A review of The Transformation of Katsina, 1400-1883 by Yusufu Bala Usman, published by Yusufu Bala Usman Institute, 2024.

By Samaila Suleiman, PhD

After years of being out of print, Yusufu Bala Usman’s historical magnum opus, The Transformation of Katsina, 1400-1883 (henceforth TTK), is back in the market with a stunning cover design and binding.

It is being published to commemorate the 19th memorial anniversary of Usman’s death, which occurred on 24th September 2005.

Originally published in 1981 by Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) Press, the new edition was republished by the Yusufu Bala Usman Institute (YBUI) Zaria, 2024, after purchasing the copyright for the book from its original publisher.

This is part of the Institute’s mission of disseminating the writings of Bala to a wider audience (the Institute has republished other critical works by Bala such as The Manipulation of Religion in Nigeria, For the Liberation of Nigeria, and Nigeria Against the IMF).

The YBUI edition, which is already available in the market, comes in different typography and layout, imagery and color palettes.

With a new front cover featuring an image of Kofar Guga (Guga city gate) in Katsina, the book is not only aesthetically appealing, but also captures its essence and genre as a history classic.

The striking image of Kofar Guga, symbolically embodies centuries of significant historical encounters in precolonial Katsina.

The Kofar Guga, as the oldest city gate and a major tollgate and entry point for merchants and traders, served important commercial and strategic functions in the precolonial era.

The new edition also has a beautiful back cover design offering a brief bio of the author, a summary of the book, and a beautiful image of a Tuareg camel’s hair blanket with red touches designed as border for the blurb.

As a classic, TTK has acquired a life of its own, defying time and advances in historical writing to remain the standard, and, arguably, the most popular and most cited academic text on the history of Katsina, which I metaphorically dubbed “the Bible of Katsina history” upon which subsequent historians of Katsina and other Hausa states take epistemological and analytical clue. Although the history of Katsina has received considerable attention from generations of local and foreign authors in the last six hundred years, the success of TTK has established a standard of historiographical excellence that has become rather difficult to transcend within the field.

Historiographical advances on Katsina have been marginal relative to the ground-breaking findings of TTK. It is considered as one of best examples of exceptional historical scholarship in Nigeria, as I will soon demonstrate in this review.

In this retrospective review, I focus more on assessing the epistemological impact of the book, rather than offering a detailed content analysis. However, it is important to revisit briefly the historiographical and intellectual context in which the idea of the book was conceived and written. 

Between the 1960s and 1970s, a group of historians based at the Department of History, A.B.U. Zaria, under the aegis of the late Professor Abdullahi Smith, spearheaded a new tradition of historical writing that challenged the dominant historiography of state formation in northern Nigeria.

The Smithian approach, named after its founder, Abdullahi Smith,  exposed the fallacy of the dominant racist anthropological paradigm, which depicted the history of African precolonial states and societies as the movement of tribes and races, lacking the historical agency to initiate social change and progress.

Colonial historiography denied the Katsinawa of their historical tradition and agency as makers of their own history.

While acknowledging Abdullahi Smith as the pioneer of this seminal approach, it was Bala who deepened it beyond the theoretical level by successfully using it to challenge the dominant racist interpretation of history as promoted by Eurocentric authors such as Heinrich Barth, H.R. Palmer, R.W. Hull and M.G. Smith, who used ethnic categories like Hausa, Fulani, Habe, Kanuri, Tuareg as units of analysis. According to Bala, the primary intellectual agenda for writing TTK was to discover if the history of Katsina was “essentially composed of the movements and conflicts of racial, tribal and ethnic units and groups and their armies”.

Deploying numerous primary and secondary sources (recovered and collected from over 150 villages, towns, and cities, and over 200 interviews and dozens of manuscripts),  Bala forcefully demonstrated that the significant features of the transformation of Katsina “were not the movement of races and tribes and their armies, but the changes in the nature and configuration of the productive occupations, in the composition of settlements, in the structure of lineages, and the changes in beliefs and the associated political ideology”.

