Ilorin and the crisis of Fulani identity By Femi Awoniyi In the Ilorin matter, a word is so sensitive that one side of the conflict avoids using it (See Daily Trust and Weekly Trust reports on gamji). It's a word that won't cross the lips of Emir Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari, Abubakar Olusola Saraki, Alfa Babatunde Belgore and other defenders of the status quo in the town.
The word is "Fulani". None of these men have ever come out to say: Yes, I am Fulani or that Ilorin belongs to the Fulanis. They only claim they are not Yoruba, and that the controversial town "belongs to the North".
This willful obscurantism or fuzziness of language is to mask the real issue involved, which is ethnicity in the politics of Fulani-traditionally ruled domains.
Fulanis often adopt identities (North, Muslim North, Hausa-Fulani) that they share with others and which don’t single them out in the Nigerian polity, and they employ these different identities in different contexts. The Fulani traditional rulership has constructed a social identity around Islam in such a way as to deny Hausas and other peoples in the Fulani-ruled communities an independent ethnic identity, and by so doing arrogate their political representation.
Fulani elite are no ‘mere’ actors in the Nigerian polity. They depart from the premise of a natural entitlement to power and position far greater than that of other Nigerians - and they have played a much more important role than their demographic strength would deem equitable in our politics. Fulanis have produced four rulers since independence (Ahmadu Bello (de facto), Murtala Mohammed, Muhammadu Buhari and Shehu Shagari) and have exercised considerable influence over all others, including the present one.
Is anybody aware that Tunde Idiagbon was a Fulani? Indeed, he was. Two Fulanis (head of state and his deputy) once ruled Nigeria!
Through this ingenious identity politics, Fulani leaders convey the impression that race and ethnicity don’t matter in their domains because their common religion is greater than any differences.
But race and ethnicity matter between Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi and Rwanda (even though they are both adherents of Roman Catholicism), between Arabs and Berbers in Algeria and Morocco, and between light-skinned Arabs and their dark-skinned compatriots in all of Muslim Arabia. In fact, in the Arab world, while dark-skinned people are treated like a citizenry apart, those with "Negroid" facial features among them (and there are many of them) are the underprivileged of an already underclass.
Ilorin by focusing on ethnicity in a Fulani-ruled domain threatens to bare Fulanis as actors by themselves and for themselves for the first time in independent Nigeria. And Bida is a potential Ilorin as are Kano, Zaria, Katsina and many other towns in the North.
The desperate actions of Fulani leaders over Ilorin are a sign that they recognise the dramatic nature of the agitation of the Yorubas. The Fulani elite are aware that ethno-national consciousness is the only countervailing cultural force capable of weakening religion as a binding agent in their domains, leading inevitably to a sweeping change to the popular perception of its trado-religious institution of power.
The folks kinship between Fulanis and Hausas in Kano, Katsina and Zaria, for example, is not closer than that between Fulanis and Yorubas in Ilorin. The extent of social intercourse and cultural unity among Fulani and the two peoples is very similar: intermarriage, Islam, common language and local cultural mores etc.
The utterances of people like Saraki ("I am Abubakar Olusola Saraki, but that has not made me a Yoruba man. I speak Yoruba because it is my mother's tongue"wink make nonsense of an ‘Hausa-Fulani’ identity.
That a man can claim in public, with gusto, that the fact that his biological mother comes from an ethnic group does not make him a member of that same group reveals one thing: the paternalistic, condescending attitude of Fulani elite to other peoples in their domains, a sense of cultural superiority. It is similar to the caste system in India. A child from a high-caste father and lower-caste mother defines himself by dissociating himself from his mother’s group.
The desperate behaviour of Saraki (one day, he says Ilorin is 80 percent Yoruba and the next he swears that there are not more than 1,000 of them there) can be attributed to the awareness that a politicised Yoruba ethnic consciousness will destroy his political influence in Kwara.
What ethno-nationalism in Nigeria (of which the Ilorin agitation could be considered a part) does essentially is to highlight the assignment of cultural meanings to geographical space, and associations between social identity and territoriality. A development that is unfavourable to Fulanis because of their lack of territorial heritage. They cannot lay primary or native claim to any part of Nigeria. This lack of ethno-national options could be said to be responsible for the hostile attitude of Fulani scholars to the notions of "nations" and "race" in our political discourse and their attempt to disparage claims based on ethno-national interests.
Yoruba agitators in Ilorin face a formidable adversary in Fulani elite who will stop at nothing to preserve their privileges.
