The Last Hijra: How Sokoto, Kano and the Whole Western Sudan Fell in Seven Years

Between 1893 and 1903 the last Islamic states of West Africa fall in rapid succession to European rifles, the French from the west and the British from the south, while the last Caliph of Sokoto chooses hijra over submission and dies on the banks of a river called Burmi. And a century of Fulani state-building ends with one bullet, one day, and a file in a London archive.

The Year the Map Changes Definitively

Until well into the 1870s, West Africa was for Europeans largely a coastal phenomenon: forts along the Senegal, along the Gold Coast, along the Bay of Benin, while the interior still appeared on maps with empty spaces and question marks, “Bilad es-Sudan”, “Soudan Kingdoms”, “Unknown River”. African rulers still negotiated from a position of relative independence with European traders.

This changed abruptly after the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, where, without a single African representative present, the map of Africa was divided into zones of influence. France claimed most of the West and Central Sudan and Great Britain claimed the southeast, Nigeria, the lower Niger valley and the country northward along the Lake Chad area, while Germany took Togo and Cameroon, Portugal retained Guinea-Bissau, the Belgians received Congo and the Spanish were left with small fragments.

These claims existed on paper; the concrete conquest came between 1885 and 1903, and it came with a new generation of weapons: the Maxim machine gun (patented 1884, in field use from c. 1890), the Martini-Henry repeating rifle, the armored steam gunboat. Against this technology no African army, regardless of how well trained, how numerous, how brave, had a sustainable tactic, and although the numerical ratio on battlefields like Kousséri and Burmi would sometimes be a hundred to one in favor of the African side, the outcome was nevertheless always the same.

This final act falls into three parts: the French dance eastward, the British dance northward, and the fall of Sokoto as crown upon both.

The French Eat the Western Sudan

The French advance had already begun under Louis Faidherbe (governor of Senegal 1854-1865), who waged the first systematic campaigns against the Toucouleur state of Umar Tall ﵀, but the full conquest phase came only after the Berlin Conference.

In 1883 Bamako falls into French hands, in 1887 Bafoulabé follows, and in 1890 Ségou, now under Ahmadu Sékou, the son of Umar Tall ﵀, is conquered by Louis Archinard. Ahmadu Sékou flees with his court eastward to Massina, where he is again defeated by Archinard in 1893 with the capture of Djenné and Timbuktu, and he retreats still further eastward, to Sokoto, where he would die in exile in 1898. The Toucouleur empire that Umar Tall ﵀ had founded does not last thirty years after his own death.

In the south Samori Touré, a Mandinka Muslim warrior who between 1880 and 1898 built up a great Islamic empire from the northern Ivory Coast deep into present-day Burkina Faso, wages one of the longest and most ingenious resistances against French expansion: when the French apply pressure from the west he moves his entire almamyat eastward, he scales up his own gunpowder manufacture, and he maintains spies in French forts. But in September 1898 he is finally captured by Captain Gouraud at Guélémou, sent into exile in Gabon, and dies there in 1900, and with him falls one of the last truly mobile Muslim armies of the continent.

And meanwhile there was yet another player: Rabih az-Zubayr, a former officer of the Mahdist Sudan, who in the 1880s had marched westward with a slave-raiding army, conquered the old Kanem-Bornu empire around Lake Chad (1893), and established a self-standing military state. Rabih is an ambivalent figure, since he was formally Muslim and conducted a certain jihad rhetoric, but his state was at its core a personal warrior empire running on slave raids, not a strictly religious project like Sokoto or Hamdullahi. In April 1900, on 22 April at the Battle of Kousséri (in present-day Chad), Rabih is defeated and killed by a French column under Commandant Lamy, and Kousséri also costs Commandant Lamy his life, an irony given that the future city of Fort-Lamy (now N’Djamena) would be named after him. Rabih was no Sokoto, but his defeat freed the northern flank of British Nigeria for the British to push through according to plan.

By 1899 the French conquest of the western Sudan was effectively complete, and by 1900 they had the boucle du Niger fully in their hands, so that only the east, Hausaland, Sokoto and parts of Bornu, still lay open to the British player.

