Ahmadu Odubogun, Faith and Ferment: The Sahel and Sudan in the Nineteenth Century (Ibadan Univ. Press 2005)
… With Abacar slain on the battlefield, the First Republic confronted an issue that it was unprepared to face: the question of succession. Like many fledgling states which had yet to experience a transfer of power, Sokoto had developed neither a legal framework nor unwritten customs to determine who would assume the leadership – a lack felt all the more since Abacar held no specific office. Like the shehu Usman dan Fodio, who he had in many ways modeled himself after, Abacar had neither a title nor a defined set of powers. He was “the liberator” or simply “Abacar,” and his authority ran as far as the people, and the Republic’s developing institutions, permitted it to run.
Sokoto had survived another such transition in 1815, when dan Fodio passed the leadership to his son Mohammed Bello, who became the first sultan. But dan Fodio had been alive to oversee his son’s installation, and Bello was a proven leader of thirty-six who had been a power behind the scenes for years. Abacar was dead, his oldest son was barely nine years old, and no preparations for the succession had been made.
The absence of such preparation was deliberate, because Abacar intended that nobody take his place. He was never comfortable with his position as “liberator” and believed that one-man rule was an invitation to tyranny. He favored a system in which a cabinet chosen by the legislature would act as the executive and make most decisions collectively, with authority in a crisis being exercised by the minister most competent to deal with it – for instance, the minister of war would command the country in times of invasion or rebellion, or the finance minister in the event of an acute balance-of-payments crisis.
But while he wrote in favor of such an arrangement, he never did anything in his lifetime to implement it. He knew that regularizing cabinet government would inevitably result in his own authority being constrained, and while he was ambivalent about that authority, he was also unwilling to lay it down while his life work remained unfinished. His response to the succession question was always to put it off for another day. Now, that day had come, and - predictably - few of the Republic's power-players were interested in respecting Abacar's wishes; rather than nobody succeeding him, everyone sought to do so.
Within days, seven separate factions had emerged to contest the leadership. Three of them, sometimes called the legitimist factions, favored a dynastic succession of one kind or another. Many of the rural Fulani supported a restoration of the sultanate under Ahmad bin Atiku, the brother of the deposed sultan; the emir of Adamawa, in whose court Ahmad resided, backed his claim in the hope of reuniting the sultanate under his own dominance. Some of the Hausa, particularly the aristocratic families who had lost their positions after dan Fodio’s conquest, saw an opportunity to break free of Fulani rule and restore the old Gobir dynasty, which had taken refuge to the northwest. Yet a third faction, which was strong in the army and the urban working class - particularly among the slaves who had been freed after the Malê conquest, wanted Abacar’s son Usman declared sultan, with a regency council consisting of his mother Aisha, army commander Amilcar Said, and the Nana Asma’u.
The remaining factions broke down according to ideological rather than personal loyalties. The liberals, headed by the Abacar family and finance minister João Silva, supported the continuation of Abacar’s reforms and a modified version of cabinet government in which an elected president would be first among equals. Said, the war minister, led a conservative faction which favored a strong presidency, a restricted franchise and removal of the assembly-field from political debate; this grouping also sought to woo the foundry-barons by promising a uniform commercial code and court system, and the provincial aristocracy by pledging to restore some of the privileges that the cities had lost with centralization.
Sixth were the reactionaries, whose opposition to Abacar’s reforms was theological rather than political; they cared less about the form of government than about rolling back his - and in some cases, Usman dan Fodio’s - theological innovations. This faction, led by Gwandu mallam Idris Ujiri, sent an embassy to Timbuktu requesting El Hadj Umar Tall, the sworn enemy of the reformists, to aid them in this task. And last were the radicals - a motley collection of imams, intellectuals, soldiers and others who Abacarism had inspired to fanatic heights that Abacar himself had never scaled - who sought to purify the Republic and purge it of reactionary influences.
