Azaghvana E-Book 2003 - Flipbook - Page 64
survey of the Gwoza hills, the Gwoza LGA was divided into three districts, but we will learn
more about that in due course. At this point it is only to highlight the fact that the Christian
elite of the eastern plain felt politically dominated by the Muslim elite of the western plain of
the Gwoza LGA. The following example illustrates this, but also shows that the system of
traditional rulers being of mainly Islamic denomination, typical for northern Nigeria, was at
that time still capable of containing potential conflict between Christians and Muslims.
The emir of Gwoza, who was a Lamang man from Hambagda (Hiɗkala), seldom came to the
eastern plains, only visiting if there was a conflict that could not be resolved by his village
heads. One such conflict was when the Muslims of Barawa stopped buying meat from the
Christian butchers there, claiming the meat was not slaughtered the correct way and was
therefore impure. The Christian butchers contested this claim, but without success, and as a
result the Christians of Barawa responded by refusing to buy meat from the far fewer Muslim
butchers. Due to the Christian majority which then existed in Barawa, the Muslim butchers
suffered the greater loss. The conflict almost triggered civil unrest, and the emir had to come
to appease the local population. This highlights the overall sharpening of controversies
between Muslims and Christians in the Gwoza LGA, which had become more fundamentalist
in tone since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre.
Rise of Islamic conversion in the hills from 2005 onwards
As already mentioned, there was a rise in conversion to Islam in the hills, especially of
younger men who were returning from Maiduguri or Yola to visit their families. I was talking
to some of them in 2005 and discovered that they held quite strong views about the proper
way to behave and dress. As previously stated, I had also raised the issue of inheritance, at
which they told me that they would be prepared to give up their rights for the sake of their
belief, should their fathers not convert to Islam. They also appeared quite intolerant towards
other religions, or even people with no specific religious convictions. They found the latter
particularly upsetting, but that didn't worry me at the time. These young men drew a lot of self
respect from their new convictions, and although they took notice of my liberal views, they
adamantly maintained that there was only one correct and acceptable answer to it all, which
was their version of Islam.
As I worked out later, it was the Izla version of Islam that had begun to take over as the main
global denomination in the hills, at least in areas where there wasn’t an existing Christian
majority, which was the case in most parts of Dgwheɗe. In 1996 we had carried out a little
unpublished survey in the ward of Dzga. This survey concluded that of the 162 households of
Dzga, only 10% were Christian while 30% were Muslim, and the rest: 60%, still practiced
traditional religion. It appeared to me that the balance of 1996 had shifted quite massively
over the last ten years, and that there were now many more followers of Islam in the hills.
This trend was presumably supported by the fact that it was older people in particular who
remained traditional, while younger men and women increasingly converted to radical Islam,
and quite a few of the traditional elders had died over the last ten years.
It’s not possible to tell how things were in the other areas of the hills, but we assume that a
similar trend was happening elsewhere. When I visited Divili in the mid-1990s I saw that this
small community on top of the Zelidva spur had quite a strong Christian church. This might
have been to do with the geographical isolation, but we wonder whether it still pertained in
2005. On the other hand Gvoko, which was not isolated at all despite being in the hills, had a
historically large Christian majority that was still thriving. The Guduf saddle also still had a
fairly high population density. Unfortunately we don’t know what the proportions in terms of
religious affiliation were in Guduf. The statistics on this are not only very sparse but also
rather unreliable. We know, for example, that the 1991 and 2006 Nigerian census excluded
ethnicity and religion from its questionnaire.
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