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A Historical Whodunit: The So-Called “Kano Chronicle” and its Place in the Historiography of Kano*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

John Hunwick
John Hunwick*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Extract

Murray Last obliquely suggests that [the “Kano Chronicle”] is best regarded as a rather free compilation of local legends and traditions drafted in the mid-seventeenth century by a humorous Muslim rationalist who almost seems to have studied under Levi-Strauss.

The danger lies in being carried away by one's own ingenuity.

The question of the authorship and date(s) of writing of the so-called “Kano Chronicle” (KC) and hence how historians should evaluate it as a source, have intrigued students of Kano (and wider Hausa) history since the work was first translated into English by H. R. Palmer in 1908. Palmer himself had the following to say:

The manuscript is of no great age, and must on internal evidence have been written during the latter part of the decade 1883-1893; but it probably represents some earlier record which has now perished….The authorship is unknown, and it is very difficult to make a guess. On the one hand the general style of the composition is quite unlike the “note” struck by the sons of Dan Hodio [ʿUthmān b. Fūdī, Abdulahi and Muḥammad Bello, and imitated by other Fulani writers. There is almost complete absence of bias or partizanship…. On the other hand, the style of the Arabic is not at all like that usually found in the compositions of Hausa mallams of the present day; there are not nearly enough “classical tags” so to speak, in it…. That the author was thoroughly au fait with the Kano dialect of Hausa is evident from several phrases used in the book, for instance “ba râyi ba” used in a sense peculiar to Kano of “perforce.” The original may perhaps have been written by some stranger from the north who settled in Kano, and collected the stories of former kings handed down by oral tradition.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 21 , 1994 , pp. 127 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1994

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Paul Lovejoy for his close and critical reading of a draft of this paper, and to Priscilla Starratt for discussions of aspects of it and for materials supplied.

This paper originally formed my contribution to “The Cloth of Many Colored Silks: a Gift of Friends to honor Ivor Wilks,” an unpublished felicitation volume presented to Ivor Wilks at Northwestern University on 22 May 1993. One of the marked traits of Ivor Wilks's approach to the study of African history has been his close analytical attention to sources. His work on the Arabic chronicles of Gonja and the fragmentary Arabic and Hausa texts on Wa resulted in two magisterial studies which have been an inspiration to those who share his respect for the African voice in African history and his concern for its interpretation. This modest contribution to one particularly intransigent historiographical problem has been inspired by Wilks's work in this area, and despite its tentative nature, is intended to demonstrate the truth of the old adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

References

Notes

1. Smith, M.G., “The Kano Chronicle as history” in Barkindo, B.M., ed., Studies in the History of Kano (Ibadan, 1983), 41.Google Scholar

2. Last, D. M. “Historical Metaphors in the Intellectual History of Kano Before 1800,” HA 7 (1980), 177.Google Scholar

3. See Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 38 (1908), 58–98.Google Scholar

4. Palmer, H.R., Sudanese Memoirs (3 vols.: Lagos, 1928), 3:92–93.Google Scholar

5. He observed that a young Arab in his employ who could read “colloquial Tripoli and Ghadamsi Arabic” had no difficulty in reading and translating the manuscript of the chronicle. The “young Arab,” who was called ʿAbd Allāh al-Ghadāmsī, was employed by Palmer (after a brief traumatic attachment to C.L. Temple) to be a kind of field assistant, since he had been in Kano since his youth. He had no doubt read over the KC with Palmer and given him an oral translation of it into Hausa. This much may be gathered from the personal memoir he wrote in Arabic about the British conquest of Kano, his brief service with Temple and his service with the apparently more genial Palmer. A photocopy of al-Ghadāmsī's manuscript (the original evidently being among Palmer's papers) is to be found in the Melville J. Herslcovits Library of Africana, Northwestern University, Paden Collection, MS 176. I intend to analyze and summarize it in a forthcoming issue of Sudanic Africa.

6. See his “Historical Metaphors.”

7. Cf. East's remarks quoted in Smith, M.G., “Kano Chronicle as History,” 35Google Scholar: “We do not know who wrote the book in the reign of Muḥammad Bello, but we think that the author did not create it entirely himself. Surely he followed other and older books which we no longer have.” (emphasis added).

8. For Last these include (but may not be restricted to) Kano kinglists in Jos (National Museum) and Kaduna (National Archives), the Song of Bagauda, published by Hiskett (BSOAS 27 [1964], 112-35; 28 [1965], 364-85), the anonymous (allegedly) mid-seventeenth century Aṣl al-Wangariyyīn, and Dokaji's, Alhaji AbubakarKano ta Dabo Cigari (Zaria, 1958).Google Scholar

9. Last, “Historical Metaphors,” 162-63.

10. Last, “From Sultanate to Caliphate: Kano ca. 1450-1800” in Barkindo, , Studies, 67–92.Google Scholar

11. This in turn seems to be based on a similar division in Ādam b. Muḥammad al-Findikī, al-Iʿlān bi-taʾrīkh Kanū (unpublished, 1933), though he does not use any term equivalent to “house” or “dynasty.” He does, however, talk of the “Runfāwiyyūn” and the “Tūbāwā” or “Tūbāʾiyyūn” whose name, he says, is the origin of “Kutunbāwā.” Otherwise they are al-Kanawiyyat al-thāniya and al-Kanawiyyat al-thālitha, with the pre-Rumfa rulers presumably constituting al-Kanawiyyat al-ūlā, though such a term is not used.

