Guerrilla History - Precolonial Nigeria w/ Max Siollun (AR&D Ep.11)

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

In this continuation of our African Revolutions and Decolonization series, we bring you another fascinating episode focused on precolonial Nigeria - the people's there, their history, the political systems, political economy, international relations, and more.  We are fortunate to be joined by the person who wrote the book on this topic, Max Siollun, whose The Forgotten Era: Nigeria Before British Rule served as the major resource in creating this episode.  We highly recommend checking out his book, from Pluto Press, and stay tuned for a future discussion with Max on post-colonial Nigeria! Max Siollun is a historian. He has written several acclaimed books on Nigeria's history, including What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and Rule, which was shortlisted in BBC History Magazine's 2021 Books of the Year, and the focus of today's episode: The Forgotten Era: Nigeria Before British Rule.  Follow him on twitter @maxsiollun. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You remember Dan Van Booh? They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's Ypresum. University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan.

How are you doing today? I'm doing well. It's a pleasure to be with you, Henry. Absolutely. Always nice to see you as well. Today we're going to have a continuation of our series, African revolutions and decolonization, and we have a really fascinating conversation in store for us. But before I introduce the topic and the guest, I'd like to remind you listeners that you can help

support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with what the show is doing as well as what Adnan and I are doing. By following us on social media, we're on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, Instagram, gorilla underscore history. And we have an email substack newsletter, gorilohistory.substack.com. And again, in all of those cases, guerrilla is spelled with two R's and two L's.

So with that being said, we have a really fascinating conversation on pre-colonial Nigerian history today. And this is going to be something of a prelude to a future conversation that we will have on, that'll touch on the colonial period of Nigerian history, but then really focused on post-colonial Nigerian history. We're joined by the author of the Forgotten Era, Nigeria before British rule, Max Sjolun. Max, it's nice to have you on the show. How are you doing today? Doing very well. Thank you for asking. And so it's a pleasure to be it. Absolutely. Like I had said, air when I had seen that this book, the Forgotten Era, was coming out through Pluto Press,

I was very excited to see that it was going to be coming. And I knew that it would make for a great topic for guerrilla history. And the reason for that is, is that within not only discussions on our show, but also just within kind of left-wing discussions more generally, when we talk about African history, we tend to think of the colonial period, the period of decolonization and then the post-colonial period, but we don't focus nearly as much on the long and rich traditions in the pre-colonial period. And so today I'm hoping that we can shed some light on the pre-colonial period of Nigeria. As an opening question, just briefly, Max, why did you think that it was important to write an entire book that focused on pre-colonial

Nigerian history? There's a number of reasons for that. One of which you touched upon, which is that lots of historical writing about Africa tends to be about two things. Number one is slavery and number two is colonialism. Now, I take the view that those two topics are not really African history, they're a history of what Europeans did

when they first made contact with Africans. So there's far less literature about Africans, just as a standalone topic where Africans have agency without it being what quote unquote Europeans did to them when they're in Africa. So I think like you said, this is an understudy topic and it was about time we made it more well known. Yeah, I think this is a really important book in making more well-known pre-colonial African history or just, let's say, pre-modern.

African history. One question that I had is I know that most of your work in other publications as well has centered around Nigeria, a modern state, you know, forged out of British colonial control. And I just wondered about how you use the frame of the modern state of Nigeria for what is a very multi-ethnic, multi-religious, geographically kind of expansive region for the stories that you tell and wondering, you know, what do you think is the, sometimes we feel like we have to use Nigeria, you know, or other modern states as the organizing framework. But the story you tell actually really crosses a lot of these modern state boundaries. And so I'm wondering what you think of as what whole. together the story in this pre-colonial sort of period. What kind of units are we talking about regionally? What makes sense from a geographic, a cultural or political framework to think about

this era and its history? And thanks for the question. It's a fantastic one. And I will confess that there's a bit of an oxymoron in the book title in that it talks about, quote, unquote, Nigeria before British rule. Obviously, Nigeria didn't exist before British rule. So just in terms of taxonomy, even though it didn't exist, I had to use terminology that is familiar to the contemporary reader. But then just to go to the crux of your question as to what did I use it as the forcrum for stringing together the histories of many different societies, it's actually ecology. So the ecological feature that Nigeria gets his name from is the river Niger. One of the longest rivers in Africa, or in West Africa at least.

It's not just a topographical feature, in my opinion. It did much more than that. Number one, it was a marine highway that economically brought a lot of the people who are now known as Nigerians together, either in pre-colonial times. number two, it in a bizarre way actually facilitated the British conquest of Nigeria because it provided them again with a means of transportation to transport their goods, weapons, soldiers, etc. across the land that is now Nigeria. And then number three, we tend to presume incorrectly in my opinion that Africans were kind of living in these disconnects.

societies not really knowing about each other until either, A, Europeans discovered them, or B, Europeans introduced them to each other. So what I was really trying to show is that that's not really true. Yes, absolutely. There was no political union, no country or no kingdom known as Nigeria in the pre-colonial era, but the peoples who now make up that country traded with each other, intermarried with each other, spoke each other's languages. Sometimes some constituent units of them lived within the same kingdom as well. And let's just be candid, sometimes they had really, really poisonous relationships with each other, sometimes engaging in walls with each other, which often reflect and still resembles the patterns of conflict that we see in modern Nigeria

today. So I think sometimes we shouldn't just think that there's a straight line between what happened before British rule and what happened to half the British rule. Very, very often the cause of the modern day conflicts have their roots or umbilical cords buried in conflicts in the pre-colonial era. Before I get into talking about the history itself, I do have another conceptual question that's related to this mention that before colonization, there was no Nigeria and there were no Nigerians. Now, this is a really interesting thing to think about because when we look at it from a cultural anthropological perspective, nationalisms develop because of imagined communities and the necessity of creating an imagined community, which didn't

exist in the past but serves for political ends. Now, again, we're kind of jumping forward, but how do you think that discussing these people as the people of Nigeria, this created country, and as these people as current-day Nigerians coming from various groups that wouldn't have seen themselves as members of the same ethnic groups in the past, how does thinking about these interactions in the past and then the current attempts to pull together a nationalism, and I'm not saying this in a negative context, but in terms of creating a Nigerian national identity, how should we view that process? Depending on which way you look at it, there's been a 180 or 360 turn in terms of developing

