The Last Hijra: How Sokoto, Kano and the Whole Western Sudan Fell in Seven Years

Between 1893 and 1903, the last Islamic states of West Africa fall in rapid succession to European rifles. The French from the west, the British from the south. The last Caliph of Sokoto chooses hijra over submission. He dies on the banks of a river called Burmi. And a century of Fulani state-building ends with one bullet, one day, and a file in a London archive.

The Year the Map Changes Definitively

Until well into the 1870s, West Africa was for Europeans largely a coastal phenomenon. Forts along the Senegal, along the Gold Coast, along the Bay of Benin. The interior still appeared on maps with empty spaces and question marks: “Bilad es-Sudan”, “Soudan Kingdoms”, “Unknown River”. African rulers negotiated from a position of relative independence with European traders.

This changed abruptly after the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. There, without a single African representative present, the map of Africa was divided into zones of influence. France claimed most of the West and Central Sudan. Great Britain claimed the southeast — Nigeria, the lower Niger valley, northward along the Lake Chad area. Germany took Togo and Cameroon. Portugal retained Guinea-Bissau. The Belgians received Congo, the Spanish small fragments.

These claims were on paper. The concrete conquest came between 1885 and 1903. And it came with a new generation of weapons: the Maxim machine gun (patented 1884, in field use from c. 1890), the Martini-Henry repeating rifle, the armored steam gunboat. Against this technology no African army — regardless of how well trained, how numerous, how brave — had a sustainable tactic. The numerical ratio on battlefields like Kousséri and Burmi would sometimes be a hundred to one in favor of the African side. The outcome was nevertheless always the same.

Let us treat this final act in three parts: the French dance eastward, the British dance northward, and the fall of Sokoto as crown upon both.

The French Eat the Western Sudan

The French advance had already begun under Louis Faidherbe (governor of Senegal 1854-1865), who waged the first systematic campaigns against Umar Tall ﵀'s Toucouleur state. But the full conquest phase came after the Berlin Conference.

In 1883 Bamako falls into French hands. In 1887 Bafoulabé. In 1890 Ségou, now under Umar Tall ﵀'s son Ahmadu Sékou, conquered by Louis Archinard — Ahmadu Sékou flees with his court eastward to Massina, where he is again defeated by Archinard in 1893 with the capture of Djenné and Timbuktu. He retreats still further eastward, to Sokoto, where he would die in exile in 1898. The Toucouleur empire that Umar Tall ﵀ had founded does not last thirty years after his own death.

In the south Samori Touré — a Mandinka Muslim warrior who between 1880 and 1898 built up a great Islamic empire from the northern Ivory Coast deep into present-day Burkina Faso — wages one of the longest and most ingenious resistances against French expansion. He moves his entire almamyat eastward when the French apply pressure from the west. He scales up his own gunpowder manufacture. He maintains spies in French forts. But in September 1898 he is finally captured by Captain Gouraud at Guélémou, sent into exile in Gabon, and dies there in 1900. With him falls one of the last truly mobile Muslim armies of the continent.

And meanwhile there was yet another player: Rabih az-Zubayr, a former officer of the Mahdist Sudan, who in the 1880s with a slave-raiding army had marched westward, conquered the old Kanem-Bornu empire around Lake Chad (1893), and established a self-standing military state. Rabih is an ambivalent figure — he was formally Muslim, conducted a certain jihad rhetoric, but his state was at its core a personal warrior empire running on slave raids, not a strictly religious project like Sokoto or Hamdullahi. In April 1900, on 22 April at the Battle of Kousséri (in present-day Chad), Rabih is defeated and killed by a French column under Commandant Lamy. Kousséri also costs Commandant Lamy his life — ironic, given that the future city of Fort-Lamy (now N’Djamena) would be named after him. Rabih was no Sokoto, but his defeat freed the northern flank of British Nigeria for the British to push through according to plan.

By 1899 the French conquest of the western Sudan was effectively complete. By 1900 they had the boucle du Niger fully in their hands. Only the east — Hausaland, Sokoto, parts of Bornu — still lay open to the British player.

