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Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria . By Moses E. Ochonu . Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press , 2014. Pp. xv + 273. $85, hardback (ISBN 978-0-253-01160-2 ); $30, paperback (ISBN 978-0-253-01161-9 ).
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Violent clashes broke out in Yelwa, in Nigeria's Plateau State, in February 2004. The combatants on both sides defended themselves by raising the specter of the Sokoto Caliphate. One side claimed their ancestors had founded the town as a Caliphal outpost; the other argued that the Plateau was never conquered and thus the Muslims were strangers with no political claims. Moses E. Ochonu opens the book with this scenario, reminding us that anyone interested in Northern Nigeria's contemporary problems should revisit the region's political history and historiography.
Shifting attention away from the Sokoto Caliphate, which has dominated scholars' attention, Ochonu focuses on neighboring southerly polities of the Middle Belt to explore fraught and increasingly unequal political relations between Muslims and non-Muslims and between different ethnic groups. It was precisely into the peripheries that the Hausa, deputed as agents of British colonialists, gradually moved and built their own empire, he argues. He writes that both 'Hausa-Fulani and the non-Muslim communities of the Middle Belt were instrumental subalterns' in the British colonial system, but 'Hausa instrumentality ... was largely proactive while Middle Belt peoples' initiatives were mostly reactive' (p....