Excerpts

Chapter One ORIGINS OF THE AFRICAN KINGDOMS BY PIERRE ALEXANDRE The stereotype of the negro king, today associated with that of the banana republic is, to say the least, derogatory (not to mention a paradox), connoting primitive savagery, inhuman brutality, and irreparable backwardness. Since the late nineteenth century, the popular adventure novel, later aided and abetted by comic strips, has imprinted on the Western mind images of a grotesque but dangerous figure in a fireman's helmet and scholar's gown without pants, fricasseeing missionaries and explorers in giant caldrons. In more recent times, the appalling deeds of General Idi Amin and Emperor Bokassa have been cited to reinforce this perception. In fact these two figures make the opposite case. They received their military training with colonial troops; Amin with the British, Bokassa with the French. They were little more than glorified junior officers without the least claim to traditional legitimacy or the least link with the historical reality of traditional political systems. Indeed, they were the mere incarnation of a European racist myth.     The ideological justification of colonial conquest rested on the obliteration of past knowledge and understanding. To appreciate this, we needn't go as far back as the legendary King Balthasar, one of the three visitors to Bethlehem during the Nativity, or to the queen of Sheba, who seduced Solomon. It suffices to recall that medieval map-makers depicted African monarchs in much the same costumes and regalia as their European counterparts. From an ethnological perspective, their portrayal was undoubtedly inaccurate, but understandable given Arab voyagers' accounts at the time. Philippe I of France and William the Conqueror of England were, in fact, petty nobles compared with the great King Tunka Menin of Ghana, who could deploy forty thousand archers in battle. And three centuries later, what European monarch could match the economic clout of the Mansa of Mali, Kankan Musa, who flooded the market with enough gold to cause a twenty percent devaluation in the Egyptian dinar?     Truth be told, the mere mention of the word "king," (not to mention "emperor") is enough to create a certain confusion with institutions that are familiar to us. Thus it is important to put the word in an African context, beginning by subsuming it under the neutral generic notion of chief, which comprises all recognized holders of political (but not uniquely political, as we shall see later) authority. Indeed, it would be a mistake to attempt to compartmentalize traditional African cultures, to try to find in them a separation of powers that would distinguish, for example, politics from religion, or rite from technique. There is every evidence of a division of labor (even in the simplest of the societies, where it was based on gender and age), but the social ideology is all-encompassing, however complex and diverse the institutions.     According to a theory, propounded by French ethnologists among others, African political formations derive historically from an extension (a "concentric" extension according to Léopold Senghor of Senegal) of the extended family. These fundamental groups can be found, we are led to believe, throughout the continent, in numerous variations depending on lifestyle (farming, herding, hunting and gathering, fishing ...) and, consequently, ecology, which determines size. They vary from a hundred members among some farmers and shepherds to about twenty among hunter-gatherers such as the Mbuti peoples (Pygmies) of the equatorial forest or the San peoples (Bushmen) of the Kalahari. Living members (elders, adults, children) of the group have a genealogical depth of three generations to which is added (in varying numbers depending on the peoples concerned), a line of from three to thirty, even forty, real or mythical ancestral generations. The extended family tends to be a largely self-sufficient production and consumption unit, but it is open to other groups in order to accommodate matrimonial networks, an openness that is necessary because of the exogamic imperative, related to a very broad and constraining concept of incest.     Politically (if the term is applicable here), what was involved was not so much a patriarchy as a gerontocracy. In fact, the elder generation had to reach a consensus before any important group decision could be taken. The family head (or supposed head), elder (social as much as or more than biological) of this generation was no more than the primus inter pares , first among equals, vested with an essential function, that of attending to ancestor worship. The ancestors were consulted in times of crisis because they constituted the principal element in the group's collective identity.     The extended family frequently underwent a process of fragmentation and dispersion, especially when the rate of demographic growth outstripped the subsistence potential of its economic territory (agricultural region, transhumant routes, and hunting ground ...). Proponents of the above theory would argue that this social and geographical scissiparity was at the origin of the clan clusters of extended families with a common ancestry. Through a similar mechanism, clans formed ethnic groups, and at this stage, it is argued, royalty develops. Unfortunately, the weakness of this view is that it is a gross oversimplification. First, there were many cases in which dispersion resulted not in the formation of clans (which required a deep genealogical memory), but in the proliferation of nonhierarchical, autonomous groups. In these groups, the original community's memory was obliterated in two or three generations, even though the members spoke the same language and observed very similar religious rituals derived from the same mythology. Second, the existence of diversified clans (erroneously referred to as a "tribe" in past terminology), which traced their descent from a single Great Ancestor or Founding Hero, did not necessarily mean that a common chief managed shared interests or mediated internal disputes. In many societies, these were corporate responsibilities, devolved upon associations whose members were very selectively recruited from among the lineage elders. To a certain extent, it involved transposing the system of birthright prerogatives from the family level to the whole society, but with a substantial qualitative leap, since this type of ancestry was mythical, rather than biological, in nature--a legal fiction. It is then that we see a senior clan chief emerge from a major lineage, which is reputed to be in the most direct line of descent from a common, real or mythical, ancestor.     The relationships between the major lineage and the minor, or junior, lineage replicate the family model. For the clan chief to be more (or other) than the elder of a group of equals, there would have to be an internal rupture, a sort of revolution, or an intervention from the outside. In the former case, often in exceptional circumstances (an external threat, food shortage, economic transformation), an individual (or a group) challenged the rules of birthright and collegiality, even if he returned to them afterward, giving historical reality a nudge in the right direction. An illustration of this is the classic myth of the elder who is lost, then found. The elder disappears or is kidnapped at birth and comes back as an adult to restore social order, which has been compromised by his disappearance. In historical fact, there have been several instances in which a valorous warrior resorted to force of arms to impose his personal domination, then passed it on to his descendants according to the traditional family model, revised and corrected, of course.     The latter case (to which the term "royalty" could be applied) closely resembled the one that resulted from intervention by a foreign group. It might have been a peaceful intervention; the foreigners, having been authorized to settle, may have formed a social stratum that was subordinate, at least for a time, to the original group's descendants. It might also have involved a successful military invasion in which the victors imposed their authority on the vanquished. In passing, it is interesting to note that cultural assimilation could go both ways. Either the immigrants adopted (and sometimes adapted) the original members' language and customs, or, conversely, the newcomers may have absorbed the original members. In either event, the result was an ethnically homogeneous situation, the formation of a society, which I prefer to call a "kingdom," reserving the term "empire" for ethnically heterogeneous political entities.     Thus we have a theoretical classification in which we can distinguish: first, acephalous, noncentralized societies, without a chief, in which political authority is diffuse, familial anarchies (Mbuti, San, highlanders of the Sudan); second, non-centralized acephalous societies, without a chief, in which authority rested with secret initiation societies (Fang of Gabon, Igbo or Ibidio in Nigeria); third, non-centralized homogeneous societies, bringing together chiefdoms with clearly defined territories, in which the authority was embodied by barely hierarchized clan chiefs with equal rights (Xhosa in South Africa, Ewe city-states in Togo and Ghana); fourth, centralized kingdoms with a clearly defined territorial foundation, in which the authority was based either on the domination of the original clan (Zulu) or on conquest followed by cultural assimilation (Rwanda, Burundi); and fifth, centralized, ethnically heterogeneous empires , territorially defined, in which the authority rested on the hegemony of a conquering kingdom (Sokoto, medieval Mali).     However schematic this attempt at classification, it permits us to foresee a great variety of concrete situations, in which common factors were not always apparent. One common factor, however, does stand out: the nature of power and its exercise. Earlier, I questioned the advisability of automatically linking the notions of tyranny and absolute despotism with the notion of African kingships. It is true that history has given us a few monarchs who fit the image, but typically, they were founders of kingdoms (Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation in the nineteenth century) or of new dynasties (Muhammad Turé, the first Askia of Songhai in the fifteenth century) or the last representative of an ancient dynasty, eliminated because of their abuses (the Fia Agokoli of Nuatja at the close of the fifteenth century). In fact, the royal function, like that of the family head, according to the same ancestry principle, remained sacred or rested on divine right. In an ethnically homogeneous kingdom, in which the sovereign was of the same blood, of the same lineage as his subjects, he played the role of a bridge builder between them and the group's ancestors, he was a priest-king. In ethnically heterogeneous kingdoms, in which the sovereign was a descendant of the conquerors and did not belong to the same line as his subjects, he was the incarnation of the god or the demiurge of his ancestors and theirs, he was a god-king. In both instances, he was more than a mere human being. He symbolized, embodied in his person, not only the principle of royalty, but the kingdom itself as an experienced reality, of which he was as much the captive as the master. The case of the celebrated Sudanese empires, which melded many ethnic groups, was more complex, but not fundamentally different. Islam was, of course, the common social factor, but it served as a link only in the upper hierarchy. The constituent ethnic groups preserved their own ancestry, and the emperor himself, commander of the faithful at the imperial level, remained sacred in the African cult of his own ethnic group.     