Frederick Lugard and His Mandate

On the British side the engine was Frederick Lugard (1858-1945), a British Army officer who had served in India and was formerly in the service of the Royal Niger Company. On 1 January 1900 the British Crown proclaimed the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, with Lugard as first High Commissioner, and his mandate was to take over local sovereignty formally, to retain as much existing administration as possible under the British umbrella (the formula he would later theorize as indirect rule), and to end the Sokoto Caliphate, which was still the largest Islamic political entity of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sokoto was at that moment, a hundred years after the jihad of Usman dan Fodio ﵀ in 1804, a mature but weakened Islamic polity that comprised thirty emirates over an area twice the size of England, with Kano as its largest commercial city, an economic center where textile production, leather industry and caravan trade took place on a great scale. But the caliphate was internally divided. Caliph Abderrahman had reigned from 1891 to 1902 as a passive sovereign, and his successor Muhammad Attahiru I ascended the throne in October 1902 in an atmosphere of rising fear, fed by reports of French campaigns in the west, British forts on the Bay of Benin, German expansion in Cameroon, and a peculiar stream of chiliastic Mahdi preaching in parts of Hausaland that further unsettled the population.

Lugard had the weapons; what he was still seeking was a pretext, and it came in September 1902 when the Emir of Keffi, a vassal state of Zaria, killed a British resident (Captain Maloney). Lugard demanded satisfaction, but the emir fled to Kano, where he was taken in by Emir Aliyu, and when Aliyu refused to extradite him that refusal became Lugard’s casus belli.

The Campaign against Kano

In January 1903 a British column of about 700 West African soldiers (recruited from the West African Frontier Force, primarily Hausa and Yoruba recruits), 25 British officers, 4 Maxim machine guns and 4 light cannons, under Colonel Thomas Morland, marched northward from Zaria toward Kano. The trek lasted three weeks, through dusty savanna in the dry harmattan wind, with a daily march of twenty kilometers, supplies on pack animals and drinking water scarce.

The Emir of Kano, Muhammad Aliyu dan Sidi, was at that moment in Sokoto for consultation with the Caliph, so his deputies had to organize the defense. Kano possessed an impressive city wall, eleven meters high, fifteen kilometers in circumference, with fourteen gates, and a great cavalry force equipped with chain mail, swords and spears, and a limited quantity of old-fashioned firearms.

On 3 February 1903 Morland reached the city and the British column took up position about eight hundred meters from the Kofar Kabuga gate, whereupon the Kano cavalry, under the command of the madaki Aliyu, executed a classical charge, thousands of horsemen in formation, lances forward, to the sound of drums and algaita flutes, against the Maxim machine guns.

Morland himself wrote briefly about it later in his dispatches, preserved in the Colonial Office archives (Lugard collection, CO 446): “The cavalry charge of the enemy was brave and well coordinated, but our Maxims opened fire at three hundred yards, and the attack did not come within eighty yards of our lines. The ground between was within ten minutes strewn with fallen riders and horses. We have suffered no losses in this.”

Three hundred yards, ten minutes, thousands of horsemen against four machine guns: that is the reality of 1903.

The British then stormed the city gate, lost a few defenders to musket and arrow fire, and broke into the city; by evening Kano was in British hands, and the city wall, which had stood for hundreds of years, had been rendered strategically irrelevant in one day.

This was a defeat through technological gap rather than through lack of courage, and the distinction matters: the Kano cavalry was by every African standard of the nineteenth century a high-quality force, and against machine guns it had no means. It is, by every rational measure, impossible to win 1903 with the weapons of the 1850s, and what this says about courage, about Islamic identity, about the right of the Sokoto Caliphate to exist is another conversation; on the battlefield itself, the outcome had been decided before the first shot.

Sokoto Must Choose

The news of Kano’s fall reached Sokoto within days, and the Caliph Muhammad Attahiru I, only three months on the throne, stood before the heaviest decision an Islamic ruler can have.