Frederick Lugard and His Mandate

On the British side the engine was Frederick Lugard (1858-1945), a captain from the Indian Army and ex-director of the Royal Niger Company. On 1 January 1900 the British Crown proclaimed the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, with Lugard as first High Commissioner. His mandate: formally take over local sovereignty, retain as much existing administration as possible under British umbrella (the formula he would later theorize as indirect rule), and end the Sokoto Caliphate, which was still the largest Islamic political entity of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sokoto was at that moment, a hundred years after Usman dan Fodio ﵀'s jihad of 1804, a mature but weakened Islamic polity. It comprised thirty emirates over an area twice the size of England. Kano was its largest commercial city, an economic center where textile production, leather industry and caravan trade took place on a great scale. But the caliphate was internally divided. Caliph Abderrahman had reigned from 1891 to 1902 as a passive sovereign. His successor Muhammad Attahiru I ascended the throne in October 1902 in an atmosphere of rising fear: reports of French campaigns in the west, British forts on the Bay of Benin, German expansion in Cameroon, and a peculiar stream of chiliastic Mahdi preaching in parts of Hausaland that further unsettled the population.

Lugard had the weapons. What he was still seeking was a pretext. It came in September 1902 when the Emir of Keffi, a vassal state of Zaria, killed a British resident (Captain Maloney). Lugard demanded satisfaction, the emir fled to Kano where he was taken in by Emir Aliyu, and Aliyu refused to extradite him. This refusal became Lugard’s casus belli.

The Campaign against Kano

In January 1903 a British column of about 700 West African soldiers (recruited from the West African Frontier Force — primarily Hausa and Yoruba recruits), 25 British officers, 4 Maxim machine guns and 4 light cannons, under Colonel Thomas Morland, marched northward from Zaria toward Kano. The trek lasted three weeks — through dusty savanna in the dry harmattan wind, with a daily march of twenty kilometers, supplies on pack animals, drinking water scarce.

The Emir of Kano, Muhammad Aliyu dan Sidi, was at that moment in Sokoto for consultation with the Caliph. His deputies tried to organize the defense. Kano possessed an impressive city wall — eleven meters high, fifteen kilometers in circumference, with fourteen gates — and a great cavalry force equipped with chain mail, swords and spears, and a limited quantity of old-fashioned firearms.

On 3 February 1903 Morland reached the city. The British column took up position about eight hundred meters from the Kofar Kabuga gate. The Kano cavalry, under the command of the madaki Aliyu, executed a classical charge — thousands of horsemen in formation, lances forward, to the sound of drums and algaita flutes. Against the Maxim machine guns.

Morland himself wrote briefly about it later in his dispatches, preserved in the Colonial Office archives (Lugard collection, CO 446): “The cavalry charge of the enemy was brave and well coordinated, but our Maxims opened fire at three hundred yards, and the attack did not come within eighty yards of our lines. The ground between was within ten minutes strewn with fallen riders and horses. We have suffered no losses in this.”

Read that again. Three hundred yards. Ten minutes. Thousands of horsemen against four machine guns. This is the reality of 1903.

The British stormed the city gate, lost a few defenders to musket and arrow fire, broke into the city. By evening Kano was in British hands. The city wall, which had stood for hundreds of years, had been rendered strategically irrelevant in one day.

This is not a defeat through lack of courage. This is a defeat through technological gap. We must distinguish that clearly. The Kano cavalry was by every African standard of the nineteenth century a high-quality force. Against machine guns it had no means. It is, by every rational measure, impossible to win 1903 if you have 1850s weapons. What this says about courage, about Islamic identity, about the right of the Sokoto Caliphate to exist — that is another conversation. But on the battlefield itself, the outcome had been decided before the first shot.

Sokoto Must Choose

The news of Kano’s fall reached Sokoto within days. The Caliph Muhammad Attahiru I — only three months on the throne — stood before the heaviest decision an Islamic ruler can have.

