Colonialism by Proxy

Moses E. Ochonu

Description

Finalist, 2015 African Studies Association Herskovits Award

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Moses E. Ochonu explores a rare system of colonialism in Middle Belt Nigeria, where the British outsourced the business of the empire to Hausa-Fulani subcolonials because they considered the area too uncivilized for Indirect Rule. Ochonu reveals that the outsiders ruled with an iron fist and imagined themselves as bearers of Muslim civilization rather than carriers of the white man's burden. Stressing that this type of Indirect Rule violated its primary rationale, Colonialism by Proxy traces contemporary violent struggles to the legacy of the dynamics of power and the charged atmosphere of religious difference.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Understanding "Native Alien" Sub-colonialism and its Legacies
1. The Hausa-Caliphate Imaginary and Ideological Foundations of Proxy Colonialism
2. Zazzau and Southern Kaduna in Precolonial and Colonial Times
3. Emirate Maneuvers and "Pagan" Resistance in the Plateau-Nasarawa Basin
4. Hausa Colonial Agency in the Benue Valley
5. Fulani Expansion and Sub-colonial Rule in Early Colonial Adamawa Province
6. Non-Muslim Revolt Against Fulani Rule in Adamawa
7. Middle Belt Self-Determination and Caliphate Political Resurgence in the Transition to National Independence
Conclusion: Sub-colonialism, Ethnicity, and Memory
Chronology
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• África
• History of Africa
• West
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 14 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253011657
• Langue: English

Extrait

COLONIALISM BY PROXY
COLONIALISM BY PROXY
Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria
Moses E. Ochonu
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone
800-842-6796
Fax
812-855-7931
2014 by Moses Ochonu
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ochonu, Moses E., author.
Colonialism by proxy : Hausa imperial agents and Middle Belt consciousness in Nigeria / Moses E. Ochonu.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01160-2 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01161-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01165-7 (e-book) 1. Middle Belt (Nigeria)-Colonial influence. 2. Middle Belt (Nigeria)-Ethnic relations. 3. Middle Belt (Nigeria)-Politics and government. 4. Great Britain-Colonies-Africa-Administration. 5. Muslims-Political activity-Nigeria-Middle Belt. 6. Hausa (African people)-Politics and government. 7. Fula (African people)-Politics and government. I. Title.
DT515.9.M49O25 2014
966.903-dc23
2013032679
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
for my Mother
Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Understanding Native Alien Subcolonialism and Its Legacies
1
The Hausa-Caliphate Imaginary and Ideological Foundations of Proxy Colonialism
2
Zazzau and Southern Kaduna in Precolonial and Colonial Times
3
Emirate Maneuvers and Pagan Resistance in the Plateau-Nasarawa Basin
4
Hausa Colonial Agency in the Benue Valley
5
Fulani Expansion and Subcolonial Rule in Early Colonial Adamawa Province
6
Non-Muslim Revolt against Fulani Rule in Adamawa
7
Middle Belt Self-Determination and Caliphate Political Resurgence in the Transition to National Independence