Sulu-Gambari has been preparing for the resurgent Yoruba struggle right from his inception of office, convinced of its inevitability. He has married the daughter of Shehu of Bornu, co-founded the Arewa Consultative Forum, co-sponsors the Arewa People’s Congress, thereby seeking sundry allies for the final showdown.
The Fulani traditional ruler has even provoked a Muslim-Christian crisis in the town to divide his supposed subjects. He openly called for the eviction of Christians from Muslim areas in Ilorin, in July 1999, thereby causing tension between the two religious groups. This action eventually led to the riots in Oja-Gboro, a suburb of the town, where 14 churches were set ablaze by rampaging Muslim youths in December of the same year.
And, nationally, we have seen the efforts made by the Fulani elite to recover grounds it perceived to have lost since President Olusegun Obasanjo came into power and his alleged attempts to isolate them. Chief among these is the introduction and promotion of the Sharia.
Sharia amounts to clearing the deck for an aggressive reassertion of Islam as the chief agent of cultural unity in the Fulani-ruled Muslim North, in particular, and the whole Muslim North, in general.
A careful reading of the Weekly Trust and Daily Trust reports will reveal an attempt to portray the Ilorin conflict as one between Islam and ‘Idolatry’. The following quotes should suffice:
"The Ilorin Emirate Chief Forum through its secretary general, Alhaji Salihu Woru Mohammed, responded to Gani Admas threat (sic). The Forum, in a statement, said Ilorin was founded and envisioned to be a bastion of Islam, and that the emir of Ilorin symbolize (sic) the Islamic identity of all Ilorin people, including members of the Afonja family who he said have produced great Islamic scholars. To attempt the unattainable ambition to revert Ilorin to Egungun or idol worshippers is not only an insult but a blasphemy The appellation Emir simply means leader of the faithful. The ruler of Ilorin is different from Obas who are custodians of Ifa, Sanga, Agemo, etc, the statement said."
(Weekly Trust, July 13-19, 2001, Afenifere vs. Arewa: The battle for Ilorin.)
In Ilorin, most of the Yorubas name their quarters by the towns their forefathers fled from. Such names as Ile Oyo, Ile Osogbo, Ile Ijesha, Ile Egba and so on are common. The Ajia Ijesha, the traditional title holders representing the Ihesha people who hailed from the present Osun State (specifically from Chief Bola Igbe’s (sic) Yoruba sub-group) is historically the closest person to the emir. It is said that he is one of the few people who have direct access to the emir’s bedroom.
This fact is founded on a tradition which has it that the Ijesha Muslim warriors were some of the most passionate defenders of Islam during the Jihad.
It is unlikely that these Yoruba elements will submit themselves to the rule of an Oba – an institution they detest as a reminder of their idolatrous past."
(WEEKLY TRUST JULY 20-27, 2001 Emirate System: Position of Yorubas in Ilorin – An Editorial Analysis)
When the Ilorin Emirate Chief Forum describes Obas as custodians of Ifa, Sango, Agemo etc, it implicitly implies that Alhaji Lamidi Adeyemi, the Alaafin of Oyo, Alhaji Oyewale Matanmi, Ataojo of Oshogbo, and Alhaji Sikiru Adetona, the Awujale of Ijebuland, frontline traditional rulers and Muslim leaders in Yorubaland, are not good Muslims. It also shows the opinion the chiefs have of the Oloffa of Offa, who is the vice-chairman of Jawarul Islam in Kwara State (Sulu-Gambari is chairman).
It is safe to infer that only Fulanis could be emirs, Leaders of the Faithful, in the reasoning of the Fulani traditional power establishment, because they are the only good Muslims in the emirates. One hopes non-Fulani Muslims in Bida, Kontagora, Kano etc. are listening. It could come to it that Nupes and Hausas might demand to be made emirs in the future and they would be told that Nupe and Hausa chiefs are custodians of ‘idolatry’.
It must be remembered that the great Muslim scholars from Ilorin in recent decades are mostly Yorubas. Prominent among these are the late Sheikh Adam El-Ilori, founder of Markazz Islamic Centre, Agege-Lagos, and Sheikh Kamaldeen Al-Adabiy, who founded the Ansar Islam Society of Nigeria. Sheikh El-Ilori was a critic of the Fulani trado-religious establishment during his lifetime.
