Lost history · 1824 to present · Mixed
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For nearly ninety years the emirs of Gombe ruled from a walled town by the Gongola River. Then the British told the emir to move, and everyone of importance went with him. The old capital is now a quiet village a long way from the city that carries its name.
About a kilometre off the Gombe to Kano highway, near a river and among low hills, there is a sleepy town called Gombe Abba. It sits about 100 kilometres from the present city of Gombe. If you did not know its history you might drive past it. Yet for nearly ninety years this was the seat of the whole Gombe Emirate.
The emirate was born in 1804, in the years of the jihad, and its founder was Modibbo Bubayero, a disciple of the reformer Sheikh Usman Ibn Fodio. A 75-year-old resident, Malam Haruna Mohammed, told the Daily Trust what his grandparents had told him. Bubayero spent years fighting to build the emirate, moving from one camp to another. He brought under his rule towns and villages across what are now Gombe, Akko, Deba, Yamaltu, Dukku, Funakaye and Nafada, and in the past his emirate reached as far as the present Muri Emirate in Taraba. For some years he lived at Dukku. But he wanted a proper capital, a permanent home for the emirate, and he chose a place on the Gongola River, west of Dukku.
The town's name, as the residents tell it, holds a small story of its own. When Bubayero arrived, he met a Bolewa man called Gombe living with his family on a hill in the east of the place. The man came down and joined Bubayero, and together they built the town. So it was called Gombe Abba: Gombe for the man of the hill, and Abba, a short form of Abubakar, for Bubayero himself.
The site was well chosen. The river gave water for people, for farms and for cattle. It also made the town hard to reach from the north-west, while the hill to the south-east stood as a natural barrier. In 1824 Bubayero built his palace and raised strong walls, the ganuwa, round the town. Malam Haruna could still name the seven gates: Kofar Madi in the west, Kofar Tara in the north-west, Kofar Wulgu in the north-east, Kofar Hinna and Kofar Siratijo in the east, Kofar Bordo Fiti in the south and Kofar Kanoma in the south-west. It is said that once the palace and walls were built, Bubayero never again left the town. He died there in 1841, at the age of 81.
Seven emirs, counting the founder, ruled Gombe from this town. The Daily Trust set out their line, and each has a small story.
Bubayero was buried in his palace, a few metres from the central mosque. His first son, Sulaiman, followed him in 1841 but reigned only three years. He died in Kano, at the age of 54, on his way home from Sokoto, and he was buried there. He had no child, so no later emir descends from him.
Next came his younger brother, Muhammad Kwairanga, Bubayero's third child, who ruled for 38 years, from 1844 to 1882. Every emir of Gombe after him traces his line to Kwairanga, and the present emir, Abubakar Shehu Abubakar III, is his great-great-grandson. He was buried near his father.
Then came Kwairanga's sons. Abdulkadir Zailani reigned from 1882 to 1888 and was buried at Birin Bolewa. His brother Hassan reigned from 1888 to 1895 and was buried at Dukku. Tukur followed from 1895 to 1898. He was the last emir to rule Gombe as part of the Sokoto Caliphate, and he too was laid near his father and grandfather.
The seventh and last to rule from Gombe Abba was Umaru Kwairanga, a grandson of the founder, who came to the throne in 1898. In his reign, in 1903, the British conquered the emirate. Oral history says Umaru submitted peacefully. But the British found Gombe Abba too far out of the way. It made running their new division hard.
So in 1913 they moved their headquarters to Nafada and told the emir to move with them. Six years later they moved again, south to the site of present-day Gombe, which made it easier for them to manage the Tangale-Waja and Dadiya peoples of southern Gombe. Once more the emir was told to follow. Had things gone differently, the paper suggests, the capital of Gombe State might today be Gombe Abba.
When Emir Umaru left in 1913, he took his whole council with him, and all the prominent people of the emirate went too. He left only his eldest son, Yarima Mazadu, to look after the few households that chose to stay. A town that had been the seat of an emirate became a village, run by village heads.
The founder's tomb still stands at the east end of the town, on the very spot where the emir's palace used to be. Its custodian, a 68-year-old named Malam Muhammad Musa, explained that the building holds three graves: those of Bubayero, his son Muhammad Kwairanga and his grandson Tukur. It is kept locked inside a walled yard with two entrances, and it was rebuilt in the time of the ninth emir, Abubakar Umar, who reigned from 1936 to 1984. Visitors still come now and then, from Gombe and beyond, to pray for the old rulers.
Retired Justice Usman Baba Liman, a former Grand Khadi of Gombe State and now chief imam of Gombe Abba, thinks the trouble began with that departure. Instead of leaving a district head behind, he said, the British and the emir left an emir's son with the title of a mere village head. He believes later emirs and governments simply forgot the place.
The reporter found what that forgetting looks like. The town and its surrounding villages hold more than 25,000 people, yet there was one primary school and one secondary school, and one small clinic that could not handle hard cases; pregnant women had to be carried about 20 kilometres to Dukku. The first Friday mosque was still built of clay. There was not one tarred road, no police post, only one policeman and two constables. People drew water from five boreholes and from the river. They fished, and they grew millet, beans and guinea corn. The imam worried most about the children: girls married off young, and the few graduates without work, which discouraged the rest.
