The Sultan Who Wrote: Muhammad Bello and the Administrative Consolidation of Sokoto

His father had lit the fire. His uncle had drafted the laws. To Muhammad Bello ﵀ fell the hardest task: turning a jihad movement into a functioning caliphate, with inkwell and sword at once. He did it for thirty years, and he did it largely with his pen.

A Son Who Had to Succeed His Father

Usman dan Fodio ﵀ died in 1817 in Sifawa, fewer than ten years after his army had defeated the Hausa ruler Yunfa at Alkalawa and the Sokoto Caliphate had become a fact. The shehu left behind something that had never been attempted in West Africa before: a literate, legally founded, Fulbe-led state stretching from Gwandu in the west to Adamawa in the east, well over a thousand kilometers across Hausaland. Inheriting such a state is not the same as governing it. The shehu had been a prophet-like figure. The shehu was mujaddid, renewer, the man who, according to his own writings, had been initiated by the Prophet ﷺ in visions into the task of reforming Islam in Hausaland. His son Muhammad Bello ﵀, born in 1781 in Degel, had to do something far more mundane. He had to do the daily work. He had to keep emirs in line, build ribats, set up tax systems, conduct correspondence, suppress revolts, settle theological debates. He had to turn the flame into a house.

Unlike many successors in history, he was prepared for it. Bello ﵀ had already led commands under his father, had led campaigns against Gobir, had founded the city of Sokoto itself in 1809 — literally a city sketched into the sand, at the confluence of the Sokoto and the Rima rivers, at 13.06° north and 5.24° east. And he had already been writing. He completed the Infāq al-Maysūr fī Taʾrīkh Bilād al-Takrūr, his chronicle of the jihad, in 1812, when he was thirty-three and his father was still alive. A son who documents his own movement while his father is still preaching is a son who knows that history must be written before the eyewitnesses die.

The Infāq al-Maysūr: The Source We Still Read Today

Let us pause at that book, for without the Infāq al-Maysūr our knowledge of the Fulani jihad and the early Sokoto Caliphate would be poor. Bello ﵀ wrote it in Arabic, in the learned style of Hausaland — sentences that build upon themselves, embedded quotations from Qur’an and Hadith, poetry interwoven with prose, lists of cities and chiefs and ulama in meticulous enumeration.

The title itself is a program. Infāq al-Maysūr means something like “The Spent Wealth” or “The Easy Expenditure”, a reference to the Qur’anic term for what the believer spends in the way of Allah ﷻ. Taʾrīkh Bilād al-Takrūr, “History of the Lands of Takrur”, uses the old geographic label by which the Arabic world had designated West Africa south of the Sahara since al-Bakri in the eleventh century. Bello ﵀ thus deliberately places his father’s movement within a long, Arabic-literate historical frame. He says, between the lines: this is not a local, tribal incident. This is a chapter in the history of Islamic civilization.

The book offers three things. First, a chronicle of the jihad itself: the sermons of Degel, the hijra to Gudu in 1804, the battles at Tabkin Kwotto and Alkalawa, the campaigns against Gobir, Katsina, Kano. Second, a geography and ethnography of Hausaland and surrounding regions, including the Fulani migration patterns, the Kanem-Bornu borders, the seven original Hausa states and the seven banza (“bastard”) states. Third, a legal justification: why this jihad was lawful, against whom it was directed, and which Maliki doctrines of takfīr and hijra underpinned it.

Bello ﵀ is a careful narrator but not an impartial one. He is the son of the shehu and writes for an audience that must continue to accept the legitimacy of the caliphate. His chronicle minimizes the conflicts within the Fulani coalition, exaggerates the theological excesses of Yunfa, and presents the campaigns against Gobir as reactive when in fact they were often preventive. Modern historians like Murray Last and Mervyn Hiskett use Bello’s text as a primary source but read it against the Bornu correspondence and the Tazyīn al-Waraqāt of his uncle Abdullahi ﵀ to obtain a more balanced picture. Yet the Infāq remains indispensable. Without it, an entire interior view of the movement would be missing.

