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Hausa-Fulani Pastoralists and Resource Conflicts in Yorubaland
Abstract
Colonial practices of ethno-racial segregation impacted grievously on conflict and state building in Nigeria. While such practices have continued to undergird postcolonial contexts of institutional fragility and state weakness, their impacts are yet to be accounted for in the literature on economic and political development in Africa. This article examines the colonial constructions of Fulani, Hausa and other groups ethnically not indigenous to Yorubaland as migrants and minorities, through their denial of land rights; dispossession and marginalization using customary law, indirect rule and other institutionalized instrumentalities of the colonial ethnographic state. It accounts for the continuing impacts of such struggles over land for citizenship, state fragility, state weakness and the forging of nationhood in Nigeria. How have colonial constructions of the customary affected resource-based conflict and postcolonial conceptions of citizenship and inter-ethnic relations? Drawing on archival and ethnographic data generated in Yorubaland, Nigeria, on the conflict between Hausa-Fulani migrant pastoralists and indigenous Yoruba agriculturalists over land, this work underlines how the struggles over agricultural resources, governance, land and political power have continued to affect the manner in which political authority is constituted in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria.
... Thus, political ecologists contend that the crisis is a product of the struggle over access to and control over resources among farming and herding groups. Pastoralists have limited access to and control over resources because national and local land tenure and land use policies ignored herders' prerogatives (e.g., Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019. They contend that states' policies favour farming interests and neglect pastoralists (e.g., Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987;Turner, 2004;Okoli & Atelhe, 2014;Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019. ...
... Pastoralists have limited access to and control over resources because national and local land tenure and land use policies ignored herders' prerogatives (e.g., Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019. They contend that states' policies favour farming interests and neglect pastoralists (e.g., Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987;Turner, 2004;Okoli & Atelhe, 2014;Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019. Hence, national land tenure policies and legislation, as well as local land use and local politics, are vital to understanding FPC. ...
... Essentially, we agree with the idea that the issue of resource scarcity does not manifest (Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019 here and cannot be supported by this study. Also, the struggle to have access and control over land and other resources (Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009 does not seem to be a primary factor in this case study. ...
The farmer-pastoralist conflict (FPC) has been discussed and given ethnic and religious appellations in some countries of West Africa, such as Ghana and Nigeria. In Nigeria, such a reading of the conflict is rampant in the media and dominant in national political discourse. However, these ethno-religious insinuations have not received serious scholarly treatment in Nigeria or been downplayed. In this paper, I examine the context in which ethnicity becomes vital to the FPCs, based on fieldwork in the Nimbo-Adani area of Uzo-Uwani municipal council of Enugu State affected most by the conflict in SouthEastern Nigeria. This area is an essential hot spot of the FPCs that has not been explored in analyzing the FPCs in Nigeria. The study is based on field observations and semi-structured in-depth interviews. The paper draws on the FPCs literature regarding the influence of ethnic identities on the conflict. It shows that the difference in ethnicity between pastoralists and farming communities is not the primary root of the conflict. At the first outbreak of violence, the difference in ethnicity was not the cause of the conflict. Ethnic identity only gets cited after the first brutal fighting between the nomads and the farming community. Non-violent conflicts often occur because of cattle destruction of farm crops and pollution of water sources. Although the herders are accused of various atrocities, such as rape and kidnapping, the first outbreak of violence was caused by retaliation for killing a herder in one of the villages. Heightening ethnic identity amplifies the construction of the herders' identity and social status as non-indigenous and non-belonging in the villages. Thus, the villages seek the eviction of the herders based on their social status as non-indigenes. The paper argues that ethnic faultlines matter to the FPCs but only after other factors have initiated the conflict. Therefore, we should pay attention to the primary root of conflicts and how they get the basis for social exclusion activated.
... Thus, political ecologists contend that the crisis is a product of the struggle over access to and control over resources among farming and herding groups. Pastoralists have limited access to and control over resources because national and local land tenure and land use policies ignored herders' prerogatives (e.g., Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019. They contend that states' policies favour farming interests and neglect pastoralists (e.g., Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987;Turner, 2004;Okoli & Atelhe, 2014;Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019. ...
