ARE THE SHUA-ARABS NOT INVADERS? Furtherance of my post yesterday. I honestly would have wished I have more time to exhaustibly deal with this issue once and for all even though with the knowledge that it will still not be understood by many, for, already, it seems to me, the supposed audience have erected a barrier of imperception in their heads. But we cannot give in to pathological arrogance of a few self-exalting entities parading as though they are paragons of virtue, to give up doing what we should even if only for the sake of refreshing our memories. At the same time, theres this resolve I have made that nobody can anymore capitalize on a false, already exhausted perception of thriving ignorance among our people. This is false. It is no more true. We will therefore measure words with anyone! LOL. If the history of Kanem Borno is known properly by those who claim to have mastered it, contrary to what I said yesterday, it will appear to them that the Shua-Arabs are really conquerors. But this has to put in a proper historical context. The whole thing is a complexity of sorts. It needs more than superficial reading. It can be recalled that in 1391, Mai Uthman B. Idris of Borno had written a letter to Sultan Barquq of Mamluk Egypt. In it, he made reference to a group of Arabs, which he referred to as Judham Arabs, as terrorizing his people, enslaving women and children and siding with their enemies to fight them. Some historians have suggested that these were the Shuas of today. At that time, being nomads they were believed to have been attracted by the availability of pasture in the shores of the Lake Chad, which was at then an object of competition among various groups of people. And it was this competition that created great tension among them. Indeed it was the same reason that attracted the Fulani around the 16th century to occupy the area. Following the migration of the Sayfawa to Borno in the late 14th and 15th century, they were believed to have moved into the West of the Lake, and eventually further attracted to Borno due to its urbanization and increased sedentarization of the Shua. That was how Fulani too got into Borno and eventually in the 19th century because they felt marginalised in a society they thought they were indigenes already rebelled against the Sayfawa Establishment--the rebellion which is now confused as a *Sokoto extension of Jihad to Borno. Well back to our point. Before this period, the behaviors of this Judham Arabs was disturbing to the Sayfawa and it was what prompted Mai Uthman B. Idris to write a letter to the Egyptian authorities to intervene. From that letter onwards, as much as I can check, theres no mention anymore of the Arabs, which, as pointed above, seem to refer to the Shua of today. But we heard later that there were the same Arabs in the contingents of Idris Alooma during the offensive launched against the Sau in 1572. It is not clear how those who used to be agents of disturbance to the Sayfawa earlier on turned to their supporters. Indeed, possibility is that, while the Egyptian authorities may have intervened in neutralizing the crisis, there was also an important aspect of the policies adopted by Mai Ali Gaji one of which was that of reconciliation in which most dissenting elements were pacified and assimilated into the Kanembu. This policy was with slight modifications pursued by Idris Alooma too when he ascended to power in the 1570s such that the society became absolutely integrated. So many dissenting elements ceased to be heard of during his reign and it was likely that these two policies were responsible for the absorption of the Shua into Kanuri because the Kanuri itself was a recreation of the Kanembu with more social integration and harmony among the various tribes under the Sayfawa authority. This is a natural phenomenon in the history of West Africa. I would not have argued on this issue if those pushing for it did not reduce this rich history to a mere eventuality and at that, of recent development, in 1893. I was aware of this, but because I knew so well that such a complexity cannot be easily understood by non-historians, (whether anyone will read this as a boast or not), I did not bother to go this deep--if this one is even really deep. No doubt, as our ever-amiable Dr Baba Bala Katsina has noted, historians own the monopoly of interpreting their facts. Now this point closed. UNDERSTANDING THE TREND OF EVENTS ACROSS THE WORLD IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES Another important thing we need draw attention to is the trend of events across globe from Europe to Asia, to America--and why not also Africa?--in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a period of transitions in political aspects of various parts of the world and therefore we must adjust the events of the 19th century West Africa into this context if at all we are to understand anything of the Sokoto Jihad. In Europe, this period saw changes in the political destinies of various nations from France in the famous French Revolution to Russia in the political upheavals of the 1770s to the Irish independence movement of 1790s in the United Kingdom and so on. In Americas, the Haitan Revolution and American War of Independence of 1775 and the series of political movements against imperial powers of Spain, Portugal, Britain and France were major trends in the political destiny of those continents. The same obtains in the Middle East and East Asia. Of course, the equivalents of these political changes in Africa and particularly West Africa were the Sokoto Jihad of 1804, the dynastic change in Borno, the series of upheavals across Yorubaland and so on. In this period, we have seen how various changes in political destinies of many nations took place. In some, the whole political system was changed while in some retransformed to fit prevailing circumstances. Now my worry has been about why so many people choose to isolate the case of West Africa in what was a general trend in the history of the world. Oh, because it is Africa? You cant still see African history within African framework? Sorry man! Was Abdullah Donfodio any different from such philosophers as Jean J Rosseau, John Locke, Marx, etc committed to searching ideals for model society or building a nation? Unfortunately this is the problem. Instead of deriving important lessons from these important aspects of our history, we care more and more about less and less. Of what significance is it to a southerner if the Fulanis invaded the north? See, if you say the Fulanis invaded the north, what can you say about the Kanuris, fella? What? *About the extension of the Sokoto jihad to Borno, we hope to discuss it tomorrow.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 17:07:05 +0000
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