The City Drawn Out of Nothing

You must imagine Sokoto for a moment as Bello ﵀ found it, or rather as he raised it from the ground. In 1809, on that spot along the Rima River, there is nothing you would call a city. There are low houses of dried clay, there are Fulani encampments, there are zongos — trade quarters — where caravans from Kano or Agadès rest briefly. Bello ﵀ chose that place deliberately. It lies at a strategic crossroads: far enough from Gobir to be safe, close enough to the Niger Bend for trade, and with sufficient water sources to sustain a growing population.

He had walls drawn — ten kilometers in circumference, seven gates, each with a Fulani name. He had the masallacin juma’a, the Friday mosque, built, with room for thousands of worshippers. He had the palace — gidan shehu, later gidan sarki — erected, with a courtyard for audiences and a private chamber for study. And he established what is perhaps his most important institution, though the least visible: a chancery. Secretaries who exercised muragabah over correspondence. Copyists who multiplied outgoing letters and archived incoming ones. A library that preserved Qur’an codices, the tafsir works of al-Qurtubi and al-Baghawi ﵀, the Maliki handbooks of Khalil ﵀ and Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀, and the writings of the shehu himself.

All of this, for a city raised from the ground only in 1809, is a stunning pace. Within a generation, Sokoto would be the intellectual capital of West Africa. Timbuktu still lived — the libraries of the Aqit family were still there, the Tarikh al-Sudan was being copied — but Timbuktu was a city of legacy, a city living on its sixteenth-century glow. Sokoto was a working center, a place where new texts were produced and where jurists wrote on contemporary matters. A living heart, not a museum.

The Ribats: Frontier Towns for Defense and Scholarship

One of Bello’s ﵀ most thoughtful policy instruments was the ribats — frontier towns that were both military outposts and religious learning centers. The word ribat has a long history in the Islamic world; it refers to the fortified monasteries along the early borders of the Maghreb and al-Andalus, places where warriors and sufis lived together, where prayer and vigilance coexisted. Bello ﵀ revived the concept for his own borders.

He founded several. Sifawa, where his father had died, was expanded into a ribat with a garrison and madrasa. Wurno, northeast of Sokoto, became a second residence where Bello ﵀ himself often stayed to be closer to the Gobir border. Gandi, Dange, Kware, Salame, Chimmola — all smaller frontier settlements that combined Fulani warriors, Hausa craftsmen and scholars. The logic was twofold. First, military: a ribat keeps a frontier in check without having to maintain a permanent army in the field. Second, cultural: a ribat makes Fulbe settlements durable in regions where the Fulani had previously roamed as nomads. The jihad thus took root in the soil. It became territorial, dug in.

This had consequences that Bello ﵀ may not have fully foreseen. The ribats drew Fulani populations toward specific cores and left the intervening regions relatively Hausa-dominant. The caliphate thus became a patchwork: Fulbe elites in the cities and ribats, Hausa majorities in the countryside, an enslaved population — about which more shortly — on the plantations and in the households. This ethnic-social stratification was not intended by the shehu — who in principle preached ummah brotherhood — but it was the pragmatic outcome of Bello’s ﵀ consolidation policy. A hundred years later, the British under Lugard would discover this patchwork and base their “indirect rule” upon it.

The Correspondence: A Hundred Letters, Twenty Emirs

If Sokoto under Bello ﵀ did one thing well that had been rare in West Africa before, it was written governance. Around a hundred letters from Bello’s ﵀ hand have survived — some in the archive of the Sultan of Sokoto, others in regional emirate archives, still others in the collections of North African and Egyptian libraries where caravan copies once arrived. Modern editions, such as those by Bobboyi and Yamusa in Nigeria and by Hunwick in the Arabic Literature of Africa project, make these letters accessible.

