3 February, 2026.
by Mohammed Bello Doka
Ignorance is loud, confident, and dangerous. Nowhere is this clearer than in the growing noise from people who do not even understand the basic difference between the Hausa, the Fulani, and the many other peoples of Northern Nigeria—yet feel bold enough to prescribe division, conflict, and hatred among them. Before such confusion is allowed to metastasize, it is necessary to pause, explain, and expose both the lie and the lie-makers—fully, historically, and without ambiguity.
The Hausa are an ancient, settled West African people whose city-states—Daura, Kano, Katsina, Zaria (Zazzau), Gobir, Rano, and Birnin Gwari—flourished centuries before colonialism. By the 11th–14th centuries, Islam had entered Hausaland through trans-Saharan trade, producing literate elites, urban administration, taxation systems, crafts, and markets. Kano’s Kurmi Market, founded in the 15th century during the reign of Muhammad Rumfa (1463–1499), became one of West Africa’s greatest commercial hubs, trading leather, textiles, grains, salt, gold, kola nuts, and later groundnuts.
The Fulani (Fulbe/Fula), by contrast, emerged historically as a pastoral and scholarly people whose migrations spanned Senegambia, the Sahel, and Central Sudan over many centuries. By the 14th century, Fulani clerics, teachers, and herders had settled among Hausa communities, intermarrying, teaching Islam, and adopting Hausa language and customs in urban centers. They were never strangers to Hausaland; they were participants in it.
Then came the defining moment that reordered Northern Nigeria’s political and religious architecture: the 1804–1808 jihad led by Usman dan Fodio. This was not merely a military conquest. It was a moral, religious, and institutional revolution. Hausa rulers accused of corruption, heavy taxation, and syncretism were overthrown; the Sokoto Caliphate was established in 1809; and Sunni Islam, grounded in Maliki jurisprudence, became the organizing principle of governance across a vast territory stretching from present-day Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara, Katsina, Kano, Zaria, Bauchi, Adamawa, to Ilorin.
Crucially, Fulani rule was consolidated through integration, not segregation. Dan Fodio and his lieutenants actively encouraged intermarriage between Fulani jihad leaders and Hausa populations to legitimize authority. Hausa language—already dominant—became the administrative and scholarly lingua franca of the Caliphate. Over generations, many Fulani abandoned Fulfulde for Hausa, exchanged nomadic life for settled urban existence, adopted Hausa dress, food, and customs, and married into Hausa families. In return, Hausa society absorbed Fulani Islamic scholarship, aristocratic traditions, emirate governance, and religious authority.
This is where today’s agitators lose the plot. The jihad did not create two eternally hostile peoples. It created a fused civilization.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what emerged was a blended elite and populace—commonly described (accurately in practice, though not ancient in origin) as Hausa-Fulani. The term itself gained currency during British indirect rule after the conquest of Sokoto in 1903, when colonial administrators simplified Northern identities for governance, ruling through existing Fulani emirates over Hausa-majority populations. The phrase was later popularized in mid-20th-century politics by Northern leaders such as Ahmadu Bello, Premier of Northern Nigeria (1954–1966), and the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) as a tool of regional unity in the run-up to independence.
And here is the first fact that shatters modern disinformation: it is extraordinarily difficult to find a “100 percent pure” Hausa or Fulani today. Lineages across Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, Zaria, Bauchi, Gombe, Adamawa, and Ilorin routinely combine Hausa, Fulani, Kanuri, Nupe, Gwandara, Babur/Bura, and other Northern ancestries. A Hausa merchant’s grandmother is often Fulani; a Fulani emir’s mother is often Hausa; Kanuri blood flows into Fulani aristocracies through Borno-Sokoto scholarly links; Nupe and Gwandara ties connect central Nigeria to the Caliphate. This is not rhetoric—it is genealogy.
Within this fused society, functional roles emerged. Political and religious authority concentrated in Fulani jihad-era lineages—emirs, sultans, jurists—while economic power increasingly rested with Hausa merchant families, especially in Kano and Katsina. The Agalawa trading networks, the caravans of the 19th century, and the merchant dynasties of the early colonial era laid the foundation for intergenerational wealth.