The book is chronologically structured into 9 chapters, covering five centuries of historical transitions from 1400 to 1883. Bala examines the inner mechanisms of historical change from the ancient settlements of Durbi ta Kusheyi, Kwatarkwashi, Kwiambana, around which the political system of corporate and autonomous garuruwa (towns) evolved, through the emergence of the Sarauta system under Sarki Muhammadu Korau c. 1445-1495 and its overthrow during the Jihad campaigns of 1804, to the emergence of the emirate system of governance in Katsina. From the first chapter  to the last, the reader is presented with a broad survey of the complex historical processes involved in the transformation of Katsina:  the Emergence of the Sarauta System:  c.1440-1684; the pattern of settlement in the 18th century; the society of Katsina in the 18th century; the state in the 18th century; the overthrow of the Sarauta system; the demise of the Jama’a in Katsina; the establishment of Katsina Emirate; administration of the Emirate; and the changing patterns of settlements and economy in the 19th century.

Two-thirds of the book is devoted to discussing how the Sarauta system was overthrown and the establishment of Katsina Emirate. He identified four phases in the Jihad campaigns in Katsina: the first phase (1804 1805) was the period when the supporters of Danfodio in Katsina were not organised; during the second phase (1805–1806), the Jihadists recorded victory against the government with the support of Kano contingents at the battle of Dawakin Girma; the third phase (1806 -1807) marked the success of the Jihadists in forming a military alliance with Kano, Daura and Katsina contingents to launch successive and organised military offences against Katsina; the fourth phase (1807-1808), was the period in which the Kingdom of Katsina finally fell to the Jihadist, paving the way for the establishment of the Emirate.

TTK is widely recognised by prominent Africanist intellectuals as a foundational text in Nigerian history. In his keynote address at the Annual Conference of the Historical Society of Nigeria in 1979, Professor E.A. Ayandele, a doyen of Nigerian historiography, described the book as a trailblazer, placing it on the same pedestal with Kenneth Dike’s path-breaking work, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885. For Ayandele, “right from 1956  when Kenneth  Dike blazed the trail with his Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta …to this year (1979) when Bala Usman‘s The Transformation of Katsina is rolling through the printing machine, Nigerian historians’ record of achievements is a splendid one indeed”. In a similar vein, the author of Nigerian Perspectives, Thomas Hodgkin, acknowledges how Bala had helpfully and politely corrected some of his errors about the history of Katsina.

The famous Ugandan academic and author of Citizen and Subject, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, holds the views of Bala on the origins and structures of the state in precolonial Africa, as espoused in TTK, in high esteem. In his book, Define and Rule, Mamdani describes Bala as a towering postcolonial intellectual figure who provided “an intellectual antidote to colonial historiography”. I have heard many stories from students of Mamdani about how Bala’s works, mocking the racist interpretation of African history, have become compulsory readings at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Uganda.

The success of TTK presented a major epistemological challenge to leading authorities on Hausaland who used the racist anthropological paradigm in their writings– including M.G. Smith, the prolific author of Government in Kano, Government in Zazzau and The Affairs of Daura. Although these works were widely used by students of history as reference texts, how did the history of Katsina elude M.G. Smith’s prolific pen? According to Murray Last, this may not be unconnected to the appearance of TTK on the scene.

However, like all great works of history, TTK has received its own share of scholarly invectives. Firstly, as Bala himself admits, there were some rich source materials available in both Nigerian and Nigerien Katsina and neighbouring areas, which he did not interrogate. In terms of his use oral sources, apart from the kirari (praise) of towns, peoples and iskoki (spirits) and the genealogical recitations of the banbadawa (clans of genealogy specialists), most of the oral traditions that Bala collected were not structured, as they were preserved in the memory of his informants “in what might be said to be an open form, susceptible to those factors that shape human memory and lacking in inner structure with which to counteract some of the distorting elements”.

On a final note, TTK is a foundational text that will continue to enjoy timeless appeal for generations. In view of its methodological rigour, rich data and analysis, the book has succeeded not only in deconstructing the conceptual fallacies of colonial historiography, but also restored the historical agency and dignity of Katsinawa, and brought their rich history and cultures to the attention of international scholarly community. It is essential reading, written in a clear language and style, which makes it accessible to even to non-experts.

*Samaila Suleiman, Ph.D, is of the Department of History, Bayero University, Kano.

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