group identities in Nigeria. So you're absolutely right. So pre-colonial era, there was no such thing as Nigeria, no such thing as Nigerians. I would even go further and say that a lot of the constituent ethnic groups in Nigeria today, Yoruba, Houssa, Ibo, etc. Just three examples. There's over 500 of them. Most of those didn't even exist either, certainly not in their current form anyway. So if you go to southwest Nigeria, which is the homeland of quote-unquote modern day Yoruba people, that's a very modern identity. That identity only existed maybe for 150, to 200 years or so. Those people, 200 years ago, lived in at least a dozen different kingdoms who saw themselves

as foreigners to each other in the same way that, say, I'm just picking two countries at random, a modern-day Libyan and a modern-day person from the DRC see themselves as foreigners to each other. So there was two kind of levels of group identities coalescing. One is that in the kind of lead up to colonization, just basically because of it made life easier for A, the colonial bureaucracy, and B, it made life easier for the missionaries who were trying to spread the Word of God,

spread the gospel to an area where hundreds of different languages have spoken, they are not going to proselytize in hundreds of different languages. So what did they do is, one, create standardized, texts of translations of the Bible in what I would call mega languages and convinced people who spoke languages that were similar or who were from the same geographic zone, hey, this new translation of the Bible, it's just the quote-unquote parent language of the language that you speak now. So really what we saw is people, lots of different ethnic group, bottlenecking into these new,

I'm not even going to call them dialects, and to these new languages that the missionaries and be the colonial bureaucracy created. And then also there's another level to that in that. In the lead up to independence, as the different groups started competing for power and who would replace the Brits as they left,

there was strength in attaching to these large group identities because one, you get the attention of the Brits and two, you get the attention of the other competing groups who are competing for power for economic resources with you. So there was a double motivation for the creation of these large ethnic identities. And of course, we'll talk about this more later when we do our future conversation on post-colonial Nigeria, but I'm very happy that you brought up the Yoruba example. I was just reading a book on cultural anthropology and the Yoraba we used

quite frequently as a group which really in terms of a solid, identity only started to develop in the 1920s and the 1930s and became one of the dominant groups of Nigeria but didn't really exist previously and how even the character of the Yoraba people and the identification with certain religious practices and when those religious practices came about speaking of the adoption of Christianity but also how we have a large group of Muslim Yoraba and how the Muslim Yoraba community is seen as more the true Yoraba, even though part of the history of the Yorba, people was the early adoption of Christianity vis-a-vis are relative to other people in the area. So it becomes very confusing,

but like I said, we'll save that for a future conversation. Adnan, I know that you have things that you wanted to say, but I just thought that that was a very fascinating point. Well, I mean, I agree with you, and I think it is a fascinating point about the construction of ethnicity in a new way, as Max was talking about. And, um, the stakes involved with the national identity. I almost would say perhaps a history that was about the peoples of the Niger River is almost like just from what you were saying about what really holds these people and their history, peoples and their history together is their proximity, you know, not just topologically, but historically, you know, on the historical consequences of change and developments through the prism of the river.

So maybe that would, in some ways, that might be the kind of histories that would prepare the historiographical narratives for more of a regional or, you know, pan-African kind of identity, you know, like the histories that we tell have consequences for, you know, political futures that we imagine. And so that's quite interesting, you know, to hear you say that actually the river is sort of the main point. But, you know, I wanted to explore maybe the, you know, early chapters of this book, not only talk about ancient archaeological kind of information and the way in which this is really not easy to integrate into contemporary historiography, but maybe the first historical. kind of peoples that we can grasp in your story really have to do with this almost mythic sort of narrative, its own kind of historiography to tell this kind of quasi-legendary sounding story about the founder or ancestor of the Housa states.

And I guess what's interesting, and I would like to hear more from you about this, is how when we label it something like these House of States, we think, okay, these are House of Peoples. They may be different states and political entities, but it's all one people that have the common, you know, somehow, some kind of common identity or they're speaking the same language and so on. And yet even this is a kind of construction. So what were these houses states and how did you grapple with trying to tell the story of this kind of political and social and cultural history of people's in the northern, I guess, part of what is today Nigeria and the southern part of what is today Niger from the 15th, you know, what appears to be basically from. the 15th century forward. How did you kind of characterize this period and what did you think was historically salient about trying to tell the story of these peoples and polities from that era? Great. Sure. Happy to give insight. And before I answer, I'll just give a caveat that I know there's probably laws of your listeners who are Africa experts who are familiar with what

I'm about to say, but for the benefit of those who are not Africa experts, the ethnic group that we're discussing the HALSA people, just for the benefit of those who are new to this, it's one of the most populous ethnic groups in Africa. Most of them are based in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, some in Sudan, some in other countries too, but the bulk of House of People live in those three localities I just mentioned.

And the kind of legend that you alluded to is, there's this wonderful folklore that explains the origin of the ancient, Halcer state. So before the early 19th century, there was seven Halcer states, seven different kingdoms, each had their own king. They were walled cities located in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, and the folk rule basically says, hey, look, even though we live in different places, even though each of these seven kingdoms has a different king, we are quote-unquote Housa backway, which basically means the Houssa 7.

That's the literal translation of that term. And if you go further back, in that folklore, the folklore says that the first kings of those seven states were, depending on who you, which version of the story you believe, were either the grandsons or the sons of an ancient patriarch called Bayajida. Now, obviously, to a sophisticated academic audience, this just sounds like it's just pure fable, it's just folklore that does serve two purposes. One is to create a group identity between those seven states, between the peoples of those seven states. Number two is to establish the legitimacy of the rulers, of the ruling monarchy as at the time that this

legend, whatever you want to call it, arose. Then there's a third challenge to go to your question is, if I'm writing a serious book and I want to be taking seriously as a serious scholar, I can't be feeding the public, which is basically urban folk tales and elderly legends. So it's very, very tempting, just to dismiss this as, look, this is just pure fable, it's just serving a cultural or anthropological purpose. But then if we really, really dig deeper into that story, there's hidden meanings to it, set multiple hidden means. One is that in a society, in an ancient society, and we have to remember that the house estates originated

maybe as far back as the 7th to 9th centuries in an era where most of the population was illiterate and not educated, if you're trying to explain complex historical processes of state formation, monarchy is arising. Maybe this legend is a way of compressing really, really complicated historical events that occurred over several hundred years

into metaphors which are easier for an illiterate, maybe not politically sophisticated population to absorb. Then there's some other hidden elements to the story which do interact or real history.