... Pastoralists have limited access to and control over resources because national and local land tenure and land use policies ignored herders' prerogatives (e.g., Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019. They contend that states' policies favour farming interests and neglect pastoralists (e.g., Blaikie & Brookfield, 1987;Turner, 2004;Okoli & Atelhe, 2014;Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019. Hence, national land tenure policies and legislation, as well as local land use and local politics, are vital to understanding FPC. ...
... Essentially, we agree with the idea that the issue of resource scarcity does not manifest (Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009, 2019 here and cannot be supported by this study. Also, the struggle to have access and control over land and other resources (Benjaminsen & Ba, 2009 does not seem to be a primary factor in this case study. ...
... From Benue to Plateau, Adamawa, Taraba, and Nasarawa States in the north and Delta, Edo, Anambra, and Enugu in the south, Nigerian media have different dimensions of reporting the clash between the farmers and the herdsmen, thereby making their own contribution to the escalation of the conflict (Gever, 2018). Some scholars (Arowosegbe, 2019;Olaniyi, 2015) have reiterated that this incessant conflict is attributable to the scarcity of resources or what could be regarded as a struggle over limited resources by both the farmers and the nomads. Ranked as the fourth deadliest conflict in the world (Chukwuma, 2020;Ezemenaka & Ekumaoko, 2018), and second to Boko Haram in Nigeria (Amnesty International, 2018), the farmer-herder clash has minimally attracted the committed attention of the Nigerian Government, especially in terms of providing permanent solutions. ...
Calls for initiating a practical binding peace and security framework in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) remain persistent, similar to that of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Article 5, which stipulates that if a member is the victim of an armed attack, every member of the Alliance would collectively respond. While Mozambique has suffered from civil war, the insurgency in Cabo Delago has brought back memories of suffering, destruction, and a divided society. The insurgency in Mozambique has questioned the idea of collective security and exposed the current ineffective security framework undertaken within the region. This chapter seeks to critically analyse the possibilities of enhancing a binding security framework to eliminate future security threats in the region. The chapter adopts a qualitative approach, where the review of the literature relating to collective security and insurgency in the region was undertaken. The chapter is anchored on the following questions: Can the SADC develop a responsive binding security framework? What are the challenges of initiating such a framework for addressing the insurgency in Mozambique and future threats that might emerge in the region? African epistemology would address these questions, which supports the notion that African challenges require African solutions.
One of the security challenges facing Nigeria is the farmer-herder conflict. Ranked second to the Boko Haram insurgency, its pervasive nature has constituted impediments to attaining Goal 16 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in Nigeria. This is owing to its adverse impact on peace, livelihoods, and property. The farmer-herder conflict, although it is not new, the intensity of media coverage and priming it receives has given it increased publicity and varying perspectives, which have not received adequate scholarly attention. This chapter, therefore, explores the dimension of this publicity and perspectives vis-à-vis conflict (de)escalatory narratives. Specifically, the study examines how the Nigerian media are implicated in constructing frames (ethnicity and cultural identities/dimensions) for the farmer-herder conflict because of the roles they played in reporting the conflict, and the stakeholders’ perception of the media reportage of this conflict. The chapter interrogates the narratives presented by selected Nigerian national newspapers about war journalism versus peace journalism. Anchored on Erving Goffman’s framing theory, the study was carried out using both quantitative and qualitative content analyses as well as in-depth interviews. The findings revealed that the media undermined the peace approach to the conflict; they are overtly or covertly implicated in the escalation of the farmer-herder conflict by foregrounding the cultural traits of the herders to depict their aggressiveness in achieving a better environment for their animals as well as the sustainability of the herding business. Given the findings, we posit that the peace approach needs to be properly articulated to actualize the attainment of Sustainable Development Goal 16 in Nigeria.
The Lake Chad Basin region has experienced a steep increase in violence and instability since 2010, associated with ethnic identity conflict, ecological degradation , and insurgency. This article explores the association between the activities of insurgency groups-focussing on the perpetration of violence against civilians and state actors-and agropastoral conflict, against a background of ecological stresses in this region. The article finds a pattern of close spatial and temporal proximity between agropastoral conflict and insurgency violence, suggesting that there is a significant intersection and overlap between socioeconomic grievances, compounded by ecological stresses, and violent instability.
