by Adigidzi Oscar Kotso
Introduction:
Why I Had to Write This;
I did not set out to write an essay about language. I was pushed into it by the weight of repetition.
Over the years, in classrooms, hostels, offices and social gatherings far from home, I have spent a lifetime performing the same ritual of explaining that while I speak Hausa fluently, I am not Hausa. I am Eggon. Each time I say this, I am met with a predictable cocktail of surprise, disbelief or polite confusion.
“But you speak Hausa,” people insist, as though a lingua franca alone determines ancestry. As an ethnic Eggon man from Nasarawa State, born in Jos, Plateau State but educated largely in Southern Nigeria particularly Lagos and Enugu, Hausa follows me like a label I did not choose. In those spaces, it announces me before I speak English, assigning me an identity that does not belong to me. Over time, this misrecognition becomes more than an irritation, it becomes erasure.
This essay is both personal and analytical. It explains how many indigenous peoples of Northern Nigeria came to adopt Hausa as a common language without becoming Hausa themselves. It argues that Hausa dominance in Northern Nigeria is the product of trade, religion, state power, colonial administration and missionary activity, not ethnicity, and that speaking Hausa often masks, rather than reveals the identities of minority peoples like the Eggon.
Childhood, Language, and the City of Jos
I grew up in Jos, a city often described as a meeting point between Northern and Southern Nigeria.
My childhood Jos was a true product of colonial and post-colonial urbanisation. Founded and expanded through tin mining, missionary activities, education and civil service, the city drew people from across Northern Nigeria and beyond. Migration, not ancestry, shaped its social life.
Jos became home to speakers of more than fifty indigenous languages from the Plateau and surrounding regions. Among the most prominent were Berom, Taroh, Angas, Mwaghavul, and Afizere. Alongside them lived significant populations of Tiv, Jukun, Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa speakers, drawn by schools, government offices, commerce and industry. In theory, this diversity should have produced a richly multilingual public space. In practice, it produced a hierarchy.
Despite its extraordinary linguistic plurality, Hausa dominated public life in Jos. It was the language of the playground, the market, public transport and everyday interaction between strangers. English was the language of the classrooms, textbooks and official documents. Indigenous languages, no matter how numerous their speakers were largely confined to private spaces like homes, family gatherings and village visits. Jos taught me early that urbanisation does not produce linguistic equality. It produces a shared tongue of convenience and in Northern Nigeria, that language has long been Hausa. From childhood, I learned to move between worlds. Hausa belonged outside.
English belonged to school. Eggon belonged to home.
The Mothers Who Resisted
That distinction mattered, and it did not happen by accident. My ability to speak Eggon today is largely due to two women, my grandmother and my mother. My grandmother lived with us for a significant part of my childhood. She spoke neither Hausa nor English. To communicate with her was to inhabit the Eggon world.
My mother reinforced this discipline. While Hausa surrounded us outside, she insisted that we speak Eggon indoors. When we responded in Hausa, she corrected us. When we struggled for words in Eggon, she waited. That “waiting” was an act of preservation. In many homes, parents did not insist, and Hausa replaced indigenous languages within a single generation. Because of them, I grew up bilingual, though unevenly so. Hausa came effortlessly. Eggon required care. That imbalance was not a personal failure. It was historical pressure.
The Architecture of Dominance
To understand why the Eggon and our neighbours speak Hausa, one must look at history, not just geography. Before Hausa became dominant, Northern Nigeria was defined by deep linguistic and political plurality. Hundreds of ethnic groups maintained distinct languages, governance systems,
and cultural institutions (Blench, 2019). Groups such as the Eggon, Tiv, Jukun, Berom, Atyap, Angas, Bura, Mada, Margi, and Nupe lived alongside one another without a shared linguistic hierarchy.
These societies also possessed their own indigenous political institutions. Leadership structures varied with some centralised, others segmentary, but they were not emirate systems. Among the Eggon, authority rested with the Aren Eggon. In Jos, the Berom traditional ruler is the Gbong Gwom Jos. The Tiv are led by the Tor Tiv. Among the Jukun of Wukari, authority is vested in the Aku Uka.
These titles are not symbolic borrowings from Hausa or Fulani emirate structures; they reflect indigenous political traditions that predate colonial rule. The Middle Belt was not a politically empty land waiting to be governed by emirs. It had its own rulers, institutions and hierarchies.
The spread of Hausa was driven by three main engines:
1) Trade
Hausa did not spread through conquest alone. It spread through usefulness. As Hausa-speaking city-states such as Kano, Katsina and Zaria grew into major commercial hubs, they drew traders from surrounding communities. Hausa became the language of exchange, negotiation, and safe passage
(Lovejoy, 1980). At this stage, Hausa functioned largely as a second language. People traded in Hausa and returned home to their own tongues. But economic centrality carries cultural weight. A language that opens markets eventually enters daily life.
2) Religion
The spread of Islam deepened this shift. While Arabic remained the sacred language of scripture, Hausa became the language through which Islamic teachings were explained to ordinary people (Last, 1967). Religious instruction, moral guidance and legal reasoning increasingly operated in Hausa. Over time, Hausa acquired moral authority. To learn, to belong and to be guided religiously
often required knowledge of the language.