Conclusion: Subcolonialism, Ethnicity, and Memory

Chronology

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index
Preface
W HEN I BEGAN this book project in 2007, my aim was to explain why the colonial form practiced in the Nigerian Middle Belt deviated so drastically from the familiar, fetishized British system of indirect rule. I wanted to engage in a simple corrective scholarly endeavor to highlight the limitations of the indirect rule paradigm and point scholars in the direction of less familiar but equally consequential forms of colonial rule.
One question in particular framed my initial inquiries and reflections: how is it that Northern Nigeria is seen in the Africanist colonial studies literature as a bastion of indirect rule when, all over the vast Middle Belt region, a system of colonization that violated the foundational rationale of indirect rule held sway? What began as a modest effort to supply evidence that mitigates the status of Northern Nigeria as an elaborate theater of indirect rule morphed into a huge scholarly undertaking. This required the collection and dissection of several genres of evidence, multiple research trips to Nigeria and Britain, oral interviews, informal discussions, archival adventures, immersion in relevant secondary literature, and many zigzags and detours that took me into several comparative geographical fields.
Another question that inspired my early quests is whether one could conceptually and empirically posit African groups as colonizers even in a circumscribed sense, given the overbearing influence of nationalist historiography, which frowns upon conceptual constructions that are outside the European colonizer/African colonized binary. Or whether one could demonstrate that subalternity was not always a bar to colonial, and in this case subcolonial, initiatives.
I recognize that I was not only going against the established, if problematic, premise of nationalist African history but also against a conceptual architecture of empire studies in which the notion of subalterns as subcolonizers and self-interested drivers of the colonial enterprise often gets a hostile reception. I pressed on only because I was convinced that the Middle Belt story, which advances a conceptual and empirical counterpoint to these scholarly consensuses, was worth telling on its own narrative merit as an exploration of an unorthodox colonial form. The main arguments and conceptual interventions in this volume then took shape around this important story, an unfamiliar story that compels one to rethink colonization in this and several other parts of Africa.
Once I actually began to collect and read archival materials and to conduct and examine oral interviews, the stories told in this volume emerged with clarity and coherence. The book also took a turn in a direction that I had not anticipated. My initial impulse was to engage in a straightforward political historical analysis, but increasingly the project became as much about intellectual history as about political events. I became captivated by the constellation of ideas and ideologies, British and caliphate in origin, which converged to produce and sustain the colonial manual of alien African rule, or subcolonialism.
In my early reflections and subsequently during the writing stage, I became engrossed in the complex genealogies and etymologies that underpin and produced subcolonialism as a form of colonial practice. I also became interested in how Hausa subcolonial rule was intellectually packaged, rationalized, and justified against the suffocating backdrop of British obsessions with the tenets of indirect rule, especially the cardinal idea of indigenous mediation. I came to see that the excavation of these instrumental ideas and rationales and their mutations over several decades are as important as the story of how subcolonialism unfolded in remote colonial districts in the Middle Belt.
As readers will notice then, the chapters of this volume have long stretches of intellectual historical explorations. These intellectual histories help ground the stories in prior processes of thought and claim making. They also reveal the intermeshing of caliphate and British ideas about the Middle Belt and its peoples and cultures, and about precolonial caliphate-Middle Belt relations and the necessity and legitimacy of Hausa subcolonial rule among non-Muslim Middle Belt communities.
Working on this volume reeducated me profoundly on the illuminating interplay between political and intellectual histories. Understanding the origins and evolution of usable ideas about caliphate superiority and Middle Belt inferiority and subordination became crucial to my analysis of how and why subcolonialism endured despite official acknowledgement that it fell short of and in fact contradicted the professed ideals of indirect rule.
This is an insight that will incubate in me and continue to inform my craft as a historian, for it is now obvious to me that the history of political ideas can clarify the contours of political events and practices that emanate from those ideas. Political history and intellectual history may have divergent protocols of understanding and analysis, but there is a vast field of play between them. Historians, especially historians of Africa, will enrich their stories about politics, chieftaincy, colonial rule, political traditions, honor, warfare, statecraft, and postcolonial political unravelings if they examine politically consequential ideas and formulations in the same analytic frame as starkly physical or institutional political phenomena.
It is particularly important that scholars who work on empire and imperial matters pay close attention to the dynamic histories of ideas that undergird imperial practice, since colonial acts occur not in ideological vacuums but within shifting grids of policy-relevant ideational consensus.
Learning about unorthodox imperial repertoires and habits and the intellectual histories that produced them has been one of the rewards of writing this book. Telling the story of a neglected form of colonial rule with consequences for contemporary politics in Nigeria is another satisfaction. Readers of this volume, specialists or not, can share in the allure of this untold, unfamiliar story of colonization.
Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK HAS been at least six years in the making. It has mutated along the way to respond to shifting research and epistemological priorities and to the robust input of many individuals and institutions. I am indebted to them all.
Major research for the book was funded by a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. A yearlong fellowship of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) enabled me to conduct supplementary research and complete the writing. Supplementary funding came from Vanderbilt University s Scholars Research Grant.
He may not realize it, but it was Richard Fardon who got me started on the path of writing this work. On reading an initial exploratory article on the broad topic explored here, he encouraged me to consider expanding it, quippi