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Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi - Politics - Nairaland

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Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Racoon(m): 11:07am On May 06, 2023
I've noticed a lot of back and forth between Hausa and Fulani people on social media lately. This column contributes to the debate:

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

The cultural and ethnic melding of Northern Nigeria’s Hausa and the Fulani people is so deep, so labyrinthine, so time-honored, and so unexampled that a fictitious ethnic category called the “Hausa-Fulani” was invented by Nigeria’s southern press to describe the emergent ethnic alchemy it has produced.

Northern intellectuals resented the label at first. For example, the late Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman, the famously iconoclastic professor of history at the Ahmadu Bello University who was ethnically Fulani and who was the scion of the Katsina and Kano royal families, condemned the hyphenation of Hausa and Fulani as both ill-willed and ignorant.

But several Northern Nigerian elites of Hausa and Fulani filiation have now enthusiastically embraced it. President Muhammadu Buhari, for instance, told the Weekly Trust in 1999 that he loved the hyphenated Hausa-Fulani identity that the southern press invented because it encapsulates the complexity of his own identity. His father is Fulani while his mother is half Kanuri and half Hausa.

More than that, though, Buhari is culturally and linguistically Hausa. Like most people in Nigeria’s northwest who trace patrilineal bloodline to the Fulani (including most of the emirs), he doesn’t speak a lick of Fulfulde (as the language of the Fulani is called in Nigeria) and is completely divorced from the culture of the “unmingled” Fulani who now live mostly in Nigeria’s northeast and in the bushes elsewhere in the country.

Over the years, the northern political elite not only used the common Islamic heritage of the Hausa and the Fulani people as an instrument to construct and cement the notion of an undivided and indivisible Hausa-Fulani identity, they also encouraged other parts of the country to see them as one, undifferentiated people.

In time, the rest of the country came to regard the Hausa and the Fulani as indistinguishable. A popular quip among the Yoruba says, “Gambari pa Fulani ko lejo ninu,” which roughly translates as “If a Hausa person kills a Fulani person, there is no case,” implying that the Hausa and the Fulani are homogenous people whose internal strife are no more than evanescent, resolvable sibling squabble.

But the emergence and unabating intensification of kidnapping for ransom and other forms of rural and urban banditry in the Northwest where most of the villains are Fulani and most of the victims are Hausa are rupturing the centuries-old ethnic harmony between the Hausa and the Fulani that Nigerians had taken for granted.

In response to the rural and urban banditry by mostly Fulani brigands against Hausa people, Hausa people have formed vigilante groups called yan sakai or yan banga for self-defense, but Fulani people say the yan banga self-defense groups often indiscriminately murder innocent Fulani people who are not even remotely connected with abductions and murders.

This has provoked an endless cycle of recriminations and retaliatory violence between Hausa and Fulani people and is threatening the age-old, Islam-inspired ethnic fusion between them.

This has been going on for years under the radar of the national and international media until BBC’s BBC Africa Eye brought it to the forefront of global attention in its Jul 24, 2022, documentary titled “The Bandit Warlords of Zamfara.” The documentary showed that although the Hausa and the Fulani share a common culture, religion, heritage, and language, they are, for the most part, divided and rarely mix in rural areas. They fight over land, water, and food.

Self-confessed Fulani bandits told the BBC that Hausa people enjoy preferential treatments in government jobs, that Fulani people face discrimination in the formal sector in northern Nigeria, and that kidnapping, banditry, and indiscriminate mass murders were the only way they could call attention to their neglect.

Following the documentary, which so unsettled the Nigerian government that local TV stations that rebroadcast it were fined, there has been an open discussion, particularly in Arewa social media circles, of hitherto culturally taboo subjects such as whether Usman Dan Fodio whose jihad inaugurated the current Fulani ruling families in much of Muslim northern Nigeria was a Hausa-hating Fulani ethnic supremacist.

Islam had been centuries old and already deeply entrenched in Hausa land before Usman Dan Fodio’s nineteenth-century jihad, which many historians have called a “Fulani war.” The well-regarded seventeenth-century Songhai Muslim scholar by the name of Ahmad Baba, for instance, had recognized Hausa land as a bastion of Islam.

