The Middle Belt’s Resistance Was Earned, Not Permitted — A Right of Reply

In response to Dele Farotimi’s claims on the deliberate un-Islamisation of the Middle Belt

By Adigidzi Oscar Kotso

A History That Had to Be Written
When my first essay in this series was published, the response from my Southern Nigerian friends stopped me. Not the debate, I expected debate. What I did not expect was people I have known for over three decades, who had sat across the table from me, saying they had never heard of the Eggon tribe. Not that they knew little about us. Not that they held a vague impression. They had never heard of us at all.

One friend assumed I was Tiv. Another said that of all the peoples I named, Berom, Taroh, Angas, Mwaghavul, Afizere, Tiv, Jukun, Atyap, Bura, Mada and Margi, the only one she had ever heard of was the Tiv. The Tiv are one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups so are difficult to erase. The rest of us, the smaller peoples of the Middle Belt, have simply vanished from the version of the North that most Southerners carry. From fellow Middle Belters came the opposite, deep recognition, the relief of seeing something finally written down that they had spent years trying to explain.

That invisibility matters. A claim about peoples most readers and listeners have never heard of is a claim that travels unchecked without friction, without correction, without the lived knowledge of those it concerns. That is precisely the condition in which Dele Farotimi’s assertion found its audience, and precisely why it demands a response rooted not in opinion but in the historical record.

I am Eggon, from the hills of Nasarawa State in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. I have spent much of my adult life explaining that speaking Hausa fluently does not make me Hausa. That argument belongs elsewhere. A different and more damaging claim now demands a response, that the peoples of the Middle Belt were not unconquered, but merely uncollected and preserved as a slave pool by imperial design.

In March 2026, Nigerian lawyer and human rights activist Dele Farotimi made that assertion in a widely circulated YouTube interview with Edmund Obilo. He argued:
^{_{‘What you call the Middle Belt today was largely un-Islamised deliberately, because if those populations had been Islamised, the empires would not have been able to keep them as slaves, and the slave trade was the most important trade sustaining the two Islamic empires in northern Nigeria’ (Farotimi, 2026).}}
Farotimi grounded this in Islamic jurisprudence, the distinction between Dar al-Harb, the land of unbelievers who could be enslaved, and Dar al-Islam, the land of believers who could not. His argument was that the Sokoto Caliphate and allied emirates deliberately withheld conquest to preserve a legal basis for enslavement. He cited military garrisons at Kontangora, Koton Karfe and Lafia as evidence of a deliberate perimeter strategy.

This is a serious argument. It deserves a serious response, not a dismissal. But the historical record does not support it, and the stakes of leaving it unanswered are real. To accept Farotimi’s framing is to transform the survival of Middle Belt peoples into a concession granted by empire. It is to recast our independence as someone else’s policy. That is not what happened.

What Farotimi Gets Right
^{Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what holds up.}

The economics of slavery were central to the Caliphate’s expansion. Paul Lovejoy has documented how the Sokoto Caliphate became one of the largest slave societies in the nineteenth-century world, with an estimated one to two and a half million enslaved people by 1900 (Lovejoy, 2000, p. 9). The jurisprudential framework Farotimi describes was real. Islamic law distinguished between those who had submitted to the faith and those who had not, and that distinction was routinely used to justify raiding non-Muslim communities (Isichei, 1983, p. 193). The garrison towns he names were indeed staging posts for slave raids into surrounding territories (Adeleye, 1971, p. 54). The raids were brutal, persistent and well-documented.

Where Farotimi goes wrong is in the leap from these facts to his conclusion. He observes that slave raiding occurred at the borders of the un-Islamised Middle Belt and infers that those borders were deliberately maintained. But this mistakes symptom for strategy. Raiding at the frontier is what empires do when they cannot advance further. It is not evidence of a decision to hold back.

