North-East: Counting the cultural costs of insurgency

The Boko Haram insurgency may orchestrate a drastic review of the culture of pulling a massive population of Quranic students from other domains to Borno and Yobe. Over the ages, Borno had enjoyed an enviable glory and reverence in the history of West and Central Africa. Daily Trust on Sunday reports. From Uthman Abubakar, Maiduguri […]

The Boko Haram insurgency may orchestrate a drastic review of the culture of pulling a massive population of Quranic students from other domains to Borno and Yobe. Over the ages, Borno had enjoyed an enviable glory and reverence in the history of West and Central Africa. Daily Trust on Sunday reports.

From Uthman Abubakar, Maiduguri

It was about 1pm. The semi-arid heat was searing. 

The convoy came to an abrupt halt. We did not know why. Only the governor and, perhaps, the government officials in the convoy knew why. 

We alighted from our eighteen-seater Correspondents Chapel bus. A few of us were taking pictures of this little similitude of ISIS-pounded Aleppo.

I surveyed the desolate ‘war zone’, right and left sides of the largely peeled-off road, clutching my canon-brand camera in my left hand. I was already getting confused over the choice of the most newsy spots and sections of the battered village. 

I took the shots of the few spots and sections my reportorial judgement suggested were most newsy. 

I, once again surveyed, as comprehensively as I could, the entire environment, pulling my mind through the miry process of fathoming the causes and effects of a typical example of man’s brutality against man in the annals of contemporary West and Central Africa. 

Sections of the ruined village were heaps of rubble; sections were overgrown with shrubs and elephant grasses. What remained of the stubbornly-standing, though tattered, sections of the walls of homes and what looked like business houses after the attack on the village by the insurgents were horribly perforated by bullets. 

I resuscitated the village in my imagination. I saw a community thriving in its tranquil way of life. 

I saw, at a late evening, or deep in the night, the gun-totting and Anti-Aircraft rocket firing insurgents, buzzing in their characteristic long file of their various sizes of vehicles out of the surrounding bushes and pouncing on the village in the paratroopers style; cordoning it and raining bullets on it; then torching it, fired by the fury to, first, unleash vengeance on a nation ‘opposed’ to their decision to carve out and establish ‘an Islamic state.’

I saw the proud Kanuri families flying out of their homes, like insects flying out of their burrows; and I saw the ensuing pandemonium and stampede as their throngs scampered in all directions into the safety of the surrounding bushes, completely appalled and devastated, and bereft of any idea where they could source any safety in their frantic flight.

Fleeing with just the clothes they had on them then, I saw the different aspects of their cultural heritage, norms and values falling off their personae – they had already abandoned the larger volumes of these spiritual valuables back in their crumbled and torched homes. I saw these spiritual valuables wailing to be carried along in the flight, but would not even be heeded. For, while fleeing from danger of this magnitude, the preference is: given just one choice, escape with your life, not with your belonging. Life, at all times, is the most valuable item.

So, those of them who survived the attack fled with their dear lives, and the few of their spiritual valuables which would not weigh them down in their frenzied flight.

I saw many of them fleeing to distant climes, to mix and mingle with different sets of their fellow humans with totally different ways of life and attitudes. Their cultures, traditions, values and norms would then fuse into, or get assimilated by those of their host communities over time. They might, in each case, acquire new cultures, traditions, norms and values, different from those which came down to them from their forebears, or those they developed according to emerging imperatives over the changing times.

An inner voice rolled out a range of probabilities about the dispersals of the fleers to climes far and near. 

Some of them might settle down in whichever non-Kanuri climes they found themselves, to establish their separate progenies and identities as separate castes of peoples with Kanuri ancestry. 

Some of them may, someday, sooner or later, trace their steps back to their ancestral home, search in the rubbles of their ruined community for the broken bits and pieces of their cultures, traditions, values and norms and re-sculpt their heritage, or construct a new heritage blended with the original, according to the imperatives of the emerging times.

I saw all of them, therefore, fleeing in throngs, condemning their ancestral community to frightening desolation.      

The ruined location was now immersed in an environment frozen in a frightening silence; more silent than the figurative grave-yard. For, in the graveyard, the moaners could supplicate for, or commune with, the dead they had gone there to inter, or had long interred there, at a hearable tone of voice, absolutely free from the fear of the lurking unknown. But here, a sniper-insurgent could be lurking somewhere in the ruins or the surrounding bushes to ‘punish’ any ‘infidel’ who pronounces ‘Boko’ as ‘Halal’ (‘western education’ is ‘lawful’).

