In a dusty, dark, unimportant corner of an inner room inside the police laboratory in Kano, a jar containing powder, intensely burnt molars and discoloured bone residue, is placed on a shelf. The bottle is capped tightly with a brownish adhesive, on the top of which, there is an official seal, proving its content has not been tampered with.
The old label on the bottle says about the content explicitly: “The remains of Late Malam Muhammadu Marwa alias Allah Ta-Tsine or Maitatsine.”
Euphemistically, the inscription is referring to the mastermind of the infamous Kano Maitatsine riot of 1980; a violence that is described in the history of Nigeria as second only to the 1967 to 1970 Civil War in terms of death toll and destruction of property.
Maitatsine was reportedly cremated after his death at the hands of the military during fighting in December of 1980. So, for 30 years, those remains have been laying in the specimen bottle. It is a fact that few people have seen it or have knowledge of its existence.
But at ‘Yan Awaki, the place where Maitatsine built an evil empire in which he organized and unleashed a reign of brutal killings, his memory is still fresh. The people there can still point to bullets holes in the walls and doors as souvenirs of the horrific moment.
No structure of the religious fanatic has been saved anyway; the vast area of land overlooking a giant drainage on which he “illegally” quartered his thousands of “proselytized” militant followers, has been converted into a police barracks and shops.
Similarly, the very spot where his house was located on the bank of the drainage is nothing now more than an alley linking parts of the neigbourhood, with no trace of the orgy of indiscriminate massacre that had occurred there.
But deep in the hearts and minds of residents here, Maitatsine represents a haunting episode that has engraved itself in their history and leaves them in a permanent state of grief, of mourning, and of sadness.
Perhaps, no family suffers this fate more than that of late Alhaji Usman Yawale, wealthy businessman and philanthropist. According to members of the family, Maitatsine personally ordered and supervised the “slaughtering” of the head of the family, Alhaji Yawale, and his first born, Abubakar, who was 12 at that time. Their ruthless killing and that of other victims in the hands of Maitatsine, was said to be sparked by vengeful fury over the “mysterious death” of the rebel’s eldest son, Tijjani alias Kana’ana.
Maitatsine was reported to have declared, over his beloved son’s death, to undertake a killing spree that would force every father to taste the bitterness of losing a child. It was reported that hundreds of innocent children were fed into the fire of that unrestrained rage.
And one mother who is yet to completely overcome the shock of losing a first child and husband to Maitatsine’s merciless knife is Hajiya Fatima, late Alhaji Yawale’s senior wife. The happiness on the face of this hospitable woman fades quickly when the issue is raised. Even when she had been encouraged by her son Sani Yawale, to bury her emotion and speak, Hajiya Fatima hardly mentioned her late son or husband without stuttering.
To her family, and especially Alhaji Yawale, Maitatsine was not a stranger. They had lived as neigbours with him for years, separated from his house only by a mosque, before her husband built a bigger mansion a trekking distance away and relocated the family there.
All the while, Maitatsine had not started preaching his rebellious and heretical views against other Muslims and the principle injunctions of the faith. So even if he had any problems at that moment, it was with the authorities for whom he had never stopped expressing his open dislike.
“My father,” said Sani “we were told, would give alms and feed the Maitatsine men, just as he did to all the other Islamic teachers and their almajiris living around him.”
When the Maitatsine riot broke out, years later, the businessman and his family, as well as some neighbours seeking refuge, holed up inside the new mansion which according to Sani, who was three then, was stuffed with enough food.
It was after staying in this shelter for days without contact with the outside world, that Alhaji Yawale suggested that the family moved out to safety as fighting in the area was getting intense.
“As we opened our door to leave the house, there were Maitatsine men hanging in the vestibule (Zaure). We were surprised at seeing them, just as they were at us. My husband asked them how long they had been around and they answered two days, asking him in return where we were going. But when he told them that he was taking us out of the trouble area they raised a stiff objection,” Hajiya Fatima stated.
