Colonial Northern Nigeria Research Articles

Debating Diya: Indirect Rule and the Transformation of Islamic Law in British Colonial Northern Nigeria

Abstract For all of British Colonial Indirect Rule’s avowed deference to Islamic law and institutions in Northern Nigeria, it radically transformed them. Of the most overt areas in which this occurred was the colonial state’s elimination of diya, the payment of compensation for unlawful killing. Justified by the colonial state on the basis of good order, the abolition of diya was the product of a debate over who had the prerogative to respond to crimes directed at the person: the aggrieved individual or the state. Prominent Muslim jurists argued in favor of the former, citing source texts and the precolonial practice that gave life to those textual prescriptions. On the other hand, colonial administrators insisted that the response to crimes against the person was the state’s prerogative and that interpersonal resolution of such matters challenged imperial authority, the protection of which was not without basis in Islamic law. At the same time, the peculiar design of Northern Nigerian indirect rule meant that statutory, and therefore, unequivocal elimination of diya, remained elusive—at least until the eve of independence. This article traces the contours of the debate over the fate of diya as a lens through which one may apprehend the impact of colonial indirect rule on Islamic law, particularly criminal law, in Northern Nigeria. The demise of diya illuminates colonial indirect rule for what it was: a “constitutional trick” that paid lip service to Islamic law and institutions while radically transforming their essence and, eventually, eliminating them. Ultimately, however, that the means through which the demise of diya was brought about—the reconfiguration of the precolonial constitutional balance between political and juristic authorities—is, at least, as significant as the demise of diya itself. Indeed, that constitutional transformation has endured, surviving colonialism and finding expression in nascent attempts to reinstate Islamic law in the postcolonial state.

What happened to the workshop of West Africa? Resilience and decline of handicraft textiles in colonial northern Nigeria, 1911–52

AbstractThe Sokoto Caliphate of northern Nigeria was the workshop of West Africa in the pre‐colonial nineteenth century, producing famous blue‐black cloth that reached many markets south of the Sahara as well as across it. Under British colonial rule this large handicraft textile industry was faced with the winds of foreign competition. We rely on a newly digitized set of colonial district reports to measure the impact of trade on northern Nigerian textile manufacturing and find that (contrary to British expectations) areas closer to railway stations were less likely to experience industrial decline. We argue that the resilience of local textiles relied on the low opportunity cost of dry‐season labour. Analysing a piece of tax microdata, we show that a low opportunity cost of labour outside of the rainy season was associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in textile by‐employment. Seasonal changes in relative factor prices were a trap as well as a refuge. Part‐time employment limited specialization and technological innovation, and can help to explain why northern Nigerian textiles eventually declined. Thus, beyond our particular case study, these results contribute to our understanding of the role of seasonality in determining the structure and pace of development of tropical economies.

Writing a Colonial Legal History of Northern Nigeria: An Analysis of Methods and Sources

AbstractThis article analyzes the methods and sources of writing a colonial legal history of Africa. The analysis is carried out with a case study of the dual legal system operative in colonial Northern Nigeria from 1900 to 1960, which saw the English common law coexist with Islamic law. I examine how three sources of colonial law – namely, legislations, case law, and legal writings – reveal the varied perspectives of European colonial officials and Africans on the workings of this legal system. I argue that while colonial legislations and legal writings are lopsided toward the perspectives of the British authority, case law in conjunction with African commentaries provide some prospect to engage in a narrative that foregrounds the voices of Africans.

Debating Diya: Indirect Rule and the Transformation of Islamic Law in British Colonial Northern Nigeria

Debating Diya: Indirect Rule and the Transformation of Islamic Law in British Colonial Northern Nigeria

The Cross versus the Crescent: Karl Kumm’s Missiology

ABSTRACTThis article surveys the missiology promoted in the writings of the Protestant missionary Karl Kumm during the first decades of the twentieth century. Kumm was famous as a missionary explorer. He was the first European to successfully cross the region known as the Sudan, from the Niger bend to the Nile. He was also notable because he founded two different missions in two different places in Africa, both aimed at evangelizing the peoples of the Sudan. Lastly, Kumm was significant for having constructed in his various writings a highly influential case against the evangelization of Muslims and for the evangelization of traditionalist people. Kumm, his ideas and actions helped shape government policy towards Christian missions and Christian–Muslim relations in colonial Northern Nigeria.

