Legend · Before the 19th century; jihad 1805-1808 · Fact and tradition
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Most towns are named after one founder. Hadejia, the emirate says, carries the names of two: a Kanuri hunter and the wife who travelled with him.
The official history of Hadejia Emirate starts with a confession. Before the emirate, it says, this land was made up of seven separate kingdoms: Garun Gabas, Auyo, Dawa, Fagi, Kazura, Gatarwa and Hadejia. None of them left written documents, and none had a fixed, agreed oral history either. So what we know about them is thin and patchy.
What survives is tradition, and one piece of it is lovely. Hadejia town, the story says, began with a Kanuri hunter from Machina named Hade and his wife, Jiya. They were out on a hunting trip when they were drawn to the area by its rivers and its other riches. They stayed. Hade became the founder of the town and the first of a long line of Hadejia kings.
People from the settlements around started moving to the couple, or at least started thinking of the place as theirs. They called it Garin Hade da Jiya, the town of Hade and Jiya. Over time the two names ran together into one word: Hadejiya. That is the name the town, the old kingdom and later the whole emirate still carry.
It is unusual. Plenty of Nigerian towns are said to be named after a founding hunter. Far fewer keep the wife in the name too.
The tradition says Hade's line ran to thirty-two kings before the nineteenth-century jihad. Only three of their names were remembered by the time a British officer, Gowers, wrote them down in 1921: Baude, Musa and Abubakar.
Hadejia was not the oldest of the seven. Tradition says Auyo and Garun Gabas were. Auyo, along with Tashena and Shira in Katagum, is said to have been founded around 1400 by migrants from Baghirmi. Hadejia and probably the others came later. What pulled people to this part of the country, east of Kano, was the same thing that pulled Hade and Jiya: good grazing, fertile soil and rivers full of fish.
None of these little kingdoms was truly on its own. Their rulers received their titles from the Mai of Borno, through an official called the Galadima, who sat at Nguru, and they owed him loyalty. Borno called this group of states the Nguderi or Gudiri lands. They stayed under Borno's control right up to the start of the 1800s.
Meanwhile, new neighbours were arriving. Fulani cattle herders, descendants of a man called Hardo Abdure, came from Machina in western Borno looking for pasture. By the late 1700s there were enough of them that Abubakar, the last Hausa king of Hadejia, appointed one of them, Umaru son of Abdure, as Sarkin Fulanin Hadejia, chief of the Hadejia Fulani, in about 1788.
When Usman dan Fodio's jihad broke out around 1805, Umaru sent a delegation to pledge loyalty to him. It was led by his younger brother Muhammadu Sambo and his cousin Laraima. They came back with a flag, the sign that Umaru was now dan Fodio's lieutenant in the area, allowed to wage war on the rulers around Hadejia and Auyo. Laraima got his own permission to fight the kingdoms of Fagi and Dawa from a place called Marma.
There is a funny detail here. Most of the men who went with Sambo to see the Shehu were not Fulani at all. The emirate history gives two reasons. One is fear: Umaru's kinsmen worried that the powerful chief of Auyo would crush them if he found out. The other, recorded by a British writer, Fremantle, in 1910, is more down to earth. They would rather stay home and look after their cows. Either way, it helps explain why non-Fulani later held so many of the emirate's civil and military posts.
The war began in 1805 with attacks on Auyo's territory. Rinde fell first, then Akurya, then Auyo's main army was beaten. Within three years Umaru and Sambo held Auyo, Hadejia, Gatarwa, Garun Gabas and Kazura. Those five were joined together as Hadejia Emirate. Fagi and Dawa went to Laraima, who became Sarkin Marma. After he died, a later emir, Buhari, folded Marma in too, giving the emirate roughly its present shape.
Then the British came, and ruled through the emirs. Sometimes they were stiffer about tradition than the emirs themselves. In 1937 the Emir of Hadejia, Usman, who reigned from 1925 to 1950, wanted to bring a capable man onto his council. The British official said no, because the man was of slave origin, even though appointing such men had long been part of how Hadejia was governed. The same emir also admitted to the Governor that western schooling was moving slowly in his domain.
The name stuck through all of it. Seven kingdoms, Borno's rule, a jihad and a new dynasty came and went. The place is still called after a hunter and his wife.