No name illustrates this continuity better than Alhassan Dantata (1877–1955), the Agalawa trader from Bebeji, near Kano, widely regarded as the wealthiest man in West Africa in the early 20th century. His trading empire in kola nuts, groundnuts, and commodities connected Kano to Lagos and London. His descendants—Sanusi Dantata, Aminu Dantata (1931–2025)—bridged the colonial and post-colonial economies. From this lineage came Aliko Dangote, founder of the Dangote Group, whose cement, sugar, flour, and refinery investments dominate modern Nigerian industry.
Alongside this lineage stand other Hausa-rooted or Kano-merchant elites: Abdulsamad Rabiu of BUA Group; Dahiru Mangal of Katsina; and the late Isyaku Rabiu, whose enterprises evolved into parts of today’s BUA conglomerate. These figures represent the Hausa commercial tradition—capital formation built in markets, not palaces.
Political power, meanwhile, remained anchored in Fulani aristocratic and scholarly lines: from Muhammad Bello (Sultan, 1817–1837) to Abdullahi dan Fodio, to modern leaders such as Sir Ahmadu Bello Sardauna of Sokoto ( 1957–1966), Shehu Shagari (1979–1983), Muhammadu Buhari (1983–1985; 2015–2023), and Umaru Musa Yar'Adua (2007–2010). The spiritual apex remains the Sultanate of Sokoto, currently led by Sa'adu Abubakar IV.
This produced an ancient-to-modern alliance—not written in contracts but repeated in patterns—where Hausa business elites funded politics and stability, and Fulani-led authority provided legitimacy, protection, and policy continuity. In the First Republic (1950s–1960s), Kano merchant families financed the NPC under Ahmadu Bello, which in turn promoted Northernization policies, agricultural marketing boards, and market infrastructure that protected indigenous commerce. In later decades, Northern business elites—Hausa-rooted and allied—funded national coalitions across parties, including the PDP and later the APC, backing Fulani-led tickets in the name of regional stability and shared interest.
This is not uniquely Northern or Nigerian. From medieval European merchant guilds bargaining with kings, to the Hanseatic League (13th–17th centuries), to Russian oligarchs backing Boris Yeltsin in 1996, to modern campaign finance in the United States, history shows the same logic: money funds power; power shields money. Northern Nigeria followed a universal pattern.
At the center of this alliance sits Islam—not as decoration, but as covenant. Islam unified Hausa farmers, Fulani scholars, Kanuri clerics of Borno, Nupe Muslims of the Middle Belt, Gwandara communities around Keffi, and Babur/Bura Muslims of Borno/Adamawa into one moral universe. As the historian Ibn Khaldun observed centuries ago, religion is the strongest cement of social cohesion. That insight remains valid today.
This is why modern attempts to manufacture Hausa-Fulani hatred must be taken seriously—and mocked relentlessly. External and internal actors now attempt to reframe insecurity and hardship as ethnic war, to pit Fulani against Hausa, to dissolve centuries of integration with slogans and social-media outrage. This tactic is old. Colonial powers used it across Africa and Asia. Rwanda’s tragedy followed the hardening of fluid identities into weapons. The Balkans burned when shared faith and language were recast as existential threats.
Yet this project deserves ridicule because it misunderstands Northern Nigeria at its core. It imagines clean ethnic lines where none exist. It imagines Fulani who have not spoken Fulfulde for generations suddenly abandoning Hausa identity. It imagines Hausa merchants turning against Fulani in-laws, emirs, teachers, and co-worshippers. It imagines Islam collapsing under the weight of propaganda.
To those funding and promoting this discomfort, be warned: you are common enemies to both Hausa and Fulani, because your hostility targets Islam, the binding agreement that unites Hausa, Fulani, Kanuri, Nupe, Gwandara, Babur, and others. You do not attack one group; you attack the covenant itself. And history shows that such attacks fail.
This is also a warning to the brainwashed Hausa and Fulani who echo these narratives. You are not rebels; you are instruments. Every society that collapses begins when people are persuaded to hate cousins and co-religionists while invisible architects profit from the chaos.
Northern Nigeria’s endurance rests on a balance forged by history: Hausa commerce, Fulani authority, Islamic unity, and multi-ethnic integration. Debate it. Reform it. Improve it. But do not pretend it can be shattered by confusion.
Let the agitators continue to waste their resources. They are shouting at a civilization formed by centuries of intermarriage, sanctified by faith, and reinforced by shared interest. They seek to pull apart what blood, markets, mosques, and memory have stitched together.
History has already ruled on such efforts.
They fail.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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