The Battle of Tsuntua

After Tabkin Kwotto on 21 June 1804 the jama’a was no longer a column of refugees but a power other men wanted to be counted with. Delegations came in to Gudu from Kebbi and from Zamfara, fighters with them, and the next step looked obvious: between the movement and the end of Gobir there was one thing still standing, the walled capital at Alkalawa. Everything that follows in this story happens because that step was taken too early.

In November the jama’a came at Alkalawa and was thrown back from the wall. This is the part of the story that is usually left out, and without it the disaster that follows makes no sense. The capital of Gobir was a real walled city with archers on the rampart and cavalry that could be sent out of a gate the moment an assault lost its shape, and the jama’a had neither the stores for a siege nor the means to open a breach. It went away from the wall beaten, and it did not go far.

Johnston, paraphrasing Bello’s ﵀ Infaq al-Maysur, has the Waziri Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀ going out after the failed assault against Yunfa’s Tuareg allies, who were still in the field near the capital. For an army that had just failed at a wall it was the reasonable thing to do: find the enemy’s allies in open country, where a wall is not in the way. It brought the jama’a to a village called Tsuntua.

The Gobir cavalry was not an improvised force. The Hausa sarkis had kept mounted troops since the fifteenth century, on Arab horses out of the trans-Saharan trade, in armour of locally forged iron, under command structures generations old. Against them the jama’a had spears, bows and a handful of old firearms that had not been fired in years. At Tabkin Kwotto it had a lake at its back and a square to stand in. Here it had neither, and it was caught in the open beside the capital.

Between two and three thousand of the jama’a were killed. The lower figure is Muhammad Bello’s ﵀ own, in Infaq al-Maysur, written by a man on that side of the field, and no Fulani source has ever tried to soften it. Among the dead were the Chief Justice Muhammadu Sambo ﵀, the Standard-Bearer Sa’adu, and some two hundred men noted for their piety and their learning. In a movement whose entire claim was learning, that was the part that could not be replaced.

A defeat of this size, this early, should have ended the movement, and in most movements it would have. It did not end this one, for two reasons the Dutch sources state plainly. The jama’a was not an army but a movement, with its core in village communities across Zamfara, Kebbi and as far east as Adamawa, so Tsuntua was one battle and not the war. And a defeat was understood as a trial rather than as a verdict, the way Uhud is understood. Usman dan Fodio ﵀ wrote a circular letter to his followers saying so, handed real field command to Abdullahi ﵀ and Bello ﵀, and went on. Alkalawa fell in 1808, four years later, which is the far end of a long road and not a consolation for this field.