Islam and Social Stratification in Northern Nigeria

Abstract

'ORTHERN NIGERIA covers an area of roughly 250,000 square miles of savannah country in the south, merging into a L n desert scrub in the north, and supporting a sparse population (the average density is 53 persons per square mile) 1 which is mainly scattered along water courses in villages and hamlets of varying size. There are, however, important urban centres which have developed since the sixteenth century on trade routes for Sahara caravans, and on dominant military positions for defence of the surrounding farming communities, and for carrying out slave-raiding expeditions further afield. It is these urban centres, which were political capitals of military chiefdoms and later Mohammedan Emirates, that are most interesting and most important from the point of view of social stratificaiion. Of a total population of roughly IO million, about 70 per cent are Mohammedan, 30 per cent Pagan and less than I per cent Christian. Under centralized British Administraton since early in the xiineteenhundreds, the region has been divided into Provinces, but as these overlap the boundaries of traditional Emirates and Chiefdoms, I am ignoring these and the political superstructure of the British Administration until later. Ethnically, the population consists of one major cultural group of Hausa-speaking people, who constitute over a third of the total population. These are now very largely Moslem, and, so far as can be gathered from their on oral and written chronicles,2 and from accounts of Arab travellers such as El Bekri and Ibu Batuta, were orgariized into military chiefdoms before the twelfth century.3 According to earlier sources there were seven main Hausa States and seven upstart or subsidiary Hausa States. There are other non-Hausa chiefdoms such as Nupe and Bornu, and a large number of culturally and linguistically distinct pagan tribes, sYho, up till the time of the Briish Occupation, were being constantly raided and enslaved by both the Hausa and non-Hausa Chiefdoms. Historians vary in their estimates as to the earliest introduction of

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.