Thus, if the king was the kingdom, it follows that nothing that concerned him was trivial. The elaborate and omnipresent etiquette surrounding him was, in fact, an essentially religious ritual, the details of which varied widely from one society to the other since they were the identifying criteria for a society. Nevertheless, a certain number of traits recurred. For example, a kingdom's well-being was often considered to be intimately linked to the sovereign's health. His vigor (particularly his virility) was tested before his enthronement and monitored afterward. In case of illness or senility, steps were taken to send him discreetly but directly to meet his ancestors. The Jukun people of what is now Nigeria offered a rather extreme illustration. After their monarch had reigned for seven years, his head was placed alongside his predecessors' in the dynastic pantheon. On another, but related, level, there were rites marking the king's distance from common mortals, his exceptional status. At times, there was an intentional break with strict social prohibitions, for example, royal incest with a mother or sister among the Bantu of the Central African Republic, or homosexual relations with the pages at the royal courts in the Great Lakes region. Other prohibitions set the monarch apart from mere mortals. Only certain domestic officials (those who monitored his physical well-being), had the right to see the sovereign eating or sleeping; outside the palace the monarch spoke through an intermediary (a "royal mouth"), his feet never touched the ground outside the palace, he was carried everywhere, and he wore a veil. When his subjects approached him, they were obliged to be barefoot or bare-chested, to prostrate themselves on the ground or kneel before him, and they could never address him directly, or utter his name. Items of regalia (jewels, weapons, ceremonial staffs of office, seats, etc.) were preciously preserved from reign to reign by an elite palace guard, who might also be charged with keeping the royal history. On the other hand, the royal paraphernalia might be liquidated when the ruler died, along with his personal servants and some of his wives.     The corps of officials responsible for the royal rituals limited the sovereign's power by preventing him from violating accepted ancestral custom and thereby committing a kind of sacrilege. Generally, there were a number of groups with distinct attributions, who checked and balanced one another. They were recruited from various strata in the population (nobles, free men, slaves, tradesmen, etc.) that they represented, legitimately and effectively, before the king. Frequently, especially in states born of conquest, a "land chief" represented the vanquished people. Since he alone had the authority to celebrate agrarian rites, he could effectively contest a sovereign's abuse of authority by refusing to perform them.     In short, without attempting even a cursory analysis of the day-to-day administration of traditional kingdoms (courts, taxes, army, etc.), it must be pointed out that, compared with their European counterparts, African kings possessed power that was undoubtedly less political, strictly speaking, than religious (or, at any rate, sacred). Although certainly based on divine right, their power was not absolute but subject to more or less representative collegial control by the subjects. COLONIAL OCCUPATION, A DRASTIC UPHEAVAL OF TRADITIONAL INSTITUTIONS The preceding outline refers to a past, dating back to colonial penetration (1850-1900) and, particularly to colonial occupation (1900-1960)--in all, a period of a little over a century, brief from an historical perspective, but which saw a drastic upheaval of African institutions--an upheaval whose effects lasted a generation after independence was attained. The independent states, incidentally, are not so much specifically African historical entities as territories defined by colonial intervention, within borders that often bear little relation to the actual distribution of ethnic groups, languages and cultures. Fewer than half a dozen states (Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Rwanda, and Burundi) more or less correspond to pre-colonial kingdoms.     The initial penetration phase paradoxically resulted (simultaneously with the genesis of the above myth) in the proliferation of so-called kingdoms, mainly on the coast. In fact, they were nothing of the sort. Naval officers and early explorers of the interior drew up all manner of protectorate treaties with people who were little more than village chiefs, heads of families, vassals, abusive subordinates, or incompetent ministers of legitimate sovereigns. In short, with individuals, or at most with subjects lacking regalian attributions, who were dubbed "kings" to lend legal weight to acts of extortion. At best, these documents constituted a de facto investiture of a pretender soliciting outside assistance to support him in his attempt to overthrow the ruler in place. As a result, the French signed a "protectorate" agreement with one king and the English with another for the same place--Petit Popo, in present-day Aného in Togo, and the Germans and the English did the same in Douala in present-day Cameroon.     