severe public reprimand for the religious and political pretensions they had begun to display. It was, in Shaw's own phrase, "a spark to the tinder." Indignation spread through the Fulani community, and Usman dan Fodio fed it directly, preaching that his own people should no longer submit to rule by a pagan king. The Fulani chiefs raised the standard of revolt, elected Usman their Sheikh, and declared a holy war under his leadership.

A war whose own start date nobody could fix

Shaw is candid that even contemporaries disagreed about exactly when the jihad began - accounts vary between 1800 and 1804 - though it evidently broke out around the same time the Tuareg conquest of Timbuktu was reshaping power farther west, and Usman dan Fodio's own uprising in Hausaland ran roughly parallel to a second Fulani jihad led by Ahmadu in Masina. Gobir itself resisted stubbornly: the province was eventually subdued, but its capital, Alkalawa, held out for the whole of Usman dan Fodio's own lifetime and was not taken until after his death. Elsewhere in Hausaland, where Fulani communities were already established inside half the towns before a shot was fired, the conquest spread far faster - Zamfara fell in the war's first year, and town after town across the savanna changed hands as the jihad's own momentum built toward an empire nobody involved at the 1802 reprimand could have predicted.

Town after town

expansionDrafted from Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905)

Gobir itself resisted the jihad it had provoked. The province was eventually subdued, but its own capital, Alkalawa, held out for the whole of Usman dan Fodio's lifetime and did not fall until after his death. Everywhere else in Hausaland the war moved far faster, because Fulani communities were already established inside half the towns before a shot was fired: Zamfara fell in the war's first year, and Zaria was either conquered outright or allied itself with the conquerors within a month of Zamfara's own submission. Kano's conquest followed shortly after; Katsina was taken in 1807; and by 1808 the jihad's armies had been carried into Bornu itself.

Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905) · Martin Bernatz after Heinrich Barth · Public domain

Cities that were already Muslim

The Fulani justified their war as a struggle to hold the courage of their armies against infidels, but the central Hausa provinces they were conquering - Katsina, Kano and Zaria - were themselves already governed on Islamic lines, their society organised under law based on the Quran. In Zaria the reigning dynasty was itself Fulani; in Katsina and Kano the sovereigns were of Hausa dynasties that had been Muslim for generations. The jihad drove large bodies of Muslim Hausa townspeople into the hills alongside the pagan population they were nominally at war to convert, and the Fulani themselves later adopted the existing Hausa legal, judicial and tax systems largely unchanged once the conquest was won - a holy war whose own conquerors ended up governing through the institutions of the people they had just displaced.

The limit of it

Bornu is where the westward push stopped. Muhammad al-Kanemi, a scholar turned military leader, met the Fulani advance with a force only four hundred strong and is said to have broken an army of eight thousand in his first encounter with it; reinforced by the victory, he won forty battles in ten months and drove the Fulani out of Bornu entirely, restoring - rather than claiming for himself - a sultan of the old dynasty. It was the jihad's first defeat by a fellow Muslim power rather than a pagan one, and Shaw's own account is direct about what it did to the war beyond Bornu's own border: the news of al-Kanemi's victories, arriving in Hausaland shortly after 1808, gave new courage to the Hausa states still resisting Fulani rule

• courage that would gather, by 1816, into the confederation Sultan Bello spent the opening years of his own reign putting down at the battle of Dagh.

Water found where they dug

peakDrafted from Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905)

Usman dan Fodio died in 1816, dividing a conquest still not fully secured between two heirs: his son Muhammad Bello, who had already founded the city of Sokoto for himself during his father's lifetime, received the eastern provinces; his brother Abdullahi, based at Gando to the south and west, took the western half. Shaw calls the period of Bello's own reign, which ran until 1837 and coincided closely with the great era of Bornu under its own reforming ruler, "the great period of Fulani rule in Haussaland." Bello inherited a war far from finished - Kano, Katsina and Zaria had already fallen to his father's armies, but the western provinces, including Gobir, Zamfara and Gando itself, remained only imperfectly subdued, and around 1816, the very year of his own accession, a confederation of Hausa states formed to fight the Fulani for their independence.

Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905) · Gwanki · CC0

The battle of Dagh

The confederation's decisive push came around 1820, reinforced by an alliance with Moorish forces and the sympathy of Bornu's own ruler. Bello assembled his army at Wurno, where Sheikh Omar, head of the Fulani church, addressed the troops and enjoined them to keep their hearts pure and commit no atrocities. The march that followed crossed genuinely hostile terrain in the dry season - Shaw describes the army's suffering from thirst as terrible enough that Bello halted the column and asked Omar to seek divine guidance on whether to advance or retreat. Omar, after a night in prayer, reported a vision of water running underground; Bello drove a spear into the earth and ordered his men to dig, and water rose wherever they broke ground. The army that reached the confederated forces at the resulting battle - known afterward as the battle of Dagh - won decisively: the king of Katsina was killed, the king of Gobir taken prisoner, and, by the account Shaw quotes, twenty-five thousand of the enemy were killed. Bello kept his own soldiers under strict discipline and permitted no slaves to be taken from the field.

Victory that settled nothing for long

Dagh broke the confederation's momentum without ending its resistance. The defeated states continued fighting Fulani rule piecemeal for years afterward, and Bello spent much of the rest of his reign reducing them one at a time - conquering Zamfara outright, marching against a revolt in his uncle Abdullahi's own territory of Gando while scrupulously respecting his father's division of the realm by forbidding his own troops to enter the town itself. Even in victory, the wars exposed an uncomfortable truth the Fulani generals could not fully ignore: many of their opponents were themselves practicing Muslims, and prisoners taken in these campaigns were tested on their recitation of the Quran before being freed or sold into slavery - a holy war, in practice, fought as often against fellow believers as against genuine unbelievers.

A suzerainty Sokoto would not exercise

contractionDrafted from Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905)

Sultan Bello died in 1837, and the caliphate his father had founded settled into the shape it would keep for the rest of the century: a religious authority radiating outward from Sokoto and Gando over dozens of Fulani emirates, each governed by its own emir and Council of Notables, each taking its own formal investiture from one of the two capitals. The empire that had once put a hundred thousand men in the field stopped expanding. What it had already conquered, it now administered - or, increasingly, simply presided over.

A company's treaty, not a government's

The first European power to reach an understanding with Sokoto was not a government at all. In 1884 a trading concern sent Joseph Thomson to negotiate its first treaty with the sultanate, and in 1886 that company received a Royal Charter that made it, for international purposes, the equivalent of a recognised government: the Royal Niger Company's own flag carried the standing of the British flag wherever it flew, its treaties with local rulers earned Great Britain's protection, and it was given the power to levy taxes and raise a small native force to pay for its own political work. Sokoto and Gando, among the more important signatories, agreed to deal with no other European power, to give Britain jurisdiction over foreigners in their territory, and to cede sovereign rights along a strip of the Niger and Benue - while formally keeping their own internal rule intact.

Emirates that stopped listening to Sokoto

That internal rule was where the empire actually came apart. As Company and then colonial pressure grew through the 1890s, emirates further from the centre began acting entirely on their own account. The Emir of Yola ordered the Company's traders to haul down their flag despite treaty rights protecting them; in Bautchi the town of Guarram was destroyed and its people carried off; Kontagora and Nupe moved to outright attack on the British administration; other emirates raided British-protected populations for slaves regardless of what Sokoto or Gando had signed. Sokoto's own response to this fragmentation was not to reassert control but to withdraw from the question entirely - refusing, again and again, to exercise its own traditional right of nominating successors when the British deposed an emir who had defied them, leaving every one of those southern emirates to take its investiture from the colonial administration instead, by conquest rather than by the old religious chain of authority. The high command that had once bound Hausaland's Fulani rulers to a single centre was, emirate by emirate, ceasing to function years before Sokoto itself was ever attacked.