12. “To the Kano chronicler then, Rumfa's reign represented a break with tradition—the start of a new kind of state” (69).

13. Last, “From Sultanate to Caliphate,” 85.

14. Smith, , “Kano Chronicle,” 5.Google Scholar

15. See SirLugard, Frederick D., “Northern Nigeria,” Geographical Journal 23 (1904), 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Flora, , Lugard, Lady, A Tropical Dependency (London, 1906), 236.Google Scholar

17. Ibid, 246.

18. Hiskett, M., “The Kano Chronicle,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (April 1957), 79–81.Google Scholar

19. Hiskett had a microfilm made of both MSS made and sent to the University of Ibadan Library. The original of MS C is still in the hands of Mallam Bala dan Idi and through the good offices of Priscilla Starratt and Murray Last I was able to obtain a photocopy of it.

20. Hiskett, , “Kano Chronicle,” 80.Google Scholar

21. I am grateful to Paul Lovejoy for making a typed version of this document available to me. The original is housed in the National Archives, Kaduna. The document was only recently recognized for what it is, and has subsequently been published by Lovejoy with Abdullahi Mahadi and Mansur Ibrahim Mukhtar as “C.L. Temple's ‘Notes on the History of Kano’—A Lost Chronicle of Political Office,” Sudanic Africa 4 (1993), 7–76.Google Scholar

22. According to him, Mallam Idris was given the book when he married into the Kutumbawa family, but this hardly makes it an “official” Kutumbawa copy and is at variance with what Hiskett was told in 1957. See Starratt, Priscilla E., “Oral History in Muslim Africa: al-Maghīlī Legends in Kano,” (Ph. D., University of Michigan, 1993), 127–28.Google Scholar

23. Smith, , “Kano Chronicle,” 35.Google Scholar

24. Palmer's, translation in Sudanese Memoirs, 3:109.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., 3:119.

26. Ibid., 3:131 reads: “We do not know much of what Abdulahi did in the early part of his reign.”

27. Ibid., 3:129 reads: “for fear of ‘Balazi,’” whereas the text reads khawf al-iṭnāb in Arabic. This is only one of many instances where Palmer substitutes a Hausa word (or title) for the Arabic word in the text, no doubt a reflection of the assistance he apparently got from ʿAbd Allāh al-Ghadāmsī.

28. This is a marginal note in both MSS (with slight variation) and in Palmer, , Sudanese Memoirs, 3:128Google Scholar, becomes a footnote that reads: “Perhaps forty, I am not sure.”

29. It is also worth considering whether the chronicle might not have been actually written in Hausa and that the Arabic text we now have is a translation. This hypothesis raises several questions: (1) what happened to the original Hausa text? (2) why was an Arabic translation necessary? (3) what evidence is there for substantial works of prose being written in Hausa in the nineteenth century?

30. The phrase is in the margin.

31. See Palmer, , Sudanese Memoirs, 3:127.Google Scholar

32. See Starratt, , “Oral History,” 126.Google Scholar The Dan Rimi was a senior slave official at the Kano court. It is worthy of remark that there is considerable detail on slaves who were appointed to office and those who filled the offices traditionally held by slaves. See Fika, Adamu M., The Kano Civil War and British Overrule, 1882-1940 (Ibadan, 1978), 34–35.Google Scholar Lovejoy et al have proposed that a strong candidate for authorship is Dan Rimi Barka, who served under Sarkin Kano Muḥammad Bello (r. 1883-1892); see “Temple's, C.L. ‘Notes on the History of Kano,’” 43–44.Google Scholar Whether a slave official would have been literate enough to put together the KC seems unlikely (halting though that literacy is) and, as I note above, the compiler clearly had something of a malam's training.

33. Other chronicles of Hausa states show a similar feature, as does the dīwān of the mais of Kanem-Bornu. This contrasts with the “Timbuktu tradition” (also represented in Gonja and Wa), wliich is replete with very specific dates (including months and days).

34. See further Starratt, “Oral History,” 129-32.

35. Arabic texts and translations of nos. (i) - (iv) with commentary has been published in Sudanic Africa 4(1993), under the title “Not Yet the Kano Chronicle: King-lists With and Without Narrative Elaboration From 19th Century Kano.”

36. E.g. husumiya—“minaret;” kūka—“baobab;” sintali—“ablution jug;” likkafu—“stirrups;” surke—?sirde—“saddle.” I am grateful to Priscilla Starratt for the suggestion that surke may be in error for sirde.

37. The text referred to is MS 97 of the Nigerian National Museum, Jos. An English translation under the title The Jihad in Kano was privately published by Ibrahim Ado-Kurawa (Kano, 1989).

38. Starratt, , “Oral History,” 137Google Scholar; Skinner, N., An Anthology of Hausa Literature, (Zaria, 1980), 1–2.Google Scholar

39. Starratt, , “Oral History,” 121.Google Scholar

40. Ibid. The informant was Sa'idu Limamin Sabuwar Kofa.

41. See Fika, , Kano Civil War, 50–63.Google Scholar

42. At the present time, when “religion” is again a matter of contest in the context of Hausa politics, it is interesting that the Kanawa are laying multiple claims to Maghīlian discourse, as Priscilla Starratt's dissertation eloquently illustrates.