A City Out of the Drought: The Establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate (1809–1817)

Alkalawa was still smouldering, and Usman dan Fodio ﵀ did something few conquerors do: he withdrew from power. Instead of taking the throne of Gobir, he had a new city sketched in the sand, divided the empire in two and gave the pen precedence over the sword. Between 1809 and 1817, almost casually, what would within a single generation become the largest pre-colonial state in sub-Saharan Africa was thus established.

Why Not Sit in Alkalawa

You have to imagine the temptation. October 1808, the walls of Alkalawa lie open, Yunfa is dead, the palace of Gobir stands empty. A thousand years of royal traditions — the sarauta that goes back to the Hausa Bayajidda sagas, the golden throne rooms, the iron-smith rituals, the courtly musicians with their long trumpets — are beheaded in a single afternoon. For a conqueror in the classical sense this is the moment to walk up the steps, sit upon the cushions, and crown himself.

Dan Fodio ﵀ does not do it. And Muhammad Bello ﵀, who had taken Alkalawa with the point of his own spear, also does not do it. Instead the old capital is not occupied but abandoned. It remains a ruin. Today it is an archaeological site, a scattered pottery of shards in the sand of Sokoto State, visited by an occasional historian, not by a court.

Why? There are three reasons that interlock.

First, ideologically: to take a seat in Alkalawa would mean that the jihad had in effect been a dynastic seizure of power, a replacement of one sarki by another. That is precisely what dan Fodio ﵀ in his Kitāb al-Farq had denied. The jihad was no usurpation; it was a reform of the wilāyāt, of authority itself. A new city, founded on virgin ground, underscored that.

Second, strategically: Alkalawa lay in the Gobir heartland, among remnants of the Hausa population that would not soon forget its loss. A new capital, somewhat to the south, beyond the old Gobir borders, was easier to defend and did not lay the political axis upon the funeral cloth of a defeated kingdom.

Third, juridically: shari’a does not inherit through conquest. A city that had fallen by jihad was fay’, communal war booty. A new founding, by contrast, could be drawn from the first day as dar al-Islam, with the mosque at the heart, the markets according to the rules, the Qadi court on the main street.

So Bello ﵀ in 1809 sketched the contours of a city at the confluence of the Sokoto River and the Rima, at approximately 13.06° north, 5.24° east. He named it Sokoto — after the Fulfulde word sokkugo, “to gather together”. A caliphate named after a city that did not yet even exist at the start of the jihad.

The Shehu Sets Himself Aside

Between 1810 and 1812 something happened that even in the warm Fulani historiography is not entirely smoothed over: dan Fodio ﵀ withdrew almost entirely from the daily administration.

He was the Amīr al-Muʾminīn, the Commander of the Faithful. He had raised the flag. His word had set an army in motion. And now, with the battles won and the flags distributed, he went back to what he had always wanted to do: read, write, teach. He moved from Sokoto to Sifawa, a smaller place a few dozen kilometres away, and afterwards back again. He worked on his Ihya’ al-Sunna, on his Tanbih al-Ikhwan, on Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra. He gave awrad instruction to his muridin, held mawlid sermons, received delegations from Kano and Gwandu, wrote fatwas when there was a theological question — but the administrative work he visibly transferred.

This is no abdication in the European sense. He remained Amīr al-Muʾminīn, remained the spiritual authority of the caliphate; his name was mentioned in the khutba of every Friday prayer. But the practical separation — between him as shehu and the executive power — was, according to Infāq al-Maysūr, formally arranged in 1812. He appointed two sub-caliphs. His son Muhammad Bello ﵀ received the east: Sokoto itself, with the Hausa core emirates Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Bauchi, Adamawa. His brother Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀ received the west: Gwandu as capital, with Kebbi, Nupe, Ilorin, the lower Niger reaches.

Abdullahi ﵀ writes of this himself, with the dry honesty that characterises his Tazyīn al-Waraqāt. He recounts that he had already during the advance on Alkalawa, somewhere in 1807, developed doubts about the discipline of some jihad commanders. They plundered, he writes, in a way that Maliki fiqh did not permit. He wrote a poem, Qasida Tazyīn, in which — in fact within a poem — he takes the decision to withdraw from the active campaign and to go to Kano to consider hijra to the Hijaz. On the way he is overtaken by messengers from his brother dan Fodio ﵀ and asked to return. He returns, but the rift had been opened. The division into two is, in part, an institutionalisation of that rift — a way to give Abdullahi ﵀ his own domain without having to force him back under a new centre.

