Ahmadu Odubogun, Faith and Ferment: Sahel and Sudan in the Nineteenth Century (Ibadan Univ. Press, 2005)
… The British government ratified the Abacar-Alexander Agreement in June 1842, although the subsidy that Captain Alexander had envisioned was drastically cut down. By the end of the year, the first installment of British aid reached Sokoto.
Although the subsidy barely amounted to a rounding error in the British budget, it had an immediate effect on the finances of the Republic’s government. Despite the growing foundry sector, Sokoto’s economy was still essentially preindustrial and the governmental bureaucracy was not extensive. The financial situation was remained difficult, because the inherited tax system depended largely on tribute rather than direct taxation and there was no effective way to keep local headmen and councils from siphoning much of the revenue for themselves, but the Republic was at least temporarily on a paying basis.
Abacar’s government used the breathing spell to good advantage. During 1843, the integration of the Malê into the local economy was completed through use of land grants, foundry shares, business grants and subsidized marriages into merchant and craftsman families. The Republic also embarked upon the construction of military roads and an expansion of the education system.
The last of these was perhaps the most profound social process to emerge from the early Republic. In larger cities, the state sponsored the construction of primary schools and subsidized Islamic teachers, but lacked the resources to do so in smaller towns and villages. Instead, it made increasing use of the jajis, the corps of itinerant women teachers created by the Nana Asma’u to educate and Islamize village women. The jaji corps’ mission was expanded from religious to secular education, and the teachers - many of whom had previously been illiterate - were taught basic literacy and numeracy and instructed to pass on these skills to the villagers’ children.
A side effect of the jajis’ activities was the increasing adoption of the Roman alphabet. The Roman letters were easier to learn and, for women and working-class children who were not expected to become Koranic scholars, more practical. In some parts of Islamic West Africa, the Roman alphabet is still known as “women’s writing,” although by the end of the 1840s, as contact with the British empire increased, it was also widely used in business.
And business had become an increasingly central part of the Republic’s economy. The military roads and the rivers of the Niger basin facilitated commerce, and the foundries turned out cheap cast-iron pots, tools, knives and farm equipment that was in great demand throughout the region. The Sokoto economy had always been founded on local trade and subsistence production, but long-distance trade now became important; by 1845, Sokoto goods were found in Lagos and Tomboctou, and fine Yoruba woodwork and other crafts were seen in the Republic’s markets.
The mid-1840s also saw governmental and religious consolidation. The government of this time was an odd hybrid of republican and autocratic forms; a representative council existed and all citizens had the right to speak at legislative debates, but most of the councilors were unelected and it was understood that Paulo Abacar retained the final say over both council and populace. Abacar himself, emulating Usman dan Fodio, held no titles and did not fit comfortably into the emerging constitutional system, occupying the keystone position by virtue of personal right and holding powers that were largely undefined by law. The Republic was not a democracy in any sense that we would recognize today.
Nevertheless, Abacar rarely made any direct intervention in the council’s work, and a number of initiatives were withdrawn due to popular opposition expressed on the assembly-field. The town, city and sectorial representatives also acted as ambassadors from their constituency to the central government, and were often successful in securing favorable political and economic concessions. While not democratic, the Republic’s political system was one in which, at least for the time being, most people felt that they were represented and that their voices were heard.
Religiously, 1844 was the year in which Abacar completed his tract Hurriya (Freedom), which articulated human freedom, and individual and social rights, as fundamental Islamic values. By this time, Abacar was well schooled in jurisprudence and had the aid of several influential teachers in composing this tract, and so it proved a considerable work of scholarship. Hurriya also contained substantial discussion of secular history and politics, which the author related to Islamic principles; while Abacar did not explicitly claim divine authorship for constitutional documents such as the Rights of Man, he made clear his belief that their authors were inspired.
