Usman dan Fodio

Usman dan Fodio, known in northern Nigeria simply as the Shehu, was a Fulani Muslim scholar and preacher whose call for religious reform turned into a holy war against the Hausa kings in 1804. The movement he led created the Sokoto Caliphate, which by the time of his death in 1817 united most of what is now northern Nigeria under one Islamic government. A prolific writer in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa, he inspired later reformist jihads across West Africa.

He was born on 15 December 1754 at Maratta in the Hausa kingdom of Gobir, into the Toronkawa, a Fulani clan of learned clerics whose ancestors had come from Futa Toro, far to the west, centuries earlier. His father's name, Fodiye, meant "the learned", and his mother and grandmother were respected teachers who gave him his first lessons. The family soon moved to Degel. He studied with relatives and other scholars, notably Jibril ibn Umar, an outspoken advocate of jihad, and by about twenty he was teaching students of his own.

From 1774 Usman travelled as a preacher through Gobir, Kebbi and Zamfara. He accused the Hausa rulers of mixing Islam with older rites, of heavy and unjust taxes, bribery and arbitrary rule, and of enslaving free Muslims, and he insisted on strict observance of Islamic law in the Maliki tradition. Unusually for his time, he taught women alongside men and attacked scholars who left them uneducated; his daughter Nana Asma'u became a celebrated poet and teacher. His community at Degel attracted peasants, herders and other scholars, and he described mystical visions, including one in the 1790s in which he was initiated into the Qadiriyya Sufi order.

Around 1788 the aged king of Gobir, Bawa, granted him concessions that protected his followers. Bawa's successors saw the growing community as a threat. Nafata banned preaching, turbans and veils, and conversions, and in 1802 King Yunfa, once Usman's pupil, revoked Degel's privileges and, by Usman's camp's account, tried to kill him. Early in 1804 Usman and his followers left Degel for Gudu, some sixty miles away, an emigration consciously modelled on the Prophet's hijra. There his followers proclaimed him Commander of the Faithful.

His brother Abdullahi led the faithful to a first victory over Yunfa's cavalry at Tabkin Kwotto in June 1804. Later that year a counter-attack at Tsuntsua, near the Gobir capital, cost them, according to his son Muhammad Bello, about 2,000 dead. Short of food and moving constantly, the community took the capital of Kebbi in 1805 and settled at Gwandu. Usman appointed fourteen leaders to raise the jihad in their own lands, and the war spread to Kano, Katsina, Zazzau and beyond, even into the lands of Bornu. By 1808 Gobir and the main Hausa states had fallen.

Usman himself, about fifty when the war began, took no part in the fighting and avoided the trappings of rule. In 1812 he divided the administration between Muhammad Bello in the east and Abdullahi in the west and returned to teaching and writing. The new state appointed Muslim judges, market inspectors and imams, and reorganised taxes along classical Islamic lines. In 1815 he moved to Sokoto, where he died on 20 April 1817. Bello succeeded him as caliph, while Abdullahi ruled the western emirates from Gwandu.

His writings, which include more than a hundred works on law, theology, government and society, are still widely read, and many Muslims in the region regard him as a renewer of the faith. His example inspired the jihads of Seku Amadu in Masina and Umar Tall, who married one of his granddaughters. The caliphate he founded lasted until the British conquest of Nigeria in the early twentieth century, under twelve successive caliphs.

Our 1800 map shows the Hausa kingdoms just before the jihad, and the 1815 map shows the new caliphate that replaced them; it appears again on the 1880 map before the colonial conquest.