Secularizing Islam: The Colonial Encounter and the Making of a British Islamic Criminal Law in Northern Nigeria, 1903–58

Emerging critiques of mainstream accounts of secularism reveal the imbrication of the sacred and the secular in ‘secular’ states. In the context of colonial Northern Nigeria, this sacred-secular entanglement, which took the form of the co-option of Islam for the colonial ‘secular’ enterprise, did not leave Islam unchanged. Co-opting Islam for the colonial project necessitated the making of an Islamic Law amenable to the colonial state. With a focus on criminal law, this article narrates the making of a British Colonial Islamic law in Northern Nigeria through the unprecedented expansion of siyasa. Departing from orthodox accounts of Islamic law's reification in colonial Northern Nigeria and heterodox assertions of its erosion by the colonial state, this article argues that neither the reification nor the erosion accounts illuminates the relationship between the colonial state and Islamic law. To show how the colonial state could assert secularism while co-opting Islam, this article presents a narrative of reform that foregrounds the following questions: Who had (and exercised) the power to decide what Islamic law was? How was the exercise of this power justified? How did the exercise of this power fit with the broader colonial project of governing religious difference? What were the consequences of these processes for Islamic law, institutions and colonial subjects?

The Invention of Corruption: Political Malpractice and Selective Prosecution in Colonial Northern Nigeria

Abstract Although corruption is overwhelmingly important in Nigerian political discourse and studies of contemporary politics, the topic has received surprisingly little attention from historians. This article considers an instance of corruption that took place in Kano emirate, Northern Nigeria, in 1924. The government’s response to the case was instructive: although the likeliest reconstruction of events suggested wide-ranging, severe political malpractice, the official inquiry took only the most moderate of steps, all the while avoiding the language of “corruption” or indeed of official criminality. Although more recent forms of corruption are profoundly different from this case, they are the recognizable inheritors of some of the politics of corruption that originated nearly a century ago.

POINTING TO PROPERTY: COLONIALISM AND KNOWLEDGE ABOUT LAND TENURE IN NORTHERN NIGERIA

ABSTRACTColonial contact created many African ‘traditions’ that are in fact novel; part of this process involved translation, in which cultural accommodations were determined not just by the political interests of negotiators but by the challenges of moving between languages and conceptual universes. This article focuses on the cultural translation of land tenure and property in colonial northern Nigeria, as legal paradigms and principles of governance. Beginning in the early colonial period, Western paradigms came to shape the ways colonial authorities understood indigenous landholding, which in turned influenced how they governed small-scale farmers. The article traces how different intellectual traditions came together to create a ‘traditional’ system of land tenure with very little purchase on past practices, and a somewhat attenuated relationship with the lives of ordinary farmers.

Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression Sara Berry Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression By Moses E. Ochonu. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Colonial Meltdown investigates the impact of the global economic depression of the 1930s on the people of Northern Nigeria. Unlike much of the historical literature on colonial Northern Nigeria, Ochonu’s study is not centered on the area formerly controlled by the Sokoto Caliphate, a Muslim state that ruled over the northwestern quadrant of Nigeria for most of the nineteenth century. When Britain took control of the region at the beginning of the twentieth century, officials assumed that the Caliphate’s jurisdiction extended farther south and east than it did, and proceeded to incorporate a large area, later known as the Middle Belt, into the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. Ochonu’s study deals with this region, focusing particularly on Idoma Division, an area reaching south from the Benue River to the borders of Onitsha, Abakaliki, and other predominantly Igbo societies. Unlike the Sokoto Caliphate, a centralized Muslim state dominated by speakers of Hausa and/or Fulfulde, much of the Middle Belt was occupied by small, non-hierarchical, multilingual polities whose inhabitants followed a variety of religious beliefs and practices. Partly because of its extreme cultural and linguistic diversity, the Middle Belt has attracted less scholarly attention than areas occupied by Nigeria’s three largest and best known ethnic groups. Ochonu’s study makes a welcome contribution to filling this historiographical gap. Taking issue with scholars who argue that British policy during the depression involved a straightforward effort to cut spending on the colonies while extracting more revenue and resources from “subject” populations, Ochonu argues that colonial officials often found themselves working at cross purposes as they attempted to ride out the depression and work toward economic recovery. Forced by plummeting revenues to practice strict fiscal austerity, administrators adopted measures that disrupted local economic life and undermined their own efforts to collect more taxes. Increased tax rates on cash-earning export commodities discouraged the production of crops whose prices were already low because of the depression, leading to an overall decline in the amount of tax revenue collected. Layoffs of government clerks, tin miners, railway workers and others undermined demand for domestically grown foodstuffs, leading farmers in Idoma—who had formerly carried yams to sell to miners in Jos, or traders in Igbo towns to the south—to retain their crops at home, and leaving them without cash to pay taxes. In Idoma, the problem was compounded by the government’s decision to save money by delaying, or cancelling, plans to build feeder roads into the rural areas, as well as their efforts to withdraw silver coins from circulation in Nigeria in order to augment the gold and silver reserves of the British Treasury. One group that enjoyed some benefit from the slump were women weavers, whose cloth was in increasing demand as supplies of imported textiles declined, and Northern Nigerians gained some relief from discoveries of gold deposits in the early 1930s. The gold mining boom did not last, however. The economy remained predominantly agricultural, and falling real and monetary incomes caused hardships for ordinary Nigerians that were exacerbated by officials’ redoubled efforts to maintain their revenue by squeezing more out of their “subjects.” The results, Ochonu argues, were not only onerous, but also disruptive, provoking resistance and evasion from hard-pressed farmers and workers, and helping lay the social foundations for anti-colonial mobilization after the Second World War. While many officials recognized that tax collections were falling because people simply did not have cash to pay them, career-threatening pressures from their superiors in Britain led them to intensify their efforts to extract more from ordinary Nigerians. In Ochonu’s succinct summation, “indirect rule became more direct.” (46) Officials resorted to increasingly harsh measures to force people to pay, keeping up pressure even in years of poor harvests, and driving some districts into famine during heavy locust infestations in the early 1930s. Intensified sanctions on chiefs who failed to deliver their tax quotas led chiefs to resort to harsh measures that alienated their “subjects” and undermined the central premise...