In a 1613 essay titled, “Al-kashf wa-l-bayān li-aṣnāfmajlūb al-Sūdān” (translated into English as “The Exposition and Explanation Concerning the Varieties of Transported Black Africans”), he wrote that “the people of Kano, some of Zakzak [Zaria], the people of Katsina, the people of Gobir, and all of the Songhay” lived under ideal Islamic rule and could never be enslaved by other Muslims.

About 200 years later, when Dan Fodio decided to “reform” the Islam he met in Hausa land, he repudiated the Islam that the Hausa people had practiced. In his 1806 treatise titled "Bayan Wujub Al-Hijra, Ala L-Ibad,” Dan Fodio rebutted Ahmad Baba’s thesis by asserting that what was true of Hausa land when Ahmad Baba wrote, “might not necessarily be true at all other times, since every scholar relates what he sees in his own days.” Dan Fodio’s son, Muhammad Bello, also wrote Infaq al-mansur in 1813, exactly 200 years after Ahmad Baba, and contested the notion that Hausa land was ruled by Islamic precepts.

Now, in everyday dialogic engagements on social media, in the marketplace, and in the streets, Hausa and Fulani people are openly talking about the jihad and its decidedly ethnic character. Hausa people are asking why all the emirs that emerged from the jihad, except for that of Bauchi, were Fulani. (Emirs in Borgu in Kwara and Niger states are not the product of the jihad and are not Fulani.)

These questions are especially important because the Fulani emirs who dislodged Hausa Muslim rulers have been doing exactly what the Hausa Muslim rulers were accused of by Fulani jihadists—keeping multiple wives and concubines, oppressing everyday folks called the talakawa, believing and partaking in fortunetelling, etc. Besides, in Islam, leadership isn’t hereditary, so Hausa people are asking why a supposedly Islamic jihad has entrenched Fulani ethnic monarchies to the exclusion of the native Hausa populations.

These debates aren’t new, of course. For example, in a June 30, 2000, article titled “The Fulani Factor in Nigerian Politics” published in the Weekly Trust, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (who later became the emir of Kano on June 8, 2014, and was dethroned on March 9, 2020) caused a stir among not just other Nigerians but also among Hausa people when he said although the Fulani in northern Nigeria have lost their language and culture to the Hausa, they still cherish the irreproducible cultural and genetic distinctiveness that their ethnic identity imbues them with.

He isolated Nigerian leaders of putative Fulani line of descent—Ahmadu Bello, Shehu Shagari, Murtala Mohammed, and Muhammadu Buhari—whom he said even their “greatest enemies” respect because they supposedly embodied incomparable and uniquely Fulani values (even when they are/were not culturally Fulani).

He pointed out that the same could not be said of “other prominent non-Fulani contemporaries of these great men,” including military Head of State Ibrahim Babangida, who is Hausa, and Sani Abacha, who was Kanuri but born and raised in Kano. Sanusi then said the Fulani are “culturally programmed, generation after generation, to imbibe the best spirits of what makes good leadership, to a far greater extent than competing cultures.”

Garba Shehu, now a spokesperson for President Muhammadu Buhari, who is ethnically Hausa from Jigawa, was incensed. In a response titled “Sanusi’s Racist Rubbish” on July 7, 2000, Shehu wrote: “When I read Sanusi L. Sanusi’s article ‘The Fulani Factor in Nigerian Politics’…I came away with the feeling that the writer wanted to do one of two things: to either be ridiculous or to insult all of us who are not Fulani with some racist crap.”

Shehu invalidated Sanusi’s ethnic supremacist notion of a Fulani culture that makes Fulani people such good, just leaders by calling attention to the atrocities that were perpetuated against Hausa people by Fulani emirs or what he called the “well-documented acts of brigandage” by the “Fulani oligarchy”— which instigated the emergence of the Northern Elements Progressives Union (NEPU).

“Where was he when the late Sa’adu Zungur, Aminu Kano, and company fought Fulani rulers who forced Hausa peasants to work the emirs’ farms, snatched wives, plundered what was kept in their trust, and appropriated/mismanaged farmlands and other resources belonging to their subjects?” Shehu wrote.