A pragmatic alliance was soon reached between the liberal faction and those who wanted Usman Abacar declared sultan, the former group acknowledging the extent of public loyalty to the family and the latter accepting that Usman didn’t want the throne and that a regency would be out of place in a republic. It was agreed between them that Silva would be the party’s standard-bearer for the time being, but that he would surrender this role when Usman reached his majority. The reactionaries and the Gobir legitimists also found common cause, anticipating that the old dynasty might find join forces with Umar Tall if the Toucouleur emperor marched south.
But even with this consolidation, none of the factions could command anywhere near a majority in the governing council, and with the army as riven as the rest of the country, none were strong enough to force the issue. Nor did it appear that any decisive outside intervention was forthcoming. The emir of Adamawa, who had dispatched his army to support Ahmad bin Atiku’s claim, found his way unexpectedly blocked by the buffer cities of Kano, Zaria and Kaduna. The three cities reasoned - correctly - that a restored sultanate under Ahmad would be little more than an extension of Adamawa, and that an Adamawa emirate which surrounded them on both sides would have little reason to allow them to continue to be independent. The cities’ militias combined to contest the emir’s passage, and the Adamawa army became bogged down in a rainy-season campaign north of Zaria.
And so the rest of 1850 passed in an unhealthy stasis, with the Republic in the hands of a hopelessly divided cabinet and legislature. In some ways, this was a perverse variation on the cabinet government that Abacar had favored: each minister was master of his (or, in the case of the education ministry, her) domain, but they worked separately rather than collectively, and often at cross-purposes. Amilcar Said, for instance, recruited hundreds of his loyalists into the army without the government’s permission; Silva, for his part, ordered his finance ministry not to pay or equip these recruits. The ministers for roads and canals, hoping to boost their own positions through patronage, began work on several projects for which no funds had been budgeted, paying for them with scrip that was, at least in theory, a pledge against the government’s credit.
By the end of the rains, it was clear that the Republic’s unwritten constitution was failing, and with it the developing tradition of public debate and tolerance for dissent. As with the other occasions on which the political process had failed, the field of play moved from the assembly-field and the legislature to street fighting and secessionist movements. In Gusau, the radical faction - which was a small minority in the country as a whole, but disproportionately urban and highly militant - seized control of the city in November. They decreed the abolition of all existing laws, appointed a commission to write a new constitution, and began purging the aristocracy and the established imamate, many of whom fled either to Sokoto or to the emir of Adamawa in the east. In Katsina, Ilorin and Jebba, the liberal-dominated councils began assuming many governmental functions, and the always-restive southern cities of Kontagora and Wawa, where the reactionaries were strong, faced pressure to declare for Ahmad bin Atiku or for the Gobir dynasty.
In early 1851, however, two events combined to arrest the slide toward anarchy at least momentarily. From the north came word that Umar Tall was marching south at the head of a Toucouleur army, and that several of the Hausa states were indeed rallying to his banner. In the east, the Adamawa emir reached an agreement with the buffer cities, promising that the reconstituted sultanate would be a federation of cities rather than a unitary state and offering hostages as an earnest of his good faith. By February, the details of the treaty had been worked out, and the emir’s army had a free road west.
With the Republic facing invasion from two sides at once, its bickering leaders found a sudden sense of urgency in mending their quarrel. Amilcar Said argued that, in time of war, the military and civil commander should be the same, and proposed that he be installed as president until the legislature’s term expired in 1852. In exchange, he would share the cabinet equally with the liberals, agree not to make any constitutional changes during his term, and allow the next parliament to decide what the permanent form of government would be. The liberals, lacking a credible military leader, agreed to the compromise, and it passed with a large majority in the governing council.
Said took office as president on March 5, 1851, and the following day, he led the greater part of the army north to face Umar Tall while the remainder sallied to reinforce the eastern border. The military threat was still dire, but there was a palpable sense of relief in the capital at the apparent stabilization of domestic politics.