“’We are under orders to take you to our master. He is the only one who can grant you permission to leave this area,” she recalled the men telling her husband. There was some feeling of apprehension amongst them, even though they were still not aware that Maitatsine’s men had launched a methodical killing spree inside the enclave Alhaji Yawale was to be taken to.
According to Hajiya Fatima, as the men escorted her husband, a neighbour who was taking refuge inside the house alongside his family, volunteered to go with him, saying “Alhaji you can’t be left to go with them alone.”
Few hours later, Hajiya Fatima said, the men “came back for us.”
“That was how we were taken into Maitatsine’s territory with our children and we remained there until the military intervened in the fighting and crushed Maitatsine and his forces,” she said. “We scattered out of the compound in different directions on our liberation.”
Two days before her husband was taken away by Maitatsine’s men, Hajiya Fatima’s eldest child, Abubakar and his two friends had been captured, she stated.
“My son, the son of Nasiru Ahali (another wealthy neighbour of Maitatsine) and his nephew were reportedly killed on a Friday by Maitatsine’s men,” she said.
For her husband, it was widely narrated that after he was taken to Maitatsine on the Sunday he was captured, the religious fanatic ordered him to attest he (Maitatsine) was a messenger of God, a request which Alhaji Yawale was said to have defiantly protested, saying “I just returned from pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia where I saw the tomb of Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W), I cannot therefore accept you as a prophet.”
Maitatsine was said to have only granted his request to be allowed to perform ablution before he ordered his execution by slaughtering. Alhaji Yawale’s murder orphaned his 16 children and left his two wives widows.
It is difficult to state the exact number of people directly affected by that uprising which swept across Kano State for about 12 days. Official account put the number of lives lost in the conflict at 4, 179.
After the crisis, pictures of military men clutching Maitatsine’s body sold like hotcake in Kano with people in their thousands flocking to the mortuary to catch a glimpse of his corpse, all due to the highly mystified personality Maitatsine successfully built around his scanty Fulani figure on one hand, and for the deadly conflict he orchestrated.
Ironically, a copy of the said picture is in the photo archives of the late Alhaji Yawale’s family as disclosed by Sani.
The man, Maitatsine
Maitatsine’s real name was Alhaji Muhammadu Marwa. He got the appellation Maitatsine from his persistent invocation of curse on Muslims of other sects, saying, in a highly Fulani-accented tone, Allah Tatsine (May God curse, so and so). Alhaji Muhammadu was a native of Marwa in Northern Cameroun and had been preaching a version of Islam that was believed by Muslims to be in contradiction of the injunctions of the faith, including its principal pillars.
Maitatsine was said to have condemned innovations like watches, radios, cars and carrying large sums of money and as he gathered more followers and acquired strongholds, proclaimed prophet hood.
Marwa’s first known contact with Kano was in 1945 and shortly afterwards, he was said to become famous for rendering controversial preaching on the Qur’an, government and traditional institutions as well as other religious groups.
Deported to Cameroon in 1966, Maitatsine returned to Kano in the 1970s and continued to propagate his own controversial version of Islam. He was arrested in 1975 in on grounds of sustained verbal attacks against constituted authorities.
Alhaji Jibrin Ali, 55, has known the violent sect leader for years before the outbreak of the 1980 conflict. According to this trader who owns a provision store which he said was the largest within the entire Kano metropolis in the 80s, Maitatsine was nothing more than a cleric who was living peacefully with his neighbours until his ideas started changing.
This man, who said Maitatsine was his regular customer, described the fanatic as someone with unassuming mien and soft-spoken, saying, “He regularly bought goods from me, many a times on credit and there was never a time he defaulted when it comes to payment as he either came by himself or sent his disciples to settle me.” He adds, “Maitatsine never took my goods by force.”
“One of his major problems was the group of armed men around him who go about brandishing dangerous weapons. This became the initial source of apprehension, although the followers never resorted to physical assault in the beginning,” Alhaji Ali stated.
“We were living in peace with him for many years, until he started preaching his offensive ideology about fellow Muslims and Islam,” says another neighbour of Maitatsine, Malam Ibrahim Adamu.