His advisers were divided. Some emirs proposed to negotiate — to accept a British resident in Sokoto, to pay tribute, to give up formal sovereignty in exchange for self-rule on a ceremonial level. This would be the dhimmi logic in reverse: not the Muslim ruling over the non-Muslim, but the non-Muslim ruling over the Muslim population. Juristically heavily problematic within classical Maliki fiqh, but in practice what many vassals had already silently been doing.

Other advisers proposed hijra. Carrying out a mass migration eastward, in the direction of Mecca, away from the dar al-kufr that was establishing itself. This option had deep Islamic justification. It referred directly back to the founding of the Sokoto Caliphate itself: Usman dan Fodio ﵀ had in 1804 himself led a hijra, from Degel to Gudu, before declaring his jihad. The concept wujub al-hijra min dar al-kufr — the obligation of the hijra from the territory of unbelief — was a classical Maliki doctrine, set out systematically by dan Fodio ﵀ himself in his Bayan wujub al-hijra 'ala al-ibad. The Caliph would thus, by choosing hijra, repeat the decision of his own founding father a century later.

And in between these, the third option which some military advisers proposed: wait, sign treaties, maneuver, gamble that the British would become overextended. This option was, given the reports from Kano, not credible.

Muhammad Attahiru I chose hijra. On 13 March 1903, after Lugard’s army approached Sokoto, he left the city with several thousand followers — family members, emirs of smaller states who joined him, students, soldiers of the consecrated guard. They moved eastward, along a route that ultimately had to lead to Mecca. The journey to be paved was 5000 kilometers long, through territory that would become increasingly hostile, with caravans that had to load food for an unknown number of months.

In Sokoto itself a small group of emirs remained, under the leadership of Attahiru’s brother. They opened negotiations with Lugard. On 15 March 1903 British troops walked into Sokoto without battle. Lugard delivered a speech in the great mosque of Sokoto, proclaimed the formal supremacy of the British Crown, and announced that he would appoint a new caliph — an obedient candidate from the dan Fodio family willing to accept British suzerainty.

And that is what he did. Muhammad Attahiru II — a cousin of the fleeing caliph, with no direct relation to the old legitimacy concept — was appointed by Lugard as Caliph. The title was suddenly a British appointment. The caliphate, which in 1804 had been founded as the supreme authority of an independent Islamic state, became in 1903 a hereditary-decorative position within British colonial administration. This Muhammad Attahiru II would live until 1915; his successors — chosen by the British authorities, later by the Nigerian federal government — would until today be called “Sultan” in Sokoto and fulfill a ceremonial role.

This is a strange form of continuity. The title survives. The state does not. The family remains on the throne. The sovereignty does not. This is indirect rule in its most clinical form.

The Fleeing Caravan and the Battle of Burmi

Meanwhile, Muhammad Attahiru I — the real caliph in his own eyes and in the eyes of his followers — marched eastward. He gathered support from local emirs who joined the hijra. Bauchi joined. Misau joined. Parts of Gombe. Their numbers grew to several tens of thousands — men, women, children, livestock, wagons. This was not a military army in the classical sense, but a muhajirin community, a migrating people with its sovereign as religious center.

Lugard saw the danger. A successful hijra would fix Sokoto in the dar al-kufr theology and give every learned Muslim an argument to also go eastward. Moreover, the British colonial project would have an unsanitized counter-narrative running alongside it for an indefinite time: “There is still a Caliph, and he is not with Lugard.” This was politically unacceptable.

So Lugard sent a column after Attahiru, under Major Marsh, and later reinforced. During the summer of 1903 the caravan had several skirmishes with British and local troops. Many followers fell off along the way — exhaustion, hunger, defectors who returned to their emirates. By July the group was smaller, but still on the move.

On 27 July 1903 Attahiru’s remaining troops, about 2000 armed followers and thousands of non-military muhajirin, reached the place Burmi in present-day Gombe State, Nigeria, on the bank of the Gongola River. There the British column under Major Marsh caught up with them. On 27 July 1903 (the same day as arrival in Burmi) the battle was fought.

