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.}