Succession to High Office: Ethnic Categories in the Sokoto Caliphate
Inheritance was the clear principle, alongside seniority by birth order, for legitimate succession to high office.[2484] What did not matter was one's skin-color or the status of one's mother.
A caliph could be the son of a concubine and have inherited her black skin color; and since all the slaves in his father's palace were speaking Hausa and not Fulfulde, the caliph's command of Fulfulde could be poor. Indeed, sons of concubines were seen as potentially the toughest emirs—they had no maternal relatives to favor. But occupations like being a merchant were not possible for an emir—his rank through his association with high office precluded occupations identified with subordinates.Administration and Islamic scholarship were the only roles appropriate for descendants of Shaikh ‘Uthman. Over time, the number of these descendants could be huge: the shaikh himself had 37 children, one of his sons had 73, a sonin-law had 48: though not all children survived to reproduce themselves, the fact that concubines were readily available meant a man could be fathering children for 40-50 years, as they were living into their sixties. Such demographics intensified competition for office among the sons (often from different mothers), and quickly led to factions and conflict, including civil war within an emirate. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were such civil wars in Kano and Bauchi, and conflicts over office even in Sokoto. The arrival of British colonial rule prevented the issue of succession from getting worse: with Christian Britons now in charge, emigration by the Sokoto elite eastward towards the Sudan and Mecca much reduced the numbers seeking high office at home.
With succession to high office, even to the role of caliph, dependent upon heredity, inevitably elite families continued to exercise control and maintain their monopoly of office: scholarly ability was not the key criterion for a caliph, though it might be desirable.
The principle was rarely challenged—most notably by the scholar already mentioned—al-hajj ‘Umar al-Futi—on the grounds that he was the best scholar present in Sokoto and therefore had the right to be elected caliph; he also promoted kinship as an important criterion by marrying the current caliph's daughter; he may even have put forward his ancestral connections as the Sokoto scholars were Toronkawa, that is, originally from Futa Toro (as was al-hajj ‘Umar). Rather different was the earlier challenge, in 1817, when a non-Pullo scholar, ‘Abd al-Salam, had thought he should be elected caliph, and was backed by his own (Arewa) people in his fight for the role; but he had long been notably troublesome to the jihadi leadership.[2485] In all the emirates of the caliphate, the principle of heredity applied, with the added proviso that the would-be emir's father had to have been the emir at one time.Ethnicity was commonly used by opponents of the jihad—not least in Muslim Borno: for them, as for the displaced Hausa rulers, it was more a “Fellata” than an Islamic campaign.[2486] But as the caliphate continued through the nineteenth century, “ethnicity” ceased to be the central problem, when what mattered was status or rank, and that was inherited from one's father. However, if the term “empire” was unacceptable in early 1960s newly independent Nigeria, so too was the Hausa ethnic label “Fulani” (or Fulbe, in their language Fulfulde; sing. Pullo) that Britons, given their preoccupation with “tribes,” always used in analyzing colonial northern Nigeria. The argument of Professor H. F. C. Smith and Murray Last was that the jihad was primarily fought by men who identified themselves primarily as Muslims, and that the jihad was not a “tribal” rising by Fulani. In short, what we called the Sokoto Caliphate should never have been called “the Fulani Empire” because it was neither “Fulani” nor an “empire.” This reflected the pervasive attempt in 1960s Nigeria to be rid of “tribalism”; the new Nigeria should be free, it was widely thought, of the ethnic and racial divisiveness that colonial rule had instituted.