The federal solution has been widely discussed in relation to political systems where the articulation of major cleavages, differences, and pluralities threatens political integration and stability. The relationship between conflict, development, and federalism, however, has been poorly accounted for in the literature on federalism. Existing theories about the utilitarian value of federalism thus face serious challenges, especially with respect to post‐colonial Africa. The relationship between conflict, economic development, and federalism in the African context needs to be carefully examined from the perspective of governance, as well as the impact they have on society‐state relations. This article discusses the impact of ethno‐linguistic, ethno‐regional, and ethno‐religious conflicts on economic development in Nigeria – informed by the inequalities, insecurity, and poverty prevalent in the country – and examines the relevance of the federal solution for mitigating such centrifugal pressures as well as other divisive and violent tendencies.
The contradictory coexistence of herders and farmers in sub-Saharan Africa: A review of the recent literature
Interpreting antagonisms in rural Africa from the angle of a "farmer-herder conflict" leads to simplistic analyses of the complex dynamics at work in the Sahel, Lake Chad, northern Nigeria, the Great Lakes, Darfur, and East Africa. The cause of the friction and violence does not rest on an ancestral opposition between the two categories of actors; they are the result of a multidimensional crisis in the governance of rural areas. The review of a hundred recent works shows that the pastoral ecosystem is the victim of a series of constraints that affect its conditions of existence. Pastoral resources are deteriorating as a result of climate change. The agricultural pioneer fronts extend and encroach on the rangelands. The monetization of access to water and the taxation of access to border crossings for transhumant livestock have multiple negative consequences. The sequencing of these causes is exacerbated by prevailing insecurity. Conflict prevention and management methods remain ineffective when they are not focused on the long-term.
The pastoral Fulani in Nigeria’s South-West geo-political zone are mostly migrants from the northern part of the country, with some hailing from neighbouring Chad and Niger. This article examines the concept of social exclusion with regards to access to the dividends of democracy in Ibarapa, Oyo State, Nigeria. Interviews were conducted with 22 selected participants, including six Fulani men, six Fulani women, four opinion leaders from Fulani communities, and four from host communities, as well as two government officials. Data was analysed using content and thematic analysis. Findings revealed that the scarce dividends of democracy are distributed to the exclusion of the Fulani due to their status as settlers. The Fulani feel cheated of their rights, even though they vote responsibly during elections. The host communities feel the Fulani are not entitled to the dividends of democracy because they are settlers and thus should return to their homeland. This has promoted division between the settlers and indigenes despite them living side by side. There is a need for the appropriate authorities to ensure the equitable distribution of the dividends of democracy in the study area, so as to engender equity and social justice, and to promote the feeling of belonging and togetherness between settlers and indigenes.
While previous studies have focused on how political and economic factors fuel herder-farmer conflicts, there is a dearth of knowledge on how desertification-induced migration amidst ungoverned spaces affect herder-farmer conflicts in Nigeria. Using data from qualitative dominant mixed method, this study interrogates how desertification-induced migration and state failure to provide security governance affect herder-farmer conflicts in Nigeria. It argued that poor security governance escalates the southward migration of herders and contributes to the intensification of herder-farmer conflicts in Nigeria. These conflicts endanger livelihoods, fuel population displacements, and undermine human security. The study concludes that effective security governance amidst increased desertification in Northern Nigeria presents an opportunity for regulating southward migration of herders, mitigating herder-farmer conflicts, and promoting human security in Nigeria.
Purpose
This study aims to examine contemporary factors underlying farmers and pastoralists’ conflict in Nasarawa state. These two communities had rosy and symbiotic relationships which have transmogrified into sour tales of mutual suspicion, destruction, deaths and violence.
Design/methodology/approach
Exploratory research design was used. Data was collected using qualitative tools of data collection such as in-depth interview (IDI) and key informant (KII) guides to extract responses from farmers and pastoralists.
