The cultural and ethnic melding of Northern Nigeria’s Hausa and the Fulani people is so deep, so labyrinthine, so time-honored, and so unexampled that a fictitious ethnic category called the “Hausa-Fulani” was invented by Nigeria’s southern press to describe the emergent ethnic alchemy it has produced.
Northern intellectuals resented the label at
first. For example, the late Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman, the famously iconoclastic
professor of history at the Ahmadu Bello University who was ethnically Fulani
and who was the scion of the Katsina and Kano royal families, condemned the
hyphenation of Hausa and Fulani as both ill-willed and ignorant.
But several Northern Nigerian elites of Hausa
and Fulani filiation have now enthusiastically embraced it. President Muhammadu
Buhari, for instance, told the Weekly Trust in 1999 that he loved the
hyphenated Hausa-Fulani identity that the southern press invented because it
encapsulates the complexity of his own identity. His father is Fulani while his
mother is half Kanuri and half Hausa.
More than that, though, Buhari is culturally
and linguistically Hausa. Like most people in Nigeria’s northwest who trace
patrilineal bloodline to the Fulani (including most of the emirs), he doesn’t
speak a lick of Fulfulde (as the language of the Fulani is called in Nigeria)
and is completely divorced from the culture of the “unmingled” Fulani who now
live mostly in Nigeria’s northeast and in the bushes elsewhere in the country.
Over the years, the northern political elite
not only used the common Islamic heritage of the Hausa and the Fulani people as
an instrument to construct and cement the notion of an undivided and
indivisible Hausa-Fulani identity, they also encouraged other parts of the
country to see them as one, undifferentiated people.
In time, the rest of the country came to
regard the Hausa and the Fulani as indistinguishable. A popular quip among the
Yoruba says, “Gambari pa Fulani ko lejo ninu,” which roughly translates as “If
a Hausa person kills a Fulani person, there is no case,” implying that the
Hausa and the Fulani are homogenous people whose internal strife are no more
than evanescent, resolvable sibling squabble.
But the emergence and unabating
intensification of kidnapping for ransom and other forms of rural and urban
banditry in the Northwest where most of the villains are Fulani and most of the
victims are Hausa are rupturing the centuries-old ethnic harmony between the
Hausa and the Fulani that Nigerians had taken for granted.
In response to the rural and urban banditry
by mostly Fulani brigands against Hausa people, Hausa people have formed
vigilante groups called yan sakai or yan banga for self-defense, but Fulani
people say the yan banga self-defense groups often indiscriminately murder
innocent Fulani people who are not even remotely connected with abductions and
murders.
This has provoked an endless cycle of
recriminations and retaliatory violence between Hausa and Fulani people and is
threatening the age-old, Islam-inspired ethnic fusion between them.
This has been going on for years under the
radar of the national and international media until BBC’s BBC Africa Eye
brought it to the forefront of global attention in its Jul 24, 2022,
documentary titled “The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara.” The documentary showed
that although the Hausa and the Fulani share a common culture, religion,
heritage, and language, they are, for the most part, divided and rarely mix in
rural areas. They fight over land, water, and food.
Self-confessed Fulani bandits told the BBC that
Hausa people enjoy preferential treatments in government jobs, that Fulani
people face discrimination in the formal sector in northern Nigeria, and that
kidnapping, banditry, and indiscriminate mass murders were the only way they
could call attention to their neglect.
Following the documentary, which so unsettled
the Nigerian government that local TV stations that rebroadcast it were fined,
there has been an open discussion, particularly in Arewa social media circles,
of hitherto culturally taboo subjects such as whether Usman Dan Fodio whose
jihad inaugurated the current Fulani ruling families in much of Muslim northern
Nigeria was a Hausa-hating Fulani ethnic supremacist.
Islam had been centuries old and already
deeply entrenched in Hausa land before Usman Dan Fodio’s nineteenth-century
jihad, which many historians have called a “Fulani war.” The well-regarded
seventeenth-century Songhai Muslim scholar by the name of Ahmad Baba, for
instance, had recognized Hausa land as a bastion of Islam.
In a 1613 essay titled, “Al-kashf wa-l-bayān
li-aṣnāfmajlūb al-Sūdān” (translated into English as “The Exposition and
Explanation Concerning the Varieties of Transported Black Africans”), he wrote
that “the people of Kano, some of Zakzak [Zaria], the people of Katsina, the
people of Gobir, and all of the Songhay” lived under ideal Islamic rule and
could never be enslaved by other Muslims.