The penetration and pacification of the interior unfolded in slightly different circumstances. Since the coast had been closed by companies plying the slave trade in the late sixteenth century, the hinterland was terra ignota ; the earliest explorations in the early nineteenth century had resulted in the emergence of only a few trails along the major traditional trade routes. There was only superficial knowledge about the social organization of the people of the interior, bereft of true understanding, riddled with errors of interpretation due to abusive Eurocentric assimilation. Paradoxically, military conquest (generally called "pacification") proved easier in large chiefdoms and centralized kingdoms than in acephalous societies. In the former case, the conquerors could exploit historic rivalries between states, or capitalize on the resentment of recently subjugated peoples to overcome resistance by organized states. Once the head fell (the king was killed, or worse), the body was easy to dismember. In acephalous societies, on the other hand, the conqueror had to proceed canton by canton, if not hamlet by hamlet, the resistance proving to be more polycephalous than the nine-headed Lernan hydra. One such example occurred in northern Cameroon. There the submission of the great emirates was brought about by 1905, while that of the acephalous highlanders did not occur for another thirty years.     Before conquest and partition was complete (symbolized by the Franco-Anglo-Germanic agreements between 1890 and 1905), the colonizers were obliged to devise an indigenous policy, that is, a body of legal and administrative measures, based on an ideology or declarations of intent that were more or less sincere. This allowed a small band of European bureaucrats to govern without too much opposition or friction from the indigenous masses. It was common practice, in this regard, to contrast direct French administration with indirect British rule . The contrast was less stark, in actual practice--in the African bush, for example--than would appear in colonial administrative law books, but the contrast was real nevertheless, and the consequences have survived de-colonization.     First, there was one consideration that sprang from the very nature of the problem. It would have been impossible for Europeans to govern Africa without the cooperation of African intermediaries. Given this premise, different solutions were chosen. The French colonizer, a republican of the Jacobin-Napoleonic persuasion, tried to unify the intermediate structures, turn the officially recognized chiefs into bureaucrats and make them submit to authority. From Dakar to Bangui, the "indigenous command" was structured as the tripartite hierarchy: the village chief, the district chief, and the senior chief. They possessed only the authority and the powers delegated them by the Republic, which, when annexed, legally confiscated and incorporated those once possessed by the sovereigns. The long-term objectives of the system (they would never be realized) were to set up a municipal and prefectural system identical to that of France d'Outremer ("Overseas France," a rather revealing term ...) extending well beyond the borders of continental France.     Her British Majesty's representatives were guided by a very different fundamental concept: minimal involvement in the everyday life of the natives, leaving the administration to the upper class and the traditional gentry, restoring their rights once they acknowledged the sovereignty of the Crown. Typically, the French administrator was the "commandant"; the British administrator, the "commissioner"; where his French neighbor and counterpart commanded, he was supposed to guide and give counsel.     At least, so went the theory. For the French, setback followed setback while they tried to impose chiefs they had recruited according to nontraditional criteria: junior infantry officers, detached or retired office clerks, who were often foreign to the group, or members of a servile or despised class or caste. Sometimes, a straw chief, a leader in name only and powerless, coexisted with a secret chief designated according to custom and the only one accepted by the population. Soon, the practice was to recruit a member of the dynasty, who was considered acceptable, frequently after laborious, discreet negotiations with legitimate chief-makers. Using tolerance and compromise, the French encountered situations like the one in which the man designated by them as the Chef Supérieur de Première Classe de Ouagadougou was in fact the mogho naba (king) of the Mossi (in addition to being a retired captain in the French Army).     