The Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903)

The Sokoto Caliphate was the state created by the jihad of Usman dan Fodio, which began in Gobir in 1804 and transformed the whole of northern Nigeria. According to the Library of Congress country study, the background was a century of insecurity: rivalry among the Hausa states, the weakness of Borno, and severe droughts and famines in the eighteenth century, which brought many Fulani into Hausaland and increased tensions.

Usman dan Fodio, a Fulani scholar of the Qadiriyya brotherhood, attracted a following among clerics and among the Fulani. The study notes that the jihad's leaders were not all Fulani at first: the cleric whose actions started it, Abd as-Salam, was Hausa. By 1808 the Hausa states had been conquered, although their ruling families withdrew to new walled towns, among them Abuja (the Zaria dynasty), Argungu (Kebbi) and Maradi in present-day Niger (Katsina).

The new state took its name from its capital, Sokoto, founded in 1809. It was a loose confederation of emirates under the caliph, the Commander of the Faithful. After Usman dan Fodio died in 1817 his son Muhammad Bello succeeded him; a twin capital at Gwandu, under Bello's uncle Abdullahi, oversaw the western emirates. By the middle of the nineteenth century there were about thirty emirates, including Kano, the wealthiest; Adamawa, the largest, founded by Fulani from Borno with its capital at Yola; and Ilorin, which joined in the 1830s after Oyo's cavalry revolted against the Oyo king.

Borno did not fall. The cleric al-Kanemi organised its resistance, drove the jihadists back, and in the end his family replaced the old Sayfawa dynasty. In the south-west, Oyo collapsed in the 1820s and its leaders founded new towns such as Ibadan.

At its height the caliphate stretched some 1,500 kilometres from Dori in present-day Burkina Faso to southern Adamawa in Cameroon. The country study calls it the largest African empire since the fall of Songhai in 1591, and says the jihad inspired Islamic states far beyond Nigeria. The caliphate's independence ended with the British conquest: in 1903 Lugard's West African Frontier Force took Kano and Sokoto, and the emirs were kept in office under indirect rule.