Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Thanks again, y'all.
This is in sugar country - in the interior of the eastern coastal plain, with much more rainfall.
BTW, the legend of the yamali isn't universal among Brazilian slaves. The urban ones, who have better access to information, know exactly what happened to the Malê - it's the rural ones, isolated on their plantations, who think that they were taken away by the gods and that Abacar is King Arthur. The legend actually started in the quilombos of western Bahia, which had some sporadic interaction and trade with the Malê guerrillas - until one day they suddenly weren't there, without any sign of a battle. The story spread slowly from there, becoming more distorted with distance and more uncertain as to the date and the characters.
In any event, the endgame of slavery in Brazil is accelerating for some of the same reasons as OTL. Brazilian slaves had a negative rate of increase (sometimes as much as 20 percent per decade), so planters depended on the slave trade to replenish their supply. The Atlantic slave trade in OTL Brazil continued into the 1860s; here, it was shut down in 1849, and the trans-Caribbean trade of surplus slaves from the Upper South (an extension of the slave-breeding that occurred there in OTL) isn't nearly large enough to replace it. Also, as in OTL, more and more Brazilian slaves are deciding they've had enough and running off to the quilombos. This means that slaves are fewer and more expensive precisely when the need for labor is increasing. This doesn't necessarily mean that the final abolition of slavery in Brazil will take place sooner than OTL, but the dynamics that led to it are already well under way.
Butterflies in Pernambuco... lovely area, though very dry and hot and very poor. Though I only visited the western region. The area around Recife is probably completely different.
This is in sugar country - in the interior of the eastern coastal plain, with much more rainfall.
BTW, the legend of the yamali isn't universal among Brazilian slaves. The urban ones, who have better access to information, know exactly what happened to the Malê - it's the rural ones, isolated on their plantations, who think that they were taken away by the gods and that Abacar is King Arthur. The legend actually started in the quilombos of western Bahia, which had some sporadic interaction and trade with the Malê guerrillas - until one day they suddenly weren't there, without any sign of a battle. The story spread slowly from there, becoming more distorted with distance and more uncertain as to the date and the characters.
In any event, the endgame of slavery in Brazil is accelerating for some of the same reasons as OTL. Brazilian slaves had a negative rate of increase (sometimes as much as 20 percent per decade), so planters depended on the slave trade to replenish their supply. The Atlantic slave trade in OTL Brazil continued into the 1860s; here, it was shut down in 1849, and the trans-Caribbean trade of surplus slaves from the Upper South (an extension of the slave-breeding that occurred there in OTL) isn't nearly large enough to replace it. Also, as in OTL, more and more Brazilian slaves are deciding they've had enough and running off to the quilombos. This means that slaves are fewer and more expensive precisely when the need for labor is increasing. This doesn't necessarily mean that the final abolition of slavery in Brazil will take place sooner than OTL, but the dynamics that led to it are already well under way.
My gut feeling is that there may be some influence around the margins, but nothing major. American abolitionism was strongly church-based, and the fact that Malê doctrines are explicitly based on Muslim scripture will put them beyond the pale for many abolitionists. Also, the Malê pulled off a successful slave revolt, and invoking them in a country that's even more paranoid about slave revolts than OTL wouldn't be a good political move. Abolitionists aren't going to win over the silent majority by prefacing their remarks with "the Nat Turner of Brazil said..."
With that said, some abolitionists will probably read the works of Abacar and his followers, and that may shape the way they think about Christian doctrine and lead them to find similar justifications in Christian scripture. Maybe a few abolitionist books and speeches will include concepts that their OTL counterparts don't. And of course, one never knows what might inspire firebrands like John Brown.
Literary interlude: The past is another country
Honório Yaji, The Shehu’s Ghost (Zaria: Alliance Press, 1935)
In the morning the shehu was digging a ditch.
“The fields are the other way,” we said. “You won’t bring them water with that.”
“I’ll plant a new field,” he answered. “I need property if I’m going to marry.”
“You, marry? What girl would have you? What girl’s father would have you? Did you ask him yet?”
The shehu only laughed. “Any girl old enough to marry me has no father to go to. A widow to console, a widow to console me… I need no one’s permission but hers.”
“There’s no widow here that old.”
“Maybe she’s from another village. Or maybe she’s already dead. Maybe I see her here, and you don’t.”
“Do you?”
“Maybe.”
“It’ll be hard digging,” we said. “And harder planting. There’s nothing here but stone.”
“I have time.”
When we came back at noon, the ditch was about five feet long, filled with muddy water from the floods. But there was already a crop of millet around it, ears drooping and almost ready to harvest. The shehu was praying dhuhr, his face turned toward a black stone the size of a man’s head, pitted and flecked with iron.
“Mecca is the other way,” we said.
“Mecca?” he asked. “What is Mecca to me? I’m Malê today. Don’t you know? When they were slaves, no one told them if the Kaaba was north or south - in the mines, they didn‘t know if it was east or west! They couldn‘t look to the Kaaba, so they found their own!” He turned back to the stone. “Forgive me, Olorum-Ulua, for I know not where your city is and I know not where your stone is. Hear my prayer, though I know not where to turn.”
“Nonsense,” said Ibrahim, who had been a soldier. “I’ve known Malê. They know where Mecca is, and they know God’s true name.”
“Oh yes, maybe the Malê-who-are-Fulani, the ones that have learned. But what about the Malê-who-are Yoruba or the Malê-who-are-Mande? Or the Malê who are everything and nothing, the ones whose parents are of all nations but who’ve been slaves so long they’ve forgotten what they were? What do they call God, my wise friend?” His voice changed, becoming high and shrill, and some of his words were from over the sea; it didn’t seem that he was speaking to us any more. “I reject you, jaji-ridden ones! I reject you, who rejected the faith that sustained you! The curse of an aligenum on you! I reject you in Olorum-Ulua’s name!” He spat once to each side of his stone and stood swaying.
“Heresy,” said Muhammadu, the imam. “Apostasy! Allah is not a false Yoruba god, and it’s you who are cursed, not me.”
“I made you,” the shehu said. “You grew from the ground where I planted you. Who are you to curse your creator?”
“There is no creator but God. If you made me, it was by his will.”
“That may be so,” the shehu said. He stood up straight. “The raka’at are finished! The dhuhr is finished!” Around him, half the millet had withered in the sun, and he seemed to see it for the first time.
“Help me harvest what remains,” he said. “I will prepare a wedding feast tomorrow, and you all shall eat.”
That night after isha, we took counsel at the village mosque.
“The roof needs new thatching,” said Mariam the jaji. “It always needs thatching, and you men are lazy.”
“The thatching can wait,” Ibrahim answered. “The shehu, or whatever he is, cannot. We don’t want our children taught apostasy. Olorum-Ulua is not our god.”
“Who knows what the shehu will believe tomorrow? And if he wants to raise up children to believe as he does, he can plant them and pluck them from the ground. The apostasy is for a day. The thatching, now - that we miss whenever it rains.”
“Even a day of apostasy is too many.”
“It’s far too late for that,” Muhammadu said. “We let it in the gate when we listened to that Abacar, didn’t we? That there can be no slaves even though the Koran mentions them? That we need no kings? That the opinion of a drunkard or an idle beggar counts the same as a scholar? That speech must be free even when it goes against the faith? We listened to all that, and now we’re surprised that someone calls on a false Yoruba god?”
“Nonsense!” shouted Dawudu the weaver. “Abacar called on no false gods. He called us to do what the true God teaches. There’s nothing in the Koran that says a man has to own slaves, and since none have ever treated slaves as God intended, he’s right to say that no man can be trusted with them…”
“The slaves are free twelve years now,” said Mariam, who had been one. “That argument is over. What shall we do with the shehu, and the thatching?”
“Let us vote on it.”