The British, on the other hand, ran into a case in which a chief, out of a sense of commitment to traditional institutions, showed an attachment to sacred customs like human sacrifice or ordeal by poison or fire--a predilection difficult to accept in the twentieth century. There again, they often had to resort to discreet pressure or negotiated compromise to bring about a change in practice or a change in chief. Finally, after two generations of European domination, colonizers found themselves (on either side of the frontier), in a comparable situation: chiefs who could, by and large, claim dynastic or traditional legitimacy, but whose attributions and powers had been largely disrupted by the actions, by the incomprehension, of the colonizer. In fact, the English and the Belgians, like the French and the Portuguese, initially saw the chief as a political figure who embodied the three powers enunciated by Montesquieu (the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government). Seeing the chief in this light, the colonial authorities tried by fair means or foul to manipulate him, all the while remaining completely oblivious of the sacred character of the institution until relatively recently (see, in general, ethnological works in the '40s and '50s). For example, the English literally imposed the exercise of political authority on the oba (rulers) of the Yoruba, and the French did the same with the Fia (rulers) of the Ewe, even though these monarchs were completely without political power--this did not prevent some of them from acquiring a taste for it. AFTER INDEPENDENCE THE GOVERNMENTS FACED THE TRADITIONAL ARISTOCRACY The chiefs' fate after independence has been, to a large degree, but not entirely, a function of the role they played and the attitude they had during the colonial era, grosso modo . So-called progressive regimes proved to be hostile to traditional chiefdoms, even when their leaders claimed to have (Sékou Touré in Guinea) or did in fact have (Julius Nyerere in Tanzania) royal blood. For some the political consequences would prove their undoing--the revolutionary Ghanaian and Burkinabe soldiers, who, like their colonial predecessors, underestimated the symbolic importance of the Asantehene of Kumasi or of the Mogho Naba of Ouagadougou, had to deal with them. By contrast, the kings of Rwanda, Burundi, Lesotho, and Buganda, like the Sultan of Zanzibar, were overthrown by popular uprisings, which were sometimes supported by the army. In the former Zaire, in the southern Sudan, the chiefdoms, at least some of them, survived as well as they could and found themselves with little power amid widespread disorder. In calmer, more heavily policed nations the traditional aristocracy had a fate similar to that of its French counterpart, enjoying social prestige that sometimes amounted to little more than snobbishness, its members adapted to the new system, carrying out local, even national responsibilities within the framework of elective institutions. Ultimately, some chiefs were little more than quaint relics of folklore, drawing on the meager resources of tourism.     It is worth taking a brief look at the cultural and historical contexts to which the leaders in this book belong. Indeed, there are just as many resemblances and differences among them as there are between European nations. A Zulu Nduna , for instance, has as much, or as little, in common with an Akan Hene as a Prussian Freiherr with a Spanish Grandee. These cultural zones coincided, grosso modo , with the major geographic, or more precisely climatic, regions, which conditioned overall lifestyles and ease of travel, elements that affect the political institutions. It is a fact that the development of complex specialized structures requires the availability of resources that exceed the immediate needs of subsistence; not only must the king and his court be fed, but he must be given a surplus that he can redistribute. Second, great political formations did not develop in difficult terrains, so a chief's authority could not extend to a point at which it was longer possible or it took too long to communicate his orders and respond to them. But that is not all. The existence of vast empires or kingdoms was linked to the existence of major trade routes, long-distance economic circuits. On the other hand, acephalous societies were nearly always modest in size, often occupying relatively inaccessible refugee zones (desert steppes, rugged mountains or cliffs, dense forests), quite closed to the outside world. THE SAVANNA: CHOSEN LAND OF THEBLD BLDKINGDOMS OF THE WESTERN SUDAN It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the great historic empires took root in the large strip of the Sudanese savanna, which extends from the dense forest to the Sahara, from Cape Verde to the Nile Valley. It is an open, virtually flat country, drained from east to west by great, partially navigable rivers, linked by ancient caravan routes to the Maghreb and the Levant, and by forest trails and coastal rivers on the Guinean coast.     Between the eighth and seventeenth centuries, the western Sudan (in Arabic, bilad as-sudan , "land of the black peoples") fell under the successive domination of three structurally similar empires. Up to the twelfth century, the Soninke Empire of Ghana; from the twelfth to the fifteenth, the Manding Empire of Mali; and finally from the fifteenth to the seventeenth, the Songhai Empire of Gao, destroyed by the Moroccan invasion after their victory at Tondibi (1591). Further east, beyond Lake Chad, in the central Sudan, the Kanem-Bornu Empire, which arose in the eighth century, survived until the end of the nineteenth century (and, though somewhat diminished, even persists in the present time). These states showed marked resemblances to one another; they brought together diverse peoples under the command of an emperor, whose authority rested on his commitment to Islam. This commitment was shared with his principal vassals and senior bureaucrats, while the masses (and the ruler himself in the domestic and private spheres) continued to practice the traditional ethnic cults. Among his subjects, the emperor, the Amir al-Muslimin (Commander of the Faithful), was still considered a priest-king, often reputed to be a great magician. He maintained a professional army with the cavalry as its nucleus--a formidable arm in the flatlands--and an administration that did its writing in Arabic, more or less adapted to local languages. He raised revenues from tribute, direct taxes, customs duties and trade monopolies on such commodities as rock salt from the Sahara and gold nuggets from the mines on the forest edge.     