As things turned out, however, it was merely the calm before the storm.
… With Abacar slain on the battlefield, the First Republic confronted an issue that it was unprepared to face: the question of succession. Like many fledgling states which had yet to experience a transfer of power, Sokoto had developed neither a legal framework nor unwritten customs to determine who would assume the leadership – a lack felt all the more since Abacar held no specific office. Like the shehu Usman dan Fodio, who he had in many ways modeled himself after, Abacar had neither a title nor a defined set of powers. He was “the liberator” or simply “Abacar,” and his authority ran as far as the people, and the Republic’s developing institutions, permitted it to run.
Sokoto had survived another such transition in 1815, when dan Fodio passed the leadership to his son Mohammed Bello, who became the first sultan. But dan Fodio had been alive to oversee his son’s installation, and Bello was a proven leader of thirty-six who had been a power behind the scenes for years. Abacar was dead, his oldest son was barely nine years old, and no preparations for the succession had been made.
The absence of such preparation was deliberate, because Abacar intended that nobody take his place. He was never comfortable with his position as “liberator” and believed that one-man rule was an invitation to tyranny. He favored a system in which a cabinet chosen by the legislature would act as the executive and make most decisions collectively, with authority in a crisis being exercised by the minister most competent to deal with it – for instance, the minister of war would command the country in times of invasion or rebellion, or the finance minister in the event of an acute balance-of-payments crisis.
But while he wrote in favor of such an arrangement, he never did anything in his lifetime to implement it. He knew that regularizing cabinet government would inevitably result in his own authority being constrained, and while he was ambivalent about that authority, he was also unwilling to lay it down while his life work remained unfinished. His response to the succession question was always to put it off for another day. Now, that day had come, and - predictably - few of the Republic's power-players were interested in respecting Abacar's wishes; rather than nobody succeeding him, everyone sought to do so.
Within days, seven separate factions had emerged to contest the leadership. Three of them, sometimes called the legitimist factions, favored a dynastic succession of one kind or another. Many of the rural Fulani supported a restoration of the sultanate under Ahmad bin Atiku, the brother of the deposed sultan; the emir of Adamawa, in whose court Ahmad resided, backed his claim in the hope of reuniting the sultanate under his own dominance. Some of the Hausa, particularly the aristocratic families who had lost their positions after dan Fodio’s conquest, saw an opportunity to break free of Fulani rule and restore the old Gobir dynasty, which had taken refuge to the northwest. Yet a third faction, which was strong in the army and the urban working class - particularly among the slaves who had been freed after the Malê conquest, wanted Abacar’s son Usman declared sultan, with a regency council consisting of his mother Aisha, army commander Amilcar Said, and the Nana Asma’u.
The remaining factions broke down according to ideological rather than personal loyalties. The liberals, headed by the Abacar family and finance minister João Silva, supported the continuation of Abacar’s reforms and a modified version of cabinet government in which an elected president would be first among equals. Said, the war minister, led a conservative faction which favored a strong presidency, a restricted franchise and removal of the assembly-field from political debate; this grouping also sought to woo the foundry-barons by promising a uniform commercial code and court system, and the provincial aristocracy by pledging to restore some of the privileges that the cities had lost with centralization.
Sixth were the reactionaries, whose opposition to Abacar’s reforms was theological rather than political; they cared less about the form of government than about rolling back his - and in some cases, Usman dan Fodio’s - theological innovations. This faction, led by Gwandu mallam Idris Ujiri, sent an embassy to Timbuktu requesting El Hadj Umar Tall, the sworn enemy of the reformists, to aid them in this task. And last were the radicals - a motley collection of imams, intellectuals, soldiers and others who Abacarism had inspired to fanatic heights that Abacar himself had never scaled - who sought to purify the Republic and purge it of reactionary influences.