“Vote on it!” Muhammadu’s voice mocked Dawudu as a true prophet might mock the false - or as a false prophet might mock the true. “Is everything a vote now? If I don’t favor voting, shall we vote on whether to vote?”
“Then we will discuss it and come to agreement, as we are commanded to do.”
“Are we commanded to sit up all night debating when we could be in bed, then?” Ibrahim asked. “It’s not enough to pray and keep the law anymore – now, to be holy, we must all act like sultans, and argue over whether our wars are just and our punishments are too harsh.”
“Are you saying, then,” said Mariam, “that God has no concern with such things?”
“He does, but he has given us rulers to take care of them. It was never our burden to debate them. If Umar Tall invades, we should fight him, not argue over whether he’s right.”
“People have always argued about these things – it’s just that no one ever listened before.”
“So I will listen,” Muhammadu said, spreading his hands wide. “What would you do with him? How about you, Atiku? The shehu made you as he did me. What would you do with your creator?”
“Drive him out,” Atiku answered.
“Truly? Drive him out? You, who are a worse apostate than he is?”
“We don’t need his superstition. True Islam is reason.”
“You will drive out nobody, either of you,” said Mariam.
“I’ll do it if I know I’m rightly guided,” said Muhammadu and Atiku at once.
“It seems we might not achieve ijma after all,” Ibrahim stated. “Shall we take our case to the headman as we used to do, and let him decide?”
“He’ll only leave you to fight,” came a voice from the door. We turned and saw the shehu, now walking with a cane, framed in the dying light.
“Stay out of our mosque!” Muhammadu cried, and threw a bound book at him. It seemed to hit, but the shehu gave no sign that he felt it. He stood where he was, and never flinched or moved.
“I have a crescent talisman,” he explained. “It was in one of the ears of millet, and a jinn enchanted it in the Malê way. You won’t harm me.”
“Was the jinn sent by your false god Olorun?”
“Who is Olorun? There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. Surely you would know that, with you an imam. I don’t make mallams who are ignorant of who God is.”
“You see,” said Mariam, shifting her turban. “He utters no misbelief.”
“Until tomorrow, when some other madness is on him,” Muhammadu said. “But let us not cast him out, you say. Let us feast him, and offer him our daughters to marry.”
“Married, married, many times married,” said the shehu. “To a princess, to a jinn, to a queen among women.” He took from his neck the thong that held the talisman, and it had changed, the crescent shaping somehow into a warrior queen. Something about her image made it plain that she’d lived long in the past, and when the shehu regarded her form, his eyes were the eyes of memory.
“There is millet,” he said. “I will cook today’s harvest for the feast, and I will slaughter a lamb for my company. But I’ll do it in another place, because I’m not wanted here.”
His back was shadowed in the darkness for a moment, and he was gone. But the next morning, he was in the fields again, in a new set of clothes.
Honório Yaji, The Shehu’s Ghost (Zaria: Alliance Press, 1935)
Honório Yaji (1897-1965), one of the founders of the West African historic fantasy genre, was an important literary and political figure in colonial and post-colonial Adamawa. He was born in Yola in February 1897, the third of nine children, to a Fulani father who was a distant cousin of the emir and a Malê mother who had served in the itinerant teachers’ corps prior to her marriage. The elder Yaji was a mid-level clerk in the department of taxation, entitling Honório to a formal education in the British-run civil service schools.
After graduating secondary school in 1916, Yaji qualified for the teachers’ corps and spent three years as a primary teacher in the rural east of Adamawa before being fired for insubordination. He found work as a trainee machinist in Zaria and, upon attaining journeyman status, became active in the nascent trade-union movement. In 1924, he joined the All-Niger Workers’ Congress, a socialist union-cum-political party which advocated a federation of the British protectorates and colonies in West Africa. He stood unsuccessfully for election to the Majlis as an ANWC candidate in 1929, winning a seat on his second attempt in 1933 and securing re-election four years later as a member of the Adamawa Islamic Popular Alliance.
Yaji was imprisoned several times both before and after full independence, most notably after the 1928 general strike and the protests over the cancellation of the 1941 election. Ultimately, he played a leading part in the republican revolt of 1955, and was a junior minister in the 1955-57 provisional government before falling out once again with his colleagues and retiring from politics. He died in Zaria at the age of 67, leaving two children, one of whom would follow him into politics and the other into literature.
Beginning in the 1920s, Honório published short stories and satirical essays in trade-union magazines and general-circulation newspapers. His submissions to the general-circulation journals were often couched in the language of fantasy or Islamic fable in order to avoid censorship. This was characteristic of the political debate of the time, which was carried on in a lively and straightforward manner in private forums but was of necessity more veiled in public, and since many of the literary figures of contemporary Adamawa were politically active, it had a strong influence on literary forms.
The first of Yaji’s six novels, In the Days of the Queen, was written while in prison following a 1931 sedition arrest and published after his release in 1932. Set in his adopted city of Zaria during the 16th century, this novel is a fictionalized life of the warrior queen Amina in the form of a series of linked stories, each of which involves her discovery and use of a magic power or artifact. Given the nature of some of the artifacts and the portrayal of Amina’s antagonists, the work was seen by many as a call to resistance against British colonial rule and the compliant government of the emir.
The Shehu’s Ghost, published in 1935, is Honório Yaji’s second novel. In it, a wanderer of extremely old age, who looks uncannily like the shehu Usman dan Fodio, appears in a rural village of what was then the First Sokoto Republic during the early 1850s. The wanderer, who may or may not be the ghost of the shehu (who died in 1817), assumes the role of a poor peasant farmer, and his plantings often grow into people or objects that produce both conflict and harmony. The opinions of the wanderer’s creations are roughly analogous to the political movements that flourished during the chaos of the First Republic’s collapse, although the aloof headman who encourages them to fight is more in line with Yaji’s view of colonialism than anything that existed during the pre-colonial state…
After graduating secondary school in 1916, Yaji qualified for the teachers’ corps and spent three years as a primary teacher in the rural east of Adamawa before being fired for insubordination. He found work as a trainee machinist in Zaria and, upon attaining journeyman status, became active in the nascent trade-union movement. In 1924, he joined the All-Niger Workers’ Congress, a socialist union-cum-political party which advocated a federation of the British protectorates and colonies in West Africa. He stood unsuccessfully for election to the Majlis as an ANWC candidate in 1929, winning a seat on his second attempt in 1933 and securing re-election four years later as a member of the Adamawa Islamic Popular Alliance.
Yaji was imprisoned several times both before and after full independence, most notably after the 1928 general strike and the protests over the cancellation of the 1941 election. Ultimately, he played a leading part in the republican revolt of 1955, and was a junior minister in the 1955-57 provisional government before falling out once again with his colleagues and retiring from politics. He died in Zaria at the age of 67, leaving two children, one of whom would follow him into politics and the other into literature.
Beginning in the 1920s, Honório published short stories and satirical essays in trade-union magazines and general-circulation newspapers. His submissions to the general-circulation journals were often couched in the language of fantasy or Islamic fable in order to avoid censorship. This was characteristic of the political debate of the time, which was carried on in a lively and straightforward manner in private forums but was of necessity more veiled in public, and since many of the literary figures of contemporary Adamawa were politically active, it had a strong influence on literary forms.
The first of Yaji’s six novels, In the Days of the Queen, was written while in prison following a 1931 sedition arrest and published after his release in 1932. Set in his adopted city of Zaria during the 16th century, this novel is a fictionalized life of the warrior queen Amina in the form of a series of linked stories, each of which involves her discovery and use of a magic power or artifact. Given the nature of some of the artifacts and the portrayal of Amina’s antagonists, the work was seen by many as a call to resistance against British colonial rule and the compliant government of the emir.
