Let me first of all thank the organisers of this event, Premium Times Books, for inviting me to review the book that they are presenting today. It is a poor choice on their part because I am not a historian, an academic, an archeologist or a linguist, when there are hundreds of these available to do justice to this assignment.
The book we are launching today is an old book, first published in 1967. I first read it more than 30 years ago.
I met the author, Murray Last, only once, at a seminar in the French city of Bordeaux in 1996. He immediately singled me out of the crowd of Nigerians at the event and engaged me in a long discussion, in Hausa, about the topic that interested him the most at the time, which was the newly appointed Sultan Muhammadu Maccido, whom he knew very well.
This occasion is very significant because Premium Times Books is launching the book’s first all Nigerian edition. It was previously published abroad even though 99% of the persons and the historical and geographic areas involved in the book all fall into modern Nigeria. The greatest impact of the old Sokoto Caliphate was and is still felt within Nigeria.
Its legacies, its capital, its Caliph [what we today call Sultan], its emirates and their Amirs [what we today call Emirs] are mostly to be found in modern Nigeria, even though there are some in Niger Republic, Cameroon and even Burkina Faso.
As Murray Last firmly stated, Sokoto Caliphate was the largest pre-colonial polity in the whole of Africa, stretching all the way from Agadez in the north to just south of Ilorin, and from Tibati, Cameroon in the east to parts of Burkina Faso in the west. Its impact was felt all the way to Sudan, North Africa and Arabia, as far west as Senegal, Europe, North America and the Caribbean Islands, where its literature was found among slaves in sugar cane plantations.
Anyone who began to read Nigerian newspapers and magazines 30 years ago might have gotten the impression that Sokoto Caliphate was an evil construct, a scheme forever meant to dominate, subjugate, alienate and colonise other people.
This media phenomenon was so pronounced in the 1990s that in 1995 or so, the then Sultan Ibrahim Dasuki, while speaking at the NUJ Convention in Sokoto, said he realized that Nigerian newspapers needed to use the word “Caliphate” in order to sell their papers. He said he will therefore start collecting royalty from any newspaper that mentioned Caliphate in its story.
This great effort by Premium Times Books in launching the all Nigerian edition of this book is a major contribution towards understanding the great historical phenomenon that was the Sokoto Caliphate, its driving ideology, its people and leaders, its historical antecedents, what it replaced, how it did it, and the struggle for consolidation that it went through in the 19th century. Murray Last’s account stopped just short of the Caliphate’s overthrow, dismemberment and its replacement by the British colonial state at the beginning of the 20th century.
It is perhaps difficult for many Nigerians to understand these days, but this study was conducted over many years, with great effort and commitment, total enthusiasm, life-long involvement and the highest educational, historical and academic motives by a man who was not a Nigerian, not even an African, and not even a Muslim. These days many Nigerians will ask him why he is devoting so much time and energy to write the history of a polity that is not of his own religious persuasion. If it is today, Murray Last may not have found some of the great men who cooperated with him to undertake this work.
Murray Last’s commitment and total devotion to the study of the Sokoto Caliphate did not surprise me personally, because I had earlier read Dr. Roland Adeleye’s Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804-1906, published in 1971. It shows that in that age of academic excellence, the commitment to scholarship was devoid of religious sentiment, unlike in modern day Nigeria, where nearly everything is placed at the service of religious sentiment.
Adeleye’s work and Murray Last’s earlier work were all part of the Ibadan History Series, one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of Nigerian academia. In that Series, Professor Kenneth Dike, Prof Ade-Ajayi and many British and foreign scholars such as Hodgkin and Smith painstakingly set out to rescue African history from the biased prisms of colonial writers, reorient it and rewrite it from the African perspective.
Today, Northern Nigeria and Sokoto in particular, is regarded as educationally backward and lagging behind other parts of the country. This is ironical because as Murray Last’s book conclusively proved, the Sokoto Caliphate was a highly literate, in fact intellectually advanced polity. Probably nowhere else in Africa did political leaders engage in so much scholarship and leave behind such a huge volume of literature as did the leaders of the Sokoto Caliphate.