Read a few, and you see a ruler governing his realm through ink. He writes to the emir of Kano about tax remittances and the correct application of zakat on herds. He writes to the emir of Bauchi about a dispute over slave prices. He writes to Yakubu of Bauchi himself — a learned emir, almost a kindred spirit — on a theological issue concerning the making of amulets. He writes to the emir of Zaria about border conflicts with Katsina. He sends fatwas, risalas, personal admonitions and formal decrees, all in the same clear, accessible Maliki Arabic.

One pattern stands out: Bello ﵀ governs with authority but rarely with menace. His letters do not sound like commands from a despot. They sound like advice from an older brother who also possesses authority. This is no accident. Sokoto’s flag system — by which the caliphate recognized its vassal emirs through a formal bay’a and the handing over of a tuta, a flag — created a federation more than a centralized state. Bello ﵀ had no standing army he could send to Kano or Ilorin to enforce his commands. He had authority, dependent on respect, dependent on his position as son of the shehu and as a literate equal of his emirs. Maintaining that authority required continuous correspondence. Not one letter a year, but a stream.

And where correspondence failed, the sword came — but always after the word. That is Bello’s ﵀ governing style summed up in one sentence.

The Epistolary War with al-Kanemi

We must now address an uncomfortable part, for honesty requires it. The Sokoto Caliphate was not recognized by all Muslims in the region. In fact, it was openly opposed by one of the most respected Muslim scholars of West Africa at the time. His name was Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi ﵀, the shaykh who from 1808 onward became the effective ruler of the old Sultanate of Bornu, east of Hausaland, around Lake Chad.

The context is important. Bornu was not a pagan realm. Bornu had been an Islamic sultanate since the eleventh century, with a mai — sultan — from the Sayfawa dynasty, with a long tradition of Maliki fiqh, with its own ulama, with a calendar aligned with that of the umma. When the Fulani jihad spread from Sokoto into Bornu in 1808 and Fulani warriors plundered the Bornu capital Birni Gazargamu, this was experienced by the Bornu elite as an attack of Muslims upon Muslims. Al-Kanemi ﵀, who came from the Kanembu aristocracy and had studied in Fez and Medina, reorganized the Bornu army, drove out the Fulani, and eventually founded a new capital, Kukawa, of which he became the de facto ruler while the Sayfawa mai remained a ceremonial figure.

And then the correspondence began. Al-Kanemi ﵀ first wrote, around 1810-1813, to the shehu Usman dan Fodio ﵀ himself. Later, after 1817, he continued with Muhammad Bello ﵀. The tone was sharp but documented. Why, asked al-Kanemi ﵀, are Bornu Muslims being attacked by you? Why do you declare our mai an unbeliever? On what Maliki basis do you ground your takfīr? Our mosques stand. Our Qadis judge. Our Qur’an schools teach. What right do you have to consider us dar al-harb?

Bello ﵀ replied. He argued that the Bornu elite mixed Islamic practices with pre-Islamic traditions — for example, around the inauguration of the mai, around certain court rituals, around fiscal practices that he labeled un-Islamic. He cited fatwas of al-Maghili ﵀ from the fifteenth century that had viewed such mixings as grounds for takfīr. He pointed to the enslavement of Muslims by Muslims, which under Maliki law was impermissible, and accused Bornu fighters of carrying off Fulani Muslim women as slave women.

Al-Kanemi ﵀ replied again. His counterarguments are intellectually impressive, and in some respects they won the debate. He argued that ritual irregularities did not justify takfīr as long as the arkan al-iman, the pillars of faith, were intact. He pointed out that the Fulani themselves, before the jihad, had tolerated identical court practices under the Hausa kings. He accused Sokoto of tribal aggression cloaked in Islamic banner — Fulbe expansion clothed in the language of jihad.

This is the truth we must not paper over: the Sokoto Caliphate had a serious, learned, Muslim opponent who refused to acknowledge that it was waging a jihad. That controversy was never resolved. Bornu remained independent of Sokoto, the war between the two simmered on, and both shaykhs died without settling their dispute. Al-Kanemi ﵀ died in 1837, the same year as Bello ﵀. Their correspondence has been preserved in several manuscripts, including the collection known among Bornu historians as the Risala and among modern publishers as Letters of al-Kanemi.

