HADEJIA A YAU!
THE MALLAM REVOLT IN KANO
Kano Emirate was perhaps the most important of all the emirates in the Fulani-dominated Sokoto Empire that emerged after the successful Fulani jihad of 1804-1808. By the mid-nineteenth century, Kano had become not only an outstanding metropolitan center of Islamic learning but also the financial entrepot for the Caliphate. But like many empires, Sokoto began to suffer from the Costs of expansion and its citizenry responded in various
ways to the increasing burdens of rents and taxes. Most, to be sure remained loyal; others joined dissident brotherhoods; and some fled to the fringes of the empire (Last 1970;345-357).
At the end of 1846, some sixteen Hausa learned men (mallams) and their families, led by Mallam Hamza, left the Islamic center of Tsakuwa in Kano Emirate, pursued by Kano forces for their refusal to pay the land tax (kurdin kasa) a tax from which they had been exempted before the Fulani Hamza never developed into a cohesive brotherhood (tariq). Instead, its retreat into a non-Muslim area on the frontier of Islam made it the founder of a predatory polity.
THE NINGI FRONTIER ZONE
The area into which Hamza's mallam community moved was peripheral to the Islamicized metropolitan centers of northern Nigeria sociologically, culturally, ethnically, politically, and geographically. In this sense, it may be regarded as a frontier zone. The Ningi area is the northern most extention of the Jos Plateau massif. It is mountainous, incised with valleys suitable for plain and terraced agriculture. Most of it is some 2,000 feet above sea level, the central area rising to 3,000 feet and peaks reaching 6,000. The Ningi area of our story nearly coincides with present Ningi Division, which is just under 2,000 square miles. The area expences a completely rainless season and it genetally shares in the hardships of the "famine zone" of the Western Sudan (Renner 1926:583- 596).
An Islamic Frontier Polity:
Frontier areas often provide refuge for those in rebellion against the metropolitan society. But once on the frontier, they face certain organizational problems. If there is a local population, they may meld into it, or keep apart from it, or try to use it for their own purposes. And the immigrants are often forced, sooner or later, lnw some kind of relationship with the metropolitan centers. This paper examines the case of a group of Hausa mallams (learned men) who fled their own society and established a polity on the fringe of the Sokoto Empire, in the Ningi mountains of the Jos Plateau of northern Nigeria. They came to live in an area occupied from time immemorial by vigorous but small-scale "pagan" societies, with rudimentary forms of organized political authority. At the same time, the immigrant mallams had not withdrawn entirely from the reach of the organized states-emirates led by the Sokoto Caliphate. Thus, paradoxically, this Muslim reformist polity came to depend on an alliance with its new non-Muslim neighbors in order to survive pressure from the Muslim states with which it had immensely greater cultural affinities. The contradictions that this entailed are at the heart of our story.
THE MALLAM REVOLT IN KANO
Kano Emirate was perhaps the most important of all the emirates in the Fulani-dominated Sokoto Empire that emerged after the successful Fulani jihad of 1804-1808. By the mid-nineteenth century, Kano had become not only an outstanding metropolitan center of Islamic learning but also the financial entrepot for the Caliphate. But like many empires, Sokoto began to suffer from the Costs of expansion and its citizenry responded in various
ways to the increasing burdens of rents and taxes. Most, to be sure remained loyal; others joined dissident brotherhoods; and some fled to the fringes of the empire (Last 1970;345-357).
At the end of 1846, some sixteen Hausa learned men (mallams) and their families, led by Mallam Hamza, left the Islamic center of Tsakuwa in Kano Emirate, pursued by Kano forces for their refusal to pay the land tax (kurdin kasa) a tax from which they had been exempted before the Fulani Hamza never developed into a cohesive brotherhood (tariq). Instead, its retreat into a non-Muslim area on the frontier of Islam made it the founder of a predatory polity.
THE NINGI FRONTIER ZONE
The area into which Hamza's mallam community moved was peripheral to the Islamicized metropolitan centers of northern Nigeria sociologically, culturally, ethnically, politically, and geographically. In this sense, it may be regarded as a frontier zone. The Ningi area is the northern most extention of the Jos Plateau massif. It is mountainous, incised with valleys suitable for plain and terraced agriculture. Most of it is some 2,000 feet above sea level, the central area rising to 3,000 feet and peaks reaching 6,000. The Ningi area of our story nearly coincides with present Ningi Division, which is just under 2,000 square miles. The area expences a completely rainless season and it genetally shares in the hardships of the "famine zone" of the Western Sudan (Renner 1926:583- 596).
Even in the remote past, Ningi appears to have been an isolated fringe area from the perspective of the flatlands on which arose the old Hausa city-scates. It shows a great deal of cultural and linguistic diversity and it had never developed, within historic times at least important integrative networks among its communities. It is impossible CO know what the
population of Ningi was when the mallams arrived. The first assessment in colonial times, done in 1908 (Groom 1910), gave a total population of some 21,500, some 17,000 of these being of "original" stock. Among these, the largest groups were the Warji (ca. 7,000), the Pa'a (ca. 5,000), and the Buta (over 3,000); the other groups were each in the range of a thousand or less. These figures suggest that the non-Muslim population that the mallams found and thac came to represent their "reservoir" of economic and military strength was in the range of a score of thousands.
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