What the Jihadists Actually Encountered
The rugged geography of the Central Highlands was not a policy decision. It was an obstacle. As the historian Samuel Nwabara observed, the Fulani empire controlled most of northern Nigeria except the Plateau province and the Berom, Ngas, Tiv, Jukun and Idoma ethnic groups (Nwabara, cited in Dudley, 1968, p. 14). Elizabeth Isichei documented how the Jos Plateau terrain systematically neutralised the Caliphate’s primary military advantage, cavalry, devastating on open plains but nearly useless on steep hillsides and against fortified rock settlements (Isichei, 1983, p. 195).

The Berom did not simply take cover behind the terrain. They engineered their defences. Botanical records confirm that Euphorbia desmondii, a densely armed cactus shrub growing up to five and a half metres tall, was planted on the Jos Plateau specifically to create village palisades impenetrable to horses (Burkill, 1985, cited in JSTOR Global Plants, 1968). These cactus walls created fortified hilltop settlements that Sokoto forces repeatedly failed to breach. This was not passive survival. It was active military engineering.

The Eggon retreated into the hills that bear our name and held them for the better part of a century. Those hills rising abruptly 600 to 1,000 feet from the surrounding plains, flanked by rivers prone to flash flooding and riddled with caves that served as natural fortified bunkers were not merely a refuge (Temple, 1919, p. 147). They were a sovereign territory. So completely did the three Eggon clans of Anzo, Eholo and Erro hold these heights that the Hausa-Fulani of Keffi and Lafia had no name for the people they could not reach. They called us Madan Dutse, Hill Mada, a label applied from the plains below, by forces that could see the heights but could not take them (SNP 7/971/1912, cited in Nasarawa Province Annual Report, 1911). A people so thoroughly unnamed by their would-be conquerors were not a managed reserve. They were beyond reach.

The Keffi Emirate, founded around 1800 by Abdu Zanga as a vassal to the Emir of Zaria, pressed from the west while the Nasarawa Emirate founded around 1838 by Umaru after his conquest of Afo tribal territory pressed from the south (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Nasarawa, 2024). Both flanked us. Neither broke through. The hills of Anzo, Eholo and Erro remained sovereign not as a concession, but as an unconquered fact until the British arrived in the early 1900s with Maxim guns capable of firing 500 to 600 rounds per minute, designed specifically to subdue hill communities that conventional infantry could not reach (Ellis, 1975, p. 85). The Fulani had no such weapon. It took an industrial killing machine, one the jihadists never possessed to finally end the independence of the Eggon hills. The historical record of the Caliphate’s campaigns against us is not a story of strategic restraint. It is a story of a century of costly, repeated failures (Isichei, 1983, p. 201; Meek, 1925, p. 78).

The academic record is unambiguous on this point. D.C. Dorward, whose fieldwork among the Eggon between 1974 and 1982 remains the most sustained scholarly study of Eggon society in the colonial period, wrote explicitly that the hills provided natural fortifications against slave raiders, who appear never to have ventured into the hills (Dorward, 1983, p. 4). Dorward further documents that prior to colonial conquest, the Eggon engaged in secular warfare primarily against external enemies, including Hausa slave raiders, defending the territorial integrity of their hill settlements against the same forces Farotimi claims were strategically holding back (Dorward, 1983, p. 4). That is not the behaviour of an empire managing a reserve. It is the behaviour of a raiding force repeatedly repelled at a frontier it could not cross.

What British firepower ultimately did to the Eggon hills is recorded in the oral traditions Dorward collected. When British forces attacked an Eggon settlement called Wulko, women and children sought refuge in a large cave the same caves that had served for generations as natural fortified bunkers against slave raiders. The British shot and threw explosives into the mouth of the cave, killing everyone inside (Dorward, 1983, p. 10). The caves that the Caliphate’s forces had never managed to breach were finally overcome not by cavalry or conventional assault, but by industrial explosives deployed against civilians. That is what ended Eggon sovereignty. Not a strategic decision by the Sokoto Caliphate. A massacre by the British Empire.