Findings
In a bid to end the conflicts between these two groups, Benue State Government enacted the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law also known as anti-open grazing law in 2018. Although the law altered the conflict landscape in Benue, it recorded trans-territorial backlashes in the neighbouring Nasarawa State where herdsmen relocated. The relocation of herders to Nasarawa State, setting up of livestock guards to check open grazing by pastoralists, rumour and politics triggered contemporary violent conflicts between these groups.
Originality/value
As against existing studies, this study examines contemporary trigger of the conflict.
The history of the Sokoto Caliphate, 1804-1903, with a detailed analysis of the office of the Wazirin, all based on [a] the arabic manuscripts of the 19th century, both the books and the surviving official letters; [b] oral fieldwork in the house of the Waziri (alhaji Junaidu); and
[c] discussions with descendants of the officials throughout Sokoto Province in 1962-5.
Recent research has revealed that modern African ethnicity is a social construction of the colonial period through the reactions of pre-colonial societies to the social, economic, cultural and political forces of colonialism. Ethnicity is the product of a continuing historical process, always simultaneously old and new, grounded in the past and perpetually in creation. Colonial states were grounded in the alliances with local ‘Big Men’, incorporating ethnically-defined administrative units linked to the local population by incorporation of pre-colonial patron-client relations. This was reinforced by European assumptions of neatly bounded and culturally homogeneous ‘tribes’ and a bureaucratic preoccupation with demarcating, classifying and counting subject populations, as well as by the activities of missionaries and anthropologists. African ethnic invention emerged through internal struggles over moral economy and political legitimacy tied to the definition of ethnic communities—moral ethnicity; and external conflicts over differential access to the resources of modernity and economic accumulation—political tribalism. Ethnicities were, in particular, the creations of elites seeking the basis for a conservative modernization. The colonial legacy of bureaucratic authoritarianism, pervasive patron-client relations, and a complex ethnic dialectic of assimilation, fragmentation and competition has persisted in post-colonial societies. Patron-client networks remain the fundamental state-society linkage in circumstances of social crisis and uncertainty and have extended to the very centre of the state. This accounts for the personalistic, materialistic and opportunistic character of African politics. Such networks also penetrate institutions of civil society and liberal democracy, undermining programmes of socio-economic and political reform.
Explaining cross-country differences in growth rates requires not only an understanding of the link between growth and public
policies, but also an understanding of why countries choose different public policies. This paper shows that ethnic diversity
helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators. In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa,
economic growth is associated with low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign
exchange markets, high government deficits, and insufficient infrastructure. Africa's high ethnic fragmentation explains a
significant part of most of these characteristics.
The editors invited this article, and the subsequent four response pieces, as a contribution to the debate on knowledge production in Africa and African studies, which was a critical issue in the late colonial and post-independence African universities, and which has continued to be a concern of leading African scholars in the decades since. Here the contributors examine questions regarding the political economy of knowledge production in universities in postcolonial Africa, reflecting on historical and contemporary challenges. What factors undermine knowledge production in Africa? What roles can African universities play in 'decolonizing knowledge production' on the continent.
One of the most neglected aspects of the national question discourse in Nigeria is on the role of land as a site and source of conflicts, especially given the increasing demand for its redistribution and reform in the periods before and after the implementation of the structural adjustment programme. This study discusses land as a crucial aspect of the national question discourse in Nigeria. It examines the question of how colonialism – through its policies and programmes as well as the administrative structures and political systems put in place by the colonial state – introduced new complications and dimensions to the land question, mainly through the creation and development of contradictions in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Drawing on data generated from focus group discussions and oral interviews carried out across the locations with pronounced incidences of land-based conflicts in the six states across South-Western Nigeria, it examines the impact of economic considerations in the ethnically motivated conflicts in Nigeria over land from 1999 to 2015. It establishes the contradictions and injustices characterising the articulation of the citizenship question vis-à-vis various ethnic majorities and minorities as well as historically dominant minorities, especially indigenes and settlers in Nigerian history and politics; and how these generate violent ethnic protests, struggles and other divisive consequences. Tapping into ethnicity, migration and other issues underlying intergroup polarisation, it discusses the conflicts between Hausa–Fulani pastoralists and indigenous Yoruba farmers in South-Western Nigeria as an illustration of the contradictions underpinning citizenship and the prevailing frameworks of land ownership in Africa.