So I mentioned that this patriarch in the legend, his name is Bayajida in the house of version of the legend. Other nearby communities outside house I land have very, very, very similar legends about their own foundation too, where they always talk about this wandering hero who has seven sons and his seven sons become the crowned rulers of their own societies as well. So at one level, it is very strange that all these people in West Africa just happen to have, that some of them don't even know each other, all happen to have the same legend, very, very similar facts. Now, here's where it interacts

real history, Borno's version of the legend, and Borno is a neighboring state to the east of Housseland, they gave this Biajida a different name, Abu Yazid. And around the time that these house estates existed, there was a real historical figure with that name. So again, it could be that this story of the House of Seven is a corrupted rendition of the story of this real historical figure and perhaps some of his followers, some of his descendants dispersed in West Africa and established the kingdoms that we now know as the House of States and some of the other states like Canaan, Borne, etc. Yeah, that's so fascinating. And actually, I have to say, I really loved in the book the way

in which you try and interpret this, what might be dismissed as a legend, to kind of situate it as having some historical meaning and significance, not only as a later construction and legitimization and rationalization of, you know, seven states or peoples before the 19th century, but, you know, to actually connect it and to think of it as a people's history, a people's memory collapsing, you know, long periods of change into some kind of way that it can be communicated and remembered. You know, and I would say, like even with educated, populations today. There's lots of, you know, kind of mythic and legendary and conspiracy theories and ways that people collapse like complex historical processes and structures and conceptual analysis

into vivid, you know, compressed stories. So it's not as if, you know, these are unsophisticated people or anything. It's their way of expressing something significant about their history. And I loved the way that you kind of interpreted and enriched that by taking it seriously. This is the question just about Abu, about Bayejida, as soon as I saw that as I was reading, I said, oh, that's Bayezid, you know, as a name. And Bayezid is basically just the Persianate and Turkish way of saying Abu Yazid. It's all the same name. So in fact, these are just different versions. There's not really a different name. It's a family resemblance of different linguistic and cultural pronunciations of a figure that at least in Arabic would be characterized as Abu Yazid. And I thought

that's fascinating. There are so many, I didn't, you know, about you talked about the Abu Yazid kind of Berber revolt, you know, in North Africa and exile and the legend, or at least story, let's say story of his kind of going to sub-Saharan Africa and that this potentially being kind of a parallel or the same kind of a figure. I hadn't known. I hadn't known. known that there were similar other stories and analogs about, you know, a figure with a wandering figure with seven, you know, sons and so forth. That's just really very interesting and striking, which suggests either that there is really a historical core here or that this is a motif that becomes, comes to be a very significant and valuable way of talking about state formation,

as you're saying, or big, big political change like the establishment of monarchy. And I would just note that, you know, even somebody like Marshall Solens, you know, and historical anthropologists who look at like Polynesian islands and kind of stories of kingship, that kings are often people who come from outside. You know, like, that's just part of the structure of where do king, like in these kinds of stories, where do kings come from? Because, you know, the kind of contrast is always that there's a more again, well, I don't know if that's the case here, but there's often a kind of characterization as a difference between a kind of more egalitarian society, but that at some point,

a king figure comes from outside, serves a certain function, and like, you know, there's a political transformation, but that power, you know, comes from this outside. thing, that the state is that kind of like foreign, you know, importation. I just think that's interesting that that's a kind of common motif. And it seems like it's operating here in the logics of African historiography to think about, like, well, how do we, how do we understand where this kind of form of political power emerges or arises? And if I may, I'd like to add something in on the first point that Adnan made for the listeners, as I turn it over to you, than Max is that there's often this conflation between history, I sorry, culture and the boundaries

of an ethnic group. And I'm putting quotations around ethnic group here. Whereas really what we should be seeing is that culture is something that is inside of what would be considered the boundaries of the ethnic group. And I'm putting quotations around everything here. But also that while culture of a ethnic group is well within the boundaries that would define the ethnic group, there is also shared culture between ethnic groups. And we see this not only in the context that we're talking about here between the Houssa and some of the neighboring ethnic groups. And again, I'm sorry, listeners, but there's like 50 air quotes that are going here that you can't see. But around the world, we see that that there is ethnic groups.

which have this idea of what their culture is, and they use it almost to define themselves, even though that, again, is not the definitional boundary of their group. But if you look at other groups that are geographically similar, historically similar, what you often see is that there are very similar points of culture or historical narratives in those other groups, which are denied by, the groups themselves is being shared with other ethnic groups because that would make it more difficult to define themselves using culture or this constructed history of themselves as a group. So again, that was more of just a point for the listeners.

But I'm going to turn it to you, Max, to address what Adnan had said. So Adnan, I have to say a huge thank you to you. Thank you so much for that point about the nomenclature and the similarity between the or the translation of Abu Yazid, the names Abu Yazid and Bayajida. And for the sake of the listeners, I just realized I actually left out a point of a really important piece of detail, which is that this historical Bayajida figure, just like you said, came from outside.

