The Fall of Sokoto and the Battle of Burmi

Three weeks north out of Zaria, Colonel Morland’s column reached the walls of Kano with about seven hundred West African Frontier Force soldiers, twenty-five British officers, four Maxim guns and four light cannon. The Kano cavalry came out in formation with the lances levelled, and the Maxims opened at three hundred yards. Within ten minutes the ground between was covered with fallen horses and riders, and no attacker came within eighty yards of the British line. Kano was in British hands by evening, and the news reached Sokoto within days. Everything that follows is an answer to what happened here, because the men who had to decide what Sokoto should do already knew precisely what a cavalry charge was worth against machine guns.

Attahiru I had three options and his advisers were divided between them. Some emirs proposed to negotiate: accept a British resident in Sokoto, pay tribute, and surrender formal sovereignty in exchange for ceremonial self-rule, which is what many vassal states had already done in silence and which classical Maliki fiqh treated as gravely problematic. Some military advisers proposed to wait, sign truces, manoeuvre, and gamble that the British would overreach, which after Kano nobody could seriously believe. And some proposed hijra, a mass migration eastward towards Mecca, away from the dar al-kufr now settling over the country. That third option carried a weight the other two did not, because it was the caliphate’s own founding act: Usman dan Fodio ﵀ had made hijra from Degel to Gudu in 1804 before declaring his jihad, and had set out the obligation systematically in his Bayan wujub al-hijra ala al-ibad. Choosing it meant repeating the decision of the founder, one century and one hundred kilometres later.

On 13 March 1903, with Lugard’s army approaching, Attahiru I left Sokoto with several thousand people: family, followers, students, soldiers of the guard, and emirs of smaller states who attached themselves to him on the road. Behind him a small group of emirs under his own brother opened negotiations, and two days later British troops walked into Sokoto without a shot being fired. There was no battle at the capital of the caliphate, and that emptiness is the whole point of this frame. Lugard spoke in the great mosque, proclaimed the supremacy of the British crown, and appointed a cousin of the departed Caliph, Muhammadu Attahiru II, in his place. The title survived and the family stayed on the throne, but the sovereignty did not, and the office that had been the supreme authority of an independent Islamic state in 1804 became a hereditary decoration inside a colonial administration.

The column moved east across the width of Hausaland, and as it moved it grew. Bauchi joined, Misau joined, parts of Gombe followed, and the numbers rose into the tens of thousands: men, women, children, cattle and carts. This was not an army in any classical sense, and treating it as one misreads everything about it. Lugard, however, could not leave it alone. A successful hijra would fix Sokoto in the theology as dar al-kufr and hand every learned Muslim in the protectorate an argument for going east as well, and it would leave the colonial project with a permanent second narrative running alongside it, namely that there was still a Caliph and that he was not in Lugard’s hands. So a column was sent after them. Along the way followers fell out through exhaustion and hunger, and deserters turned back to their own emirates, so that by July the community was smaller than it had been in April but still moving.

The pursuit was not one officer’s from the outset, whatever the shorthand of later accounts suggests. Lieutenant Browne made the first attack on 17 May at Gwoni with one officer and fifty-one men and a single Maxim. Barlow followed with two more officers and sixty mounted men and occupied Ashaka on the Gongola on 31 May. Sword’s contingent and Browne’s second wave brought the force to seven officers and a hundred and eighty men by 19 June, and about two hundred and seventy by the twenty-seventh. Major Marsh, whose name the story is usually told under, does not arrive until 12 July. From 4 June the muhajirin at Burmi were under blockade, which meant that the community was no longer moving and could be starved in place.

On 22 June the British stormed Burmi and were thrown back. This is the one moment in the whole story where the technological gap does not settle the matter, and it is worth pausing on, because everything before and after it is decided by machine guns. The defenders were fighting from prepared positions in a place already known as a strongpoint, at close quarters where a Maxim’s advantage narrows, and against a force that at this date was still under two hundred men. What the failure bought was five more weeks, and what it cost was the certainty that the next attempt would come with artillery.

After 22 June the British stopped trying to force the place and set about starving it. Birri was sacked on 30 June to cut the supply of food coming in, and inside the perimeter the community had now been sitting still for seven weeks with its herds and its children. On 12 July Major Marsh arrived with the reinforcement that settled the matter, and here the sources part company: one account gives him a hundred and sixty-five men and a single seventy-five millimetre gun, another gives five hundred of the Northern Nigeria Regiment with sixty mounted men, two Maxims and two field guns. Nobody has reconciled them and this map does not pretend otherwise. What is not in dispute is that by 24 July everything the British had was assembled in front of Burmi, and that it included artillery.

The attack opened with a bombardment, then a frontal assault, and then hand-to-hand fighting inside the settlement. Attahiru’s people attacked in waves, at close range, with swords and carbines, and against Maxims and Martini-Henry rifles it was over in a few hours. Major Marsh was killed by a poisoned arrow. Muhammadu Attahiru I was killed with nine other emirs who had marched with him. The counts of the dead differ: British dispatches report about ninety British and West African casualties and an estimate of seven hundred to fifteen hundred on the Sokoto side, many of them non-combatants. Some of the survivors went on east, and a small group eventually reached Mecca; one of them founded the Takruri colony of Maiurno in Sennar province, Sudan, in 1906 and 1907. As a political movement the hijra was finished. This was a loss, not a moral loss, because the legal argument on the Islamic side was strong, but a factual and material one, and it does not need to be spun into a victory to be worth remembering honestly.