His advisers were divided. Some emirs proposed to negotiate: to accept a British resident in Sokoto, to pay tribute, to give up formal sovereignty in exchange for self-rule on a ceremonial level. This would be the dhimmi logic in reverse, not the Muslim ruling over the non-Muslim but the non-Muslim ruling over the Muslim population, juristically heavily problematic within classical Maliki fiqh but in practice what many vassals had already silently been doing.

Other advisers proposed hijra, a mass migration eastward, in the direction of Mecca, away from the dar al-kufr that was establishing itself. This option had deep Islamic justification, since it referred directly back to the founding of the Sokoto Caliphate itself: Usman dan Fodio ﵀ had in 1804 himself led a hijra, from Degel to Gudu, before declaring his jihad. The concept wujub al-hijra min dar al-kufr, the obligation of the hijra from the territory of unbelief, was a classical Maliki doctrine, set out systematically by dan Fodio ﵀ himself in his Bayan wujub al-hijra 'ala al-ibad, so that the Caliph, by choosing hijra, would repeat the decision of his own founding father a century later.

And in between lay the third option, which some military advisers proposed: to wait, sign treaties, maneuver, and gamble that the British would become overextended. Given the reports from Kano, this option was not credible.

Muhammad Attahiru I chose hijra. On 13 March 1903, after Lugard’s army approached Sokoto, he left the city with several thousand followers, family members, emirs of smaller states who joined him, students, soldiers of the consecrated guard, and they moved eastward, along a route that ultimately had to lead to Mecca, a journey 5000 kilometers long, through territory that would become increasingly hostile, with caravans that had to load food for an unknown number of months.

In Sokoto itself a small group of emirs remained, under the leadership of Attahiru’s brother, and they opened negotiations with Lugard. On 15 March 1903 British troops walked into Sokoto without battle, and Lugard delivered a speech in the great mosque of Sokoto, proclaimed the formal supremacy of the British Crown, and announced that he would appoint a new caliph, an obedient candidate from the dan Fodio family willing to accept British suzerainty.

And that is what he did. Muhammad Attahiru II, a cousin of the fleeing caliph with no direct relation to the old legitimacy concept, was appointed by Lugard as Caliph, so that the title was suddenly a British appointment, and the caliphate, which in 1804 had been founded as the supreme authority of an independent Islamic state, became in 1903 a hereditary-decorative position within British colonial administration. This Muhammad Attahiru II would live until 1915, and his successors, chosen by the British authorities and later by the Nigerian federal government, would until today be called “Sultan” in Sokoto and fulfill a ceremonial role.

It is a strange form of continuity: the title survives while the state does not; the family remains on the throne while the sovereignty does not. This is indirect rule in its most clinical form.

The Fleeing Caravan and the Battle of Burmi

Meanwhile, Muhammad Attahiru I, the real caliph in his own eyes and in the eyes of his followers, marched eastward and gathered support from local emirs who joined the hijra: Bauchi joined, Misau joined, parts of Gombe followed, and their numbers grew to several tens of thousands, men, women, children, livestock, wagons. This was not a military army in the classical sense, but a muhajirin community, a migrating people with its sovereign as religious center.

Lugard saw the danger, since a successful hijra would fix Sokoto in the dar al-kufr theology and give every learned Muslim an argument to also go eastward; moreover, the British colonial project would have an unsanitized counter-narrative running alongside it for an indefinite time, “There is still a Caliph, and he is not with Lugard”, and that was politically unacceptable.

So Lugard sent a column after Attahiru, under Major Marsh, later reinforced, and during the summer of 1903 the caravan had several skirmishes with British and local troops, while many followers fell off along the way, through exhaustion, hunger, and defectors who returned to their emirates, so that by July the group was smaller but still on the move.

On 27 July 1903 Attahiru’s remaining troops, about 2000 armed followers and thousands of non-military muhajirin, reached the place Burmi in present-day Gombe State, Nigeria, on the bank of the Gongola River, where the British column under Major Marsh caught up with them, and on 27 July 1903 (the same day as the arrival in Burmi) the battle was fought.