The sound of automobile engines startled me. I was transmuted back to consciousness. We were to proceed immediately. 

The convoy snaked forth towards Bama.

Kawuri was a community located about halfway between Maiduguri and Bama.

It is one of the about 1,000 local communities obliterated by the about seven-year old Boko Haram insurgency which, according to the UNICEF Interim Report on the catastrophe, displaced about 2.9 million people and affected about seven million in various ways across the North-East region.

Most affected states in the region are Borno, which bears about 90 per cent of the brunt of the devastation, followed by its sister Yobe; then Adamawa and Gombe states.

In Borno State alone, at the peak of the appalling calamity, the insurgents snatched 20 out of the 27 local government areas from the Nigerian nation. 

The massive descent of the Boko Haram catastrophe on the most affected states of Borno and Yobe forced an unprecedented exodus of the obliterated communities in the Boko Haram captured areas, as the people fled in colossal numbers, hundreds of thousands to the safety of IDP camps in Maiduguri, Damaturu and other cities and locations across the country; yet hundreds of thousands seeping into other host communities across Nigeria and the neighboring countries of Cameroon and Niger for refuge.

These movements, to some noticeable degree, plunged them into conscious and unconscious changes, adjustments, fusions, assimilations, and even reneging from cultures, traditions, norms and values in their new-found, or forcefully built, socio-cultural and economic relations with the peoples they now found themselves living with, a population comprising other ethnic communities they might never have, hitherto, imagined living with in an unprecedented necessity of this magnitude.

The Boko Haram catastrophe is proclaimed nationally and globally as affecting the entire northeastern Nigeria. But its effect on the various parts of the region is sharply different and in crystal clear degrees on historical, socio-cultural, economic and political foundations, which shaped the entire way of life of the Kanuri and their immediate neighbours, inhabiting an expansive land historically shared by both the Western and Central Sudan, and contemporarily shared by both the West and Central Africa.  

The brunt of these affairs in historical and socio-cultural heritage terms is borne majorly by, first, Borno State, and second, its sister Yobe State, the domain of the Kanuri.

In contemporary terms, the calamity ensnares regions in Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, impacting, at varying degrees of gravity, on their multifarious affairs, and substantially shaping global trend of affairs.

Whoever planned the Boko Haram catastrophe, and from wherever, whoever ignited it, whoever stokes it; and for whatever purpose, of utmost concern is the Kanuri domain, the nucleus of the Boko Haram terrorism, over 90 per cent located in Borno. This is the area most pathetically affected in cultural heritage terms.   

The hypothesis is: The historical and socio-cultural impacts of the Boko Haram insurgency on the majorly affected states of Borno and Yobe, which historically seated the administration of the Kanem-Borno cum Kanuri empires for over 1345 years before the advent of colonialism, therefore, developed distinct socio-cultural identity, norms and values, which now seem brutally assaulted by the insurgency, as severally happened over the 1345 years of the severally transformed and realigned entity prior to the colonial times.

History and culture

The now about 1350 years Kanem-Borno Empire underwent a series of transformations. It began from the first Kanuri Empire under the Saifawa Dynasty; then the second Kanuri Empire, transiting from the Mai dynasty, largely given account of by the famous medieval Chronicler, Ahmad Ibn Fartuwami, in his Girgham, to the dynasty of the Shehu. 

The entity experienced different phases of its history, including the period of the union of the Kanem-Darfur. The entity enjoyed uninterrupted dynastic rule.

The entity, from the onset of the preceding 13 and a half centuries to this day, has acquired sufficient, albeit ‘nasty’, experience on violent interregnums in the class of Boko Haram insurgency. The only difference among the interregnums has been the weapons of catastrophe used at every given one, determined by the advancement attained in science and technology at every given time.

Every catastrophic interregnum heralded a new phase in the life, size, prowess, glory and identity of the entity as it severally transformed, culminating in an entity administered from Ngazargamu by the advent of the 19th century Sokoto jihadists.

The genesis of the severally-transformed empire could be traced to three different sources.