About 200 years later, when Dan Fodio decided
to “reform” the Islam he met in Hausa land, he repudiated the Islam that the
Hausa people had practiced. In his 1806 treatise titled "Bayan Wujub
Al-Hijra, Ala L-Ibad,” Dan Fodio rebutted Ahmad Baba’s thesis by asserting that
what was true of Hausa land when Ahmad Baba wrote, “might not necessarily be
true at all other times, since every scholar relates what he sees in his own
days.” Dan Fodio’s son, Muhammad Bello, also wrote Infaq al-mansur in 1813,
exactly 200 years after Ahmad Baba, and contested the notion that Hausa land
was ruled by Islamic precepts.
Now, in everyday dialogic engagements on
social media, in the marketplace, and in the streets, Hausa and Fulani people
are openly talking about the jihad and its decidedly ethnic character. Hausa
people are asking why all the emirs that emerged from the jihad, except for
that of Bauchi, were Fulani. (Emirs in Borgu in Kwara and Niger states are not
the product of the jihad and are not Fulani.)
These questions are especially important
because the Fulani emirs who dislodged Hausa Muslim rulers have been doing
exactly what the Hausa Muslim rulers were accused of by Fulani
jihadists—keeping multiple wives and concubines, oppressing everyday folks
called the talakawa, believing and partaking in fortunetelling, etc. Besides,
in Islam, leadership isn’t hereditary, so Hausa people are asking why a
supposedly Islamic jihad has entrenched Fulani ethnic monarchies to the
exclusion of the native Hausa populations.
These debates aren’t new, of course. For
example, in a June 30, 2000, article titled “The Fulani Factor in Nigerian
Politics” published in the Weekly Trust, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (who later became
the emir of Kano on June 8, 2014, and was dethroned on March 9, 2020) caused a
stir among not just other Nigerians but also among Hausa people when he said
although the Fulani in northern Nigeria have lost their language and culture to
the Hausa, they still cherish the irreproducible cultural and genetic
distinctiveness that their ethnic identity imbues them with.
He isolated Nigerian leaders of putative
Fulani line of descent—Ahmadu Bello, Shehu Shagari, Murtala Mohammed, and
Muhammadu Buhari—whom he said even their “greatest enemies” respect because
they supposedly embodied incomparable and uniquely Fulani values (even when
they are/were not culturally Fulani).
He pointed out that the same could not be
said of “other prominent non-Fulani contemporaries of these great men,”
including military Head of State Ibrahim Babangida, who is Hausa, and Sani
Abacha, who was Kanuri but born and raised in Kano. Sanusi then said the Fulani
are “culturally programmed, generation after generation, to imbibe the best
spirits of what makes good leadership, to a far greater extent than competing
cultures.”
Garba Shehu, now a spokesperson for President
Muhammadu Buhari, who is ethnically Hausa from Jigawa, was incensed. In a
response titled “Sanusi’s Racist Rubbish” on July 7, 2000, Shehu wrote: “When I
read Sanusi L. Sanusi’s article ‘The Fulani Factor in Nigerian Politics’…I came
away with the feeling that the writer wanted to do one of two things: to either
be ridiculous or to insult all of us who are not Fulani with some racist crap.”
Shehu invalidated Sanusi’s ethnic supremacist
notion of a Fulani culture that makes Fulani people such good, just leaders by
calling attention to the atrocities that were perpetuated against Hausa people
by Fulani emirs—or what he called the “well-documented acts of brigandage” by
the “Fulani oligarchy”— which instigated the emergence of the Northern Elements
Progressives Union (NEPU).
“Where
was he when the late Sa’adu Zungur, Aminu Kano, and company fought Fulani
rulers who forced Hausa peasants to work the emirs’ farms, snatched wives,
plundered what was kept in their trust, and appropriated/mismanaged farmlands
and other resources belonging to their subjects?” Shehu wrote.
These sorts of emotive brickbats between
everyday Hausa and Fulani people are escalating and becoming mainstream in the
aftermath of the bloodstained conflict between Hausa farmers and Fulani
herders. In fact, there are now calls, from both Hausa and Fulani
interlocutors, for the reformation of the emirate system to strip emirship of
its exclusivity to people of Fulani ancestry.
I think these are transitory,
spur-of-the-moment tensile pushes and pulls that may soon abate, but it’s
astonishing that it’s even happening.
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