This is no conflict like that between European crown princes. No armies march against each other, no blood relatives fall by each other’s swords. But the tension between Sokoto and Gwandu smoulders from that moment on through every generation of the caliphate. Abdullahi ﵀ dies in 1829, twelve years after his brother, on post in Gwandu, and to his death he writes critical treatises that later Sokoto scholars receive with mixed feelings.

The Flag System as Constitution

What Bello ﵀ and his father had devised was, juridically speaking, more a federation than a unitary state. It bore the name khilafa — caliphate — but it functioned through an old Islamic instrument that took on a new, ingenious form in Hausaland: the bay’a tied to a tuta, a flag.

You must imagine the procedure. A Fulani scholar or jihad commander — let us say Sulaimanu, a Kano Fulbe who had studied for years in Gwandu — travels to Sokoto. He kneels before dan Fodio ﵀, or later before Bello ﵀, and pledges the bay’a: the oath of allegiance, word for word, according to the formula transmitted in the Islamic tradition since the time of the Prophet ﷺ. He swears obedience in what is good and resistance to what is evil. He then receives from the hands of the shehu or the caliph a green flag, a written wathiqa — a flag-grant document — and a formal mandate to wage jihad in his region, to establish an emirate, and subsequently to govern it in the name of Sokoto.

Thus arose, between 1804 and 1817, the great emirates that would form the federation. Kano under Sulaimanu, succeeded in 1819 by Ibrahim Dabo, whose dynasty rules to this very day. Katsina under Umaru Dallaji and his Sullubawa clan. Zaria — the old Zazzau — under Mallam Musa of the Mallawa Fulani. Bauchi under the scholar Yakubu ﵀, whose emirate stretched from the Plateau highlands to the Benue River. Gombe under Buba Yero, who expanded into the Gongola valley. Adamawa under Modibo Adama, a Yola Fulbe who carried the flag across the Faro and Benue rivers and founded an emirate that today still spans the border between Nigeria and Cameroon. Ilorin, the southernmost emirate, under the Yoruba-Fulbe cleric Alimi, whose sons Abdussalami and Shitta would break apart the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo and Islamise the northern frontier of Yorubaland. Nupe under Mallam Dendo and his sons, around the Niger bend. Hadejia on the north-eastern frontier, where Sambo Digimsa and later the notorious Buhari guarded the unstable border with Bornu.

By 1817 — the year of dan Fodio ﵀'s death — the federation counted at least thirteen major emirates and a dozen smaller ones. Together they covered an area from the Niger bend in the west to the Mandara Mountains in the east, from the Sahel in the north to deep into the subtropical savannah in the south. The Infāq al-Maysūr and the later Rauḍ al-Jinān of Gidado dan Laima give lists with the names of the emirs and the dates of their installation.

This system was elegant because it made expansion faster and cheaper than a central army could have done. It was vulnerable because it carried from the start the same tension that all federations carry: emirs who became locally sovereign, who kept internal taxation, who waged their own wars, and who were tied to the centre only through bay’a loyalty, zakat deliveries and correspondence. That this system stood until 1903 — the British conquest — is testimony to its flexibility. That the British then literally took it over as the basis for their indirect rule and continue to build on it the northern administrative geography of Nigeria today, is testimony to its deep root.

Ten Million Subjects, More or Less

How many people actually lived under this flag?

The honest answer: we do not know precisely, and anyone who names an exact figure is selling certainty where there is none. But the historiographical estimates run — for nineteenth-century Sokoto at its peak — between roughly seven and ten million inhabitants. Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn, the two historians whose work in Slow Death for Slavery (1993) and Transformations in Slavery (2011) has set the standard frame, place the middle of that estimate around 1850 at nine to ten million.

That is, whichever estimate one takes, an enormous number for a pre-colonial African state. Songhai at its peak in the sixteenth century, Mali under Mansa Musa in the fourteenth — these empires presumably also numbered millions, but no modern historian places them above five million. The Ashanti empire in the same nineteenth century: one to three million. Zululand under Shaka: a few hundred thousand. Abyssinia under Tewodros: perhaps four to five million. In a time when most African states numbered between 500,000 and three million people, Sokoto — simply by its demographic size — stood in a class apart.

