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Running Head | 77 3 77 Emirate Maneuvers and “Pagan” Resistance in the Plateau-Nasarawa Basin More compelling and unique examples abound of precolonial caliphate ventures and the ways in which they sparked resistance and adaptations among non-caliphate peoples, eventually contributing to the emergence of a subcolonial system that fobbed off power to Hausa-Fulani personnel. In the Bauchi-Plateau sector, Bauchi emirate’s loose precolonial amana-based hegemony applied to some of the non-Muslim ethnic communities. Most, however, enjoyed some form of independence from Bauchi emirate’s control. Upon being conquered by the British, however, many of the non-Muslim ethnic groups of the plateau highlands and lowlands found themselves placed under Bauchi’s rule, administered through Hausa-Fulani agents. This British policy was founded on a misreading of precolonial relations and on the search for usable conquering groups, whose supposed legitimacy as precolonial political hegemons predisposed them to colonial leadership in non-Muslim communities. This pattern of emirate-centered colonial organization and rule requires a closer examination. Another proximate example is the vast region encompassing the Niger and Benue littorals. Caliphate military agents and their Hausa-Fulani followers extended caliphate influence to the region and raided nearby non-Muslim communities . Caliphate military control was, however, inchoate, contested, and sporadic by the time of the European scramble for African colonial possessions. In the case of this region, early British travelers and missionaries who witnessed the most violent phase of caliphate incursions helped to give caliphate hegemony a stability and completeness that it lacked on the ground. These early European interlocutors were clearly enamored of the martial capacities of caliphate agents and the centralized political hierarchies of the caliphate system. As a result, their polemical and descriptive writings helped to establish the basis for caliphate preeminence in British colonial administration in the region. This travel corpus, the claims of caliphate agents and caliphate-affiliated outposts, and British obsessions with the virtues of centralization and Islamic civilizational superiority constituted the tripod on which British colonial administrative policy in this area was supported. The resulting British imposition of Hausa-Fulani and Muslim Kamberi (Kanuri) chiefs and officials as the vanguard 78 | Colonialism by Proxy of colonial administration on the non-Muslim communities of the region found justification in these claims and in the imperative of fiscal pragmatism. Emirate subcolonial rule triggered multiple anxieties among the peoples of the Northern Benue and Lafia region. It also elicited multiple protests and violent backlash from the non-Muslim peoples subjected to it. These protests often degenerated into violence. They intensified during the post–World War II period of pre-independence political positioning, as the fear of Hausa-Fulani and Muslim domination took on a new valence, and Hausa colonial agents consolidated and normalized their positions in preparation for independence. These new waves of late colonial protest, often accompanied by violence toward Hausa and Kamberi officials, required careful British intervention. British officials occasionally acknowledged the legitimacy of the struggle for self-administration and of the protest against emirate subcolonial rule among the autochthonous groups of the region. These rare official vindications, however, seldom altered the established British commitment to emirate proxy rule. As a result, the subcolonial initiatives of emirate colonial agents took center stage in the colonial system. Once officials grew comfortable with a system of subcolonial delegation, they were reluctant to let their occasional critique of its excesses get in the way of their continued support. As the late colonial period wound down, protests escalated, fueled by new anxieties about the position of marginalized ethnic minorities in the future politics of a decolonized Northern Nigeria. From Amana to Bauchi Colonial Agency on the Plateau In the Sokoto Caliphate’s eastern sphere of influence, the preeminent enforcer and protector of the caliphate’s moral, religious, and cartographic boundary was the emirate of Bauchi. Bauchi was a direct product of the Fulani Jihad; the founder of its Muslim Fulani dynasty, Mallam Yakubu, was a jihad flag bearer charged with the “pacification” of a vast frontier peopled by several groups of non-Hausa traditionalists. Attacks carried out by Yakubu’s army in the Bauchi-Plateau highlands between 1814 and 1850 brought him and the caliphate directly into contact and conflict with the ethnically plural, non-Muslim hill and plain regions of the Jos Plateau. Yakubu’s southward inroads benefited from the presence of numerous Fulani communities (the Jama’a) among the traditionalist communities of the Bauchi-Plateau plains. Some of these communities had by the time...

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