Chapter 19

The Kano Chronicle Revisited

Paul E. Lovejoy

The Kano Chronicle is one of the classic texts of African history.1 It appears to
represent a combination of oral tradition and Arabic text that has often been
cited as primordial to African studies. As Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias
has shown, it is essential to situate traditions and texts in historical perspec-
tive; that is, to determine why they were created, when they were created, and
what implications derive from context.2 By establishing context, the signifi-
cance of the Kano Chronicle takes on added meaning. It is indeed a classic text
that relates to the history of the Hausa nation and the long ethnohistory of
the classical ‘seven’ Hausa states (Daura, Katsina, Kano, Rano, Zaria, Biram ta
Gabas, and Gobir) and the identity of the seven ‘useless’ ‘Hausa’ states (refer-
ring to Zamfara, Kebbi, and Yauri, which are Hausa, but also Gwari, Kwara-
rafa, Nupe and ‘Yoruba,’ which are not) of the Bilad al-Sudan. Along with the
‘Song of Bagauda’ and the Wangarawa chronicle, the Kano Chronicle provides
some of the best documentation on the history of Hausaland; it also provides
some of the best insights we have specifically on Kano as a political construct,

1 The research for this study has benefited from interaction with several colleagues with whom
I have discussed various aspects of my analysis, although the conclusions are my own respon-
sibility. I would like to mention in particular John Hunwick, Sydney Kanya-Forstner, John
Edward Philips, Abdulkarim Dan Asabe Ibrahim Hamza, and various authorities of tradition
in ­Nigeria whose interviews have been invaluable, including Mukhtar Muhammad Kwaru,
Ibrahim Aliyu K ­ waru, and Abdulkadir Yakub. My discussions with Sean Stilwell in particular
were essential in this reconstruction and in the correction of an earlier interpretation that
conflated Dan Rimi Ibrahim Barka and his son Dan Rimi Malam Barka. The research was
carried out with the support of the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History and
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would also like to thank
Benedetta Rossi and Toby Green for their feedback and patience, and for organizing the con-
ference in honour of Paulo Farias, whose hospitality on my initial introduction to Nigeria
helped to shape my scholarship.
2 Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias, “Praise Splits the Subject of Speech: Constructions of King-
ship in the Manden and Borgu,” in Graham Furniss and Liz Gunner, eds., Power, Marginal-
ity and African Oral Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 225–243; and
idem., “The Gesere of Borgu: A Neglected Type of Manding Diaspora,” in Ralph Austen, ed., In
Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature and Performance (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 141–147.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004380189_021

The Kano Chronicle Revisited 401

and in this light the role of the Kano Chronicle as both historical text and politi-
cal project is crucial.3
While the Kano Chronicle has to be seen as an intellectual project that drew
on ancient and collective knowledge of the past, the fact is that the surviving
texts are relatively modern: the most important version – perhaps the only
relevant text – dates to the late 1880s, and relates to the events at that exact
time. In this chapter I suggest that the genesis of the Kano Chronicle has to be
examined in the context of the Kano civil war of 1893–94 and the emergence
of the Tijaniyya as the dominant Sufi ṭarīqa in Kano.4 While the earlier analysis
of Murray Last and M.G. Smith argued that the text was a compilation dat-
ing back many centuries, the current view, as argued by John Hunwick, holds
that it was authored in the late 1880s, which is confirmed here.5 Specifically,
it can now be suggested that Dan Rimi Malam Barka of Kano, a high official
of slave status during the reign of Sarkin Kano Muhammad Bello (1882–93),
is its author.6 This identification confronts several important problems, but

3 Mervyn Hiskett, “The ‘Song of Bagauda’: A Hausa King-List and Homily in Verse,” Bulletin of
soas 28 (1964): 540–567 and 28 (1965), 112–135; 363–385; Muhammad A. Al-ḥāğğ, “A Seven-
teenth-Century Chronicle on the Origins and Missionary Activity of the Wangarawa,” Kano
Studies 1, no. 4 (1968): 7–16; and Paul E. Lovejoy, “Notes on the Wangarawa Chronicle,” Kano
Studies 2, no. 3 (1978): 46–52. Also see W. Hallam, “The Bayajidda Legend in Hausa Folklore,”
Journal of African History 7 (1966): 47–60; and Dierk Lange, “The Bayajidda Legend and Hausa
History,” in Edith Bruder and Tudor Parfitt, eds., African Zion: Studies in Black Judaism (New-
castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 138–174.
4 For emergence of the Tijanīya in Kano, see John Paden, Religion and Political Culture in Kano
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 73–104.
5 Murray Last, “Historical Metaphors in the Kano Chronicle,” History in Africa 7 (1980): 161–178;
M.G. Smith, “The Kano Chronicle as history,” in Bawuro M. Barkindo, ed., Studies in History of
Kano (Kano: Bayero University, 1983), 31–56; and John Hunwick, “Not Yet the Kano Chronicle:
King-Lists With and Without Narrative Elaboration from Nineteenth-Century Kano,” Sudanic
Africa 4 (1993): 95–130; also see Finn Fuglestad, “A Reconsideration of Hausa History before
the Jihad,” Journal of African History 19, no. 3 (1978): 319–339.
6 Paul E. Lovejoy, Abdullahi Mahadi and Mansur Ibrahim Mukhtar, “C.L. Temple’s ‘Notes on the
History of Kano’ [1909]: a lost Chronicle on political office.” Sudanic Africa, 4, (1993): 34–35.
Temple’s “Notes on the History of Kano,” or more accurately, Nuhu Dan Rimi’s “Notes on the
History of Kano,” came to my attention in the Nigerian National Archives in Kaduna when a
staff member, S.D. Dapip, brought the typescript to me and asked me if I knew what it was,
since it did not have an accession number and was found in a pile of loose papers. From inter-
nal evidence, it appears to have been misplaced sometime after 1921. W.F. Gowers had access
to the document when he compiled Gazetteer of Kano Province (London, 1921); pages 8–15 are
a verbatim copy of Nuhu’s “Notes.” Gowers probably kept the “Notes” to construct his report
on droughts and famines, “Principal Famines of Hausaland,” snp 17 K2151, which clearly was
based on Temple’s document. For a discussion, see Lovejoy, Mahadi and Mukhtar, “Notes on
the History of Kano,” 8–9. Ibrahim Hamza subsequently located a copy of the manuscript at
Rhodes House in the "Agricultural Papers" series on Kano that inexplicably include papers