One source showed the Kanuri as originating from the Gujarati of India, migrating from their ancestral home, Calcutta, all the way from India, down to Arabia, through Yemen, down to the Nile region; then finally settling at the Lake Chad region.

Another source showed them as migrating from North Africa, while the third source traced their origin to the Assyrians, descendants of whom were forced to migrate from the Middle East when the Mongols attacked Arabia, moving down to this region through the Turkish/Moroccan border.

Whichever of the sources holds credibility became instrumental to the origin of the Kanuri of Borno, right from their original organisation into empires, in consortium with other people in the Central Sudan over time. 

The dynastic empire existed for more than 1346 years, terminating at the advent of colonialism, even though said to have been drastically weakened in size by the Sokoto Jihad.

Right from its foundation, the empire, throughout its different stages, existed and thrived in all ramifications as a wholly Islamic entity. It built an enviable reverence as a renowned centre of Quranic scholarship in the annals of both West and Central Sudan (and West and Central Africa).

In spite of the allegations of syncretism, immoralities and heathen practices contaminating religious practices and the conduct of affairs over the times in the about 14-century old entity, in which the leaders of the 19th century Sokoto Jihad were said to have found sufficient justifications to chastise the entity, Borno, until the most recent decades, savoured unmatched glory and reverence as the leading centre of Quranic scholarship. 

In majority of Hausa land and many of the Muslim-dominated areas (in the present-day Nigeria and Niger), not many Quranic memorizers and scholars were seen to be worth their weight in gold if they had not, at some period of their Quranic education, been to Gabas (East, as the domain of the Kanuri is referred to in Northern Nigeria) to study in a renowned Tsangaya (Quranic institute) or stoop before a Kanuri Goni (the similitude of a professor) to acquire the knowledge of recitation and memorisation.

Aside, therefore, whatever alleged virus of syncretism immoralities and heathen practices contaminating the conduct of religious practices and other affairs of the Kanuri/Borno entity, Islamic principles and practices were portrayed as forming the sole fulcrum of its culture and traditions, producing cultural and social practices, even if such cultural and social practices were, allegedly, wholly un-Islamic; or were synchronised with whatever other un-Islamic practices.

In recent decades, however, specifically from the beginning of the 1980s to date, the advent of other Islamic sects, such as Shi’a, Izala and Salafiyyah, on the decisive quest to restore the principles and practice of Islam to pristine purity, gnawed deep and fast at the glory and reverence Borno has savoured in Quranic scholarship over the ages.

These sects established their respective systems of education, establishing their own institutions (Islamiyyas and higher education institutes), and developing their own curricula of studies on their respective concepts of pristine pure Islam. 

These curricular principally include the teaching of Quranic recitation and memorisation with what they believe is the proper method of recitation, intonation and phonology for the required conveyance of the meanings and implications of the Quranic contents, in sharp contrast to the recitation using only one or two methods stuck to in most west African climes over the ages, in most cases, ‘allegedly’, not even properly applied in terms of intonation and phonology.

The more such institutions flowered across the land, climaxing currently with the establishment of Islamic faith-based universities, the less the flow of students to Gabas for Quranic knowledge, as obtained in the olden times.

The historic introduction of the Almajiri Integrated Education Programme in 2012, orchestrating the rapid establishment of primary and secondary schools in fulfillment of the mandate of the programme, dealt another decisive blow to the glory and reverence of Borno in terms of Quranic scholarship.

Inversely, within the Kanuri domain of Borno and Yobe, the formation of the Boko Haram insurgency has ignited deep reservations about, and continued relevance of the age-old culture of the domain attracting Quranic students from other domains in the neighbouring countries – until the recent emergence of glaring evidences debunking their reservations and claims of non-Kanuri indigenes constituting the majority of the insurgents. Majority of the Kanuri notables substantially attribute the insurgency to the massive inflow of such Quranic students from diverse climes over the ages to their domain, which the late Mohammed Yusuf allegedly recruited as militants.

Sequel to what the Kanuri perceive as the conceptual background to the Boko Haram violent militancy, there seems a deepening contemplation among them about reviewing and readjusting their domain’s most identifying culture of drawing massive populations of Quranic students from the neighbouring domains, even as they seem substantially resolute on the maintenance of the Tsangaya system of Quranic scholarship to sustain the core-component of their age-old cultural glory and reverence in the scholarship. 

To be continued.