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Introduction: Understanding “Native Alien” Subcolonialism and Its Legacies
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
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Running Head | 1 Introduction Understanding “Native Alien” Subcolonialism and Its Legacies On February 24, 2004, ethno-religious violence erupted in the small town of Yelwa, Plateau State, in the Nigerian Middle Belt. A multiethnic coalition of selfidentified Hausa and Fulani Muslims attacked non-Muslim ethnic communities within the town, maiming, killing, and looting. On May 2 and 3, non-Muslim refugees, former residents of the town who had fled the February violence, embarked on revenge attacks with the support of neighboring non-Muslim ethnicities . They injured, killed, and rendered homeless hundreds of Hausa-Fulani Muslims and their allies. Non-Muslim “Middle Belters” blamed Hausa-Fulani Muslims for the violence , describing them as “nonindigenes,” “settlers,” and “migrants” from the territories of the defunct Sokoto Caliphate. Their grievances rested on reconstructed memories of precolonial and colonial-era hegemonic practices of Hausa-Fulani imperial agents. Over time, grievances morphed into allegations of Hausa-Fulani Muslim domination and complaints about Hausa-Fulani competition for resources and political offices they regarded as the exclusive assets of their autochthonous communities. The Muslim residents of Yelwa responded to these accusations by both claiming to be the descendants of the nineteenth-century founders of the troubled town and embracing the glorious Islamic and political heritage of the Sokoto Caliphate. They thus placed themselves within the same historical master narrative as their ethno-religious kinsmen in northwestern and parts of northeastern Nigeria, the core of the defunct caliphate. Since then, at least six major episodes of conflict between autochthonous non-Muslim groups and Hausa-Fulani Muslim groups have occurred, the most recent being the 2009 clash over local elections, which resulted in intermittent fighting and reprisal killings that persisted for months. These claims about autochthony versus foreignness, indigene versus settler, and non-Muslim ethnic victimhood versus Hausa-Fulani Muslim domination— and the violent conflicts that they have inspired—are not unique to Yelwa. The same claims and counterclaims thrive in the narratives of many recent conflicts in the Nigerian Middle Belt, the vast territory on the southern frontier of the dissolved Sokoto Caliphate. These clashes have brought into sharp focus the 1 2 | Colonialism by Proxy construction of a non-Muslim “indigenous” minority consciousness, and its antipode : a “settler” identity embodied by the supposedly intrusive hegemony of Hausa Islamic presence in the Middle Belt. The conflicts repoliticize earlier confrontations between the Hausa-Fulani and Middle Belt peoples during colonial times and have inspired debates on the indigene/ settler question. These discussions, however, have failed to explore how the indigene/ settler dichotomy developed historically. The enduring influence of colonial administrative arrangements implicated in current conflicts can be better understood by probing the complexities of those arrangements and by explaining the afterlives of colonial struggles. Hausa assertions of political rights and privileges in the Middle Belt have long, complicated histories that go back to the Sokoto Caliphate’s quasiimperial practices in the predominantly non-Muslim region. Similarly, non-Muslim peoples’ fear of Hausa domination and their violent resistance to perceived Hausa Muslim control in the Nigerian Middle Belt have deep and complex roots. Among other themes, Colonialism by Proxy probes some of the historical processes and struggles that underpin today’s dueling understandings and claims around the concepts of “indigene” and “settler,” and hegemony and noble victimhood. The book attempts to understand one of the historical roots of the violently policed ethno-religious dichotomies present today in Nigeria’s Middle Belt: the articulation, bureaucratization, and consequences of a caliphate-centered colonial administrative imaginary. This was a colonial governing ideology founded on a belief in the superiority and administrative utility of significations, practices, symbols, systems of rule, and methods of socioeconomic and political organization associated with Hausa-Fulani Muslim identity, an identity derived from the modes of belonging forged by the Sokoto Caliphate. My analysis, however, does not assume a smug teleology of causality and logical consequence. Instead I argue that debates, memories, and conditions negotiated into existence during the tumultuous process of caliphate-centered colonization have found a reworked and shifting resonance in today’s tensions. Although its power stretched beyond the logic of political utility, the Hausacaliphate construct in colonial Northern Nigeria was primarily an ideology of governance and social classification. As a philosophy of authority and control, it was a type of manifest destiny the Sokoto Caliphate had first deployed in its relations with the non-Muslim, decentralized peoples on the empire’s southern frontier. The British colonials adopted this system, modifying it to serve as a fulcrum of...