State and Ethnicity in Precolonial Northern Nigeria

Abstract

Despite scholarly assertions to the contrary, the dramatic increase in the scale and intensity of migration in Africa, since the fifteenth century, has made the formation of ethnically constituted states the exception rather than the rule. This paper traces the origin and development of the multi-ethnic state of Katsina, which is in the area that was to become northern Nigeria. It maintains that territorial identification was more salient than ethnicity in the precolonial period. It goes on to show that even the nineteenth-century jihad, which incorporated Katsina and the other Hausa states into the Sokoto Caliphate, and which has often been portrayed as a religious or ethnic movement, did not significantly increase the salience of ethnic identification in the area. The Sokoto Caliphate was more politically fragmented than the various Hausa states which preceded it. Consequently, though the Caliphate created a Fulani aristocracy, and replaced the ideological underpinnings of the independent Hausa states with an Islamic superstructure, it nevertheless, remained an ethnically heterogeneous polity in which territorial identification superseded any sense of being Hausa-Fulani.