The Shehu’s Ghost, published in 1935, is Honório Yaji’s second novel. In it, a wanderer of extremely old age, who looks uncannily like the shehu Usman dan Fodio, appears in a rural village of what was then the First Sokoto Republic during the early 1850s. The wanderer, who may or may not be the ghost of the shehu (who died in 1817), assumes the role of a poor peasant farmer, and his plantings often grow into people or objects that produce both conflict and harmony. The opinions of the wanderer’s creations are roughly analogous to the political movements that flourished during the chaos of the First Republic’s collapse, although the aloof headman who encourages them to fight is more in line with Yaji’s view of colonialism than anything that existed during the pre-colonial state…
*******
In the morning the shehu was digging a ditch.
“The fields are the other way,” we said. “You won’t bring them water with that.”
“I’ll plant a new field,” he answered. “I need property if I’m going to marry.”
“You, marry? What girl would have you? What girl’s father would have you? Did you ask him yet?”
The shehu only laughed. “Any girl old enough to marry me has no father to go to. A widow to console, a widow to console me… I need no one’s permission but hers.”
“There’s no widow here that old.”
“Maybe she’s from another village. Or maybe she’s already dead. Maybe I see her here, and you don’t.”
“Do you?”
“Maybe.”
“It’ll be hard digging,” we said. “And harder planting. There’s nothing here but stone.”
“I have time.”
When we came back at noon, the ditch was about five feet long, filled with muddy water from the floods. But there was already a crop of millet around it, ears drooping and almost ready to harvest. The shehu was praying dhuhr, his face turned toward a black stone the size of a man’s head, pitted and flecked with iron.
“Mecca is the other way,” we said.
“Mecca?” he asked. “What is Mecca to me? I’m Malê today. Don’t you know? When they were slaves, no one told them if the Kaaba was north or south - in the mines, they didn‘t know if it was east or west! They couldn‘t look to the Kaaba, so they found their own!” He turned back to the stone. “Forgive me, Olorum-Ulua, for I know not where your city is and I know not where your stone is. Hear my prayer, though I know not where to turn.”
“Nonsense,” said Ibrahim, who had been a soldier. “I’ve known Malê. They know where Mecca is, and they know God’s true name.”
“Oh yes, maybe the Malê-who-are-Fulani, the ones that have learned. But what about the Malê-who-are Yoruba or the Malê-who-are-Mande? Or the Malê who are everything and nothing, the ones whose parents are of all nations but who’ve been slaves so long they’ve forgotten what they were? What do they call God, my wise friend?” His voice changed, becoming high and shrill, and some of his words were from over the sea; it didn’t seem that he was speaking to us any more. “I reject you, jaji-ridden ones! I reject you, who rejected the faith that sustained you! The curse of an aligenum on you! I reject you in Olorum-Ulua’s name!” He spat once to each side of his stone and stood swaying.
“Heresy,” said Muhammadu, the imam. “Apostasy! Allah is not a false Yoruba god, and it’s you who are cursed, not me.”
“I made you,” the shehu said. “You grew from the ground where I planted you. Who are you to curse your creator?”
“There is no creator but God. If you made me, it was by his will.”
“That may be so,” the shehu said. He stood up straight. “The raka’at are finished! The dhuhr is finished!” Around him, half the millet had withered in the sun, and he seemed to see it for the first time.
“Help me harvest what remains,” he said. “I will prepare a wedding feast tomorrow, and you all shall eat.”
_____
That night after isha, we took counsel at the village mosque.
“The roof needs new thatching,” said Mariam the jaji. “It always needs thatching, and you men are lazy.”
“The thatching can wait,” Ibrahim answered. “The shehu, or whatever he is, cannot. We don’t want our children taught apostasy. Olorum-Ulua is not our god.”
“Who knows what the shehu will believe tomorrow? And if he wants to raise up children to believe as he does, he can plant them and pluck them from the ground. The apostasy is for a day. The thatching, now - that we miss whenever it rains.”
“Even a day of apostasy is too many.”
“It’s far too late for that,” Muhammadu said. “We let it in the gate when we listened to that Abacar, didn’t we? That there can be no slaves even though the Koran mentions them? That we need no kings? That the opinion of a drunkard or an idle beggar counts the same as a scholar? That speech must be free even when it goes against the faith? We listened to all that, and now we’re surprised that someone calls on a false Yoruba god?”
“Nonsense!” shouted Dawudu the weaver. “Abacar called on no false gods. He called us to do what the true God teaches. There’s nothing in the Koran that says a man has to own slaves, and since none have ever treated slaves as God intended, he’s right to say that no man can be trusted with them…”
“The slaves are free twelve years now,” said Mariam, who had been one. “That argument is over. What shall we do with the shehu, and the thatching?”
“Let us vote on it.”
“Vote on it!” Muhammadu’s voice mocked Dawudu as a true prophet might mock the false - or as a false prophet might mock the true. “Is everything a vote now? If I don’t favor voting, shall we vote on whether to vote?”
“Then we will discuss it and come to agreement, as we are commanded to do.”
“Are we commanded to sit up all night debating when we could be in bed, then?” Ibrahim asked. “It’s not enough to pray and keep the law anymore – now, to be holy, we must all act like sultans, and argue over whether our wars are just and our punishments are too harsh.”
“Are you saying, then,” said Mariam, “that God has no concern with such things?”
“He does, but he has given us rulers to take care of them. It was never our burden to debate them. If Umar Tall invades, we should fight him, not argue over whether he’s right.”
“People have always argued about these things – it’s just that no one ever listened before.”
“So I will listen,” Muhammadu said, spreading his hands wide. “What would you do with him? How about you, Atiku? The shehu made you as he did me. What would you do with your creator?”
“Drive him out,” Atiku answered.
“Truly? Drive him out? You, who are a worse apostate than he is?”
“We don’t need his superstition. True Islam is reason.”
“You will drive out nobody, either of you,” said Mariam.
“I’ll do it if I know I’m rightly guided,” said Muhammadu and Atiku at once.
“It seems we might not achieve ijma after all,” Ibrahim stated. “Shall we take our case to the headman as we used to do, and let him decide?”
“He’ll only leave you to fight,” came a voice from the door. We turned and saw the shehu, now walking with a cane, framed in the dying light.
“Stay out of our mosque!” Muhammadu cried, and threw a bound book at him. It seemed to hit, but the shehu gave no sign that he felt it. He stood where he was, and never flinched or moved.
“I have a crescent talisman,” he explained. “It was in one of the ears of millet, and a jinn enchanted it in the Malê way. You won’t harm me.”
“Was the jinn sent by your false god Olorun?”
“Who is Olorun? There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. Surely you would know that, with you an imam. I don’t make mallams who are ignorant of who God is.”
“You see,” said Mariam, shifting her turban. “He utters no misbelief.”
“Until tomorrow, when some other madness is on him,” Muhammadu said. “But let us not cast him out, you say. Let us feast him, and offer him our daughters to marry.”
“Married, married, many times married,” said the shehu. “To a princess, to a jinn, to a queen among women.” He took from his neck the thong that held the talisman, and it had changed, the crescent shaping somehow into a warrior queen. Something about her image made it plain that she’d lived long in the past, and when the shehu regarded her form, his eyes were the eyes of memory.
“There is millet,” he said. “I will cook today’s harvest for the feast, and I will slaughter a lamb for my company. But I’ll do it in another place, because I’m not wanted here.”
His back was shadowed in the darkness for a moment, and he was gone. But the next morning, he was in the fields again, in a new set of clothes.
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Honório Yaji, The Shehu’s Ghost (Zaria: Alliance Press, 1935)
Honório Yaji (1897-1965), one of the founders of the West African historic fantasy genre, was an important literary and political figure in colonial and post-colonial Adamawa. He was born in Yola in February 1897, the third of nine children, to a Fulani father who was a distant cousin of the emir and a Mal[FONT="][FONT="]ê[/FONT][/FONT] mother who had served in the itinerant teachers’ corps prior to her marriage. The elder Yaji was a mid-level clerk in the department of taxation, entitling Honório to a formal education in the British-run civil service schools.
