Lost history · early 1800s to present
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Drive halfway from Yola to Maiduguri and you reach a town where the signs on your right welcome you to Adamawa and the signs on your left welcome you to Borno. The road is the border. How it came to be the border is a story of stubborn petitioners and a judge's simple answer.
The road from Yola to Maiduguri is about 400 kilometres long. Roughly halfway, some 200 kilometres from Yola, it runs straight through the middle of a town called Uba. A visitor arriving there meets a crowd of signboards that seem to argue with each other. Every sign on the right welcomes you to Adamawa. Every sign on the left welcomes you to Borno.
"This road defines everything in this town," a resident told the Daily Trust. On one side is Uba-Borno, also called Uba-Askira. Cross the road and you are in what used to be Uba-Gongola and is now Uba-Adamawa, since Adamawa State was carved out of the old Gongola State.
It is one town under two state governments, sometimes run by rival parties. Long ago its two halves looked to two rival powers as well, the Sokoto Caliphate and the Borno empire. And yet the people live together as citizens of a single town. They share markets, schools, hospitals and even football teams.
The town's roots, according to an article by Yakubu Abdullahi Yakubu, who holds the title Wakilin Tarihi, the keeper of history, of Adamawa Emirate, reach back to the early nineteenth century, the time of the Sokoto jihad. A Fulani leader of the Mallawa clan, Ardo Muhammadu Mola, moved out of the Borno empire and settled at Uba. Over time the town came to hold Fulani, Marghi and several smaller peoples.
For many years Uba was a single district under the Adamawa Native Authority, with 38 wards and villages. Fulani men were appointed as its district heads. That changed in 1972, the present Emir of Uba (Borno), Alhaji Ismaila Mamza, told the paper. The Marghi, who are the majority across the wider district, asked that it should now be their turn, and the Lamido of Adamawa agreed. He appointed the emir's own father as the first Marghi head of the district. Most village heads, the emir said, were Marghi, except in Uba town itself.
Then came 1976, with the local government reform and the creation of new states. The old North Eastern State was split, and Borno and Gongola were among the new states. Uba was placed in Borno.
The two main peoples of the town felt very differently about it. The Marghi welcomed the move gladly, as a chance to step out from under Fulani dominance. The Fulani wanted to stay in Gongola, for much the same reason: they did not wish to be ruled by the Kanuri majority of Borno.
Petitions poured in to the Head of State, General Murtala Muhammed. A panel under Justice Irikife was set up to look into them. It recommended that all of Uba District stay in Borno, and that Shani, a district in Borno, should go to Gongola. Neither the people of Shani nor part of the Uba community would accept that.
What happened next, as the Wakilin Tarihi tells it, says a great deal about the people of Uba. They decided to send someone to the Head of State with their grievances every single week until they had an answer. Each week they bought a plane ticket to Lagos and sent a man with their petition. They took their campaign to the newspapers too, especially the New Nigerian and the Nigerian Standard. In the end, he wrote, the Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters saw that these were a determined people, and the government gave them another hearing.
A new committee came, led by Justice Mamman Nasir. It met the people at the school playground in Uba. Borno sent a large delegation in more than 30 vehicles. Gongola sent no one. The emir remembers a heated debate, with some speaking against the idea of a road as a border. But Justice Nasir settled it in a plain way: the highway through the town would be the line between the two states. It did not matter who got more; a clear mark on the ground was the easiest answer. About 30 wards and villages went to Borno and the remaining eight to Gongola.
The split ran through more than the land. Uba-Borno has since grown into an emirate with a first-class emir, while Uba-Adamawa remained a district. Two villages, Husara and Mufa, were also cut along the line, and each has two village heads.
The division brought some surprising gifts. Isa Galadima, who holds the title Galadima of Uba on the Adamawa side, said that both states built schools in their own halves, so that a town with one public primary school came to have six, and three secondary schools. Borno built a clinic and a general hospital that serves people well beyond the town; Adamawa added a second clinic. The old market fell on the Adamawa side, so Borno opened a grain market beside the road. It did so well that Adamawa opened a cattle market just across from it, and now the two weekly markets feed each other.
Football ties the town together best of all. Its two main clubs, Wakili FC and Arsenal FC, pick players and officials from both states. Their fields are on the Adamawa side. A player named Manga Yakubu recalled how fans of both halves would celebrate wins together along the very road that divides them.
Life on the line has its oddities. A car dealer, Ibrahim Chinanda, lives in Adamawa and crosses the road each morning to his office a few metres away in Borno, so he pays his state tax to Borno. Mechanics pay where their workshop stands. Each half must travel far to its own local government headquarters, Hong for Adamawa and Askira for Borno. Muhammad Mayas, a former administrator of the Adamawa side, remembered a judge in Uba-Borno who ordered the arrest of a groom from Uba-Adamawa. A man wanted back the money he had spent on a girlfriend who left him to marry the groom. The judiciary faulted the judge and moved him elsewhere. Still, Mayas said, shared history and marriages across the road have kept the peace.