For those who deal honestly with our history: the jihad of Usman dan Fodio ﵀ was an authentic reform movement that liberated thousands of Hausa peasants from predatory rulers, that anchored Maliki law in Hausaland, that expanded literacy. It was also a Fulbe takeover of power justified with theological tools, and one explicitly rejected by another great Muslim scholar. Both things are true. Whoever denies one is lying about the facts.

The Gaskiya: Poetry in Two Languages

Bello ﵀ was, besides a statesman, a poet. He wrote in Arabic and in Fulfulde, his mother tongue. Part of his poetry is referenced within the Sokoto tradition under the collective name Gaskiya (“truth”) — though this term has later been used more broadly for the entire Fulfulde corpus of the dan Fodio family.

What did he write? Qasidas in honor of the Prophet ﷺ, in the tradition of al-Busiri’s Burdah. Didactic poems on tawhid and on Maliki fiqh, intended for students of his madrasa. Personal laments — for example, on the death of his sister Nana Asmaʾu’s twin son, a poem in which the statesman’s fire briefly steps aside for human grief. Political poetry in which he admonishes emirs or celebrates victories. And tabshir poems, consolation poems for believers in difficult times, which were read aloud in mosques after the Friday prayer.

His sister Nana Asmaʾu ﵂ was, incidentally, herself a poet of international stature, and together brother and sister formed a cultural center of gravity that West Africa had not seen since Ahmad Baba ﵀ in Timbuktu. Nana Asmaʾu’s ﵂ yan-taru — her network of female teachers who instructed women village by village — was an educational project far ahead of its time, and one that would not have been possible without the logistical protection of her brother Bello ﵀.

Bello’s ﵀ poetry has not yet been fully translated into European languages. Parts have been made accessible in English by Hiskett, by Mukhtar Bunza, by Ibrahim Sulaiman. For our madrasa networks in Kano, Zaria, Yola and Gombe, however, it remains a daily presence — quoted in tafsir lessons, sung in mawlid celebrations, recited in the Fulfulde that Bello ﵀ himself spoke.

Campaigns, Revolts, the Slow Burn

Bello’s ﵀ reign was not peaceful. He campaigned continuously. The Gobir remnants under various successors of Yunfa kept invading the north of the caliphate. In 1818 they defeated Bello ﵀ at a battle and he had to retreat temporarily. In 1826 he personally led a great expedition against Gobir, in which the final defeat of the last Gobir ruler was sealed. He campaigned against the Kebbi rulers, against remnants of the Zamfara sultanate, against Nupe revolts in the south. The eastern border with Bornu remained, as said, a smoldering crisis.

At the same time, he had to manage internal tensions. Between Sokoto and Gwandu — the western branch of the caliphate, under his uncle Abdullahi dan Fodio ﵀ — discomfort grew. More on that in the next scene. Conflicts arose among emirs: Kano versus Katsina over territory, Bauchi versus Adamawa over the treatment of non-Muslim populations, Zaria internally over succession. Bello ﵀ mediated, redistributed, punished and rewarded. He became a kind of Islamic federal arbiter.

And he carried the burden of the slaveholding character of his caliphate. This must be said honestly. Sokoto, despite its reform rhetoric, ran an economy that depended substantially on slave labor. The campaigns against non-Muslim populations — Kurfi, Kebbi villages, southern Gwari, parts of the Jos Plateau peoples — continually produced new slaves. Plantations around Kano, Zaria and Sokoto itself were worked by slaves. The jangali tax on herds, the zakat on grain, and the slave trade formed the three economic pillars of the caliphate. Historians like Paul Lovejoy have calculated that by the mid-nineteenth century the Sokoto Caliphate was one of the largest slave societies in Africa, with millions of unfree people. Bello ﵀ was aware of this and defended the practice within Maliki limits: non-Muslims in dar al-harb could be enslaved, Muslims could not; mistreatment was forbidden, manumission was meritorious. But the institution itself was not put up for question. Whoever speaks of Bello ﵀ without mentioning this economic reality tells half a story.