After graduating secondary school in 1916, Yaji qualified for the teachers’ corps and spent three years as a primary teacher in the rural east of Adamawa before being fired for insubordination. He found work as a trainee machinist in Zaria and, upon attaining journeyman status, became active in the nascent trade-union movement. In 1924, he joined the All-Niger Workers’ Congress, a socialist union-cum-political party which advocated a federation of the British protectorates and colonies in West Africa. He stood unsuccessfully for election to the Majlis as an ANWC candidate in 1929, winning a seat on his second attempt in 1933 and securing re-election four years later as a member of the Adamawa Islamic Popular Alliance.
Yaji was imprisoned several times both before and after full independence, most notably after the 1928 general strike and the protests over the cancellation of the 1941 election. Ultimately, he played a leading part in the republican revolt of 1955, and was a junior minister in the 1955-57 provisional government before falling out once again with his colleagues and retiring from politics. He died in Zaria at the age of 67, leaving two children, one of whom would follow him into politics and the other into literature.
Beginning in the 1920s, Honório published short stories and satirical essays in trade-union magazines and general-circulation newspapers. His submissions to the general-circulation journals were often couched in the language of fantasy or Islamic fable in order to avoid censorship. This was characteristic of the political debate of the time, which was carried on in a lively and straightforward manner in private forums but was of necessity more veiled in public, and since many of the literary figures of contemporary Adamawa were politically active, it had a strong influence on literary forms.
The first of Yaji’s six novels, In the Days of the Queen, was written while in prison following a 1931 sedition arrest and published after his release in 1932. Set in his adopted city of Zaria during the 16th century, this novel is a fictionalized life of the warrior queen Amina in the form of a series of linked stories, each of which involves her discovery and use of a magic power or artifact. Given the nature of some of the artifacts and the portrayal of Amina’s antagonists, the work was seen by many as a call to resistance against British colonial rule and the compliant government of the emir.
The Shehu’s Ghost, published in 1935, is Honório Yaji’s second novel. In it, a wanderer of extremely old age, who looks uncannily like the shehu Usman dan Fodio, appears in a rural village of what was then the First Sokoto Republic during the early 1850s. The wanderer, who may or may not be the ghost of the shehu (who died in 1817), assumes the role of a poor peasant farmer, and his plantings often grow into people or objects that produce both conflict and harmony. The opinions of the wanderer’s creations are roughly analogous to the political movements that flourished during the chaos of the First Republic’s collapse, although the aloof headman who encourages them to fight is more in line with Yaji’s view of colonialism than anything that existed during the pre-colonial state…
*******
In the morning the shehu was digging a ditch.
“The fields are the other way,” we said. “You won’t bring them water with that.”
“I’ll plant a new field,” he answered. “I need property if I’m going to marry.”
“You, marry? What girl would have you? What girl’s father would have you? Did you ask him yet?”
The shehu only laughed. “Any girl old enough to marry me has no father to go to. A widow to console, a widow to console me… I need no one’s permission but hers.”
“There’s no widow here that old.”
“Maybe she’s from another village. Or maybe she’s already dead. Maybe I see her here, and you don’t.”
“Do you?”
“Maybe.”
“It’ll be hard digging,” we said. “And harder planting. There’s nothing here but stone.”
“I have time.”
When we came back at noon, the ditch was about five feet long, filled with muddy water from the floods. But there was already a crop of millet around it, ears drooping and almost ready to harvest. The shehu was praying dhuhr, his face turned toward a black stone the size of a man’s head, pitted and flecked with iron.
“Mecca is the other way,” we said.
“Mecca?” he asked. “What is Mecca to me? I’m Mal[FONT="][FONT="]ê[/FONT][/FONT] today. Don’t you know? When they were slaves, no one told them if the Kaaba was north or south - in the mines, they didn‘t know if it was east or west! They couldn‘t look to the Kaaba, so they found their own!” He turned back to the stone. “Forgive me, Olorum-Ulua, for I know not where your city is and I know not where your stone is. Hear my prayer, though I know not where to turn.”
“Nonsense,” said Ibrahim, who had been a soldier. “I’ve known Mal[FONT="][FONT="]ê[/FONT][/FONT]. They know where Mecca is, and they know God’s true name.”
“Oh yes, maybe the Mal[FONT="][FONT="]ê[/FONT][/FONT]-who-are-Fulani, the ones that have learned. But what about the Mal[FONT="][FONT="]ê[/FONT][/FONT]-who-are Yoruba or the Mal[FONT="][FONT="]ê[/FONT][/FONT]-who-are-Mande? Or the Mal[FONT="][FONT="]ê[/FONT][/FONT] who are everything and nothing, the ones whose parents are of all nations but who’ve been slaves so long they’ve forgotten what they were? What do they call God, my wise friend?” His voice changed, becoming high and shrill, and some of his words were from over the sea; it didn’t seem that he was speaking to us any more. “I reject you, jaji-ridden ones! I reject you, who rejected the faith that sustained you! The curse of an aligenum on you! I reject you in Olorum-Ulua’s name!” He spat once to each side of his stone and stood swaying.
“Heresy,” said Muhammadu, the imam. “Apostasy! Allah is not a false Yoruba god, and it’s you who are cursed, not me.”
“I made you,” the shehu said. “You grew from the ground where I planted you. Who are you to curse your creator?”
“There is no creator but God. If you made me, it was by his will.”
“That may be so,” the shehu said. He stood up straight. “The raka’at are finished! The dhuhr is finished!” Around him, half the millet had withered in the sun, and he seemed to see it for the first time.
“Help me harvest what remains,” he said. “I will prepare a wedding feast tomorrow, and you all shall eat.”
_____
That night after isha, we took counsel at the village mosque.
“The roof needs new thatching,” said Mariam the jaji. “It always needs thatching, and you men are lazy.”
“The thatching can wait,” Ibrahim answered. “The shehu, or whatever he is, cannot. We don’t want our children taught apostasy. Olorum-Ulua is not our god.”
“Who knows what the shehu will believe tomorrow? And if he wants to raise up children to believe as he does, he can plant them and pluck them from the ground. The apostasy is for a day. The thatching, now - that we miss whenever it rains.”
“Even a day of apostasy is too many.”
“It’s far too late for that,” Muhammadu said. “We let it in the gate when we listened to that Abacar, didn’t we? That there can be no slaves even though the Koran mentions them? That we need no kings? That the opinion of a drunkard or an idle beggar counts the same as a scholar? That speech must be free even when it goes against the faith? We listened to all that, and now we’re surprised that someone calls on a false Yoruba god?”
“Nonsense!” shouted Dawudu the weaver. “Abacar called on no false gods. He called us to do what the true God teaches. There’s nothing in the Koran that says a man has to own slaves, and since none have ever treated slaves as God intended, he’s right to say that no man can be trusted with them…”
“The slaves are free twelve years now,” said Mariam, who had been one. “That argument is over. What shall we do with the shehu, and the thatching?”
“Let us vote on it.”
“Vote on it!” Muhammadu’s voice mocked Dawudu as a true prophet might mock the false - or as a false prophet might mock the true. “Is everything a vote now? If I don’t favor voting, shall we vote on whether to vote?”
“Then we will discuss it and come to agreement, as we are commanded to do.”
“Are we commanded to sit up all night debating when we could be in bed, then?” Ibrahim asked. “It’s not enough to pray and keep the law anymore – now, to be holy, we must all act like sultans, and argue over whether our wars are just and our punishments are too harsh.”
“Are you saying, then,” said Mariam, “that God has no concern with such things?”