The population was not ethnically homogeneous. Fulbe formed the ruling elite but not the majority. The Hausa population was numerically dominant in the countryside and in the old cities. In addition, there lived in the empire Kanuri in the east, Yoruba Muslims in Ilorin, Nupe in the south-west, Gwari, Plateau groups, Chamba, Mumuye, Mandara peoples — dozens of languages, dozens of ethnic groups, held together by Islam as a shared institutional language and by Arabic as administrative language.

A state the size of France and Germany combined, with a population that was more than twice that of the United States at the same moment, governed in Arabic by a Fulbe elite that itself spoke Fulfulde, over a majority that spoke Hausa, united in one legal system that had been imported from Maliki Andalus via Timbuktu. This is a polity that commands respect, also — precisely — when one does not talk away its dark sides.

The Kitab al-Farq as Constitution

An empire of this size needs a constitution, explicit or implicit. Sokoto had an explicit one. Or rather, a library that together functioned as a constitution.

The core work was still dan Fodio ﵀'s Kitāb al-Farq bayn Wilāyāt Ahl al-Islām wa Wilāyāt Ahl al-Kufr, “The Book on the Difference Between Muslim and Unbeliever Government”. We discussed it in scene 42 as an indictment against Yunfa. After 1809 it became something else: a negative constitutional document that described what an Islamic government must not do, and thus — by mirror image — what it must do. No arbitrary taxes beyond zakat, jizya and kharaj. No jurisprudence beyond shari’a. No court rituals mixed with non-Islamic elements. No enslavement of Muslims by Muslims. No persecution of ulama. No sarauta titles that drew Islamic authority to themselves.

Alongside the Kitāb al-Farq stood the Bayān Wujūb al-Hijra ʿalā al-ʿIbād, dan Fodio ﵀'s 1806 text that set out the obligation of hijra from a dar al-kufr region juridically. This text supplied the legitimation for the jihad exodus itself and was read in the caliphate as proof that the founding of Sokoto — literally as hijra destination — had been an Islamic duty, not an adventurous conquest.

Alongside this circulated the manuals of Khalil ibn Ishaq ﵀ (the Mukhtasar as Maliki reference), of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀ (the Risala as elementary legal handbook), and the fifteenth-century fatwas of al-Maghili ﵀ — who had advised the Songhai sultan Askia Muhammad two centuries earlier and whose texts were used in Sokoto as direct jurisprudential precedents.

And then there were Bello ﵀'s own works. The Infāq al-Maysūr, completed around 1812, as historical and juridical self-justification. Abdullahi ﵀'s Diya’ al-Hukkām, “Light for the Rulers”, a governance guide for emirs. Nana Asma’u ﵂'s poetry and didactic works in Fulfulde, Hausa and Arabic — she would, after her father’s death, become a scholastic authority in her own right, whose works were disseminated by her brother Bello ﵀ as official state texts.

Together these books formed what Murray Last in his standard work The Sokoto Caliphate (1967) called “a theocratic constitution by accumulation”. No single document was the constitution. The whole library was.

The Waziri and his Inkpot

A state is not governed by books, but by officials. Bello ﵀ built up in Sokoto an administrative structure that, for its time and region, was strikingly professional.

At the centre stood the Waziri, the grand vizier. The first holder of this office was Abdullahi al-Sadiq ﵀ — no relative of dan Fodio ﵀, but a scholar from the Toronkawa-Fulbe clan, someone who had risen in the system not through blood but through knowledge. He was Bello ﵀'s right hand in correspondence with the emirs, he supervised zakat revenues, he formulated fatwas, he maintained the scholarly networks with Egypt and the Hijaz. The Rauḍ al-Jinān of Gidado dan Laima — Gidado was Bello ﵀'s successor as waziri from 1817 — describes the duties of the waziri in detail: raʾīs al-kuttāb (head of scribes), ṣāḥib al-barīd (responsible for correspondence), muḥāsib al-zakāt (auditor of zakat revenues).

Beneath the waziri stood the Galadima, a Hausa term that dan Fodio ﵀ and Bello ﵀ had deliberately retained from the old sarauta vocabulary — not everything from before the jihad had to go. The Galadima was a kind of second minister, responsible for a specific geographical portfolio, often the northern border regions.

