THE MAITATSINE RIOTS IN , 1980: AN ASSESSMENT

BY

MERVYN HISKETT

Throughout the spring and summer of 1980 there seethed and bubbled in Kano, northern , a violent manifestation of sup- posedly Muslim Schwdrmeret usually referred to as the "Maitatsine riots". It boiled over to a destructive and macabre climax in November and December of that year. It was finally put down by the Nigerian Army, after considerable initial hesitation on the part of both the Federal Government and Kano State Government and after many hundreds of people had been killed by the rioters. The cenobitic leader of the rising, the notorious Maitatsine, 'The Anathematizer', was wounded in the army's attack and died short- ly after, either of his wounds, as was first believed or, as now seems more likely, of a heart attack. His remains, hurriedly buried by his followers, were exhumed by the authorities and publicly cremated, an unusual procedure among Muslims, undertaken on this occa- sion apparently to forestall his parousia; and also, perhaps, in sym- bolic anticipation of the dies irae! However, the affair did not end there. In October, 1982, similar riots broke out in Bulumkuttu, near , and in , all of which displayed similarities with the Kano eruption. Later still, in February and March, 1984, violent events took place in Yola, allegedly perpetrated by followers of the 'martyr' of Kano, under the leadership of a certain Musa Makanaki, who now claim- ed the chiliast's mantle in the wake of the vaticide. While not on the same scale as the Kano outbreak, these later happenings caused considerable loss of life and, being beyond the power of the Nigeria Police to contain, had in the end to be brought under control by the Nigerian Army. Further rumblings from lurking covens of the 'Yan Tatsine, as the Maitatsine's followers were called, continued to be heard here and there in northern Nigeria. Strong rumours circulated in the Sokoto/Gusau area in June, 1984, of Maitatsine-style incidents in 210 several large villages, and police and army activity at that time cer- tainly lent them credence. When I left Sokoto in October, 1985, these rumours had still not wholly subsided, although certainly no major outbreak was publicly known to have occurred since that of Yola. Without attempting prophesy, my impression at that mo- ment was that the gaunt and spectral figure of the Maitatsine had effectively been put to flight, at least for the time being. Needless to say, the Federal Government, the Kano State Ad- ministration, the Nigeria Police and the Nigerian Army, all came in for instant criticism from the media and, subsequently but not 1 always more thoughtfully, from the academic armchair.'

Trends in academic comment on the Maitatsine riots

In commenting on the Kano events, Lavers has said, "It is prob- ably true to say that more has been written and less has been said about Maitatsine than any other aspect of " .2 By this I suspect he refers to the access of near unanimity of a socio- economic kind in academic comment so far. While I share some of Lavers's discontent, I do not go the whole way with him. A great deal has been said and some of it is illuminating. But it certainly emanates for the most part from the single viewpoint of socio- economic and even Marxist orthodoxy. There is thus a sameness about it, and a predictability, that may well provoke disenchant- ment ; and also a tendency to select small pieces of the whole com- plex mosaic and blow them up into a total causation. I therefore believe it will be useful to seek a more prosographic interpretation, based on an amplitude of insights rather than on a preconceived model. First, however, I shall summarize the main academic con- tributions that rest on the Marxist given. I. L. Bashir, in an early paper apparently written before the se- quels to the Kano uprisings took place, examines the history, in Kano, of a pre-colonial Muslim mercantile capitalist oligarchy and shows how its members successfully allied themselves with the col- onial government and the expatriate firms of the colonial era, to become the influential middlemen of the resulting economic struc- ture ; and then went on to become heirs to the colonial bureaucrats and commercial managers when these finally withdrew. He then deftly shows how this once-mercantile capitalist oligarchy smoothly took over control of the emerging industrial capitalist complex in