He wasn't a native of Hausa land. And where did he come from? He came from the Middle East. So it just segues fantastically with your points about the monocale, in the histories of several different people. We're not talking about West Africa now, always being or usually being outsiders. And number two,

by Adjida, just being really a reconstruction of the Middle Eastern name Abiyazid. So I can only say thank you for illuminating that. Well, what I wanted to follow up from there is how this all changed. And like you, of course,

part of the story, and perhaps you can tell us little bit further about it is that there was religious change that happened over the, you know, from the 14th or 15th centuries on. And of course, the Canem Borno polity that, you know, was even older in the Chad, Lake Chad area. And, you know, they had adopted Islam in about the 11th and early 12th centuries and so on. And, and there's religious change. that's taking place and happening during this period. But whatever condominium of religious cultures

that existed, you know, between those who maintained practices of worship that don't relate to confessional, you know, Islam has a confessional religion, as well as, you know, I don't like to say syncretic because I don't know, that's not always the best way to describe, but multiple practices that integrated some components of practices that we could identify as consonant with and continuous with, you know, other, you know, practices, religious practices, and like some learned, orthodox Islam that, you know, kind of

integrated in patterns of travel and scholarship, a kind of cosmopolitan Islamic legal and scholarly tradition. You've got a real range in the religious environment and religious culture, but that something happens and transforms in the 18th century with this, you know, the Uthman Danfodio and the family of Uthman Danfodio. And so I'm wondering if maybe you could tell us a little bit about, well, about that transformation. And one question that I have about it is so often,

and I think you even alluded to this in your discussion, it was named the Sokoto Caliphate, right? Okay, but, you know, that's the end point is that there is a state that is a vast state that is formed that's called the Sokato Caliphate. But I think there's some dispute about whether it really is or should even be called a caliphate. It doesn't seem like. the title of caliph was adopted, though a title of commander of the faithful, Amir al-Mu'maunin, a title that is associated with caliphs in the early past, but didn't have like the full, say, religious resonances. It's a commander of the people, you know, basically as opposed to caliph as a almost a religiously endowed sort of title of

being a deputy, a kind of steward, you know, it's a Quranic phrase as well. But he found like some new polity out of these Houssa states that you were describing before. And I'm just interested in your insights about that process by which this transformation takes place and its consequences. Sure, happy to feel illuminate that. So, it's a good segue from our discussion on the seven HALSA states. So these seven states have existed for approximately, or at least 1,000 years. Now, Housaland was not mono-ethnic.

A group of immigrants who were from the area that's now Mauritania, Senegal, Gambria, etc., had been migrating eastwards across West Africa into what is now northern Nigeria and southern Niger. And those people, those immigrants, they're called Fulani people. And the reason for that immigration was that originally they were occupational specialists. They were really originally cattle-rearing nomads. But there was an elite group within Fulani society who were Muslims.

There were scholars. They were teachers. They were writers. And they came to Hausa land, which they started coming around 15th century or so. Now, by the early 19th century, although, although Haltham, Halseland is nominally Muslim, the kings are Muslim and maybe the elites are

Muslim, really what they're doing is viewing Islam not as a replacement religion for their prior religious beliefs, but just, hey, this is just another religion that's on the menu for us to kind of pick and choose. That caused a lot

of friction with these immigrants, the Fulani's who prided themselves on being the true Islamic practitioners and their view was no you must pick one or the other

it's nothing enough this is a Abrahamic faith where you cannot say that you're a Muslim and continue with residues of your pre-Muslim or pre-Islamic faiths so there's this wonderful the character that you mentioned

there is Osman Danfodio he was one of those scholars that full of any scholars that migrates to Housseland. Now, one of the Houssa states, Gaubeer, which is in now southern Niger, the royal house hired him to be a religious teacher for one of the princes of the royal house called Yomfa. Fast forward a few decades, that prince becomes the king.

And Dan Fodio rebels against the king that when he was a young man was his own pupil. So there's this wonderful kind of story of teacher versus student. And basically Dan Fodier declares a jihad throughout House of Land. And within the space of four to five years, overthrows these seven states that at least the first state have been in existence for a thousand years. It's just an incredibly rapid revolution. And in place of the House of States, he replaced them with the state that is now called, and now I'm doing air quotes, Henry,

the Sokoto Caliphate. Let's just say, look, it was a theocratic state led by Dan Fodio himself, who did take the title in Arabic, Amir al-Mumanim, the commander of the believers. Now, in terms of terminology,

at no point did any of the people ruling that state called it the Sokoto Caliphate. Sokoto is the name of the capital city of this massive confederate.

Federation of Muslim states that Danfoglio created, which in its heyday in the 19th century was the largest state in pre-colonial Africa. It spanned three, four countries, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and at its western end, the border was almost touched Mali, so it was absolutely massive. But what was really interesting about this state in that is that in the modern era, the word jihad doesn't always, it doesn't have a, um, a very positive connotation with a lay audience, should we say. But the people who led this jihad, they weren't just warriors. They weren't just soldiers.

These were, like I said, highly, highly erudite men and women, scholars, teachers. That was their occupation pre-jihad. And it wasn't just about violence. It wasn't just about overthrowing the pre-existing House of States. It was actually about people who had a preconceived, template for a new purified state that would emerge after the jihad that will be governed by religious precepts acceptable to them and that will be governed as a pure um islamic state now did they accomplish all those objectives those things are open to debate but um i would actually

say that as well as being a jihad this revolution in early 19th century northern Nigeria, southern Niger was actually also an intellectual revolution because it spawned so much writing. And it's because of that jihad that we know so much about 19th century West Africa is because of the massive library of documents that those jihad leaders left behind. Now, I'm going to apologize in advance, Max. I'm going to give you an absolutely huge question just because I know we have limited time today, unfortunately, and we have a lot that we want to cover. So this question is going to be very, very large. So we've already talked about the Hausa kingdoms. We've talked about the Sokato Caliphate. We talked, I believe briefly,

about the Canaan Borno Empire. But we haven't talked about the culture, economic bases of these places, which of course is very important, not only when defining, again, culture falls well within the boundaries of an ethnic group, but often it's conflated with the boundary of an ethnic group. So we haven't really talked about what the culture was in this era. And also, of course, economy is a critical component that we certainly need to talk about. After you finish that, we've been focusing on northern Nigeria, but also we have a lot to talk about with regard to the kingdoms of southwest Nigeria, Benin, Togo. So once you finish your discussion of the and the economic bases of these kingdoms in the northern part of Nigeria and southern Niger,

if we can then turn towards the southern part of pre-colonial Nigeria as well. Sure, no problem. I'm happy to. So the question you asked about the culture and economy, and maybe I'll use Hausa land, just because we've been talking about that as my example for answering this question, those seven Hausa states that I mentioned, each accord-eastern. to that legend that I mentioned had a specific economic, social,

political or military duty entrusted to it. So for example, the state that I mentioned by name, Gobir, which is where that jihad started, that was nicknamed the king of war. Its duty, basically it was the military outpost that protected Housseland.