The Afonja family, which is at the forefront of the struggle against Fulani supremacy in Ilorin, is a Muslim one, and historically, the struggle has been carried out by Muslim Yorubas. It may be recalled that Abdulsalami, who established the Ilorin emirate in 1824, when he violently overthrew Afonja as ruler of the town, faced the greatest resistance in Oke Suna, a Yoruba Muslim settlement, which he destroyed after his victory. Oke Imale, another quarter inhabited by Yoruba Muslims, rebelled against Emir Momo which led to his death in 1895. The quarter also played a prominent role in the popular resistance to Momo’s successor, Emir Suleiman. (Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas)
Why then should an Afonja after becoming an Oba in Ilorin turn to ‘idolatry’?
In the frequent mention of ‘idolatry’ lies the danger of a possible genocide against Yorubas in the North especially at a time when Islam is experiencing a renewed fervency in the region. The campaign seeks to create a moral climate permissive of violent attacks on Yorubas because of a possible perception of their collective threat to the spiritual wellbeing of Muslims. It wouldn’t matter that most of the would-be victims could be Muslims like the would-be perpetrators.
The recent threat of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria (its president, Dr. Ibrahim Dati Ahmad, is a Fulani) to avenge the killing of some northerners in last year's violent clashes between some Yoruba and Hausa youths in Lagos is an evidence of the end to which the Fulani elite could put Islam.
The battle for Ilorin could eventually end up marking the beginning of the end of the Fulani traditional supremacy. Yorubas in the North, however, could suffer a full-scale backlash in the event of the agitation turning violent. The magnitude of this possible outcome seems to be lost on many protagonists of the Yoruba cause in the matter, hence, their feeble and uncoordinated actions.
Perhaps the unconscious helpers of the anti-Yoruba campaign in the North are some Yoruba agitators who make statements which betray a lack of clear appreciation of the enormity of the cause they are championing. The basic struggle of Ilorin Yorubas is for a legal recognition of Yoruba traditional authority in the town. The clamour for the merger of Yorubas in Central Nigeria with their kins in the Southwest or for the creation of an Oya state plays into the hands of their Fulani opponents who seek to portray the Ilorin issue as an attempt to diminish the territorial influence of the North.
Even if there were a sovereign Yoruba nation, it would be impossible to have all Yorubas within its borders. Ethnic Germans are native to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. French people can be found in France, Luxembourg and Belgium, to name a few examples. Yorubas in Kwara and Kogi will always belong to the geographical North and should play an important role in the politics of the Middle Belt.
The anti-Yoruba campaign, employing the phantom danger of an OPC invasion of Ilorin, mounted by Saraki and the Arewa Consultative Forum, employs ‘North’ as the rallying point in a deceptive bid to portray the conflict as one between Yorubas (or the Southwest) and the North.
What Ilorin shows is that Yoruba intellectuals are not actively involved in advocating the interests of their people. And there is today an historic opportunity in Nigeria to effect fundamental changes peacefully. The time has come, therefore, for our intellectuals to act. If the most endowed section of the population doesn’t get involved in this momentous quest for redemption, the fray will be left to unenlightened actors whose actions we must all answer for.
Our intellectuals need to strengthen our people and confirm them in the justice of the cause of regional autonomy.
Fulani traditional supremacy will continue to constitute a source of hindrance to national unity and progress in Nigeria. To preserve their privileged status, Fulani elite will always encourage radical Islam in the Muslim North, and to bond with the rest of the region, according to classic method of creating commonality—unite distinct peoples by identifying a common enemy–will continue to pitch the two major regions of the country against each other.
There has to be a process of reinterpreting Islam in such a way as to cause a greater sense of cultural self-confidence among Ilorin Yorubas. For example, Muslim prayers in traditional Mosques in the city contain the names of, among others, Othman dan Fodio, Shehu Alimi and some other past Fulani scholars and emirs, as interceding instances (patron saints) "for the glory or rank which they possess in the eyes of God" (Stefan Reichmuth). This concept is also said to be found in Hausa Islamic literature and it explains the alleged abject political submissiveness of non-Fulanis said to prevail in Fulani-ruled domains.
In general, a new paradigm in ethno-nationalism in Nigeria must stress the cultural and historical links between peoples of South Nigeria and their Northern compatriots, Yorubas and Edos with Igalas and Kanuris, for example.
Just like Fulani politicians, intellectuals and journalists would like to sensitise Yorubaland to its religious differences, the Fulani ‘singular identity’ must be located and essentialised in our politics. ‘Hausa/Fulani’ is a culturally constructed ethnic identity to serve the political interests of the Fulanis and this should be systematically contested and resisted.
The establishment of an equitable relationship of democratic power in Nigeria is contingent upon curtailing the influence of the Fulani establishment in our polity.
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Femi Awoniyi is a journalist and he lives in Speyer, Germany