This article discusses the growing tension between constitutionally defined citizenship and socially accepted practices of “we–they dichotomies” as a turbulent component of the national question discourse in Nigeria. It examines the adoption of dual citizenship across the country as well as how this generates violent ethnic conflict. Importantly, while citizenship refers to one’s full membership of a sovereign political community acquired either by birth, naturalisation or any other process legitimised and recognised by the supreme law of the state, indigeneship, on the other hand, is a discriminatory policy employed by local or provincial governments for protecting the rights of their so–called indigenous populations to employment, political power and other resources of the regions or states against domination by alien populations and outsiders. It is argued that while such distinctions have been made possible inter alia by Nigeria’s multi–ethnic character, the ensuing struggles and tensions have been driven by the normless competition over resource allocation. These have especially been the case in instances where ethno–territorial cleavages have been the primary beneficiaries and targets of such resource allocation. This article discusses land as a major economic resource over which heated ethnic conflicts have taken place in Nigeria. Drawing on the conflicts between Hausa–Fulani pastoralists and Yoruba farmers in South–Western Nigeria, it examines the question of how disputed access to land and water has underlain an almost permanent basis of conflict in Nigeria as well as their implications for the country’s fledgling democracy. How does the struggle over land affect the articulation of the citizenship question in Nigeria? How have scarcity and competition over resources affected the contest over citizenship and the forging of nationhood among natives and settlers in South–Western Nigeria? How have colonial framings of socially accepted practices of indigeneship entrenched an understanding of the state in Nigeria as a representation of permanently defined subnational conceptions of ethnic citizenship? What role can the state in Nigeria play towards transforming the multiplicities of traditional societies into coherent political societies as a basis for (i) eliciting deference and devotion from the individual to the claims of the state, and ultimately for (ii) increasing cultural homogeneity, political integration and value consensus? Drawing on data generated from an ethnographic study carried out in South–Western Nigeria between October 2009 and March 2015, this study interrogates these questions.
The introduction is voiced as a response to Ben Anderson's The Spectre of Comparisons. Note that "The Nation and Its Fragments" was voiced as a response to Imagined Communities. Chapter 1 is caled "The Nation in Heterogeneous Time" rulers/ruled governors/governed civic nationalism identity politics Anderson, nationalism vs ethnicity
This article discusses approaches to governing ethnically divided societies, examining the impact on ethnic groups of specific solutions, such as guarantees of individual or collective rights, ethnic federalism, and consociationalism. It explores the relationship of these approaches to such concepts as "nation-state," confederalism, interna tional guarantees of minority rights, the right of self-determination, seces sion, and cultural autonomy. Some fundamental issues associated with different options for groups living in a diaspora and for territorially concentrated minorities are analyzed, and attention is drawn to particu larly complex cases where groups are mixed, or where one ethnic group which may itself be a "minority" encompasses a smaller group which otherwise belongs to a "majority" within the state. The author draws extensively from the experience of Yugoslavia, but also from other countries.
The state is a specific modality of class domination, a generic phenomenon in capitalist and socialist formations. The unique feature of the socioeconomic formations in postcolonial Africa is that the state, if we can properly talk of such an existence at all, has very limited autonomy. The state in Africa is only a particular modality of class domination. In the social formations of Africa that are supposedly capitalist, we find a rudimentary autonomization of class domination. In the African social formations that are purportedly socialist we find a limited possibility of class domination being mediated and autonomized effectively by commodity production and exchange. As far as the state and social forces are concerned, we can state that much of postcolonial Africa remains essentially an enclave capitalism marked by the class domination typical of capitalism.
Four explanations of xenophobia and racism will be reviewed by confronting them with the results of empirical studies. I try to show that xenophobic and racist views of the social world are not instrumental to a fight for scarce jobs or housing. Neither is it appropriate to interpret them as a result of a culture clash that is caused by migratory movements across countries and continents. They are not mere radicalizations of the discourse of exclusion and devaluation which political and administrative elites generate and institutionalize, for example, in immigration policies. Starting from the insights of this critical review, I shall develop the hypothesis that xenophobia and racism should be seen as appeals to the pact of solidarity into which state and society have entered in modern nation‐states and which in times of intensified social conflicts seems fragile in the eyes of downwardly mobile groups. The xenophobic discourse serves not only to reassure identity when nationalistic self‐images run into crisis but is an element of a political struggle about who has the right to be cared for by the state and society: a fight for the collective goods of the modern state.