Then Kano and Rano were known as, quote, the kings of indigo, because that was the center for basically making clothing and exporting it throughout West Africa. So basically each of those seven states was responsible for some produce that was critical to the success and the sustenance of Housseland. Then within each of those states, I mentioned that they were walled states.

The walls, so a couple of purposes. One was defensive, obviously just a defense. from outside invaders. But then behind the walls, the cities were not directly located behind the walls. There was always a large space for farming, for agriculture. So it was meant to allow an agricultural population to thrive to prosper. And also, in case of prolonged military conflict or a siege,

to leave space for farming and survival so that in case there was a siege, the inhabitants of the city would be able to survive. Then there is also a dark side to the successor states and the Sokota Caliphate is a dark side to their economy, which was slavery. So one of the great ironies of the Sokut al-Caliphate is that one of the triggers for that jihad was that the jihad leaders were agreed by the enslavement of Muslims.

So they partially, not only partially started that jihad because according to them, being a Muslim, made one ineligible for enslavement. But then the irony is that after they established the Sokata Caliphate, they ended up enslaving more people than the predecessor House of States before them. At one stage, the Sokata Caliphate had about two million slaves, which was more slaves than any other pre-colonial African state. That slavery element really had tectonic consequences for identity culture and the diaspora African population, because a lot of them ended up in Brazil, in the Americas, etc. Some of them did return, but here's the irony. A lot of those people that returned, a lot of the enslaved population or their descendants that returned, they did not return to the same ethnic identity. they left in. So you may have been enslaved as calling yourself a house person or a canori person,

but then because the point of return for those who were man-limited was Lagos, which is modern-day Yoruba land, a lot of the returnees assimilated and, for want to a better term, transformed themselves into Yoruba people, which is the ethnic identity of the host area that they return to. Well, that's fascinating. I mean, but I think Henry also wanted to talk. I think you started touching upon some of the history of what is today the south of Nigeria.

So in the Lagos as the main port city, but in what is now sometimes thought of as Yoruba land. And this is already a fascinating history if there's large numbers of returnees who basically become Yorubized, you know, because they were non-Muslim, Hausa, and other groups, and as a result, were targets of conquest and enslavement. And as a result, when they return from being sent to Brazil when they come back, they become Yorua. That's a fascinating window into the multiplicitous sort. of history for the southern polities and kingdoms. So I'm wondering, you know, maybe you can elaborate a little bit on what was kind of unique or different and what kind of trajectory did the southern part of what is today Nigeria undergo as distinct from these house estates

and then their absorption within, you know, what we call the Sokato-Khalopate. So what was happening in the South, both, you know, politically, culturally and economically. So the South, in terms of topography, was very different from the North. And I'll touch upon later on, I'm going somewhere with this, why I'm always starting with topography. So the northern Nigeria is more dry savannah grassland. Why is that relevant? The Socutta Caliphate's power, why it was able to conquer its neighbors, was due to cavalry.

So in that dry savanna area, horses can thrive, survive. In the south, the climate was wetter, more humid, it was densely forested. Again, why relevant? Horses found it very, very difficult to survive there because of the SETI flight lurking in the forest. And that's actually a reason why the Sokata Caliphate, one of the reasons why it couldn't penetrate sell and conquer the southern societies. Now in southwestern Nigeria, the area that's now populated by the ethnic group, group that is now called Yoruba, a few hundred years ago, as Henry alluded to,

the Yoruba ethnic group did not exist, certainly in its current form. There was a term, a similar term, called Yareba, that was used to describe the inhabitants of one of the kingdoms that is now in southwestern Nigeria. And that kingdom was called Oyo. It was the largest of the kingdoms in southwestern Nigeria and its borders. It was large enough where its borders went into the country that's now modern-day Benin and into modern-day Togo. I mentioned at the start of the Bayegidad legend about a patriarch with seven sons who will become crowned rulers. Yorbaaland has a very, very similar legend for the origin of its kings as well.

Their patriarch is called Oduo. Just like Biajida, he is this wandering hero from the Middle East. Just like Bajedah, he has seven sons who all become kings. Sound familiar? And again, although they regarded themselves as sibling states, Oyo, which was the northern most of those states, became the most powerful. The reason for that is Oyo had the fortune and the misfortune of having those two ecological zones, as I mentioned, the surveillance. Vana belts and the forest belt. Oyo was the only one of those Euroba

kingdoms that had both. So because of that, it was able to acquire cavalry and horses from its northern neighbors, Canembo, the house estates, etc., which it used quite candidly to terrorize its neighbors and invade and override them. So it conquered Dahomey, which is now modern-day Benin Republic, conquered the other Yorba kingdoms, etc. but apart from conquest, it wasn't just an imperial power.

It was actually one the most sophisticated pre-colonial African states in terms of its administration and its governing structure. What amaze me about Oyo is that, keep in mind, we're talking hundreds to maybe 700 years ago. It had an elaborate separation of powers before modern democratic states existed. So Oyo's king had the title of Al-Afian, which the literal translation is the owner of the palace.

And he had these wonderful majestic titles like deputy to the gods, etc. that made him sound like he had unlimited power. But he really didn't. He had a seven member council of advisors or ministers called the Oyo Messi, who if they judged him guilty or cruelty or misrule, could depose him, could remove him from power. and replace him, the way in which they could depose him was pretty dramatic.

Basically, the only way of being removed from being a king was by death. So this council could actually sentence the king to death if they felt that he wasn't performing, but they had a fantastic incentive not to abuse their power because if they used that power, one of them had to die with the king. So it sounds like on the face of it like oh my goodness water needless waste of lives the king dies and then one of his counsellors has to die as well but to me I actually kind of view that as an ancient form of mutually assured destruction and building in constitutional incentives for people to behave reasonably by basically telling them if you behave unreasonably

the price is going to be your life. One of the things that you mentioned, which reminds me of another point that I wanted to bring up, is that oil were acquiring horses from their northern neighbors. Now, I bring up northern neighbors because one of the points that you raise in your book is foreign relations. And this was very interesting because typically when we think of pre-colonial period foreign relations of various African locales, ethnic groups, or kingdoms, it's typically only thinking about European relations coming to them.