These sorts of emotive brickbats between everyday Hausa and Fulani people are escalating and becoming mainstream in the aftermath of the bloodstained conflict between Hausa farmers and Fulani herders. In fact, there are now calls, from both Hausa and Fulani interlocutors, for the reformation of the emirate system to strip emirship of its exclusivity to people of Fulani ancestry.

I think these are transitory, spur-of-the-moment tensile pushes and pulls that may soon abate, but it’s astonishing that it’s even happening.
https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2023/05/rising-ethnic-tension-between-hausa-and.html

25 Likes 4 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Arrewa: 11:08am On May 06, 2023
Divisive propaganda like this can make it to nairaland front page...

And negative news like this can make it to the front page twice a day


https://www.nairaland.com/7678621/police-arrest-man-absconded-after#122953791


https://www.nairaland.com/7678087/man-stabs-mother-death-kano#122943923

This made it to the front twice a day!!!


But news like this don't make it to front page!! A Newly launched airline in the north is a news that don't make it to front page of nairaland....

https://www.nairaland.com/7677486/just-ganduje-flag-off-rano#122935577

But fake news and misinformation about the north make it to the front page of nairaland within the speed of light!!

The agenda is clear!!

25 Likes 7 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Oseniwaje: 11:09am On May 06, 2023
Their headache

29 Likes 1 Share

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by SOSinNigeria: 11:09am On May 06, 2023
This blogger self.

Anyways, it's left for Hausas to continue living in the shadow of fulanis or exert themselves to be seen as equals.

64 Likes 1 Share

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Racoon(m): 11:10am On May 06, 2023
Over the years, the northern political elite not only used the common Islamic heritage of the Hausa and the Fulani people as an instrument to construct and cement the notion of an undivided and indivisible Hausa-Fulani identity, they also encouraged other parts of the country to see them as one, undifferentiated people.In time, the rest of the country came to regard the Hausa and the Fulani as indistinguishable.


But the emergence and unabating intensification of kidnapping for ransom and other forms of rural and urban banditry in the Northwest where most of the villains are Fulani and most of the victims are Hausa are rupturing the centuries-old ethnic harmony between the Hausa and the Fulani that Nigerians had taken for granted.

In response to the rural and urban banditry by mostly Fulani brigands against Hausa people, Hausa people have formed vigilante groups called yan sakai or yan banga for self-defense, but Fulani people say the yan banga self-defense groups often indiscriminately murder innocent Fulani people who are not even remotely connected with abductions and murders.

This has provoked an endless cycle of recriminations and retaliatory violence between Hausa and Fulani people and is threatening the age-old, Islam-inspired ethnic fusion between them.
Hehehe! The marriage have tired both of them having ganged up to exploit others ethnic nationals after the British unjustly skewed political leadership toward them.

66 Likes 2 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Racoon(m): 11:10am On May 06, 2023
The monsters they allowed to fester uncontrollably have dragged them to the threshold of self destruction.

However, the fulanis don't see themselves as equals to the hausa just as the monolithic North hegemony seized to exist immediately the middle belt soldiers revolted during the Lt Col Suka Dimka coup of February 13 1976.

55 Likes 1 Share

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Dreamhighnow(m): 11:10am On May 06, 2023
It is long overdue. In as much as I do not support ethnic bias but the truth is how can Hausa who owns the land become slave of the visitors. The visitor took over their lands and see them as second to them. It is not right

Well wetin be my own

83 Likes 5 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by donbachi(m): 11:16am On May 06, 2023
Untamed dogs that grew into beasts.