When war, famine, pestilence, or a decadent ruling elite brought an empire to its knees, its constituent peoples regained their autonomy and formed or re-formed traditional kingdoms, even though at times their ruler, if he was a descendant of a former imperial governor kept up at least the outward appearances of practicing Islam.     The Mogho Naba of Ouagadougou was an exception to the rule. Tourist guides' claims aside, he was not really an emperor. He reigned over only a segment of an ethnically homogeneous people--he was a divine king, the supposed descendant of a union between a local princess and a foreign hunter, whose daring romance was believed to have produced the founder of the dynasty. In fact, reasonably reliable historical sources seem to indicate that in the fourteenth century, Voltaic- (or Gur-) speaking warrior clans took advantage of the struggle between a declining Mali Empire and a rising Songhai Empire to consolidate themselves into small kingdoms. Acephalous agricultural groups in these kingdoms willingly or unwillingly accepted protection from the heads of bands of horsemen. Among the Mossi and their Dagomba, Mamprusi, and Gurma neighbors and related peoples, we still see traces of the distinction between a hierarchy of "commoners," including village headsmen, provincial governors, and servant-ministers (equerries, gatekeepers, palace guards, head eunuchs, etc.) and an aristocratic hierarchy, the Nakomse , who were hereditary heads of districts (or fiefs) and, as such, military leaders. To sum up the situation, the mogho naba "rules, but custom governs."     Indeed, custom was the concern of the priestly council, which designated the new monarch from among his predecessor's eldest sons, after a kind of symbolic regency with one of his virgin daughters and one of his grandsons. Throughout his reign the mogho naba 's power, though theoretically absolute, was constantly balanced by a whole range of ritual prohibitions, overseen by a joint council of representatives of the Nakomse and the commoners, which could prevent his orders from being carried out. This is symbolized by the daily "going-off-to-war" ceremony, in which the ruler does not actually go off to war. What is more, the kingdom of Ouagadougou was quite pacifistic, while the other great Mossi state, Yatenga, with a similar political structure, carried out an expansionist strategy against neighbors and related peoples. This warlike policy did not produce a Mossi Empire, but it did transform the ethnic landscape by driving the Akan into the forest around the fourteenth century.     East of the Mossi nation, the Hausa states took a different path. They had been welded into an empire in the early nineteenth century by a foreign minority whose power had been both dislocated and confirmed by colonial occupation. The Hausa, the largest ethnic group in northwestern Nigeria and southern Niger, formed a complex of peoples, united by a common language. The most widely spoken language in the western Sudan, Hausa seems to be related to the Hamito-Semitic family (it is relatively close to Berber and ancient Egyptian) rather than to the Niger-Congo family, and has been written in Arabic characters since the end of the Middle Ages. The population consisted of a rural industrial mass, the talaka , who practiced intense agriculture, and an urban population, residing in large fortified cities, who plied highly developed crafts, and worked in exports and in commercial warehouses at the junction of the Saharan and Sudanese trade routes.     The seven "legitimate" Hausa states ( Hausa Bakwai )--Daura, Gobir, Katsina, Biram, Kano, Rano, and Zaria--emerged between the tenth and twelfth centuries. According to legend, they were founded by the children from a union between the queen of Daura and a white warrior reputed to have delivered the country from a dragon terrorizing the land.     The legend, which was common to several kingdoms in the region, had special currency in Songhai and Ghana. Interestingly enough, the Hausa founding hero had a dual name (African Bayajida and Arabic Abu Yazid ) although the monarchs did not officially convert to Islam until the fourteenth century. And long before that, the economic impact of the Hausa Bakwai brought about a partial assimilation of the seven "illegitimate" states ( Banza Bakwai )--Kebbi, Zamfara, Yauri, Gwari, Nupe, Ilorin, and Kororofa (Jukun)--in the middle belt of modern Nigeria. None of these states were very active in external warfare, but their frequent internal clashes left them vulnerable to partial subjugation by Mali and Songhai, and in the east by Bornu from whom they borrowed a great deal culturally. At any rate, no Hausa Empire or unified Hausa kingdom ever emerged; instead there were periods when one or other of the states was predominant. (Continues...) Copyright © 1991 Arthaud, Paris.