Colonialism within colonialism: the Hausa-Caliphate imaginary and the British colonial administration of the Nigerian Middle Belt

Introduction This paper explores three interrelated issues; the origins and development of a Hausa-Caliphate imaginary in the intertwinements of caliphate and British discourses and its subtle entry into official British colonial policy in northern Nigeria; how the search for administrative coherence prompted British colonialists to craft an administrative policy envisioned to normalize and spread this Hausa-Caliphate socio-cultural and political model to the Middle Belt; and the on-ground unfolding and implementation of this policy in the non-Hausa speaking part of the Middle Belt. [1] This colonial administrative project of politico-cultural uniformity sought to make the Middle Belt more like the Caliphate sector, which was deemed more suitable for the British administrative policy of Indirect Rule. [2] It was not aimed at achieving cultural sameness for its own sake but as a vehicle for ultimately strengthening Indirect Rule in all of northern Nigeria. This was largely a pragmatic administrative project, although pre-existing British and Caliphate narratives about the sociology and politics of northern Nigeria contributed to its formulation as an ideology of colonial rule. But the accentuation of ethno-cultural difference was indispensable to Indirect Rule. How then did difference and homogeneity co-exist in British colonial administrative practice? To tease out the paradox in the British creation of both ethnic difference and functional cultural homogeneity is not to suggest that the British consciously thought about or crafted these ideas in those terms; that would concede more coherent intent and intellectual deliberateness to British colonialists than they actually exhibited in their encounter with Africans. The argument here is that the two fundamental prerequisites of Indirect Rule--ethnic difference and a pre-existing, centralized system of rule--necessitated the creation, witting or unwitting, of both difference and politico-cultural sameness across northern Nigeria, using the colonially-approved Hausa-caliphate model as a reference. The most notable site of this colonial policy was the Middle Belt, which, while possessing the desired ethnic difference, lacked the centralized political and cultural institutions and symbols of the emirate system, deemed crucial to Indirect Rule. To illustrate this British colonial phenomenon of using a Sokoto caliphate idiom to "civilize" those considered not civilized enough for Indirect Rule, I will focus the empirical discussion and examples of this paper on the Tiv-Idoma (Benue) axis of the Middle Belt. The choice is informed by the fact that this was a part of the Middle Belt where Hausa was not spoken or understood to any significant degree and where Caliphate culture had not penetrated as much as was the case in other parts of the Middle Belt. As a result of these interpellations, this colonial policy of engineering administrative sameness was more contested here, and its outcome a lot messier than was the case in the Hausa-speaking parts of the Middle Belt. The literature on colonial political constructions of ethnicity in Africa has focused largely on the emergence of politically charged ethnic categories as a function of colonial practices and ideologies of ethnic differentiation for the purpose of Indirect Rule. Ethnic and cultural difference was central to Indirect Rule because of the centrality of tradition and customs to its working. The standard argument identifies a key site of struggles over ethnicity and culture: the bureaucratization of "created" or reified ethnic difference, the witting and unwitting imputation of privilege and marginality into these categories of ethnic difference, and the colonial and postcolonial appropriation of difference as a claim-making device by Africans. It is argued that European colonialisms, for a variety of reasons, were obsessed with ethnic and cultural difference among their African subject populations; that they proceeded to make cultural difference the centerpiece of colonial administrative policy; and that the legacies of colonial ethnic differentiation have been tragic for postcolonial Africa, inspiring ethnic hatred, civil war, fierce political competition, and even genocide. …