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and aggression, some Hausa-Fulani Muslims also suffered within the emirates. He also points out that Southern Kaduna non-Muslim groups also took slaves, but these were few and constituted captives of inter-ethnic land conflicts and counter-attacks against slave raiders (Kazah-Toure, 1999). Such Hausa-Fulani slaves were integrated into Southern Kaduna households, as the Southern Kaduna groups neither had the need for slave labour, nor an internal slave market (Kazah-Toure, 1999:115). Moreover, he argues that
In spite of prevailing internal contradictions, the polities of Southern Kaduna did not develop oppressive institutions and there was no taxation and forced labour. Major forms of domination, exploitation, oppression and repression – associated with the feudal emirates of the Sokoto Caliphate hardly existed (Kazah-Toure, 1999:116).
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It is not clear if the British understood the troubled precolonial status and semiotic resonance of Hausa as a socio-political category in the non-Muslim sector of northern Nigeria, if they did, it did not stop them from crafting a colonial policy that privileged the emirate system of administration and social organization and sought to spread it to the middle belt, where several ethnic groups had either resisted it or were suspicious of it (Ochonu, 2008:100).
In his more recent book, Colonialism by Proxy (2013), Ochonu offers fresh insights into the colonization of these ethnic groups of northern Nigeria. For Ochonu, the strategy was
“Subcolonialism” by the Hausa Fulani based on dialogue/agreement between Hausa-Fulani elites and British officials, rather than indirect rule commonly understood to be the colonial system across northern Nigeria. Instead of using elites from among these communities, Hausa-Fulani agents were deployed to “civilize” them because they were perceived to be backward, while Islamic civilization was considered superior by the British. Both colonial British and Hausa- Fulani elites imagined the middle belt as a pagan area highly in need of “monotheistic”
governance and colonization/conquest. Thus, in their intervention in northern Nigeria, British officials shoved preexisting struggles in directions that were advantageous to Hausa-Fulani; and availed them with superior resources that enabled them to extend their dominance economically, politically and religiously. In addition, Lugard, in his administration of the Northern region, is believed to have restricted Christian proselytization in the area (Ademolakun, 2013), while Muslims were freely able to proselytize (Bolaji, 2013). A slightly different view is that other colonial officers were hostile to Christian missionaries in the region, and that Lugard himself did not support missionary activity, but did not actively campaign against them (Faught, 1994). Yet, in The Dual Mandate (1922), where Lugard articulates in detail his theory of indirect rule and British governance of Africa, there are strong indications that Lugard actively restricted and campaigned against missionary activity in northern Nigeria. For example, alluding to criticism of the colonial government for restricting and being hostile to Christian missionaries, Lugard argues that Christian missionary activities were never successful in Muslim societies, and that in northern Nigeria, Europeans, including tourists, were viewed as part of the colonial government, thus, the establishment of any European Christian mission would be viewed as a colonial government’s activity and a “bridge of the pledge of non-interference” with Islam, and lead to a loss of confidence (Lugard, 1922: 592). In any case, this literature agrees that Christian missions met with administrative restriction and hostility that prevented the early spread of Christianity in northern Nigeria due to an understanding between northern elites and colonial administration
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aimed to preserve what they considered the culture and religion of the north, namely Hausa and Islam.
At the establishment of indirect rule in northern Nigeria, about three among the dozens of ethnic groups in Southern Kaduna had developed relationships with Zaria emirates that allowed them to be independent and ruled by their own emirate-style Native Authorities. The colonial administration incorporated non-independent groups into the Zaria emirate since these groups did not have centralized authorities. The emirate, therefore, appointed Hausa-Fulani Muslims as district heads for the incorporated communities (Suberu, 1996). Suleiman (2011) notes that the situation in Southern Kaduna was quite ugly since the Hausa-Fulani who had settled among Southern Kaduna people at that time were a minority living in small enclaves in the Southern Kaduna area, and Southern Kaduna relationship with the Hausa-Fulani up to that point had not been a good one (2011:7). Another view is that Southern Kaduna communities had related well with the few Hausa-Fulani that lived and did business among them. Thus, they had considered them to be different than the Hausa slave raiders from Zaria – until they suspected them of colluding with the emirate and colonial authorities (Mustapha, 2000). The most important thing, however, is that relationships were significantly changed and certain ideas about the Self and Other began to take shape and have continued to impact views about identity in contemporary Nigeria.
