When the Andalusian diplomat and explorer León el Africano wrote his observations on the kingdom of Bornu in the 16th century, he indicated that “its king only has as income what he obtained from the looting and murder of his neighbors, who are his enemies.” Then he was referring to the monarch of a huge kingdom that held empire status for almost a thousand years, a formidable extension of land that came to be made up of 12 tributary kingdoms. and that it maintained its hegemony in what is now northern Nigeria and Cameroon, parts of Niger and southern Lebanon, and almost all of what we know today as Chad. The full name of the empire in its golden years was Kanem-Bornu, which for many here is like the Spanish Empire here.
It is worth understanding from now on that in Africa, in a similar way as in any other part of the world, the history of the peoples is remembered and perpetuated in one way or another among the individuals who inherited it; Just as a Spaniard today could sing praises for Blas de Lezo or a Mongol for Genghis Khan, not a few Malians proudly remember that King Mansa Musa existed or, in this case, Not a few inhabitants of northern Nigeria and parts of Niger and Cameroon remember the golden days of the Kanem-Bornu empire. This memory of the past that gets stuck to us could be considered as a common element shared by all peoples, like bedtime stories.
Bornu, Borno
When talking about Boko Haram terrorist group, immediately jumps the spring of jihadism and its link with Islam. But we would have to open our sights to find other motivations that govern their followers, such as the economic factors that lead young people to enlist or the intermittent memory of an empire that remains in the thoughts of the group’s majority ethnic group.
The kanuri, also called kanembu, emerged in the mid-ninth century, when waves of Berber and Arab nomads from the north entered the Chad basin and began to associate with the black populations that already inhabited it, thus creating a mixed-race community which came to be known under this title. It was they who established a new kingdom in the region, initially known as Kanem and which would later grow to adopt the territories of Bornu. And they were among the first to embrace the Islamic faith in the 11th century, thus creating, through ethnic miscegenation and the introduction of a new monotheistic religion, the structure of this kingdom that would not fall definitively until the years of colonization. Of course, the kanuri were not the only inhabitants of this extensive empire, because the Chad basin was already a hive of peculiar life at that time and it was common for the kanuri to make war with neighboring communities.
It is said that Kanem-Boru based its commercial relations on the sale of ivory, animals and tin in exchange for fabrics, weapons and horses, and centuries later began an exchange of salt, leather and cotton for perfumes, gold and silk brought by Europeans and Arabs from the trade routes that were being established between the Atlantic coast and the Sahel. The sale of slaves was also fruitful for them. As Leo Africanus continued to explain, the monarch of the kanembu led a series of seasonal raids in which he attacked the kotoko and the bulala, but also the Hausa who are still his neighbors today: “The king summons merchants from Barbary to provide him with horses that he barters for slaves (…). With these horses, he would mount an expedition against his enemies and make the merchants wait until his return. (…). When he returned from the expedition, he sometimes brought enough slaves for the merchants, but other times, they were forced to wait for the following year because the king did not have enough slaves to pay for them.
The hangover of this kingdom can still be glimpsed today. In Nigeria, the northern state of Borno owes its name to him, just as the Kanuri currently make up the ethnic majority in this area. And if we were to grant that history has an impact on the present, it should not be underestimated that Boko Haram was created in Borno State by individuals of the Kanuri ethnic group. These raids even continue, today categorized as “kidnappings”, with motorcycles acting as horses and where the followers of Boko Haram, bastard heirs of Kanem-Bornu, kidnap hundreds of girls to transform them into their wives (sex slaves). It is also no coincidence that Boko Haram’s areas of influence in south-eastern Niger coincide with areas occupied by ethnic Kanuri Nigeriens, nor that an unwritten agreement between Niger and Boko Haram is rumored to allow terrorists to escape the Nigerian justice crossing the border and hiding in the Kanuri territories (in a similar way to how the ETA members hid in the French Basque Country).
The kanuri, innocent and designated
But not all the kanuri belong to Boko Haram, as is evident, in the same way that not all the Basques belonged to ETA. In reality, most of the kanuri do not belong to Boko Haram and suffer in their flesh the bite of religious fanaticism. Ibrahim Maiduguri is a trader of the Kanuri ethnic group who lives in the northern state of Yobe, neighboring Borno, and confirms that “Boko Haram kidnaps human beings and sells them like cattle.” It is he who recalls that one of the main intentions of the terrorist group is to expel all Western influence from northern Nigeria, thus maintaining a category of own traditional values and sustained by religion and cultural bias that characterizes the inhabitants of his area. .
Boko Haram’s discourse has many resources: they force hunger on families to call to arms, they recite the Koran, but they also accuse European colonization of dividing the Kanem-Bornu empire for their own benefit (conveniently omitting that the internal struggles were the main cause of its collapse). The religious background of Kanem-Bornu has also revealed itself as a useful ally for jihadist propaganda.thanks to the creation of an accentuated feeling of victimhood where the new leaders they bear the responsibility of recreating the glory lost at the hands of the conqueror, Christian and Western. This Islam-nationalism hybrid to pit recruits against Christianity and Western values allows Boko Haram to set up the illusion of a double fight, designed to feel religious but also patriotic. echoes of the mai Dunama Dibbalemi (13th century), the first king of Kanem-Bornu to establish Islam as the official religion of the empire and responsible for launching a devastating jihad against neighboring kingdoms. His name reoccupies the lips, and he mai Dunama is today a benchmark among Boko Haram fighters, an ideal example to underline this cocktail of tradition and religion that is so useful to them.
Thus, they rely on a pre-established discourse while their actions demonstrate the opposite, since their attempts to assassinate members of the Kanuri royalty have been repeated, while their strategy reveals an interest in configuring a new social and political universe for the inhabitants of the areas. that dominate They make up an ideological homunculus that pecks at Salafist fundamentalism, local frustrations against Nigerian politics and a historical mist reinterpreted à la carte, using for their purposes the same violent methods that have been used in the territory for centuries.
The immediate result has been further discrimination by other Nigerian ethnicities against the Kanuri. In the presidential elections that took place last February, the campaign of harassment and demolition suffered by the APC vice-presidential candidate, Kashim Shettima, was significant when broad sectors of society accused him, not only of being affiliated with Boko Haram , but to be one of the leaders of the group. A campaign of bullying and demolition that Shettima blamed on his Kanuri status and that greatly damaged the results of the APC in the northern Nigerian states (excluding, of course, Borno State and its Kanuri majority).
Dots remain to be tied up for centuries. Grain after grain, chipping away at the jihadist mountain, there is no doubt that the Kanuri’s dissatisfactions will serve Boko Haram’s strategy as long as they are not dealt with properly by the Nigerian government, or whoever is charged with fixing it. Blaming Boko Haram’s existence solely on the Kanuri’s past, or on the Kanuri as a whole, may seem rash, but there is certainly a strong nationalist and traditionalist component to the recruitment strategies of this deadly cluster.
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