26 Likes 1 Share

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by MXrep: 11:25am On May 06, 2023
Long overdue. Once we educate Hausa and they librate themselves from fulani hegemony Nigeria will rise. As long as a large population of extremely poor illterate Hausa exist, Nigeria is not going anywhere because they will never vote rightly

74 Likes 2 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Parachoko: 11:27am On May 06, 2023
Wetin concern the tapa man for Hausa Fulani matter

95 Likes 3 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by saintkel(m): 11:28am On May 06, 2023
Make them fight

8 Likes 1 Share

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Dyke15(m): 11:34am On May 06, 2023
I served in Sokoto and I became aware of d difference btw d hausa's ND fulani's during my stay there.
Of d truth, hausa's re very peaceful and lovely people. They hate being attached to the fulanis.
They made me understand that fulanis re normadic nd live in bushes while few live in town.
But in conclusion, hausa's don't like fulanis

116 Likes 11 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by helinues: 11:45am On May 06, 2023
Family affairs

Funkeeeeeee, bikonu bring the beans make I pick some

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Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Advancedpenis: 11:47am On May 06, 2023
helinues:
Family affairs

Funkeeeeeee, bikonu bring the beans make I pick some


Another ronu reasoning

12 Likes

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by huptin(m): 11:47am On May 06, 2023
Fulanis hate being seen as being the same with Hausas...I learnt this years ago during my youth service. They beleive that they are superior to the Hausas

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Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Ibechris2: 11:49am On May 06, 2023
I think the educated Hausa have started reading how their problem started.

Whether we like it or not,Hausa and igbos are the most suppressed in this nation...the only difference is that, that the igbos are very vocallly vociferous and ambitious while the Hausa people are less vocal and hidden like chicks under the mother hen with chains of religious incarceration.

89 Likes 1 Share

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by 4Play(m): 11:50am On May 06, 2023
I think these are transitory, spur-of-the-moment tensile pushes and pulls that may soon abate, but it’s astonishing that it’s even happening.

This part is wishful thinking. This is only the beginning.

Factors that will drive more conflict across Nigeria include: Climate change with its impact on desertification which deprives herdsmen and farmers of arable land and water resources, and the growth in youth population which generates lots of young men with few economic opportunities.

Expect more conflicts not less in the immediate future.

39 Likes 3 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by helinues: 11:54am On May 06, 2023
Advancedpenis:




Rule 18

Thank you for mentioning mods, baits worked

75 Likes

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Advancedpenis: 11:55am On May 06, 2023
helinues:


Thank you for mentioning mods, baits worked

Is that why you refused to ronu today ?

6 Likes

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by MasterJayJay: 12:11pm On May 06, 2023
Reno Omokri: North love themselves.

19 Likes

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Odin13: 12:31pm On May 06, 2023
Presently .. the Hausa in the northwest re supporting Tinubu .. and his government.. aside vote suppression.. Atiku being fulani affected his votes in Northwest..

the attempted fulanization of Nigeria by buhari regime let to open acrimony ..

And did endear the Beri( kanuri) in the northeast to Hausa ..


However .. the Fulani stil calls the shot and do control the politics of the North. For now.. maybe tomorrow tinubu government may deeply divide .. the north on a short term… but never on a long term politically

10 Likes 1 Share

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Christistruth02: 12:33pm On May 06, 2023
The Hausas are just patiently waiting for Buhari to step down before pouncing on the Bandits

They have sharpened their Swords and Loaded their Machine guns

60 Likes 2 Shares

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by RepoMan007: 1:11pm On May 06, 2023
Kperogi tried but overall, his attempt to remain silent on the christian victim pattern around Kaduna did not do his piece any good.

The Hausa now see themselves as victims but mostly the Hausa Christians.

41 Likes

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Armaggedon: 1:29pm On May 06, 2023
Igbos have left the north for them and they can now smell each other's mouth.

When Biafra leaves, Igbo haters will have no other person to antagonise except themselves.

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Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by hakeemhakeem(m): 1:29pm On May 06, 2023
If this is not manage quickly it ...........

1 Like

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Whois(m): 1:30pm On May 06, 2023
Fulani and hausa are not one, shey na fulani and yoruba come be one. ? cheesy

2 Likes

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by Blue3k(m): 1:50pm On May 06, 2023
Lol every bloody tribe speaking for the Hausa. Some please wake me up when a Hausa comments and agrees with these sentiments.

8 Likes 1 Share

Re: Rising Ethnic Tension Between Hausa And Fulani By Farooq A. Kperogi by rash47(m): 3:39pm On May 06, 2023
Very refreshing read from kperogi..

4 Likes

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