Lost history · 1934 (festival); older fishing rites before that
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Most people know Argungu for thousands of men leaping into a river at the sound of a gun. Fewer know the festival was born as a handshake between two old enemies.
If you have seen a photo from Argungu, it is probably the one everybody takes: a wall of men, waist deep in brown water, nets and gourds held high, all crashing into the river at the same moment. It looks like pure fun, and it is. But the reason the festival exists at all is a story about two neighbours who spent more than a century at each other's throats.
After Usman dan Fodio's jihad of 1804, the new power in the region was Sokoto. Kebbi, the old kingdom to its west, never fully accepted that. The two became rivals, and the rivalry showed up the way it usually did in those days: raids, skirmishes, the steady background noise of people who do not trust each other. Argungu was the seat of the Kebbi side.
According to the man who later ran the festival, Abubakar Ladan, the turn came through a friendship. When Hassan dan Mu'azu was still a prince in Sokoto, he had a personal friend in Muhammadu Sama, who became Emir of Argungu. Once dan Mu'azu became Sultan, he decided to visit Argungu himself and formally put an end to the hostility. That was 1934.
The people of Argungu had to welcome him somehow. They were famous fishermen, so they did what they knew best. They threw a fishing festival. Ladan told Trust Radio that this is why it is called a celebration of peace: it marked the moment the two kingdoms stopped being enemies. The local story goes that the Sultan watched the crowd of fishermen pulling big fish out of what looked like a small river, was impressed, and prayed that Argungu would become famous.
He got his wish. But the story is a little more tangled than one royal visit.
Ask in Argungu and you will hear 1934. Look in the books and you find something older. A 2010 book on the festival by Olagunju and Mera, quoted by Trust Radio, says fishing on this river goes back before Kanta of Kebbi's conquests in the early sixteenth century. It started as religious rites, then a family and community affair, long before any Sultan came to visit. So what happened in 1934 was less an invention than a renaming. An old local habit got a new meaning and a royal stamp.
That old habit still shapes the rules. Nobody fishes in the river for the rest of the year. Not by day, not by night. The emirate pays guards to patrol it around the clock, and the festival chief told Trust Radio that anyone caught fishing out of season can be prosecuted and face a year in jail. The ban is the reason the fish get big. The prize fish, the Nile perch that people call Giwan Ruwa, the "elephant of the water", grows fat in a river nobody is allowed to touch.
The guardian of all this is the Sarkin Ruwa, the "king of the water", also called Makwashi. In 2015 that was Alhaji Hussaini Makwashi, the fourth of his family to hold the job, which he said had come down from his great grandparents. People believe the Sarkin Ruwa has powers over the river. If you go in without his say-so, the story goes, you come out with nothing. On festival day he is said to order the crocodiles to leave everyone alone. On any other day, nobody is promising anything.
Makwashi described the start of the festival in plain terms. A man stands by the river with a flag. Makwashi signals him to raise it. Then a man with a gun fires three times. The fishermen, who have spent the night on the bank at least a kilometre back, start running. Makwashi sits in a boat with the drummers, and when the shots ring out the women start singing and the drums start up. At its peak, around 30,000 fishermen made that dash, each one trying to beat his neighbour into the water while photographers fought for the best angle. In 2009 there were 250,000 people watching. Whoever pulls out the biggest fish takes the prize.
After the civil war, the festival took on a second job. Ladan said that in the 1970s the federal government picked Argungu as one of the events meant to pull a broken country back together, and began sponsoring it. Riverine states from the south were invited in. Rivers State was even given a plot to build its own permanent pavilion. It started building, then left it unfinished.
The festival's own history has been bumpy. Ladan pointed out that by 2015 it was 81 years old, but only 60 editions had been held. It was called off in 2010 when President Yar'Adua died, and then kept being postponed because of insecurity. Organisers were afraid one bad incident could ruin its name for good.
The river has changed too. Ladan said it had silted up badly. Spots that were once around 30 metres deep were down to six or ten, and since big fish keep to the deep water, many had moved on. Dredging was discussed, but some locals pushed back. To them, nobody should be messing with that river by artificial means. It is a fair instinct for a place whose whole peace was built on leaving the water alone.