Attahiru’s troops fought bravely, attacking in waves, close, with swords and carbines, but the British had Maxims and Martini-Henrys, and within a few hours it was over. Muhammad Attahiru I was killed, together with nine other emirs who had marched with him. The casualty counts differ; British dispatches report about 90 British / West African losses and an estimated 700 to 1500 on the Sokoto side. Many of them were non-combatants.

And here comes a detail that a hundred years later still feels uncomfortable.

The Body and the Photograph

After the battle, the body of Muhammad Attahiru I was identified by the British. Lugard’s dispatches and the British press of the time report that his body was placed on a cart, driven around the encampment, and that his head, according to some sources, was viewed by British officers, according to other sources briefly displayed in public to the remaining muhajirin, as proof of his death. This was no unusual practice within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial warfare, since both Samori Touré’s capture and Rabih az-Zubayr’s beheading had been accompanied by comparable rituals.

For the muhajirin this was a definitive spiritual defeat. Their Caliph, who was the heir of Usman dan Fodio ﵀ himself, who had correctly applied the hijra doctrine, who had made his choice on the basis of Islamic juristic tradition, that man lay dead on a British cart. Some followers still fled eastward, and a small group did indeed eventually reach Mecca, where they would survive as a Takruri colony into the twentieth century (the Sudanese city of Maiurno, in Sennar province, was founded by one of them in 1906-1907), but as a political movement the hijra had ended.

This image deserves a pause, because there is a temptation to frame Attahiru as shahid, as martyr, and that temptation is not needed here. Attahiru certainly deserves dignity; the trouble is that framing a defeat as victory, “he won spiritually, even though he lost militarily”, erases the real character of what happened. Attahiru was killed, his people were killed, his body was treated without honor, and the Islamic state he served was incorporated into a heathen-British empire. This was a loss: not a moral loss, since on the Islamic side the juristic argument was strong, but a factual, material, world-changing loss.

This loss may be acknowledged without giving in to despair, since the Islamic tradition has acknowledged other great losses, the fall of Baghdad in 1258, the fall of Granada in 1492, the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, without losing its faith in the process. The acknowledgment of loss is precisely what binds us to that tradition: we come from a umma that has suffered losses and has gone on, and the loss does not have to be spun into a victory in order to be carried onward.

The Elegies of Wakili Junaidu and the Sokoto Poets

What does remain, and this is richer than one sometimes thinks, are the elegy poems of Sokoto from the years immediately after 1903. In Hausa and Fulfulde, written by the ulama class that after Attahiru’s death had remained in Sokoto and the cities around it, there exists a genre of mourning poetry in which the defeat was described with exact naming: which emir fell, which ulama were captured, which libraries were plundered, which mosques were converted into barracks.

From this elegy tradition dozens of works were preserved in the libraries of Sokoto, Kano and Dauche, and in later collections such as those of Hiskett. They are not triumphalism but classical Islamic mourning, in the tradition of the elegies for al-Husayn ﵁ at Karbala, for the fallen of Uhud, for every shahid in every later defeated period. The genre convention gives room for precisely what is being done here: acknowledging that there was a loss, honoring what was lost, without making the loser greater than he was or the victor smaller.

The British installed their indirect rule in Northern Nigeria with relative efficiency. The emirs were left in their position, provided that they accepted the British tax authorization and admitted British residents in their courts, while Islamic education was tolerated but marginalized in favor of new colonial schools, and the shariʿa courts continued to function partially under the supervision of British native courts. The mosques remained standing, but the central political authority of the Caliph, who for a hundred years had symbolically led the umma of the Western Sudan, had been ended.

What Colonial Conquest Did Not Achieve

And yet something must be said here that does not appear in Lugard’s dispatches.

The conquest of Sokoto was political rather than religious: the British replaced the caliph; they did not replace Islam. In the years after 1903, Muslims in Hausaland and the broader Fulani regions continued to read the Qur’an, fast, travel to Mecca and teach their children Arabic, and the tariqas, Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya, continued to function, sometimes even strengthened by the disappearance of the state-Islam (which had sometimes co-opted ulama). In the 1920s and 1930s new shaykhs such as Ibrahim Niass ﵀ in Kaolack (Senegal) and later the heirs of Sheikh Dan Fodio would build up powerful religious movements again, now within but not of the colonial structure.

