The ceremony held last Wednesday in Kano to inaugurate and showcase the newly refurbished Gidan Palmer is an indication that Kano is finally coming to terms with its past. After all, history, per se, is the totality of our life experience, the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly. Gidan Palmer was built in 1914 as an office for the British colonial resident and was first occupied by the legendary Herbert Richmond Palmer. The building was situated within the Government House complex and was in use until the country’s independence in 1960.
Herbert Palmer was a colonial officer, one of the first to be assigned to the vast kingdoms of the far north. Palmer joined the colonial service immediately after graduating in 1904, a year after the British had occupied Kano, and was posted there as Assistant Resident, also overseeing Katsina Province. He was the up-and-doing type and worked diligently to consolidate British rule in both Katsina and Kano. In doing so, he also initiated significant institutional changes within the Katsina and Daura Fulani ruling Houses.
In Katsina, he facilitated the replacement of the Dallazawa Fulani rulers in 1906 by appointing Muhammadu Dikko, a titleholder with no royal ties, as Emir of Katsina. Muhammadu Dikko, the Durbin Katsina and District Head of Mani, was installed on the throne of Katsina, displacing Sarki Yero Dan Musa, whose dynasty had held the throne since the Fulani Jihad. Previously, Palmer had struggled to deal with Sarki Yero and, perhaps due to the urgent circumstances of the period, recommended his replacement with Dikko, whom he considered more cooperative with their demands.
In the same year, a similar situation occurred in nearby Daura, where Palmer replaced the Fulani emir, Murnai, with Sarki Musa dan Nuhu from a rival Hausa lineage. To this day, both in Katsina and Daura, the ruling houses established by Palmer still subsist. He also contemplated attempting such dynastic changes in Kano, but for the sagacity of Emir Muhammadu Abbas, who was astute enough to remain calm despite deliberate provocations by the colonial authorities. Palmer became a legend among the colonial officers of those times for his zeal in implementing the Lugardian concept of Indirect Rule. He was one of the longest-serving colonial officers.
He was considered capable and trusted enough to serve in the ‘holiest of holy’, a phrase among the colonial officers referring to the big kingdoms of Borno, Kano and Sokoto. He arrived here as an Assistant Resident, became a Resident in Borno and Kano and elsewhere, rising to the post of Lieutenant-General of Northern Nigeria, effectively the governor of the region. He was reputed to have strengthened the power and authority of the traditional rulers. He resisted initiatives that he believed would undermine their authority, for example, by fending off missionaries from their kingdoms.
Palmer was a scholar who deliberately set out to study the culture, history, and languages of the people he presided over. He authored scholarly works on the history and literature of the Hausa, Fulani, and Kanuri peoples. He translated the Kano Chronicles into English, a book written in Arabic in the 1880s by Malam Barka, which listed the Kano emirs stretching back to the 10th Century and retold events that occurred during their reigns. He was the principal promoter of establishing the first government teachers’ college in the north in 1922 in Katsina, where many of our independence leaders, including Sardauna Ahmadu Bello, Kashim Ibrahim, and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, received their higher education. During his residency in Borno, he produced the Sudanese Memoirs and the Bornu Sahara and Sudan. These volumes contained studies on the ethnology of Western Sudan, primarily focusing on Borno Province, which he oversaw. Writing these books involved a lot of travelling to obtain first-hand information, both within Nigeria, Chad and Sudan.
I found it fitting that the Kano State Government renovated this building and made it accessible. I recall that the Borno State Government had trodden a similar path many years ago when it renovated Rabeh’s Fort in Dikwa. Rabeh Ibn Fadlallah was the infamous Sudanese warlord who invaded and occupied Borno from 1893 to 1900. He murdered the Shehu, Kyari El-Kanemi, and destroyed Kukawa, the capital. He established his new capital in Dikwa and from there unleashed a reign of unmitigated terror on the people of Borno that lasted seven years. Unfortunately for him, the opening days of the 20th Century coincided with the coming of the European colonialists scrambling for territories in Africa. In a fierce battle, Rabeh was killed by the French in Kousseri, now in the Cameroun Republic. His son and successor, Fadlallah, was killed in Gujba, leading finally to the subdivision of Borno between the French and the British colonial powers.
Coincidentally, I happen to be reading a small book, Labarin Maimaina na Jega Sarkin Askira (The Story of Maimaina na Jega Sarkin Askira). Maimaina was closely associated with the British occupation of Kano in 1903. He was the local sent to Kano in 1902 by Lord Lugard to stealthily assess the capabilities of the Kano army before a decision was made to invade. He is the great-grandfather of the first-class Emir of Askira in Borno State. His history is riveting, as it had consequences not only for Kano but also for Borno. We will continue the discussion next week.