This teacher further recalls: “I can still remember vividly those days when he would invite me to ceremonies like naming of children while I also invited him to attend mine. But as his weird sermon attained its peak, he ordered me – being the second Imam of the mosque near his house – to stop my muezzin from calling prayers, saying he has banned it.”
“When I informed the senior Imam about the radical’s order, he told me not to budge if I feel I could but he himself relocated to another area,” Malam Adamu narrated.
He counted his eldest son among the lucky persons, who despite being targeted by Maitatsine’s men, managed to escape death as they continued to evade their places of businesses and homes after receiving alert that they were being hunted.
It was learnt that at that time, Maitatine’s army had grown in number and had started posing clear threat to the residents of the area. According to Malam Bara’u, a one time friend of Maitatsine’s firstborn, Tijjani, hundreds of men had converged on the enclave between late 1979 and early 1980.
Malam Bara’u recalled being told by Tijjani “inside his (Tijjani’s) room in his father’s compound” that his father (Maitatsine) has mustered men and weapons that only the military could defeat. “My father’s men can take out your policemen in no time,” Malam Bara’u recalled being told by Maitatsine’s son in 1980.
Official account would later show that some of Maitatsine’s men came from Niger Republic, Cameroun, Chad and some other African countries, in addition to thousands of homegrown.
Bara’u, who claimed to have witnessed Maitatsine’s metamorphosis to a full religious zealot, said the preacher’s men started by attacking policemen as the symbols of the established institutions they negated. “With my eyes I saw how they snatched a policeman and detained him for close to two weeks in the abode. They would order little children to flog him every morning until he swore never to return to his job again,” he stated.
As the disciples grow in strength, so too did they become sophisticated in rascality and oppression of the residents of ‘Yan Awaki.
“There was a day I went to fetch water from that tap (points at a pump near a bridge bordering the spot where Maitatsine’ house was located), but to my greatest surprise, his men chased me away, warning me not come near the place again as the tap was meant for them,” he said.
Over the years, Maitatsine was said to have erected “illegal” structures to house his growing army. Government records showed that residents of the area filed numerous complaints to then civilian administration of Alhaji Muhammadu Abubakar Rimi, which in turn forwarded such petitions to the police for action.
The records also showed that Maitatsine was invited by the state Urban Development Board (Kano State) to explain his reasons for blocking a drainage and encroaching on government land in the ‘Yan Awaki area or have the property brought down. He however reportedly flouted or refused to honour the invitation.
Many of the residents of ‘Yan Awaki had at that time sensed a clear danger from the attitude of Maitatsine and his men, an in order not to be caught unawares, they fled the area. Alhaji Ali was among the first batch of people to relocate, saying Maitatsine “as an Islamic scholar surprised me by taking to violence.”
“I parked all the goods in my shop, with the exception of this refrigerator and the lantern (pointing at them) and moved to Kofar Mata but when the smoke of the conflict thickened around that area, I moved further to Hausawa. Full fighting broke out between Maitatsine’s men and the authorities exactly 30 days after my family and I had fled from the area,” he explained.
After everything had died down, Alhaji Ali returned to his ‘Yan Awaki shop to discover that Maitatsine’s men had used it as a war room, where they used his abandoned blue powder and cotton wool to paint their faces and dress wounds.
“For that damage, government paid me a compensation of N200,” he stated.
The crisis
The Maitatsine crisis, according to residents of the area, was precipitated by the death of his son, Kana’ana. It was said that the son was especially loved by the extremists even though he did not take to his father’s way. Thus, instead of learning how to preach hatred and slander other Muslims, Kana’ana hobnobbed with members of notorious gangs.
He was reportedly wounded during one of their night outs at Sabon Gari, by a suspected rival group, a development that angered Maitatsine.
“I was told he knelt down before the son’s corpse and wept uncontrollably, saying ‘Is this what you will do to me, Oh, Kano people?!” his neighbour Malam Adamu said.