Such a work could hardly be anything other than controversial. Many imams in Sokoto and elsewhere had long denounced Abacar’s notions, and now that the theology behind these ideas had solidified, they fiercely attacked its underpinnings. Those who equated the social order with the divine order were particularly incensed at a philosophy which, they believed, encouraged slaves to rebel against masters, women against men, commoners against kings, and ultimately humans against God. The intensity with which these rival doctrines were held, added to the undercurrent of unrest in the countryside and towns.
The Republic also faced other daunting challenges. The Abacar-Alexander pact required it to use its best efforts to suppress slave raiding and transshipment by middleman kingdoms in the interior. It was largely successful in doing so along its borders, and this success, combined with Britain taking possession of Lagos as a local base and staging area for contact with the Republic, resulted in a drastic fall-off of slave shipments from the eastern coastal areas. Dahomey and the other middleman states to the west remained out of reach, though, and of more immediate importance, slave-trade suppression required a considerable commitment of the Republic’s military. When this was combined with the need to garrison the constituent cities and guard against raids and foreign invasion, the army’s resources were increasingly overstretched.
The benefits of economic growth, too, were uneven. Many local craftsmen, especially in the capital, were able to integrate into the nascent industries - some involuntarily, as the government sometimes paid for their work in foundry shares - and others, particularly in Katsina and Ilorin, pooled their resources to start their own foundries. Still others, however, were crowded out by cheaper foundry-produced goods. Also, many of those who had initially received foundry shares had sold them for immediate cash rather than viewing them as an investment, and their equity was bought up by a growing class of industrial barons. The government sought to mitigate these effects by distributing zakat through the mosques and Islamic schools, but the displaced made their grievances known more and more often on the assembly-field.
Matters came to a head in late 1844, when the finance minister initiated a proposal for direct taxation. This plan had the support of the businessmen, who saw it as an opportunity to distribute the tax burden more fairly, as well as the army and many of the Islamic schools, who would benefit from the increased revenue. The displaced class - which was too poor to pay much in taxes, and hoped that better-funded public works would provide them with jobs - was also largely in favor. But the city oligarchies - believing correctly that the plan would reduce their personal revenue and that the bureaucracy necessary to implement and collect the taxes would cut into their autonomy - were opposed, and they dominated the council.
The plan was clearly popular on the assembly-field, and citizens turned out during the debates to support it. But with most of the municipal representatives in opposition, it failed by two votes when the question was called. The dry tinder had been laid, and Abacar proceeded to ignite it by declaring that, notwithstanding the council vote, he would implement the finance minister’s program.
Within days, several provincial cities had declared rebellion, and rioting erupted on the streets of Sokoto itself, fanned by dissident clerics. Several days of pitched battles ensued between Abacar’s followers and those of the rival schools, with the latter often targeting the foundries as the source of unrest and evil. The army had to be called out to protect the military industries from destruction, and by the time the dust cleared, almost a hundred people were dead.
This also meant that much of the army had to remain in the capital when Abacar took the field to put down the rebellions. He was fortunate in that many cities, particularly those where the merchants and foundry-owners were strongest, remained loyal, and even more so in that the rebellious towns were unable to form a united front. By the time the 1845 rains put an end to the campaign season, only Kontagora and Gwandu remained in rebellion, and both would surrender on terms the following year. But the fabric of the state had been strained, and the enforced centralization that Abacar would implement in the wake of the revolt would strain it even further…
… The Republic’s neighbors were hardly at a standstill while all this was going on. The region’s rulers had kept a close eye on the Malê wars and had taken note of their weapons and tactics; by the mid-1840s, all who could do so were reforming their own military forces and tactics and combining massed musket infantry with traditional cavalry. Field artillery was also in demand, and although the Republic refused to sell any, a few of the neighboring monarchs were able to acquire field-pieces from other sources or to learn, through bribery and espionage, how they were made.
