Hausa Kingdom

7 Key excerpts on "Hausa Kingdom"

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  eBook - ePub

  Great Kingdoms of Africa

  • John Parker, David Adjaye(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Thames and Hudson Ltd

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7

  FROM Hausa KingdomS TO THE SOKOTO CALIPHATE

  Muhammadu Mustapha Gwadabe

  With a long history of state-building, urban development and cultural creativity, the Hausa region of West Africa is one of the most populous and well-studied parts of the continent. Occupying the central section of the Sudanic savanna zone between the Niger River to the west and Lake Chad to the east, kasar Hausa or ‘Hausaland’ today is encompassed by northern Nigeria and the southern parts of the Republic of Niger. In that historic heartland and in West Africa beyond, up to 40 million people speak Hausa as their mother tongue, and perhaps another 20 million as a second tongue, making it one of the continent’s most important languages.1 Over the course of the last millennium, what would emerge as kasar Hausa experienced a gradual process of political, economic and cultural evolution, resulting in features such as walled cities, a dynamic economy based on agriculture, craft production and trade, and political institutions characterized by powerful kings and sophisticated courtly cultures. The region’s city-states developed impressive military capabilities and a cultural ethos of the heroic mounted warrior, which not only shaped conflict between them, but also allowed for further territorial expansion. For a long time, Hausaland was little known to the outside world, forming something of a decentralized frontier between the more powerful kingdoms of Kanem-Borno to the east and Gao to the west. Yet by the sixteenth century, the region had emerged as a key crossroads of trans-Saharan trade routes and those extending across the savanna zone to the south of the desert. The leading Hausa Kingdoms, first Katsina, Kano and Zazzau and subsequently Zamfara, Gobir and Kebbi, had begun collectively to forge a distinctive identity and an influence in the wider region. That influence would further be enhanced by the collapse in 1591 of Songhay, which had expanded from its heartland of Gao to become the last of the sequence of great imperial states in the western Sudan (see chapter 2 ). Despite recurrent military conflict between – and sometimes within – the Hausa Kingdoms, the following centuries witnessed ongoing economic prosperity, demographic growth and the deepening influence of Islam.2

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  West Africa before the Colonial Era

  A History to 1850

  • Basil Davidson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There were many Hausa cities engaged in trade and politics. Daura and Gobir, Katsina, Kano and Zaria – these are only five of the better-known names. Sometimes these states cooperated for their common good. Often they quarrelled. They never had a single government that ruled them all. They did not form a Hausa empire. Yet the Hausa states, generally more friendly with each other than with their non-Hausa neighbours, had influence and commercial power over a wide area of the eastern region.

  These states were in close and constant touch, sometimes by war but more often by peaceful trade, with the peoples of the forest lands along the West African coast, notably with the Yoruba and their wealthy neighbours. It was largely through Hausaland that the goods of the Yoruba country, especially kola nuts, went northward into the Western Sudan and across the Sahara to North Africa; and it was largely through Hausaland that the forest peoples could import the North African goods they needed.

  The Hausa achievement

  Built in a fertile land, rich in skilled farmers and determined traders, the Hausa cities and states became a strong and stable part of the West African scene.

  They were deeply influenced by Muslim methods of government as practised in the neighbouring empires of Songhay and Kanem-Bornu. These methods tended to strengthen the power of kings at the cost of ordinary folk. Government taxes and tolls grew heavier. The needs of courts and armies weighed down on tax-paying citizens and the farmers of the countryside. Armouries glinted with the metal of expensive coats of chain-mail and fine helmets.

  By the 1440s there were even a few muskets in Hausaland, brought in by traders from Bornu who had got them from Egypt. And now the Muslim rulers began to use slave labour on a large scale. In 1450, for instance, the then ruler of Kano, Abdullahi Burja, a tributary vassal or under-king of the empire of Kanem-Bornu, sent out soldiers on raids for captives which are said to have brought him as many as 1,000 slaves a month. He is reported to have established no fewer than twenty-one settlements of royal slaves, each with 1,000 men.

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  A History of West Africa

  • Toyin Falola(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads for Embassies: Studies on Diplomacy and Diplomatics, eds. Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 658–682.
• Davidson, A History of West Africa, 105.
• Michael G. Smith, The Affairs of Daura: History and Change in a Hausa State, 1800–1958 (Los Angeles: University of California, 1978).
• Mahdi Adamu, The Hausa Factor in West African History (Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1978).
• Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857), quoted in Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, 94.
• Bawuro M. Barkindo, ed., Kano and Some of Her Neighbours (Bayero: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1989).
• John N. Panden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020), 432–435.
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7 STATES AND EMPIRES

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198260-9

Introduction

Right from its earliest origins, the development of human civilization/society has been driven by the insatiable needs of humans, which in the beginning consisted of a basic desire for survival: the search for food, shelter, and warmth. In this original quest for survival, humans, whose greatest obstacle was the environment, fashioned tools and pooled together into groups, establishing various modes of social (intra- and intergroup) interactions—kinship, citizenship, trade, and other forms of social partnerships—to improve their chances at an easier existence. With an ever-growing capacity to subdue and adapt to the environment to meet immediate needs, population expansions were recorded, which produced tensions and competition to acquire and control access to increasingly scarce resources.

The next stage in political development in West Africa was sponsored by the availability and use of iron tools, which added another important dimension to social interaction. As certain groups acquired the capacity to compel others to do their bidding, society developed more complex forms of social organization and interaction, producing structures determined by individual capacities and the varying types of social contracts that emerged.