Beneath an escalating conflict between herders and farmers in central Nigeria lies a relentless but often under-reported force: history.
Events in the 19th century helped shape today’s violence between mainly Muslim Fulani cattlemen and largely Christian farmers — a battle of blood and identity.
Sokoto, an ancient city in northern Nigeria, is where many Fulani, a semi-nomadic people stretching from Lake Chad to the Atlantic coast, have their spiritual roots.
Phto: AFP
Cross-legged, his eyes closed and palms turned upwards to the heavens, Saidu Bello prays before a huge marble tomb covered in blue velvet: the resting place of Usman Dan Fodio, revered by many as a Muslim saint.
“I pray Allah to give me the same strength as he gave to the Shehu,” says Bello, a 29-year-old trader, referring to Fodio.
“Whenever I have doubts, I come here for his help to make the right decision.”
Phto: AFP
ROOTS OF CONFLICT
In 1804, Fodio, a learned Fulani, declared holy war on despotic leaders.
Urging Muslims to observe a “pure Islam,” he launched an insurrection that, four years later, led to the establishment of the caliphate of Sokoto.
Phto: AFP
The state was as large as it was prosperous, extending from modern-day Burkina Faso to Cameroon — an area that took four months to cross end-to-end. The caliphate ended when its last leader was killed by the British in 1903.
“Usman Dan Fodio united former Hausa kingdoms and brought peace to the whole region,” says Sambo Wali Junaidu, advisor to the current sultan of Sokoto, a direct descendant of the first caliph and Nigeria’s highest-ranking Muslim. “He fought social injustices and undue privileges.”
Fodio’s charisma and writings — treatises and poems written in Arabic, Hausa and the Fula language — inspired Fulani jihads in West Africa throughout the 19th century. And his popularity persists today. At the shrine in Sokoto, pilgrims come from as far as Senegal, laden with offerings. Many of these faithful are barely-literate Fulani herders who have not read any of Fodio’s writings but learned of him through madrassas, or Islamic schools.
The conflict in Nigeria between Fulani and sedentary farmers has erupted in a fertile central region called the Middle Belt.
Demand for water and access to land, driven in part by a surging population in a country of 200 million, are among the contemporary causes for the fighting.
But there is a deeper reason: the Middle Belt lies in Nigeria’s religious faultline, between the predominantly Muslim north and mainly Christian south.
It is also a region that, historically, suffered chronic unrest. Lying on the southern rim of the caliphate of Sokoto, the Middle Belt was largely populated by animist communities.
These were frequently raided by the caliph’s troops to provide slave labour for the plantations, salt mines or burgeoning iron industry which made the empire so prosperous.
Contemporary descriptions by traders are eye-opening. In 1824, in the great commercial hub of Kano, the ratio of the population was 30 slaves to every one free man.
“Native populations, living in this zone of influence during the time of pre-colonial Islamic empires, were psychologically scarred” by the raids and the enslavement, says Alioune Ndiaye, a specialist on Nigeria at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada.
Many became Christian as a result, and the traumatic episode resonates in Nigeria today, he says.
“There is still this dread among people in the south that the northerners are coming ‘to dip the Koran in the ocean,’ as the saying goes,” Ndiaye says.
’BLAME THE FULANI’
This backwash of fear and mistrust is often reflected in the Nigerian media, whose main outlets are owned by a southern tycoon.
Fulani herders are routinely called “terrorists,” and a supposed Fulani “plot” to Islamize Nigeria, begun under Fodio, is also media fodder.
Stigmatization worsened after the election in 2015 of President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim Fulani from the north. His every decision — from the speed with which he has condemned massacres to the response of the armed forces and the appointments he makes in the army and police — is scrutinized through the lens of ethnic bias, says Ndiaye.
Ibrahim Abdullahi, who represents an association of herders in the northern city of Kaduna, says the notion of a modern-day “Fulani jihad” is a “pure fantasy” that was being manipulated for political ends.
Unlike Mali and Burkina, where jihadist groups exploit ethnic resentment to recruit among Fulani people, the Fulani in Nigeria generally have no claims based on religious ideology.
“Most of the Fulani pastoralists are poor and haven’t been to school. They don’t have a voice, there’s no organization or political elite speaking on behalf of all of them,” he said. “That’s why each time something goes wrong in Nigeria, people blame the Fulani.”
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS