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In the first half of the century it was the diehards of Gobir and
Katsina who caused the Sultans the greatest trouble and anxiety, but
in the second half, with the submission of Dan Halima and the
founding of Sabon Birni, the pattern changed. Thereafter, as already
mentioned, raids from the north fell increasingly on Katsina, Kano,
and Zaria Emirates, while the pressure on Zamfara and Sokoto was
eased. But so far as Sokoto was concerned, this shift was
counterbalanced by the resurgence of Kebbi. By 1875, in fact, the
Kebbawa and their allies, the Arewa and Zabermawa, had become a
major threat to the strength and stability of the Empire.
In the early days of the jihad, it will be recalled, the Fulani had
invaded Kebbi, sacked the capital, and driven out the Chief,
Muhammadu Hodi. In his place they had installed their puppet, Usuman
Masa, but in the crisis following the defeat at Alwasa he had proved
false and had turned against them. After the victory of Gwandu,
therefore, they had hunted him down and killed him.
Before the defection of Usuman Masa the Fulani had been
disposed to treat the Kebbawa in the same way as the Zamfarawa,
assuming that they were friendly unless they showed hostility and
ruling them through their own Chiefs. Betrayal had brought
disillusionment, however, and Usuman Masa's treachery had
caused them to reverse this policy. Thenceforward Kebbi was no
longer regarded as an ally but treated instead as a defeated enemy.
The towns that resisted were reduced and the Hausa ruling classes,
if they had not already fled, were deprived of their offices and
titles and replaced by Fulani whose loyalty to the régime could be
relied upon 1.
The resistance put up by Muhammadu Hodi in the Zamfara Valley
and then by Karari in Argungu and Zazzagawa has already been
described in an earlier chapter. It will be recalled that after Karari's
death his son Yakubu Nabame had thrown himself on the mercy
of the Fulani, that his life had been spared, and that for sixteen
years he had lived as an exile at the Court in Sokoto and Wurno.
Bello, magnanimous by nature, accorded to him the privileges that
befitted his birth and breeding. With the passage of time, moreover,
he gradually won the trust of the Fulani so that, when the
easy-going and genial Aliyu Babba succeeded as Sultan, he
seems to have been treated almost as if he were a member of the
family 2.
It was the special trust which Aliyu reposed in him that led in the
end to the termination of his banishment. In about the year 1847 the
Gobirawa diehards raided the town of Gora in central Sokoto. A
Fulani expedition was quickly dispatched to intercept them and with
it the Sultan sent his eldest son Umaru, entrusting him, as
he was still young and inexperienced, to the special care of Yakubu.
In the fighting that followed Yakubu saved Umaru's life and the
Sultan, in gratitude, told him to seek whatever favour he pleased.
Yakubu begged to be allowed to return to his own country and his
wish was granted 3.
Once back among his own people Yakubu, it seems, began to ponder a
taunt that had been hurled at him by the Gobirawa at Gora. He should
be fighting with them, they had cried, not by the side of his
father's murderers. These words gradually became an obsession with
him and at length drove him to rebellion 4.
In 1849, like his father before him, he suddenly renounced his
allegiance and proclaimed himself to be Chief of Kebbi. So ended
eighteen years of peace, the longest truce that there was to be in
this war.
Yakubu had prepared the ground with care and, as soon as he raised
his standard, men from Kebbi, Arewa, and Zaberma thronged to join
it. Sokoto and Gwandu were caught unprepared and before their forces
could be concentrated they had suffered a number of sharp reverses.
The worst blow of all was the sack of the Fulani stronghold of
Silame, which guarded the western approach to Sokoto 5.
As soon as the news reached the Sultan he gave orders for his army
to be mustered.
When the army had assembled Aliyu himself led it down the
Rima Valley. By this time Halilu had succeeded Muhamman
as Emir of Gwandu and he joined Aliyu to lay siege to Argungu just
as Bello and Muhamman had done eighteen years earlier 6.
There the parallel ended, however, for the results of the two
expeditions were to be very different.
There is no better example than this of what an ineffective Sultan
Aliyu was. Because of the excessive trust that he had reposed in
Yakubu he had brought about a serious rebellion in the west at a
time when he was barely holding his own with the Gobir and Katsina
diehards in the north. It was obvious that he must move heaven and
earth to scotch this revolt before it gained strength and momentum.
To do this he only needed to storm Argungu and recapture Yakubu. But
instead his patience gave out or his resolution wavered and, after
sustaining the siege for some time, he raised it and marched away 7.
In doing so he was acquiescing in the revival of the Hausa State of
Kebbi and making the first important surrender of territory that had
taken place anywhere except in Bornu since the original conquests.