Murray Last wrote that he spent three years on this study. He spent one full year in Sokoto, in the zaure [mud hut] of the Waziri of Sokoto, Alhaji Junaidu, where he sat on the floor and read hundreds of books, pamphlets and letters in Arabic and Ajami.
Before embarking on the project, Murray Last learnt both Arabic and Hausa, without which he would have relied on second hand sources.
The first chapter of the book, on Sources for the study, is extremely rich. It shows the depth of scholarship and also shows why this book is a classic for all times. I suspect that scholars and general readers will still be quoting it hundreds of years from now.
The sources of Last’s work included hundreds of 19th century Arabic manuscripts written by Shaikh Uthman Danfodio, his brother Abdullahi, his son Muhammad Bello, Waziri Gidado and Waziri Abdulkadir ibn Gidado. It also included 270 books in the Sokoto Divisional Library; 85 books in the Sokoto Town Council Library; 100 books in the Nizamiyya School Library in Sokoto; 150 classical books in the Shahuci Judicial School in Kano; 160 different works by Sokoto Caliphate leaders found at the National Archives in Kaduna; 1,100 manuscripts at the Department of Antiquities in Jos; manuscripts and microfilms at the University of Ibadan and several volumes of manuscripts at Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, many of them taken by the French from Senegal. On top of it, Murray Last also extensively used the private collection of Waziri Junaidu in Sokoto, one of the oldest, largest and richest personal libraries in the country.
The author’s concern was not the entire Sokoto Caliphate but the central part of it, Sokoto town and its immediate hinterland, which was the capital of the Caliphate and residence of the Caliphs for most of the 19th century.
Last traced the history, geography, ethnology and politics of this area. He then traced the establishment of Dar al Islam in Sokoto, Shaikh Uthman bin Fodiye, his rise to prominence as a Muslim cleric and reformer of great charisma and prestige, composition of the community around him, his conflicts with the Sarkin Gobir, his flight or Hijra, the successful battles he and his followers waged in the Sokoto region to establish the Caliphate, and what followed up until 1903, when the British overthrew the Caliphate.
However, Murray Last was mostly concerned with one aspect of the Caliphate’s history and administration, that is, the office of the Vizier, or Waziri as it is locally called.
He was lucky that the Waziri of Sokoto at the time of the study, Alhaji Junaidu, was a scholar of tremendous repute, a historian, author, poet and linguist who wrote numerous books and composed numerous poems in Arabic, Fulfulde and Hausa as well as some smattering of English.
Having myself grown up in Sokoto, I knew Waziri Junaidu from afar, from the late 1960s until his death in January 1997. I knew many of his children and I read many books and pamphlets that he wrote at the Sokoto History Bureau, of which he was the grand patron during his lifetime. At the time of his death in 1997, I was Deputy Editor of New Nigerian and my management sent me to do an 8-page special pull out on him. He was, among many other things, the man who chaired the committee in the 1950s that toured Sudan and North Africa and produced the Penal Code for Northern Nigeria when the British said we must codify our laws. It was his cooperation and access to his inestimable library, as well as his making himself available every afternoon for one year to answer Murray Last’s questions, that made this book the classic that it is.
The launching of this all Nigerian edition is therefore a major contribution by Premium Times Books to a reorientation of Nigerian youths and even elders to learn our pre-colonial history from the straight prisms of great academics who were motivated solely by scholarly objectivity, academic rigour and strict recounting of historical facts in their proper context. It was also the first major historical work of its kind that relied on written local sources and not diaries of European travelers.
It is my hope that Nigerian media practitioners, politicians and others will stop their destructive habit of grabbing aspects of our pre-colonial history upside down, reducing them to clichés to suit the politics of the modern day, and then weaponising it in modern day Nigerian political battles.
By the time each part of Nigeria seizes the history of its opponent communities, rejigs it, disembowels it, distorts its context, reduces it to clichés and weaponises it in modern-day inter-tribal and inter-regional battles, a time will come when no community in Nigeria will know its correct history. We will all be blundering along as rootless people who know not whence we came from.
After all, as Dr. Yusuf Bala Usman said when the teaching of History and Geography was discontinued in our secondary schools, “Without History we don’t know who we are. Without Geography, we don’t know where we are.”
Let us pray that such a fate will not befall modern Nigerians.