So, you know, how do the European states, which in some cases will eventually become their colonizers, how do they relate to one another? But your book also looks at foreign relations between various places that are near each other as well as also branching out from each other, and particularly in the case of Housseland, But, you know, as you just mentioned, the oil, we're also trading for one of the materials, horses, that allowed them to become so successful in their particular topography. So can you talk a little bit about what foreign relations were like in the various different parts of what is today, Nigeria, in this post-colonial period? Sorry, pre-colonial period. No problem.

Sure. Happy to. So you're absolutely right. So I guess there was three levels of diplomatic relations between the states. One is relations with non-African states. And I'll give one example, Kanem-Borno had treaties and diplomatic relations with Turkey. As an example of a non-African state,

then with African states had embassies in Libya, in Egypt. Now, Benin, which we haven't mentioned yet, it's kind of a sister-stroke cousin state of the Eurobe Kingdoms, because that legend I mentioned of the seven sons of Odduwa, the seventh son was, according to the legend, was said to be the first king of the Benin kingdom, which a lot of your listeners will know from the Benin Bronze and so on. Benin had a very unique history and relationship with European countries

because it was one of the first West African societies to have relationships with European countries, where there was no asymmetry of power. They were just meeting as peers, trading, there was no conquest. It was just states deciding to be friends. And I'll give an example is Portugal. So the Portuguese arrived in Benin in the late 15th century.

And by the early part of the following century, Benin was sending ambassadors to Portugal to ask for weapons, ask for goods. And Portugal was actually amenable to provide these things. And as is the case today where donor states often demand conditions for providing aid, you know, adopting certain political and economic values, etc. The Portuguese is just set to being fine. You can have weapons, books, educators on the condition that you Christianize. So that was really just, it was, but again, that was just really haggling and bargaining. It wasn't a case of

we are going to impose the Christianity in you by invasion, which we saw a few centuries later. Then there was relations with each other, as in relations between different African states. So Canem Borno and Hauser and Hausa land for hundreds of years were almost sibling societies to each other, to the extent that as later as the 19th century, one of the Hauser states Zaria,

actually had an official called Back on Borno, which literally means the messenger to Borno. So they literally had an ambassador from Borno sitting in their king's court. Then the Yoruba states, especially Oyo, had

economic relations with the states to their north, primarily Halerlan, Kanem Borno, and the New Pay Kingdom, which we haven't mentioned. That relationship tended to be economic. So, Oyo relied for a lot of its military power on the north, the states to its north. So it's acquired

horses from the states to its north. And also, its cavalrymen who served in its army, tended to be mercenaries from northern states as well. And a lot of just economic immigrants, should we say, were also from the north. So medical providers, people rearing and feeding their horses, And then lastly, it wasn't always friendly. The relations between the African states, obviously there was some hostile relations. The best example of that is probably Oyo and Dahomey. That's Oyo and the country is now called Benin Republic, where basically for about a century, Oyo just kept invading Dahomey, just subjecting it to a torrent of military assaults.

And then the other example of the non-friend. friendly relations would probably be in northern Nigeria, the ethnic groups who were not Muslims resisted incorporation into the Sokata Caliphate and actually adopted Christianity as a badge of resistance to the Caliphate. So there was, just to summarize, there was absolutely different levels of relationships between the states, positive and hostile, and also with non-African states too. Yeah, this is fascinating. You know, we often think and freeze these identities, you know, in time and think of them as very inimical simply because they're different. And so it's interesting to see different pathways by which, you know, Christians and Muslims become, you know,

Christians and Muslims, you know, I mean, there's a lot of geopolitical trading you were mentioning and then also resistance to kind of expanding reformist Muslim kind of polity. As far as these relations with kind of, say, European powers, I mean, I fully appreciate and so much appreciated that your history is not framed through a Eurocentric kind of emphasis on Europeans in Africa. And essentially, that's the history that's being told, you know, through slavery and, you know, and colonialism. However, these are processes that are starting to gain significance, obviously, during this period as well and have consequences. And so I did want to kind of ask a little bit about maybe some regional comparisons, because I think you also do a very nice job of showing that, say these Fulani groups in different parts of West Africa in previous eras also led

kind of reformist and revolutionary or rebellions. But I was kind of thinking a little bit about the Senegambia and Senegal kind of situation and somebody's work like Rudolf, you know, Butch Ware's book, The Walking Quran, where he contextualizes this anti-colonial and anti-slavery. I mean, you mentioned that like there was this, it may have been an irony of history, but like it's, you know, the socotopality

of Uthman Danfodio and his descendants, you know, really began in some sense through grievances on like enslavement of Muslims, but ends up enslaving quite a lot of non-Muslim Africans in the course of its expansion and conquest and so on. But, you know, Butch Weir's argument for at least his case, that is maybe somewhat different, but I'm just wondering what you think about what's happening in this region in terms of responses and relations to European colonization and the opening up increasingly of a transatlantic slave market, you know, like that's kind of a crucial feature.

There may have been, like, you know, raiding and enslavement of captives and things like that that happened, you know, in Africa. But something transforms when it's connected to a plantation economy in the Western hemisphere, you know, and West African enslavement. But there were these kind of anti-colonial and anti-slavery sorts of movements. How would you put, you know, what's happening in what is to become Nigeria in the context of these resistance to European encroachment and colonialism? So maybe I'll use the circuit of caliphate as an example. example to respond to your question. So I think maybe two, three levels, that revolution,

for want of a better term that created the Sokata Caliphate, it occurred just globally in the time of revolutions around the world. So I think the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the American Revolution all occurred within a five to 20 year period of that Socrates Caliphate foundation of the revolution that founded it. So I think just generally globally, it's just a period of instability and great change going on. Secondly, the jihad in northern Nigeria was not unique in terms of the Fulani. They'd kind of been establishing Muslim states in the far end of West Africa, towards West Africa's westernmost coastline in waters, now Senegal, Gambia, etc.

So to some extent, you could view this as the sequel jihad of other jihad that their ancestors had been causing in the previous 100 to 150 years or so. Then lastly, your point about kind of anti-colonial resistance to colonial effects or European stimulus, it happened or it was relevant rather. to the Socutus Caliphate, not at its foundation, but later on. So I mentioned that it just became this large slave raiding state. So the Caliphase leaders, they were okay with themselves capturing and selling slaves. What happened when we got past Husman Dan Fodio, who was the first leader, and we got to his son, Mohamed Bello? Bello discovered that, hey, look, the slaves that we are selling to the kingdoms to our south are ending up in the hands of Christians and are ending up being sold to transatlantic slave traders.