A pragmatic alliance was soon reached between the liberal faction and those who wanted Usman Abacar declared sultan, the former group acknowledging the extent of public loyalty to the family and the latter accepting that Usman didn’t want the throne and that a regency would be out of place in a republic. It was agreed between them that Silva would be the party’s standard-bearer for the time being, but that he would surrender this role when Usman reached his majority. The reactionaries and the Gobir legitimists also found common cause, anticipating that the old dynasty might find join forces with Umar Tall if the Toucouleur emperor marched south.
But even with this consolidation, none of the factions could command anywhere near a majority in the governing council, and with the army as riven as the rest of the country, none were strong enough to force the issue. Nor did it appear that any decisive outside intervention was forthcoming. The emir of Adamawa, who had dispatched his army to support Ahmad bin Atiku’s claim, found his way unexpectedly blocked by the buffer cities of Kano, Zaria and Kaduna. The three cities reasoned - correctly - that a restored sultanate under Ahmad would be little more than an extension of Adamawa, and that an Adamawa emirate which surrounded them on both sides would have little reason to allow them to continue to be independent. The cities’ militias combined to contest the emir’s passage, and the Adamawa army became bogged down in a rainy-season campaign north of Zaria.
And so the rest of 1850 passed in an unhealthy stasis, with the Republic in the hands of a hopelessly divided cabinet and legislature. In some ways, this was a perverse variation on the cabinet government that Abacar had favored: each minister was master of his (or, in the case of the education ministry, her) domain, but they worked separately rather than collectively, and often at cross-purposes. Amilcar Said, for instance, recruited hundreds of his loyalists into the army without the government’s permission; Silva, for his part, ordered his finance ministry not to pay or equip these recruits. The ministers for roads and canals, hoping to boost their own positions through patronage, began work on several projects for which no funds had been budgeted, paying for them with scrip that was, at least in theory, a pledge against the government’s credit.
By the end of the rains, it was clear that the Republic’s unwritten constitution was failing, and with it the developing tradition of public debate and tolerance for dissent. As with the other occasions on which the political process had failed, the field of play moved from the assembly-field and the legislature to street fighting and secessionist movements. In Gusau, the radical faction - which was a small minority in the country as a whole, but disproportionately urban and highly militant - seized control of the city in November. They decreed the abolition of all existing laws, appointed a commission to write a new constitution, and began purging the aristocracy and the established imamate, many of whom fled either to Sokoto or to the emir of Adamawa in the east. In Katsina, Ilorin and Jebba, the liberal-dominated councils began assuming many governmental functions, and the always-restive southern cities of Kontagora and Wawa, where the reactionaries were strong, faced pressure to declare for Ahmad bin Atiku or for the Gobir dynasty.
In early 1851, however, two events combined to arrest the slide toward anarchy at least momentarily. From the north came word that Umar Tall was marching south at the head of a Toucouleur army, and that several of the Hausa states were indeed rallying to his banner. In the east, the Adamawa emir reached an agreement with the buffer cities, promising that the reconstituted sultanate would be a federation of cities rather than a unitary state and offering hostages as an earnest of his good faith. By February, the details of the treaty had been worked out, and the emir’s army had a free road west.
With the Republic facing invasion from two sides at once, its bickering leaders found a sudden sense of urgency in mending their quarrel. Amilcar Said argued that, in time of war, the military and civil commander should be the same, and proposed that he be installed as president until the legislature’s term expired in 1852. In exchange, he would share the cabinet equally with the liberals, agree not to make any constitutional changes during his term, and allow the next parliament to decide what the permanent form of government would be. The liberals, lacking a credible military leader, agreed to the compromise, and it passed with a large majority in the governing council.
Said took office as president on March 5, 1851, and the following day, he led the greater part of the army north to face Umar Tall while the remainder sallied to reinforce the eastern border. The military threat was still dire, but there was a palpable sense of relief in the capital at the apparent stabilization of domestic politics.
As things turned out, however, it was merely the calm before the storm.
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