3) State Power
The Sokoto Caliphate transformed Hausa into an administrative language. Governance, taxation and courts operated in Hausa, regardless of ethnic identity (Last, 1967). Even under Fulani-led emirates, Hausa persisted because it was already deeply rooted in urban and commercial networks. Authority changed hands but the language did not. This continuity further entrenched Hausa as a regional lingua franca rather than the exclusive language of a single ethnic group. British colonial rule later reinforced this hierarchy through indirect administration. Hausa became the language of government, education and mass communication (Lugard, 1922). By the mid-twentieth century,
Hausa dominance was no longer a matter of choice. It was structural. By the time I was born, this hierarchy felt natural. No one questioned why Hausa filled every public space around me.
The “Hausa-isation” of the Cross
Christian missionary activity reinforced Hausa’s dominance in subtle but lasting ways. Faced with immense linguistic diversity, missionaries often prioritised translating the Bible into Hausa rather than into dozens of smaller languages (Sanneh, 1989). Church services, hymns and literacy
programmes operated in Hausa, linking faith and education to a language not native to many congregations.
This had consequences beyond worship. It reshaped naming practices and public perception. Many indigenous non- Hausa Northerners adopted Hausa biblical names that blurred ethnic boundaries.
Prominent examples include Generals Yakubu Gowon and Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma whose names Yakubu is the Hausa form of Jacob, are Angas from Plateau State and Jukun from Taraba State respectively. Also, General Christopher Musa whose name Musa, is the Hausa form of Moses is an Atyap man from Southern Kaduna. Their names, though biblical and rendered through Hausa, often lead to assumptions of Hausa ethnicity.
Language and religion merged in the public imagination. Minority identities became linguistically invisible. For smaller communities such as the Eggon, this shift accelerated language loss. When schooling, church life and administration operate in Hausa, indigenous languages retreat into domestic space and sometimes disappear altogether.
The Tiv Exception
The Tiv of Benue State, however, represent an important exception to this general pattern. Due largely to their population size. Tiv are widely regarded as one of the five most populous ethnic groups in Nigeria and they were able to resist the complete linguistic displacement experienced by many smaller Northern communities. Christian missionary activity among the Tiv led to the early
translation of the Bible into the Tiv language, providing a strong foundation for literacy, worship, and education in Tiv rather than Hausa. In addition, the establishment and growth of the NKST Church (Nongu u Kristu u i Ser sha Tar), a predominantly Tiv-run Christian denomination, ensured that church life, preaching, hymns and community organisation were conducted primarily in Tiv.
This combination of demographic strength, early Bible translation and institutional support allowed the Tiv to preserve their language in ways that were not available to smaller groups such as the Eggon. While many Tiv still speak Hausa as a second language, especially in urban or interethnic settings, Tiv has remained a strong first language for millions of people. Their experience demonstrates that language survival in Northern Nigeria has often depended less on cultural commitment alone and more on numbers, institutional backing and early access to written religious materials.
The Double Bind: “Onye Hausa” and Shibboleths
While studying in Enugu, the label ‘Onye Hausa’ which is the Igbo term for Hausa person was pinned to me daily. It was often meant harmlessly but each time I corrected. Over time, correction itself becomes exhausting. You begin to wonder why your identity must always be defended. Why language is allowed to overwrite history. Meanwhile, among native Hausa speakers, the “Northern” identity is equally fragile. Our accents, idioms and sentence structures act as shibboleths. We speak Hausa fluently, yet we are always “visitors” in the language.
Middle Belt Identity and Resistance
This is why many indigenous Northern groups increasingly identify as Middle Belters. This identity is not merely geographic. It is political. It resists absorption into a homogenised “Hausa North” and insists on recognition of histories that predate Hausa dominance (Falola and Heaton, 2008).
It is important to note that colonial administrators themselves recognised the distinctiveness of what is now referred to as the Middle Belt where most of the Indigenous tribes of Northern Nigeria are found. In The Northern Tribes of Nigeria (1925), C.K. Meek referred explicitly to the “Middle Belt” and to the “pagan tribes of the Middle Belt.” In A Sudanese Kingdom (1931), he described the Jukun and neighbouring groups as inhabiting “Central Nigeria.” Earlier administrative writings, including O. Temple’s Notes on the Tribes, Provinces, Emirates and States of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria (1919), distinguished between emirate territories and the so-called “pagan belt.”
While the terminology was shaped by colonial prejudice, the geographical distinction was clear, the region between the Hausa and Fulani emirates and the southern forest zones was understood as culturally and politically distinct. The modern political articulation of “Middle Belt” identity did not emerge from nowhere, it evolved from historical recognition of difference, albeit filtered through colonial categories.
Conclusion: Language Is Not Identity
I speak Hausa fluently and I always will. It shaped my childhood and my education. But it does not define my ancestry. I am proudly Eggon.
In Nigeria, language can be a tool of survival, a bridge to one’s neighbour, or a tool of erasure. Understanding how Hausa became dominant helps explain why so many of us must keep saying this out loud. We must stop allowing a shared tongue to overwrite a specific history.
Adigidzi is a Finance Professional based in Edinburgh.
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