He was also condemning his successors in Sokoto and Gwandu to fifty
years of hard and unprofitable fighting.
The resurgent State of Kebbi now bore the shape of a wedge driven
into the flank of the Fulani Empire. In the west Arewa, Dandi, and
Zaberma formed the broad base of this wedge. In the centre it
narrowed down to the four walled towns of Augi, Zazzagawa, Gulma,
and Sauwa. And in the cast its heavily armoured tip, the town of
Argungu, was inserted into the vulnerable joint between Sokoto and
Gwandu. During the five decades of fighting that was to take place
along these frontiers each part of the Kebbi wedge was to play its
part. Arewa and Zaberma were to supply a steady stream of new
recruits. The walled towns in the centre were to provide the
necessary defensive stiffening. And Argungu was to serve as the
bridgehead for the raids and forays with which the Kebbawa now
started harrying the Fulani.
In the course of one of these raids Yakubu. Nabame was mortally
wounded and thus became the fourth successive Chief of Kebbi to
perish in this contest. To the Fulani, who remembered only the young
man spared by Muhamman and befriended by Bello and Aliyu, he was a
rebel and a double-dyed traitor. To the Kebbawa, on the other hand,
he was an heroic figure, like Wallace or Bruce, who snapped the
fetters of servitude and led his people back to dignity and freedom.
Yakubu was succeeded by his brother, Yusufu Mainasara, and the
war went on 8. The main
battlefield was the flood plain of the Rima River, which hereabout
is three or four miles wide. During the height of the rains it
becomes a broad sheet of water, but in the dry season, when the
floods have gone, it dries out into a flat, treeless expanse of
clay, clothed in coarse grass or thorn-scrub and cut up at intervals
by the shifting channels of the river. The Kebbi fortresses of Augi,
Gulma, and Sauwa were all situated on the edge of this flood-plain
and looked across it to Fulani fortresses on the other side. During
the campaigning season it became a no-man's land across which the
war was fought.
Here, in 1859, the Kebbawa suffered yet another set-back.
Mainassara was in Argungu when a message was brought to him
saying that the Fulani had launched a surprise attack on Gulma. He
immediately sprang to arms and, accompanied by such men as he had
been able to collect, set out to ride across the valley, but on the
way he and his party were ambushed by a superior Gwandu force and he
was killed. His head was cut off and taken back to Gwandu town,
where it was fixed over the main gate 9.
He thus became the last of the five Chiefs of Kebbi who fell in this
war.
Haliru had recently succeeded his elder brother Halilu
as Emir of Gwandu and for him this was a great triumph. In the
following year, however, he was to suffer an identical fate. For a
reason which has never been clearly explained, he then decided to
by-pass the Kebbi towns that stood in the front line and attack a
remote place of secondary importance called Karakara, which lay far
to the west. The Kebbawa, however, seem to have got wind of this
plan. At any rate, they had time to prepare an ambush and Haliru,
falling into their trap, was surrounded and killed. His head, like
his victim's, was then cut off and borne back to Argungu 10.
The new Chief of Kebbi, Muhammadu Ware, did not live long to
enjoy his triumph. On his early death he was succeeded by Abdullahi
Toga, another son of Karari. At first this change made little
difference, but in 1867, when Ahmadu Rufa'i became Sultan in
Sokoto, the political scene was suddenly transformed.
Ahmadu Rufa'i, who was a son of Shehu, was an elderly man
when he was elected. Being pious and retiring by nature, he had
already been passed over three times when Aliyu Babba, Ahmadu Zaruku,
and Aliyu Karami, who all belonged to the next generation, had been
made Sultan before him. During their reigns he had lived at Silame
and had only just escaped when the place had been sacked by the
Kebbawa. Indeed, if tradition is to be believed, he had lost members
of his family and household during the fighting 11.
These experiences, in other men, might have engendered a thirst for
revenge. In Ahmadu Rufa'i, however, they had the opposite effect. As
has already been mentioned, he had the perception to see that there
were only two ways of dealing with the rebellion in Kebbi: either to
crush it or else to accept it as a fact. Being a man of peace, he
chose the second course.
In 1867, therefore, Ahmadu Rufa'i and Abdullahi Toga made a treaty
of peace. Under its terms the Fulani recognized the independence of
Kebbi and agreed that all the territory that the Kebbawa had
recovered was to remain in their hands 12.
This treaty, though it represented an important success for the
Kebbawa, was by no means a triumph for them. While confirming them
in the possession of Argungu and most of the territory beyond the
river, it nevertheless left the Fulani as masters of much more than
half of their erstwhile State.