Nonetheless, it needs to be noted that the early manuscript lists of both the jihadi martyrs and the new emirs that Shaikh ‘Uthman appointed were overwhelmingly made of men who had Fulfulde as their mother tongue: only one emir, Yakubu at Bauchi, was not a Pullo, and he was given a non-Pullo wife by Shaikh ‘Uthman when he was a student of the shaikh. We know the shaikh sought to minimize the divisive ties of clanship amidst the mujahidun, but men outside the core jihadi ranks reaffirmed that the Fulbe were indeed the jihadi elite; even some non-Fulbe fighting with the jihad complained bitterly of discrimination against them, especially in the allocation of territories to govern. Nonetheless, I would still argue that Shaikh ‘Uthman and his family were fighting (and preaching) primarily as Muslims, not as Fulbe, and were seeking to create a new, viable Islamic polity that would persist until the Mahdi appeared. If they were to achieve this end, they needed a radically new breed of leaders to serve God-fearingly as the jihad's leaders; for this role they trusted their fellow Fulbe scholars, more than either already powerful Fulbe chiefs (ardoen) or Hausa scholars, most of whom, in their eyes, had been compromised by their links within the former anti-jihad Hausa “establishment.” Trust (and a shared set of scholarly values) does seem to have been nonetheless an important element in the new regime's solidarity, especially when it was new: they were then all speaking the same language, and probably knew each other from their days as Islamic students seeking out teachers across the region. If the aim of the new-style polity was to enable Muslims to prepare themselves for the world's imminent end times, then it was not, I suggest, primarily to enable Fulbe men, whether scholars or warriors, to accumulate great wealth, including concubines and slaves—though to many skeptical eyes that seemed to be the end result of the jihad. To scholars such as Shaikh ‘Uthman, what would be the use of such wealth? At the end of his life, though, he was worried that he had indeed been the cause of the death of Muslims, and might be answerable for it.[2487]Historians thus remain divided over how much to emphasize the ethnic dimension, not just of the jihad fighting itself but, more importantly perhaps, of the caliphal state that ensued.
For some, the term “empire” simply implies one specific group ruling over all other groups. The debate can turn very heated, with data taking second place to prior convictions. Taxation, for example, bore much more heavily on the non-Fulbe—especially the Muslim Hausa, whom the caliphal rulers labeled Habe, in itself a denigratory Fulfulde term for “blacks” or “non-Muslims.” The Arabic formal term for them was al-Sudan, and Muhammad Bello, as the shaikh's senior administrator (and son), had the formal title of amir al-Sudan. Traditionally, Fulbe do not consider themselves as “black” but as “white” (along with Arabs and Berbers), and so distinguish themselves, in their own minds, from a Hausa—learned scholar though he might be—who is a Sudani. It would have been very difficult indeed for the new Sokoto caliphal administrators to eliminate straightaway, from the minds of several of their “white” fellow mujahidun, any underlying notions they might have had that there were some important differences between them and those they conquered or took captive, almost all of whom were “black” and did not speak Fulfulde. What is also crucial to remember is that there was no Sudaniwide revolt, no huge slave rising, throughout the life of the caliphate: there was dissent, escape, disillusion among al-Sudan, but a particular Sudani consciousness as Sudani seems not to have been activated politically.[2488] Being, or speaking, “Hausa” was less important than one's local identity as a ba-Kane (a man from Kano) or ba-Katsine, ba-Zazzage, etc.Annual taxation was imposed differentially—much more for the subordinate Hausa (2,500 cowries) than for the elite Fulani or Fulbe (initially none; later 500 cowries)—but it is significant that the rates changed as the century wore on.[2489] Labor could also be required from each (large) subordinate household for such tasks as repairing a town's walls section by section; and children could be used as part of the labor force. Though ethnic origins were beginning to matter less, in some aspects of everyday life, such as Islamic teaching, there was (until very recently?) still a tendency for Fulfulde-speaking students to gravitate toward Fulani scholars (whose deep command of classical Arabic was a distinguishing feature), with non- Fulani scholars forming separate networks among themselves.
The divisions may not matter, but they are there, despite Shaikh ‘Uthman's jihad having been aimed at nullifying such divisions within the new Muslim umma. Ultimately, whatever its faults, was not the sheer size and success of the caliphate, unique for this region of the savannah, not “proof” that Allah has blessed it?