Since colonial Native Authority officials constituted the emirs, district heads and other officials who were mainly Hausa-Fulani Muslims, it was they who enforced colonial policies on the non- Muslim communities and thus, among the non-Muslim population, Hausa-Fulani became synonymous to colonialists, exploiters and oppressors (Suleiman, 2011). Moreover, because of the kind of leadership Southern Kaduna communities experienced under these Native Authorities, the idea that they were facing a Hausa-Fulani Muslim colonialism became popular (Smith, 1960; Kazah-Toure, 1999; Suleiman, 2011). Non-Hausa, non-Muslim groups were, for the first time, subjected to illegal forced labour for construction of personal houses of Native Authority officials and markets, heavily taxed and extorted; their women were used as carriers of loads and suppliers of firewood, amongst other things (Kazah-Toure, 1999). Although Hausa- Fulani commoners also experienced these practices in other parts of northern Nigeria, they were reserved for the non-Hausa-Fulani in the Southern Kaduna area. Non-Muslim women were also
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taxed by the British who incorrectly claimed that these women, unlike Muslim women, could own property (Kazah-Toure, 1999). For a long time, all the Native Authority officials in the administration including security services (police and prisons), labour, judiciary and others, were Hausa-Fulani Muslims, and non-Muslim groups were often regarded as infidels, and regularly and arbitrarily subjected to Muslim legal and judicial systems – an experience that immensely contributed to their high receptivity to Christianity when they had access to it (Suberu, 1996;
Kazah-Toure, 1999; Ochonu, 2013).
How did the colonial authorities respond to this situation? Native Authority officials were met with protest and resistance right from their first arrival in the 1900s. However, colonial authorities brutally suppressed these protests (Mustapha, 2000). The initial response of the British officials to the protests by Southern Kaduna ethnic groups can best be understood within the framework of the dominant racist representations of these groups among colonialists, as well as British anthropologists and explorers. The colonialists saw the ruling circles of the Sokoto Caliphate and its emirates “both in theory and practice, as the most ingenious, intelligent, cultured and politically sophisticated” (Kazah-Toure, 1999: 115). Although Lugard and his officials thought Islam inferior to Christianity, they also saw it as the highest form of spirituality that Africans could attain, superior to African traditional religions, and they believed that it provided a level of civilization not found among the ‘pagan’ cultures of northern Nigeria (Weiss, 2004). The non-Muslim ethnic groups of Southern Kaduna and other parts of the Middle Belt were described as “raw pagans”, “savages”, “uncivilized”, “primitive”, and of “inferior stock”
(Galadima and Turaki, 2001:88; Kazah-Toure, 1999:116). Thus, apart from the physical separation of settlements and facilities of Hausa-Fulani from the other ethnic groups, the British justified forced labour by arguing that it provided the opportunity for the “pagans” to develop confidence in their affairs with the “more civilized” Hausa people, and also that the people could complain when unjustly treated. Yet, the British always backed the Hausa-Fulani rulers when the people complained or protested, thus, activists faced trials presided over by the same people against whom they had protested and who also managed the prisons where they served their sentences (Kazah-Toure, 1999)
Southern Kaduna peoples, thus, increasingly called for socio-political and judicial changes in form of new independent chiefdoms to be headed by their own people, a non-Muslim judicial
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system, and an end to deliberate oppression, amongst other things (Suberu, 1996). They also exploited all avenues available to them including missionary education and the formation and joining of associations such as the Northern Nigerian Non-Muslim League founded in 1949. The persistent resistance of Southern Kaduna people to emirate rule led to the questioning of this rule by one of the colonial governors, Cameron, who also made attempts at reforms. However, other British officers rejected his attempts on the basis that it would undermine the Emir’s authority, and the Emir argued that the people were too primitive to be left without Hausa-Fulani supervision. Nonetheless, the Governor asked that Southern Kaduna people be incorporated in positions such as district heads (Okpanachi, 2010:). Commenting on the fact that much of anticolonial revolt in Southern Kaduna was targeted at Hausa-Fulani Muslim and the construction of Hausa-Fulani as the enemy, Suleiman puts forward the following argument:
It should be pointed out that the Hausa-Fulani aristocracy (emirs, chiefs and district heads) in Northern Nigeria which the British colonial government met, put in place and/
or worked with were as much victims of colonialism as their colonial subjects – both Muslims and non-Muslims across the protectorate. Several emirs and chiefs were deposed and exiled by the British colonial power while scores of district heads were relieved of their positions across the northern region of Nigeria during colonial rule (2011: 7).
While this is true, the subordinate position of and experience of aggression by the non-Hausa groups, coupled with the absence of the British in the colonized space of minorities makes it challenging to accept any narrative of equal victimhood. Relative to the experience of minorities, the Hausa-Fulani was powerful – arbitrarily. This view and the encounters that informed it continued to play out beyond the colonial era as the section that follows illustrate. It is also a dominant narrative among members of the Online Forum analyzed for this study. Thus, the foregoing discussion helps to situate online narratives in the broader northern Nigerian context and story.