The peace, which is known to history as the Peace of Toga, lasted
from 1867 to 1875. It marked the end of another stage in the war
and, apart from the eighteen years when Yakubu Nabame was either a
fugitive or an exile, was the only period during the whole century
when there was a real pause in this bitter struggle.
The Peace of Toga came to an end in 1875 because the people of the
Kebbi town of Fanna in the Lower Rima Valley, on account of some now
forgotten quarrel with Argungu, decided to transfer their allegiance
to Gwandu. The Emir agreed to their doing so, but the Kebbawa
construed the action as a breach of the treaty and by way of
reprisal seized ten thousand head of Fulani cattle. This naturally
provoked retaliation from the Fulani and hostilities began again 13.
In the early stages of its resumption the war centred upon the town
of Giru, which stood opposite Fanna on the east side of the Lower
Rima Valley. Sarkin Shiko, its ruler, declared for Argungu
and defied the Emir of Gwandu, now Mustafa, to do his worst. The
Fulani's first attack failed and so Mustafa summoned reinforcements
from Nupe. When these arrived Giru was invested and, after a
four-month siege, captured 14.
The fact that the Gwandu Fulani were unable to take a small town
like Giru without the help of their vassals showed how far their
power had already declined. The truth was that, ever since
Abdullahi's death, the theory of their status being equal to
Sokoto's had been little more than a polite fiction. The resurgence
of Kebbi exposed the limitations to Gwandu's power and at the same
time drastically reduced the base from which it was exercised 15.
After the fall of Giru the focus of the war moved north to the
Argungu-Gwandu sector. The Kebbawa launched a major assault on
Ambursa, but failed to take it and the Fulani were no more
successful when they attacked Gulma.
In the main, however, it was a war of forays and ambushes rather
than sieges and pitched battles. It threw up its own champions, such
as the Zarumin Kola of Gwandu, the Galadima Dan Waje
of Kebbi, and the Magaji Jan Borodo, who fought first for one
side and then for the other 16.
Being constantly engaged on a relatively narrow front, the
contestants came to know the methods and tactics of their
adversaries and were always striving to outwit and overreach one
another.
It was, in fact, a moss trooper's war and it bears many striking
resemblances to the border warfare of the English and Scots. If
anything, however, it was even more bloody and relentless. The rank
and file might surrender and hope to purchase their lives with their
liberty, but for men of quality there was no question of quarter or
ransom. Those who were unhorsed settled themselves on their
outspread shields in the posture of prayer, as Karari and Mainasara
had done, and with their rosaries in their hands stoically waited
for their enemies to dispatch them.
The last phase of this struggle between the Fulani and Kebbawa
was dominated by Sama'ila, the son of Yakubu Nabame. He was
born in 1842 at the time when his father was an exile in Sokoto. As
a small boy of seven or eight he must have been present at the siege
of Argungu and he grew up in a soldier's world of patrols and raids.
In stature Sama'ila was not unusually tall, but his frame, with
broad shoulders and deep chest, was exceptionally lithe and
powerful. He took great pride in the profession of arms and from his
youth he trained himself in the use of every weapon, being
especially deadly, it is said, with the javelin. Moreover, he
studied to harden himself so that he never betrayed pain or fear. As
a soldier, in fact, he matched great natural gifts with ruthlessness
and dedication. But there was more to him than just this. He also
had a strong personality, which was made more formidable by the fact
that he was by nature rather taciturn and morose, and as he matured
he showed outstanding gifts of leadership 17.
Most important of all, he possessed a flair for guerilla warfare
that amounted almost to genius.
In Sokoto, in the meantime, the peace-loving Sultan Ahmadu Rufa'i
had died in 1873. According to the tradition of alternation, it had
still been the turn of the house of Atiku to provide a
successor, but again they had failed to produce a suitable
candidate. The succession had therefore gone in turn to two sons of Bello,
first to Abubakr na Rabah and then, on his death in 1877, to Mu'azu.
When he in turn had died in 1881, the claims of the Atikawa had
again been passed over and Umaru, the eldest of Bello's
grandsons, had been appointed Sultan.
This Umaru, now a man of fifty-seven, was the same son of Aliyu
Babba whose life had been saved by Yakubu Nabame
thirty-three years earlier in the fight at Gora. He had not
forgotten his debt and when he succeeded he at once sent an embassy
to Argungu, where Toga was still Chief, proposing peace. But
unfortunately the war party, led by the renegade Fulani, Jan
Borodo, was in the ascendant there and so the Fulani overtures
were rejected 18.