“From then on, Maitatsine started slaughtering people in the name of revenge. I could remember how about 12 almajiris (scholars), most of whom I knew personally, were herded into the enclave and slaughtered. It took place shortly after Alhaji Yawale and his son were executed. That was when I sensed real danger and decided to leave the area,” he added.
A cache of weapons, including Dane guns, bows and arrows, axes, swords, daggers and cutlasses that were recovered from Maitatsine’s men are shelved in the museum of the Kano State Police Command. Also lying there are an amulets-sewn dress and a crocodile skin, said to be worn by Maitatsine’s senior commanders as protection during the conflict.
Maitatsine’s men were believed to comprise hundreds of Nigerians and aliens from Chad, Niger and Cameroon Republic. But what helped spread fear about them during their confrontation with security forces was the rumour about their invincibility on account of their speculated magical powers. One of such rumours during the fighting was that they were hardly killed by a gun.
Some of the findings of the Federal Government commission of inquiry set up by the administration of then President Shehu Shagari under the chairmanship of Justice Aniagolua to ascertain the remote and immediate causes of the crisis seemed to lend support to the presence of that fear.
In its submission to the federal government, the commission reported about the acting commissioner of police in the state at that time, thus: “Indeed his whole demeanour in the witness box confirmed that he had totally succumbed to the permanent existence of the threat, which like the state governor and other government functionaries, was believed to be beyond suppression. It was a case of total surrender to an overwhelming situation.”
The governor (the late Alhaji Abubakar Rimi) however, had since dismissed most of the commission’s findings as a mere hatchet job that was organized by Shagari to ridicule his administration. Rimi described the handling of the whole Maitatsine episode by the then NPN led federal government as deliberate attempt to humiliate his PRP government of Kano.
Similarly, the federal government had been criticized in various quarters for encouraging the police in Kano to insubordinate itself to Rimi’s authority, such that things got out of hand and cost the state and the country direly.
It took the Nigerian Army two days to bring Maitatsine and his men to their knees in Kano, as they had ensconced themselves in and around places like Fagge, Sabon Gari Market and other places after dislodging the police.
Salisu Garba, who said he was 12 during the fighting, recalled how people trooped from different parts of Kano, shortly after the fighting, to the city centre to witness the ruins left by the fighting.
“There were corpses of Maitatsine men everywhere. Some of them fell and died inside gutters, some were lying on the roads while others were being evacuated in trucks. It was indeed an eyesore,” he said.
Four years ago, Maitatsine’s wife, Zainab, granted an interview to one of our correspondents at her matrimonial home in Katsina, dismissing the charges against her husband as “frame up.” Zainab, who had since got married to another man in Karofi town in Dutsinma Local Government and has six issues with him described her late husband as a man who fought for a cause that was largely misunderstood.
She dismissed as misperception the notion that she wielded enormous power during the lifetime of her husband.
“I don’t believe I was what people thought about me. You see, Malam was such a nice person who made both his family and his followers’ part of him and that because I was immediately responsible for most of the house chores in his family, I became so much well known not because I was something special.
“I cannot say but I believed it was a deliberate action to stop somebody from performing his rights. To the best of our knowledge Malam was an embodiment of scholarship, a father and a religious reformer that was misunderstood. He preached tolerance, peace, harmony and religious revival.
“As his most immediate families, we knew that he was never what people were made to believe of him. To the best our understanding of him, he was a man of humility and we are sure he was framed, misunderstood and castigated for preaching,” she said.
She then pleaded with authorities to investigate and establish the real cause of the crisis that enveloped Kano in 1980, saying her late hubby had nothing to do with it.
One person who seemed to disagree with Maitatsine’s wife is the younger sister of slain Alhaji Yawale, Hajiya Sabuwa, explaining that none of them at ‘Yan Awaki had expected that the clergy would take to violence and become so cruel.
“After butchering my brother and his son, Maitatsine, I was aware, executed one Malam Saleh and Malam Kwatanche,” she said.
She added, “I suffered persistent nightmares as a result of the conflict and I pray that none of my relations and fellow beings witness that again.”
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