Islam in West Africa grew, in fact, faster under colonial rule than before it, and the statistics are available: in 1900 about 30% of the inhabitants of what is now Senegal were Muslim; by 1960 (independence) it was around 85-90%. The picture is comparable in northern Nigeria, where the mass-Islamization of Hausa peasants who were earlier nominally or partially Islamized took place largely in the twentieth century. This is a paradox that should not be papered over: the political defeat of Islam in 1903 went together with a demographic breakthrough of Islam in the decades thereafter.

This is not an argument that the conquest was a blessing, but an observation that religious identity and political authority are not the same layer. The British could end Sokoto as a state, but they could not pull Islam as faith tradition out of the people, and that tradition learned to organize itself anew under colonial conditions, in zaouias, in Qur’an schools, in merchant guilds, in migration communities, in the Hajj caravans that now departed from Lagos and Dakar by steamboat.

The Long Arc After 1903

The regions discussed here, Sokoto, Hausaland, the Senegambia-Mandinka, the Bambara of Ségou, the Fulani of Massina, the Imazighen of the Sahara, are precisely the regions from which the Atlantic slave trade carried people away. Between those places and the descendants of the people who were shipped across the ocean run bloodlines and spiritual lines, and sometimes the map has been lost, and sometimes it is simply still there, in names and in customs and in an intuitive sense of having to do with West Africa.

This is the long arc: from the Zaghawa and Wagadu in the early Middle Ages, to Mali and Timbuktu and Mansa Musa, to Songhai and Tondibi, to the century of fragmentation, to the jihads of Seku Amadu ﵀ and Umar Tall ﵀, and finally, here, to Burmi 1903 and the fall of the last great Islamic state of West Africa.

The story does not end in 1903. It bends there through a narrowing, a tunnel in which the political power of the umma is briefly switched off, and emerges on the other side, changed but not extinguished. Senegal becomes independent in 1960 and is ninety percent Muslim; Nigeria becomes independent in 1960 and has in its north a Muslim majority that still carries the caliphate heritage as identity-core; Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea and Mauritania are all majority-Muslim, all with their own Sufi traditions running along lines touched on here. The Suwari tradition of the Jakhanke still exists, the Tijaniyya of Umar Tall ﵀ flourishes worldwide, including among Muslims in the Netherlands, the Qadiriyya via Kunta lines lives on in Mauritania and Niger, and Sokoto still has a Sultan.

The lesson may be this: Islamic West Africa is part of a world that has taken blows, great blows, and that is still here. Its history is not only a story of defeats but a story of people who wrote books while another’s armies stood at their door, of rulers who made choices that hurt but that were honest, of scholars who quarreled with each other about the right path and ultimately, each in his own variant, both went that path, of merchants and herders and clerics and soldiers who, through the centuries, tried to build something that could carry their names.

A part of that has disappeared, another part still stands, and yet another part, a not-small part, travelled the routes that the Atlantic slave trade laid out and lives on in the descendants of those who were carried away. Wherever they pray, wherever they fast, wherever they have their children recite Qur’an, they do something in which the Sokoto Caliphate, the Mali Empire, the Timbuktu libraries, the Jakhanke villages and the Hamdullahi majlis all, in their own way, still breathe along, not as the dead but as forebears.

That is a history that does not have to be lied about to be found worthy.