Attahiru’s troops fought bravely. They attacked in waves, close, with swords and carbines. The British had Maxims and Martini-Henrys. Within a few hours it was over. Muhammad Attahiru I was killed, together with nine other emirs who had marched with him. The casualty counts differ; British dispatches report about 90 British / West African losses and an estimated 700 to 1500 on the Sokoto side. Many of them were non-combatants.

And here comes a detail that a hundred years later still feels uncomfortable.

The Body and the Photograph

After the battle, the body of Muhammad Attahiru I was identified by the British. Lugard’s dispatches and the British press of the time report that his body was placed on a cart, driven around the encampment, and that his head, according to some sources, was viewed by British officers, according to other sources briefly displayed in public to the remaining muhajirin, as proof of his death. This was no unusual practice within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial warfare — both Samori Touré’s capture and Rabih az-Zubayr’s beheading had been accompanied by comparable rituals.

For the muhajirin this was a definitive spiritual defeat. Their Caliph, who was the heir of Usman dan Fodio ﵀ himself, who had correctly applied the hijra doctrine, who had made his choice on the basis of Islamic juristic tradition — that man lay dead on a British cart. Some followers still fled eastward, and a small group did indeed eventually reach Mecca, where they would survive as a Takruri colony into the twentieth century (the Sudanese city of Maiurno, in Sennar province, was founded by one of them in 1906-1907). But as a political movement the hijra had ended.

Let us pause for a moment at this image. There is a temptation to frame Attahiru as shahid, as martyr. We do not need that temptation tonight. Not because Attahiru does not deserve dignity; he certainly deserves dignity. But because framing a defeat as victory — “he won spiritually, even though he lost militarily” — erases the real character of what happened. Attahiru was killed. His people were killed. His body was treated without honor. The Islamic state he served was incorporated into a heathen-British empire. This was a loss. Not a moral loss — on the Islamic side the juristic argument was strong — but a factual, material, world-changing loss.

We may acknowledge this as a loss without giving in to despair. The Islamic tradition has acknowledged other great losses — the fall of Baghdad in 1258, the fall of Granada in 1492, the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 — without losing its faith in the process. The acknowledgment of loss is precisely what binds us to that tradition. We come from a umma that has suffered losses and has gone on. We do not have to spin the loss into a victory in order to carry on with it.

The Elegies of Wakili Junaidu and the Sokoto Poets

What does remain to us — and this is richer than one sometimes thinks — are the elegy poems of Sokoto from the years immediately after 1903. In Hausa and Fulfulde, written by the ulama class that after Attahiru’s death had remained in Sokoto and the cities around it, there exists a genre of mourning poetry in which the defeat was described with exact naming: which emir fell, which ulama were captured, which libraries were plundered, which mosques were converted into barracks.

From this elegy tradition dozens of works were preserved in the libraries of Sokoto, Kano and Dauche, and in later collections such as those of Hiskett. They are not triumphalism. They are classical Islamic mourning, in the tradition of the elegies for al-Husayn ﵁ at Karbala, for the fallen of Uhud, for every shahid in every later defeated period. The genre convention gives room for precisely what we are doing tonight: acknowledging that there was a loss, honoring what was lost, without making the loser greater than he was or the victor smaller.

The British installed their indirect rule in Northern Nigeria with relative efficiency. The emirs were left in their position, provided that they accepted the British tax authorization and admitted British residents in their courts. Islamic education was tolerated but marginalized in favor of new colonial schools. The shariʿa courts continued to function partially under the supervision of British native courts. The mosques remained standing. But the central political authority of the Caliph, who for a hundred years had symbolically led the umma of the Western Sudan, had been ended.

What Colonial Conquest Did Not Achieve

And yet, before we close this scene, we must say something that does not appear in Lugard’s dispatches.