Having failed to make peace, the new Sultan decided to mount an
expedition against Argungu, which was now the recognized capital of
Kebbi as well as being its bridgehead on the east bank of the Rima.
Command was entrusted to an experienced but ageing freedman called Sarkin
Lifidi Lefau 19. This time
the Kebbawa did not shut themselves up in the town, as they had on
both previous occasions, but decided to risk a battle in the open.
For the first time command of the whole Kebbi army was given to
Sama'ila. It was a great opportunity, which he seized with both
hands. The Fulani forces were intercepted near Argungu and,
according to tradition, it was a javelin hurled by Sama'ila himself
that brought the Fulani commander down and turned the tide of the
battle. Certainly, Lefau was killed and his army routed 20.
For Sama'ila this victory came at a most opportune moment. In the
following year the old Chief Toga died and he was elected to
succeed. Endowed now with supreme military and political power, he
soon began to display his genius for this kind of warfare.
The remarkable run of successes that Sama'ila achieved between 1883
and 1903 was based on accurate intelligence and good tactics. In the
collection of intelligence, to which he devoted infinite pains, he
was far ahead of any of his contemporaries. In his tactics he relied
mainly on surprise and shock. By riding out of Argungu at nightfall
he could get into position by first light on the following day for
an attack on almost any town in northern Gwandu or southwestern
Sokoto, and this is what he normally did.
As Sama'ila's list of victories grew, so the superstitions that
clustered about him multiplied. His famous bay was said to be no
horse but a jinn and he himself was reputed to be able to change
himself at will into an animal so that he could reconnoitre the
towns which he proposed to attack. As a shrewd commander he played
on the fears that his name inspired and often intimidated his
enemies into flight or surrender. If a town opened its gates he
contented himself with carrying off the booty and captives that he
wanted and forbore from sacking or burning it. If it resisted,
however, he delivered it up to fire and the sword 21.
In the space of twenty years Sama'ila is said to have captured
ninety Fulani towns and villages 22.
Probably, a majority of these were mall places protected only by
stockades, but many must have been walled towns and among them there
were certainly a few real fortresses such as Gande, Shagari, Kajiji,
and Aliero 23. All the
countryside lying within reach of Argungu was ravaged by him and
when the British arrived in 1903 they were appalled at the havoc
that he had wrought. Here is the report of Burdon, the first
Resident of Sokoto Province.
Throughout the whole distance from Shagari to Ambursa, all
round Gwandu and north-east to within twenty miles of Sokoto, I was
much impressed by the devastation wrought by the Kebbawa, much of it
within the last eight years. The country is strewn with the ruins of
towns 24.
There is no doubt that during the last two decades of the century
the Kebbawa, under the inspired leadership of Sama'ila, not only
held their own but took the war to the Fulani. Gwandu suffered most,
but Sokoto, too, was distracted and weakened. Moreover, these events
took place at the very time when, as we shall see in the next
chapter, the approach of Rabeh from the east and the British
from the south made it imperative for the Sultans to be strong and
vigilant. For this reason, even though the Kebbi wars were fought in
a restricted theatre and on a limited scale, they nevertheless
played an important part in determining the fate of the Empire.
Notes
1. Information confirmed by Alhaji Junaidu.
2. Oral tradition preserved in the Kebbi ruling
family and confirmed by Alhaji Junaidu.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. For the family tree, see Table 6 in Appendix II.
9. Oral tradition preserved in the Kebbi ruling
family. For the family tree, see Table 6 in Appendix II.
10. According to a tradition preserved in the
Kebbi ruling family, a black magician called Mallam Muhamman
encompassed the deaths of both Mainassara and Haliru. He first lured
Mainasara to destruction with his spells and then, having been
bribed by the Kebbawa to change sides, did the same to Haliru. See
Johnston, op. cit. pp. 131-3.
11. Oral tradition preserved in the Kebbi ruling
family. Confirmed by Alhaji Junaidu.
12. Gazetteer of Sokoto Province, p. 17.
13. Ibid. pp. 41-42.
14. Ibid. p. 42.
15. Compare Gwandu Emirate in Maps 2 and 6.
16. Oral traditions preserved in Gwandu and Kebbi.
See Johnston, op. cit. pp. 134-6.
17. Oral tradition preserved in the Kebbi ruling
family.
18. Oral tradition preserved in the Kebbi ruling
family. Confirmed by Alhaji Junaidu.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Oral tradition preserved in the Kebbi ruling
family.
22. This claim is made on his gravestone.
23 Information confirmed by Alhaji Junaidu.
24. Annual Reports, Northern Nigeria, 1900-11, p.
175.
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