British Conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate
Britain destroyed the largest state in nineteenth-century Africa in about two months with a force of a few thousand men. The Sokoto Caliphate had been founded by Usman dan Fodio's jihad of 1804 and covered much of what is now northern Nigeria, Niger and northern Cameroon — some thirty emirates owing allegiance to a caliph at Sokoto, with a literate administration, Islamic law, a substantial economy in textiles, leather and grain, and a very large enslaved population. The British claim rested on the Berlin conference and on a charter given to the Royal Niger Company, and the caliph had answered Lugard's assertion of authority by writing that between them there could be no relations except war. Frederick Lugard's campaign of 1902 and 1903 took Kano in February after a siege of some hours, using Maxim guns and artillery against walls thirty feet high, and Sokoto itself on 15 March. Caliph Attahiru I refused submission and left on hijra eastward with thousands of followers, and was killed at Burmi in July. Lugard then invented the system he became famous for. Rather than replace the emirs, he kept them in office under British residents, kept Islamic law and taxation, and governed through the structure he had just conquered — indirect rule, which was cheap, and which he exported to much of British Africa. It also froze northern Nigeria's institutions, kept missionaries and Western schooling out, and produced the educational gap between north and south that Nigerian politics still runs on. Slavery was another instance of the same calculation. Lugard abolished the legal status of slavery rather than slavery itself, so that no one could be reclaimed by force and no one was freed either, and the institution wound down over decades rather than ending at a stroke.
- Year: 1900 CE
- Category: Military