“He does, but he has given us rulers to take care of them. It was never our burden to debate them. If Umar Tall invades, we should fight him, not argue over whether he’s right.”
“People have always argued about these things – it’s just that no one ever listened before.”
“So I will listen,” Muhammadu said, spreading his hands wide. “What would you do with him? How about you, Atiku? The shehu made you as he did me. What would you do with your creator?”
“Drive him out,” Atiku answered.
“Truly? Drive him out? You, who are a worse apostate than he is?”
“We don’t need his superstition. True Islam is reason.”
“You will drive out nobody, either of you,” said Mariam.
“I’ll do it if I know I’m rightly guided,” said Muhammadu and Atiku at once.
“It seems we might not achieve ijma after all,” Ibrahim stated. “Shall we take our case to the headman as we used to do, and let him decide?”
“He’ll only leave you to fight,” came a voice from the door. We turned and saw the shehu, now walking with a cane, framed in the dying light.
“Stay out of our mosque!” Muhammadu cried, and threw a bound book at him. It seemed to hit, but the shehu gave no sign that he felt it. He stood where he was, and never flinched or moved.
“I have a crescent talisman,” he explained. “It was in one of the ears of millet, and a jinn enchanted it in the Malê way. You won’t harm me.”
“Was the jinn sent by your false god Olorun?”
“Who is Olorun? There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet. Surely you would know that, with you an imam. I don’t make mallams who are ignorant of who God is.”
“You see,” said Mariam, shifting her turban. “He utters no misbelief.”
“Until tomorrow, when some other madness is on him,” Muhammadu said. “But let us not cast him out, you say. Let us feast him, and offer him our daughters to marry.”
“Married, married, many times married,” said the shehu. “To a princess, to a jinn, to a queen among women.” He took from his neck the thong that held the talisman, and it had changed, the crescent shaping somehow into a warrior queen. Something about her image made it plain that she’d lived long in the past, and when the shehu regarded her form, his eyes were the eyes of memory.
“There is millet,” he said. “I will cook today’s harvest for the feast, and I will slaughter a lamb for my company. But I’ll do it in another place, because I’m not wanted here.”
His back was shadowed in the darkness for a moment, and he was gone. But the next morning, he was in the fields again, in a new set of clothes.
Nice update ! If only Indonesian classical Islamic fictions were like that....
Cuāuhtemōc
Banned
This is an extremely good update. I don't think I need to say more. Your writing is of an extremely high caliber. I would be lying if I wasn't a bit envious of it.
You should write novels.
You should write novels.
It's very good reading as a story; the preface on the author is a whole truckload of information, and in that context trying to figure out the allegorical meanings of the different opinions of the shehu's villagers is wonderfully perplexing!
I wouldn't have guessed that the "republican revolt" would be delayed as late as the 1950's for instance; that's almost OTL. The impression I have is that while nominal independence comes not much earlier than OTL, the nation that finally does establish its independence is much more developed than OTL Nigeria.
I wouldn't have guessed that the "republican revolt" would be delayed as late as the 1950's for instance; that's almost OTL. The impression I have is that while nominal independence comes not much earlier than OTL, the nation that finally does establish its independence is much more developed than OTL Nigeria.
Hey, The Girl from the Coast is pretty amazing.
That, and also a look at peasant Malê religion, the kind of Islamic-Yoruba syncretism that existed in Brazil and that some of them (primarily the less-educated and those who had settled on rural land-grant farms) still practiced in the Sokoto Republic at this point in the story. Black Muslims in OTL Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - there were still a few of them, albeit increasingly assimilated - were often regarded as sorcerers who could call on jinn and make magic talismans, and some of them made a living selling spells and charms.
And, of course, to throw in a few spoilers about what will happen later, in one of the nations that will pick up the torch after the First Sokoto Republic falls.
(Some other parts of the novel are more clearly an allegory of twentieth-century politics. Ultimately, the shehu leads a revolt against the village headman, and then leads another revolt against himself.)
That's a common essay topic for college students in this timeline, as Honório Yaji went to his grave without telling. One interpretation is that the shehu is Abacar, who didn't always intend the ideologies that grew from the seeds he "planted," and who "made" both the reactionaries and radicals. More commonly, though, both the shehu and the villagers are associated with twentieth-century figures and political movements, such as... well, that would be giving things away.
The republican revolt happens a considerable time after independence; Adamawa will initially become independent as a monarchy. Think, oh, Nepal, or what might have happened if the Nizam had managed to keep Hyderabad separate from the rest of India, although the presence of an indigenous democratic tradition means that these are only very rough analogies. That cancelled 1941 election has a lot to do with the independence movement, although it will take a few more years for things to shake out - full independence will come in the mid-to-late 40s.
And yes, the country is quite a bit more developed than OTL.
Well, since you're the second person to mention it...
I'm currently working on the second draft of one - not AH but a historical, set in my other favorite period and taking place in Crete and Egypt around 1620 BC. Anyone who might be interested in critiquing the first draft is welcome to drop me a line.And thanks to all for the praise, of course. I won't deny it's like fine wine.
Brig. Murtala Bello, A Military and Political History of the Malê Wars (Adamawa War College: Yola, 1979)
The war against El Hadj Umar Tall was anticlimactic in more ways than one.
The postwar judgment of many - including Tall himself, who never forgot the lesson - was that the Toucouleur emperor’s zeal outran his preparation. With Paulo Abacar dead and the Sokoto Republic descending into political chaos, here was a golden opportunity to crush the Malê heresy - and, with such a chance presenting itself, how could Tall not march? And so he did, without - he would admit later - making adequate preparation to counter Malê tactics or fully securing his alliances with Sokoto’s neighboring states.
Umar Tall had never fought the Malê, and while he knew of their field artillery and massed musket infantry, he’d never seen them in action. In his heart, he was still wedded to the traditional cavalry charges that had won the Sahel for the Fula in the preceding century and that had won him an empire in this one, and he believed that superior mobility, numbers and fanaticism would carry the day. He was all the more sure of that after winning the first engagement, shattering a Malê advance column that had established a strongpoint near the village of Niamey.
Flushed with victory, he pressed east toward Sokoto without waiting for the Hausa and Djerma infantry who had pledged to join him. When he caught up with the main Malê army near Dosso, the armies of only two Hausa cities were with him, and the force led by the exiled Gobir dynasts - who had joined the war in the hope of regaining the lands they lost when the Sokoto Caliphate was formed - was still several days away. And even worse news awaited him at Dosso itself: rather than opening the gates to him as expected and allowing him to fortify the city, its militia drove off his scouting column with a musket volley from the walls. Tall would soon learn the reason for this abrupt change of heart: Amilcar Said, the Malê general, had contracted a marriage with the local king’s sister, and had pledged tribute of muskets and cast iron.
The two armies joined battle the following day, May 11, 1851, and Tall found out what facing Malê combined-arms tactics actually entailed. Said was at least as good a tactician as the more mercurial Abacar and, if anything, was better at logistics and coordination. He fought a textbook engagement, using field guns to break up the Toucouleur cavalry formations, sending his own cavalry out as skirmishers to prevent flanking maneuvers and drive the enemy onto the infantry squares, and ultimately catching the bulk of Tall’s force between the cavalry hammer and the infantry anvil. Tall saw the trap in time and fought his way clear, but was forced to fall back on the Niger and regroup.
Said was now able to turn his attention to the advancing Gobir army, which he engaged and routed three days later on the Birni Nkoni road. With the enemy defeated in detail, he advanced on Niamey, hoping to prevent Tall from fortifying himself there during the rains.