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Sources

• Usman dan Fodio ﵀, Bayan wujub al-hijra ʿala al-ʿibad, written in Ramadan 1221/November 1806, as dated in Last, p. 46; Masaʾil muhimma, whose fourth question on dealings with unbelievers became in March 1903 the basis for the submission of Sokoto, as discussed in Adeleye, p. 284.
• Frederick Lugard and T. N. Morland, the reports on the Kano-Sokoto expedition and the fall of Burmi in the Colonial Office series C.O. 446 and Morland’s report to Lugard (Cd. 1433), as used in Adeleye, pp. 269, 272, 309.
• R. A. Adeleye, Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies, Humanities Press, New York 1971 (Ibadan History Series), pp. 3, 95, 131, 169–170, 193–194, 221, 237, 264–265, 267, 269, 272–273, 277, 279–285, 288, 307–311.
  • pp. 3, 95, 221: the caliphate over an area of about 250,000 square miles; the reign of ʿAbd al-Rahman ibn Atiq from March 1891 until his death in 1902; Lugard’s proclamation of 1 January 1900, sent in Arabic translation to the caliph and the emirs.
  • pp. 131, 170, 193, 237: the Berlin West African Conference; Rabih, formerly in the service of Zubayr Pasha in the Eastern Sudan, who began the conquest of Bornu around December 1893 and was defeated and killed by the French at Kusseri on 22 April 1900.
  • pp. 169–170, 194: the French overthrow of the Tukulor empire of Segu and the flight of Ahmad ibn Shaykh Umar ﵀ eastwards into Sokoto territory, where he died on 16 December 1897.
  • pp. 264–265, 267: the murder of Captain Moloney at Keffi on 3 October 1902 by the men of the Magaji Dan Yamusa, the Emir of Zaria’s representative; the hero’s welcome given to the Magaji in Kano by Emir Aliyu, for Lugard the casus belli.
  • pp. 269, 272–273: Morland leaving Zaria on 29 January 1903 with twenty-four officers, twelve NCOs, 722 rank and file, four 75 mm guns and four Maxims; the attack of 3 February: walls thirty to fifty feet high, the failed shelling of the Zaria gate, the storming of the Kabuga gate with ladders, about three hundred defenders killed and on the British side none killed and fourteen wounded.
  • pp. 277, 279: the charges of the Kano cavalry on Lieutenant Wright’s square at Kotorkwoshi and Rawiya on 25 and 26 February; the submission of the Wombai Abbas on 6 March, with only 120 rifles collected.
  • pp. 280–285, 288: the divided opinions in Sokoto between peace, fighting and hijra; the caliph’s camp outside the walls on Friday 13 March; the battle of 15 March, in which the main body of two thousand horse and four thousand foot was broken in under twenty minutes, with about a hundred killed, after which Attahiru I fled eastwards and the British entered the deserted city at eleven o’clock; the wazir Muhammad al-Bukhari ﵀ who returned on 19 March; Lugard in Sokoto on 19 March, the nomination of Muhammad al-Tahir ibn ʿAli ibn Bello (Attahiru II), the loser of the election of 1902, on 20 March and his installation on 21 March in the centre of the town, with the guarantee of the free practice of Islam.
  • pp. 307–311: Major Marsh reaching Nafada on 23 July with a force of five hundred men, twenty-five officers, four Maxims and two guns; the attack on Burmi on 27 July at eleven o’clock, the death of Marsh by a poisoned arrow, over six hundred defenders killed and Attahiru I falling with about ninety men near the gate; on the British side Marsh, four rank and file and six carriers killed and about ninety wounded; the destruction of Burmi on 28 July; the flight of his son Mai Wurno to the Nile, where the emigrants settled near Shaykh Talhat and some thirty years later founded the village of Mai Wurno.
• Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate, Longmans, Green and Co, London 1967, pp. 46, 140–141.
  • pp. 140–141: the election of Muhammad Attahiru ibn Ahmad on 13 October 1902, three days after the death of ʿAbd al-Rahman, and the battle at Sokoto on 15 March 1903; prayer and charms against bullets as the main defence; the Emir of Kano, ʿAli ibn ʿAbdullah, who deserted his army; the Amir al-muʾminin who after the lost battle slowly made his way east, while most office-holders stayed behind under Lugard’s promise not to interfere with Islam.
• Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, Oxford University Press, New York 1973, pp. 14, 124, 153.
  • pp. 14, 124, 153: Lugard who in 1903 defeated the Emir of Kano and the caliph and established a British protectorate, leaving the Fulani framework of government intact under British Residents; the Kano poet who around 1903 sang of the British expedition as the armies of Gog and Magog; the framework of the Fulani empire that survived under Indirect Rule into independent Northern Nigeria.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, p. 53: the Sokoto caliphate that lasted a hundred years until the British conquest.