This article looks at the making of the Indigenato, the set of institutions that defined the difference between settler citizen and native subject in colonial Mozambique, and considers its legacy for post-colonial politics. It argues that approaches to the democratization of local governance in rural areas today must recognize that the customary authorities were shaped by a colonial state that was bifurcated in conception but imperfectly so in practice. The Indigenato imposed new oppositions and reconstructed those of gender and ethnicity, but its dualisms were continually violated by cross-cutting contradictions of class in the world it interpreted and shaped. An enduring part of the legacy of the Indigenato is a real but ideologically misleading effect: the dualistic opposition of tradition to modernity. This image compromised Frelimo's attempt to construct a unitary socialist society at independence and recurs in contemporary debate in Mozambique over democratization and local governance.
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
The following discussion is divided into two parts. It begins with a review of broad historical changes that shaped the political and economic conditions under which Africans made and exercised claims on land during the long twentieth century of colonial and postcolonial rule. This discussion is followed by several examples of recent land transactions or conflicts that illustrate the way land claims have been asserted, and historical precedents debated, in specific local contexts. The cases have been selected to illustrate differences in land scarcity, in sources and intensities of land conflicts, and the manner in which they have or have not been resolved. Together, they serve to illustrate both the complexity of contemporary land conflicts in Africa, and their importance as sites of debate over the social meaning of property, and the place of the past in contemporary struggles over governance and the distribution of resources.
It is argued in this paper that what happened in the region of Katsina in c. 1492–3 was not a dynastic change, but the establishment of the institution of ‘kingship’. This ‘kingship’ did not grow out of local pre-existing institutions. Rather, it was imposed on the kinship-society by the leaders of the new (Wangara) community of Muslim clerics and traders. These leaders aimed probably at creating a Muslim state in Katsina. However, owing to the resistance of the indigenous population, they failed to achieve this. Therefore, a rapprochement with the indigenous paramount animistic ‘priest-chief’—the durbi —was attempted. This led to the establishment of an institutional structure defined as ‘dual’ or ‘contrapuntal paramountcy’. Within this institutional structure the durbi became responsible for choosing the sarki or ‘king’. As a consequence, the institution of ‘kingship’ took on some of the characteristics of a ‘sacred’ animistic ‘kingship’.
It is further suggested that the evolutionary process outlined for the region of Katsina was paralleled by similar processes in Yauri, Kano and Gobir, and possibly also Zaria. However, in Kano the institution of ‘kingship’ did not originate from within the new community of traders and clerics: rather, the Kano ‘kings’, whose power was traditionally circumscribed by that of the local ‘priest-chiefs’, tried to bring about revolutionary changes with the support of the Wangarawa. But they too apparently failed.
It is suggested, finally, that the rapprochement achieved with the animistic ‘priest-chiefs’ alienated the community of clerics and traders; i.e. the community which constituted in a sense the very power-basis of the Hausa ‘kings’. This in turn may explain in part the jihad of 1804.
Agriculture is the main sphere of material production in all African countries. It is generally recognised that all African countries, excepting the South African Republic, belong to the group of under-developed agrarian countries. It is impossible to define the exact share of agriculture in the total annual output because of the predominance of the subsistence economy, and the almost total absence of statistics on this phase of labour. As a rule, the available statistics underestimate the share of agricultural output. Some idea about the role of agriculture in African economies can be gained from the data on the distribution of rural and urban population. Though in the past 20 years there has been considerable movement from villages to towns, nevertheless the rural population in various countries still constitutes from 67 per cent in Egypt (1957) to 96 per cent in Togo (1956). Only in the South African Republic is the urban population nearly half (46·6 per cent in 1951) of the whole population.