Making Headway: The introduction of Western civilization in colonial northern Nigeria

Making Headway: The introduction of Western civilization in colonial northern Nigeria

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria. By Andrew E. Barnes. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora 41. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2009. xii + 330 pp. $95.00 cloth.

Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria. By Andrew E. Barnes. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora 41. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2009. xii + 330 pp. $95.00 cloth.

Andrew E. Barnes, Making Headway: the introduction of Western civilisation in colonial northern Nigeria. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press (hb £66 – 978 1 58046 299 0). 2009, 352 pp.

Andrew E. Barnes, Making Headway: the introduction of Western civilisation in colonial northern Nigeria. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press (hb £66 – 978 1 58046 299 0). 2009, 352 pp. - Volume 80 Issue 4

Book Review: Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

Book Review: Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria

Andrew E. Barnes. Making Headway. The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2009. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora, xii + 330 pp. Maps. Graphs. Abbreviations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00. Cloth.

Andrew E. Barnes. Making Headway. The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2009. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora, xii + 330 pp. Maps. Graphs. Abbreviations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00. Cloth.

THE ROLE OF SLAVE LABOR IN GROUNDNUT PRODUCTION IN EARLY COLONIAL KANO

ABSTRACTThis article reinforces the interpretation of numerous scholars who have highlighted the role of slave labor in groundnut production during the ‘cash-crop revolution’ in West Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also expands Jan Hogendorn's argument on the African initiatives involved in the expansion of groundnut production in colonial Northern Nigeria. In particular, it provides evidence of the key role of the emir of Kano (Abbas) and important merchants in the transition to groundnut cultivation and the significant use of slave labor by these large estate-holders. The article focuses mainly on the Fanisau unit of Kano.

‘The Great Prohibition’: The Expansion of Christianity in Colonial Northern Nigeria

AbstractHistorical research on the spread of Christianity in colonial Northern Nigeria has been hampered by a focus on the wrong issues. The population of the colony was predominantly Muslim, but the colonial territory created by the British contained large populations of African traditionalist peoples. During the colonial era the British government prohibited Christian proselytization of Muslims. Historical research had focused on the battle between colonial administrators and missionaries over entry into Muslim areas, a battle missionaries lost. But during the colonial era Christian missions experienced real success in Christianizing traditionalist peoples. The colonial government also sought to impede this development, significantly by using the same rules that prohibited the proselytization of Muslims to prohibit the proselytization of traditionalists. This article makes the case that the government’s efforts to halt the spread of Christianity to traditionalists, not Muslims, should become the focus of new research.

The Middle Belt Movement and the formation of Christian Consciousness in Colonial Northern Nigeria

This article looks at the connection between a political movement and the evolution of Christian consciousness. It seeks to answer a series of questions not often asked, in hopes of demonstrating that these questions deserve more attention than they have generated in the past. Historians and mission scholars rightly expend a good deal of effort studying the transition in mission-established churches from European to indigenous control. Missions did more than establish churches, however. They established local Christian cultures. Yet while there is some understanding of what indigenous peoples sought to do when they assumed direction of churches founded by missionaries, there is very little idea of what indigenous peoples have sought to do when they take over local Christian cultures. But, if it is the case that, as Lamin Sanneh has argued, Christianity “stimulated the vernacular,” then the local Christian cultures built upon the vernacular, perhaps more so than the churches missions founded, are the true legacy of the missionary enterprise.

"Native Habits are Difficult to Change": British Medics and the Dilemmas of Biomedical Discourses and Practice in Early Colonial Northern Nigeria

"Native Habits are Difficult to Change": British Medics and the Dilemmas of Biomedical Discourses and Practice in Early Colonial Northern Nigeria

'religious Insults': Christian Critiques of Islam and the Government in Colonial Northern Nigeria

AbstractThis article discusses two Christian critiques of Islam published during the colonial era, and the response by the colonial government to each. The first goal of the article is to characterize Christian criticisms of Islam during the colonial era. The second is to demonstrate how conflict over Islam could shape relations between British administrators and Christian missionaries. The third goal is to narrate the history of a religious controversy as it developed over two generations. As will be seen, the war of words over government religious policy toward Islam could become quite vicious, even without any active participation by Muslims.