The second engagement, which began on May 27, was a nearer-run thing. The Toucouleur had spent much of the preceding two weeks digging themselves in, and had been joined by the armies of two Hausa city-states, although many more had turned and headed for home after the loss at Dosso. The first battle had also taught Umar Tall some caution: he fought defensively from his strongpoints rather than trying to break the Sokoto army with an all-or-nothing cavalry charge, using cavalry sorties mainly to frustrate the deployment of the field guns. The battle quickly developed into positional fighting interspersed with probing raids, as Said attempted to place his artillery and reduce the strongpoints one at a time.
The fighting at Niamey lasted six days, with Said’s army slowly advancing on the Toucouleur-held positions. It seemed likely that the final conclusion would favor the Malê, but that conclusion never happened; on June 3, Tall received word that several of the Bambara subject kingdoms had revolted in his absence, and hastily evacuated Niamey in order to prevent his empire from falling apart. He intended to return his attention to Sokoto as soon as he had dealt with the threat at home, but he never would.
Said returned to Sokoto having won a substantial tactical victory - but when he got there, he found that he had made a strategic mistake. Like most of Sokoto’s officer corps, he had considered Umar Tall’s alliance the greater of the two threats the Republic was facing, so he had led the main field army to meet it while sending a smaller force to face the invasion from Adamawa. But the Adamawa army was not the same one that the Malê had defeated ten years earlier. Unlike Tall, the emir of Adamawa had fought Sokoto, and had adapted his own tactics and weaponry to match the Republic’s; by 1850, Yola had its own nascent military industries, the bulk of the army consisted of musket-armed infantry battalions, and the emir had hired Egyptian officers to train his artillerists.
Sokoto’s army was still more modern than Adamawa’s - especially its rifle-armed skirmishers, who had no equivalent in the emir’s forces - and the emirate's adaptations did not yet include the use of Spanish guerrilla tactics. The Malê also had the advantage of experience in using its updated weaponry. Much of the gap had been closed, however - and, fatally, Said underestimated Adamawa almost as much as Umar Tall had underestimated him.
And so the war in the east was disastrous for Sokoto, who faced a numerically superior foe and whose massed infantry was much less advantageous against an artillery-equipped army than against cavalry alone. The emir of Adamawa, who was leading his forces personally, pushed the defenders back from the headwaters of the Sokoto River in the first engagements of the war. Resistance became stiffer as the defending force fell back through the hill country, choosing its defensive ground and deploying guerrillas to harass the Adamawa supply lines, but by the onset of the rains, the invaders had pushed to within sixty miles of Sokoto city.
Throughout the summer, Amilcar Said made feverish plans to meet the Adamawa army in battle, but also sent emissaries to the emir’s camp in the hope of reaching a political settlement. Like his predecessor, Said was willing to fight but preferred to negotiate; if anything, his preference for diplomacy was stronger, since he lacked Abacar’s popular legitimacy and had an incentive to conserve his army as the guarantor of his rule. He was also facing both radical and reactionary agitation at home, the latter grown all the stronger now that it was clear that Umar Tall wouldn’t be the reactionary imamate’s savior. He needed to be in a position to devote his full attention to Sokoto, and also to consolidate his patronage of Dosso, which was now bound to him by ties of personal loyalty that were more reliable than the fractious cities of the eastern Republic.
As things turned out, the emir also wanted to negotiate. He had beaten three regiments of the Republic’s army, but knew that facing its entire defensive force - as he would have to do if the war began again after the rains - was a different matter. He had also left several walled cities in his wake as he pursued the defenders through the hill country, and was in danger of being cut off if rebellion broke out behind the lines. And for a state that was still consolidating the gains it had made in 1841, biting off too much of the Republic would be a massive overextension even if he could keep it.
With the diplomatic weather so fair, a rough accord was worked out by the time the rains ceased, and the final treaty was signed soon after. The invaders would withdraw to a rough north-south line running through Kaura Yamoda and Gusau and following the Sokoto River from there, which they would guarantee as the Republic’s border. Also, Ahmad bin Atiku would renounce, both for himself and for his family, any claim to the throne of Sokoto. Both the emir and bin Atiku promised that the border would remain open to merchant caravans, itinerant peddlers and members of the jaji teachers’ corps. In exchange, the area between the new border and Adamawa - including the former city-states of Kano, Zaria and Kaduna - would be created as the Sultanate of Zamfara, of which Ahmad would be sultan.
By November, the armies had stood down, and both president and emir turned their attention homeward…
Yakubu Mahmud, “From Nothing to Nowhere: The Zamfara Sultanate in the 1850s,” African History Quarterly 56:339-60 (Autumn 2002)
… The Sultanate of Zamfara came out of a bargain between two men, each of whom had an interest in it being weak. The Emir of Adamawa, Lawalu bin Adama, wanted a country he could rule indirectly, with a sultan who would be dependent on him for support. The then-President of the Sokoto Republic wanted a large weak state between Sokoto and Adamawa to occupy the emir’s attention and serve as a buffer against invasion. The sultan himself would most likely have preferred a strong state, but he had little say in the matter.
The end result was that the sultan was granted direct rule only over those areas that had actually been occupied by the Adamawa army during the war. The parts of the sultanate which hadn’t been conquered would maintain their own governments, with an obligation to pay an annual tribute and contribute troops to the sultan’s army. In this way, Emir Lawalu fulfilled the promise he had made to the cities of Kano, Zaria and Kaduna in exchange for their neutrality, and President Said ensured that the cities which remained loyal or at least friendly to Sokoto would have considerable freedom of action.
The sultan was not without a base of power, as he ruled much of Zamfara’s agricultural land and the Fodio family still commanded the loyalty of many Fulani clansmen. However, he didn’t directly control any major cities: in fact, when he moved his court to his new domain in late 1852, he had to found a new town, Zamfara City, as his capital. He had to deal with the other cities - many of which had substantial militias and several of which had liberal, albeit oligarchic, governments - as only slightly less than equals.
And then, of course, there was Gusau. In 1840, when Paulo Abacar had proclaimed emancipation in Sokoto, the slaves of Gusau had revolted and had linked up with the Malê armies during the war of 1840-41. Although the ex-slaves were unable to maintain exclusive control and had to share power with other local notables, pre-existing authority and legitimacy structures had been destroyed by the end of the war. As a result, politics in Gusau was more of a bare-knuckle affair than elsewhere in the Republic, with fewer unwritten rules, and extremism of both the radical and reactionary kind was stronger than in other cities.
In late 1850, during the interval of dysfunctional cabinet government that followed Abacar’s death, the radical faction - a minority, but a well-organized one - seized control of the city. These radicals were inspired by Abacarist ideas, but their ideology went much further; rather than reforming their society to be more respectful of individual liberties, their aim was to create an entirely new one. In some ways, their policies were progressive: radical Gusau was the first state in the region to explicitly recognize the rights of women (the Sokoto Republic, while promoting the education of women and opening new fields of employment to them, never enshrined the changes to their status in law) and it created a uniform penal code and criminal court system to replace the patchwork of jurisprudence that had existed under the old regime. The French-inspired Declaration of Liberties issued in May 1851 would also, in later years, be regarded as a model constitutional document.
In most respects, however, the Gusau radicals ruled with a repressiveness that belied their nominal commitment to freedom and participatory government. The new regime ruthlessly purged anyone associated with the old civil-religious hierarchies and, defining political opposition as treason, executed or drove out many of their factional opponents. Also, in a significant break with the policy of the Sokoto Republic, the Gusau state involved itself in the practice, rather than merely the philosophy, of religion. The radical government ruthlessly stamped out folk-religious practices as relics of ignorance - in this, at least, finding common cause with the reactionaries - and also nationalized the mosques and religious schools, reserving to itself the right to appoint imams and teachers. In August 1851, the government decreed a new prayer - the Appeal for Liberty - to be performed after the required raka’at of each daily prayer was completed. These measures accelerated the exodus from the city, which was only partly offset by radical immigration from elsewhere in the region, and by the beginning of 1852, the radical state suffered from both labor and fiscal shortages.