Neighbouring the Eggon to the north, the Mada and Nungu similarly held out. Colonial records are explicit on this point that only a few tribes within the Keffi province were not subdued by the Fulani. The Mada, Nungu and Mama were counted among those who maintained their resistance and independence until the arrival of British rule (Meek, 1925, p. 78). Lord Frederick Lugard himself, surveying the region in 1902, wrote that the Nasarawa country showed remains and ruins of deserted towns bearing witness to a century of slave-raiding and yet these peoples endured within it (Lugard, 1902, cited in Ochonu, 2008, p. 42). That endurance was not passivity. It was organised, generational defiance.

The Alago, who had governed themselves from Keana, Doma, Obi and Assakio since at least 800 AD, maintained governance structures so intact that the British chose to preserve rather than replace them on arrival (Temple, 1919, p. 22), proof that no earlier empire had dismantled them.

The Tiv: A System Designed to Be Unconquerable
The Tiv of the Benue valley present perhaps the most analytically compelling case against Farotimi’s thesis. As Paul and Laura Bohannan documented, the Tiv maintained a deliberately decentralised, segmentary lineage system, a social structure with no paramount chief to capture, no capital to sack and no single point of political surrender (Bohannan and Bohannan, 1953, p. 11). An empire cannot accept the submission of a people who have no mechanism for collective submission.

The Tiv also practised guerrilla withdrawal and scorched-earth tactics, destroying their own settlements rather than yielding them. The Benue valley was, in the words of more than one colonial observer, the region where the jihad simply stopped working (Isichei, 1983, p. 248). Not because the Caliphate judged the Tiv more useful as potential slaves than as subjects but because the Tiv had built their society, over generations, to be extraordinarily difficult to subdue.

The Warriors Beyond the Plateau
^{The resistance extended well beyond the hills.}
In the west, the Borgu kingdoms held off the Fulani jihad for the entire nineteenth century. The cost was real. In 1837, King Siru Kpera of Nikki led a Bariba contingent against the jihadists and was killed in battle, though Borgu itself did not fall (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Borgu, 2024). The Wasangari warrior class, historically committed to their indigenous religion, did not produce a single convert to Islam until 1920 nearly a century after the jihad’s launch (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Borgu, 2024). Borgu became an emirate not through Fulani conquest but through a British colonial administrative decree in 1900, when the Bussa chiefdom was converted into an emirate by the same imperial power simultaneously defeating the Sokoto Caliphate (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Borgu, 2024). The emirate title that Borgu carry today was imposed by London, not won by Sokoto. That the British had to invent an emirate structure for Borgu rather than inherit one is itself evidence that the Caliphate had never managed to establish one there.

To the east, the Bachama, the Bwatiye people of the Upper Benue valley knew their rivers and floodplains with an intimacy no invading force could match. They weaponised that knowledge to repel incursions from the Adamawa Emirate for decades (Nissen, 1968, p. 44). Geography was not backdrop for the Bachama. It was armament.

And standing behind all of these communities was the legacy of the Jukun and their Kwararafa Confederacy. The Kano Chronicle records that Kwararafa invaded Kano in 1653 and again in 1671, eventually taking the city, and that Kano and Katsina signed a mutual defence treaty specifically out of fear of further Kwararafa intervention (Isichei, 1976; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2024). The Caliphate’s caution around Jukun communities in the nineteenth century was not theological restraint or economic calculation. It was the institutional memory of what these people had done to Kano within living historical memory.

