Celebrating a scholar judge: Alkali Hamman-Joda

Throughout this week, a celebration of a kind will be taking place in Yola when the descendants of Alkali Hamman-Joda host their kinsmen from N’Gaoundere, a city across the border in the Cameroun Republic. It is an annual event that both Yola and N’Gaoundere take turns to host. Already Yola is abuzz with the news […]

Throughout this week, a celebration of a kind will be taking place in Yola when the descendants of Alkali Hamman-Joda host their kinsmen from N’Gaoundere, a city across the border in the Cameroun Republic. It is an annual event that both Yola and N’Gaoundere take turns to host. Already Yola is abuzz with the news of the coming celebrations. The social media is all agog, there are jingles of the event playing for days over the radio in Fulfulde. Hotel rooms have been booked solid, days in advance for both the diaspora kinsmen and the descendants spread all over Nigeria.  

Readers might ask, why all this interest in the judge who died over a century ago, in 1908. At the onset, it is necessary to make some clarifications. What is Adamawa today, is only a fraction of what it was in the 19th Century, the period when Hamman-Joda lived and flourished. Adamawa, then, extended to cover probably the entire northern part of the Cameroun Republic, brought together by the Fulbe Jihadist, Lamido Modibbo Adama.

At the height of its powers in the mid-1850s, the Adamawa Emirate could have been the biggest province of the Sokoto Caliphate covering also Garoua, Maroua and N’Gaoundere, all now major cities in Northern Cameroun. It was only at the turn of the 20th Century that the Adamawa Emirate suffered what also afflicted other parts of the caliphate when they were conquered by the invading European colonial powers and subdivided into bits and pieces. The Adamawa part that went to the Cameroun Republic still retained roughly the same structure. The Fulfulde language still predominates as a lingua franca.  

Alkali Hamman-Joda was born in Chikari, in 1822, when the Adamawa Emirate was in the process of stabilizing. From an early age, Hamman-Joda was said to have distinguished himself by his devotion to learning. This made him head for Namtari near Yola in search of the proverbial golden fleece. He made Namtari his home while also visiting nearby Girei for classes. Despite being well-established in the Yola elite class, Hamman-Joda decided to emigrate to Arab countries in the quest to deepen his knowledge. He embarked on a journey to Mecca in 1870 with two of his wives. He went through Maroua now in Cameroun Republic.  

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He went northwards and stopped in Sudan, living in Kordofan, to further his education. He headed to Cairo in 1882 where he became a student at the Al-Azhar University specializing in Law. Finally, he reached Mecca to perform the Hajj and also visited the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. He remained in Mecca for some years sharpening his specialization in Islamic Jurisprudence and its associated branches.

He returned to Yola in about 1886 with the glamour of being the first person of that emirate who had travelled so far in search of knowledge in those days. He was immediately absorbed into the judiciary and became the Chief Alkali in 1888.  

As Chief Alkali, Hamman-Joda was well-known to have brought his insightful knowledge in all his judicial forays. He was a fearless judge and brought the law sharply to the doorsteps of all social classes in Adamawa Emirate. In one of the famous cases he adjudicated, he sat over a civil case between the Lamido of Adamawa, Zubeiru and a commoner. What was outstanding about that case was that the Lamido came to the court, bereft of his courtiers, unwound his turban and entered the witness box. Adjudicating the case, Chief Alkali Hamman-Joda found the Lamido guilty and did not release him to go till he made the restitution to the commoner as required in the judgment of the court.  

Alkali Hamman-Joda was also fearless in his advice to the Lamido and could always be relied upon to tell it as it was. When the British gunboat arrived in Yola in September 1900 in their bid to subdue the city, Lamido Zubeiru was adamant for a showdown. Hamman-Joda having lived in Sudan at the time of a similar altercation between the British and the Sudanese and knowing that the Lamido did not have the arsenal to face the British advised him to submit to avoid bloodshed. Lamido Zubeiru refused and went for a fight. In what historians believed to be one of the most hotly contested fights in the North, the British artillery reduced the Lamido’s Palace and the Yola Central Mosque to rubbles. The next day it was Alkali Hamman-Joda who led the rump of Adamawa Emirate Councilors to meet with the British outside Yola city walls. It was at his insistence that the British appointed the brother of the vanquished Lamido, Bobbo Ahmadu to the throne.  

I understand that part of the programme at this week’s Yola reunion would be an unveiling of an updated biography of the judge, detailing his fascinating story. The book is titled: ‘Alkali Hamman-Joda, 1822-1908, Life and Times of the Man, the Scholar, the Judge’. The book was originally written by Hamidu Alkali, a grandson of Hamman-Joda.

Hamidu Alkali who died in 2009 is a well-known scholar and the first Nigerian Provost in 1964 of Abdullahi Bayero College, Kano which later became Bayero University Kano. He was the writer of ‘The Chief Arbiter: Waziri Jinaidu and His Intellectual Contribution’.  

This version of the biography of Alkali Hamman-Joda was updated by Professors Abdullahi Abba and Nura Alkali, both descendants of Hamman-Joda.