State formation and disintegration proceeded apace. In the Yoruba heartland, which was still shaken by the collapse of the Oyo Empire in 1836, every city had asserted its independence; although the remnant of the Oyo army had established themselves at Ibadan, few if any other towns acknowledged its sovereignty. There was some discussion of the need for unity in light of the British seizure of Lagos and the increasing pressure being put on the Niger Delta kingdoms, but thus far, this had come to nothing. In contrast, the turmoil in the Sokoto Caliphate had accelerated the process of reactive state formation along its borders, such as the Jukun-dominated Wukari proto-state to the south of Adamawa.
Most striking, however, was the travel of ideas, many of them originating from Sokoto, which had become the center of intellectual ferment. In some neighboring states, such as Adamawa and the three buffer cities, the influence of Sokoto was direct; Nana Asma’u’s jajis were allowed by treaty to operate there, and brought with them basic literacy and Abacar’s theology. The rulers of these countries allowed them to function, reasoning that they would benefit from having their women and children educated at someone else’s expense; they were not yet sensitized to the potential of such education to spark social change.
Elsewhere, such as the western Fulani kingdoms of Masina and Futa Jallon, ideas spread through diffusion, brought by the Niger River merchants and sometimes by exiled scholars. Here, the notions that took hold were primarily, albeit not universally, those of the Sokoto dissidents who held Abacar’s reforms to be sacrilegious and heretical. El-Hadj Umar Tall, a rising scholar and chieftain in Futa Jallon - and one who, like Abacar, had married a granddaughter of Usman dan Fodio - was a particularly strong exponent of such views. Ironically, in the name of defending Fodio’s reforms, he would adopt a radically reactionary theology that the Sokoto shehu would likely not have recognized.
Possibly the most intriguing developments, however, took place in Bornu, the Sahelian empire lying to the north and east of Adamawa. Bornu was a much older state than the Fulani kingdoms: as the inheritor of the Kanem empire, its roots dated back at least to the ninth century, and it had been Islamized since the eleventh. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was in decline, having lost ground to the Fulani jihads in the west, the richer and better-armed Ouaddai empire to the east, and restive provincial rulers in the center. During the early part of the century, Fodio’s army briefly took the capital, and his forces were only repelled through the efforts of another charismatic teacher, Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi. Although al-Kanemi didn’t overthrow the traditional king - the mai - he became the de facto ruler of the country, and also carried on a public debate with Fodio in which he argued that Muslim armies should not wage jihad against other Muslims.
By the time of al-Kanemi’s death in 1837, Bornu had regained a measure of stability, but this was quickly lost under his son Umar, a weak ruler who was opposed by the mai and by the powerful local governors. This was the country into which the last Sultan of Sokoto, the deposed Ali bin Bello, fled after the peace of 1841. He would adopt many of al-Kanemi’s positions on the limits of religious warfare and, in fact, would preach a radical withdrawal of religious teachers from politics.
Bello, disillusioned by the fate of the Sultanate and the tendency of jihads to succumb to factional fighting, retreated into the Qadiriyya Sufi disciplines of which his grandfather had been a great teacher. He embraced the Qadiriyya principle that religious thought must be free, but unlike Abacar, declined to apply this to political thought. Instead, he argued that because political thought is inherently unfree, religious study must be freed from political concerns and must focus on pure conceptions of ontology and ethics.
He did not preach true monasticism, which is forbidden in Islam, but he argued for something close to it: autonomous, self-sustaining communities of married couples who would spend most of their time in study and prayer, and to whom neighboring people could come for spiritual guidance. In the chaos that was Bornu in the 1840s, the idea of such peaceful scholarly communities proved attractive to many people.
In 1846, the last mai sought to oust Umar bin Muhammad al-Amin from power with the aid of Ouaddai. His attempt was unsuccessful, and Umar became sultan, but during the course of the war, Bello was forced to flee to Mecca. In the meantime, however, several religious communities had been founded along the lines he advocated, and in the course of his fifteen-year stay in Mecca, he would preach his doctrines there…