The Gaze of a European Stranger

Something remarkable happened in 1824. A Scotsman named Hugh Clapperton, an officer in the British Navy and member of an expedition that had traveled south from Tripoli, reached Sokoto. Bello ﵀ received him personally, spoke with him in Arabic through an interpreter, questioned him on European politics, on Napoleon, on the relations between England and France, on naval technology. Clapperton’s Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa (1829) is for us an invaluable foreign view of Bello’s ﵀ court.

What did Clapperton see? A sultan who read and wrote Arabic, who understood geographic maps, who asked him whether England would support Bornu against Sokoto (Clapperton refused to intervene politically), who showed him books from his library. He saw a city in which the markets were regulated, in which women — at least the Muslim women of the Fulani elite — lived within purdah but in which the aristocratic women such as Nana Asmaʾu ﵂ were certainly intellectually active. He saw mosques full, madrasas full, slave caravans heading north. He saw, in other words, a functioning Islamic state in the heart of Africa.

Clapperton returned with Bello’s ﵀ letters to King George IV, in which Bello ﵀ asked for British diplomatic relations and for the supply of Sokoto with books, medicines and firearms in exchange for trade access. London responded slowly. Clapperton died two years later in the Fulani camps near Sokoto, exhausted by dysentery, buried at Jungavi with Bello’s ﵀ blessing. The diplomatic opening came to nothing; only a quarter of a century later would British colonial interests seriously approach Hausaland, and then under entirely different terms.

But the episode is important for us. It shows that Bello’s ﵀ Sokoto was not the isolated interior that nineteenth-century European descriptions often made it out to be. Bello ﵀ knew about Napoleon. He knew that England was great. He knew that African coastal states were under increasing European pressure. He tried, in his own way, to choose a diplomatic position for his realm. That Europe did not respond is not Sokoto’s failure. It is Europe’s tragedy.

Death in Wurno, the Legacy in the Pen

Muhammad Bello ﵀ died on 25 October 1837 in Wurno, the ribat he himself had founded. He was fifty-six. His reign had lasted twenty years — almost as long as that of his father during the jihad itself and the brief caliphate period combined. He left behind a consolidated caliphate: thirty vassal emirates, a stable capital, a functioning chancery, an intellectual tradition that would feed his successors for generations to come. He also left behind a network of unresolved tensions: Bornu, Gwandu, the slavery question, the growing technological gap with a Europe that was industrializing.

His grave lies in Wurno, his books in Sokoto, his poems on the lips of talibes in Kano. He was the sultan who wrote. He was the man who turned a movement into a state without betraying the movement. He was, in an age when most heads of state in West Africa governed illiterate, a scholar of international stature. He was, at the same time, the ruler of a realm that ran on slave labor and treated other Muslims as apostates.

That is the real Bello ﵀: mature, complicated, historical. No saint, no tyrant, but a statesman in the full Islamic tradition — with all the light and all the shadow that such a notion permits.

What Is to Come

While Bello ﵀ ruled from Sokoto, his uncle Abdullahi ﵀ was building his own project on the other side of the caliphate. Gwandu, the western emirate, was officially subordinate to Sokoto but in practice semi-autonomous. And Abdullahi ﵀ was, unlike his nephew Bello ﵀, a scholar of the doubting kind — a man who had helped launch the jihad project but who, once success had been established, began to write about what had gone wrong internally.

His autobiography Tazyīn al-Waraqāt is one of the most honest texts in the entire Islamic reform tradition. He speaks openly about commanders who plundered in the name of the jihad, about distribution of spoils that violated Islamic rules, about his own decision not to follow the advancing armies all the way to Alkalawa. To that man, to that project, to that critique-from-within, we now turn.

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