Plusieurs « théories » ont été consacrées à l'intégration politique: les théories du nationalisme, de l'édification nationale, de l'intégration régionale (internationale ou intranationale), du développement politique, de la stabilité politique, du fédéralisme. Toutes s'entendent à considérer une forte homogénéité culturelle comme nécessaire à l'intégration politique. Même celles de Ernst Haas et Amitai Etzioni sur l'intégration régionale ou d'aucunes relatives au fédéralisme n'expriment, à cet égard, qu'une apparente dissidence.
Plus fondamentale est l'objection de la théorie dite « consociétale » qui affirme la possible intégration d'une société culturellement fragmentée, à condition que les chefs des différentes sous-cultures qui s'y rencontrent combattent délibérément et conjointement les effets désintégrateurs de la diversité culturelle. Le « consociétalisme » n'est pas qu'une explication structurée; c'est aussi un schème normatif applicable à plusieurs pays fragmentés et dont il faut admettre les coûts, financiers ou autres, tout comme les réels bénéfices politiques.
This article examines the motives for the establishment of foreign banks in colonial Nigeria. Unlike the Bank of Nigeria, set up to prevent the advancement of credits to Africans, the Bank of British West Africa strove to do so. However, it was discouraged by the colonial government, partly because the government believed that Africans could not be trusted when it came to credit repayment. This distrust was also one of the reasons for the 1894 and 1900 regulations aimed at limiting advances to the Africans. These regulations may also have been a ploy aimed at entrenching the supremacy of the British in Anglo-African trade.
Changements economiques, transformations socio-politiques contemporaines, ethnicite et conflits ethniques participant et constitutifs d'une dialectique entre la dynamique d'une universalisation d'un mode de production et de vie d'une part, et les strategies de differenciation sociale identitaire qui l'accompagnent d'autre part
This paper endorses the criticisms of neo-classical populism and its advocacy of redistributive land reform provided by other contributions to this special issue of the Journal, to which it adds several further points. If GKI propose a version of an agrarian question of ‘small’ or ‘family’ farming, and its resolution through a familiar (Chayanovian) path of development, much of the critique rests, in one way or another, on the ‘classic’ agrarian question in capitalist transition, in effect the agrarian question of capital in which the agrarian question of labour was once subsumed. Here the question is posed whether, in the conditions of contemporary ‘globalization’ and its tendency to the ‘fragmentation’ of labour, there might be a new agrarian question of labour, now detached from that of capital, and which generates a new politics of struggles over land (and its distribution). Even to conceive of this question is beyond the analytical and political field of vision of neo-classical populism. Some of the dimensions of an agrarian question of labour are illustrated in a brief consideration of recent, and highly contradictory, events in Zimbabwe: a unique case of comprehensive, regime-sanctioned, confiscatory land redistribution in the world today.
Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0198281935/toc.html
This book, which was first published in 1973, presents a systematic treatment of the conceptual framework as well as the practical problems of the measurement of economic inequality. Alternative approaches are evaluated in terms of their philosophical assumptions, economic content, and statistical requirements. In a new annexe added in 1997, which is as large as the original book, Amartya Sen, jointly with James Foster, critically surveys the literature that followed the publication of the first edition of the book, and evaluates the main analytical issues in the appraisal of economic inequality and poverty. The technical and non‐technical sections of the book are not presented separately, but it is possible to skip or skim through the formal sections and go directly from the intuitive presentation of the axioms to the intuitive explanation of the results.
Ethnic minority identities and their associated politics of disadvantage have been a central feature of post-colonial Nigerian politics. Tensions which became manifest in the 1950s have combined with new developments such as the militarization and personalization of state institutions and politics, demographic changes and the economics of structural adjustment to create a volatile situation which has affected the transformation of ethnic minority identities and the trajectory of minority politics. Three case studies are considered which show transformations in minority identities and how these transformations are themselves part of a wider realignment of politics in ways which have profound consequences for the national and international politics of the Nigerian state. In this way, the salience of identity issues in the current African crises is highlighted.
Some Comments on Abdullahi Smith’s ‘a Little New Light on the Collapse of the Alafinate of Yoruba
- Joseph Atanda
- Adebowale
The Rise of Ibadan as a Yoruba Power
- Bolanle Awe
Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830-1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria
- Kenneth O Dike
Nigerian Land and Custom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
- Taslim Elias
- Olawale