Had the Sokoto-Adamawa war not happened, or had it ended differently, the Republic would no doubt have put down the radical rebellion in Gusau before things reached this pass. As matters stood, however, the Republic was entering its final days, its attention was directed elsewhere, and the redrawn borders made Gusau the Zamfara Sultanate’s problem. The question now was whether Ahmad bin Atiku would or could subdue Gusau before the rebellious state either reformed or collapsed of its own weight, and any of these options would lead the region further into uncharted territory…
The war against El Hadj Umar Tall was anticlimactic in more ways than one.
The postwar judgment of many - including Tall himself, who never forgot the lesson - was that the Toucouleur emperor’s zeal outran his preparation. With Paulo Abacar dead and the Sokoto Republic descending into political chaos, here was a golden opportunity to crush the Malê heresy - and, with such a chance presenting itself, how could Tall not march? And so he did, without - he would admit later - making adequate preparation to counter Malê tactics or fully securing his alliances with Sokoto’s neighboring states.
Umar Tall had never fought the Malê, and while he knew of their field artillery and massed musket infantry, he’d never seen them in action. In his heart, he was still wedded to the traditional cavalry charges that had won the Sahel for the Fula in the preceding century and that had won him an empire in this one, and he believed that superior mobility, numbers and fanaticism would carry the day. He was all the more sure of that after winning the first engagement, shattering a Malê advance column that had established a strongpoint near the village of Niamey.
Flushed with victory, he pressed east toward Sokoto without waiting for the Hausa and Djerma infantry who had pledged to join him. When he caught up with the main Malê army near Dosso, the armies of only two Hausa cities were with him, and the force led by the exiled Gobir dynasts - who had joined the war in the hope of regaining the lands they lost when the Sokoto Caliphate was formed - was still several days away. And even worse news awaited him at Dosso itself: rather than opening the gates to him as expected and allowing him to fortify the city, its militia drove off his scouting column with a musket volley from the walls. Tall would soon learn the reason for this abrupt change of heart: Amilcar Said, the Malê general, had contracted a marriage with the local king’s sister, and had pledged tribute of muskets and cast iron.
The two armies joined battle the following day, May 11, 1851, and Tall found out what facing Malê combined-arms tactics actually entailed. Said was at least as good a tactician as the more mercurial Abacar and, if anything, was better at logistics and coordination. He fought a textbook engagement, using field guns to break up the Toucouleur cavalry formations, sending his own cavalry out as skirmishers to prevent flanking maneuvers and drive the enemy onto the infantry squares, and ultimately catching the bulk of Tall’s force between the cavalry hammer and the infantry anvil. Tall saw the trap in time and fought his way clear, but was forced to fall back on the Niger and regroup.
Said was now able to turn his attention to the advancing Gobir army, which he engaged and routed three days later on the Birni Nkoni road. With the enemy defeated in detail, he advanced on Niamey, hoping to prevent Tall from fortifying himself there during the rains.
The second engagement, which began on May 27, was a nearer-run thing. The Toucouleur had spent much of the preceding two weeks digging themselves in, and had been joined by the armies of two Hausa city-states, although many more had turned and headed for home after the loss at Dosso. The first battle had also taught Umar Tall some caution: he fought defensively from his strongpoints rather than trying to break the Sokoto army with an all-or-nothing cavalry charge, using cavalry sorties mainly to frustrate the deployment of the field guns. The battle quickly developed into positional fighting interspersed with probing raids, as Said attempted to place his artillery and reduce the strongpoints one at a time.
The fighting at Niamey lasted six days, with Said’s army slowly advancing on the Toucouleur-held positions. It seemed likely that the final conclusion would favor the Malê, but that conclusion never happened; on June 3, Tall received word that several of the Bambara subject kingdoms had revolted in his absence, and hastily evacuated Niamey in order to prevent his empire from falling apart. He intended to return his attention to Sokoto as soon as he had dealt with the threat at home, but he never would.
Said returned to Sokoto having won a substantial tactical victory - but when he got there, he found that he had made a strategic mistake. Like most of Sokoto’s officer corps, he had considered Umar Tall’s alliance the greater of the two threats the Republic was facing, so he had led the main field army to meet it while sending a smaller force to face the invasion from Adamawa. But the Adamawa army was not the same one that the Malê had defeated ten years earlier. Unlike Tall, the emir of Adamawa had fought Sokoto, and had adapted his own tactics and weaponry to match the Republic’s; by 1850, Yola had its own nascent military industries, the bulk of the army consisted of musket-armed infantry battalions, and the emir had hired Egyptian officers to train his artillerists.
Sokoto’s army was still more modern than Adamawa’s - especially its rifle-armed skirmishers, who had no equivalent in the emir’s forces - and the emirate's adaptations did not yet include the use of Spanish guerrilla tactics. The Malê also had the advantage of experience in using its updated weaponry. Much of the gap had been closed, however - and, fatally, Said underestimated Adamawa almost as much as Umar Tall had underestimated him.
And so the war in the east was disastrous for Sokoto, who faced a numerically superior foe and whose massed infantry was much less advantageous against an artillery-equipped army than against cavalry alone. The emir of Adamawa, who was leading his forces personally, pushed the defenders back from the headwaters of the Sokoto River in the first engagements of the war. Resistance became stiffer as the defending force fell back through the hill country, choosing its defensive ground and deploying guerrillas to harass the Adamawa supply lines, but by the onset of the rains, the invaders had pushed to within sixty miles of Sokoto city.
Throughout the summer, Amilcar Said made feverish plans to meet the Adamawa army in battle, but also sent emissaries to the emir’s camp in the hope of reaching a political settlement. Like his predecessor, Said was willing to fight but preferred to negotiate; if anything, his preference for diplomacy was stronger, since he lacked Abacar’s popular legitimacy and had an incentive to conserve his army as the guarantor of his rule. He was also facing both radical and reactionary agitation at home, the latter grown all the stronger now that it was clear that Umar Tall wouldn’t be the reactionary imamate’s savior. He needed to be in a position to devote his full attention to Sokoto, and also to consolidate his patronage of Dosso, which was now bound to him by ties of personal loyalty that were more reliable than the fractious cities of the eastern Republic.
As things turned out, the emir also wanted to negotiate. He had beaten three regiments of the Republic’s army, but knew that facing its entire defensive force - as he would have to do if the war began again after the rains - was a different matter. He had also left several walled cities in his wake as he pursued the defenders through the hill country, and was in danger of being cut off if rebellion broke out behind the lines. And for a state that was still consolidating the gains it had made in 1841, biting off too much of the Republic would be a massive overextension even if he could keep it.
With the diplomatic weather so fair, a rough accord was worked out by the time the rains ceased, and the final treaty was signed soon after. The invaders would withdraw to a rough north-south line running through Kaura Yamoda and Gusau and following the Sokoto River from there, which they would guarantee as the Republic’s border. Also, Ahmad bin Atiku would renounce, both for himself and for his family, any claim to the throne of Sokoto. Both the emir and bin Atiku promised that the border would remain open to merchant caravans, itinerant peddlers and members of the jaji teachers’ corps. In exchange, the area between the new border and Adamawa - including the former city-states of Kano, Zaria and Kaduna - would be created as the Sultanate of Zamfara, of which Ahmad would be sultan.
By November, the armies had stood down, and both president and emir turned their attention homeward…
*******
Yakubu Mahmud, “From Nothing to Nowhere: The Zamfara Sultanate in the 1850s,” African History Quarterly 56:339-60 (Autumn 2002)
… The Sultanate of Zamfara came out of a bargain between two men, each of whom had an interest in it being weak. The Emir of Adamawa, Lawalu bin Adama, wanted a country he could rule indirectly, with a sultan who would be dependent on him for support. The then-President of the Sokoto Republic wanted a large weak state between Sokoto and Adamawa to occupy the emir’s attention and serve as a buffer against invasion. The sultan himself would most likely have preferred a strong state, but he had little say in the matter.
