The Killing in Eggonland: Wulko, 1912 and What Britain Did Next.

Adigidzi Oscar Kotso
A child of Eggon heritage | Part Three of the Being Eggon Series

I am Eggon. That is not a disclaimer. It is an orientation and it is the same orientation I have written from in everything that precedes this.
I write this knowing that Campbell’s grave still stands at ancestral Wulko Village, in the Eggon Hills above what is today Nasarawa Eggon Local Government Area of Nasarawa State, a heap of stones at Kilometre 14 on the Akwanga–Lafia Highway. To reach it, you turn off at Wowyen, the neighbouring village at Kilometre 16 on the same highway, and travel approximately four kilometres inside. It is an unmarked pile of stones in the ancestral ground of my people, declaring by its very presence that a European died here and that the killing was answered. There is no monument for the women and children who died in the cave on a mountain cliff overlooking ancestral Wulko Village. There is no marker there. There is no grave for Mashi Ekuembi, the only survivor, who walked out of that cave with a baby on her back and then died of what she had seen. There is no memorial for the 179 Eggon people whose deaths a Colonial Office official confirmed in writing at Kew, in passing, in a letter clarifying a headcount.
In the two essays that precede this one, I argued that the Eggon held their hills against the Caliphate for the better part of a century, that Keffi pressed from the west and Nasarawa from the south and neither broke through. I argued that we were not a slave pool preserved by imperial design. We were unconquered. That argument was about the nineteenth century. This essay is about what happened next when the British arrived with Maxim guns and what those guns were used for.
What there is, is memory. Oral history, preserved across four generations, still naming names at Wulko in 2003 when a researcher sat with M. Namo and others and wrote down what they said. And there is the archive, fragmentary, euphemistic, bureaucratic, but legible between its own lines to anyone who knows how to read what colonial correspondence refuses to say directly.

I am going to say it directly.

_{A note for readers encountering this history for the first time: In May 1912, a British mining engineer named Campbell entered the Eggon Hills of what is today Nasarawa State, Central Nigeria, to survey land for tin prospecting. He had entered territory the colonial administration had formally acknowledged was not under British control. He placed survey beacons near Eggon farms, uprooted crops, and ignored formal warnings from the elders of Wulko village. He was killed by an Eggon man named Alaku Awazi. The British colonial government responded with a military punitive patrol, led by Captain Hopkinson, which destroyed Wulko and neighbouring villages, seized the community’s stored food, and killed 179 Eggon people, a figure confirmed in writing by the Colonial Office in London. A group of women and children who had taken shelter in a cave on a mountain cliff overlooking ancestral Wulko Village were killed when the soldiers threw explosives into the cave. Only one woman, Mashi Ekuembi and her baby survived. They both died shortly afterwards. This essay tells that story from the Eggon side, using colonial archives, peer-reviewed scholarship and oral history preserved across four generations at Wulko.}

I. Our Hills Were Not Empty

The Eggon Hills were not a frontier when Campbell arrived. That word, frontier, is one of the empire’s most persistent lies. It implies an edge, a limit, a space not yet organised. Our hills were organised. Deeply, intricately, spiritually organised, by a system of governance that the British had neither the patience nor the vocabulary
to understand and so classified as primitive and moved past.
My people, Wulko Village of Eggon Eholo, governed themselves through the Ashim, which was simultaneously a religion, a legal code, a political institution, and a covenant with the earth. The Mo’andakpo Ashim, the council of elders held executive, legislative and judicial authority. The Adan Ashim presided as high priest. The Adan Ubin, the father of the land held final authority over the covenant between the people and Ubin, the earth deity, one of the specific sacred presences within the cosmological framework already described in this series created by the supreme Ahogben. Every village, including Wulko, maintained its own Anva Ashim, a sacred grove that was the ritual heart of that covenant (Dorward, 1984, p.85; Alumbugu et al., 2025).
This is not folklore. This is governance. Decisions about war and peace, about land use, about punishment, about marriage all of it flowed through institutions with defined roles, succession rules and legitimacy grounded in the spiritual authority of the ancestors (Dorward, 1984, p. 85). When the Mo’andakpo of Wulko sent a warning to Campbell, they were not asking him nicely. They were issuing a lawful notice from a functioning sovereign institution. They had the authority to do so. They exercised it. He ignored them. We were in the hills, not because the hills were all we deserved, but because the lowlands had been taken. The nineteenth-century jihad of Usman Dan Fodio drove Fulani emirate power across what is now Nasarawa State, and the peoples of the middle ground, my people among them, retreated to the granite heights where cavalry could not follow. As I have documented in the preceding essays, the Keffi Emirate pressed from the west and the Nasarawa Emirate from the south. Both flanked us. Neither broke through. The hills were not poverty, they were strategy and they were sovereignty. And in those hills, we farmed.
_{Farming was not incidental to Eggon life in 1912. It was the covenant itself. To destroy a crop was to desecrate the relationship between the living and the earth that sustained them.}
Locust beans, which provided protein and seasoning across the dry months. These were not abstract commodities. They were the physical expression of the covenant between the people and Ubin. And 1911 had already been a hard year. Harvests had failed. The 1912 planting season was arriving with uncertain rains. The farms that Campbell’s survey beacons threatened were not fields of surplus. They were the margin between life and famine. We know this, because a year later, the Resident of Nasarawa was writing letters about the famine at Wulko (NAK 10/339p, 1913; Ayuba, 2007, p. 78). The archive confirms what our oral history preserved.

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