For jurisprudence there stood at every level an Alkali — a Hausa adaptation of the Arabic Qadi. The Qadi of Sokoto was the highest judge, an appeal in last instance. Beneath him stood emirate-Qadis in Kano, Katsina, Zaria, and so on, and beneath them again district-Qadis in smaller towns and villages. They applied Maliki law, with reference back to Mukhtasar, Risala and local fatwa collections. Legal cases were recorded in writing — a practice that was rare in pre-colonial West Africa. A part of these sijillat, judicial registers, has been preserved in the archives of Kano and Sokoto.

The taxation structure was Maliki-classical. Zakat on herds (jangali), agriculture (ushr, a tenth) and trade goods, levied on Muslims. Jizya, poll tax on non-Muslim subjects who enjoyed protection as dhimmi. Kharaj, land tax on land that had previously been non-Muslim and now fell under Islamic government. In addition tolls on the great caravan routes — particularly the north-south route from Agades to Kano and the west-east route from Timbuktu to Bornu — and state monopolies on certain goods such as salt from Bilma and kola from Borgu.

It was, with all its limitations, a functioning fiscal system. European travellers such as Hugh Clapperton in 1824 and Heinrich Barth in the 1850s — Barth travelled through the caliphate between 1851 and 1854 and devoted in his Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa (1857) page after page to the Sokoto administration — wrote of it with a mixture of astonishment and admiration. Barth notes that the market of Kano was “the largest in all of Sudan”, larger and better ordered than what he had seen in North African cities of comparable size.

The Shadow We Must Not Wipe Away

And here we must remain still for a moment, because history demands honesty and our Afro-Caribbean ears hear in this story something that touches us personally.

The Sokoto Caliphate was a slave society. Not a society with some slaves at the margin — a slave society in the definition of Moses Finley and Paul Lovejoy: a state in which slave labour is a structural economic pillar, in which the slave population in large parts of the empire makes up thirty per cent or more of the total population, and in which the reproduction of the system — by war, by purchase, by birth in slavery — is a continuous state task.

The Maliki fiqh, as applied by dan Fodio ﵀ and Bello ﵀, permitted the slave trade and slaveholding provided certain conditions were met. Muslims could not be enslaved. Slaves had to be treated humanely, could not be separated from their children below a certain age, had to be cared for in illness, had a right to one day of rest per week, could buy their freedom through mukataba or be released by ʿitq as a pious act. The ʿaqida of the shehu was clear: a Muslim owner who broke these rules committed sin.

But what was legitimate within the legal framework was meanwhile carried out on an industrial scale. The campaigns against non-Muslim populations — and “non-Muslim” was in Sokoto practice an elastic category — produced thousands of slaves annually. The southern frontier zones, what one called the dar al-harb edges, stood permanently under ghazwa pressure: the Cross River peoples, the Plateau pagans (Angas, Berom, Jukun remnants), the Mumuye and Bata in Adamawa, the Gwari to the south of Zaria. Each dry season cavalry units rode out from Bauchi, from Adamawa, from Yola on slave raid, brought back hundreds to thousands of captives, who were sold on the markets of Kano, Sokoto, Yola, Ilorin.

Where did these slaves go? Three routes. First within the caliphate itself: plantations around Kano (indigo, grain, cotton), plantations around Sokoto, household slaves in the elite compounds, sarkin dogarai — slave soldiers in the armies of the emirs. Second north, trans-Saharan: caravans via Agades, Ghat, Murzuq to Tripoli, Tunis, Cairo. This was an old route, centuries old, that in Sokoto times reached precisely a peak because European abolition of the Atlantic trade made the Saharan route relatively more attractive for North African buyers. Third — and here it touches our Caribbean family history — southwards, via Aro-Chukwu, Bonny, Lagos, to the Atlantic coast. This route had already been active before 1809, via Hausa intermediaries and Yoruba networks; it diminished in the nineteenth century, but disappeared entirely only in the 1860s–70s. Hundreds of thousands of West Africans who reached Suriname, Trinidad, Curaçao, Brazil and Haiti came from regions that during their youth stood under Sokoto influence or had been carried off by Sokoto-affiliated raids. Not directly from Sokoto itself — the great dhimma regions produced few Atlantic slaves — but from the edges, from Adamawa, from the Nupe-Yoruba border, from the Benue valley.

This we must say directly. The roots of our presence in the Caribbean lie in part in the wars that were waged under this green flag. The jihad that Maliki scholars described as righteous has — through many intermediate links, along many other types of perpetrators — also brought our ancestors into the holds of ships. This is no indictment of dan Fodio ﵀ personally — he condemned Atlantic slavery explicitly, wrote that Muslims must never deliver their fellow believers to Christian buyers. It is, however, a fact that the economy that flourished under his political legacy was a slave-holding economy, and that the demographic pressure that the raids towards the south caused brought people into the hands of Atlantic buyers.