At the Niger-Benue confluence, the Igala kingdom described by historians as the most powerful state in North Central Nigeria between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, having previously defeated the Jukun, the Bini and the Hausa city-states (Okwoli, 1973, p. 19; Ukwede, 2003, p. 44) outmanoeuvred and survived the Jihad of Uthman dan Fodio in the 1840s. This was not the survival of a weak people granted a quiet corner. The Igala were a sovereign kingdom with centuries of military and diplomatic experience who absorbed the pressure of the jihad’s advance and held their capital at Idah. The Fulani jihad reached the Niger-Benue confluence and could go no further. Attah Ameh Oboni, the Igala king who ruled in the 1940s and 1950, faced with British annexation in the 1950s, chose death rather than deposition, the final expression of a political culture that did not bend to external authority (Okwoli, 1973, p. 87). That culture was not formed by being permitted to exist.

The Bassa-Nge, a Nupe-speaking people driven from their homeland by Fulani raids and the demands of the Bida emirate, refused conversion and moved southward, eventually settling along the Niger at what is now Bassa Local Government Area of Kogi State (Isichei, 1983, p. 217). Their migration is itself evidence of what the Caliphate’s expansion produced at its frontiers, not a strategically managed population of potential slaves, but a landscape of fractured communities, some subdued, some fled and some still fighting. That is not an empire executing a deliberate containment policy. It is an empire straining at the limits of its reach.

The Igede, a distinct people of Benue State often mistakenly grouped with the Idoma, offer a different kind of evidence, survival through migration and cultural persistence. Moving through Igboland into the heavily forested southeast of what is now Benue State, they maintained their language, identity and governance structures through every upheaval (Ochonu, 2008, p. 57). Their territory was simply beyond the effective reach of the Caliphate’s savannah-suited cavalry. Geography and culture were, for the Igede, mutually reinforcing shields.

The Idoma of the Benue valley present a more complex picture, and that complexity is itself instructive. Oral tradition and the historical record confirm that the Idoma were known as warriors and hunters, and that the greater part of Idomaland remained inaccessible to outsiders well into the 1920s (Meek, 1925, p. 91). Their nineteenth-century warrior masquerade, Oglinye, was not ceremonial in origin, it celebrated men who had taken enemy heads in battle, and its dancers were formally integrated into the community’s system of social control (Okpeh, 2005, p. 33). These were not the practices of a people consigned to passivity. It is also true that two Idoma states, Doma and Bagaji, became satellite vassals of Zazzau, subdued by military defeat and strategic accommodation (Adeleye, 1971, p. 68). Farotimi’s argument would treat this as evidence of deliberate Caliphate restraint elsewhere. The honest reading is different, the Caliphate broke through where it could and failed where it could not. Doma and Bagaji fell but the rest of Idomaland did not. That unevenness reflects the limits of imperial power, not its strategic generosity.

The Evidence Written Into the Names
Perhaps the most striking evidence against Farotimi’s thesis is one he himself invokes, the Koton Karfe garrison, without apparently knowing what the name means or how it came to be given.

The town was originally called Igu by its indigenous inhabitants, the Ebira people. The jihadist forces renamed it after their campaign to take it failed. Koton Karfe means ‘powerful land’, a name given in acknowledgement of defeat (Sani, 2007, p.14). The name the garrison now carries is a monument to a failure, not a policy. The Ebira fought sustained campaigns against the jihadists for decades. Between 1865 and 1880, under the warlord Achigidi Okino, they battled jihadist forces from the emirates of Bida and Ilorin (Sani, 2007, p. 22). Their hilly terrain, like the cactus walls of the Berom and the escarpments of the Eggon, neutralised the cavalry advantage. The jihadists raided at the margins of Ebira territory for decades and could not advance.

Read together, the names of Farotimi’s three garrison towns form a complete political taxonomy. Kontangora derives from kwanta gora, ‘lay down your gourds’, aconqueror’s command to the defeated. Lafia means ‘peace’, a pacified territory. Koton Karfe means ‘powerful land’, an unconquered frontier. The empire named its victories after victories and its defeats after defeats. The map of names is the map of power. And the map of power has a clear edge.