The conquest of Sokoto was political. It was not religious. The British replaced the caliph; they did not replace Islam. In the years after 1903, Muslims in Hausaland and the broader Fulani regions continued to read the Qur’an, fast, travel to Mecca, teach their children Arabic. The tariqas — Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya — continued to function, sometimes even strengthened by the disappearance of the state-Islam (which had sometimes co-opted ulama). In the 1920s and 1930s new shaykhs such as Ibrahim Niass ﵀ in Kaolack (Senegal) and later the heirs of Sheikh Dan Fodio would build up powerful religious movements again, now within but not of the colonial structure.

Islam in West Africa grew, in fact, faster under colonial rule than before it. The statistics are available: in 1900 about 30% of the inhabitants of what is now Senegal were Muslim; by 1960 (independence) it was around 85-90%. Comparable in northern Nigeria: mass-Islamization of Hausa peasants who were earlier nominally or partially Islamized took place largely in the twentieth century. This is a paradox we should not paper over. The political defeat of Islam in 1903 went together with a demographic breakthrough of Islam in the decades thereafter.

This is not an argument that the conquest was a blessing. It is an observation that religious identity and political authority are not the same layer. The British could end Sokoto as a state. They could not pull Islam as faith tradition out of the people. And that tradition learned to organize itself anew under colonial conditions — in zaouias, in Qur’an schools, in merchant guilds, in migration communities, in the Hajj caravans that now departed from Lagos and Dakar by steamboat.

Us and Them, Now

Tonight we sit here, in a hall in the Netherlands, most of us with Surinamese-Antillean roots, Afro-Caribbean Muslims with a heritage that via the Atlantic slave trade comes from precisely the regions we have discussed tonight. Sokoto, Hausaland, the Senegambia-Mandinka, the Bambara of Ségou, the Fulani of Massina, the Imazighen of the Sahara. Somewhere between those places and this hall run bloodlines and spiritual lines, and sometimes the map has been lost, and sometimes it is simply still there, in names and in customs and in an intuitive sense that one has to do with West Africa.

Tonight we have walked through the long arc. From the Zaghawa and Wagadu in the early Middle Ages, to Mali and Timbuktu and Mansa Musa, to Songhai and Tondibi, to the century of fragmentation, to the jihads of Seku Amadu ﵀ and Umar Tall ﵀, and finally, here, to Burmi 1903 and the fall of the last great Islamic state of West Africa.

The story does not end in 1903. The story bends there through a narrowing — a tunnel in which the political power of the umma is briefly switched off — and emerges on the other side, changed, but not extinguished. Senegal becomes independent in 1960 and is ninety percent Muslim. Nigeria becomes independent in 1960 and has in its north a Muslim majority that still carries the caliphate heritage as identity-core. Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Mauritania — all majority-Muslim, all with their own Sufi traditions running along lines we have touched tonight. The Suwari tradition of the Jakhanke still exists. The Tijaniyya of Umar Tall ﵀ flourishes worldwide, including among Muslims in the Netherlands. The Qadiriyya via Kunta lines lives on in Mauritania and Niger. Sokoto still has a Sultan.

For us tonight, as Dutch Afro-Caribbean Muslims, the lesson may be this: we are part of a world that has taken blows — great blows — and that is still here. Our history is not only a story of defeats. It is a story of people who wrote books while another’s armies stood at their door. Of rulers who made choices that hurt but that were honest. Of scholars who quarreled with each other about the right path and ultimately, each in his own variant, both went that path. Of merchants and herders and clerics and soldiers who, through the centuries, tried to build something that could carry their names.

A part of that has disappeared. Another part still stands. And yet another part — a not-small part — walks, via the routes that the Atlantic slave trade laid out, in us ourselves. When we pray, when we fast, when we let our children recite Qur’an in Amsterdam or Rotterdam or Paramaribo or Willemstad, then we do something in which the Sokoto Caliphate, the Mali Empire, the Timbuktu libraries, the Jakhanke villages and the Hamdullahi majlis all, in their own way, still breathe along. Not as the dead. As ancestors.

That is a history we do not have to lie about to find worthy. That is what I have wanted to offer you this evening.

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