War, as God has enjoined

endDrafted from Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905)

By the end of the nineteenth century Sokoto's own authority had become mostly ceremonial rather than administrative - Shaw describes the Sultan as the recognized religious and political head of Hausaland, from whom every Fulani emirate not subject to Gando took its formal investiture, even as Britain's own colonial administration expanded steadily around it. The British High Commissioner tried conciliation first: a friendly letter announcing the new British administration went to Sokoto in 1900 and was never answered, its messenger treated with open contempt; a 1901 request that Sokoto nominate a successor to a deposed emir went unanswered too. In May 1902 Sokoto finally replied, in terms Shaw quotes in full: "I do not consent that any one from you should ever dwell with us... Between us and you there are no dealings, except as between Mussulmans and Unbelievers - war as God Almighty has enjoined upon us."

Kano falls without a real fight

War came the following year. A British force of under a thousand rank and file left Zaria in January 1903 under Colonel Morland, and found Hausaland's supposedly impregnable stronghold, Kano - a walled city eleven miles in circumference, its walls forty feet thick at the base - defended half-heartedly at best. The city's own emir had already withdrawn to Sokoto with his army and the bulk of the ruling family a month before the assault, leaving Kano's defense to two trusted slaves; when the emir tried to return and retake the city, his own brother the Wombai refused to fight and split off a large part of the army, and the emir himself fled in disguise toward the French frontier rather than face the British force in open battle. Kano fell on 3 February 1903, and within three days its great market had resumed full activity, caravans moving in and out as though the country were at peace.

Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905) · Solasly · CC BY-SA 4.0

The battle that ended a century of Fulani rule

Sokoto alone stayed defiant. Conciliatory letters to the Sultan went unanswered, and the British column pressed westward through brutal Harmattan heat and salt-poisoned water toward the capital. On 15 March 1903 a battle was fought outside Sokoto itself, and the Sultan's own army was defeated and put to flight. The city that Muhammad Bello had founded less than a century earlier as the eastern capital of his father's jihad state passed, in a single afternoon, under British colonial rule - the last independent seat of a religious and political authority that had once commanded holy war across the whole of Hausaland, undone not by a rival Muslim power or an internal Hausa revolt, as its own history had weathered before, but by an army its own defiant letter had explicitly, and unsuccessfully, invited.

A turban and a gown

afterlifeDrafted from Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905)

The fighting did not end with Sokoto's own fall in March 1903. The deposed sultan fled east with a body of followers, was pursued to the frontier of Bornu, and was killed that July in an engagement near Burmi alongside a rebellious district chief who had joined him - the last armed resistance of any consequence the conquest produced.

Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (1905) · Ministry of Information, Northern Nigeria · Public domain

An installation borrowed from the throne it replaced

What followed was not the dismantling of the caliphate's own institutions but their adoption. The British High Commissioner, following the same principle already used to reconstruct the southern emirates, turned to the Council of Notables that had traditionally elected the Sarikin Muslimin - Commander of the Faithful, the title the Sultan of Sokoto had always carried - and asked them to choose between recalling the fled ruler's predecessor or naming someone new. The installation itself was staged with the same royal trumpets that, by custom, could only be sounded for a duly accepted emir: troops drawn up with Maxim guns mounted, a carpet spread for the new Sultan and his officers, a public assurance that the administration would not interfere with Islamic worship, and the gown and turban of office presented as the new sultan accepted British terms in front of an assembled crowd. Shaw records that the office continued to work "in the utmost cordiality" with its British Resident from that point on.

What outlasted the conquest

The caliphate's own religious geography survived its political one almost entirely intact. Sokoto's investiture of the lesser emirates - the same chain of authority that had been quietly breaking down for two decades before 1903 - became, under colonial indirect rule, the actual machinery the British used to govern the north: the same councils, the same emirs, the same religious hierarchy, now answering to a Resident instead of functioning independently.

That machinery outlived the colonial administration that adopted it. The Sultanate of Sokoto continues in Nigeria today, its holder recognised as head of the country's Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs and, by long tradition rather than any constitutional office, the spiritual authority most Nigerian Muslims look to - a religious position now held by the twentieth man to carry a title Usman dan Fodio's own jihad created, more than two centuries after the reprimand at Gobir that started it.