Lovejoy’s figure — that in the second half of the nineteenth century the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the two or three largest slave societies in the world, alongside the American South and Brazil — is a figure that demands our historical maturity. We carry the pride in dan Fodio ﵀'s scholarship and the wound of what happened in his realm. Both at once.

April 1817: The Shehu Dies

Usman dan Fodio ﵀ died on approximately 3 Jumada al-Thaniya 1232 — the beginning of April 1817 — in Sifawa. His health had gradually worsened over the last two years. The Rauḍ al-Jinān of Gidado describes how in his final months he was barely able to write any longer, that Bello ﵀ and Nana Asma’u ﵂ sat at his bedside, that he had the dhikr on his lips to the end.

He was buried in Sokoto, not in Sifawa. The founder of the empire was buried in the city he had had founded but where he had himself barely lived. His grave — the Hubbare — still lies today in the heart of Sokoto, a place of pilgrimage for Yan Shehu from all over northern Nigeria, Niger, northern Cameroon, Mali and, via the diaspora, from London, New York and Amsterdam. It is a simple grave in a whitewashed qubba, with a Qur’an reciter who reads through daily, with pilgrims who perform tahlil. No monument. A resting place.

Bello ﵀ pledged the bay’a as second caliph. The transition went smoothly — no Abbasid fratricide, no Umayyad putsch, no doubt in Sokoto itself. But in Gwandu, Abdullahi ﵀ waited. He had not stood in Sokoto to witness his brother’s death; he had not come to the funeral in the first weeks. Only later in 1817 was the formal relationship between Sokoto and Gwandu restored: Abdullahi ﵀ acknowledged Bello ﵀ as Amīr al-Muʾminīn, Bello ﵀ acknowledged Abdullahi ﵀'s autonomy over the western domain. The brother-nephew situation — Abdullahi ﵀ was older than Bello ﵀, but Bello ﵀ was the son of the shehu and thus dynastically the principal heir — was thereby resolved to the extent that each retained his own sphere. The scars remained.

The Greatest State of Africa

Let us, before we close this scene, soberly establish one thing.

By 1817, eight years after Sokoto had been sketched in the sand as a city, the caliphate covered approximately 400,000 square kilometres — larger than present-day Germany. It counted thirteen great emirates and many smaller ones. It had a combined population that by mid-century would reach nine to ten million, more than any other sub-Saharan African state at that moment. It had a written administration, codified jurisprudence, a federal constitution by accumulation of texts, a diplomatic position reaching to Istanbul and Cairo, a library of which parts had been copied as far as Rabat, Fes and Medina.

Was it “the largest pre-colonial state of Africa”? That depends on what one measures. In absolute area Songhai in the sixteenth century was larger. In duration the Ethiopian empire was older. In military striking power the Mahdist state in Sudan and Shaka’s Zululand of their times were impressive. But in the combination of area, population, administrative literacy, economic complexity and legal institutionalisation, Sokoto in its nineteenth-century form stands alone. That is what Last, Hiskett, Lovejoy, Bobboyi and contemporary historiography — Nigerian and Western — broadly confirm.

This, then, is also what our forebears bequeathed to us: not only villages and rituals and stories, but a polity that in its time belonged to the largest in the world. That we never heard of it in our schools is a colonial blindness that we must now undo ourselves. That Bello ﵀ in 1824 spoke with Clapperton in Arabic about Napoleon, about British naval policy, about world trade routes — that is no exotic detail. That is evidence of a political maturity that we must come to take for granted, just as we take for granted the maturity of the France of Louis XIV or the Ottoman Empire of Süleyman.

What Comes Next

The shehu is buried. Bello ﵀ rules. Sokoto grows. And in the chancery the paperwork begins that for the next thirty years will hold the empire together.

It is now up to Bello ﵀ to show what it means to convert a jihad movement into a functioning caliphate. He will do it with his pen, with his ribats, with his hundred letters to emirs, with a correspondence with al-Kanemi ﵀ that — as we will see — calls into question the theological foundation of the entire enterprise. He will do it as a statesman, as a historian, as a poet and, where it must be, as a field commander.

The sultan who wrote. Let us go and meet him.

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