One more name belongs in this reading. Nasarawa Eggon, the ancestral heart of my people carries the word ‘Nasarawa’ not because we chose it, but because it was placed there by emirate forces that reached the foot of our hills and went no further. It marks their ambition, not their achievement. The hills of Anzo, Eholo and Erro were never theirs to name. We are still here. The name they gave our town remembers them. The hills remember us.

Raiding Is Not Restraint
Farotimi’s argument conflates two fundamentally different things, the Caliphate’s intention and its outcome.

There is no serious dispute that the Caliphate intended to expand. It was an expansionist empire with a religious mandate for conquest (Last, 1967, p. 9). There is also no dispute that where expansion failed, raiding continued. These two facts of expansionist intent and sustained raiding at the frontier are entirely consistent with a third fact that Farotimi’s narrative cannot accommodate, the Caliphate simply could not conquer these communities (Lovejoy, 2000, p. 197).

Raiding is what empires do at the edges of their power. You extract what you can from the periphery when you cannot hold the centre. The garrison towns at Kontangora, Koton Karfe and Lafia were not forward positions in a deliberate containment strategy. They were the furthest points of effective control, the line beyond which the empire’s military reach became too costly to extend.

To say that the Middle Belt was “deliberately” left un-Islamised is to grant the Caliphate a strategic composure and a degree of control over these communities that the evidence flatly contradicts. It is to read a failure of power as an exercise of it. It transforms the people who died defending the Eggon hills, who built cactus walls on the Plateau, who burned their own homesteads rather than surrender them into passive objects of someone else’s policy. They were not. They were the policy’s obstacle. And they won.

Why the Distinction Matters
This is not merely a historiographical disagreement. It has direct consequences for how the Middle Belt understands and presents itself.

A region that survived because an empire permitted it to survive is, in some sense, still defined by that empire’s choices. A region that survived because its peoples organised, fought and repeatedly defeated the most powerful military force in nineteenth-century West Africa has a fundamentally different relationship to its own past. As Moses Ochonu has argued, the Middle Belt’s political consciousness is rooted precisely in this memory of organised resistance, not acquiescence (Ochonu, 2008, p. 3).

The modern Middle Belt political identity, contested and imperfect as it is, draws its meaning from the memory of resistance, the cactus walls, the guerrilla archers, the hill fortresses and the unconquerable lineage systems. Farotimi’s argument, however well-intentioned, would hollow out that foundation and replace it with a narrative of strategic abandonment. That is a significant thing to do to a people’s history, and it should not go unanswered.

There is also a risk of misappropriation. A claim that the Middle Belt’s non-Islamisation was a Caliphate policy rather than a Caliphate failure can too easily become ammunition for those who wish to minimise the violence of that history, or to imply that the region’s communities were in some sense accommodated rather than threatened. The historical record does not support that reading. The raids were real. The casualties were real. What was also real was the resistance that made total conquest impossible.

Conclusion: We Are Here Because We Fought
Dele Farotimi’s broader point that the Middle Belt’s identity and its relationship to the Caliphate demands serious public attention is well taken. He is right that this history is under-discussed and frequently misunderstood. Where his argument fails is in the specific claim that non-Islamisation was a deliberate imperial strategy rather than the result of sustained, organised and costly indigenous resistance.

The Caliphate raided where it could not rule. It ruled where it could not be stopped.
In the Eggon hills, on the Jos Plateau, in the Benue valley, at the Niger-Benue confluence and in the plains of Borgu, it was stopped not by theological restraint or economic calculation, but by the organised, ingenious resistance of people who refused to be absorbed.

I am Eggon. I speak Hausa because of the weight of history, trade, colonialism, urbanisation and missionary priorities. I do not speak it because my ancestors submitted. They did not submit. The hills remember what they did instead.

We are not here because anyone permitted us to be. We are here because we fought to remain.

References
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Adigidzi Oscar Kotso is a child of Eggon heritage on a mission to document, preserve and champion
the identity and history of Nigeria’s Middle Belt minority peoples before the story disappears.