Lost history · pre-colonial to 2001 · Mixed
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High on the Tula plateau, the ancestors dug a cave into the hill right under their own village, with a mouth so small no enemy could find it and a well inside. Tula remembers itself as the chiefdom no one could beat, until the British came.
The Tula plateau rises in Kaltungo Local Government Area of Gombe State, about 120 kilometres from the state capital. The chiefdom of Tula is made of three settlements: Tula Yiri, Tula Bowle and Tula Wange, which is the seat of its traditional rulers today.
For a long time getting there was a feat in itself. When a Daily Trust reporter wrote about the place, the paper noted that reaching the plateau had once been thought a daring adventure. The road climbed through rough, mountainous ground, and only some special vehicles plied it now and then, carrying the indigenes for whom the journey home was not optional. In the 2000s the Gombe government under Governor Goje finally laid a tarred road. That made the trip easier, but the old monuments at the top were still lying idle.
The most remarkable of them is a cave the people call Wuro Titilo. Andrew Aliyu, the 64-year-old village head of Tula Wange, explained how it came to be. The ancestors saw that the hills around them were rock, and they used the rock for their safety. Living among the mountains gave them cover against enemies, he said. Then they went further. They bored into the very hill on which Tula Wange stands and made a cave beneath their own settlement.
The choice was careful, he said. Because the cave lay right under the village, people could reach it quickly in time of danger. From the outside it had only a small hollow opening for an entrance, so small that invaders would not notice it was there. Inside, it was carved out wide enough for several hundred people to live in, and a well was dug within it so that those hiding would have water for all their needs. While the women, children and others sheltered below, the warriors could fight knowing their people were safe.
The reporter went to see it, about 200 metres from the mountain gate of Tula. What should have been a national monument had become ordinary farmland. Weeds covered the small entrance and everything around it.
The people of Tula tell their past with pride. By their tradition, Tula was the only chiefdom in the whole of the old Tangale/Waja federation, the lands of present-day southern Gombe, that no enemy ever subdued in the days of wars between peoples. They also say that none of their wars was fought on Tula soil. Tula always went out to meet its enemies, the paper reports, and the one exception was the colonial war.
The battle they remember best was against the Emir of Misau, a town in present-day Bauchi State. Andrew Aliyu told it this way. The Tula warriors blocked the water source of the Misau army and poisoned it. They also had on their side the power of a war seer, a woman named Kwalleri. With her help, he said, the battle was won easily, and the Tula fighters beheaded the Emir of Misau and carried his head home to Tula. "This tells you the bravery and supremacy of Tula," he said. It remains, in their telling, the greatest victory in their history.
Some tellers go further and say Kwalleri fought that battle alone. In the account Andrew gave, she drove off the Misau army with her spiritual power, sending out bees and fire against them until the enemy lay dead on the field. This is a war legend, and it is told as one, but it shows how the people of Tula remember a woman as the heart of their most famous win.
Then the British arrived. By 1908, the paper says, neighbouring peoples had gone to the colonial Resident in Bauchi to complain that Tula was still raiding and harassing smaller groups. The colonial officers came to make peace among the communities. Tula refused every offer. Worse, in the eyes of the visitors, someone stole a white man's gun. The officers left, promising to come back for a war.
They came back. A Captain Calye, as the paper spells his name, led the colonial force that fought and conquered Tula. Andrew Aliyu believes his ancestors were simply sure of themselves. Tula had always had the upper hand over its enemies, and the people thought this fight would go the same way. It did not.
Even so, Tula kept an important place for a long time. Its three communities had a well-ordered royal setup, and the paper reports that Tula served as the headquarters of the Tangale/Waja Native Authority, covering what are now four local government areas of southern Gombe, from 1906 until 1970. The colonial period left buildings there: a secretariat headquarters, quarters for the resident officer, a dispensary used by missionaries, and a prison. The paper records that Chief Obafemi Awolowo, former Premier of the Western Region, was once held in that prison in the early 1960s.
But Tula's strength, its height and its hard roads, became its weakness. Other chiefdoms complained that the headquarters was too hard to reach. In 1966 the calls to move it grew louder. In 1970 the chiefdoms of Billiri, Kaltungo and Cham voted together to move the Native Authority headquarters to Billiri, which stands on the Gombe to Yola highway.
People said the chief of Tula Wange had once headed the traditional council of all Tangale/Waja. After the move, Tula found itself answering to Kaltungo, which had been just one chiefdom among the rest. "When the mighty fell," the paper put it, "the master became the servant." By 2001 Tula had won back its standing as a chiefdom of its own. The cave beneath Tula Wange, meanwhile, waits under the weeds.
