Lost history · 1903 to present
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In 1903 a Sultan of Sokoto left his capital rather than bow to the British and headed east. He was killed at a walled town in what is now Gombe. The British flattened it and forbade anyone to live there, so today his grave stands alone in the middle of the farms.
Four kilometres from Bajoga, the headquarters of Funakaye Local Government in Gombe State, there is a stretch of farmland. In the middle of it stands a low white wall, and inside the wall is the grave of Muhammad Attahiru I, the twelfth Sultan of Sokoto.
How a Sultan of Sokoto came to be buried in a farm in Gombe, far to the east of his capital, is a story an old man of Bajoga, Muhammad Yarima Lamu, told the Daily Trust. He holds the title Yariman Bajoga and is the elder brother of the district head, and he was born there about forty years after the battle.
Mbormi, he said, began with a man named Modibbo Jibrin Zai, also known as Malam Gaini. He had been driven out of his birthplace in what is now Katagum Emirate in Bauchi State. He came to Gombe, and the fourth Emir of Gombe, Abdulkadir Zailani, gave him a farm called Mbormi. Malam Jibrin turned it into a stronghold. He built walls round it and dug two trenches, one inside the wall and one outside. More and more followers came. He fought several emirs of Gombe in turn and took many of their towns.
Then the British arrived in the north. They defeated Modibbo Jibrilla in battle and took him to Lokoja, where he died. But Mbormi kept its walls and its name as a place that did not welcome the British.
Attahiru had become Sultan after the death of Sultan Abdurrahman in 1902. In March 1903 the British defeated the forces of the Sokoto Caliphate. Rather than stay and submit, Attahiru left Sokoto in protest with a large company of followers and set off eastward, probably, the paper says, on the way to Arabia. Mr Lamu believes the Sultan chose to stop at Mbormi because he had heard how strongly its people stood against the British.
The British came after him. In July 1903, the paper reports, the battle began in the early hours under the command of Major Francis Charles Marsh, and it went on until a quarter to seven in the evening. It is remembered as the fiercest resistance the colonialists met anywhere in northern Nigeria.
The Sultan's men fought with spears, swords and poisoned arrows. Some were on horseback and the rest on foot, and they believed their cause was just. Near the start of the fighting Major Marsh was struck in the thigh by a poisoned arrow. Within twenty minutes he was dead.
Still the British pressed on. After a long, hard fight, Mr Lamu said, they broke through the wall and entered the town. The Sultan was at prayer in the central mosque. When he heard that the wall had fallen, he walked out, and he was shot in the forehead. He died beside the mosque wall and was buried very close to the mosque. With him died two of his sons, the chief imam of Sokoto, and more than 600 of his followers.
When it was over, the Emir of Gombe at that time, Umaru Kwairanga, came with some of his men to the scene of the killing and made sure the Sultan was given a decent burial.
Then the British did something that shaped the place to this day. They destroyed Mbormi completely, and they declared that nobody should ever live there again. And nobody has. Where a walled town once stood there is now open farmland dotted with baobab trees, worked by farmers from the nearby villages of Bula Gaidam and Garin Aba. Only three graves remain: the Sultan's, the chief imam's, and that of Major Marsh, the man who led the attack.
When the Daily Trust reporter visited, there was no guide and no guard. To reach the tomb you follow a bush path through the farms off a rural road that leads to Ashaka. The grave lies under neem and desert date trees, ringed with cement blocks. The white paint on its wall had faded, and the wall was low enough for passers-by and even animals to step in. The door was standing open. The reporter could not help comparing it with Hubbare in Sokoto, where the Sultan's great-grandfather, Sheikh Usman Ibn Fodiyo, lies.
At about noon an elderly man named Ahmad Bello appeared. He looks after the grave and sweeps it every day as a volunteer, without any pay. In the past, he said, crowds came, especially on Mondays and Fridays, to pray for the Sultan or ask for his blessing. Now hardly more than ten come even on those days, mostly from Bajoga and the villages close by. In three hours that Monday, only a few people came; they washed, prayed and left quietly.
Part of the trouble is water. There used to be a well where visitors washed before going in, as people feel they must. It has dried up, so they bring their own water or buy sachets on the way. The local government began building a mosque and small halls beside the tomb but ran out of money and stopped.
About fifty metres north lies the chief imam's grave, its fence only half built, with no door. About 150 metres away is Major Marsh's grave, and it is worse: the fence was abandoned and the grass has swallowed it, so the grave cannot even be seen. People in Bajoga say his relatives used to come now and then to pray there, but not for many years.
Mr Lamu remembered that when he was a boy, people came from far away to seek blessings from Attahiru, whom many, especially his Fulani kinsmen, regard as a saint. Some of the Sultan's descendants used to come from Sokoto. The wall round the tomb, he said, was built by descendants of those who escaped the battle and settled in Sudan. As far as he knew, no reigning Sultan of Sokoto, from Attahiru II to the present Sultan Muhammad Sa'ad Abubakar III, had ever visited.