So when he found out that was happening, that's when he suddenly became an opponent of slave trading. So he found a way to theoretically rationalize his own enslavement of people, but just could not find a way of rationalizing why the Euroba states all the way down to the Lagos coastline were selling those slaves to, as he put it, to Christians, because that was just, to him, any European was a Christian. So there was a dichotomy there that's very, that bellow in his head rationalized, but perhaps today we would find hard to reconcile.

Well, I just want to push back a little bit on thinking of it only in these kind of theological terms and as a kind of rationalization, because I think, you know, in terms of political economy, I think there's a big difference, although it's interesting. I mean, this is a big period of change, and so your point about how the Sokato Caliphate ended up, like having the largest number of, you know, slaves of any African society as a result of its expansion and conquest and so on.

So there could have been that that's sort of the basis for a major change in the character of the institution. But it seems to me that there is a difference between the kind of practice of basically household, slavery, captives, and so on in African societies of the early modern and slightly pre, on the cusp of modernity premed. modern states versus the kind of scale and transformation and ultimate racialization in the political economy of the plantation societies of the, you know, kind of Atlantic world. And that when it kind of is being transformed more closely or fully into an adjunct of that kind of political economic process, it becomes something of it, it has more devastating kind of consequences. And so it may not just be a kind of uncomfortable or inelegant rationalization of it's okay for us, but not for you, but more of a critique or a response to changing and

political economic pressure as this part of Africa is getting integrated into the Atlantic world, you know, kind of slave trading and resistance to that. So I just wonder, you might be right that it's really just kind of theological kind of difference, that it's sort of in-group and out-group defined by this religion. But I wonder if there is also some kind of kind of sense that that, because this is what sort of, you know, Butchware argues for a different kind of, but somewhat parallel case where maybe theologically they went even further. But it was kind of like, well, the religious language was used to justify a kind of anti-colonial sort of approach, as opposed to, you know, the way one might look at it in this other context of the Sokato polity,

of justifying a kind of two different sort of policies. So I just wonder if the political economic kind of question of how Atlantic world slavery on our kind of grand scale to feed the plantation economies is something that's different than what's happening on the mainland in West Africa, in traditional, even though this wasn't really a traditional society, I think that's kind of the important point. So I just wonder how you balance that if it changes the picture at all to think about it as more than just, it's okay for us, but not for you, into there's something different, perhaps, about, like, the evacuation, you know, in this context. And that's a fabulously nuanced point that you raise, and thank you for raising it.

And you're absolutely right in that there's not one catchal categorization of slavery. So someone who is enslaved in the area that later became southern Nigeria versus northern Nigeria, lived in very, very, very different conditions. And there's some people who are in the literature that we now see where their enslaved condition was, A, not a barrier to upward mobility. B, you know, it wasn't a status that lasted for life. So in fact, some of the most famous people from southern Nigeria were once enslaved. So Bishop Crowler.

I'm just giving examples. Two, Jarja, Smolpubo. were three, Echiano, who wrote the first slave narrative. These were all people who were formally enslaved in southern Nigeria and then gained greater status in life than people who were born and stayed free, their all life. So you're absolutely right. There's different conditions of this.

I think then there's another thing is, as the Sokutu Caliphate, maybe it kind of entered its third, four, fifth decades, the slave raiding became very, very indiscreet. And it went beyond the intentions of the founders of the caliphate. And if you actually read their literature, they are actually criticizing a lot of their soldiers for engaging in what they basically feel is banditry. They basically can look, this is not about religion. This is not why we founded this society.

And their greatest adversary, Mohamed al-Kanini, who was a scholar from Borno, which is a neighboring empire, when the Sokoto Caliphate invaded Borno, he sent these wonderful letters, these very, very pointed, precise theological letters to them, where he really challenged them intellectually and said two things. One is, we are appalled that you, in the name of reforming our religion, Islam,

are enslaving and killing fellow Muslims. We cannot please explain this to us. And then secondly, he also, and this really hurt the leaders of the socket caliphate. He accused them basically waging a political war for land for resources and camouflaging their intent under the banner of religion as a way of gaining popular support. And so I think those are two other angles or two other ways of looking at this.

And thank you for raising this and kind of jolting my memory about these things. I know Adnan has to leave soon, but there is another big question that I want to ask. Actually, two big questions, and I'll put them to you at once. And if Adnan has to go before we wrap up, I'll read him out for the listeners. But there's two big questions that I have. One is that we've mentioned a couple times throughout the conversation that the Yoraba are generally accepted to be a post-colonial construction. or sorry, not a post-colonial construction, but a colonial construction of the colonial period and then continuing to develop in the post-colonial period. There's another group that is often considered to be

a colonial or post-colonial construction, which is the EBO, but within your book, you also examine the pre-colonial roots of the Ebo people. And so for the first question, I'm wondering if you can make kind of a comparative analysis of these two groups that many people would consider both to be entirely rooted in the colonial period and post-colonial period, but you seem to make a distinction between the history of the Yoraba and the Ebo people with regard to when kind of ethnogenesis was really occurring. That's one question. The second question is entirely unrelated, but I'm going to put it at the same time anyway, just because we have to wrap up the conversation at some point. The second question is related to the first military

coup, your section in the book, the first military coup. So you mention that the coup of January 1966 was, by many, considered to be unprecedented in Nigerian history, but actually there was precedent. And you tell a very fascinating story in the book. So I'm wondering also if you would be able to tell the story of the first military coup in Nigeria and then also the resonances with the military coup of 1966. So too big, unrelated questions. Apologies for that. No, no, no, no, no worries. I'll try and collapse, you know, a couple of hundred years of history into into by-sized chunks, but no worries. So thanks for raising the southeast area of Nigeria, which is where the eB,

people now live, we spent, you know, the bulk of the conversation talking about large states, Sokoto, Canembono, Benin, Oyo, the Yorba kingdoms, etc. The Ibo area could not be more different from those other places socially and politically. So whereas those other places had these large states that now traverse multiple post-colonial borders, the Igbo society was incredibly decentralized in the pre-colonial era. So there's actually a maxim saying Ibo Amoeze, the literal translation is the Igbo knows no king. As bizarre as it may sound to some of your listeners

who are maybe not so familiar with Africa, these societies functioned in a very, very egalitarian way without kings, without monarchs, in some cases, without a government at all. The way they worked is that each Igbo village had a village council which every adult in the village belonged to. And matters affecting the entire community, the entire village had to be decided democratically. Basically, the village council would meet.

And you as a member of that village had the assurance that no decision affecting you could ever be taken without your consent because you had a representative. Every family sent their family leader and had a dejure. right to have a family member on that village council. So somehow this worked for for Ebo society in the pre-colonial era. And a lot of, it actually caused the problem for the Brits when they arrived. And I'm now touching on the, you know, the colonial era. Because Britain governed by what they called indirect rule, which is when they

went to conquer a particular society, they would govern. using the existing kings of their society as their intermediaries to rule on their behalf. That works if you already had kings, but in Ibo land where there's no kings, just indirect war was a complete and utter disaster. So in terms of differentiation, Ibo society completely decentralized, Eurobrass society highly, highly centralized. So it also explains a lot of the things that happened in the colonial era and in post-colonial Nigeria. So the Ibo area of Nigeria was the area that gave the Brits the biggest headache during the colonial era. There was just rebellion after rebellion, and it took the Brits decades to conquer that area.

If you accept that, it was actually conquered. Some of the Ibos believe that they were never conquered, whereas the Brits conquered other large societies in two, three days. And it's just because these are people who would not accept one as their own as a leader. so why on earth would they accept an outsider to do something that they would never accept from a member of their own society? So that's the Ebo society and this wonderful, I guess,

similarity that you touched upon about military coups. So for those who know Nigeria, Nigeria was for the first three decades of its existence as an independent nation, it was under military rule for almost 30 years. Jews had nine, ten military coups.

I mean, even until today, it's been democratic for over a quarter of a century, but it's still living with the legacies of military rule, which ended in 1999. So basically, between 1966 and 1999, the military was in power almost uninterrupted, except for a four-year period in those 33 years. Now, in January 1966, that was the very first coup. or so people believe in Nigeria's history, where a group of army officers who ironically trained in Britain, most of them, Sandhurst, trained to the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy,

overthrew the then democratically elected government. That was viewed as a tectonic, unprecedented event. Now, one of the political crises that the coup leaders justified for their coup was that there was a leader, Yoruba leader in southwestern Nigeria called Samuel Akintola and he established a political alliance with northern Fulani leaders

which generated some some controversies which are just too limited to go into which was basically used as a rationalization for that coup. Now, if we go back in time about 150-ish years approximately, there was actually another military coup in the same part of Nigeria with almost the same facts.

So I mentioned about or you're having this very elaborate system of checks and balances and being having a decentralized political structure. So in pre-colonial oil, the commander of its army in the

early 1800s was a man called Afonja. Now, one of the let's say customs for a new king coming to the throne is that he would deputize his army commander to go and basically name, name a place to conquer, to establish your valor. So the new king at that time did exactly that, told Afonja, look, I've named a city for you to go and conquer, but what did the army do? They got to

the city gates. Because the city was fortified, was on high ground and never been conquered, they basically thought this is a suicide mission and they interpreted as basically the king trying to get rid of the army's power. And instead of conqueringacity, they turned around, went back to the palace, mutinied, placed the king under siege, and forced him to commit suicide.

Then Afonja, this guy from southwestern Nigeria, what did he do? Something we saw in the 20th century, which is he invited an iterent, Fulani Muslim preacher called Alimi. Well, that's not his real name,

his nickname. His real name was, Sali Al Janta, but Alimi was his nickname. He invited him in into what is now Yoruba Land and formed an alliance with him. Within a space of about 10 to 15 years, that alliance basically allowed the jihad that had started up north in the Sokata Caliphate. It brought the jihad to the doorstep of Yoruba land. And that jihad basically overthrew the leadership of Oyo, which had been there.

again for about 700 years or so. Now, it's a very subtle and not very well-known era of Nigerian history, but it's absolutely incredible how the same fact pattern, very, very similar events unfolded in a pre-colonial era, and then replicated again in the 1960s. Yeah, absolutely. It's fascinating. The similarities, I really enjoyed that section of the book.

And there's a lot more that we can. could talk about, but I know that we're going to bring you back on again, Max, again, assuming that you'll come back on what we can be the... I will. Excellent, because we would love to talk with you about both the colonial and the post-colonial periods. I know that you're working on a study on the colonial period now, so we can hold most of that conversation for an even further down-the-line conversation, but the post-colonial period would be great to talk about with you sometime soon.

like I said, there's a lot more that I could talk about, but we'll save those future conversations for the future conversations. Again, no. Listeners, our guest was Max Silun, who wrote the terrific book, and I highly recommend everybody pick it up from Pluto, the forgotten era, Nigeria, before British rule. Max, can you let the listeners know where they can find more of you and your work? Yeah, absolutely. All my books are on Amazon. Amazon.com or Amazon. whatever your country store is.

And also the latest book that Henry just mentioned is available from Pluto Press as well. Absolutely. So I'm going to read out Adnan. Adnan, being a professional academic in the middle of his workday, had a meeting that he had to run to. So I will just tell you that you should check out

Adnan's other show as well, which is the Adnan Hussein show on YouTube. And also you can find it as an audio podcast. podcast and you can support that show at patreon.com forward slash adnan hussein, hus a I-N-a-N, or through buy-me-a-coffee.com forward slash adnan hussein. And of course you can follow adnan on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain. As for me, listeners, I am not online very much these days because, well, various reasons. One, I don't have time. Two, the sanctions make it very difficult to get onto a lot of sites, including social media.

So I just have stopped trying. That being said, if you want to follow me, you can still find me on Twitter at Huck-N-N-N-N-E-C-K-1-9-5. A reminder that I have another show that I've recently started up, which is going to start rolling out with more content as soon as I get the video component from my co-host. That's SARS and K-S-A-R-S and K-S-R-R-S- from Rus to Modern Russia, which is a history of Russia

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