The end result was that the sultan was granted direct rule only over those areas that had actually been occupied by the Adamawa army during the war. The parts of the sultanate which hadn’t been conquered would maintain their own governments, with an obligation to pay an annual tribute and contribute troops to the sultan’s army. In this way, Emir Lawalu fulfilled the promise he had made to the cities of Kano, Zaria and Kaduna in exchange for their neutrality, and President Said ensured that the cities which remained loyal or at least friendly to Sokoto would have considerable freedom of action.
The sultan was not without a base of power, as he ruled much of Zamfara’s agricultural land and the Fodio family still commanded the loyalty of many Fulani clansmen. However, he didn’t directly control any major cities: in fact, when he moved his court to his new domain in late 1852, he had to found a new town, Zamfara City, as his capital. He had to deal with the other cities - many of which had substantial militias and several of which had liberal, albeit oligarchic, governments - as only slightly less than equals.
And then, of course, there was Gusau. In 1840, when Paulo Abacar had proclaimed emancipation in Sokoto, the slaves of Gusau had revolted and had linked up with the Malê armies during the war of 1840-41. Although the ex-slaves were unable to maintain exclusive control and had to share power with other local notables, pre-existing authority and legitimacy structures had been destroyed by the end of the war. As a result, politics in Gusau was more of a bare-knuckle affair than elsewhere in the Republic, with fewer unwritten rules, and extremism of both the radical and reactionary kind was stronger than in other cities.
In late 1850, during the interval of dysfunctional cabinet government that followed Abacar’s death, the radical faction - a minority, but a well-organized one - seized control of the city. These radicals were inspired by Abacarist ideas, but their ideology went much further; rather than reforming their society to be more respectful of individual liberties, their aim was to create an entirely new one. In some ways, their policies were progressive: radical Gusau was the first state in the region to explicitly recognize the rights of women (the Sokoto Republic, while promoting the education of women and opening new fields of employment to them, never enshrined the changes to their status in law) and it created a uniform penal code and criminal court system to replace the patchwork of jurisprudence that had existed under the old regime. The French-inspired Declaration of Liberties issued in May 1851 would also, in later years, be regarded as a model constitutional document.
In most respects, however, the Gusau radicals ruled with a repressiveness that belied their nominal commitment to freedom and participatory government. The new regime ruthlessly purged anyone associated with the old civil-religious hierarchies and, defining political opposition as treason, executed or drove out many of their factional opponents. Also, in a significant break with the policy of the Sokoto Republic, the Gusau state involved itself in the practice, rather than merely the philosophy, of religion. The radical government ruthlessly stamped out folk-religious practices as relics of ignorance - in this, at least, finding common cause with the reactionaries - and also nationalized the mosques and religious schools, reserving to itself the right to appoint imams and teachers. In August 1851, the government decreed a new prayer - the Appeal for Liberty - to be performed after the required raka’at of each daily prayer was completed. These measures accelerated the exodus from the city, which was only partly offset by radical immigration from elsewhere in the region, and by the beginning of 1852, the radical state suffered from both labor and fiscal shortages.
Had the Sokoto-Adamawa war not happened, or had it ended differently, the Republic would no doubt have put down the radical rebellion in Gusau before things reached this pass. As matters stood, however, the Republic was entering its final days, its attention was directed elsewhere, and the redrawn borders made Gusau the Zamfara Sultanate’s problem. The question now was whether Ahmad bin Atiku would or could subdue Gusau before the rebellious state either reformed or collapsed of its own weight, and any of these options would lead the region further into uncharted territory…
Fascinating update. It's sad to hear of the Republic's final days, but I'm eager to see where you take West Africa from here.
At this point, as the Sokoto start to bow to their internal pressures, I'm still not at all sure of which external power will try to seize their mantle. Perhaps the British? The French? You vaguely hinted that Umar Tall will try to invade again, and be repulsed again.
In any case, great work.
Cheers,
Ganesha
At this point, as the Sokoto start to bow to their internal pressures, I'm still not at all sure of which external power will try to seize their mantle. Perhaps the British? The French? You vaguely hinted that Umar Tall will try to invade again, and be repulsed again.
In any case, great work.
Cheers,
Ganesha
Kaiphranos
Donor
Hmm. What with the two simultaneous invasions at opposite ends of the country, for a moment Sokoto's situation reminded me of the end of Anglo-Saxon England, with General Said cast as Harold Godwinson--I was half-expecting the Adamawans to do him in. But it looks like Sokoto has staved off collapse for a little longer...
In any case, interesting stuff! I look forward to further developments.
In any case, interesting stuff! I look forward to further developments.
Hmm. I'm starting to think Said will crown himself or Abacar's son as Sultan, abolishing the Sokoto Republic and creating a much-diminished Sultanate. Given Said's original position as a minister in Abacar's cabinet, I'm leaning towards crowning Abacar's son in an effort to get some of the conservatives on-side while keeping most of the power for himself.
wolf_brother
Banned
Wouldn't the Abacarist actually be the radical-progressives, not conservatives?
To Jonathan Edelstein; its interesting that you state that Adamawa had Egyptian officers train her forces, as there is quite the considerable distance between Sokoto and Egypt. I was unaware that the Khedivate had such considerable influence so far away from its core.
I figured that Said would become more used to power as time goes on, and seeks to cement his rule in the traditional way for the region. He could even claim inspiration from the first Napoleon, and later Napoleon III, which might help given how much the Abacarist ideology draws from the French example.
Basically, the Republic has to end one way or another, and given how things stand, this is the best way to end it while still preserving a Sokoto nationalism.
Regarding the officers; I can't answer for Jonathan Edelstein, but I imagine that there's a big difference between substantial influence and hiring a few officers. A few artillery and infantry officers might not be missed in Egypt, and they will go a considerable distance in the Sahel. If the Sultan of Adamawa can pay better than the Egyptians, it might not be that hard to attract a few veterans to the Sahel.
Kaiphranos
Donor
Remember Adamawa is east of Sokoto, so they're a little bit closer. Overall, I suspect that even at that distance, Egypt is still the closest source of experienced infantry officers; I seem to recall Muhammad Ali and his successors did a fair bit of modernizing the Egyptian military to fight the Ottomans a few decades earlier, creating a pool of veterans for Adamawa to hire from...
Umar Tall won't be back. He'll spend a few years consolidating his empire, and then find another enemy - and the encounter with the Malê will give him a much better appreciation of what fighting that enemy will entail.
Several countries will pick up Sokoto's mantle, each taking a different part of it. Sokoto itself will be one of them - it won't cease to exist, it will just cease to be a republic for the time being.
Very, very warm. It won't be Abacar's son, though - as wolf_brother says, he isn't part of Said's faction, and he has another role to play.
Many of these questions will be answered in the next update (most likely two at once), which will cover the fall of the First Republic and bring the first story arc to a close.
Pretty much what kaiphranos said. These aren't serving Egyptian officers - they're retired officers who the emir hired. Egypt didn't have a great deal of influence over this region, but there was some contact through trade and diplomacy, and it would be the closest place for Adamawa to find field-artillery and infantry instructors. Their presence might increase Egyptian influence in Adamawa in the future, or then again it might not - after all, they're technical specialists rather than general military advisors, and as you say, Egypt is too far away (and will be, more than likely, too preoccupied with other matters) to project any meaningful amount of force.
As I'm currently envisioning it, French West Africa will be "Greater Senegal" plus Côte d'Ivoire - basically an inland extension of where they had a pre-1840 coastal presence, but nowhere near as far inland as they got in OTL. They certainly won't get OTL Niger or Chad. On the other hand, their Central African empire will be somewhat larger than OTL.